After the exhibit, Alex tried to change his face back to his own only to wind up as “pulsating walnut” that seemed to be quietly muttering the same sequence of numbers as before. As they came to terms with this, the party found they had a few leads to follow up:
Amaya Inc. who own the exhibit turned out to be a company that buys other companies as they are going under and sits on their assets until they become valuable. At first glance they just seem to be Venture Capitalists, but they do seem to be particularly interested in South American historical artefacts. They bought a company, DC Logistics 2 years ago and found the exhibition materials in a warehouse. There is no evidence to suggest that they knew DC Logistics would own them beforehand though. They are based in Washington DC.

Marleen Langley is a historian who specialises in the Incas. She started her career looking into myths of supernatural powers among the Incas, then disgraced herself by pursing them again later in her career. She was later head hunted by Amaya Inc. to curate their exhibition. The evening of the party’s visit to the Cusco stone she had all her research stolen from her home but she was able to tell the party that NYU had a similar stone on display. While the Cusco stone didn’t have any folklore surrounding it, this one was supposed to be able to raise the dead.

Going to visit this stone, the party found the police had apparently come and told the university to close their exhibition and taken away NYU’s South American History Expert, Marcus Salt.

Annabeth snuck into the exhibition and found two men in suits examining the stone, eventually finding whatever they were looking for and saying “Great, now we just need to bring it back and insert it.” After attacking them and finding nothing on their bodies, the party decided that it must have been a space to insert into rather than something to insert elsewhere they found. It seemed that they had some connection to the Federal Agency The Administration on Aging based on the only number in their mobile phones.

Researching Marcus Salt threw up shockingly little information, very few articles and none of them hosted by NYU. They decided to break into NYU’s library the next day and see if they could find hard copies of Langley and Salt’s work.

That night they all shared a dream where they watched a group of explorers fighting the undead in a temple around the new stone. They woke up to see what appeared to be animate skeletons walking the streets of New York…