What happens when a mad dash for funds and renown causes an accidental apocalypse?
Laureen Anston, an up-and-coming archaeologist, faces threats of defunding and disbanding her team unless she brings something of value. Upon finding an abandoned chi...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The air got harder to breathe as the darkness deepened around her. Small beams from their battery-powered flashlights barely made a dent against the inky veil the farther they went inside the cave system. Her chest tightened, and words died out in her throat. The fear wouldn't last long, because right after the initial darkness, as soon as her eyes adjusted, she would be seeing the beauty of the old civilization in Cangabayi.
It took a while to map out a path through the winding systems inside the mountain the locals called Bayurawan, and most of the budget for last year went into that. After an extensive defense over a glitchy online conference, the higher-ups decided Laureen's team could still operate for two more years. Should they fail to find anything conclusive even through the extension, Laureen resolved to stop trying, pack her bags, and return home with her boonie strings behind her ears.
She didn't expect for the two years to be shortened to less than a month. What was Penelope thinking?
A blatant curse echoed into the darkness. Laureen whirled to the source to find Stell Morris, the post-grad intern, peeking at the soles of his boots in distress. What's it now?
"Man up. It's just a wee bit of bat poo," Quid Gillian, their resident linguist and culture specialist slapped the intern upside the head, almost uprooting the hard hat sitting on Stell's curly dark hair. "By the time you got to Laurie's level, you'd be swimming in it."
As Stell's face contorted into pure horror, Laureen kept her amusement to herself, turning back to the journey ahead. There was a time when she ended up in a pile of shit in the vast catacombs of Petardiff, but that's only because nobody told her the adjacent cavern was still a functioning sewer system. She drilled straight into it, and soon, it deposited her right into the puddle of unspeakable mysteries.
It became a running joke, courtesy of Penelope long before the woman became anyone in the department. She was also Laureen's long-time work buddy, having been with all kinds of various misadventures throughout the years. Laureen stayed being her eccentric self. Penelope went on to become the director.
Quid came months later, replacing Penelope's spot in Laureen's life because of the number of years he spent working under Laureen's team. He wasn't around during the poop swimming debacle, but he was fast in absorbing all the rumors about his colleague. Laureen doubted the linguist had any shred of respect left for her after everything he heard from the other teams and divisions.
Laureen had thrown her tantrums over the years.
"Hey, you okay?" she asked Jasper who took the lead on of their small group.
The doctoral student didn't bother looking back at Laureen when she hummed. "It's farther than what I remembered," she said. "Remind me to start recording the time each time we go back here."
Leave it to her to start bossing everyone around as if she's already finished her degree. Laureen thought nothing of it, though. Jas was a fast-worker and a dedicated researcher. She reminded Laureen of her heyday.
