06/18/2023 Snippet, Alkali Jones and the Lost Devil-City.

Yeah, we’re going with this.

Alkali Jones and the Lost Devil-City

Wilds of Newhome
(State of Yucatan, Mexico)
3040 AD

I would have felt sorry for the human, except that he was an ass.

That’s a weird word, etymologically speaking, since the Old American word that it’s derived from either means “donkey,” or “place where the crap comes out.” I’m not sure which version best fit Captain Bruce Bigwave; he was stubborn as a jackass, and as full of crap as any humanoid I’ve ever met. If I had realized how bad he was going to be on this expedition, I would never have let him hire me for it. I’m a professional salvage archeologist. I have expectations of my employers, and Bigwave wasn’t living up to them.

Case in point? Right now we had stopped for a bit to “look at the map,” which was Euphemism for “letting the human get a break from the sun.” I’ll be fair and admit that he needed it; by now Bigwave was going through zinc-oxide at an almost comical rate, and his woad-paint was practically a clown mask. He didn’t look at all like the conspicuously civilized (and carefully coiffed) Confed adventurer who had hired me a month ago. 

Still, any sympathy I might have had for his suffering under the relentless Yucatan sun had long since evaporated, like perspiration from my borrowed sweat glands. It wasn’t that Bigwave whined. Proud descendants of a hundred generations of Californian warrior-kens didn’t whine. No, he just thought about whining, hard enough that the birds and beetles in the forest around us could hear. I almost thought about calling him on it, except that the actual whining would probably have been worse.

Did Bigwave have any laudable qualities at all? Sure. He was the money. In the field of salvage archeology, that virtue covereth a multitude of sins.