Adventure Seed: Godzilla’s Guitar.

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Godzilla’s Guitar

Well, it may not be the actual Godzilla’s actual guitar.  However, it is in fact something that looks remarkably like a stringed musical instrument – admittedly, one that’s over two hundred feet long – so maybe it is the Gorilla-Whale’s guitar. It’s possible, at least.

Or maybe not.  Two months ago Godzilla’s Guitar came screaming down to Earth, end over end, and left a remarkably restrained impact crater in the Chilean Andes. This is one of the alarming things about the artifact, given that it’s estimated to weigh a bit more than thirteen hundred tons.  Something that big and heavy hitting the planet and not breaking up should have wrecked South America’s day at an absolute minimum, and yet it did not. That implies that the Guitar made something like a controlled landing, which is when people start wondering whether the Guitar is even a musical instrument in the first place.  Maybe we’re all just the equivalent of Stone Age savages trying to make sense of a computer, huh?

And yet, again, it looks like a stringed musical instrument.  It has strings (seven).  It has frets. Given the right construction equipment, you can even tune the Guitar, although not for very long: it seems to revert to a default Brazilian classical tuning.  The Guitar is also powered, although nobody knows by what. There is even what appears to be some sort of electronic I/O device at one end. Possibly interactive? Maybe it can be deciphered… provided that you understand the musical theory and ‘language’ that drives the Guitar’s operating paradigm.  But doing that requires real expertise.

And that’s why your team has been tasked with retrieving six specific classical guitarists and musicologists and informing them that they’ve just been drafted, thanks to a secret codicil of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.  Once that delightful revelation has been properly digested, then it’s off to Chile to watch the musicians poke at an alien monstrosity of a musical instrument that’s using an unknown power source. Needless to say, every other country on good terms with Chile has sent a team that’s doing the same thing, and the countries that aren’t has sent a team anyway.  This site is going to end up being hideously overstaffed with bored professional paranoids with agendas, is what I’m saying. And almost certainly at least one group is going to be there with at least a secondary mission objective of messing with your team.  But don’t feel too self-righteous about it; your superiors have undoubtedly handed you an extra assignment or two, as well.

Of course, while this is all going on your team should keep watching the skies. After all, an alien guitar implies an alien guitar-player.  And what if it wants its guitar back?