How could it be this dark out? It’s only a little after seven. And the wind! This dust blowing -- I can’t see more than fifty feet…
She walked slowly along the roadside, stopping every so often to look around for something she remembered seeing before. And seeing nothing but the sand.
I haven’t seen anything I recognize! Lost. I’m lost.
She hadn’t even seen a T-barrier in the last ten minutes...
My first day here, and I’m lost. And I don’t know if anybody even knows I’m out here…
Thank God the road is paved. If I keep following it -- what if it stops? What if it turns? Whywhywhy didn’t I leave the chow hall with the other guys?
The road abruptly turned to gravel and the dust storm abruptly turned worse.
Okay, don’t panic, she thought. I don’t remember any stretch of gravel, but maybe I just walked a little bit too far--
Barbed wire? Omigod -- I'm on the perimeter! Okay, now's the time to panic! Waitaminnit -- that looks like a light! It is! There’s a light over there! Pleasepleaseplease let it mean there’s a person there, a real person, not just a security light! It’s so dark out here…
A window! I can see desks and computers! There’s somebody working in there! Window’s too dusty, I can’t see who -- oooooh, there’s the door!
She tried the door and found it unlocked. She peered in and --
“Hello? Can you help me?”
-- promptly jolted the daylights out of me. I turned away from the class I was preparing and saw an armed Munchkin in full body armor, standing just inside the door, fetchingly shedding dust all over my rucksack.
"I'm lost."
"No, you're *found*. The hard part's over -- all we have to do now is get you from here to where you're supposed to be."
Well, it took a lot of backtracking and some judicious enroute questioning (“Okay, do you remember *anything at all* about what’s around your hootch? Ummmmm, *aside* from the 12-foot T-barriers?”), but eventually we figured out where she’d made the wrong turn. I calculated a correction for wind drift, sand drift, and spindrift and had her back home less than half an hour after she'd interrupted my class prep.
By the time I'd walked back to the office, the nightly "Turn Off the Generator to Conserve Energy" time had kicked in, so I *still* have to finish that class. 'Nother prime example of the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished.
John ‘n’ SWWBO get furry refugees from the storm showing up on the Castle doorstep in the middle of the night.
I get li’l Navy chicks on their first deployment with no sense of direction showing up on mine.
Heh. Sometimes 27 trumps 82.
And, no, Cassie, I didn’t ask if she was wearing a thong.
Hmmpf. “All we can say is that we're hoping Bill will run out of ammunition soon...” How droll…