>Saying she needs pictures to prove it right?
"You mean… it doesn't matter unless you can prove it?"
"No! I mean OK, yeah, sort of, but also literally. This place, not this place, but the incident site. It's crazy. Nothing works down there. I mean seriously, everything breaks. No wireless at all. We're using these heavy industrial light bulbs for submarines and they burn out in like six hours. You can't take photographs, not just digital ones either, we tried with film too, even the super long exposure kind, you can't take any photographs. The negatives just…"
"Let me guess," says Kendra.
"They turn green?"
"Yeah, with these sort of wavy lines - how did you know that?"
"It's gotten to be a bit of a pattern. Keep going."
"What? Right. We think it's something like Cherenkov radiation, but really faint, and apparently not in a fluid, that's Doud and Yosef's current theory, but even they admit they're just guessing. Everything else screws up too. No audio recordings, plug in a microphone and it just gives you waves of static before exploding. Other instruments, like the geiger counters, heck, pretty much any kind of sensor you plug in down there goes crazy, even temperature readings, but it's just noise. Signals but no cause."
"So… sorry, I'm still not getting it. That's cool right? I mean, weird and frustrating and probably expensive… but cool?"
"Yes! It is cool! But when you try to tell people you've found an enormous room containing what appears to be an enormous sugar factory from a hundred years ago that never left any records of its existence, packed with mummified bodies of seriously deformed people, everyone thinks your crazy! Especially if you come from the department that researches UFO's and psychics and bigfoot and nobody takes you seriously anyway!"
"Ah…" says Kendra, with sympathy.
"And if you try to tell them you're not crazy then they say 'Where is your proof then?' and you say 'Weeeeelll photographs don't really work down there and we tried video recording but the camera sort of melted - you kinda have to come see it for yourself. Oh! There's some stuff we can send you. Here's a perfectly normal brick, an easily forged piece of mouldy paper, and a drawing of a body with six legs. Ah, you want us to send you one of the bodies? No, sorry, we'd like too but we haven't been able to convince CNSC to lend us a radiation proof truck yet!'"
Elizabeth pauses, realizing she's started yelling again. "Anyway, after that, people tend to hang up on you."
"So what? Nobody is taking you seriously?"
"Nobody important. I mean, I managed to convince a Col - a moderately important person - to come see for themselves, but they won't be here for another three weeks and - and I should not be telling you this."
Notes
Note: It should be "than I am entirely comfortable with"
Thank you! That has been messing me up since grade school.
At the beginning of this magical journey, I thought I understood what was going on. A girl just wants to do her laundry, but oh no! Spooky things!
Then, there was a very large period of time when I thought there would be no understanding of this story. I just accepted that there was never going to be any explanation, it would be Dr. Who all over again, where I just nodded my head and pretended to understand the time travel and just sat back and enjoyed character development and great quips without really getting the plot.
Now, with this conversation… lots of stuff is being left out, but I finally feel like I might be understanding some of this! Sort of! So thank you!
Hey! Glad you're still reading! I'm glad you feel like you're getting it. That really makes me feel more confident.
For a long time, longer than I'd like to admit, my goal has been to… I'm not sure how to phrase this - I suppose 'earn' is the closest. I have been trying to earn all those strange and spooky things in the earlier chapters.
I don't want to explain them necessarily, explanations seldom satisfy, but I want people to know that there are explanations, even if we never touch on them directly.
I'm glad that's, at least, sort of working.