March 4, 2020, 6:20 am

Dave woke up bright and early, then woke Joe up. They'd been asleep most of the past twelve hours because it was so dark and cool inside the abandoned library. While the library had been much more comfortable than they were expecting, they both agreed that they would find a hotel if this went into another night, if there still was a hotel in this town. Semi-well rested, they headed out into the cool morning air and headed for the observatory. There was a little moisture on the ground from an overnight rain.

There was little left of the observatory, which looked like a ruin you'd find in an Old West town. The exterior walls were mostly still standing, but the explorers could see straight through the second-floor window openings, as well as a large hole in the wall on the front left of the building, to the sky. The large dome in the center was entirely collapsed. The entire structure was overgrown, but the interior and a few parts of the exterior were not as severely overgrown.

Dave decided to see what he could find in the rubble. Joe hesitated before following, realizing that the most dangerous time to explore this structure would have been many years ago before it all collapsed. They walked through the hole in the wall, carefully watching their steps. They entered a room; the entire floor above was gone, and pieces of what had been the second floor itself now littered the first floor. The walls were still standing on the first floor, along with a wooden door; whatever had covered the remaining walls had long vanished, because they were bare brick. A blackboard had fallen off the wall.

The explorers opened the door and were in a hallway. It felt as if they were in a heavily decayed building with no roof; the interior walls were mostly still there on the first floor, but there was nothing where the second floor or roof had been. Again, pieces of the second floor and rubble from both floors littered the floor. Looking toward the center of the building, the explorers saw the collapsed dome at the end of the hall.

They went into a large room that was adjacent to what had been the dome; in fact, it covered the whole back half of the building. Inside this room was a very old mainframe computer. Though heavily dented and covered in rubble, Joe determined that it was a UNIVAC 1107, made around 1963. There were a couple of storage tapes in a desk near the computer's terminal. The desk protected the tapes from the bright sun, rain and snow that had been coming down on the UNIVAC itself for an untold number of years.

After getting plenty of good video, the explorers went into the dome area, finding the remnants of the collapsed planet models laying on the ground.

The right side of the building didn't have much on its front side, just some '60s science books and a chemistry assignment dated November 17, 1965. The back room on the right side was bewildering. There was a broken desk with an '80s model McIntosh computer laying next to it; both looked to have fallen at some point, perhaps from the second floor. A few chairs and a big-screen TV sat up-ended. A crushed ConSumo arcade cabinet set at the other end of the room, and the explorers nearly stepped in broken glass from a chemistry set. Just outside the window was a generator – were these '80s squatters, or another building that had just decayed quickly?

March 19, 1985 3:22 am

By 1985, the observatory had been long closed for "safety concerns". Built as a library for the school in the 1890s, it was rendered obsolete by the new library built in 1960. The school converted it into a planetarium and science building, but that only lasted a few years before financial concerns led to the building being closed permanently. The nerds took it over in 1972, at least in one inconspicuous room chosen so the staff wouldn't catch them. Of course, being kids, they performed no maintenance.

On this night, Earnest kept a bucket in the room to catch dripping water from yet another roof leak, drowning out the dripping with new wave music as he finished working on a new design for his portable spud gun. He'd been in the room for twelve hours, and he was starting to drift off to sleep, but he had to have this done tonight because of a nagging bad gut feeling; he just knew something bad was going to happen on March 19. Months of work had gotten him a design that would fire reliably but was too strong, as evidenced by the bowed-out bricks in the next room over from Tuesday's test. Too strong, and the spud gun could kill someone. Today, he tried a 125-psi pneumatic design instead of a 150 psi one. If this one could knock a hole in the wall, but the brick stays intact, it would pass.

He drew five targets on the wall and fired at each. All five shots were a success. Earnest noted it in his notebook. The only step now would be to send the schematic to Spazz Industries to get the new spud gun into series production for the Nerds.

As he walked back into the room excited and exhausted, Earnest's foot hit the water-filled bucket. He tripped, falling flat on his chest, and dropping his notebook, which was luckily spared any water damage. Gallons of water flowed toward the schematic of the spud gun, a 3' x 4' detailed engineering drawing that laid flat on the floor. By the time Earnest saw that the schematic was in danger, the water was inches from it, and he was several feet away.

In a split second, Earnest put his arms on the ground and pushed down, forcing his body upward into a standing position. He nearly fainted from the sudden bodily shift and came very close to falling again as his right foot slipped on the wet wooden floor. He grabbed the schematic, momentarily dazed. When he came to, he noticed that the corner had gotten wet, and the water had missed the drawing of the barrel by just a half-inch. He laid the schematic on top of the ConSumo machine and fell asleep in a chair. There were no towels to mop up the spilled water, and Earnest couldn't care less anyway. He needed the sleep.