sixthiterationlogs | July Arrivals

Entry tags:

July Arrivals

WHO: Arrivals
WHERE: The fountain park
WHEN: July 1, 12:00 PM
OPEN TO: ALL
WARNINGS: N/A
STATUS: CLOSED

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

It is the first of July.

It is precisely twelve o'clock in the afternoon.

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"Oh, like San Francisco," Nerys said, because that she knew about. Ensign Morales wouldn't shut up about it, ze being from that part of Earth. "And I know Earth," she added, nodding a little bit. "I haven't ever had a chance to go there, but friends of mine come from there. My, uh, boss, for starters."

"Yes!" Peggy rushes to agree, so pleased to hear some familiarity. It's so strange speaking to someone like this and having them know about Earth, but so relieving at the same time. Good to know that it's still kicking around, even if in a manner of speaking. "I haven't had time to go up to San Francisco yet," she admits. "I had been thinking about it, but...well, the job does get to you, sometimes."

"I know the feeling. I'm...pretty sure I don't remember the last time I stopped working." And that was when she'd had what could be classified as a job, as compared to a way of life that never, ever stopped, but Nerys had learned that you didn't just go around telling people you were a terrorist in a past life when they had no sense of the context.

She shifted her pack over her shoulders and back, trying to make it more comfortable.

Does that mean this is the forced vacation that she's being meant to take? All that time in Los Angeles working on her vacation had been so good to have purpose and to not have to deal with Jack and his cronies. It doesn't seem like they're here, but what's Peggy to do with a deserted town?

"We should figure out why it seems that we're the first residents here in some time," she says absently. "That can't be natural."

"I don't know what bothers me more, that we're the first people here in some time or that we're not the first people who've ever been here," Nerys replied, frowning in thought. "I mean, it's a relief that there's shelter, but..."

Shelter definitely wasn't everything, wouldn't feed people or keep water clean.

"Yes, I know what you mean," Peggy agrees, that chilling sensation down her spine not helping her in the least. If they're not the first people here, that does beg the question of what happened to the last group.

And why isn't there a single one of them left? "Maybe we're just not looking in the right places. Maybe there are other people in another part of the settlement."

"Maybe," said Nerys, but she sounded incredibly doubtful. It was rare that people kept living in a place in this condition, in her experience, but maybe they didn't have the right kind of resources--something in her gut said everyone was gone.

"Or maybe there's a reason that they're not so easily found," Peggy adds, a wariness in her words. If there's some natural predator or some possibility of something that could harm them, she can imagine that people might go underground or hide away.

"We'll need to do a thorough investigation, I think. Only then can we know if we're truly here alone or whether the civilization has simply evolved to something else."

Thorough investigation sounded enough like Odo that Nerys nearly smiled, though she stopped herself easily enough by remembering the gravity of the situation. "Once we have the resources to do it," she said, agreeing with reservations. "Gotta get enough food to keep ourselves able to do more than, well, just finding food."

"Yes, I would rather avoid the part where we all starve trying to be neighbourly," she tries to joke, but she'd much rather simply not return to rationing if at all possible. Those are years of her life that she'd like to avoid.

"Still, I would rather not have to worry about sleeping with one eye open. A thorough investigation to see who else is here would help with that."

The joke felt to Nerys a bit like a rebuke, but her interpretation was that it was a joke of a kind she was used to from Odo, so there wasn't much sting. What bothered her more was the fact that she hadn't thought that there might be danger from others, had assumed they were alone, but Peggy was right.

Clearly, she was getting soft. "It's a good point," she agreed. "A surprise attack...those are the worst."

"Yes, especially if we're the ones thinking that everyone will be friendly," Peggy admits, trying not to think about those long nights in the war, not sure she wanted to sleep because of what might come over their lines in the middle of the night. "Then again, I know from experience that it's no way to live. Maybe we can set up alarms. Traps?"

"Me too," Nerys agreed, looking at Peggy's face as she mentioned experience. Her own was written into her bones. "Alarms, maybe, though everyone here will need to know exactly where they are. Traps if they're needed, but until we know..."

It wasn't really worth the effort until they knew they were trapping someone malicious.

"Alarms, then," Peggy says, because she wouldn't want to lose her leg on a perfectly normal walk just because someone's paranoia drove them to setting up something with a great deal of sharp edges. "Maybe something that won't harm anyone if they come across it without knowing. I'd hate to limit our already apparently small population."

She nudges the door to the structure they've arrived at open, having to use her shoulder to give it a bit of a push.

"What do you think this is?" she asks, of the large building.

Nerys squinted into the dim light as Peggy tried to get the door open a little further. Clearly someone hadn't been there in some time--but the room they could see from this entrance had a number of tables and chairs, plus what looked like a bar off to one side.

Funny, how bars looked the same on nearly every world Nerys had ever been to.

"A cafe," she said, thoughtfully, stepping gingerly inside and checking her corners with a quick glance or two, just in case. "Or some kind of bar or something. But not for a long time."

Peggy's only seen this sort of thing in history books the likes of which stretched past the first world war, to homes that her grandparents might have lived in. It's very odd for her to be standing in one of them, unsure what to make of it.

"We should check for food," is her first instinct. "Maybe someone's left something?"

"Yeah," Nerys said, as she realized that losing the contents of her stomach (a very nice dinner with Riker, who had then fucking shot her) was likely a really bad survival technique in the long run. "Though I don't know how old it will be. I...is this Earth, do you think? I don't recognize any of the trees."

"I've never seen any other planets," Peggy says with an apology heavy in her words. She feels like she's missing information to be useful, but unfortunately she can only offer what she knows and she knows that this looks like Earth, but she also hasn't travelled all over. "The oxygen levels are clearly suited to life," she says.

"So Earth or something else like it."

What if this were some sort of alien planet? Maybe it would explain the somewhat abandoned state? The time period, even, to a degree? Or maybe she's just reaching.

"It's okay, don't worry about it," Nerys says, looking around them at the mysterious trees. "Humans didn't have interstellar travel for ages, so if we're from different places in time..." She shrugs and chews on her lower lip, realizing that maybe, just maybe, this might be breaking some kind of rules about temporal interactions. Not that she's subject to Starfleet regs about the Temporal Prime Directive around here.

"Earth or not, it's definitely a Class M world, or we wouldn't be breathing, and a pretty comfortable one at that, so that's a benefit, I guess."

Peggy keeps looking around her at the strange little structure they've come to, like a holdover of time gone by. "What do you supposed we're meant to do in this place? There must be some reason we're here," Peggy says, not believing that this is all just a coincidence. "Perhaps we all have some function, some purpose."

"Maybe it's not that we're meant to do anything specifically...just that we should do what we do, and be observed," Nerys replies, and her tone's just a little bit bitter, because she thought she was past that stage of her life. Though if they're being watched, hopefully the watchers are less sadistic than Cardassians.

"I've never appreciated being a lab experiment and I think I'd like being a goldfish even less," is Peggy's opinion of such an idea. She shakes her head in disbelief to imagine that could possibly be the case. She breathes her frustration out. "I'm sorry. I'm in a mood. Being kidnapped does that, apparently."

"Didn't say I liked the notion either," Nerys replies, but it doesn't have any bite to it--she's too soul-weary to care, and she can tell, just as Peggy says it, that her companion is feeling similarly. "Oh yeah, it definitely does for me too. It's okay."

She gestures vaguely with one hand towards the roofs in the distance. "So, should we go downtown?"

Peggy gives a brusque laugh at the remark. "Yes," she agrees wryly, thinking that if this is to be the downtown she has to get used to, it will hardly take even a nano-fraction of the time it took for her to understand both New York and Los Angeles. "Let's not get lost now," is her deadpanned joke.

Nerys tries to remember the human story about getting lost and putting down pieces of food or rocks to try and trace one's way back, only to fail, but she can't remember the exact way it went in Chief's telling, so she decides to shelve the idea.

"Don't know how much more lost we can get, honestly," she says with a darkly amused grin.

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