When I first hit the research, I was struck by the idea of Nuclear New Mexico. They have everything but the power plants there; a uranium mine-to-waste disposal facility vertical slice through the entire nuclear industry.
The plants are elsewhere, and the nuclear testing moved to Nevada. But you can still follow the whole story with visits to the right sites in New Mexico.
I was holding back from sending Penny through that because I really want on this one to be plot-focused. Background and context will always be there, and some two-headed red herring are appropriate, but I do want to move away from lectures whenever possible. I realized this morning on my walk to work that there's a thing I've been doing where Penny has an insight based on what she has learned, but a good part of what she had learned was off-screen so she has to do a quick info-dump for the reader.
That realization was in the context of the White Sands Footprints and how they might help Penny move out of the Desert Solitaire she's gotten into on this adventure. A motion I might not want, in the larger scheme of things; being on her own is a good place to take her, and saving the reader from her increasingly complicated history (that stuff came to a head in the Paris novel) is even better.
I also want her outside, under the sun, in the arid-if-not-desert. I want any ruins she urban-explores to be on the surface and showing the wear and tear of those conditions. Which is a pity, because I just ran across this:
Atlas F missile silo in New Mexico, from a visit by urban explorers.
It is always a balance, plotting-wise, between using what is local, and using what is appropriately thematic. One of the extremes is what I've called "James Bond Plotting," where you decide on a particular thing like the London Eye or Carnival in Rio and you arrange the plot to make a visit.I'm falling in that direction because I can't resist including the Shroud museum in Alamogordo. Not for the Shroud (they don't have it there), but for the VP8 Image Analyzer they do have there.
Being as it is an analog computer, it is deliciously retro-tech but also basically useless for anything I might find an excuse for Penny to use it for. That vaunted processing can be beat with a free ap for her phone. But thinking about it gave me a bigger integration of Lon to her investigations and more investment from her when he is killed, so...
(The downside is having to get into the Shroud and pseudoscience and especially Biblical Archaeology, which I've been saving for a story where I give her an excavation to run and her own field techs working for her...but for a sponsor that is really, really hoping to verify an Ark or something.)
Ooh, and I just realized a plot advancement that could happen with a visit to the WIPP. I mean, she can't even get through the fence, and there's nothing for her to learn there, but she absolutely could become aware of picking up a tail. Meaning she now knows that whatever Lon discovered that got him killed is after her now. (She's not...entirely wrong.)
