Chapter 211: Day 210

Day 210,

Morning thought: Cass will be in town today.  I should not be dreading that as much as I am.

 

Well, we didn’t have that conversation, but I did tell Cass about the catacombs.  As expected, she was angry at having been left out and kept in the dark, and I didn’t blame her.  I don’t care to recount the specifics save to say that it took a while, but we worked through it and she shifted to bombarding me with questions trying to extract every possible detail from my memory, both the translated chanting and the open sarcophagus.  Interwoven with those lines of questioning were threads of ideas for other things to try.  Opening the sarcophagus again to see if the shade came back.  Copying down the symbols from inside the sarcophagus and seeing if we can write them on something else to trap a shade.  Or keep them away.  I drew the line at the suggestion that I try sleeping down in the catacomb on a mist night.

In an attempt to redirect and channel some of that enthusiasm I suggested we do that thorough examination comparing the chant transcriptions we’d been meaning to.  For a few hours anyway, then we’d need to get ready for tonight’s telling.

Of course, Cass jumped straight to examining the period between Maiko and I going downstairs and our return.  I made a point of complimenting her good archival work in annotating that.  It was a genuine compliment, but I’d be lying if there wasn’t some preemptive guilt contributing to my verbalizing it instead of just thinking it.

After another round of questioning me about how fast I was going down the stairs and at what point I had my vision she narrowed down what she claimed to be an excerpt containing the translated portion somewhere within.  She even tried reading it aloud to see if that triggered anything for me, but it all still sounded like gibberish to me.

As before, working too long on denotation-less strings of phonetic symbols still gives me headaches, but while I was taking my breaks from that, Cass kept going.  When I returned to find her rapidly flipping back and forth between several pages she had bookmarked I asked the obvious question of whether she’d found something interesting.  Of course, she had.  Not so much a pattern, but a break in one.  While we’d not seen any full looping segments yet, we had identified a few words or phrases that, whenever they showed up, were always followed by another specific word or phrase.  She’d found one of these phrases that seemed to be missing its second half.  Excited, I joined her and confirmed what she was seeing.  Even cross-referenced it with Lin and Vernon’s transcriptions.

We spent longer than we meant to on examining the preceding and following passages around that breakpoint (which Cass claimed had been seamless enough not to notice while listening, especially after having been at it for hours), but eventually we figured out the other thing that had been bothering Cass about that segment.  We figured we’d missed it at the time due to not comparing the notes before and after our rainless lunch break combined with fatigue from hours of listening to gibberish and writing it down, but somewhere around the time we started going back downstairs and putting hands on top of sarcophagi to listen to them, we starting finding repeated segments from around the time we’d first arrived that day.  The implication being that there is a looping nature to the chants, but it’s hours long and opening the sarcophagus may have caused the loop to restart from the beginning prematurely.

A potential discovery worth the price of once again not having the proper time to practice and prepare for the telling.  We wound up sort of winging it once again.  We had fun though, both the telling and the research.

If only it could always be like that.

 

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