word mining central
Day 106:
I feel like the digging will never end.
Add one to the xenobiology list: we appear to have something resembling bats. Mammalian-like as far as I can tell (not getting that close), hang upside-down from the roofs of caves.
One big difference: these are not using ultrasonic frequencies. I can hear them just fine. And they squeak incessantly. Like flying rats at a rat political convention discussing rat business.
Day 105:
Spent the day chasing a seam of granite through the depths of my caverns. I thought I’d gone as deep as I’d ever gone before… then I broke through a wall into a cavern where apparently I had already left a torch.
Either that or the zombies have suddenly decided to start playing with fire because hey, did I mention cavern full of zombies?
I’m getting better at killing them efficiently, but still makes the heart race a bit.
Also, they wrecked my shoes and most of my pants so I have to make more.
Stupid zombies.
PS there was also a ducken in the cavern.
Day 104:
Did some sand “mining” for a bit this morning, then went fishing the rest of the day. Pulled up a glass bottle full of liquid. I know you’re thinking “of course it’s full of liquid, you found it while fishing,” but the thing is that there was a stopper in the top of the bottle (cork maybe? Could there be cork here somewhere?) and the liquid in the bottle was a bright cerulean blue, unlike the darker blues of the river and lake nearby. (And ocean, I tend to forget to mention the ocean.)
I have set it on a shelf and I am hoping it doesn’t explode. I have no intention of opening it.
Well, not right now anyway.
Side note for those of you reading One Among the Dead: a bunch of the posts between day 88ish and today were missing their sketches. This oversight has been corrected. So if you like seeing horrible sketches of Minecraft-like characters terrorizing a confused protagonist, go reread.
It’s yes, I should write an eligibility post season again.
“Rudy’s Revenge”, published by Alliteration, Ink in No Shit, There I Was. This anthology is a collection of stories all beginning with the phrase, “No shit, there I was…”
No shit, there I was, trying to get one of the new clowns—guy who called himself Rudy—to back down from an ace-high straight. “Dude, don’t bet a witch doctor your immortal soul,” I warned. Most of the new guys would have listened. Most of the guys in the room were shaking their heads in disbelief.
Rudy scoffed. “What kind of witch doctor goes by Donald?” he said, waving his hand in the middle-aged man’s direction. “This guy’s a joke.”
“The Smell of Home”, published by Dreaming Robot Press in 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. This anthology is the fourth in its series. Each year the publishers collect science fiction stories appropriate to middle-grade readers regarding exploring. They emphasize diversity in characters and situations.
I knelt on the porch, the bare pads of my toes cooling on the cement. The late summer sun hadn’t made it around to this side of the house yet, and the roof kept the porch a good ten degrees cooler than the grass, except where the shadow of the cable bisected the field.
Caroline said our house needed guarding because of the cable. It was slate grey, wider than an oak, and it soared through our roof into the sky and out of sight. Caroline said thousands of lives depended on it.
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