Digging In The Dust

So Digging in the Dust is working on an attempted rebirth. Or, rather, I’m working on attempting to give it life once more. So more of a Frankenstein thing, I suppose. Yes, definitely – bringing it back from the Dead.

Story basics:

College team of archaeologists are on a dig at a mesa in new mexico, and discover a cave. In the cave, they unwittingly uncover and ‘activate’ an artifact that places the entire mesa in a slow time – for every day that passes in the area near the mesa, 100 years pass everywhere else. The team leaves the mesa one by one, at first going for supplies… then going to look for those who went for supplies. And each one who leaves learns about the time bubble, as well as finding out that the artifact has made them immortal (just the long lived part – they can still be killed). Most of the team go mad, and die gruesome self-inflicted deaths. A few are captured by government authorities and ‘studied’ to death. A world war occurs during this time, with countries fighting over the “forever people”. Eventually the wars fall behind, and all that is left at the dig are a man and a woman, who have been so absorbed in the dig that they’ve been there for weeks without even really noting the passing of all the assistants and students. Then the woman leaves… The man stays another day before he wonders what happened to her, and also leaves. He spends years wandering the ‘now-peaceful’ world, looking for her, and gradually learning of the horror that has befallen him and the rest of the dig team.

Possible Character Names
Men:
Rob, Flannigan, Flagherty, Red, Graham, Decklan, Sam, Steve, Norton, Drake, David, Thom, Perry, Henry

Favorites from the Wife:
Christopher, Sean, Frank, Matthew (Matt),

Women:
Catherine, Kat, Kelly, Karin, Karrine, Darby, Denise, Bernice, Sigrid, Anise, Haley, Allie, Betsy, Sarah, Farrah, Jessica, Beverly, Sharon, Shelly, Charise, Josephine, Allison, Seraphina, Zoe, Chloe,

Favorites from the Wife:
Alice, Samantha, Sabrina, Sabine

So, some basic premise type things:
1. Dig in the New Mexico deserts (I’m not absolutely married to this, but I need a very “Devil’s Tower” mesa to be present, and New Mexico has a few of these.
2. Said Mesa must be near an American Indian reservation. Native American. American Indian. ‘indigenous peoples’. Whatever. Again, New Mexico has this.
3. The Artifact can be “ancient tech” or “voodoo and weirdness”, but either way it exhibits the following properties/behaviors:
a. When it is ‘activated’, nobody really notices. There’s nothing to cause alarm. (Bilbo: alarum)
b. When activated, it causes a temporal… bubble. This bubble radiates outward from the artifact roughly a mile or two – far enough out that it isn’t apparent to those inside that the bubble exists.
c. The temporal bubble slows time, relative to the outside world. Those inside notice no change, but for every day or so in the bubble, hundreds of years pass everywhere else.
d. The artifact protects itself from ‘rediscovery’. Basically, once you leave its sphere of influence, you forget where it (and subsequently the Mesa) is.
e. This is the clincher. The artifact makes all those within the sphere of influence at the time of activation… immortal. This immortality exhibits itself in the ‘you won’t die of natural causes’ mode. Those affected can still die, and will, from violence, but never from aging, or sickness.

At this point, I know I’ve stretched the bounds of credibility quite a bit, but we’re also talking about a supernatural sort of event. Luckily, supernatural doesn’t just mean ‘magical’, but anything outside the realm of ‘the natural’. Ancient Tech that can cause temporal shifts (and all that other stuff) would definitely be counted as supernatural, I believe.

Anywho, that’s the premise. More to come.

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