"About five days. I don't like not knowing the lay of the land, so I decided to come a few days early, and scout around a bit." replied Cox. "I couldn't decide which surprised me more; how quickly details came back to me, like which way to go to get to somewhere specific, or how much I couldn't remember about the place, particularly the way it is now.
I've been back to the shelter, briefly. Looked small. I've not been home. And I didn't see any sign of another living creature here until you all arrived."
Game: Return to Home
Amy looked meaningfully at the icy cubes, reminding Cox that there may yet be creatures out in the cold that they hadn't seen yet. She settled back, then, and picked out her blanket. She glanced between it and her short sword, as if trying to decide which she needed. Eventually the blanket won out, but she kept her sword nearby. As she drifted off she watched her twin mend the fire and a small smile crossed her face.
Once the fire is built up, and has started to catch to the point where it doesn't need constant supervision, and seeing as his sister has started to settle down, Cox starts to get some supplies out from a bag in one corner of the room. He pours some water from a container into a pot, and adds some beans, and a little bit of meat. He opens a couple of small pouches, and sprinkles in a pinch or two of the contents before carefully resealing the pouches. That done, he gently stirs the contents of the pot with a wooden spoon, before leaving the pot on the floor near the fire, which isn't yet hot enough to start cooking over it.
This done, he goes over to where the others are to see if he can help them make some sense of the ice cubes.
After peering at the strange cubes for some time, Eili still has no idea what they are. Or, indeed, anything about them. She softly sings a short tune, a guardinal song she had heard a lot when she was a child, and weaves small amounts of arcane power into the music. She then begins probing the cubes in various manners - changing the colours, cleaning them off, uncleaning them, and a few others - to see how they would react, if at all.
Eili casts Prestidigitation and does various things to the cubes with it, just to see if she could get any kind of reaction or resistance from them.
Pants of the North!
At the sound of the fire, Amy returns to the first room and sits beside her brother. She stretches her hands to catch the warmth, mostly a gesture of gratitude. The fire is too sickly to give up much heat, but Amy appreciated the way that Cox tried to make everyone feel comfortable. It reminded her of the old days.
"You've been here long," she said to Cox simply. The signs were all around: ashes from a previous fire, the snow on the floor pushed into the corners, the already broken crusts of ice on doors leading into the shelter. Her real meaning remained, as always, unspoken. It was clear that her twin had lived for a while in this building, but what was unclear was why and whether he had seen anything useful. Her eyes asked these questions as the aasimar twins puzzled over the icy cubes.