Expedition notes 1

[bratfarrar]

So, I want to turn these into proper prose at some point, but right now wordy outlining is all I can manage. But I might as well stick it up here as anywhere, see if anyone else thinks it might be interesting.

*****

Expedition 1 (June 27) - Rabbit and Cave Entrance, Undocumented Wanderings

• George finds the cave entrance chasing what he thinks is the neighbor’s rabbit. (They live in a little curve of houses that wagon-wheel out into the surrounding forest.) Their neighbor has a white rabbit that they walk in a harness occasionally.
• However, when George finally chases it down into a crack in the cliffside, the rabbit has a little smudge of brown fur on its forehead. (This fur perhaps shifts shape into seeming punctuation marks throughout the story; George treats them like speech.)
• The opening is just wide enough for George to walk through straight-on; James will have to turn sideways and carry his pack through by hand instead of on his back. The sort of antechamber is very tall and sort of narrow perpendicularly. The floor is nearly even with the creekbed and full of loose stones; it pretty obviously floods whenever the creek does.
• There are two openings further up into the body of the cliff; they incline somewhat steeply into the rock, but they’ll drop again deeper and deeper as the children start to properly explore.
• George happens to have a flashlight in his pocket, so he pokes around a bit (rabbit clutched in one arm), going far enough along one passage to be sure that there are more openings and it’s definitely worth coming back with proper supplies. He may find Cave 1, but he’s always rather elusive when his siblings tries to pin down how far he went and how long he was in there rather than wandering around the forest & creekbed like usual.

Expedition 2 (June 28) - Cave 1: Music Machine

• The cave is smallish, but somewhat tall; very nice acoustics, and dry. No mustiness when they enter, though perhaps a trifle stale. Smells of metal and wood and perhaps a lubricant of some sort.
• Marble racks run all around the walls of the cave, filled with an unfathomable number of ball bearings. (George makes off with a pocketful, and there’s no visible change in how the marbles fill the racks.) These are punctuated at points by reservoirs of more marbles, and run through several intimidating looking pieces of machinery, comprised of giant gear wheels, multiple unlabeled levers, coils of tubes and smaller racks of marbles, and long belts with moveable studs.
• After a bit of experimentation, they figure out that each machine is actually an instrument, which can be cranked or treadled, depending on what works best for the machine. They have to be synchronized by ear. (Or are there massive gears built into the floor connecting them, and they can be engaged/disengaged via levers?)
• This cave makes an excellent first impression on the kids, even as it raises some major questions right off the bat, like a) the dimensions of the cave don’t in any way match those of the tunnel leading in + the surrounding rock. And there’s b) no way to get all that machinery in, let alone c) without someone noticing, not to be mention d) there’s no one around to have done it.
• They spend a lot of time in here even later on, programming the belts using Jane’s piano music (abandoned since she switched to flute).