"Sure!" Ileyna said brightly. She motioned towards the fallen centurion. "But really, you better get that armor off of him. Mass Effect makes things soft, but then they get really, really hard! So I don't think you want him waking up in even BETTER armor. And maybe we should break his gun too."

"All right." Fishing the paper back out, Max handed it to Ileyna. "Take this inside and get what's written on it. Make it quick. You're looking for a specific brand of sundial."

"A sundial?" Ileyna remarked, plucking the note out of Max's hand and glancing at the runic text on it. "Ah, whatever. I suppose there's worse ways to make a keystone."

Ileyna planted her feet back on the ground and made her way into the building, still clad in her aura and effects. "Sundial, sundial," she could be heard muttering.

Roughly five minutes later, she came out, clutching one in her hand. "I think this is it..." she said, handing it to Max.

Max's silent guardian snapped the centurion's gun in half as Max took the sundial from Ileyna's hand. Slipping the note from her other hand, he flopped it back open, glancing between it and the sundial. "Looks about right. You want to make sure you've got exactly the artifact or device you need for things like this. You wouldn't believe how many ancient civilizations are rigged to blow when you stick in the wrong bauble."

The police cars, now closer, parked next to the sidewalk, and officers carefully deployed with guns drawn. "Put your hands in the air!"

Ileyna's hands immediately shot into the air at the police's demand. As did her telekinetic attempt to yank away their sidearms all at once.

[Ileyna: 4dF = 2 + 4 Telekinesis = 6]

Officers yelped in surprise as the girl flung their guns away from their hands.

"Will you cut it OUT?" Max snapped, pushing down Ileyna's hand. Towards the police - "Look, we're not here to cause trouble. THIS guy - " he pointed at the fallen centurion - "attacked us and the town with his punks, so we had to set him straight."

"Do you know what's going on, then?" one of the braver officers asked.

"Excuse me for not wanting to get shot at," Ileyna muttered. She put her hands down, but the guns stayed out of the police's hands, hovering in the air.

"This lunatic here," she explained while waving a hand at the downed centurion, "Is apparently looking for some artifact hidden in a nearby ruin of some sort. I don't suppose you folks have made any archaeological discoveries recently, have you?"

One officer, an older one with a bushy brown moustache, scratched his head. "Not to my knowledge. I don't know anything about no ruins. And you're saying he was looking for one?"

"All I could find was something about putting a sundial in the right place." Max held up the sundial in question. "Apparently when you do that at the right time, the shadow will point towards where you need to go to find the ruins."

Moustache cop looked towards the others. "Isn't there some kind of overhang in that park on the hill with sundials?"

"That's right," one of the other officers said. "Maybe that's a place you can look."

"... yeah, I remember seeing that place when I arrived," Ileyna said, turning towards Max. "It was close by, and like I said about Gateways... they take you where you're needed."

She wished she could thank him for that revelation, back when she were a child. It had made things so much simpler.

Alas, that was impossible now.

Offhandedly, Ileyna brought the weapons back down to the cops. She held her hand out to Max to take. "Let's get there quick."

Max took Ileyna's hand, and said to the officers, "We'll wrap this up fast. This guy had a lot of minions following him, and some of them might be still be milling about." He gestured to the discarded armor plopped in a heap away from the centurion's form. "Just keep that armor away from this guy, though, and he ought to be easy to deal with."

Moustache cop nodded. "Well, all right. We'll keep an eye out, I reckon, but you might want to move fast. Need a sun for a sundial to work and sunset's about an hour from now."

"We'll keep it in mind!" Ileyna said as she lifted up into the air, taking Max with her. Within moments, they were speeding off in the direction of the park.

One of the cops present looked at his returned sidearm, then at the trail of blue light left in the glowing teenager's wake. "I don't recall coming to work drunk."

"I didn't see anything if you didn't see anything," moustache cop remarked.

It was only minutes before they had reached their destination, and Ileyna gently landed before setting Max down with her telekinesis. She glanced around the park, looking for the sundials and the overhang.

"Any bets on what this thing's gonna do?" she asked in a conversational manner. "Big portal, fabulous light show, maybe?"

Only a few children, two with their mothers, were playing on the park's jungle gym playset as they landed. They pointed in awe as Ileyna and Max touched down, their swinging on the swing set slowing to a crawl as they watched.

"That's usually how it works," Max said. "It's always big and dramatic for some reason."

Stone benches faced a chain link fence towards the sunset floating down towards the lake in the horizon, blocking off the overhang from wandering children. Before the benches stood a small sundial, perched on a pedestal, a long shadow pointing south towards the jungle gym.

Settling the sundial under his arm, Max approached the pedestal. "This must be it." He traced across the smooth stone with his fingers. "I don't see a slot, though...probably hidden. Look for a switch."

Ileyna nodded and her aura winked out of existence, much to the children's chagrin. For several moments, they looked over the dais for any clue as how to activate it and use the sundial on it, but it was to no avail. She could see nothing that could help him.

"Ah, whatever," she finally snapped. "We're running out of time. Let's take a page out of her book."

And she ran up to the pedestal and kicked it. The entire pedestal shuddered and began to move, even as Ileyna was reduced to hopping up and down clutching her aching foot.

"Don't BREAK it!" Max said. Then the pedestal slid forward, and his anger vanished as he watched. As the stone column slid forward, another rose from underneath - a thinner dias of pristine golden finish, rising without a sound or scrape from its compartment, rising taller than the pedestal that had hid it. Max placed the sundial on the golden column's open plate, twisting it until it clicked. At once, the tip of the sundial shimmered in response to the fading sunlight. A sparkling stream of light arced from the sundial, high over Silverton, until its tip slid into the center of the distant lake waters.

Max scoffed. "See what I mean? Always overdramatic."

"Yeah, that's... ow... kinda what I expected," Ileyna said, limping up to the activated pedestal. "I'm glad that worked through. Always seemed to work for... huh."

She saw where the light was pointing--right in the middle of the bloody lake. "Well that doesn't look shallow at all!" she cried. "Crud. Well, at least I don't have to worry about swimming there."

"We'll get scuba gear if we need to." Max approached the fence, studying the arcing beam of light overhead. "I've got a feeling that these ruins are my ticket out of here."

"I wouldn't count on it," Ileyna said, shaking her head. "But, really, don't worry about SCUBA gear. I've got it covered."

She opened herself up to her powers once more, alighting in the blue aura and extending her wings. "My power will be enough to keep us dry," she said as she took Max by the hand again. "You just need to keep yourself close to me. Now, let's go!"

Grabbing him with her telekinesis, she took to the skies again, following the arch of light to Silverton's lake. It wasn't long before they were hovering just over the water, right near where the light met liquid.

As they hovered, the calm waves of the lake suddenly shook, growing choppy. They seemed to pan out from where the point of light touched the water.

Max pointed towards the sky. "Bring us up!"

A dull rumble echoed in the air as the lake water receded, revealing smooth dirt long whipped into shape by the currents. From the depths, something rose - the golden tip of a structure, rising higher into the air. Water and wet earth streamed off of golden columns, shaking free from a long imprisonment.

Ileyna blinked as the ruins became to emerge from the depths of the lake, gleaming golden despite being submerged for who knows how long. She guided herself and Max away as it from the structure as it rose.

"This... there's no way whoever built this were from around here," she said, all traces of her usual silliness gone from her voice. "This design... these materials... Max, I think this is a lot more serious than we thought."

"You're right." Max rubbed his chin, his face creasing as he squinted at the ruins rising higher, its summit looming over Silverton. "At first I thought these ruins would be Grecian, judging by the kind of armor our friend wore and his warriors. But this is a different story. Whatever's in here must be worth something big."

"The real question is what needs to be done with it," Ileyna said, craning her neck upwards. How much more was this thing going to sprout? She was certain it was now taller than the depth of the lake would allow. "Keep it, or throw it in a volcano? I hope it's not the latter. That kind of thing leads to aliens."

At last, the ruins shuddered, its massive thundering expansion coming to a halt. The structure as a whole looked layered, like it had unfurled from itself like a golden, metallic spring. Water continued to gush down its sides.

Max pointed down towards the base of the ruins. "Let's find a door and see what we're dealing with."

"Wouldn't it be easier to just fly to the top?" Ileyna pointed out, even as she started taking them to the temple's base. "I mean, I can do that. Wouldn't be too difficult to make our own doorway, either. Mass Effect's good at that."

Max looked at her. "Come on, Ileyna. Do you REALLY want to mess with an ancient temple that just rose from a lake without knowing what it can do first? You have no idea if it's just a normal temple with traps or some kind of alien doomsday signal beam. Trust me, that happens more often than you think."

"I actually have a pretty good idea as to how often that happens," she corrected. She landed them on the outer edge of the structure, but kept herself in her aura and wings. "Honestly, going by past experience we're pretty boned on getting our way no matter what we do."

Ileyna was looking around the structure, but not for doors, it seemed. "Still, what made this?" she asked herself, muttering under her breath. "Is it Orokin? No, why would it be Orokin? There's still humans around, can't be that..."

The teenager started walking around the edge. "C'mon, girl, think! What do you know about waterborne temples? Other than nothing good comes from them?"

She went on like that as she searched.

They stood on the base of a pavilion attached to the main temple. Intricate, curling blue patterns laced with gold edge decorated the towering double doors before them, still sopping wet from their watery exit. Similar blue patterns trailed up surrounding columns.

"What are you muttering about now?" Max asked. He took a step forward, and paused, as the familiar sound of a boat motor hummed in the distance.

"Just trying to see just how bad this could go, is all," Ileyna said distractedly. "This doesn't look like the Isle's craftmanship, though it's kinda close."

She was tracing a finger across the blue designs inlaid on the building when the sound of the boat could be heard. "Let's hope that's the cops and not Greek Guile's cronies headed this way," she said, glancing back before pressing her hand firmly against the wall.

Maybe I can open something up with my power, was Ileyna's thoughts. Maybe I can get it to react.

She started probing with telekinesis across the nooks and crannies of the building, spreading it out like sonar, feeling along the edges for something to slip through.

And hopefully this won't melt us all. That'd be a wonderful way to end the day, wouldn't it? Getting melted. Magical.

Ileyna's field seeped along the crevices within the layered hull of the temple. It held firm, from what she could tell along the surface. However, panels surrounding the doors yielded to her power, just a little.