I was feeling bad about only getting 200 words of this story done today, until I remembered that I also wrote about 1000 words of unrelated stuff beforehand. Today was actually productive, really. It didn’t feel like it, but what do I know?
The first sign that something was going wrong was the high-pitched drone that suddenly reverberated inside my skull — and if ‘high-pitched drone’ sounds nonsensical, I’m sorry about that. I’m trying to describe what an unpleasant magical sensation feels like, and if you aren’t a mage it’s not going to make much sense. If you are a mage then you’d likely know exactly what I was talking about.
You’d also realize that hearing the drone meant a spell had just started to disastrously unravel, so you’d be hitting the dirt (literally, in this case). That’s what I was doing, yanking down Yuri along the way: I could see Barbara taking a dive, too, with barely enough time for her to yell “DUCK!” along the way and have it be useful.
Luckily, salvage archeology self-selects for people who know when to take cover at a moment’s notice. It turned out that almost all of the team at least got out of the metaphysical line of fire when the uncontrolled magical energy started manifesting as chain lightning (there are reasons why that happens, but you probably don’t care what they are).