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.