FROM THE FIELD JOURNAL OF DR. OREN REDRIDGE, EXPLORATORY ARCHEOLOGIST

207TH DAY OF THE 472ND YEAR OF CIVILIZATION

The sign hung on a rusted metal fence, surrounding a mostly empty patch of desert. It seemed like an oasis in the field of menacing spikes I had just passed through. I slid my pack off my shoulders and rummaged through the top pocket, eventually extricating my Ancient-to-Common translation guide. I thumbed through the worn pages, checking the words from the sign I didn’t recognize against the crude definitions in the guide. The sign seemed to be a general warning of some kind of danger, probably to protect a ceremonial site or valuable item. A few of the lines caught my attention, however: “This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.” These seemed to counter my theory of a ceremonial site.

I shook off these doubts, and began to search for my bolt cutters. Since archeologists like myself began exploring Ancient sites from before the Great Flare, we’ve found that sites defended by signs proclaiming danger often contain the most valuable information to our research. Why, just two years ago one of my colleagues found a group of massive strange white dishes arrayed in the desert, surrounded by a fence and signs labeled “Do Not Enter” (an Ancient warning often found surrounding areas they considered forbidden). The find advanced our field by magnitudes, and we now believe the dishes are a much larger version of those found on the rooftops of domiciles in Ancient settlements, although their purpose remains unknown. The Ancients seem not to have differentiated in phrasing between things that posed a danger to others and things that they considered valuable. I believe this site contains the latter, although my apprentices were not convinced, and wouldn’t even go past the first razor-wire-topped fence. It had taken me the better part of a day to make it through the forest of spikes — which only furthered my belief that the Ancients were trying to scare people away from a site of great value — and the sun neared the horizon as I extracted the bolt cutters from my pack. The metal surrendered quickly to their powerful jaws, and I made short work of creating a gap big enough to squeeze myself through. Once on the other side, I reassembled my pack and began to head sunward, traveling for only a few hours before being forced by the oncoming night to make camp.

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