Hera was in her bedroom, back in Zaxalam. In the same house that was gifted to her dad once he moved to the MAZE. They were living together ever since that happened, although calling that living together might not be completely accurate. After all, Hera spent more time away from this place than she spent here. That was mostly due to the fact that things kept happening that forced her to stay out of this place. But at the same time, it didn't mean that she didn't have a room here. A proper bedroom.
It was a bit strange to have one in her dad's house. Yet it felt pretty nice at the same time. It gave that childhood feeling of being at the parent's house all the time and her dad seemed to be very supporting of pretty much everything she did. Sure, Hera understood that there was a good amount of guilt related to that, but she wasn't going to complain about being pampered.
Although she always made sure not to let her dad overdo things. It was fine if he was offering help or trying to give her some food, but if he started to get a bit too overbearing, she had to tell him to stop. Especially when he took it upon himself to clean up everything from dishes to laundry. Hera had to tell him several times that she was not a child and she could help with all the general housekeeping. He didn't have to do everything on his own. Then again, Eridan was focusing the types of skills and spells he got into woodworking. And amongst them, there were a couple of abilities to quickly clean up dust and other dirt from an environment.
But despite all the minor issues, they were enjoying each other's company very much. Hera always felt sad that she had to leave her home as soon as she turned 18 because of Stella. After all, with the exception of how tense things were because of that strained relationship with her mother, Hera really loved her father.
They always got along really well and hardly ever had any issues while living under the same roof. It was a very peaceful and pleasant relationship, one that not many people had with their parents. Exactly because of that, Hera wanted to cherish it as much as she could, while not putting anything to strain that relationship.
However, there was one thing that she did accept. Despite the house being given to Eridan, there was an unspoken agreement that it was, in fact, given to Hera. And one of the reasons for it was the bedroom. It was a very large area with a pyre-like bed that seemed to be very common for the ancient Naga. And Eridan decided to give that room to Hera, refusing any arguments that his daughter might have. It was a place made for her. And while it didn't start that way, it eventually became one quite literally.
Taking a page from the book of the Naga, Eridan figured out a way to create proper beds for Ophidianites. Which took the form of beddings with a coil-like shape. The idea was that in the lower area of the mattress, people could coil their tails and leave them there. Which, according to Hera, was very cozy. And in the days that she didn't want to have that particular feeling, of having a limb sort of trapped under her, she could just pull some pillows to the center of the bed and sleep on her side.
The Naga might not have pillows. Then again, they might have them. Fabric like that wouldn't survive the time it took for them to discover the ancient civilization. So, maybe this is exactly how they used to sleep. Hera really needed to go back to Spiral and ask Darni and the others about that kind of stuff just to know what she could be doing in the future. As a matter of fact, instead of going there, she could just ask Shane and the others to ask about it.
They were there anyway.
The empress was thinking about that and considering when it was the best time to send a message when she got a call from a group chat. One that Bonnie made just before she left for Spiral. It was a place for them to talk and discuss the things they were discovering about Naga spell crafting. Bonnie also played a bit with the name until landing on SSSSpellSSSS. It was such an on the nose joke that Hera couldn't help but laugh at how proud her friend seemed to be of the name.
Shane, Farica, and Callena appeared on the screen.
"Is anything going on Deakoshara?" Shane asked right away, ignoring any type of conversation.
"Stop that. At least ask if she's doing well," Bonnie scolded the Enchantress.
"I'm fine. How about you? Is everything okay?" Hera asked.
"Yeah," Bonnie nodded. "We just finished the normal mode run and unlocked the hard mode for the week. But it's late and we've already rushed too much to get here, so no one is really willing to go there right now. Well, almost no one." Bonnie rolled her eyes and everybody knew she was talking about Shane. "How about you? Did you find anything?"
The Empress nodded her head. "I did. Check this out." She pulled a couple of the printed pages that she had gotten and showed to the camera.
Instead of bringing the entire journal here, Hera and her court carefully took pictures of each page. There were several variations of each. Various types of lighting and with different filters on the camera, including an infrared one that revealed some extra pieces of text that couldn't be seen by the naked eye. Or at least most people's naked eye.
Hera herself was able to see that if she wanted. And now, she was going over them in her bedroom along with some of the Court who were also doing the same, everybody in their own place trying to translate the entire journal.
"What's that?" Shane asked, trying to approach the screen even though it wouldn't really matter.
The Empress quickly gave an explanation of what those pages were and where she found them, which only made Shane upset about having left for Spiral just today.
"Seriously? Couldn't you have found this yesterday? Then I would be there and will be able to help you. Now I'm going to have to come back."
"Yeah, no," the Empress interrupted. "I really appreciate you wanting to be on top of things. But you need to understand that everybody is doing their part. Just because you're not here, that doesn't mean that we're going to mess up anything. And if I send you the text, I'm sure you're going to spend the entire night going over them before tomorrow. So chill. I got this. I'm just as invested in this as you. You may not like it, but that's the truth. So trust me and if there's anything really big, I'll let you know. Okay?"
Shane groaned a bit but seemed to understand what the empress was saying. Still, she kept asking various questions about the laboratory and everything else that she found in Deakoshara.
The conversation lasted a couple of hours. Bonnie, Callena, and Farica only were there for the first 20 minutes of it. As they still were able to talk to her and ask a few questions about the place. The questions from Shane became too intricate and specific that they grew bored and decided to just rest for the night.
Hera herself was getting really annoyed with all the insistent questioning, especially since about half of what Shane wanted to know was if the empress was doing things that she knew how to do. If she was checking every nook or every strange empty wall with her infrared vision or she was making sure not to touch anything that could be easily destroyed. In addition, to various small actions that were already ingrained in her a long time ago when they were discovering the Wailing Valley.
Still, after finishing the call, Hera asked her Court, who was up to be translating the journal at night while she was sleeping. This was one of the benefits of her legacy. Technically speaking, she would never need to stop working, since one of her court members could always be there.
Filigree, Vulcan and Viper offered to participate, but the Spymaster had to give up once Crimson refused, stating that she didn't have the energy to do that kind of thing today. Unfortunately, due to the nature of their original form, they couldn't be summoned separately.
Hera went to bed, leaving her court in the living room, which was close enough to her bedroom so they didn't even need any special quests or to have another court member waiting outside her bedroom door to move around with her.
By morning, they had finished translating a couple pages of the documents. The process was somewhat slow due to how the Naga language worked. Not only had they used something akin to hieroglyphs, but there were also a lot of double and triple meanings in what they were saying.
For instance, on the first page they translated there was a passage that could either mean the 'Sun was shining in the afternoon', 'the storm was approaching', or, 'I ate some butter'. Which meant that not only did they have to translate each individual sentence, multiple times. Only to then check all translations to see which ones would fit into a coherent context as a whole. It just made the entire process much more lengthy than most translation work from ancient languages. Usually, one would only need to translate the individual words and get the context and not do this guessing game.
Things became even more complicated if they were to assume the journal had some sort of cipher or code to hide its messages. But that was something they were only going to think about after finishing the work.
If that wasn't bad enough, there was also the added infrared writing. Those pieces of the journal never really had full meaning by themselves. Only when placed on top of the already existing text. But once more, the text was not the same. The infrared writing was not something that Naga would write over a single word or a single passage. Instead, it would be something hidden in the entirety of the text. And each combination of words would create a different meaning for the infrared text.
That was a much more intricate part of their language, and it worked almost like some sort of code that used the surrounding words as a cipher. To truly understand how that worked, what they needed was someone from back then to aid in understanding. But they didn't have that. At least, not for now.
Or did they?
Hera sent the message with all the pages she recovered and all versions of those pages to Bonnie. That way, when they got to Spiral, the Astral Witch could see if Darni and the others were able to help them understand what was written there. It was a bit of a long shot especially since beings from a dungeon tended to have some restrictions related to the types of things they could share but maybe this was just separated enough from their situation that would allow the system to accept the request of help.
Hera's Court had managed to fully translate a single page. They were making good progress on about eight different ones, but the infrared writing was still proving to be an issue. They had to match what was said in that writing to what was said on the page, for it to make sense.
What Filigree, Vulcan, and Viper were able to find out was that the first couple of pages of the journal, or at least the first of all pages they were able to recover, talked about a large scale experiment. Something that was happening all over the room and that many teams were being deployed everywhere. It didn't say any specifics, and the writing was very upbeat, in a sense that the person writing seemed to be very excited about the prospect.
The infrared text was specifically talking about how, even though they were happy to be on the lake team, they really wanted to be participating in the Pyre instead. As there was someone there who respected their work and their ability to mess with trees would be very helpful on that specific project.
But, that ended up being all that they were able to discover. And all they would be able to discover for a little while. Typhera had sent a message asking Hera to meet her in the Aerie of First Flight. And that was likely to mean that she was being asked as an Aspirant Hero, not as an Ophidianite.