The Missing Coordinates

[Ailith Rayner]

Map reading; one of the base units for Spies. And Ailith loved it. You could plan every aspect of every journey and a map was all you needed. You could see what was ahead, you could time how long it would take you to get to where you wanted to be, you could see how far away you were and it was silent and slow. No ridiculous GPS things which never seemed to work for Ailith. A machine meant you never had to think, never had to wonder or enjoy the journey. This was one of the only times Ailith prefered paper to machine only because paper didn't lose frickin' signal!

So, sitting with a map in front of her, pencil and paper in hand and a task to find out how far you would have traveled if you went from the post box at 125174 to the bar at 167191, Ailith was content. The girl sitting across from her, the one and only Sophie Mathieu, seemed to be ... well not quite so content. Ailith looked up with a sympathetic raised eyebrow.
"Do you need a bit of help with it?" Ailith asked softely.

[Ailith Rayner]

"Well I'm certainly not divine but I have contacts," Ailith laughed, "let me see."
Ailith knelt on her chair to look over Sophie's work. It...well was a bit of a mess. By Sophie's notes, the post box was the church with a spire at coordinates 176128 and the public house was the public toilet at 199163. She had also worked out that it would be 453,743.0043 kilometres away. Which, Ailith considered, was impressive, since the scale was 1:10,000 and there appeared to be no working out whatsoever.

“Right erm… see this,” Ailith pointed to the grid reference for the post box, then withdrew her finger decidedly, “in fact let’s just… yeah let’s just get rid of this page and start again.” Ailith tugged at a page and tore it out of the file block. “What did you understand from the demo?” Ailith asked as she left her seat to sit in the one beside Sophie.

[Ailith Rayner]

Ailith frowned. Oooookaaaaaay… that plan failed to launch and imploded… “How about we start again?” Ailith suggested without waiting for an answer. She grabbed her own pen and paper and jotted down bullet-pointed words as she spoke. “Everything you said was right but I’ll just give you some pointers so you can jog your memory in future.” She had listed down the features and terms of a map without their definition.

Grid reference –
Co-ordinates -
Scale –
Orientation -
As the crow flies –
Not as the crow flies -
Symbols –

“Recognise any of those?” Ailith pushed the paper to Sophie.