Lapin Luna

Chapter 1 - - Lemuria

Joseph stood on the balcony of his apartment, peering through his telescope at the full moon. The room behind him held a maze of desks, each covered in research articles, ancient texts, and his own scrawled notes. Bookshelves lined one wall, while another wall was plastered with more notes, drawings, and yarn pinned between them to connect clues into a story. In the center of the room was a disc map of the earth, with seas carved down and lands built up with chalk and paint. It displayed and labeled each landmass. Europa, Asia, the two Americas, Africa, Advanta, Australia, and Antarctica. The eight continents of the known world, showed in crude detail a parallel in shape to the very moon that he was viewing.

"Craters in place of islands, ranges in place of land, but it all lines up so perfectly!" he spoke to himself. "Except for this. If this were indeed accurate to the shape of our world by an unbelievable coincidence, there would be a ninth continent, but that would be impossible."

Joseph reached down to the audio recorder perched on the railing next to him and pressed pause. He consulted with his maps and notes, and by all accounts there should be, in the far south to the west of the Americas. He found folklore of a strange land that had been collected from the shores of what was now called Chile. Photos of long ago discovered cliff-carved stories in a dead language, a story which spoke of giant men with fantastic technology who lifted up and helped the natives in the area.

He swapped out the lens in his telescope. "I need more detail." he had recently received in the mail a crystal lens from a university, where an old friend of his worked. It was carved from hecatolite, and his friend insisted it could amplify the light of the moon in some strange manner. He was skeptical, but willing to give it a try.

It gave the surface of the moon a bluish color and an iridescent sheen, but... "Drat, the magnification is worse on this one. Although, " he said, then remembered to resume the recording. "Experimental hecatolite lens insert proves ineffective at magnifying the light of the moon in my telescope, and it corrupts the coloration. However, it has improved the contrast, allowing for greater perception of detail. Further use may prove its worth after all. Moving on, I am increasingly certain the existence of a ninth, as of yet undiscovered continent."

He drew as finely as he could a map of the supposed new land. If it were to scale on the map of craters and valleys, it would be roughly a half of the size of Australia. He pinned his cut out drawing of the landmass to an atlas of the world, as close as he could to where it out to be relative to the surroundings.

"No one will believe me on this. I've had to convince my colleagues that I am simply studying the surface of the moon for its own sake. I would be stripped of my tenure should people discover my findings here, and so if whoever finds this recording finds it with the rest of my... stuff, please keep quiet about it. But know that I will have already set out in search of this new land. If I don't find it, I will probably never return. If I do find it, I shall call it, Lemuria. If I don't return, Charlotte, I hope you understand why I have to do this for myself. All the best, This is Doctor Joseph Murphy." And he stopped the recording. He took the card out from the camcorder and laid it on top of the carved earth map in the middle of the room, where he knew Lemuria must be.

Joseph looked around the room at all his years of work. He was pulled out of reminiscing however by a realization. The room did have an odd blue hue to everything. He opened and closed each eye to realize that his right eye was no longer seeing the right colors. Anything red appeared gray, and everything else was tinted blue in the one eye. A glance in his bathroom mirror showed his right pupil to be noticeably larger than the other. "How in the blazes? He'll be getting an earful about that hecatolite stuff if this doesn't wear off."

He had been convincing himself of this fantastical new land for years, and had gradually been steeling himself for a journey from which he may never return, though he hoped. He had a boat ready that he could take on the ocean, and it was installed with a strings reactor so he didn't have to worry about fueling it. Over the following days he collected preserved food and purified water to last himself for months, as well as a portable solar charger for his phone and gps in the case he left his boat to go ashore. He also packed many books and downloaded movies and shows to watch, and any other ways he could think of to occupy himself in months of solitude. The last thing he brought was a blank journal and a pack of pens. When the day arrived, He wrote a final farewell to Charlotte and their daughter and left it with the recorder card in his apartment.