You travel back towards where you saw the "crop circles". One appears every mile or so, and never seems to be more than a few hundred feet off the main road. Most of the fields are guarded by nothing more than a post fence, so you should have no problem getting close to one of the circles.

Tobias hangs his field bag over one of the nearby posts and gets to work. His first order of business was a thorough search of the circles for insects, devices, or other objects that didn't look at home in a cornfield.

Next, he glanced quickly to the left and right before muttering a few syllables of gibberish and slowly scanning the circle and the nearby area. [Private to GM: Casting Detect Magical Aura and searching about.]

Finally, he pulls out his laptop and switches it to tablet mode. He began pacing the circles from the center to the edge, measuring from the center of one to the center of the other, and entering the data into his laptop for any sort of pattern, mundane or arcane.

Once you get closer you realize that the crop circle is actually three separate, smaller circles. They don't seem to be arranged in any discernible pattern, and each of the smaller circles is isolated from the next.

As you pace around and measure each of the circles, you realize that each are exactly 30ft in diameter, and are very close to a perfect circle. Even stranger, in places where a plant from outside the circle crosses into the circle, only the part of the plant that is within the radius has died, while the part outside is perfectly fine.

You do not detect any strange insects or disturbances; it simply appears as if the crops in these three areas have dried up and withered away.

[Private to Tobias Byrne: You do not detect any magical aura, but something about this area leads you to believe that something outside the realm of the mundane has gone on here.]

Tobias hums tunelessly to himself as he compiles and saves his information. Pulling out his rod, he flips the second switch along its length, a metallic toggle switch, and the device extends out several times, sprouting a small screen and an earbud.

He sweeps the area with his metal detector before packing up and moving to another circle to correlate his findings.

You don't get any out of the ordinary readings with your metal detector, but you do find 35 cents.

The next set of circles is about a mile down the road, and on the other side of the road. Like the first set you investigated, there are again a set three circles each of 30ft diameter, set about 200 feet off the road. They are in no discernible pattern.

Alright, free gumball. Still, thirty-five cents was not really a significant compensation for this mystery. He returns to the car, turns on the AC, tunes into the one radio station he could get out here, and wracks his brains for an idea on what could cause this.

[Private to GM: 12:40, Today: Tobias Byrne rolled 16 using 1d20+15. Rel.
12:40, Today: Tobias Byrne rolled 31 using 1d20+15. Arcane.
Time for checks!]

[PM]

[Private to Tobias Byrne: I'm not sure what your first roll is, but your Arcane roll is enough to tell you that the damaged sections could have come from a spell, but it's not any spell you recognize. If a spell caused the damage, it's likely that each smaller circle would be caused by a separate casting, so someone would have had to cast three spells for each "crop circle".]

PM

[Private to GM: Religion and Philosophy. Like myths and legends about this stuff...]

PM

[Private to Tobias Byrne: Oh! Duh.
You know that most modern and many former religions tell stories of plague and pestilence, where God, a god or the gods punish people for wrongdoing by destroying their crops. You don't know of any religions that specifically describe crop circles, or anything like them. The number of circles in each group may have religious significance, though, as the number three is important in many religions, especially Abrahamic ones.]

PM

[Private to GM: Could the life in the circles have been used to power a spell? Enhance it somehow?

And is the indistinguishable pattern between the three circles the same between each grouping? In other words, is each group laid out the same?]

Woo! 200th post!

PM

[Private to Tobias Byrne: Most spells that you know only need minor components. If the dead spots were used as components for a spell, you know that it would be a very powerful spell. That sort of magic would need one or more powerful casters, and could take from minutes to hours to perform.

Each group of three circles is laid out differently. You can't detect any pattern within or between them; each one seems to be completely random.]

[Private to GM: General Int check to make sure I didn't overlook looking for something obvious. ;)
14:59, Today: Tobias Byrne rolled 15 using 1d20+4.
]
And with that, Tobias heads back to town.

PM

[Private to Tobias Byrne: You can't think of anything else obvious to look for.]

If you want to go back into town, you can join Frank's thread. If you want to visit the last crime scene you can join Adele's thread. Otherwise, you can use the main thread.