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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Audrik" data-source="post: 7644150" data-attributes="member: 73653">Future/Perfect - Session 2cThis Hughes guy must have been pretty strange if those tapes were accurate. Dempsey was starting to come around to the weresnake theory. Hughes preferred the dark, and he liked heat lamps. Snakes like heat lamps. His sense of smell was incredible, and snakes had some of the keenest noses in the animal kingdom.Tongues. Clark told the Irishman snakes smelled with their tongues. Well, Dempsey wasn’t so sure about that, but whatever. Clark also pointed out snakes weren’t exactly vegetarians, but it sounded like Arthur Hughes was. Still, heat lamps. Clark agreed there was a similarity, and he still liked his weresnake theory. It was something to keep in mind.Clark took the Geiger counter and the Master Lock key, and the agents headed out back to the root cellar. Dempsey swung the doors open and looked down. The cellar had dirt walls reinforced by wooden supports. A set of slate steps led the way down.Clark went down first, gun out, and once at the bottom, he pulled the chain dangling from an uncovered lightbulb in the ceiling. The bulb came to life and illuminated the roughly ten-foot square cellar. The cellar was empty, and the soft dirt floor had been meticulously raked. It looked somewhat like an uninspired Zen garden with only parallel grooves. A rake rested against the near wall at the foot of the stairs.Well, Dempsey wasn’t about to go messing with a dead man’s Zen garden. That’s how you get bad karma. He was about to head back up the stairs when he noticed a clicking sound from the Geiger counter. Clark suggested Potter may have buried something in the dirt and raked it over to hide it. That may be, but if he did, Dempsey reasoned, it appeared to be something radioactive.Clark shrugged and followed the trail until the counter clicked the fastest. If anything here was radioactive, it wasn’t strong enough to be dangerous in small doses. Clark began to dig, and it only took a moment before he found something.He pulled a large jar from the ground, and Dempsey immediately wished he hadn’t. It was full of some sort of liquid, but it was what floated in the fluid that made the Irishman flinch. It looked like a dragonfly curled in a death position, and it was at least two feet long. Clark was a little bothered by it, but on seeing just how badly it affected Dempsey, he reverted to his bro days. He teased Dempsey by pretending to throw the jar to him a few times.The Irishman was not amused. His older brother had tortured him with a dead dragonfly when they were younger, dangling it over young Dempsey’s head or setting it on his shoulder. The incident ended when Dempsey’s brother forced him to eat the thing. Nope. Clark could put that right back in the ground or send it off to the nerds at the lab. Clark laughed and set it aside for the moment.There was one other thing in the hole; a Ziploc bag with a golden cube. The cube was a little less than three inches on each side, but it had to weigh almost 15 pounds. Either it was gold-painted lead, or it was actually gold. Clark wasn’t sure this much gold should be radioactive. He probably should have studied harder for his Physics class instead of partying. Either way, it had to be worth millions of dollars if it was real. Clark suspected the cube might actually be 2.718 inches, and if so, it would match the measurements of the sockets from the drawing in the notepad.The edges and corners were rounded, and there were odd symbols etched into each face. Clark thought he knew some of them, or at least he recognized the style. It had been little more than a year since the tragedy at the community center in Buffalo. That was where he met and recruited the State Department linguist Dolf de Jaager. What was it de Jaager called the language they were learning? Anglo? He knew that wasn’t right, but it was close.Dolf hadn’t been assigned to this Operation, but he could help. Clark took pictures of each face of the cube with his phone and sent them to de Jaager. He received a response on the first before he’d even sent the last. Aklo. That was the language.The etchings each had a few different translations. One translation would indicate direction – north, south, east, west, middle, and time. Another would indicate relative position – first, last, above, below, transition, and before.Dempsey wasn’t so sure the second set of translations made sense. Why would one stand for before if another stood for first? Clark didn’t care too much. They had a two-foot-long dragonfly and a multi-million dollar radioactive cube to hide. The nearest Green Box was probably in Bakersfield, so the back of the SUV was going to have to suffice for now.</blockquote>

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