Revenant said:

which means look for both of your characters to be killed off quite quickly and be replaced by a robot and an Alux.  No, I'm just kidding…..or am I?     

---

Can I be a robotic Alux? :)

ACK!!

As I slowly begin my demise by having accidentally swallowed some Tennessee bourbon instead of Kentucky bourbon (I think Rev may have switched the labels).
I offer one last contribution to the RCS Team.
http://news.yahoo.com/video/local/portland
Bigfoot, hack!, discovered, cough!, in, gag!, Portland.
I'm fading fast my old teammates, tread on without me. ACKKkkk!

CHAPTER [WHATEVER THE LAST ONE WAS PLUS TWO MINUS ONE]

Stepping over the outstretched forms of sleeping emus, Nosfer wandered over to where Revenant sat at the edge of the firelight. He was seated on a log with a bemused look on his face and a rock in his hand.

"How goes the calibration, Rev?" Nosfer asked.

"I won't lie to you," replied Revenant.

In the ensuing silence, Nosfer realized that not lying also meant that Revenant wasn't going to tell the truth, either.

"Come on, it can't be that bad"

"Well," Revenant started. "It might be. For every job there is the right tool. I may be wrong, but a medium-sized piece of granite probably wasn't the best tool for making fine adjustments on this FLIR."

Nosfer looked at the mangled housing at Revenant's feet. "Hmmmm, you're probably right. Igneous…I don't know, you probably should have gone with some sort of metamorphic rock"

"I think you're right, well, live and learn, I always say," Revenant conceded. "I should probably put this in the RCS handbook. What's the symbol for boulder?"

After thinking for a moment Nosfer responded, "I think it's 'squiggly line, bird, guy with arms stretched backwards and forwards'"

After Revenant carved the note onto the RCS tablet, the two headed back to the campfires where Blinddog was getting on much better.

"So," he muttered between alternating swigs of espresso and bourbon, "Where are these Jackalopes we're supposed to be looking for?"

"Well, legend says…" began Revenant, "…Why is Cookie sitting on your head?"

Alicat quickly explained the sequence of events.

"Well, live and learn, I always say," Revenant said when she was finished.

"Are you going to put this one in the handbook, too," Oubliette asked.

"Just a minute, just a minute," said an irritated Revenant, reaching for his tablet, chisel, and mallet. "What's the symbol for roadkill?" he asked after a moment.

"'bird, guy with arms stretched backwards and forwards, squiggly line'" Nosfer informed him.

Chink, Chink, Chink, Clunk, Thud

"Hmmmm, Sedimentary….that's it, those make better tablets than igneous," Revenant said looking at the pile of broken tablet at his feet.

"Elementary," Nosfer said with a grin.

"No, I said _sedimentary_," Revenant corrected him.

The remainder of the RCS team stood motionless with eyes rolled towards the stars.

"Anyway," he continued, "Legend has it that the fanged Bigfoot lives in the area on the other side of the big clearing on the other side si…"

"Bigfoot?" asked Oubliette, "I thought we were looking for Jackalopes"

There was a great shuffling of tablets as Revenant looked through his notes. Then some more bemused looks. "Ha, funny that, the fanged Bigfoot has often been mistaken for a Jackalope, so I WAS right. So, the fanged Jackalope could be mere days away, we should get some rest. I sense a long day ahead of us tomorrow"

"Why is that?" Blinddog asked.

"Simple, it's the summer solstice tomorrow." Revenant replied.

TO BE CONTINUED

CHAPTER 17 – Ecce Iaccalopus

The team had followed Revenant’s squiggly-lined tablet for no more than three minutes when they crested the small ridge that was just outside their camp. Having reached the end of Revenant’s map, they began looking around and considering their options for travel when, all of a sudden, Oubliette pointed down into the clearing ahead.

The RCS stood in wonderment as they watched the creature nibbling at grasses here and there. It would occasionally make short darts in one direction or the other to chomp on a more succulent blade but seemed not to take notice of the RCS staring at it intently from the nearby ridge.

"We need to document this and get some visual evidence," Alicat suggested.

"Right," agreed Revenant. He paused and then started reaching into his pack.

As the team watched, Revenant pulled out an easel and quietly set it up. Then he reached into his backpack once again and began pulling out tubes of various colored paints which he arranged in a neat semi-circle on the ground in front of him. In the center he placed his palette, and finally he removed some brushes and a small bowl. He turned to Oubliette, handed her the bowl and whispered, "Here, would you go fill this with water from that creek over there?"

Oubliette began making her way to the small brook that flowed down and away from the clearing with the Jackalope while Revenant started dabbing little blobs of paint onto his palette from each of the tubes. Without making a sound, Nosfer slowly moved over to him, keeping one eye on the Jackalope, and whispered, "Wait a minute, I might have a better idea."

Revenant paused and arched an eyebrow quizzically as a bead of orange paint dropped onto the center of the palette.

Digging into his backpack, Nosfer pulled out his camera while the other members of the RCS team stood motionless watching the Jackalope.

“Crude, but it might work,” Revenant conceded and put the cap back on the tube of “Orange.”

Nosfer dropped to a crouch and began adjusting the aperture and shutter speed. Then he continued to lower himself to the ground until he was flat on his stomach and began slowly crawling through the underbrush towards the animal which was still grazing calmly, though with what appeared to be a grin now crossing its face.

Nosfer had crawled about 5 meters forward at a very slow rate, at times barely moving lest he startle the feeding Jackalope. At the edge of the clearing, he brought the camera up to his eye and paused. The RCS team then watched as he started worming his way back towards them, inch by inch (the RCS is quite adept at using many standards of measure and interchanges English and SI units at random to throw off the competition.)

A half-hour later Nosfer had finally reverse-crawled his way back to where the RCS crouched with puzzled looks on their faces. Turning his head back to look up at them and, with a hint of panic and urgency in his voice he whispered, "The batteries are dead, I need new batteries."

"Is the Jackalope depleting the energy or is there some other entity down there that is trying to manifest?" Oubliette asked.

"No," Nosfer continued in a whisper, removing the batteries from the camera. "I'm not sure what happened, I put them in the solar charger right before we went to sleep last night so they could fully charge overnight." He paused, slowly turning the batteries over in his hand and then added "But for some reason they’re still dead."

"What size do you need?" Revenant hissed.

"4 double-As" Nosfer replied.

"Will 8 single-As work?" Blinddog asked.

"They might, but I'm going to need a metamorphic rock so I can cram them all in there," Nosfer responded, looking at how much room there was in the battery compartment.

"Wait a minute. Here, try these," Alicat said handing him the appropriate quantity of the appropriate size battery.

"Thanks, I suppose these might work," said Nosfer, setting down the rock and handing Blinddog back the other batteries. He slipped the batteries into their compartments and, after closing the lid and verifying that he had full power, began readjusting the settings on the camera.

With fresh batteries in place, Nosfer began anew the painstaking process of crawling forward through the brush towards the seemingly still-oblivious Jackalope. The process, by the way, was no less painstaking for the other four members of the RCS who began comparing him to various annelidae and reptiliae they had come across during other expeditions.

"Kinda looks like that Mongolian Death Worm we almost saw, doesn’t he?" Revenant chuckled, and the others grinned, nodding their heads.

“Or that Big Bolivian Boa we missed by mere minutes,” alliterated Alicat [Editor’s Note: Another fine example of alliteration.]

As Nosfer reached the edge of the brush again, however, the team became quiet once more, watching intently as he brought the camera up into position and began taking picture after picture of their query.

"This is going to be good!" Revenant said in a loud whisper.

"I'm never going to have to pay full price for pizza again," Blinddog added, almost shouting and with a wild look of glee forming in his eyes.

“I just hope he remembered to take the lens cap off this time,” Alicat cautioned.

“…J-a-c-k-a-l-o…” Oubliette murmured as she hastily made additions to her resume while Cookie sat quietly, still shaking her head.

After several minutes, Nosfer began crawling his way backwards through the brush to where the other four crouched. He finally reached the group and stood up. With one last look back at the Jackalope, they all quickly and quietly moved over the small ridge back toward camp.

---

CHAPTER 18 – Evidence Review

“Did you get him?” Revenant asked, finally, when they had reached the campfires.

“Oh I got him alright,” Nosfer said breathlessly, “Take a look at these!”

He held the camera out and the others gathered around as he began cycling through the pictures. They watched in awe as he showed them picture after stunning picture.

“Such clarity!” Revenant said.

“Beautiful!” Oubliette added.

“Look at the contrast and the lighting!” Alicat pointed out.

“Free Pizza!!!!” Blinddog yelled, rubbing his hands together which turned out to be an unwise action since he was holding a cup of bourbon at the time.

“I know! I know!” said Nosfer, his hands shaking, barely able to contain his excitement. “Here, we’re almost finished going through the shots of my trip to Cancun…okay, here…now, these should be the ones that I just took of the Jackalope.”

A hush fell over the group.

“We need to get back to civilisation and show these to Stephen,” Revenant declared finally.

“Why did you use an ‘S’ instead of a ‘Z’ when you said ‘civilization’?” Alicat questioned.

“Because all the expeditions I’ve read spell it that way in their notes,” Revenant replied.

TO BE CONTINUED….

Chapter 19 (Back at camp)

Having gone through the pictures of Cancun, the Bahamas, the Jackalope, and some pictures of a winery that Nosfer had forgotten he had taken, the RCS began to settle in for the night, resting themselves for the long journey back to civilisat^h^h^hzation. It was impossible to sleep, though, and by 4 in the morning, their trusty leader was calling everyone to get a move on.

With no emus remaining, the team hastily cached the supplies they could not carry ("for when we come back here leading tours," Revenant explained) and hiked out of the clearing to where the unicycles were laying. There they began the arduous process of rolling the 30 feet down the hill towards where they had all started back in Chapter 7.

After brushing the dust and dirt from his forehead, Nosfer sat up and looked around, "That didn't take too long," he said.

"No," replied Revenant, pulling grass and twigs out of his hair and crawling back over to the unicycle, looking at the bent spokes. "Now, we must find Stephen," he finished.

"Isn't that how Chapter 1 started?" asked Alicat.

"Yes, but we now know that he is in the vicinity of the Press Club and could be wearing a false mustache," chimed in Blinddog.

"Alright, let's get our gear unloaded from the unicycles and go find him," Revenant said impatiently.

The RCS started unloading their equipment when Nosfer looked over at the assorted gear laying around Revenant's unicycle. "What happened to your black bag?" he asked.

Revenant looked up and glanced around for a moment and then shrugged, "I must have left it back in the conference room. You still got your camera?"

Nosfer looked into his pack and pulled out the camera which was only slightly worse for wear after having been used as a brake during the unicycle dismount. "I think the memory card is still good," Nosfer replied.

"Good, let's go."

The RCS walked down the street, at first oblivious to the stares directed at them by people passing by. The staring took its toll after a while and Revenant muttered something that sounded like, "If one more person asks 'Dr Livingstone, I presume' I swear I'm gonna…." he said, trailing off, leaving his threat unfinished.

Blinddog had his map which, unfortunately, did not have a location marked "Stephen" on it, though this fact did not deter him from calling out directions.

Revenant turned to Nosfer and whispered, "Do you think you can still figure out where we are by the sun?"

Nosfer looked at the cloudy sky for a moment before saying, "I've got a better idea, the ancients used a navigational trick where certain monuments were arranged along the legs of triangles and it allowed them to travel great distances without a map or even a Children's Book," he said, nodding toward Blinddog's copy of Where's Waldo?

"How does this work?" Oubliette asked, overhearing the conversation.

"Well, I only studied the basic theory of it just before Revenant called the last meeting. If I had known he was going to be as late as he was, I probably could have figured it all out, but I think I have enough to go on."

"And four, you're not the boss of me," Revenant countered.

The others, with the exception of Alicat, gathered around Nosfer who explained, "Basically what we do is look for two monuments that look like they are equidistant and at diverging but equal angles away from a third monument, then we go to one of the two monuments and that should lead us to a third monument." The others nodded uncertainly.

"Only thing that might be a problem is this was designed by the ancient Britons thousands of years ago. There are two things that could complicate matters. One, I don't think we are in Britain." The others turned toward Blinddog at this point for confirmation, but Blinddog all of a sudden became very interested in the section of sidewalk between his feet.

"The other problem," Nosfer continued, "Is that I think these structures predate Stephen. But…," at this point Nosfer pulled out some string, "…there may be another way."

"Wait a minute," said Alicat, reappearing and holding what looked like a phonebook in her hands. "I was just checking in the Yellow Pages and there is a listing for Stephen's Supernatural Sightings 'Splained…I wonder if this is him?"

---

Chapter 20

The RCS stood outside an old building with blacked out windows and a tattered roof. "This must be it," Oubliette said, reading the sign. They pushed the door in and walked into the waiting room.

"Do you have an appointment?" the woman behind the counter asked.

"We're the RCS," Revenant said, "We need to talk to Stephen."

There was a scrambling sound in the other room, followed by what sounded like an office chair rolling into a file cabinet, and then a few muffled oaths. Then a sigh that was audible through the closed door and: "Alright, send them in…."

The RCS walked into Stephen's office. "What do you guys want this time?" he asked, rolling his chair back toward the desk and looking at the dent in the file cabinet.

"That should buff right out," Blinddog suggested helpfully.

"Have a seat," Stephen said, gesturing towards some chairs on the other side of the desk. "You haven't found another Loch of the Woods monster have you?"

"Oh, no," said Revenant, "We've got something much better this time." The others nodded. "We've got some pictures of something you just won't believe!"

"Probably not," said Stephen, recalling the pictures of the inner tube on Oubliette's pond that they had showed him the last time. He hauled out his laptop and set it on the table between them. As it booted up, a distinct yellow SSSS logo appeared on the screen.

"Nice new laptop," Revenant said, immediately regretting the compliment, realizing this would remind Stephen of what happened to the OLD laptop.

"Alright, let's see what you've got," Stephen said, and Nosfer handed him the memory card. As Stephen brought up the first image a puzzled look crossed his face. He tilted his head left and right and then pulled back a ways. "Still haven't learned to focus that thing yet, have you?" he said finally.

"It was pretty dark in that winery," Nosfer admitted, "Check the next ones."

"Ah, okay, these are much better," Stephen said. "Cancun IS nice this time of the year." He continued to bring up images and then stopped. A look of absolute amazement crossed his face, followed by disbelief, followed by a quivering of the lower lip.

Back out on the street again, and dusting themselves off for the second time that day, the RCS looked at each other as the door slammed behind them.

"Well, that didn't go as well as I thought it would," Revenant said after a moment.

"He must get dozens of cranks coming in every day with hoaxes, blurry pictures, and who knows what else," Alicat said. "I guess you can't blame him for not jumping right on something when we bring in a REAL find that looks this good."

"Could be," said Revenant, "But at least we've got some great pictures for the next magazine issue. Nosfer, let's see those images again."

Nosfer got out the memory card and brushed the dust off the view screen of the camera and brought up the first picture of the Jackalope.

There was a collective "Wow" to which Revenant added, "We're going to have to go glossy with this issue!" The others nodded in agreement.

---

Click Image to Enlarge
Double-Click Image to Close

Link to the 5000-year old navigation system courtesy of Alicat.

In the book I suggested to whoever that was who was asking about books to build into her(?) library, there is great discussion of those ley lines and it goes further talking about some folks who postulated long ago the basic premise of the navigation system. Trouble is that the ages of the monuments span such a tremendous amount of time that there are immediately problems. Mixing Neolithic monuments in with ones only a thousand or so years old? Kinda raises some eyebrows on my part, too.