Good morning all. I hope you are having a fantastic morning. I again resisted the lure of my snooze button. I am however craving the coffee. I can smell the scent drifting through the air and know that soon a cup will be mine. Before then, we have a prompt to do. Are you ready? then let’s go.
Oh it feels like the timer stopped just before the action started. Personally i think someone is about to die. Or there is about to be an attack from the outside. Not sure. the timer dinged before I mentally sorted it. I’ll have to come back and figure that out later.
Tuesday, February 28th: He sharpened his machete.
He sharpened his machete. I knew that it was a necessary tool for getting through this thick vegetation. It was literally a jungle out there. However there was something menacing in the gesture. The slow scrape of the metal against the whetstone. Every so often I would catch the flash of his eyes as he looked up from his work, the torch light catching them and making them shine.
A part of my imagined that he was thinking dark thoughts, planning dark deeds.
I tried to shake off the foreboding I felt about the following day’s journey into the wild. Perhaps I was reading too much into it. It was the trouble with being who I was. In the grand scheme of things I was no one. I held no power and commanded no segment of the team. I was here to map the land we traversed so that it would be knowable in a way that it wasn’t now.
The others were here to look for resources and to make judgement calls about safety. I was the map maker and as most of those on this team thought that we were just going in in as straight a line as possible for as long as we could go and then coming back, most thought I was pretty useless.
Part of that stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t from their division. All cartographers like me were attached to the research division. Most of those in my division simply studied the things others like this tem brought back. It didn’t earn a lot of respect.
However I had been attached to this team for a while. They watched me at first and once they realized I would take their direction and stay quiet as I made my maps and that my skills would not slow their progress down, I earned a measure of acceptance.
As I was trying not to rock the boat when I first began, I stayed quiet unless asked a direct question. I had never been one for idle gossip and here where I knew so little about the people around me, there was no one to gossip to with or about. It meant that everyone soon knew I would keep my mouth shut about their gossip.
At first I listened as I wanted to be polite and because I wanted to get to know those around me a bit more. As the weeks turned into months, I became a sounding board. I was the person they could complain to without fear of angering another member of their team. Two years on and I was somehow their secret keeper. I knew their jealousies and their ambitions. I knew their anger and their amusements.
Perhaps this was what made the sound of the slowly sharpening machete so ominous in the half light of the flickering torches. I know Gerovan’s anger at being passed over for promotion by the man who was even now sleeping with his ex-girlfriend. I knew that Verna found the situation amusing and couldn’t resist poking each of the members of her team involved, making them each think all of the decisions were personal, just so she could amuse herself. I knew Devar chafed at the limitations put on him by the team leader, wanting to push faster and further when their leader argued for a more cautious approach.
I wondered what I should do with my knowledge. I had not reached a decision when a messenger arrived. To my surprise, after checking in with the team leader, the messenger was sent to me.
Ten til Midnight 