Ok, regarding the questions as to why I showed my mother a drawing of the symbols on the drone. During college she worked in the foreign languages section of a library, and had a lot of downtime.

Anyway, on move to the Mojave again with the group I was with recovering the Chinese spy plane bits.

We're going on weapons cache identification out in the desert, and checking in on some other things like the status of Barstow, Fort Irwin, and then the LA area, as no one's been really in contact with anyone in the LA area since those marines arrived at the beginning of April.

So as I was saying. Lots of tanks.

Apparently the local solar array that was built a couple years ago was a cover for tank storage, because it was basically a big underground parking lot full of tanks, apcs, mobile artillery and troop transport trucks.

And ammunition.

And fuel.

All hidden and protected from harm by a few feet of dirt, armor plating and reinforced concrete.


And we just moved everything out.

Oh and a silly amount of spare parts, spare armor plating, spare everything. It's kinda amazing that it was just sitting there hidden like that. Kind of cool actually. Anyway on move.  Armor is headed north to join the fight, as well as some mobile artillery.

Let me preface this by saying I've been all over the valley of my hometown, explored every interesting location, and would never have expected there to be such a treasure-trove of military vehicles hidden here.

So apparently a silly amount of tanks, munitions and fuel were hidden in my hometown.

Not allowed to say where, at least not until we get them all moved out, which might take a while.

It seems the gate guards upgraded weapons while I was gone.

On arrival we were greeted by two toyota "technical"s with type 67's set up on them. They almost opened fire, we almost opened fire, and it was almost a clusterfuck.

After about an hour of discussion we finally were allowed passage in. We're staying at the hotel right at the creek edge for now, one of the lieutenants that came along is off at a council meeting finding out what happened exactly and trying to get permission to actually go through town proper to look for the armor cache we think is here.

I can guess what happened based off how armed the town is though.

The Chinese rolled in, probably looking for those unicorns that we're chasing, and then they were ambushed and either killed or captured. And all the arms that the Chinese soldiers had got split up among the local militia.

On a related note my mom and dad are alright, and they heard from two of my brothers, which leaves one still off somewhere, though before all this started he was in Britain on business. Should probably try e-mailing him I guess.

Showed my mom sketches of the drone symbols, and she has no idea what it means only that she's seen the language maybe once before. She didn't say much beyond that.

On my way home to check up on things off that way. I've also been asked to take some of the soldiers with tank training with me because someone in the upper command thinks there's a cache of armor back that way.

I guess. I've kinda been all over that way since I was a kid and there really isn't a lot of places that can hide tanks and things like that, but it's not my time wasted.

Found ourselves a blacklight, and it just makes the mystery even bigger.

At a distance the pattern actually looks like a QR code, only blown up to a large scale, unfortunately we don't have a cell phone that's that smart that works otherwise we'd try and "read" the code.

Even back at Leemoore there's no clue as to what it is.

Anyway Russians dismantled the chinese plane and took the blackbox somewhere. While we were off in the desert the Chinese got their asses handed to themselves in Fresno and the lines are further north. Every few minutes we can hear the crack from the Mariposa artillery shelling the chinese. It's a strangely comforting sound. Albeit loud. I'm going to see if I can get a day to go check on home.

Spent the last couple of days messing with the "drone" or whatever the hell it is trying to make sense of it. None of the components are anything like we've seen before.

The circuit "boards" are paper thin, there's no obvious data ports and there's no writing that we can recognize it and we don't have a blacklight with us, the metal its made up of is resistant to cutting with both a hand saw and a cutting torch, but a diamond blade on a hand grinder went through it like a hot knife and butter, though the cutting blade burned up pretty quickly.

It also takes an edge pretty nicely and so we all made knives from the hull. Light material, strong and doesn't break easily. Can't ask for much more than that, it might be worth trying to mill out a rifle receiver from it if we can find a shop with a cnc machine, but that's for a whole other day.

beyond that, not much to talk about. On our way out of the desert.