To Find a Toff - Part One

                Speckled patches of morning sunlight, or dappled patches of morning shade depending on your perspective on the blocking of light, littered the rainforest floor. They were further fractured by the roots, leaves twigs and husks on which they fell, smearing, shattering and distorting them into an incomprehensibly complex landscape. Had anyone made attempt to reconstruct the overhead canopy from the lit and shaded portions of the forest floor, assembling the bright bits like a jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces to its name, then they would have found the task rather difficult. Prohibitively so, perhaps. It may come as a relief, then, to know that no-one had ever attempted to do so.
                In the absence of anyone trying to glue light back together, all the constituents of a natural kind of peace were present beneath the canopy. There was the chittering of birds both near and far, the whooping and howling of animals unknown, and the rustling of the same through leaves and branches with no respect for leaving clear thoroughfare, but together they turned silence into a background noise that was even more calming. Unfortunately for the only three people who stood a chance of appreciating those sounds, the acoustic footprint of nature left unchecked, they couldn't hear any of it. It was all drowned out by a sky-filling 'brr' sound, which sometimes made forays into 'waa' or 'vvv', and occasionally tossed in a ‘chuga-chuga-chuga’ based on criteria which escaped everyone. It invited itself into their ears without waiting for a welcome, put its shod feet up on the sofa while reclining across the coffee table, and spat all over the carpet, leaving no room for anyone else and making as much of a nuisance as it reasonably, or unreasonably, could. Despite this, all three of the acoustically aggravated listeners would hate for it to never enter their lives again, because it was made by a small, red and uncomfortably rickety helicopter. Chugging frustratingly slowly through the air above them, it was the only means they had at their disposal for ever getting home. It was also travelling directly away from them.
                "What kind of pilot doesn't bring enough fuel for carrying their passengers on the return trip." growled Dr Monica Seetch. "She'd bloody well better come back for us in time."
                The doctor had voiced this concern many times on the journey, mostly after the pilot had confessed to not preparing for a camping trip at the landing site, not having been informed that this wasn't a simple drop-off, and having a load of laundry in the machine, waiting to be unloaded. This had been made all the more irksome by the hours of planning and discussion in which the pilot had been actively involved, and her many assurances that she was equipped with everything required for a multi-day trip to the wilderness.
                "What?" shouted Taylor, the youngest of the three. "I can't hear you over the plane."
                "Eh?" Monica asked, hearing nothing but engine noise and indistinct blurts of human speech. She shook her head, quite to herself, in unmasked apathy and disappointment. There was no use in worrying about idle chatter and maintaining professional relationships any longer; this was her last expedition before retirement. She'd made that well known to the good people at Doctors Without Maps, the charity dedicated to saving lost and injured souls beyond the range of traditional emergency services around the world. As a threat, it would have carried more weight had she not been one trip from retirement for the last thirty years, and a thousand or so expeditions.
                "I know exactly where we are. We'll find those lost toffs within a couple of days." said Kari, their guide and survival expert. No-one was listening, which was typical of advice given by those hired to provide it.
                "What?" Taylor repeated, in case the other's hadn't heard that she couldn't hear, and ignoring the possibility that they might not be able to hear her making allowance for them to not have heard her inability to hear them.
                "They went this way. You can tell from the ground, and the way these twigs and leaves er..." Kari struggled to find the words."...are." She gestured vaguely at the foliage which clawed and swiped at her as they pushed their way onward. For a survivalist who claimed to make fires, traps, shelters and decadent monuments with her bare hands, those same hands looked remarkably unscarred and callous-free.
                In what might as well have been silence, despite all the talking, they began to make their way through the broad trunked, buttress rooted trees, slick with algae, as the sound of the helicopter's engines and rotors went from roar, to growl to whisper. Then, at a time which could be defined in only vague and nebulous terms, there was finally no aeronautical noise at all. They were truly cut off and alone, with nothing else to do but track down their missing toffs, as Kari had so handily put it.
                Humid rainforest air held the scent of carnivorous plants and delicate blossoms, with the disquieting sweetness of decay dancing around its edges. A chromatic panoply of Gaia's creativity, the rainforest flora excluded no colour in its displays except for yellow; this fact didn't really register in anyone's conscious mind, but something deep in their brain, their instinctual, primal, ancient intelligence, told them that something was missing and that it was peculiar. It was untrustworthy. It was wrong.
                Mingling in with the multi-coloured but yellow-phobic lightshow, and casting their own ephemeral reflections around the dense foliage, were lazily dripping beads of last night's rainfall. It gave the rainforest the impression of crippling indecision as regards to its choice of weather, in an attempt to be both sunny and rainy at all times. Monica suspected that if the rainforest could shoehorn in high winds, perfect stillness and a blizzard as well, then it would very much be doing so. It was the kind of hostile and petulant behaviour she had come to expect of any locale to which she was sent on an emergency aid mission; not because she was particularly hard done by compared to the other medics working for Doctors Without Maps, but because the cretins to whom she was committed to helping always chose to visit places totally unsuitable for human habitation, or even visitation. Dr Seetch had lamented many times, to anyone who would listen, that if bored fools could be prevented from throwing themselves into terrible peril then she herself would not need to go and bail them out of their own mistakes. If those same bored fools were still alive when she found them, then those lamentations could be delivered directly to them; after all, they were the ones who needed to hear it most. That it was typically given a few weeks after they really needed to hear it, and took the form of a sustained and vicious telling off, was besides the point. By that time they were a captive audience who relied on her deft medical care, and could therefore neither run away nor reasonably stop listening as she tore into them over the course of a gruelling journey across dangerous landscapes. The chance of such a reward for her suffering was about all that kept Monica going, most days.
                "Ah, great. There's a lot of smeared striation on the delaminated bark of these trees. Good. We're on the right track." Kari jabbered, wiping two fingers cross a vast, wet tree trunk to her right. Her arm shook a dangling knot of vines, causing them to dump a not insignificant quantity of rainwater directly onto the back of Taylor's neck. She gave an understandable yelp.
                "Urgh! That went right down my back!" she complained, wriggling her shoulder blades. It made her backpack sing with a metallic rustle.
                "Yeah, that'll happen. It's the gravity here. Points downwards." Kari said, authoritatively. Monica scowled.
                "Doesn't sound that unique to where we are."
                "Never said it was. That's one of the most dangerous things about these wildernesses in my experience; there's lots of commonality with other places so you can't always know where you are for sure or which rules to follow. But I know them all really well; probably the best of anyone in the world, so there's no need to question me."
                It was exactly the kind of statement which invited heavy questioning, but Monica didn't have the will and Taylor was desperately trying to rearrange her skeleton, such that her shirt was held away from her soaked back. She wasn't enjoying as much success as she might hope.
                Based on her insights from some unconvincing statements about algae, Kari led the group through a dense and sustained curtain of hanging vines and creepers, which held tangled limbs which had long since broken free of their trunks and were now rotting in mid-air. A modest ecosystem of insects with more antennae, proboscises, pincers, mandibles and legs than was practical had established itself on each of these decaying pieces of timber. They'd been happy there, insofar as insects ever tend to be happy rather than purposeful, for many weeks, and were making real progress in their efforts to scuttle about a bit in a pleasing but unpredictable pattern; they'd mapped out all of the stumps and bumps, all of the splits and hollows, and every patch of unsettlingly slimy fungus, with a rich pheromone trail reinforced over the course of thousands of journeys. After all that time and work it really felt like home. When Kari's machete, a strangely shaped blade with colours that reminded Monica a lot of her car’s paintwork, callously carved its way through the vines binding one such decaying branch, it was sent crashing to the ground with no regard for this investment of time. It landed with a series of wet cracks, and erupted in a spray of invertebrates, which was somewhat of a disappointing happenstance for all members of the displaced community.
                "I don't know how comfortable I feel about climbing through that." Taylor confessed, smoothing her hair down reflexively as she looked at the grasping mass of vines. "There are bugs everywhere. They're going to get in my hair and inside my shirt and all over my skin."
                "It's not nice, but it's going to happen anytime you're in a rainforest." Monica said, with as much sympathy as she could muster. "What are you worried that they're going to do when they're on you?"
                "Um... they might bite me, I suppose? Or burrow inside and lay eggs. Or eat through the straps on my backpack or post inflammatory accusations using the charity's official social media accounts."
                "A lot of those things seem unlikely; some more than others."
                "I mean... you know what, honestly, I think that just being on me is the bad thing that I'm worried about. They don't need to do anything else while they're there; it's enough to simply have dropped onto my head and body. Any abuse of auto-login and auto-fill on my phone would be a bonus problem."
                "Odd use of the term bonus, but fine."
                "Look, you can keep the bugs off you by rubbing your hair and cheeks with your scent gland. That's what the marmosets here do, and they've never posted bigoted opinions on any public platform. Now let's keep moving before the freaky bugs rebuild their vine and wood curtains." Kari declared, crouching through the aperture she'd cut and swinging her blade around for further thoroughfare clearance.
                Taylor looked down at her wrists. She’d seen lemurs at the zoo with scent glands there, and wondered if she’d just glossed over the existence of her own all her life. Her search yielded nothing positive.
                “I don’t have any of those.” she informed her companions, who were both entering what Taylor would come to know as ‘the unacceptable bug zone’, a name which set clear intentions despite how soon she would be entering it.
                "Of course you don't. Humans don't have scent glands. Kari was, I can only assume, mocking you. Not necessarily the most helpful response from a guide, but you do just have to suck it up and accept that bugs might touch you. They're more scared of you than you are of them."
                "I doubt it. I'm scared enough of them not to ride on their shoulder, or even go near them."
It was an incontestable point, but Dr Seetch had moved beyond caring, and grew steadily closer to moving out of earshot as well. Either way, the situation would resolve itself.
                "I have scent glands. I use them all the time to keep myself free from insects and rival members of the species, actually. So I wasn't mocking anyone unprofessionally, I was doing a great job." claimed the guide, without a hint of irony.
                "You have scent glands?" Monica asked flatly, trying to cram the degree to which she wasn't buying it into the tiny, distressed pouch of her tone of voice.
                "Yes."
                The guide ducked beneath a low branch, which dripped with rainwater and sap. A couple of frogs were watching the events with their own inscrutable motivations.
                "Show me, then."
                "No."
                "Then you don't have them."
                From behind them came the sound of Taylor drawing a deep ‘about to plunge through a living net of flora and invertebrates’ breath, and steeling herself for something unpleasant.
                "Yes I do! They're just private."
                "I've been a doctor for forty years, Kari. I have seen every private place that any human does or does not wish to show me, and that I did or did not wish, or even need, to see. In no case have I ever seen a scent gland on a human wrist.” Dr Seetch dipped her head away from a swinging vine, laden with thorns. “I’ve seen tattoos of local bus stops, piercings that defy logic, subdermal implants in the shape of Doncaster, and a forgotten half-sandwich, but never a gland for the production of scented pheromones with which one might repel beetles.”
                “That’s because you’ve never examined me.” Kari said, defiantly, stepping free of the vine mass and standing up straight. Monica could not help noticing that her sleeves had been pulled right down to her palms, but had given up all notions of following through with any investigation. This was her last job. Her last expedition. If she had to spend it with a guide who wanted to convince a colleague that human scent glands existed then so be it. She watched the suspected liar brushing herself down and looking at a fallen trunk, which was lying across their path in a less then helpful manner.
                With a great deal of wailing, muffled by her valiant but futile attempts to put on a brave face, Taylor completed her trudge through the vine curtain. That she was rubbing both wrists frantically against her head as she did so was somewhat tragic, but yet again Monica couldn’t muster the will to get emotionally invested.
                “We’ll just pop over this log. I think our quarry did the same, judging by this.” Kari assessed, pointing towards something metallic and shiny on a snapped twig. It twinkled with a small, piercingly bright reflection from the meagre sunshine that could penetrate the dense foliage above. Without realising it, they had transitioned from the outskirts of the trees to a deeper, thicker and more leaf-choked part of the rainforest, and this tiny reflection of polished metal highlighted how dark everything else had become.
                “What is that?” Dr Seetch asked, stepping towards it. Kari leaned to grab it while Taylor jigged about in a circle, trying to look at the back of her own head and ensure that it was free of venomous millipedes or rude worms.
                “It’s wild-sign. The tracks of the prey we pursue.”
                “They’re not our prey; we’re here to rescue them, not eat them.” snapped Monica. Privately, she assured herself that she could also give them a real telling off, too, and it helped to calm her.
                “Rescue, eat, whatever. Either way we need to follow their trail, which is what I’m expertly doing, much like I’ve done many times before. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to follow a toff through the rainforest, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar with no scent glands.” Kari said, expertly heading off any suspicions about her before they could form.
                Monica shuffled past her and grabbed the reflective trinket. It was a metal ring with a fine chain hanging off the side, and a disc of glass in the middle.
                “It’s a monocle…” she said, turning it over in her hands, and then she sighed. “Of course it’s a bloody monocle. That damned fool wore a monocle to explore a rainforest.”
                “You think it’s Jebediah’s?” asked Taylor, her urgent bug removal activities having come to an end for the moment.
                “Among these otherwise uninhabited and unvisited trees? The ones that require a helicopter to access because they’re inside a sheer-walled bluff? Yeah, I think there’s a reasonable chance it’s Jebediah bloody Torshank’s. Look, it’s not even a lens! It’s just plain glass in a circle to make him look snootier. He actually wore this in a place where no other human would see him.”
                “Other than his companion, Mr Durle.”
                “Urgh, yes. His other bored rich friend.”
                “The briefing pack didn’t mention them being bored, Dr Seetch.” Taylor said, scratching at the side of her face. “It said that Jebediah Torshank was seeking to expand humankind’s knowledge of one of the few totally uncharted territories left on Earth.”
                “And why do you think a man with more money than most small countries might personally do that? With no training on how to survive in the wild and a disregard bordering on contempt for bringing adequate equipment?”
                “Er, bravery?”
                “You’ve got to be brave to do the things I do every day. Yep, facing this kind of peril on the regular needs nerves of titanium. Steel won’t cut it.” Kari interjected, slapping the fallen tree trunk. Her hand came away wet with some kind of thin fungal slime, which she wiped on her backpack.
                “Anyway,” Monica said, sparing a withering look for her guide, “it’s arrogance. He decided that this was something he wanted, and no amount of good sense or consideration for his safety, or that of those would have to come and rescue him, could get him to change his mind.”
                "Um, Katie didn't go into details on that. She just said that Quentin and Jebediah wanted to be the first to discover this region using nothing but their own wits, some rudimentary tools, and millions of pounds of inherited wealth. Really achieve something off their own back." said Taylor, earnestly.
                "It's probably the only place in the world where Father's connections couldn't totally pave the way, to be fair." sneered the doctor.
                "Maybe?" Taylor answered, trying to get along. "But they've been gone longer than we thought they should be and there's been no contact, so regardless of why they came here, we have committed to trying to save them. That's what Doctors Without Maps is for, right?"
                It sounded like the sort of question which should have been rhetorical. Coming from anyone else, Monica would have assumed that to be the case, but from Taylor, who had just made a good go of growing and utilising scent glands, it was no longer a likely option.
                "Yes, that's basically it. They rescue people in places where no other emergency services can be bothered to go. The sorts of places where no-one has even got around to making a map."
                "Oh! Hence the name!"
                "Yes... hence the name." Dr Seetch said, with a sinking feeling.
                "Well it sounds like a great cause to be a part of. I'm glad I signed up! How long have you worked for them?"
                "I don't. I'm freelance but do a lot of contracting for them, because there aren't many people will my skillset and patience for trudging around carrying sterile gauze. But I have been doing this for more years than you've been alive, I think."
                "They don't have medical professionals on staff? That's interesting. I'll maybe recommend that at my next mentoring catch-up. It's better than relying on volunteers like you two to be available."
                Monica's sinking feeling morphed gradually into a dreadful capsize, with a scuttled hull and the loss of all hands.
                "They hire experienced medics like me to tend to the wounded, experienced guides like Kari," the guide waved her machete in acknowledgement, which on closer inspection seemed to have the kind of latch that holds car doors shut, "to get me safely to them, and send experienced, erm... well we normally just have two medics or survivalists, but you don't seem to be either of those. And you don't seem to be very experienced. What exactly is your role at Doctors Without Maps?" asked the doctor, regretting it in real time.
                "Oh, didn't anyone tell you? I'm the new intern." Taylor said, smiling politely.
                "No. You're not an intern, because sending an intern out here would be lunacy. What are you actually here to do?"
                "To see what the charity does and get a bit of experience. See the real work in action. Take the chance to see a bit of the world. Grab some photos for the social pages and advertising." Taylor persisted. The sinking feeling hit the ocean floor.
                "I don't believe you."
                "Well..." Taylor said, fishing in her pocket, "here's my ID card for work."
                Monica accepted the offered rectangle of despair and, never hoping more in her life to have been lied to, saw the name Taylor Gusto, a photo of the same, and the job title "Community Management Intern".
                "Oh good Christ." Monica sighed, dropping her face into her hands and pressing her fingers hard into her forehead.
                "I know, right? What a great opportunity they've given me."
                "How did this happen? I know Katie. She's not a murderer, which is what someone would have to be to send you here, and she isn't a masochist, which is what someone would have to be to let me find out they'd sent you here. She knows better than to invite my ire."
                "I... she just said, when we were talking about this expedition, that maybe I should tag along and see the sights. Then she laughed a lot."
                "And that didn't make you think it was a joke?"
                "Well, no. I thought she was just happy about being so kind; giving me three weeks away on my first day. And I wanted to show initiative so I sorted out all the travel and visas and things myself, made sure I knew where to meet you and Kari, then submitted my expenses claim as the last thing before I left."
                "Urgh, you're the worst. Get your expenses in straight away, next time! Otherwise accounts have a nightmare signing off the expenditure in the right financial period and it makes a real mess." Kari snapped. Monica gave her a look which expertly married the glare of disgust with the squint of mistrust. It probably helped that they rhymed. "I mean, that sort of thing probably matters to pen pushers. Not to legitimate and honestly hired survival experts like me." she pulled a strip of bark off the fallen trunk and chewed it confidently, to lend credence to her statement. When the others stopped variously staring and scowling at her, she spat it out again.
                "Great. I really wish you'd told me this before the helicopter left, so I could have sent you back home." Monica said.
                "Well that doesn't seem very nice."
                "It's nicer than having you turn into our next patient to rescue."
                "I'll be fine! Kari can guide us through anything safely, she already said so!  And Katie wouldn’t have suggested I came along if it wasn’t perfectly safe to be here.”
                “She was joking, Taylor! And of course it’s dangerous; that’s why we’re having to come here and rescue these fools in the first place. All of this is incredibly obvious.”
                Taylor frowned, but kept her mouth shut and considered what Monica was saying for a few moments.
                “I suppose it would explain why I had so many missed calls from Katie, and why she messaged me last night saying something about terrible mistakes or demands to come home or something. At the time, I thought she’d just got the wrong number, but maybe she really was joking about me joining you.”
                “Yeah, maybe she was.” grumbled Monica. “But we’re here now. The helicopter’s gone, and it won’t have enough fuel to come back and grab you. We’re just going to have to keep you safe with us. Do exactly as we say, don’t stray or touch anything that we don’t tell you to, and for goodness sake try to look after yourself.”
                “All of that was stuff I’m already planning to do.” smiled Taylor, apparently feeling quite relieved that the unpleasant period of confrontation had come to an end. “So what’s the plan now?”
                “Kari?” Monica asked, expertly passing the buck to her guide while she passed the ID back to Taylor. That kind of simultaneous double-passing was vital for the modern field-medic.
                “We head over this trunk and keep moving in the direction of the snapped stuff. If we find more upper-class detritus then we’ll know we’re definitely on the right track, and if we don’t then we might still be on the right track, because I don’t make mistakes. My old mentor in survival regularly broke into spontaneous applause at how well I learned from him. In fact, at how much I taught him. I mentored him, more than the other way round, and I have great teeth.” Kari said, looking into middle distance and trying to appear debonair. After holding the pose for a moment, long enough to nail down the undying respect of her companions, she bounced with impressive agility and vaulted over the thick trunk. “Don’t worry if you can’t replicate that; it’s pretty hard and I’m very good.”
                With Taylor making a good show of limbering up for a brave attempt at hurting herself in a display of unnecessary athleticism, Monica grabbed her by the shoulder and walked her around the fallen trunk. It involved more pushing through short, bushy undergrowth and several more encounters of the invertebrate kind, but without having to leap over any frictionless logs they managed to arrive at Kari’s side.
                “Yep, that was the right thing for you to do; glad to finally confirm that and keep you safe.  Onward.” said the guide. Monica chewed on her tongue, eyes burning into the back of Kari’s head, but eventually followed along.
                The going through the deeper rainforest was about as easy as pushing a wardrobe through a muddy riverbed. There were no tracks worn by hoof and paw, no gaps in the web of branches, twigs, leaves and creepers, and no clearings to provide a respite from pushing oneself bodily through the sustained growth of millennia. Every few steps, it seemed, they would be confronted by another vast buttress root, rising to hip height before curving upwards to its associated trunk, forming their next hurdle or chicane. The distinction was often driven by the location of the nearest rainforest bramble; they were a lot like the common brambles from Monica's neglected garden at home, only their thorns were longer and sharper, their stems thicker and smoother, and their leaves were bedecked in venomous spines. Suffice it to say that no member of the expedition considered bottom-to-bramble contact to be an acceptable risk.
                From above, too, the obstructions grew more opaque and more determined. The vines and creepers hung thicker and with more tangles, their broad, bucket shaped flowers dumping vast consignments of pollen out in choking clouds, while catkins fell down the back of Taylor's shirt with alarming accuracy. Eventually, she simply gave up retrieving them, instead adopting the rare aesthetic of the jungle scarecrow.
                Even though Kari insisted that there were obvious signs of someone else having passed through these particular dense thickets of flora, Monica couldn't see anything of the sort. For a couple of hours they trudged onward through the ever-denser tangle of plants, where ever-deeper shadow met ever-damper ground, until they were squelching through a spongey, cushion layer of leaf litter and other rainforest detritus, with whichever denizens of the deep wood lived within the softly decaying layers. Whenever their boots disappeared into the carpet of treefall, they just tried not to think about what might be crawling, sliding or biting its way on board.
                "I think we should take a rest." Monica called out, eventually. Panting and sweating from the effort of travel as well as the muggy, cloying air, she didn't feel very photogenic at all. This had never before been a concern of hers, but with Taylor constantly trying to snap action shots in support of the next month's online content strategy. Dr Seeth was sure that there could only be a need for so many photos of the back of her sweaty head, or Taylor's frustratingly pristine smile despite the exertion, but the regular sound of a camera shutter, rendered digitally by Taylor's phone, informed her otherwise.
                “Oh…” panted Kari, immediately stopping and leaning against a tree. Sweat was pouring down her face and her ribcage was periodically doubling and halving in volume. “If you need to… then I guess… for your sake… we can stop…”
                Taylor crunched alongside Monica and set her backpack down without looking. Unbeknownst to her, it was now sinking gracefully into a wet and questionably poisonous patch of mushrooms, their juices gradually soaking into the fabric and infusing it with a smell that would yield to no cleaning agent known to humankind.
                “I mean… I could keep going for hours more.” Kari said, straightening up. It took only a few seconds for her to fold over onto her knees again.
                “Marvellous. For the sake of my old knees and Taylor’s phone battery, let’s take the opportunity you’re graciously carving out for us.” Monica said drily, despite how thoroughly soaked she was. Even if she hadn’t been sweating, which she was, the air was so saturated that it could have filled a water bottle if it was swung with the lid off.
                Taking more care than their intern had, Monica and Kari placed their packs down, and the three travellers sat in the nook of two great roots from one of the towering rainforest trees. A flask of water and small parcels of dried, high density snacks were eagerly consumed by Monica, and while Taylor, who had taken all the advice she could find in a quick online search, sipped from a plastic bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling wine, it was still at least a known-potable fluid. Kari’s insistence on grasping at nearby leaves, and trying to lap up beads of condensation and rain water, left Dr Seetch rather disturbed.
                “There could be anything on those leaves, Kari. Are you sure that’s safe?” she asked, restraining her deeper intentions to dole out the telling-off of a lifetime.
                “I know how to get water wherever I am; no need to carry a flask, or a bottle, or even a mug with me when I go exploring.” she said. Her words were a bit muffled by a broad frond of something like an enormous lettuce, which she had folded and was using as a funnel for water droplets. “The quantities you’re drinking there will be done in an hour or so, and then you’ll be carrying empties around for days. I’m freed from the burden of washing up, too.”
                “So you don’t ever use sterilising tablets? Or a condenser? Or any of the other water extraction and purification kit that I’ve been using for three decades?” Monica asked.
                “Pah! Never. That stuff’s great for kids who need to rely on hand-holding when it comes to getting a drink out here in nature, which is where water lives and has always lived. Where it literally falls from the sky all around us.”
                “Where it washes animal urine and plant poisons out of the canopy and onto your leaves?”
                “Where… yeah! Especially that. I love it. Makes it taste better. I mean, it’d be scary if you weren’t immune to that sort of weakling stuff. When you’ve been exploring as long as I have, which is ages, actually, you don’t need to worry about things like getting sick.” Kari said, but Monica couldn’t help observing how she sniffed at her funnel, and looked up for any sign of large mammal lavatory usage at higher altitudes.
                “You heard what I said to Taylor earlier, right? About not becoming one of our patients?”
                “I hear everything.”
                “I heard it too.” Taylor confirmed.
                “Great. Well if you get yourself sick by licking a toadstool or trying to drink sloth urine then we’re going to have quite a disagreement.”
                “Does arguing with someone help them recover?” asked the intern. “I can help if so; I’ll be no good at emergency surgery or diagnosing bladder problems, but I can totally be contrarian if that makes someone feel better from poisoning.”
                Monica patted her on the head, and then recoiled with disgust at how much water and pollen splashed out of her hair.
                “Urgh. Yeah, no, but thanks anyway.”
                Silence returned as Monica and Taylor consumed their prepared rations. The former kept her eyes on Kari though, watching her get up and shuffle around the area, testing this leaf and that against some unspoken criteria, squeezing what fruit she could find with tentative fingers, and sniffing at natural growths which might or might not have been edible, lethal or even sentient.
                “Aha!” she finally cried, yanking a round, green fruit off a vine with a single, triumphant hand. It was obviously a triumphant hand because a defeated one would have been much more limp and downward facing. “A wild mango, Latin name Mangus Ferocii. This will be a nutritious and all natural snack, foraged by my own two hands.”
                “Well done. Do experienced survivalists always have to celebrate finding food like that? It must be very commonplace for you, given that you’re doing it for every meal. Unless… this is the first time you’ve managed it?” Monica asked, starting out with the intention of feigning innocence that she was being passive aggressive, but quickly losing interest in the ruse.
                “I was just showing both of you so that… er… you could find the same thing if you need to. When you need to, in fact.”
                “I’d like to see you cut into that one first, please.” said the doctor, quietly refreshing her own memory on how to induce vomiting to purge inedible vegetation. “If we’re going to be harvesting more of these, then let’s make sure they’re definitely edible first.”
                Kari scowled at Monica, which was strange behaviour for someone being challenged to taste the lunch they’d just acquired. Nonetheless, she took a knife out of her belt and dragged it confidently through the flesh of the fruit. It leaked a viscous, purple juice immediately down her fingers, which felt like quite a red flag. It did not descend the flagpole when she peeled back the skin to reveal a wobbling, translucent jelly.
                “Mango, you say?” asked Monica.
                “Wild mango.” Kari corrected. “It’s hard to recognise if you’ve only seen the supermarket coward’s version of a mango, but this one, unique to this region, is much better.”
                Before Monica could lunge to stop her, Kari plunged her teeth aggressively into the jelly, spraying a purple fountain over her cheeks and jaw.
                "Don't eat that!" Monica yelled, but it seemed that the guide was in no mood to listen. With a squelching that set the doctor's teeth on edge, Kari chewed and gashed at the mystery fruit, before coughing a spray of purple chunks over a largely innocent lizard. Its minor infractions in mocking officers of the law and parking over two bays did not deserve such a punishment as a fruit shower.
                "My god that's good." wheezed Kari, grimacing. "So light and refreshing." she managed to add, forcing the sound through airways which had sealed up for her own good.
                “Oh, great. Can I try some?” asked Taylor. Monica put a hand on the intern’s shoulder to stop her reaching for the fruit.
                “I don’t need both of you to get food poisoning on the first day.”
                “If you follow my advice then we won’t.” Kari shuddered. “Yikes. I’ll admit that it’s a bit sourer than I was expecting, and could possibly be riper, but it’s good. I’m going to have all the energy I need from foraging nature’s bounty.”
                Dr Seetch, in her capacity as a snap-decision-making, charge-taking medic of action, used to acting based on her gut to save lives under extreme conditions, was unaccustomed to stalling in her path. She was barely an arm’s length away from Kari, and had been emotionally prepared to give her the back-slapping of ages to dislodge any fruit flesh from her mouth, before the grand vomiting, but she had been stopped in her path by something she’d come to think of as impossible. Kari, the guide of increasingly dubious qualification, had made a concession, however minor, towards not being omniscient, perfect, and eternally correct. It may well have been the first moment of genuine honesty and integrity of the trip, and possibly of her life. Perplexingly, it gave the doctor confidence that maybe, just maybe, Kari hadn’t petulantly imbibed poison for the sake of her own reputation.
                “I see.” she said, neatly summarising those feelings in a completely clear manner. “Sour but delicious? Which is why you felt the need to spit it across the rainforest?”
                “That’s largely it, yeah.” said the guide, who had just about managed to get her breathing under control. To celebrate, she took another, equally enormous bite of the fruit. This time she managed to stifle her coughs into a series of purple faces and muffled groans.
                “Well… if you want some mango to make you do that,” Monica told Taylor, pointing towards the asphyxiation show going on, “then you have my blessing. Doesn’t look like the most fun way to spend our short rest period though.”
                Taylor spent a modest amount of time considering the options with which Dr Seetch had presented her, and then elected to start snapping some photos of Kari instead.
                “These might seem like cruel and kind of unappealing pictures, but I think it’s good for the charity to show people what kind of lengths we go to on these expeditions.” she needlessly justified. Thankfully for her, Monica couldn’t care less.
 
                Several more hours of pushing through the dense jungle followed, with the rescuers trudging, tripping, stumbling and hacking their way onwards. For all her disbelief in Kari’s qualification to guide them, they did keep coming across fallen artefacts of Jebediah and Quentin. Each one gave more confirmation that they were on the right track, and each one made Monica hate the man she was trying to save just a little bit more.
                The false monocle, their first find, had been bad enough as a superficial status symbol and total inconvenience for exploring any biome, let alone an uncharted rainforest. It was followed by a shred of what Kari assured her companions to be a morning suit; it was apparently obvious by the brush of the cloth and the thread count, two aspects of clothing identification which rarely went hand in hand with a knowledge of rainforest survivalism. The third scrap of evidence was a top hat, starched and ready for a night out at any opera they may have found in a totally uninhabited region of the planet, hanging upside down on a patch of bare and scratchy twigs. Finally, they discovered a patch of flattened undergrowth with a discarded cummerbund. Kari’s sniff test confirmed that it was worn, and suggested that the gentleman explorers they tracked had stopped for an outfit change. After all, she said, they couldn’t be expected to wear a morning suit in the afternoon, and would surely have changed into a lounge suit for the more informal part of the day. There mere vision of two clueless oafs lugging armfuls of suit-bags around with them filled Monica with hatred, as did the idea that whatever luggage they carried would have had a top hat balanced precariously on it somewhere, ready to tumble off before they’d managed to make it to even their first evening. When they finally found the men, dead or alive, the telling off they were going to receive would be legendary.
                Mercifully for all of the travellers, and in particular for Monica’s mood, the rainforest had begun to thin again just after the discovery of the cummerbund, and before long they had emerged completely from the humid grasp of nature’s tangle.
                “Wow.” Taylor had said, as they emerged into the dying light of the sunset. “Is the humidity actually trapped within the trees? I can feel myself drying off already out here.”
                It was undeniable that drier air had apparently been lying in wait for them outside of the canopy. They found themselves standing on the edge of something rather like a savannah, dry scrubby grass popping up here and there among large patches of cracked earth, but it had the topography and overall landscape of a series of vast, towering desert dunes. Somehow the ground itself, without breaking through to rock, was undulating up and down in long, ponderous waves that obscured one another and the horizon.
                “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Monica said, trying to wrap her head around what they were facing. What little they’d seen of the land beyond the rainforest while riding in the helicopter had not prepared her at all.
                “Really? Oh. I have, loads of times. What you’re looking at is grass and soil. Probably a bit of sand and clay too, if you search hard enough. Yep, I reckon this dirt here could probably sustain a small amount of plant life. Might have some worms underneath it.” Kari assessed, sucking air through her teeth like a builder making an estimate.
                “Well great, then. You can expertly navigate for us and find the toffs tomorrow morning.”
                "Yep. Easy. We'd better bed down here for the night first, though." Kari announced. "Dunes like these can travel for over a mile at night, and we wouldn't want to have to walk all that way back."
                "Pretty sure that only happens to sand, not just anything in a vaguely dune-like shape.”
                “I heard it happens a lot to all sorts of types of ground.” offered Taylor. “Rockslides happen. Mudslides happen. Logslides probably happen in the woods.”
                “They’re called log flumes.” Kari corrected.
                “Log flumes, got it. In any case, I don’t see why these soil dunes shouldn’t get about as well. If we stay up and film it happening it’d be brilliant B-roll for a fundraising campaign.”
                There was a great deal of bouncing around, with hands held up to frame the exact field of view for her prospective video.
                “Would you need footage of a brave explorer riding one of those dunes towards their destiny, fortune and eternal fame? I’ve done it loads of times and can put on a great show.” Kari said, trying to prop her leg up on a mound, dramatically. Unfortunately, the surrounding area was a bit too smooth and flat for such a pose, and instead she was forced to hover one leg in the air. It made her look less like a daring explorer, and more like she was practicing her yoga.
                “As great as this cinematic epic of background video  would be,” started Dr Seetch, exceedingly diplomatically, “it’s probably more important that we get some sleep tonight. It’s still our first day here, and we can’t be getting immediately exhausted with late night videography.”
                “In my experience, which is vast, you’re better off getting exhausted quickly if it’s going to happen, because then you’ve got the whole rest of the trip to recover.” The guide tapped at her temple, indicating that she was doling out highly valuable pearls of wisdom to her companions.
                “That,” said Monica, pulling out the tarpaulin which would form the bulk of her salubrious accommodation, “is possibly the least medically sensible statement I have heard in a long time.”
                “Pah, medical sense is just a fancy term for cowardice and old timey thinking, like allowing three days for a cheque to clear with the bank, or investing across a diverse portfolio in order to minimise overall risk. I got myself exhausted a week ago so that I’d be ready and recovered for today, and look how much travelling we’ve done.”
                Monica shook her head, opting out of the conversation and instead gathering some of the more accessible fallen lumber from the edge of the rainforest. She and her old timey medical sense would sleep under shelter, with a fire for warmth and to cook something to eat. If Kari wished to use her alleged experience to force the ground to move, and to ride it like a surfer with a serious misunderstanding of kinematics, then that was her lookout. Whatever happened under the cover of night, Dr Seetch was committed to getting a good night’s sleep and nothing else.
 
                Morning arrived slowly in the wilds. There was no rooster to crow as a signal of the new dawn, no alarm clock to shrilly annihilate any peaceful slumber, and certainly no milk float idling outside the window two hours before sunrise. That there was no window outside of which to idle was immaterial. Gradually, the sky re-illuminated from black, to deep blue, to a mixture of light blue and pink, like someone was playing with the colour balance on a television screen to try to make the scene more interesting.
                When the sky had become bright enough to shed light through Monica’s tent, she awoke to the sound of snoring from Kari’s direction, and rustling from Taylor’s. This had the unfortunate side effect of reminding her that those two were her companions. Instead of waking up in her own luxurious bed, next to her husband and not terribly far away from her dogs, she was stirring on a thin bedroll at an indeterminate distance from several cretins. But she was saving lives, she told herself, and that was a deed good enough to deserve only the strongest punishment.
                Business-like as ever, Monica put a pin in her own ruminations and set about getting ready. Clothes were pulled on in the series of strange contortions only ever witnessed within a tent, resulting in barely a handful of crossed-over buttons and inside-out sleeves. A healthy glug was taken from her flask, getting herself hydrated and ready to refill it from the still-proximate rainforest. Her boots went on, then came off again for sock adjustment, then back on and off to locate a stray twig, and then again a few more times to get the tongue to sit just right against the top of her foot. By the time she finally got into the cool, outside air of the strange plains on which they found themselves, her boot laces had seen as much wear as a pair twice their age.
                The remnants of last night’s fire sat cold and inert in their circle of rocks. It had taken some convincing for Kari to let her extinguish it completely, with the guide arguing that it would keep their tents warm and Taylor agreeing that it’s nice to have an atmospheric mood-light for the night. The imminent danger of burning to death was a surprisingly ineffective counter-argument, and Monica began to wonder if she was travelling with a pair of companions to whom injury and loss of life were not only acceptable risks, but desirable outcomes.
                “Is someone else awake?” called Taylor, still ensconced within her hessian home-from-home.
                “Yep.”
                “Ah, great. Good morning, Monica. Did you sleep well?”
                “Yeah, no complaints, thank you. I’ve had to put up with worse conditions.”
                “Awesome. Me too; I spent a night in a shower cubicle once because I wanted to feel contained and secure, and I can tell you that it’s not the most comfortable way to pass twelve hours.” said the intern. There was a pause, which Monica took to mean she should be replying.
                “Oh. That sounds like a strange decision to have made. Glad last night was a bit better.”
                “Yeah. Would you mind helping me with my extensions, please?”
                Dr Seetch, scowled at the tent, confused.
                “With what?”
                There was a zipping sound, which appropriately accompanied a zipping motion from the zipper on the zip of Taylor’s tent. It was a wonderfully cohesive and consistent event.
                “With my extensions.” repeated Taylor, who had half a head of bright orange synthetic hair extensions braided into her own black locks. “Now I know what you’re going to say,” she added, seeing the look on the doctor’s face, “and no this isn’t strictly necessary for travelling through an unknown land, but if we want to have a good set of reusable images of the social pages, that can be uploaded in any order, then we need to have some aesthetic variety. Otherwise, it‘ll look like we just took hundreds of photos on a single day, and then tried to make use of them infinitely thereafter. A few sets of extensions is a small price to pay for maximising the longevity of our photographic products from this trip, and they’re much lighter to carry than the dozens of suits that Quentin and Jebediah probably have.”
                It was a little frustrating to Monica that her complaints had been telegraphed on her face and then neatly nipped in the bud; this was a telling off lost to time. But, she consoled herself, if the braiding process ended up wasting valuable time at any stage then she’d be able to launch in guns blazing.
                “I see. And you’d like some help doing the other side of your head, would you?”
                “Please, yeah. I can reach some of them, but I’m left-handed so getting to this patch,” she pointed at an untouched part of her hair, “is pretty awkward for me. I’m desperate for a wee, too, so any help in getting it done quickly would be amazing.”
                “Can’t you go as you are?”
                “I’d need to take all these plaiting bands off my hands if I did that. It’d be a whole thing.”
                Dr Seetch sighed.
                “Sit down, then. Let’s get this sorted out.”
                It had been a long time since Monica had needed to braid anyone else’s hair. Her own children were long grown up, and times were few and far between on international medical missions that emergency hairdressing was a necessity. It all came flooding back to her though, and her fingers were soon articulating like the levers on a typewriter, rhythmically and mechanically entangling hair and polyester into a series of tight fluorescent ropes. Kari was still snoring away when they’d finished.
                “Awesome, thanks for your help, Mon. How do they look?” asked Taylor, who was trying to take photos from various angles.
                Dr Seetch looked at their handiwork. In all honesty, she’d most accurately describe it as looking like they’d stuck a deformed cartoon tarantula onto a woman’s head, but suspected that it wouldn’t be a terribly tactful thing to say.
                “Very vibrant.” she said, which wasn’t a lie.
                “Great. Today’s pictures will be fresh and exciting.”
                “Would the whole new landscape not achieve the same thing?” asked the doctor.
                Taylor looked at the alien landscape surrounding them, then back at the dense, green rainforest.
                “Nah. We’d look completely the same, so no-one would be paying attention to the ground. Anyway, still desperate for a wee, excuse me.”
                Monica let her young friend get a head start, before following discreetly towards the tree line. She too had a mighty need to release some fluids, and a bladder with several decades more wear trying to hold it all at bay.
                When they arrived back, separately but not too far apart, Kari had rolled out of her own tent and was trying to start a fire using her boot and a stone.
                “Dare I ask?”
                “Flint and steel, Dr Seetch.” replied the guide. “Pretty basic stuff; I have steel toe cap boots, and some of these stones must have some flint in them, so it’s just a case of kicking them hard enough to make a spark.”
                “Alright, where on earth did you learn your survival skills? Where have you been before this trip?” Monica snapped. The fact that this particular event had pushed her over the edge of direct confrontation was as much of a surprise to her as it was to Taylor and Kari.
                “I learned from ancient native tribes you won’t have heard of.”
                “That use steel toe cap boots?”
                “They use loads of things. It isn’t just the developed world that makes use of metal, you know. The use of iron dates all the way back to the bronze age, and gold has been the most stable form of currency, due to the way it holds its value as a tangible asset, for as long as humans have lived in organised societies. You’re just looking down on tribal wisdom.” Kari argued, meandering in a narrative path that no-one would dare follow.
                “No. At least half of that is nonsense and we both know it. You bit a mystery plant, you tried drinking off a leaf, you didn’t bring any water or food rations of your own, the store tags are still on your boots, with which you’re trying to start a fire by kicking some sedimentary rocks, and on closer inspection it appears that your machete is, in fact, part of a car door strapped to a stick. I don’t think you’re qualified to be here, and-“
                “Alright! Okay! I think we all need some breakfast. Monica sounds a bit hangry, and Kari’s forgotten how to start a fire, but I’ll get things sorted.” Taylor interjected, leaping between the two women. “Luckily, we don’t need fire to eat these croissants.” She produced a six pack of the aforementioned bread product from somewhere unseen.
                “Croissants? Nice!” Kari said, eagerly taking the pastry from Taylor and forgetting everything about the bickering for a moment.
                “She’s endangering our lives by pretending to be a guide!” Monica growled, and Taylor made the unexpected move of filling the same oral maw with squashed breakfast food.
                “You’re endangering our morale by staying grumpy. Eat the croissant. We all deserve better than the type of work environment that your tone is setting.” quoted Taylor, directly referencing the Doctor’s Without Maps Dignity at Work policy.
                Yet again that morning, Monica felt herself being actively robbed of a telling-off by the intern. But, as before, it was hard to argue with her logic; at least, it was hard to care enough to argue when her mouth was already full of an admittedly enjoyable pastry.
                “Fine.” she mumbled through flaking baked goods. “Thank you for the food. Not the most practical thing to carry with you, but thank you regardless.”
                “You’re welcome.” smiled the intern, orange hair glowing in the morning sun, as she sat herself down and started her own morning meal.
                Courtesy of Monica’s outburst, justified or not, the tents were packed up in near silence. There were a few mumbled requests to pass the mallet, or help with rolling up a canvas, or to deny that anyone’s blade was the lower-left part of the driver’s side door of Monica’s car, sheared off when the doctor had been distractedly taking inventory of her things, but conversation otherwise did not flow.
                As they set about marching into the unknown savannah, Monica’s thoughts were conflicted. On the one hand, she had been very abrupt and hostile towards Kari, all over a misguided attempt to access steel, and the misidentification of a stone. It was no-one’s fault that geology was taught improperly in most educational institutions. On the other hand, knowing how to make a fire, and having the tools to do so, was such a fundamental skill to survival in the wilds that it all but confirmed Kari’s claims to be fallacious. Couple that with the concerns Monica’s outburst had raised, which still seemed valid to her, and there was a strong case for continuing to interrogate the matter.
                Ultimately, however, she couldn’t help admitting to herself that she was once again following Kari’s path through uncharted territory. Kari had led them accurately on the trail of several discarded items of upper-class formal-wear and there did seem to be boot prints in the dried ground where their guide was taking them. It would be far too awkward to bring her questions and accusations up again now, especially without the catalyst of rage at stone-kicking, and Taylor would definitely make her feel guilty about making a toxic workplace again. She decided to let it lie, and get her mind back on the job.
                It was only when they crested the first of the dune-like hills on their strange plains, a climb which would have been more pleasant had the heat of the day not been building with every passing moment, that they understood the true scope of the new land in which they'd found themselves. From the bottom of the rise, the horizon had been obscured by the lumpy and crawling landscape. From the top, they could see that horizon extending, as it traditionally does, all the way across their line of sight; land and sky met in a vaguely bumpy line, like a child's free-hand drawing, and those bumps reached all the way from that limit of vision to the ground beneath their feet. The whole plain, as far as was visible and then even further, was covered in the same undulating, baked-dry earth. Deep shadows and patches of darkness lay between them, bloomed out by the bright reflections of direct sunlight on bare, pale, ground. Peppering the sun-facing hillsides were the hollow, desiccated remains of ancient trees, some of them a lot like the very much damp and living examples they'd seen in the rainforest, and others not much like any other trees at all. They pierced through the ground, each one with a mound of earth around its base, as if they preferentially sprouted out of molehills for reasons best known to themselves, or dragged the soil up with them as they grew.
                "My god. What is this? It's like a... a giant sea floor or something." Monica said.
                "Maybe it's the floor of a giant sea?" offered Taylor, unsure of where she'd got the flash of divine inspiration that led to such a hypothesis.
                "Nah, seas are wet. There'd be loads more water here if it was a sea bed, and it'd be above us because we're on it. So it can't be that." Kari observed. "I reckon it's just not been rolled for a while. My garden does it all the time; ants make a huge mess of it and then you have to get the roller out to squash it all flat again."
                "It'd need a lot of ants to do this."
                "That's the thing with ants that you city folk might not understand. There are actually loads of them in every nest, more than ten, and they all have their own jobs to do."
                "Really?" asked Taylor, whose knowledge seemed to have gaps in totally arbitrary places.
                "Oh yeah. There's your queen, she's sort of like the ruler and is basically in charge. Lays eggs and stuff. Then you've got your workers who dig, your soldiers who fight, your scavengers who look for food, and that sort of thing. But older ones probably get more advanced and need more clerical ants, or infrastructure support ants, or bus driver ants and things. It's all well and good walking when the nest is small, but once it gets huge you need a bus service to get your workers from the residential burrows to the really good business districts. It's where humans got the idea for buses, as it goes." Kari said. She shot a few looks at Monica as she spoke, daring her to question the authority of such an experienced guide yet again, but the doctor, if she had any complaints about it, did not feel the need to voice any of them.
                "Wow... that's really cool."
                "Yep. Part of the reason I got into exploring was to see ants of the world and look at what they've done. Clearly, the ants in these parts are major builders, and they like to build replica sand dunes, probably as a tourist trap. Ants are renowned for trapping things. They invented the hole with spikes at the bottom, and then fantasy authors ripped it off. Happens all the time."
                Monica twitched. She knew it wasn't worth the argument, but keeping her temper was like holding onto a galloping horse while coated, head to toe, in the pantry's finest butter.
                "Let's keep moving." said the doctor. If they were going to talk nonsense, then at least they could do it while making progress. "Our toffs could be at the bottom of any of these hills."
                "Or the top. I've seen loads of things on top of hills in my travels, if you believe that I've done any travelling." added Kari.
                The doctor sighed, hoping that anger could be expelled from the body via exhalation.
                "I'm sorry that I snapped at you and accused you of being a fraud this morning, Kari. It was unfair of me." she said, not believing her own words and unsure as to why she was saying them. Something about Taylor's earnest distaste for conflict had cut her to a strange and confusing depth.
                "No problem. I get it all the time; jealously does terrible things to the mind, and people lash out at overachieving heroes like me all the time. But I'll still steer you right and get you to your injured aristocrats or whatever they are. Their hedge funds won't wait forever, and we need to save as much of their investment from the twisted claws of inheritance tax as possible."
                Monica plunged her teeth into the collar of her shirt to keep from throwing Kari down the hill. Taylor gave her a thumbs-up, bit her own collar, and then took it promptly out of her mouth again.
                "Yours must taste better than mine. You'll have to let me know what kind of chewing shirt you buy; it'll be a great detail for the write-up."
                "Hey, I see something on that rise over there; at the top, not the bottom." Kari said, squinting and pointing ahead. "Might be a shadow from something exciting and rare, or it might be a tuxedo. It's certainly black enough, and it has the bearing of something double-breasted and suitable for after-dinner speaking. Let's get over there and check it out."
                Dr Seetch grunted, left enough of a safe distance between her and the guide that she wouldn't throw a right hook, and then followed along.
                The sniping and ever-escalating old tripe being spouted by Kari was doing a great job of infuriating Monica, but nothing got her blood boiling quite as much as having to admit that she was right. Every time they reached the top of a hillock, they could see the black shape more clearly, and every time they saw it more clearly it looked more like a tuxedo jacket. The tails were perfectly visible, laid out flat on the hillside to prevent creasing, and there was a bow tie hung over the dead limbs of a small, petrified bush.
                "It's a strange place to leave a tuxedo." Taylor said, as they stood around it in a triangle. "I would have used a hanger, I think. Or put it back in the suit bag. Leaving it on the dusty ground is silly."
                "Maybe he took it off because he got hot from the climb." Monica said, flatly.
                "Nah, that won't be it. He'll have taken it off because they got here after eight p.m., and that made it time to change out of a tuxedo and into an evening jacket. These sorts are sticklers for etiquette."
                "Kari, how could you possibly know that they got here at eight?"
                "Because I'm a pro tracker, and because of the time gaps between the other bits of suit we've found, assuming that they're walking on all fours like dogs. It's the only thing that makes sense."
                "Why would they be-"
                "Because they're too stupid to realise that you can walk on two feet in other countries as well as the UK. This is the basics of wilderness tracking, quack. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but you can't argue with results."
                Upon hearing this, Monica took herself off for a walk to calm down. Walking was about all they'd been doing anyway, and it had barely helped her mood at all thus far, but she lived in hope that 'out of sight and out of mind' would hold true for the enemy she'd made for herself. Being no fool, she headed in the direction in which the toffs had presumably been travelling, and lived in hope that she'd stumble upon them herself, before the others caught up. That way she could really let rip into the pair of them without anyone trying to report about in on the company's news feed.
                Ahead of her, from what she'd been able to see when standing by the tuxedo jacket, the next rise held one of the deep shadows. It was strange how the shadow there had persisted despite the progress of the Sun, which had lit up many of the other hillsides and burned away any hint of shade therein. Monica was sure that her ever-so-knowledgeable guide would have seen shadows that get darker the more light you shine on them, or that walk like chickens or something equally ridiculous, but back in the realm of the real, Monica was starting to doubt that it was a shadow at all. When her burning thighs delivered her to the top of the slope, she got her answers.
                “Finally decided to stop and wait for the terrain expert?” asked Kari, when she and Taylor caught up a few minutes later.
                “Yeah, something like that. Why don’t you tell us what’s up here before you see it, if you’re such an expert?”
                “Oh, I reckon it’ll be hundreds, possibly thousands, of stone lilies. They’re always found in wild lands like these. There’s no-one to water real lilies, you see, so the stone ones are the only type that can survive the environment.”
                “Oh dear. Swing and a miss for the infallible Miss McDermot, explorer extraordinaire.”
                “Is it a dog? I’d love to see a dog.” Taylor suggested.
                “No, it’s not a dog either.” said Monica, now a little sad. She would have loved to see a dog as well.
                “If it’s neither of literally the two only possibilities,” Kari said, panting from the climb, “then what could it possibly be?”
                She too, got her answer at the top. And an answer to what the hills really were.
                “No ants forged these, Kari.” Monica told her companions, redundantly.
                The three of them stood at the edge of vast chasm, a void the size of a cathedral, but sadly not the shape of one. It dropped away almost vertically, save for the slightly cylindrical rounding of the edge, which was patterned with fissures, furrows, and tiny shoots. The hill was hollow, for they stood atop the dirt-covered surface of an impossibly huge root.
                Below them, the remainder of the hill’s structure owed its strength to a web of other roots, similar in size to the one on which they were standing, upon which a layer of soil had built up, as if they were the timber frame of a huge mud hut. Within the core of the hill, those same roots twisted around one another and grew into a woven orb, a living record of their probing search for water and nutrients, and formed something of a deeply perilous set of steps and slides which could bear one into the heart of the earth.
                “I would suppose the top of this hill caved in at some point, hence why it’s open while the others are sealed.” Monica speculated.
                “Yeah.” Kari said, gawping into the abyss. They waited for her to inform them that she lived in one of these for several years, and had in fact invented them, but no such declarations were made.
                An electronic shutter sound told them that Taylor had kept her professional head squarely in place, despite the confusing majesty of what they were seeing.
                “A tree with roots like this would be… beyond enormous. It would be visible for miles. I wonder when it fell down.”
                “We don’t know that it was a tree, do we? It might be the roots of something flatter. Or wider. Or underground.” said Taylor. They peered deeper into the hole. “We don’t have to go down there to find out though.”
                “Don’t we?” asked Monica, leadingly.
                “No.” Taylor confirmed, like a horse that has been helped towards water but denies any knowledge of thirst.
                The doctor pointed towards a cravat and a pair of spats at the edge of the chasm, and the undeniable scratches and scrape marks where a pair of suited gentlemen had made their descent.
                “Oh.” said the intern.
                “Oh.” echoed the doctor.
                “It’s fine. I’ve rappelled into the hollow of a monumental root structure loads of times before.” added the guide, but her heart wasn’t in it.
                They stood at the edge for a while, not speaking, not preparing or taking action, not moving at all; they just peered into the darkness.
                “Whatever these roots belong to, the situation is materially unchanged.” said Monica, finally.  “Our toffs are down there, or at least were down there at some point. If they made it out, then we can too. And if they didn’t, then that’s where we’re needed. We said we’d go where no map has ever been drawn and we need to be as good as our word, because lives may depend on it. We’re heading down.”