I have been working on a secret project for a while now and it is nearing the time when I will let the first select few into the know. What follows is a snippet (previous snippet):

Wallace was sitting by himself with a cup of coffee in the cafeteria module when the Avatar came in. He happened to be looking directly at the door when it opened, so he was momentarily blinded by the flood of harsh light in which she was just a slim silhouette. A silhouette with a mushroom-shaped head that resolved itself into a pith helmet when she closed the door.

"Mr Hicks." The Avatar said in a warning tone, her pretty face drawn up in a delicate frown.

Suddenly remembering, and not wanting a repeat of the last time he forgot, Wallace leaped to his feet. Banging the table and knocking over his chair in the process. "Uh... Hello Avatar." He was still blinking from the bright daylight.

The Avatar smiled and sat down across from Wallace. She was dressed in a white linen safari suit, only slightly dusty, that perfectly matched the helmet she now took off and put on the table. Her features were Eurasian, but her eyes were a bright blue. As were her lips, nails, and short-cut hair. Wallace assumed the latter were artificially colored, he wasn't certain about the former.

"Be glad," She said. "that I don't make you kneel to me."

Wallace grimaced, but kept his mouth shut. Certainly all the drudges at the base, the people who weren't scientists, knelt to the ground whenever she passed near.

"I understand you've made some interesting progress."

Wallace wasn't certain what she meant. "I've finished the gene studies on the samples I've been given. And I've started to work on the cylinders Gomez is removing from the tombs."

"It is to those cylinders I refer. They are . . . a natural material I understand."

"Uh..." This put Wallace on firmer ground. "Yes, scat to be precise. Dried dung, apparently the dung of the Ancients. Carefully rolled into cylinders and stored in separate boxes."

"So, they buried their dead with little boxes of shit. You found genetic markers in this shit?"

"Lots of different things, it looks like the Ancients were definitely omnivores. But there were also some markers that matched the few samples we have been able to pull from Ancient bones. The, uh, scat was actually better preserved."

"I am especially interested in these boxes of shit." The Avatar leaned forward and looked up at Wallace with a baleful eye. "Someone, maybe the Ancients themselves, razed their cities, tore down almost every trace of their civilization. The only things left intact on this entire forsaken moon were these tombs. And all we find in them are bones, primitive stoneware, unadorned agricultural implements, and iron age weapons. And little boxes of shit. Many little boxes of shit. I want to know why it was so important to them!"

She stood up and put her helmet back on her head. "More than half a million years ago the Ancients had a very high technology. We've found traces of fiber optic cables, semiconductor chips, and other indications of this technology here and on the other moons. But we've found no writing, no storage medium of any kind. There must be some clue what happened. You, Gomez, and the rest are going to find that clue for me. I don't care what it takes. You will work harder, or you will face the consequences!

"I am the Avatar of the Goddess Isis, and my will is Hers. Do you understand?"

Wallace nodded dumbly. Sometimes, in the three weeks since he had woken here, he got to wondering if he wasn't stuck in some kind of virtuality game gone bad. Moonbat-crazy crap like this just reinforced that feeling. Still, virtuality games don't run on for weeks. And they can't actually hurt you, can they?

And the one thing Wallace knew for sure was that the petite woman across the table could drown him in an ocean of pain with a blink of those innocent blue eyes. That was one reality he didn't want to experience ever again.