Still attempting to make heads or tails of the last few days, for starters there's been too much interference to connect the uplink for almost a week.. which is alright anyway since we were on our way out of the ashlands last week already.

Bideford's dead... but he's not dead. It's a weird state of being to say the least, basically I need to rewind to the 18th and work my way through the events that've led to today.

The short of it is, Bideford pissed off the tree-man thing I've seen out here... he and I were patrolling the campsite edges for any last bits of equipment that the ash might've swallowed up since we were moving camp to a new area to see if there were any different species to catalogue. The Ent (just going to refer to it as that for here on because it's more or less what it was) just wandered up over the rise, stomping along, more or less ignoring us, I gave it my usual wave.... and well Bideford... He lost his cool, snapped up his rifle and shot it, right in the side. I'll admit, I'm impressed at how quick he got the shot off, side note, .30 cal hollowpoint does literally nothing to one of these creatures, at least nothing visibly.

Well you ever have one of those moments where you screw up, and you have a bit of time to reflect on the fact you've screwed up.... that's basically what happened. The ent , just kinda stops and turns to face us, as if to say "I'll give you one chance to apologize"... well bideford is lining up for another shot, I try and get him to drop the rifle because at this point I've realized two things, "the ent is intelligent" and "It's welling up magic and waiting"... well bideford takes another shot, hits it in the arm, and it, howls out something, low and monotone before loosing whatever spell it was making on us,

 Eivan has made it over to us by that point, so has Fiske, and the plants on the hillside begin to convulse and rapidly grow, growing from woody stems to softer and vinelike tendrils that brush the three of us aside and converge on Bideford... kinda like a venus fly trap on a fly almost.. he struggled, we tried to pull him free, but the plants kept shoving us off and the wines started constricting around him...I'll spare ya'll the details....

 At the point Bideford finally stops screaming, and struggling, I realize the ent has stomped over and is admiring it's work. It's easily twenty or twentyfive feet tall, and just looms down at us before reaching down with it's gnarled hands, and just brushes me, Eivan and fisk aside, picks up the plant coocoon around Bideford and just stomps off into the ashlands.


So... Eivan breaks out the alchohol we were saving for a successful return from the expedition and we just spend the rest of the day drinking around our campfire. No one really talks for about a week.

Well on friday, as we're pulling stake and getting ready to head out finally, Bideford stumbles into our camp... only.. well he's not bideford... I mean he has all his memories, well aside from his death and whatever the ent then did to him, there's also the fact that he has a set of wooden deer antlers growing out of his head now and has gone... more or less "full hippie"...love peace and flower power... it's a strange change to say the least and we're still debating on what to do with him... Eivan says he's been marked by nature magic and the druids back in SLC will want to study him...

Me?... I just want to get back to civilization, get paid and be done with these ecologists. They're getting on my nerves wanting to stop and look at everything... they literally have a half ton of samples that we're hauling back, and a quarter of that is scat from the bison, deer and coyotes that are out here... I'll admit I'm curious as to how they've survived out here too... but there's no reason to bring back that much crap.

The ecologists need their own satcom.

So.. add that onto the list of things needed for further expeditions out here, along with one or two of the Order's GPS units with the twin signal for better accuracy. Would make for mapping out anomalies a bit easier.

That or a signal booster for both. for some reason out here there's just horrendous latency, making ecological uploads take so long, and phone calls have that awkward 2 to 3 second delay between what you say and the response...

Few more new species. They'e more or less decided what I was calling manzanita is a species of manzanita, they're debating over the scientific name though.

Not much else to mention though.

delayed updates are a thing too.

I had intended to make an update sooner, but the ecologists were hogging the  uplink sending data back since Friday.

I won't bore you with the details but they've identified about twelve new species of lichen, 6 new species of plants, tried to catch as Bideford described it, "a coyote that was running around that had deer antlers strapped on its head"...kinda think someone came out here and strapped a set of christmas antlers on it as a prank, but that'd be farfetched to say the least and I didn't see it personally.

No sign of the entfolk yet, or a dragon but on occasion I've felt like we were being watched from a distance. Eivan noticed it too and we've been taking watches at night as a precaution.

Well....time dilation... that's a thing I guess.

To say today is a weird day is an understatement.

Last night we set up camp, staked tents, dug trenches and prepped for a long stay... today we completely undid it all, pulled stake and moved about a quarter of a mile and re-established our main camp... why you might ask?

Well yesterday for us was May 1st.... and today is October 30th. Somehow in the span of about eight hours we managed to lose, would lose even be the right term?  Skipped I suppose is better.. regardless, 6 months. Half a year!

We chose that site oddly enough because it had less ashfall than some of the other areas.. Eivan said it seemed to have weird magic, but we just thought it was what was keeping out all the ash.

Last night we went to bed all well and good, and this morning we woke up all fine, well aside from there being much more ash at the edges of the clearing, and then I go to rig up the sattelite uplink and my PDA syncs up and flips forward 6 months, I don't realize this till I patch through, adjust the antennae the right direction and manage to call out to Leishey to let him know we'd established our camp, and... well freaking the hell out would be an understatement, he thought I was a ghost. I had to get Eivan on the line to talk him down, and get the full story... seems we missed some stuff back in civilization, but the weather isn't changing (it almost never does change in the ashlands anyway), so we may as well complete the job. Bideford insisted we make a radio call to SLC, got the Order guys on the first try too, and asked them to relay a message to his wife to let her know that no he's not dead... next radio day is going to be next weekend, hope things work out for him I guess.

Hopefully no timey wimey bullshit is going to happen again tonight. I'll be very pissed off if I miss christmas new years and my birthday.

Blowout soon fellow skulkers

At this moment, I'm going to have to go on hiatus once again. No it's not writers block.

As some of my readers are aware there's been a change in where I'm working, and due to the nature of my work, I'm way off in the remote mountains and living in an area where internet is less a fact of life, and more a luxary (unless I can convince my cell service guys to allow tethering).

Anyway, how long the hiatus lasts depends on how well I can fast talk my phone company, or if I can figure out if these phone lines where I'm living are actually connected to anything, but it has the potential to last until october.

Thanks for being a reader, and I'll be back in the future. I swear it.

The rest of the team arrived along with a bunch of Leishey's people who are going to be setting up an office for The Archive (what he's calling his organized stalker outfit now) in the SLC area. No one I actually know and none of the guys who were "running" things out at the DMZ either.

Fiske is back for another trip out into the ashlands, he took my and advice and tracked down Axel (literally the only person I trust when it comes to runic magic) and got his equipment and clothing improved.

Leishey managed to convince Doyel to join us to help wrangle the ecologists, so that's definitely a plus.

The other two members of his team are green, they brought unnecessary gear like axes, light duty synthetic tarps, hell their packs are half plastic, at least the guy the Confederacy is sending out to keep an eye on us (because we're going to be bringing in a silly amount of samples through SLC to the airport and they promised to execute us if there's a repeat of the thunderegg incident.), he at least is experienced enough to listen to Eivan and I when we told him fire resistant gear is a must.... seems a bit jumpy though... might throw his rifle into a gravity trap anomaly just to be on the safe side.

So in all we've got Myself, Eivan, Doyel, Fiske, Wissal (ecologist), Weaver (ecologist) and Bideford (SLC guy with an itchy trigger finger).


Somehow I suspect this is going to be a long three weeks.

Wow.... the last month and a half just sorta blew by.

And I don't really know hat to say really. Well the short of it is, things got really crazy, literally the day after the 6 tons of equipment showed up from the west.

After a bit of digging I think I finally figured out what sparked it all happened. Some dumbass dragged in a thunderegg from the ashlands and cracked it open in SLC.  To the initiated, an ashlands thunderegg isn't like its normal counterpart, these radiate some magic, granted not everyone can tell this, so to most people they're relatively normal looking agate rocks... well until you crack one open. If you cut, crack or otherwise destabilize one from the ashlands it releases all the contained energy all at once and temporarily inflicts everyone and everything in a two block radius with magical effects and abilities... which obviously caused all kinds of chaos.

Some of the people affected claimed visions from god, others just white noise filling their minds, Regardless things got out of hand and the SLC Confederation (as they're currently calling themselves) used this as reasoning to attempt to start regulating "anomalous peoples", which unsurprisingly backfired creating something of a "cold war" between magic users, regular people, and then some California Republic guy decided to agitate things by intentionally cracking about seven of them downtown by tossing them off a roof.

This started a half month vicious cycle of tougher crackdowns, more agitation chaos and bullshit, until the military remnants brought in heavy equipment and started enforcing curfews and order. Unfortunately this only happened after the confederation cracked down to the point where a miniature version of the inquisition was happening and "foreigner internment camps" were being considered in open.



So last week after the order forced the leaders of the confederation to "sit down and have words" with agitated magic users and foreign interests everyone was able to agree on some form laws and regulations, basically everyone coming into SLC territory gets inspected when bringing stuff in, mages don't get pulled out of their homes in the middle of the night and someone came up with some "standardized" rules for magical duels and managed to slip them into the discussion.... more or less everyone walked away unhappy.


So with that out of the way, Monday or Tuesday the rest of the expedition team should arrive for the ecologists to study deep into the ashlands some more.

Hopefully someone doesn't do anything stupid and break the peace again.

Sorting through a mountain of gear that Leishey got shipped to us from the west between the storms. We're kinda hoping that the weather calms down and we can get out back into the ashlands again... this snow is kinda getting on my nerves.

Odd dreams, nothing much beyond that.

Made it back to SLC between sets of storms, one of the guys who predicts the weather thinks it's going to be the last really cold storm that's going to hit out here. On a related note, we got word from Leishey that the next expedition into the caldera is starting to take shape and to not get caught up in anything that'll keep us busy beyond March.


Other than that had a few odd dreams involving the coyote, the one in the dreams not the one I was hunting, and wandering a desert with weird stuff way off in the distance, the basalt pillar from before, a giant eye of  providence in a tophat wandering along remaking things into caricatures of themselves just over the next ridge...things of that nature.

I don't know if coyote is just showing me these things to teach me, or warn me. Maybe in time I'll learn.

Game set match.

Took a while, also a few days wandering out in the snow after a whiteout storm buried the barn but I finally got the coyote...

Kinda sucks, it was an interesting challenge taking down a coyote that was much smarter than one should be but unfortunately it ended up being not only a job of protecting the livelihood of the rancher that was employing me but also an issue of protecting the ecology of this area since I found a few spots where it had killed some of the local antelopes and left them to rot like it was hunting for sport and not to eat... I think at times it was using a form of magic... like on a basic sense and not knowingly... hard to describe it I guess.

Rancher wants the meat, let me take the pelt, I think I'm going to get it cured in SLC and see what I can do with it... or maybe keep it and take it to California and see what Axel can make with it. Once the storm breaks again I'm going to make my way back to Salt lake and see what's been going on there.

Snow storms, lightning and still playing cat and mouse with a coyote.

Not much to report, just letting people know I'm still alive really.

There was an impressive snowstorm this last week, dropped a few more feet of snow in addition to an impressive lightning display.

And yes the big coyote is still toying with me and almost took down one of the ranch's horses last night. For some reason it was out in the pasture instead of the barn and so the coyote was chasing ig around trying to tire it out. I took a shot at it and winged him and he ran off before I could line up another shot... so I now have a wounded coyote out there that probably doesn't like me anymore. Gonna try and track it down between storms and while I still have light.

Decided to head out before the next set of storms rolled in to that ranch I was offered work at for coyote abatement.

Not much going on really, holed up in one of the barns, got coffee, and a warm place to sleep with a decent view of their fields, not really that cold either, snow's barely not melting during the day.

Been in a sorta standoff with a large coyote, large enough to take down one of the rancher's horses alone, pretty smart one too, almost like a wolf, but eventually it'll have to try and get at the bait carcass, not much else out here to eat what with the ranches cattle in shelter. Kinda sucks to have to hunt them, but coyotes are just a bit too stupid (or maybe too smart) for their own good. Wolves at least learn to leave a ranch alone after you nail one from over 200 yards away, yotes just don't do that, the ones you don't see learn your tells when you get the ones you do see... I guess it's like playing a game of who's the better sneaker.


On the subject of coyotes I had another one of those weird dreams again.. the one with the coyote talking at me under the desert stars, now I'm not saying it sounded like Johnny cash... but well it had that tone and I kinda caught some of the meaning of what I'm being told, mostly  it was a sorta "you will understand in due time" feeling, and then I woke up when the coyote pack started howling and making noise across the field.