A little something that wouldn´t leave me alone after some discussion in Discord channels yesterday.
@Made in Heaven @Arathnorn , for your eyes to decide whether or not to include in the quest at all.
Sir David Tushingham in "Not the Discovery!"
The 90´s.
*Sir* David Tushingham HATED the Nineties - and how could he not? It was that accursed decade with its overblown sense of self-worth and entitlement that ushered in the demise of someone like him who was just starting to make it big in the world of paleontology (
*not archeology* - Seriously, how hard was it to get the difference between someone who examined fossilized bones and someone who examined long-forgotten bits of pottery? The nerves of some people...).
Sure, mistaking roast chicken bones his hired muscle threw away at a dig site for a revolutionary new discovery in the heat of the moment might have been less than ideal and his approach to waste removal could have been framed as just a tad lackadaisical in an age where environmentalism was on the rise after some "scientists" who were getting too big for their boots started spouting nonsense about a hare-brained concept they variably called either "global warming" or "climate change", depending on what sounded more alarmist at any given time.
But that did not give anyone the right to completely discredit him by insinuating that the strange, cubical stone object he excavated that one time might have been at best another case of him mistaking some modern appliance for a new discovery putting everything Mankind thought established into question (that happened to him
*one time in the heat of the moment* - some people were simply too resentful about past grievances like some pieces of roast chicken) and at worst he was trying to buff up his resume by intentionally faking that discovery (he'd never sell out like that just for some fame and glory). All his rebuttals were for naught and he was stripped of his honours by Oxford University shortly after, forcing him to make a meager living by advertising the Famous Paleontologists´ Home Study Course during infomercials.
That only made things worse because he quickly got sued by countless low-bred slobs for "falsely advertising an alternative to years of studying paleontology" when it was clearly only meant as an
*entry* into the field and a
*Foundation* to build up on. Nobody ever said that home courses and honorary doctorates bought somewhere would equal an actual education - not even that raving lunatic over in Danville was stupid enough to do that and he reputedly made it rain rotten meat a while ago within his "territory" that everyone knew was just some marketing gag to play up the shtick of "evil CEO and tin tyrant" his company ran for some ungodly reason, by Jove! Not only that, but some particularly moronic people even accused him of having
*bought his honorific address the same way*.
Ennoblement did not work that way at all, for Pete's sake!
Be it as it may, all this injustice born of the arrogance inherent in 90s society led to him losing everything and having to scrape by with positively degrading odd jobs like appearing at children's birthday as a famed ARCHEOLOGIST (...trying to educate some people on the clear differences was simply an exercise in futility, it seemed) and getting whacked on the head by some brats upset about "some dusty old fossil-digger pretending to be an awesome adventurer like that Croft gal from the video games" with various household items up to actual frying pans.
His dismal current situation was the only reason he had even entertained the offer made by that crummy little cryptic website from *the 90s* called "So Weird" to oversee a paleontology dig site in South America with some kind of discovery dating back to the rough time frame to the extinction of the Dinosaurs (although to his chagrin, his contact kept referring to the area as "what used to be Southwest Pangaea", despite even Laurussia and Gondwana having long since broken up into something approaching the current continental configurations, never mind the earlier super-continent of Pangaea). Well, it was either this dig site or hunting down supposed cryptids in Oregon and as much as David had come to loathe his former passion thanks to the ignorance of others,
something about the State of Oregon just gave him the willies as of lately.
So here he was, digging through the dirt for some kind of fossil at night like back in the glorious days before everything came down crashing around him. He simply
*knew* that he was onto something here, because the rock layer in the area (ironically enough only a few dozen miles away from the place where the "chicken bones incident" had taken place at, but that was beside the point) was unlike
*anything* he had found before. The slab the machines had already unearthed below kilotons of rock was simply
*gigantic* - several square meters in size, in fact. With the greatest care possible, Sir Tushingham freed the object from any possible impurities and obstructions before squinting his eyes suspiciously in the lamp light. Didn´t the slab look a bit
too perfect in makeup, its´ angles almost
artificial in their precision? And didn´t those protrusions look just the slightest bit..like...letters?
In frustration, he hastily rose from his kneeling positions and stormed out of the pit. Once more he was being ridiculed for his past inaccuracies by conflating
*paleontology* with
*archeology*. That was the straw that broke the camel´s back and he was simply DONE with getting made fun of. To think that for one second, he genuinely thought that this dig site might give some new and revolutionary insights into the life of dinosaurs shortly before and maybe even during the extinction event. He could care less for how that
*plague* got down there, but he would not stand any longer for being someone else´s laughing stock. The *jokesters* running "So Weird would have to find someone else to laugh at, but
*Sir David Tushingham* would not be that person.
...That being said, he still needed to pay his bills
*Somehow*, so even though he wanted nothing to do with this particular job anymore, ends needed to meet regardless. With that in mind, he prepared a text to his contact with the website administration stating that the matter clearly was falling outside his area of expertise and whether that offer regarding Oregon was still open. As much as even thinking about that place set his hairs on edge, he needed to get food on the table and even if those cryptids turned out to be nothing more than some painted goats, at least that kind of failure did not rely on everything he was or used to be getting mercilessly mocked by some fratboy with too much time and too little brains.
Leaving behind the dig site, he payed little further mind to the plague that, after some careful linguistical reconstructions of the long-dead language used, might have been discovered to spell out the words
FRUITCO
MAKERS OF FINE WAX FRUITS
A division of the WESAYSO CORPORATION
....Lord above, did he HATE the Nineties...
