The lost plateau - The lost daughter Notes
For those who wonder, this is still not the end of Dean and Sam's adventures on the plateau ! I have no idea about a posting date but I'm working on the next sequel. Now here are a few notes (beware spoilers if you haven't read the story yet) :
• Impala and the other gentle dinosaurs you see in this story are inspired by the Chilesaurus diegosuarezi who's been discovered fairly recently and used to live around Chile about 150 million years ago. I fell completely in love with this dinosaur as soon as I saw the drawing. You can also read the article in Nature. For the record, I seriously doubt the Chilesaurus used to jump as I have Impala and her brethren do ;)
• I researched a bit how bullets were made back at the beginning of the 20th century but I'm not a scientist and, in these troubled times we're living in, I didn't get past Wikipedia to avoid getting in trouble for researching online that kind of topic, so take everything I write on this matter with a big boulder of salt, like any other scientific one I touch on for this highly fictional story.
• Speaking of which : Pyroclastic flow or surge (nuée ardente). They are almost the same, the surge being made of more gas and thus lighter. It can travel over hills and water, making it dangerous even to places that seemed far enough from the eruption. This is indeed what killed 30,000 people in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in 1902 ; it was also proved to be the reason of the deaths in Herculaneum and Pompeii when the Vesuvius erupted back in the year 79, many flows going over the area up to 18 hours after the initial one. More recently, the mount St Helens' eruption was another example. In real life, I guess there's a good chance our fearless explorers would have died anyway (gas is sneaky like that !), so don't try to get close to an angry volcano. Just sayin'.
• Once again, I heard about an important plot point of this story on the radio (thank you France Info !) This time, it was about the Willis (or Wilis, French article), when someone talked about Adolphe Adam's opera Giselle. I jotted down the idea, thinking it would make for a great addition to some SPN fic, and researched a bit around the characters. When I decided to use them for this fic, I made some kind of mash-up with more legends attached to them to create my own supernatural threat. I did the same with the Sarramauca (fr). I used the fact that I might have easier access to specific French legends than English-speaking writers to renew a tiny little bit the kind of threats the Winchesters and their friends are confronted with. Stay tuned, there will be more in the next story !
• The Second Boer War, very bloody and expensive, took place from October 1899 to May 1902, leading to the annexation of Transvaal and Orange Free State to the British empire. Both inside and outside the Great Britain, this war tended to be unpopular at the time, in part because of the concentration camps (both for Boers and native Africans, with a huge death rate), and the scorched earth policy of the British army.