‘The door dilated!’
I started back up on the second leg of my survey this morning. It actually took shorter than I expected, but only because I hadn’t really understood just how big the Sentinel Dump is. Maybe I should have taken the ‘garbage dump for half of New England’ thing more seriously.
You can’t see much of the dump from the road, but you can smell it from a mile off. It’s not an intense reek, but it’s powerful. The aroma gets past any kind of mask or filter, and moves right into your nose. As to how it smells? I can’t describe it, just break it down to individual scents. Lots of chemicals, a bunch of decay, things that were on fire that shouldn’t have been — I haven’t smelled anything like this since my pre-college Service. We were dismantling a pre-Reform refugee work facility, and it was one of the ones where they tossed anybody who died into a chemical pool in the basement… well. It’s not something you expect to encounter while doing your year, is all I’m saying.
Anyway, from what I can see of the dump, it’s got at least one hill that looks perfect for the towers. It’s big and it’s bare, and I’d like to have a third reason for symmetry’s sake, but I don’t need more than ‘big’ and ‘bare.’ That it’s also ‘foreboding’ isn’t really relevant in this case. It’s a century’s old garbage dump. It’s going to be foreboding.
“century’s old” should be “centuries-old”
…unless the garbage dump *did*, in fact, belong to some particular century in a meaningful way. That sounds like a different story than the one you’re writing here, though.
Oh, and I feel like if we’re talking about “hills in used-to-capacity dumps” for the purpose of putting the equivalent of a cell tower on, then the character would also be concerned with “stable”.
Oh, they keep the hills clear of stuff. Suspiciously clear of stuff.