"Take it easy, Mee, we'll get through this okay."
"Yes, well, I just resent having our future decided by a dilettante who doesn't know the first thing about proper scientific investigation."
"Just don't get her mad. She's a deadly fighter, either armed or unarmed, and she's stronger than any ten of us."
"I'll keep that in mind," Jamie said with naked irony, then headed back to the table as the two men followed. Without waiting for acknowledgement she began her report.
"The patina covering the artifact contained no radioisotopes, but its composition is identical to a deposit common to the rock strata where it was found. The deposit is created by a chemical reaction and the rate of formation is relatively constant. Based on the amount of material that accumulated, I estimate the artifact had been put into place a little less than ten billion years ago, shortly after Avernus formed. Elemental analysis of the artifact itself revealed traces of thorium-232. This is the longest-lived isotope we know of, with a half-life of fourteen billion years. The amount that remained, along with the amount of decay products present, establishes that the thorium had undergone approximately ten half-lives of decay before analysis, which puts the age of the material the artifact was made from at around one hundred and forty billion years. This gives us an upper and lower limit to the age of the artifact itself."
Finished with her report, Jamie offered the printout to Medb. The massive woman took it without comment and walked off to one side to read it.
Cecil took the opportunity to move off to one side and check in with his office, leaving Jamie and Dimitri alone. She sidled up next to him.
"I understand you gave her the 'tour' last night; how was it?"
"Probably like you and Cees, only better." It was no secret that Cecil and Jamie were lovers, despite their attempts at discretion. But it was Jamie who wanted to keep their affair a secret, while Cecil would have bragged about it openly if she let him.
"Isn't she a bit big for you?"
Dimitri grinned. "That gave us some trouble at first, but we figured out how to work around it. The important thing was that when we got our hips lined up, I could bury my head in her breasts with little effort. The only real problem was that she liked to be on top; she damned near smothered me a few times. Still, it was kind of interesting to be completely covered by a woman like that."
"How did you get that suit off her, or did she even bother to undress?"
Dimitri guffawed. "I get the feeling she wouldn't wear any clothes at all if she had the choice. She just touched a spot on the buckle and the damned thing flowed around her body into the belt itself. After that, all she did was take it off."
Cecil's return interrupted any further discussion. The trio then waited for Medb to finish with the report.
Fortunately, it wasn't long before she looked up to address them. "It would seem we have a paradox on our hands." She spoke somewhat imperiously, or so Dimitri thought.
As Jamie nodded, Cecil asked, "I don't understand, what paradox?"
Before Medb could respond, Jamie explained. "The current estimate for the age of the universe is eighteen billion years; that makes the artifact's material older than the universe by a factor of ten."
From "The Golden Mushroom"
Shadow-stalker sat on a stump and kept an eye on the Girls as they went about their harvesting. Eile should have been watching out for danger, but instead she observed Sunny as she rooted around inside a decaying log. Not that Shadow blamed her. The reputation of the Dark Wood was such that they had expected to be under almost continuous attack by monsters, cannibals, or crazed cultists. When nothing happened during the first hour, and the rest of the day promised to be similarly uneventful, they began treating the expedition like a holiday excursion, complete with picnic lunch. The only thing that marred their enjoyment was the overcast sky. Even Shadow felt bored, and she knew the Wood's reputation for danger was no joke.
How the Girls were able explore it unscathed mystified the feline, but as an old saying went, fate had a way of protecting innocents, fools, and adventurers, and the Girls qualified for at least two of those criteria. Though even after a year, Shadow found it hard to think of them as adventurers; they looked too much like typical young ladies. Eile was older, being in her mid-twenties. She had a slim figure, with ochre skin and indigo-blue eyes. She gathered her long seal-brown hair into a ponytail that hung to her knees, while her face and forehead were framed by four big locks dyed a vivid fuchsia. A half-dozen rings pierced each ear, and her left nostril bore a single stud. Sunny had just starting her third decade, and she was better endowed in bust and hip, though both Girls were fit and trim. She also stood taller, but only by an inch or so, and she looked more adorable, though Eile appeared quite cute. Her complexion was buff and she had azure-blue eyes, with a huge mane of gamboge hair that billowed around her head, down her back, and over her shoulders. She wore a pair of glasses, though she only needed them for reading. She insisted on wearing them full-time, however, because without them her eyeballs would pop out of her head and start attacking each other.
Or so she claimed.
Sunny squealed in triumph as she stood up. "I got it!" She held out one hand, and in the gloved palm lay a mass that looked like stiff, opaque, yellow gelatin.
Eile bent over to open the backpack sitting at her feet, and pulled out a jar. She pulled the corked and presented it to Sunny, who dropped the mass into it. Sunny stripped off the glove as Eile recorked the jar and dropped it back into the pack.
"We're just about finished, aren't we?" Eile asked as she straightened up.
Sunny pulled a scroll out of her belt. She wore a darling adventurer's outfit, consisting of a collared, sleeveless top that left her midriff bare, an open, long-sleeved jacket, and a flowing, pleated skirt that dropped to her ankles. Her feet were covered with soft boots and she kept the gloves tucked under the belt when she didn't wear them. A Robin Hood hat, complete with a large, fluffy, golden plume, topped her head. Her composite bow leaned against the log, and she also carried a long, slim dagger in a scabbard dangling from the belt.
"Let's see. Trovah leaves, sheckel berries, cannard acorns, shroom nuts, hilizon root, kasbah moss, urndin lichen, sorvaun fungus, and now vumit slime mold. Yep, the only item left is the Golden Mushroom."
"And where do we find that?"
Sunny unrolled the scroll further to reveal a map. While Eile looked over shoulder, she glanced around the clearing. "It should be this way--" She nodded towards her front left. "--in some kind of wetland."
Eile gave her an appreciative grin. "I'm sure glad one of yer magical talents is an unerring sense of direction. I wouldn't want ta get lost in these woods."
Sunny returned a loving smile, but said nothing.
As Sunny rolled up the scroll, Eile picked up the pack. "Great. Looks like we'll get everything in record time." She wore a suit of armor that consisted of a hauberk of cuir-bouilli covered in overlapping metal scales and reinforced with a metal breastplate and shoulder guards, over a leather unitard. Leather gloves and shoes completed the ensemble, but she wore no helmet. She was armed with a short-bladed, double-edged broadsword, and she kept a wooden shield braced with iron secured to her back.
Sunny retrieve her bow. "Come on, Shadow."
The cat hopped down and trotted over beside them as they headed out of the clearing. "So, it will be a quiet trip after all."
"Yeah, looks like our luck's holding."
Shadow yowled in irritation. Sunny's dogged cheerfulness and carefree attitude could be annoying at times, especially when they were in potentially dangerous situations. Even Eile would lose patience with her on occasion.
"Well, I don't understand why the bad rep," Eile remarked. "I mean, we've heard all the stories, but this doesn't seem like such a bad place. A little gloomy perhaps, but nothing like the Enchanted Woods."
"Perhaps," Shadow said, "but the Enchanted Woods lies just across the Oukranos River. The Zoogs could colonize the Dark Wood, but the
y won't live here, or even visit except in large numbers, and there is very little that Zoogs fear. That should tell you something."
"What about cats?" Eile spoke in a slightly mocking tone.
She sneezed in derision. "We fear nothing, not even what Zoogs fear. But we're not foolhardy." And with that she sprinted out ahead of the Girls.
Eile couldn't help smiling. Shadow always did that when she didn't want to talk anymore.
"You shouldn't antagonize her like that," Sunny said in a disapproving tone. "She's only doing her job, trying to keep us safe."
"Yeah, sorry." She meant it, but Shadow could be so gloomy sometimes that it got on her nerves. There was a time, after she and Sunny first arrived in the Dreamlands, when she also would have been cautious, even a bit paranoid, but after their first few adventures it became apparent that, no matter how dire the circumstances, they were never as hopeless as they appeared. She still tended to take their adventures more seriously than Sunny, but she had learned to enjoy them more.
Besides, the cats had once forced them on a mission by threatening them with death, and while they had made amends with a generous reward and a monthly stipend, and had treated them fairly ever since, she still held a minor resentment over the incident and gained a certain perverse pleasure from