Two days earlier, in the Yellowleaf Mountains.
Kia slowly opened her eyes, got dressed, and stepped out of her tent. A blast of icy air hit her in the face, making her shiver.
The camp was already bustling. Soldiers were cooking over fires nearby, while members of the expedition surveyed the surrounding terrain.
"Ah, Miss Kia. Good morning."
A soldier spotted Kia and greeted her.
"Good morning. Have you seen my grandpa?"
"Dr. Franco? He should be over there, fiddling with that strange machine."
"Thank you."
Kia thanked the soldier and headed toward one side of the camp. A rather oddly shaped machine stood there, roughly the size of a refrigerator, with a tall antenna sticking up from its top. If the governor of Steel City hadn't sent mechanized escorts along this time, getting that machine into the mountains would probably have been no easy task.
But without the machine, they probably wouldn't have come into the mountains at all...
"Sigh..."
At that thought, Kia quietly sighed. Her grandpa had only recently built this machine. It had originally been commissioned by the Empire's authorities, primarily to improve radio equipment. Her grandpa had designed the theoretical framework and the hardware, while Kia had programmed the operating system.
The "Electromagnetic Wave Detector" her grandpa had built was based on those requirements. In plain terms, the authorities wanted a portable device that worked like a signal tower. Even out in the wilderness or in remote, uninhabited regions, switching it on would allow it to pick up surrounding radio signals and facilitate communications within the area.
All right, that covered the details. But what did any of this have to do with their current expedition?
Well, when they finished building the device and put it into operation, the strange machine picked up an extremely