Public Profile for FiveAlarm

I thought you would never ask! The story of how mapping teams came to be as we know them is actually quite interesting. Stay a while and I shall tell you about it.

In the beginning, mappers were solitary creatures. Having little regular contact with other mappers they cared not for hygiene and appeared rugged and grimy to outsiders. During the day they would rest for the sun beat down fiercely and work was hard to do. During the night they would come out of their holes and use their time to scavenge by torchlight for suitable twigs, leaves and other scraps. If they were lucky enough, they might even find a rodents nest to ransack for its bedding. The soft material they found was sometimes quite dirty but, with the help of some mud could be molded into rocks or other features more effectively than twigs and leaves.

On special days when the sky was cloudy and the sun beat down less harshly, the mappers would be roused from their slumber before dusk. They would take the opportunity to construct great model worlds outside their holes with the materials they gathered. (Some of these models have withstood the elements so well that they can be admired even today!) The mappers dreamed of a world far more advanced than their own and took great pride in constructing examples that preserved their ideas. When they were satisfied with their work they would mark it as theirs by imprinting the ground nearby with the shape of their hand. This was a lonely task, and few others would ever appreciate it but, the mappers were compelled to continue nonetheless.

During this early stage of the mapper's development contact with others would occur very infrequently. As has been depicted on many wall paintings within well preserved mapper holes, contact was generally the result of a mapper with an extinguished torch becoming lost in the darkness and stumbling on another mappers hole while trying to find his way home. Occasionally the lost mapper would take notice of the other's work and utter a passing grunt of approval or dismissal and the other's pride would swell or deflate briefly before the lost mapper departed. In most cases, the other gained nothing from the exchange. He could not identify what feature of his model had elicited the reaction.

As time passed, the mappers developed a system of communication and could share ideas and criticisms much more effectively. As they became more social some alpha personalities even began to clean their faces and trim their scraggly beards. Slowly but surely they began to crave each others feedback and desired to work together more frequently. The results of their collaborative efforts (identified by grouped handprint impressions) can be seen in some of the younger works that have been left behind and the individual work of most mappers during this new age surpassed the quality of anything found outside the oldest mapper holes.

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