RVA: The Red Vixen at Sea, Part Eight

Mother Goddess be praised, Rolas was willing to take it slow as they strolled around the perimeter of the island. The sand was just normal sand, though the shells of the arthropod analogs that Greenholme hosted were delightfully strange compared to what could be found on Foxen Prime. Melanie plucked one half buried in the sand, revealing a conical shape perhaps five centimeters long and two wide, which was an odd greenish shade and sounded metallic when she tapped it with her claw.

“I wonder if there’s copper in this shell,” she mused. “Could the creature be digesting it in some way, and adding it to the shell’s structure to strengthen it?”

“If so, I don’t want to be nipped by it, if it can harvest copper,” Rolas said. “Nor meet the creature that it has to protect itself from, if it has to be deterred by metal armor.”

“Good point,” she she agreed, pocketing the shell and resolving to tread the beach more carefully.

( That's not the only mysterious discovery. )