The Tillamore Tales 3 A few (very few) ideas for a third Tillamore adventure. Actually I got the starting idea for this before "The Fat Lady Sings", but for some inane reason :-) I think that one should be second and this one third (or maybe fourth). Marystead has grown into a rather big town over the years, and this is the episode where we find that it even has a university of its own. To start with a sidetrack, one of the local scholars is a entymologist called Dr. Spelling, about whom it is claimed that he is so famous they named a species of bee after him! (Spelling Bee - get it?) One day one of the other local scientists comes to see William, who doesn't take long to figure out that the man has ben assaulted - which is not exactly a difficult guess considering the size of the lump on his head. He verifies William's deduction by telling him that as far he can tell, he was knocked out with one of his own stone tablets! From there it's rather easy to further deduce that he is a linguist specializing in forgotten lan- guages (forgotten by all but the linguists, that is!) from way before the invention of paper. At some point or another one of them remarks that he should have tried studying hieroglyphs instead - papyrus rolls don't hurt that much! Anyway, the linguist was attacked in his study and knocked unconscious, and when he recovered it did not take long to realize that one of his pre- cious stone tablets (not the one used on his head) was missing. So now he wants not just the tablet back, but to find out why someone would find it that interesting! There is a greater mystery than that behind it, though. The linguist tells William that he makes a habit of photographing all the tablets he gets his hands on - both for backup use and because photos are easier to work with! He had already photographed the missing tablet, so the first thing he did after receiving first aid was to get a big print of the pic- ture and try to figure out what made it so important. With his training it did not take him long to realize that the inscription consisted of numbers. At first he thought it was some kind of inventory listing or something, but then he discovered that it was a date. And not just any date - even though the tablet was a couple of thousand years old, the date inscribed on it was a day in our time! In fact, a date only two weeks after the day the tablet got stolen! And so we have two mysteries: Why wold anyone two thousand years ago write down a date that from their viewpoint was in a distant future, and what about that date would anyone consider important enough to steal it? But it gets even more strange. Or curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said. After William has been searching for a while, the linguist re- turns with more news. When he realized how important the stone tablet seemed to be, he made several prints of the picture of it and mailed them to various colleagues for safekeeping, which led to an amazing discovery: One of the linguists who received a photo reported that he had had a tablet like that too, but it was recently stolen! Fortunately he had made a couple of sketches of it, and so it does not take long to figure out two things: The two tablets appear to be two fragments of the same inscription, and the other tablet does not contain a date - but a position given with the same accuracy as the date! After some swift calculations the linguist declares that the given position is as close in space as the date is in time - it indicates the position of the stone circle outside Marystead that was briefly mentioned in the conversation with Arya Maninoff in part one! So what? We have a date and a place - is something special going to take place there and then, something that could be foreseen two thousand years ago? Well, I'm afraid I haven't planned much longer than this, except for one thing: It transpires that the people who made the tablet is one of those who (according to von Däniken and his ilk) were visited by travellers from other words... So did someone decide to write down the time and place where their friends from Somewhere Out There were planning to return, or what? Will the whole game end just like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"? [Or perhaps an episode of X-files?] Don't ask me, it's 2:05 AM and time to go to bed before I have to get up! Zzzzzzzzz............ Looks like this has been gathering dust as well. I just mentioned in file 1b that it hadn't been updated since February and now it's August. Oh well... The idea I got a few days ago (more details in 1b) started with the realisation that if we use the idea with episodes set in different seasons (as outlined in part 2!), part 1 takes place in the summer, and part 2 in the fall, this part would have to be the winter part (even though they do not necessarily take place in the same year!). And what effect does a de- tective story being set in the winter have on the plot? Tracks! The first (?) time William comes to the university he meets someone (Dr. Spelling perhaps?) who tells the young detective that when he (the extra) heard about what happened to the linguist (looks like I haven't found a name for him yet??!), he took a walk around the building the linguistics lab (?) is in, and found no other tracks than those of the linguist enter- ing and leaving, and since the snow fell the previous afternoon the thief must have been in the building since the day before and still be there - unless, of course, there is any truth in the rumour that there's a network of secret underground passages connecting all the buildings! (It's an old university!) A stray idea for dialog which isn't really funny, just a way of making my own opinion heard (I'm really not too crazy about winter and all that it brings with it, except for Christmas of course... and my birthday which is in January). The scientist (?) explains that "The snow that we have all been eagerly waiting for...", William interjects "Not me!" and the other continues unperturbed: "... that most of us have been eagerly waiting for finally started falling last night, so..." etc. etc.