History and Entropy

I've been kind of loathe to post here, partly because things are just such a mess in the Cavern of late, and partly because there's this sort of madness that seems to infect all new Explorers, that we can never get enough of the Ages we link to, never get far enough, high enough, deep enough...

I'm no exception some days, which is, I suppose, the reason I put my hand on that linking panel even when I could see that the book only had an old and smudged Maintainers mark, no mark from the DRC, and no mark from Yeesha. This was at the end of last month.

One of the rockfalls damaged the windows of the balcony overlooking the community room of our hood, and because I already had my climbing gear out and I wouldn't have to break anything -myself- (archaeology takes precidence over curiosity, at least for me) I went up there. There was the book. I think it must have been the original Garden Age for our 'hood. It had smudgy marks on the linking panel, no sign of anybody, bit of a mess in the room. I guess the DRC never went up there, since it was pretty well sealed.

I don't know the Age's real name, but I started calling it Chert after the rocks I found there - lots and lots of chert.

And fortunately, no supernova, because I didn't have any kind of Maintainers suit or anything. I realized seconds after I'd put my hand on the panel just how STUPID I had been, but... The age was stable. Or stable enough.

That was it for the stupidity, anyway. I went back and got Jack - him being the only one of my 'hood-mates I could find at the time, and we went back through together.

We found the aforementioned chert, with a fair bit of calcite and other limestone deposits as the local matrix for the mountains we were in. There were trees, wildlife of various kinds - it's a fairly Earthlike age, with a single sun and a single moon. But we also found old abandoned buildings. It looks like this was one of the ages the D'ni of our 'hood evacuated too just after the Fall...only, given the state of repair, either they moved well, well away from the link-in spot, or they didn't survive the plague they brought with them. I didn't find bodies, anyway, and if Jack did, he didn't tell me.

I spent a lot of time just walking around. Looking at things. The way they'd dammed the river for drinking water and electrical power. Puzzling out how the pump had worked - and getting it going so that I wouldn't have to haul water myself. Fixing a hole in the roof of the least time-worn building so that we'd have someplace to stay. There were food containers, but the local wildlife had long since got into them. Likewise, the buildings - but it meant they weren't living there anymore, since there was nothing worth stealing.

From the way the building was built, it looks like the winters are milder at the altitude we were at - we got lightheaded climbing hills, so either the planet's less dense or we were high up - or the snow just doesn't come down into the valley. But we could see glaciers aways to the north (sun rose in the East for purposes of definition) and there was enough leaf mold to make me think the trees shed their leaves every winter.

Anyway. We came back to more politics, and Engberg still missing. Er'cana had been re-released, and so I started fiddling with my ovens, trying to get a decent concoction to feed the algae with. But I pulled the book out of the 'hood and put it in my Relto, on the shelf where Yeesha left me the original Journey book, rather than on my nara-locked shelf, since I never know what's going to appear in there.

I've only been back once since Jack and I left. It was...very peaceful? But also very lonely. And it wasn't a 'finished' age the way the ones the DRC releases are. It was full of dirt and grime and a mess, and I was cleaning it up. Without time off to spend there, I don't think I could do anything more than get frustrated. And from the noises going on about the Bahro, it may not be safe for me to go there alone right now.

I'm hoping to get Jishin and Meiczyslaw out there at some point, though. Because I think if we got all of us there together at once, we could do some pretty hefty reconstruction work, and maybe get the place to a point that we could spend time there just as a retreat or something. Assuming the reactionary Bahro ever figure out that we are not the enemy they hate.