TEC: Chapter 49, Part 2: Back in the Caves
Murphy heads off to the Reed Gold Mine, a site of great biblical importance…
Or maybe where Phillips took his family on their last vacation. Either or.
He ditches the tour of the mine, and heads off on his own. Lest you think he came ill-prepared, he brought “a small flashlight.”
Call me crazy, but I would bring a lot more than that on a mission set up by a guy who once sicced a lion on me.
In the most vague and unhelpful clue ever, Murphy spots a few boards that are “loose,” one of which has the word “Conrad” on it.
Conrad? Murphy thought again. Conrad was the name of John Reed’s son who discovered the seventeen-pound gold nugget!
I am so pissed off that he randomly knows so much about this incident. It bothers me on a very deep level.
He heads on down to wherever, and…
For the first time in all of his encounters with Methuselah, Murphy suddenly wondered, Who is this mysterious man? How can I find out more about him?
What a great academic. What a curious adventurer. Meth has been sending him on mysterious (and fruitful) missions for years, and it only now occurs to him to wonder about what kind of person he is?
I’m bored by this whole gold mine thing now, mostly because it is way too gorram similar to the time Meth trapped Murphy in a cave in the last book. But he finds a hole back in the deserted part of the mine or whatever, and Meth has put a golden cup in the hole. Also some rattlesnakes.
[Murphy] felt like he was in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark–and he hated snakes too.
Big baby. Also, it kinda surprises me that Phillips is being that obvious with his copy-catting.
Still, Murphy is not a complete fool, and uses two small boards to lift the cup out without having to reach his hand in. But, just like in Raiders, actually (go figure) Meth has made an additional trap–Murphy moves the cup and then a box of other snakes falls on his head. So he uses the boards to flip the snakes away from his feet and beats cheeks outta there.
It’s…actually not terribly exciting.
Back in South Carolina, Murphy reveals to Shari that he believes the cup to be one of the cups at Belshazzar’s party.
Oh, and he got a fingerprint of Meth’s. He saved it on a Band-Aid. Really.
“[Methuselah’s] really quite strange.”
Strange, eh? Well, Murphy, you were the one who was twiddling his thumbs and punching Moar Arabs when he could have been finding an amazing archeological biblical thingie. I frankly don’t blame Meth a bot for getting impatient.
Posted on October 12, 2016, in The Europa Conspiracy. Bookmark the permalink. 9 Comments.
RubyTea
Heathen Critique 
Please, copy-cat more blatantly! I could use some actual action-adventuring right about now.
Meth isn’t just running out of patience, but out of budget and ideas too. A warehouse with a wrestling ring or a lion was a lot more creative than a box of rattlesnakes. Especially since, as Murphy pointed out, it’s just ripping off Indiana Jones.
Just spend half a page on Murphy looking up the starter clues and spending the morning taking notes, and his completely absurd trivia mastery becomes good research and study habits that are much more believable and almost admirable. He’d start looking like someone with a working brain in his head who might have deserved his job once upon a time.
Instead we have this bizarre factoid vomit that the typist thinks is somehow representative of intellectuals. I guess only the most insufferable kind who like to lord over others their command of obscure information?
Murphy’s a trivia hipster, isn’t he.
Maybe there was a passage explaining that Murphy has a positronic brain and remembers every fact he’s exposed to, and I just missed it.
Why snakes? They seem so obvious. Why not fire ants, or scorpions, maybe? I hate them, and I’ll be Murphy does, too.
Not that the authors have really established a baseline for normal behavior in this universe.
If he’s trying to rip off Indiana Jones, he’s doing a very bad job of it. For example, when Indiana Jones sets off a trap while looking for treasure, it’s usually a lot more dangerous and exciting than a box of snakes falling on his hand.
Murphy has only now started to wonder about the motives of Meth? Really?
This ‘trap’ sounds more like the kind of thing you’d find on a hidden-camera prank show than an adventure story.
“Hey buddy, you want a drink of water? There’s a cup right over there, why don’t you pick it up and- HA YOU’RE STANDING UNDER A BOX OF SNAKES I TOTALLY GOT YOU BRO!”
Actually Methuselah just likes snakes and wanted to amuse his pets.
Pingback: Deconstruction Roundup for October 14th, 2016 | The Slacktiverse