Today's #flashfiction Didn't You Read The Sign?

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

Wile E. Coyote* #quote

Today I watched a Hunger Games movie with my family. We ate dinner during it so I didn't hunger during the games.

Didn't You Read The Sign?

         Lead archaeologist Ted Burns entered the ruins along with his colleagues and a camera crew. It took days and days of digging in the agonizing sun of Egypt to open up these ruins. Their funding came from a television channel that wanted to make a show of the initial entering of a ruins. The camera crew only came after the door to the area was first unearthed. Their presence made Ted Burns and his colleagues uncomfortable, they feared they would damage something, and he was contractually obligated to not enter the room without them. Not even to open the entrance.

         Carefully he opened the door, the camera crew rushing in front of his colleagues. The desert made him sweat, but knowing that people who didn't know how to handle the precious artificats of the past were preventing him from taking the care necessary for full preservation, made him sweat more than any desert heat. A single mistake could damage anything. He knew the television crew held no malice, and tried to be careful when he asked them to, but when they looked in all the wrong places to get better shots instead of being cautious to avoid damaging things he felt more nervous with each passing second.

          Ted held a powerful flashlight with one hand that lit up the hallway that started the ruins. The camera crew also used their own lights that lit up the ruins, and the archeologist. His light brown shirt, hat, and pants weren't the most extravagant of clothes, however everyone on the camera crew did notice the extremely large amount of pockets covering both the front and back of his pants. Also the large pocket on the front of his shirt as well. This made them all wonder what he could be carrying in that vast array of pockets. Their imagination filled with tools and supplies for complex adventures worthy of an action movie.

          After a few twists in the hallway the ruins opened to a large room. Ted entered the room and looked around to see nothing, only hallway leading to the next.

         Ted as per contract started narrating about the inner parts of the ruins, starting to make filler for the show being taped. However a mummy holding a spear walked slowly from the dark hallway leading into the next room and it started speaking ancient Egyptian.

         Everyone stood still in fear and for a moment they didn't say anything, one cameraman, the boldest of them all, asked, “Do you understand what it is saying?”

          Ted Burns replied in a squeamish yell, “I-I don't know how to speak ancient Egyptian, nobody alive has for thousand of years! I can only read it! This sounds completely different from what people guessed it would sound like!”

         When the mummy finished speaking it pointed at a set of hieroglyphs on the wall near the end of the hallway they arrived from. Everyone turned to the hieroglyphs and Ted read them aloud in the same voice he would have used if reading from a confusing map.

         “Meeting the Pharaoh is by appointment only?”

          The eyes of the mummy erupted a red mist and the glass of the cameras shattered as the ground shook. They all ran out of the ruins while the mummy pointed the spear at them while speaking ancient Egyptian at them like an annoyed security guard at a theme park. The ruins collapsed around them and no one ever believed their story so they turned their footage into one of those sci-fi clips and got a least a little bit of a profit as people thought “the special effects were amazing”.