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September 15, 1995. [/b]
Pacific Ocean, 110 miles west of Costa Rica. [/color][hr][/right]
[indent][i]He hated storms.[/i] Daniel Rumer did his best to go over his notes as the small business jet was rocked by the turbulence over the storm. The man, moving closer and closer to thirty and his black hair already prematurely thinning, had the window overlooking the wing closed. He did his best not to even consider the fact that they were thousands of miles above the earth and that one mistake, one tiny [i]problem[/i] could send all eight passengers careening towards the earth to obliteration. He shifted in the denim shirt, speckled with a tinge of sweat from the warm cabin. His fingers tapped against his seat's arm-rest, an obvious sign of his nerves. 

He scanned the room. There was the photojournalist he’d been working the Nazca article with, Jules. There was an older gentleman in a flower shirt somehow sleeping in all of this turbulence, still balancing aviator sunglasses on his face. There was a nearly-bald man sitting near the back, constantly checking his watch or looking out of the window. A few others dotted the plane as well, but no one really stood out to Daniel as he tried to focus on something else. He’d worked for [i]New Scientist[/i] now for roughly four years, having dropped out of his graduate program to pursue something more lucrative than studying geological formations and tectonic plate shifts (and this was after he’d changed his major from paleontology after spending a summer workshop with a hardass doctor in Montana) and found himself penning articles for the “Earth” sections in the paper. [i]Earth[/i] was just a fancy way of way of lumping together tons of different disciplines that no one in the technology, mathematics or medical fields really cared about. 

Hell, they had four different tech writers on staff, guys who were on the cutting age discussing robotics, the possible future of nanotechnology and how computers were now possible of discerning trillions of lines of code in weeks. There was one article he remembered back when he first started, an interview with some Scottish CEO about supercomputers breaking down the trillions of lines of DNA from extinct creatures. The fact that his job was looking at old rocks, fossils and lines in the sand meant that his chance for a pulitzer was unobtainable. It paid the bills at least. 

He and Juliet were flying to Costa Rica from Peru after doing some on-site talk with new studies on Peru’s Nazca lines. Juliet had managed to get a few incredible shots from a small plane of the lines as well; at least from what she told him. He’d been on the ground speaking with a few scientists and locals with the help of a translator. Now they were on a 4 hour connecting flight before the big airliner in San Josè would take them back to the States. But [i]Christ,[/i] how long was this flight taking? Daniel did not keep a watch, but this was starting to feel like an eternity; something that made him want to look out the window and get his bearings, regardless of his fears of heights and death. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, turning to Juliet who was sitting across from him. “Has it been four hours yet or is this turbulence just messing with my mind?” [/indent]