“Good morning, dear colleagues,” I began, my voice quivering with anticipation as pale dawn crept across the aftermath of the great gale of August. “For the benefit of posterity—and future shoreline scholars—it is incumbent upon us to record our survey of Rawley Point with the utmost precision.” I brandished my notebooks and oil lanterns, patting the three bulging satchels at my side.

“Three sunscreens?” Edwin Barlow—known in certain circles as The Gentleman Diver—arched an eyebrow.

“Prudence, Mr. Barlow. Citrus, aloe, and mint: a trifecta of epidermal defense!” I tapped one satchel. “And four Uncrustables—strawberry jam, mind you. Grape is the coward’s preserve.” I flashed my emergency deck of holographic Pokémon cards. “Posterity may scoff, but a well-timed snack or a gleaming Charizard can uplift the weariest of surveyors.”

Thomas Ashford, The Restless Engineer, fiddled with a stray rung of driftwood. “Might I propose—once we uncover our objective—I repurpose the oil lantern’s mantle into a microbarometer?” He peered at me, lens glinting. “A barometric chronometer–slash–compass, if you will.”

We set foot on the serene expanse of Rawley Point: a broad sweep of pale sand, unbroken and gleaming, where the lake met the sky in a horizon of austere perfection. Edwin clambered onto a hulking log and declaimed, “Canvas dive bags outperform their nylon impostors in both tensile strength and aesthetic gravitas!” His voice boomed off the across the lake, each word measured and grand.

“Is that your final verdict?” I called up.

“Unequivocally!” he declared—until he froze, mid-gesture.

“By the Mighty Fitz,” Thomas muttered, peering over Edwin’s shoulder. “What have you found?”

Edwin knelt; the sand sighed beneath him. “Behold!” he whispered as he brushed away silty grains. “Time itself, stilled by the lake’s hand!” He revealed a gold pocket watch, cracked yet still shimmering. “Its hands are balked at a moment lost to posterity.”

I nearly dropped a half-squeezed Uncrustable into the surf. “Remarkable,” I breathed.

Thomas examined it through his lens. “Or merely waterlogged gearing,” he intoned. “With careful tinkering I could transform it into our next expedition’s premier navigational instrument.”

At that precise moment, a rising bank of mist parted to reveal the GLRC—Great Lakes Research Commission—advancing in uncanny formation. They came in matching uniforms of storm-gray, hems crisp as rulebooks, their clipboards raised like bayonets. Not one coughed, not one glanced aside; even their shoelaces seemed regulated by statute. At their head strode the Commission’s leader, eyes narrowed like a surveyor’s theodolite, with a phalanx of deputies behind her, pens uncapped, ink cartridges gleaming like ordnance. They moved with the precision of tides scheduled by committee, a bureaucratic wave rolling inexorably toward us.

“That pocket watch must be bagged and conveyed at once, in strict accordance with Regulation 44B,” she declared.

Edwin rose, bristling like a cornered walrus. “Regulation 44B? I discovered it!” He gripped the watch as though it were spun of living gold.

Thomas’s jaw tightened. “I say we settle this with dueling pistols.” He brandished a sarcastic grin.

“Order, gentlemen!” I interposed, stepping between them and the GLRC. Drawing the wrapper of my half-eaten Uncrustable, I sketched formal rules of engagement in the damp sand. “I volunteer as second, to ensure strict adherence to the Heterogeneous Accord of Shoreline Disputes, Clause VII, Paragraph 2.”

The GLRC leader raised a brow, cool as lake ice. “Clause VII was superseded by Regulation 44B—ratified, if memory serves, by your own Order a century ago. Jurisdiction over personal artifacts containing precious metals was ceded to us in exchange for exclusive rights to ship logs.”

The words landed like a cannonball in a dinghy. Edwin spluttered, “Logs? We traded watches for soggy ledgers?”

Thomas groaned into his lens. “Ship logs, yes, but still—logs!”

And there it was: the fatal comedy of our position. The Order had out-foxed itself generations earlier, signing away golden relics for the promise of sodden journals. The GLRC’s deputies, pens already flowing, simply invoked the dusty statute, bagged the pocket watch, and swept back into the mist.

Both sides dutifully inscribed the event in our Aligned Ledger. But make no mistake: the GLRC did not simply take the pocket watch; they took the story. With brisk words and a signature in triplicate, they erased our discovery from the record and wrote themselves in its place.

We were left clutching nothing but a sandwich wrapper in the sand, our vaunted codes of honor reduced to beach graffiti. The Order lost not in combat or wit, but in the cold theater of bureaucracy—our own bureaucracy, no less.

We of the Order remained at Rawley Point, lanterns guttering in the dawn wind, staring at the pure strand of sand as if trying to etch our names there before the waves returned to wash them out. Thus ended the Rawley Point Affair—not in triumph, but in a slight.

In the days since, rumors have metastasized like unchecked mussel growth: some insist Edwin drew his pistol (he did not), others whisper I attempted to bribe the GLRC with a holographic Squirtle (true—and they refused). Yet let this be recorded also: the Order will not be slighted twice. The lake remembers, and so do we.

— Eleanor Price, Provisional Member, humbly submitted for the record