NaNoWriMo, Day 28: 1,520 / 54,380.

Really, I have absolutely nothing against either the Boy or the Girl Scouts. My wife was a Girl Scout. And yet…

The most alarming thing about the Scout camp was how 95% of it wasn’t alarming at all. I’d vacationed in camps like this, growing up on Jefferson; the colony didn’t have full electricity until I was in flight school. If you didn’t mind chemical toilets and food cooked with open flames, it’d even be luxurious by my childhood standards. It was certainly prettier; the buildings were carefully made, then smoothed and polished to clean-lined elegance. Look at a photo of the place, and you’d decide it was peaceful, even serene.

As long as you didn’t go inside.

For example: there was a library (the cabin doors were locked, but I discovered very quickly that the keys were invariably on the top sill). Inside were two rows of school desks, and shelves full of books, each bearing the Scout logo. They apparently needed books on things like woodworking, knot-tying, and carpentry… plus social engineering, demolitions, anatomy, space-based tactics, enhanced interrogation, pharmacology, and eschatology. And those were just the ones I looked through.

The one on enhanced interrogation had both diagrams and photos. It was also written for teenagers.