Mystery Picture Coordinate Plane Novels & Stories

"So, someone knew your old work, your personal projects?" "More than that," Lila said, her voice dropping. "They knew the obscure stuff, the things I barely remember doing. Things I never published, never shared." "That's... unsettling," Jake muttered, his eyes glued to the screen. "What does the message say?" Lila took a deep breath. "It's a series of coordinates, followed by a date and time. And… a single word." "Coordinates? Where?" Lucas asked, his voice tense. "A remote location, deep in the mountains," Lila replied, scrolling through the information. "And the date... it's tomorrow."

The tree. The giant tree. The strange tree. The tree that— My thoughts abruptly slipped. Gone. Like water through my fingers. I frowned. Sol looked up. "What?" I held up the notebook. "Do you remember this?" The monarch stared. Then frowned. His confusion mirrored mine perfectly. "No." The answer came instantly. Yet the evidence sat directly in front of us. Pages. Drawings. Descriptions. Coordinates. Proof. We had clearly found something. Something important. Something neither of us could remember.

He slid the yellowed sheet music toward the glass partition. "It’s you." I looked at the notes. They weren't music. Not really. I’m a critic; I know how to read between the lines. The staves were jagged, the rests were uneven. It was a set of coordinates. A longitude and latitude buried in a minor key. And beneath them, a date: May 12th. The cliffhanger wasn't my arrest. It wasn't the trial of the century. It was the fact that the "North Star" wasn't a man at all. It was a map. And the treasure was still buried in the dark.