Moe Lane

Had meetings and game tonight. I was lucky to get anything done.

Down here there were more traces of the Scouts’ presence; cracks in the metal walls, floor, and ceiling had been repaired with plastic of paris. They had even sanded down the goop until it was flush with the surface, which showed dedication, in its way. There were also what were probably helpful signs on the walls, but seeing those in the dark was one level of miracles too much for even lightfolds.

It occurred to me that there were flashlights in the kits, too. It also occurred to me that neither Oft nor the Anticipant had taken theirs out. Neither told me their reasons for that, but I decided I agreed with them anyway.

“What are we looking for down here, Oft?” I asked him, quietly but without whispering. Too many things out there notice whispers. “It’d help if I know what the goal was.”

“That’s the problem, Pam. We don’t really know. All that we’re sure of is that the Scouts did things down here, far away from prying eyes like ours. Whatever those deeds were, we need to know about them — but there are so many awful possibilities. It’s best for us to have a completely open mind about it.”

Just a little ragged, Pam is getting.

It bothered me that the elevator platform went down the Dig shaft without bobbling or jerking. When you descend somewhere horrible that was used by cultists, you expect things to be slovenly, right? I kept waiting for the mechanisms to start whining or smoking, or maybe for the platform itself to turn out to be rickety and ready to collapse if you breathed on it too hard. That’s how cultist stuff generally was. People with no sense of self-preservation suck at doing maintenance. But not Scout-made gear! Oh, no! Those teenagers built things to last. I could tell how everything had been properly put together, with solid materials and no corners cut. They had done a proper job of weatherproofing, too. God help us all, somebody had worked hard on this job.

“Oft,” I ground out in the increasing gloom, “how sure are we that the Scouts are really off this planet by now?”

“Very,” he replied. “If they weren’t, we’d never have gotten this far without being challenged.”

“Lucky us.”

“Lucky us and lucky them, Pam.” The rough change in his voice made me blink. I looked over, and even in the dimness I could see how he stood tall and terrible, and a piercing light was in his eyes. In contrast, the Anticipant beside him was almost a shadow herself, the colors of her robe shading smoothly into the growing dark. It was alarming. The two of them might have both been weird, but I hadn’t really seen either as capable of being dangerous before. Now they looked thoroughly ready to deal with whatever we found, down here in the pit of the Dig.

I would have been afraid, if I had for a moment thought that they were here to deal with me.