xp_logs | Nathan and Doug, backdated to Saturday

Somewhere in the Gobi Desert...

"We," Nathan murmured ironically as he brought the 4WD to a stop, "are lost." He sighed, eyeing the sand dunes surrounding them. The rumble was more than audible, and he smiled slightly as he looked sideways at Doug. "On the bright side, the dunes are singing. Hear them?"

Doug poked irritably at the GPS mounted in the dash of the vehicle. It beeped entirely unhelpfully, and Doug wished that Forge were along to make it work right. "You," he noted to Nathan, "are entirely too blase about being lost. And I have absolutely no idea what you mean. The dunes are -singing-?"

"Singing sand dunes," Nathan said, more cheerfully. "Wind causes it, most of the time. The sand grain vibrate, become synchronized, and 'sing'. The dune resonates, like a loudspeaker. Just listen." He fell silent for a long moment, letting the sound of the wind and the oddly harmonic vibration fill the emptiness. "As for being lost," he finally said, opening the door of the 4WD and stepping out, "it could be much worse. Dom had fifty bucks on us running into hostile nomads."

"That's because someone told Dom the story about the paranoid Iraqis, and she promptly lost all faith in my ability to balance out your bad karma." Doug smacked the GPS a bit harder, and leaned back in his seat. "So what are we going to do about the fact that we're lost?" At least they had come well stocked with provisions for just this sort of eventuality.

"Well, if we keep driving eastward we're going to get the edge of the barchans at some point." Nathan waved a beckoning hand at Doug and turned towards the face of the dune beside them. Maybe the view from the crest would be helpful. "The potential of missing Eagle Valley by a few hundred kilometers is a little higher than I'd like, though."

"A little higher?" Doug asked incredulously as he exited the vehicle and slowly trudged up the dune with Nathan. "Your ability to understate is shocking. Missing by a few hundred kilometers is definitely not my idea of a successful or good time."

Nathan gave him a tolerant look over his shoulder. "Yes, but who knows what we'll find in those few hundred kilometers we weren't planning to travel?" he said with a certain malevolent good humor. "That's the whole purpose of the trip, remember. We're investigating."

"I was under the impression that we were going to be investigating things more important and interesting than the sides of sand dunes and just how far it is possible to raise the ceiling on getting lost." Doug harrumphed. "Also, you have a perverse and twisted sense of humor." He was being a touch childish, but he didn't much care. "Also, your head is freakishly large." He kicked at a clump of sand.

"And you are turning into a fussy old man before your time, Ramsey. Must be all the time you're spending around Remy - I've noticed that lately he seems to have lost what little sense of humor he had. I was really hoping the regular sex would help with that."

"Thanks, I'd been trying to avoid the mental image of Remy having sex in any way. Sharing is -not- caring. Besides, he's had a rough couple months, what with his ex-wife having a mad-on and trying to get him killed. That'd put a damper on anyone's sense of humor, I'd think." Doug was just glad that something had brought Remy back from the brink of wherever he'd been headed. He remembered that sparring match all too well.

"And Magneto tried to fracture my skull with a pipe the other week, in the latest lousy twist to my 2007. Somehow I'm managing to cope," Nathan said, and gave his head an irritable shake. Apparently his pride was still stinging over Derbent. You'd think the downtime in Tel Aviv would have taken care of restoring the sense of proportion. He sighed as he reached the top of the dune, looking out over the sea of sand. "Although I'm kind of regretting the lingering effects of the concussion. I don't think I'm up to the exoskeleton, as nice as an aerial view would be..."

"Yes, yes, you are still king of the interesting concussions. All hail King Nate." Doug waved a hand dismissively. "So yeah, back to the original subject," he said as they crested the dune. "Still lost."

Nathan tilted his head and started to extend his minds outwards. "Hypothetically," he said, sounding distracted, "this area's got such a low population density that if I can pin down any significant number of minds, even off in the distance, they should be living along one of the routes out of here."

Doug recognized the slightly vague look on Nathan's face, and did his best to keep both his mouth and voice quiet in hopes of not distracting his efforts. The theory was good, he just hoped that theory could match actuality.

The effort made his head hurt. Lots. "Son of a bitch... fucking Magneto," Nathan muttered, rubbing his temples for a moment as he raised his shields again. "South-southeast," he said. "The area might be playing silly games with our equipment, but I feel a cluster, out there... we can stop again in a couple of hours and I'll re-check, to make sure we're still on-course."

Doug glanced worriedly at Nathan, but he still seemed to be doing okay, so he let it slide. "Let's get a move on, then," he declared. The less time they had to spend lost in the desert the better.

They started back down the dune, and Nathan mustered up a smile. "You know," he said, "so long as it doesn't take us more than a day or two to get back to what passes for civilization, we can at least say the trip's been worthwhile." They'd encountered such a variety of different situations, vis-a-vis mutants and social attitudes towards them. Positive and less positive, and half a dozen cases would be worth looking into further. "It may make things a lot more complicated, that there's no single 'mutant question' in Central Asia, but I don't know... I see that almost as a good thing."

"Hm. You've got a good point there." Getting lost had rather skewed Doug's outlook on things, but Nathan was right about how worthwhile the trip had been. "It's nice to see some positive attitudes towards mutants." Seeing the less positive attitudes wasn't so great, but it was a reality.

"It's amazing how one tribe or ethnic group can look at mutants as hellspawn, and their neighbors half a day's travel away are at the other end of the spectrum. The trick," Nathan said thoughtfully, "would be to come up with ways to help ease the first attitude, and to reinforce the second. One size does not fit all." He gave Doug a quick, crooked smile. "I may be giving you all some more research work. Pete will owe me another beer."

"If I weren't underage, I'd say you owe -me- a beer for piling more work on my desk," Doug groused goodnaturedly. He did do a lot of work, but it wasn't quite so bad, as the work was interesting and valuable. "Maybe I'll save it up for May," he decided with a grin.

"Ah, see, Pete will owe me a beer because getting work from nice respectable NGOs is good for the think-tank image. You, on the other hand..." Nathan snorted. "Well, maybe we'll call it a beer for getting you lost in the Gobi Desert. This isn't something I do very often, you know - get lost, I mean. But it's been a while since I've been in a real desert." He was just out of practice. That was it.

The pair reentered the 4WD, which started smoothly. "I..." Doug drew himself up in a grandiose declamatory pose, then paused for a moment before shaking his head and leaning back in his seat. "...have bad desert karma."