From a fanfic about Daring Do, a female Indiana Jones parody character on MLP:FIM:
The stallion plucked his monocle from his eye and cleaned it on his ascot as he gave her a grin. “Jolly good show, Miss Do… The Society will once more be in your debt if we can manage to locate the Professor. As will I. He’s an old schoolchum of mine, don’t you know.”
A confident grin crossed the flying mare’s features. “Ah well, it’s all in a day’s work for an international archeologist like me.”
McMonocle raised a tufted grey eyebrow and settled his lens back in place. “Really? I thought a day’s work for an archeologist was making a sort of grid with string and wooden stakes over a patch of dirt and digging about for shards of pottery and the like.”
Daring blinked at him, then cleared her throat with an uncomfortable expression on her face. “Uh… Yeah, that happens sometimes, when… when we want to take a break from poison darts and pit traps and ceiling crocodiles and stuff. Yeah…”
The older stallion nodded sagely. “So it’s rather like gardening then?”
There’s also excellent, hilarious use of the “Lost Race” motif, and some truly horrendous puns.
Every so often, you do get someone writing about the nitty gritty of science in an interesting way. But even Agatha Christie, who married an archeologist and spent tons of time on his digs, didn’t quite manage it for archeology.
Right now I’m reading an old mystery (Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes) which has a great phonologist character, but only manages it by making him an annoying, overenthused, professorial bore with a super-duper gramophonic sound-meter machine. (And American in the typical Golden Age UK mystery style.) I hope he turns out to be the murderer, because it would be awesome to find out that it was all just a mask for his true evil genius. But then, Michael Innes always put a lot of dangerous academics in his books.
