One thought on “Location Seed: Building 17 (Transformer Annex).”
See… my first read on this is that the “explorers” are going to be someone in the US army. Like, there’s a building here, that hasn’t seen use in almost thirty years, and no one knows what’s up with it. I guarantee that that building falls up under *someone’s* command. The obvious reason someone would be exploring it is that some new guy came in, figured out that there was a building that was under his command that no one knew a thing about, decided that that was not acceptable, and ordered someone to recon the thing. Then the weirdness starts piling up and he goes in there to check it out himself.
Also, you got one thing wrong in your description. That button? No one knows if it can be depressed with a gentle touch, because *absolutely no one* is going to be touching that thing until *after* we find out what it does.
in the 90s, Fort Leonard Wood would have been home to the US Army Engineer school and not much else. Okay. past that… there are a *lot* of things wrong with this picture. Like, “US soldiers died in a stateside posting and we didn’t send the bodies home” is *weird*. Making something like *that* fly with purely mundane explanations requires the kind of direct oversight by powerful people that very much does *not* lead to “this thing is secured with a broken lock and nothing more”.
Like, seriously, “powerful wide-scale enduring memetic effects not adequately explained by current science” becomes one of the *more likely scenarios* in this case, and that’s well before you get to the existence of not-quite-humans in the mix.
…but what it boils down to is relatively simple, for my military mind. We have no idea what this thing is. The world is clearly stranger than we know. 30 years isn’t *nearly* enough time for the contact information in their wallets or the dog tags around their necks to have decayed. So we get the soldiers burial with honors, and adjust any appropriate records to show that they died in the line of duty. We secure the hell out of that location. Whoever it was that attacked could be killed by standard firearms wielded by standard soldiers, and *we have those*. we check the available contact information of those who are *not* US Army soldiers, and see what we can do to follow those back to whoever it was that they were working for. We attempt to determine whether the US soldiers were on attack or defense in this case (*probably* defense, but better to check). We do paperwork searches to attempt to determine what units these soldiers were assigned to at the time of their deaths, and see what we can dig up there.
Oh, and we wait for the men in black to show up, and then let them be awkward at us for a while because they have absolutely no jurisdiction here… unless they have enough throw weight to convince someone in my chain of command? Perhaps we can just discuss his like civilized folks.
…and if all else fails, we *carefully* send some engineers in (EOD sounds good for starters) to try to figure out what that button is connected to.
See… my first read on this is that the “explorers” are going to be someone in the US army. Like, there’s a building here, that hasn’t seen use in almost thirty years, and no one knows what’s up with it. I guarantee that that building falls up under *someone’s* command. The obvious reason someone would be exploring it is that some new guy came in, figured out that there was a building that was under his command that no one knew a thing about, decided that that was not acceptable, and ordered someone to recon the thing. Then the weirdness starts piling up and he goes in there to check it out himself.
Also, you got one thing wrong in your description. That button? No one knows if it can be depressed with a gentle touch, because *absolutely no one* is going to be touching that thing until *after* we find out what it does.
in the 90s, Fort Leonard Wood would have been home to the US Army Engineer school and not much else. Okay. past that… there are a *lot* of things wrong with this picture. Like, “US soldiers died in a stateside posting and we didn’t send the bodies home” is *weird*. Making something like *that* fly with purely mundane explanations requires the kind of direct oversight by powerful people that very much does *not* lead to “this thing is secured with a broken lock and nothing more”.
Like, seriously, “powerful wide-scale enduring memetic effects not adequately explained by current science” becomes one of the *more likely scenarios* in this case, and that’s well before you get to the existence of not-quite-humans in the mix.
…but what it boils down to is relatively simple, for my military mind. We have no idea what this thing is. The world is clearly stranger than we know. 30 years isn’t *nearly* enough time for the contact information in their wallets or the dog tags around their necks to have decayed. So we get the soldiers burial with honors, and adjust any appropriate records to show that they died in the line of duty. We secure the hell out of that location. Whoever it was that attacked could be killed by standard firearms wielded by standard soldiers, and *we have those*. we check the available contact information of those who are *not* US Army soldiers, and see what we can do to follow those back to whoever it was that they were working for. We attempt to determine whether the US soldiers were on attack or defense in this case (*probably* defense, but better to check). We do paperwork searches to attempt to determine what units these soldiers were assigned to at the time of their deaths, and see what we can dig up there.
Oh, and we wait for the men in black to show up, and then let them be awkward at us for a while because they have absolutely no jurisdiction here… unless they have enough throw weight to convince someone in my chain of command? Perhaps we can just discuss his like civilized folks.
…and if all else fails, we *carefully* send some engineers in (EOD sounds good for starters) to try to figure out what that button is connected to.