tarnation

She'd been thinking about heading to the battlefield, and had wandered in that general direction before getting distracted by the field with its trove of rusting human-things. She'd started poking around, wondering if any of the junk there could be used to make herself some sort of weapon or something. She'd turned over a weird turtle-shell looking thing and was surprised to find a skull in it, and had jumped back, startled, before she'd laughed at herself and gone back to poking at it. It wasn't a wolf skull, or any prey animal she'd ever known. The shape was vaguely primate-like but weirdly rounded. Could it be the remains of a long-extinct human? She wasn't really sure the humans had been anything more than a myth, but if this was a human skull they must have been pretty silly looking. She was guessed the turtle shell looking thing had been meant to protect the head, but it hadn't done a very good job of it. The skull had a neat little hole all the way through the brow and out the back. Closer examination of the inside of the shell thing behind the skull showed a flattened chunk of soft metal dug into the weird metal of the shell, though she couldn't fathom what the purpose of that was. Surely it hadn't killed him, even if it had somehow fallen from a cliff - which there were none around - it wouldn't have gone fast enough to do that sort of damage. Though there were stories about humans being able to spit metal bits that could kill animals... but that was just a myth, right?

Well, either way the weird shell thing wasn't shaped right to fit on a wolf's head, so that wouldn't protect anyone in a fight. She continued her wandering, but while poking around inside a huge metal carcass right on the border with the battlefield she slipped and banged her shoulder against the side and gashed it on a sharp piece of metal, drawing a surprised yelp from her before she could get her balance back. She eyed the bleeding shoulder balefully. Great, lovely. Now what?