_____________________________________________________________________
Yet another peculiar box came into my possession today… this one, thankfully, less gruesome on the outside than the last. While the box has been badly burned, the top is adorned with a design that appears to be Celtic in influence… but the Celts resided in areas ranging from Ireland to Norway… If it were not for its resemblance to a certain creature that resides in a Scottish loch, I would have many more places to investigate in hopes of locating this box’s origins.

Within the lid of the box was an intriguing slip of paper, crisp and yellowed and burned. What I could see of it read:

“These eggs can remain viable for an indefinite amount of time, so long as they remain submerged. It is suspected that they will only hatch when exposed to a large body of fresh water that does not already contain a monster, thus, when the monster of a lake dies, several eggs will hatch, and the strongest will live to grow large and reproduce. In this way, the freshwater lakes do not overcrowd, while still ensuring that there will be plenty of offspring to repopulate the lake when the last adult dies.”

The rest of the box was filled with plantlike padding of some sort, along with a couple of freshwater mollusk shells and stones… but most importantly, there is a bottle, sealed with wax and containing an algae-green liquid, suspended in which is… an egg, it seems. It somewhat resembles a fish or amphibian egg, though with peculiar streaks and markings within. It moves slowly through the fluid, indicating that it is of similar density as the water itself. This is rather peculiar, since the plesiosaurs that these lake monsters appear to resemble bore live young. Could this be a newer trait, used by prehistoric survivors? Parallel evolution? Or perhaps, could it be an older variety that outlasted its cousins?

One could only imagine what would happen should I put this egg in the local lake...
_______________________________________________________________________

The last of the pieces I made for the macron art show this coming weekend. Here, have some crummy video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBwHevfrTTg