It was the Chicago Flood and we were in the midst of it. Not on purpose, mind you. Jan and I had been planning this trolling expedition for weeks, poring over old maps of the sewers and utility tunnels and catacombs, downloading information to our pint-sized portable PCs, checking the waterproofness and resilience of our trolling togs. We had some new head-mounted still cameras we were raring to try out, special from the manufacturer. They were pretty cool, tracking our eye movement and focus zone and capturing exactly what our eye saw. The next best thing to directly downloading our brain, allegedly. The dry runs had gone great, but deep underground, where it's deep and dark and dank and damp, technology has a way of failing.
So there we were, well into the city's underbelly, when some fool chiseled half an inch off his mark and rather than shaping a hole to countersink a bolt shaped an escape hole for the Chicago River. You'd think they'da learned after the first flood, back in the nineties under similar circumstances, but evidently not. So there we were, the infamous Two Trolls, mighty glad to learn that our clothing was indeed submersion-proof and mighty hopeful that all the rest of our gear met that same standard.
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