Chapter 76: Epitaph of a People
Two days later, the sea of paper was still up to Derek’s hips, and that was with everything they’d already scanned having been moved out into the hall in neat stacks.
And seeing the motion of the paper being the only sign of progress was goddamn depressing.
Take paper, run phone over paper, put paper outside the room, rinse and repeat.
Mimi was putting together a high-resolution automated scanner, but that’d take a couple more hours still, and given a choice between doing nothing and manually scanning, Derek chose advancing the process of understanding the language so that they could finally start to make headway towards uncovering just what had happened here.
Not the bunker, mind you, that had been pretty easy to figure out. Last refuge on the planet, last survivors of a dying race, World Boss overhead that injured you if you so much as looked at it … yeah, everyone had gone a little crazy towards the end. Even the workaholic they now all agreed had been preparing for the eventuality that they’d be discovered by alien explorers hadn’t exactly been acting “sane” by the standards of any known sapient species.
DING!
Derek jumped as his phone chimed, head slamming into the ceiling with a resounding smack before he fell back down, belly-flopping into the as-of-yet unscanned piles moments later.
Damnit, he groaned. Haven’t had that happen in a while.
He looked at his phone, only to realize he was looking at his bare palm. Sighing, he spent the next few seconds digging his phone out from under the papers.