1912: a mountain nobody has climbed, a photograph nobody can explain, and a newspaper that has already printed the headline.
In 1912 a newspaper baron funds an expedition to a sheer-sided plateau above the South American rainforest, on the strength of a single photograph of something enormous in the trees. The expedition has a leader who needs a triumph, a photographer who took the picture, a guide who has been to the top before, the financier's representative with a contract and a deadline, and a paleontologist who would rather be proved wrong than lied to. The ropes are new, the maps are wrong, and something up there has already noticed them.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
A celebrated explorer whose celebrated discoveries were mostly exaggerated, on his last chance to find something real.
The Swedish photographer whose blurry picture of a giant in the treetops launched the whole expedition.
A river guide who has climbed the plateau once before, came back alone, and has never told anyone what he saw.
The newspaper baron's man on the expedition, who has a contract, a deadline and a crate whose contents he will not discuss.
A paleontologist from St. Petersburg who believes the photograph shows a living fossil and needs it to be true for reasons of her own.