The Explorer side of the expedition was, by all observable metrics, considerably more organized than its counterpart.
This was by design.
Where the Adventurers had been dispatched into the northwest with the broad directive of finding things and not dying, the Explorers moved through the eastern approach with the methodical precision of people who had prepared documentation protocols before they had prepared weapons.
Routes had been pre-assigned.
Party compositions had been deliberated.
Every discovery was to be catalogued before it was touched, measured before it was moved, and recorded before it was claimed.
Lakyus Ariel had not built the Explorers Association into what it was by tolerating improvisation.
And so the eastern approach proceeded exactly as she had designed it—systematic, efficient, and productive in the measured, accumulative way that serious exploration always was.
At least, for most of the parties.
