Morning all. Personally I could have used a few more hours sleep, but here we are. Let’s put the coffee on and see what comes out of the brain while it brews. Timers at the ready and off we go.
I kind of like this as a fun intro to a murder mystery. I would need to think of the details first as murder mysteries sort of require you figure out a flight path before you write them, but it could be fun.
Thursday, May 30th: We studied the ruins.
We studied the ruins. It took weeks of meticulous planning, studying the site from all angles. We looked at photographs of standing structures, we looked at areal photographs taken in the 1940s and decommissioned from military use. We looked at more recent satellite imagery and we even had a lidar scan to get through the dense tree growth in certain areas so we could make educated guesses as to how far the site extended.
That was before we were even on the ground. Once there, we set up grids, dividing the dig site into smaller areas. It was a complicated site with thousands of year’s worth of occupancy. Everything we found had to be precise when we marked it’s location. Afte several moths working on the site and sleeping in the tents at the very edge of it, we could all walk the site in our sleep, navigating with our eyes closed if we had to.
That morning, something was different. We could all feel something was off, even if no one could, at first pinpoint exactly what was off. Something was not as it should be. Many tried to brush it off as a consequence of the thunderstorm the night before. We were prepared for a deluge and covered the site with thick plastic sheeting, hoping for the best. The ran never came. We were treated to front row seats for a dramatic lightning show and it was accompanied by booming cracks of thunder but the rain never reached us. The thunder and lightning danced in the sky just south of us and the wind blew the storm from east to west. Our higher ground was safe.
It had been nerve wracking to hear see and smell the storm and we had spent a good deal of effort in making sure the site was covered. We over our shared camp breakfast there were musings about the off balance feeling we felt being the result of disappointment that our efforts to secure the site from the storm were a wasted effort.
“Practice run,” Angela called. “Just a practice run for when an actual storm hits.” She then walked towards the site and then stopped. The rest of us stopped behind her.
“I don’t think it was disappointment,” Angela said. “Something’s shifted.” She pointed and sure enough we could see that there was a bump hidden under the tarp that did not match any of our mental maps of the site.
“Maybe something fell over,” Jonas said.
“I suppose we had better see,” Sebastian, our site leader said. We all clustered around the area as Jonas and Mike pulled back the tarp. Some speculated about fallen masonry while others thought a sink hole. None of us expected the dead body.
Ten til Midnight 