Helen smiled at the goings on and shook her head.
"Gi'," she began with the sound of experienced authority with a touch of bemusement, "I'm hiring you to make sense of alien languages, not beg to be perforated. Ms. Stroud, Doctor, you most certainly will be getting paid - though how much will depend on what we find."
The geologist then went around behind her chair and opened up a green canvas backpack. Some of her mid-back length hair slid down, causing her to brush it back over her ear, exposing a bit of grey that she had missed. Helen then pulled out a
DataJockey and set it on the table.
"As for where we will be going," she continued, flipping through pages of files until she picked one of them, "this is the place."
The file opened up into a map of a forested foothills area, centred on a location that looked like an ancient river bed through a relatively flat terrace. The river that may have used it before seemed to be miles away now and had quite the nice floodplain of its own. A small creek now ran through the old bed that, due to its course found it's way to the main river in the area.
"This place, from what I can tell, used to be where two rivers flowed together into a marsh, before flowing over this cliff here, at the end of the valley."
She pulled up some settings and selected one of the sub-surface layers. This caused the map to change to false colour, with various clusters of bright shapes and colours.
"This is the same area looking at a scan of the metals found. Much of it is in mineral form; however there is one that seems to be quite pure, despite the fact that it is never found in that state naturally."
Helen indicated various small dots of cyan that look as if they had washed down the river more than the other colours, then zoomed in on a cluster.
"You never see Aluminium in this state unless it has been cooked by someone first. Finding out whom that someone was will be our job for the near foreseeable future. Any questions?"