(no subject)

[calmhrtprevails]

The Capital Wasteland is a difficult place for people from other worlds to acclimate to. Fawkes hasn't brought many people to visit, but he's been there when his friend's done as much, and he's seen the looks on new arrivals' faces. It's only fair, he thinks, to make it gradual for Feuilly; he's managed to reach the Bar through a door northwest of Springvale and Megaton, in what's left of a barn. It provides a broad view and an opportunity to turn around and go back before it's too late.

Now he just has to find the Frenchman before opening the door back to the Wastes again.

Comments

[tu_vas_triompher]

After they'd made the plan to visit Fawkes' home, Feuilly had hurried up to his room to collect a few odds and ends. A French-English dictionary, and another French-English dictionary because it's good to have a second opinion, and then an English-only dictionary because it's good to have a third opinion in the language itself when a bit of translation becomes difficult. A couple of notebooks. Pens and pencils. After some thought, a camera: he can always take pictures of texts to bring back and work on, if necessary, yes?

He has no idea what else to bring, so he doesn't really bother. What had Fawkes and Mme Park said about their world? The year is 22-something; they live in a wasteland that was once the seat of American government. (Virginia, Maryland, Washington, destroyed? Good God.) People like Mme. Park live there, apparently human, and people like Fawkes, who is--well--not very apparently human.

He's ready to head out by the time Fawkes finishes up his happy hour shift.

[calmhrtprevails]

Once the glasses and bottles are put away and the Bar wiped down, Fawkes pats the Bar briefly. The system's back in service, and doesn't need him now. Time to find Feuilly. "Ah," he rumbles as he spots the man, "there you are. I trust I haven't kept you waiting too long."

[tu_vas_triompher]

"Oh, no. I was just getting--dictionaries, things like that." He laughs. "Once we're out of Milliways you'll have to put up with my English. It's not very good."

Shrug. He should be able to get by. "--Oh. What will you tell people there about where I come from?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"The same thing that they've been told about any other visitor my friend's brought across," says Fawkes. "They've learned to mostly stop asking if they're told someone is from outside the Capital Wasteland. Mostly because she doesn't tell them much beyond that. Some people may think you were kidnapped by aliens and frozen on board their ship in the sky, and only just thawed out recently. Other people may think you come from a secret civilization of mole men who live in tunnels beneath the Wastes. Neither I nor my friend have very great stakes in correcting misconceptions like that. It's just simpler to let people make up their own stories, sometimes."

[tu_vas_triompher]

Feuilly raises his eyebrows, but nods. He's not unfamiliar with that combination of internal wild speculation and external mind-your-own-business. "But--are there mole men? And ships in the sky?"

He has his dictionaries and notebooks in a satchel slung over his shoulder; he's ready to go.

[calmhrtprevails]

"While there are people who live in some of the tunnels below parts of the Waste," Fawkes says, "most of them are just ordinary people with a penchant for violence and no real urge to live somewhere their victims can find them. There's no such thing as mole men, to my knowledge. The ship's quite real, though. Its masters made a mistake some years ago when they kidnapped my friend. The masters are dead now, and their former slaves have control of the ship, and are slowly sending back the people their masters stole through the ages. It's a tricky process, from what I'm told."

He opens the door on the dim but sun-dappled interior of the half-wrecked barn.

[tu_vas_triompher]

"Stole--through the ages?"

He steps through, still puzzling over the idea of frozen men unthawed--alive? And then blinks a moment as his eyes adjust. He hadn't been sure it would work. The information he'd read about Milliways had said the dead would fade after three days or so, but what exactly does fade mean? He glances surreptitiously down at himself. Still here.

[calmhrtprevails]

"Yes." Fawkes closes the door behind him; sometimes he finds radscorpion sign around here, and it wouldn't be polite to let one of them get into the Bar by mistake. "They had machines that let them put a human being into a kind of suspended animation through extreme cold. My friend encountered a man who had been frozen since the days of the samurai warriors of Japan. He took very thorough vengeance on his captors."

Ah, there; when he glances out the barn door there's nothing hostile to be seen. A few mole-rats the size of respectable dogs, yes, but they know better than to attack a pair of travelers, particularly when one is Fawkes' size and color. The raiders that occasionally take up residence on the shattered remains of the elevated highway were swept out a few days ago and haven't returned yet, so it should be safe to show Feuilly into the Wastes.

[tu_vas_triompher]

And of course as soon as they're out of the bar, the translation is gone. Feuilly's been running through English phrases in his head since he and Fawkes met, but as always it's so much harder to understand a foreign language when it's spoken than when you can read it or put together your own sentences. Machines, and extreme cold, and a man who had been frozen. A warrior? Vengeance?

He's about to ask Fawkes to go more slowly, when he sees the hairless dog-sized...things. With teeth. And then he starts to take in the countryside around them.

Feuilly takes a steadying breath. (Dead or not, heart and lungs seem to keep on going.) "This is the...wastelands?" He knows his pronunciation is terrible. But he's pretty sure it's the right word.

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes nods, and scans the horizon. Eventually, he points at a half-collapsed dome in the distance. "That," he says, slow and careful, "was once the Capitol Building. The center of government."

He doesn't remember anything before the FEV chamber, and he's only ever read about America or America's government, so there's not really much reason to sound wistful about it. Still, it was a mighty building once, and it's all but gone now. One can grieve for architecture, at least.

[tu_vas_triompher]

"Ah." That he understood, which is a relief. He peers at the distant structure. "It was builted in my time. I have seen engravures. But--was it destroyed before you have ever seen it?"

A bit like hearing about the first Republic, he thinks. Only no, that was never destroyed so thoroughly.

[calmhrtprevails]

"Long before," agrees Fawkes, and indicates a slenderer bit of half-stone, half-rebar nearly as far away. "Just like that- the Washington Monument. Both of them were destroyed in the War, two hundred years ago."

He thinks, anyway. There may have been battles after the bombs fell, conventional ones, but-

Well, probably it was the nuclear bombs. It doesn't much matter now.

"Do you see the road ahead?" he then asks, and lowers his hand to point at the shattered grey remnants of what used to be asphalt. It runs in something a little like a straight line; it's hard to say with the guard rails and markings missing. "That's our route south, to Springvale. We have about a mile and a half to go."

[tu_vas_triompher]

And no one rebuilt it? That says more in a way about the war than the initial destruction. Feuilly scrubs a hand over his face.

"Very good," he says to the road. That's not far at all. "Those--animals--they are--férocious?"

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes shakes his head. "Dangerous if you come too close," he says, "but not ferocious. There are other things in the Wasteland more likely to attack you. I'll warn you if we see any."

There's no sense in scaring the poor man with stories of armored crabs the size of men, or mutant reptiles ten feet tall with claws that shred armor, or the enormous bears you almost never see until they're almost upon you.

"But you should know there are giant ants that patrol the edges of town. Most of them are under control."

[tu_vas_triompher]

"Ants," Feuilly repeats doubtfully. "What is--oh, they are that insect, black or red, this big?" Fingers held just a smidgen apart. "Les fourmis? But these here, they are--"

He gestures with his hands, first the size of a rat, then a cat, then a little wider than his shoulders. "--No? Bigger?"

[calmhrtprevails]

Fawkes thinks for a moment and then endeavours to convey something the size of one of his own legs.

Fawkes is something close to seven or eight feet tall; take that as you will.

[tu_vas_triompher]

Feuilly nods resignedly. It seems to be that kind of a place. "Maybe," he says, half-joking, "you should bring from Milliways the small and soft animals. The little cats. The baby chickens. Something--kind--for this world."

Well. He nods to the road. "We shall go?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"We have some chickens," Fawkes notes. "We had to start somewhere."

He nods. "This way. It shouldn't be long," he says, and sets off down to the road. It's not much as a surface, but the worst obstacles were cleared some time ago to make water caravans' passage easier; all the wrecked prewar cars and such are off to one side or the other, rather than getting in the way.

[tu_vas_triompher]

"Chickens, they can live any place."

Fawkes has rather a longer stride than Feuilly, but he manages to keep up. As they go, he keeps his eyes open, trying to think what it would be like to grow up in this place. How would it shape a person? What would move a person to nostalgia if they left it?

[calmhrtprevails]

They're heading mostly southward. Ahead of them, on the left, there's the glittering remains of a partly-dried-up lake; it's broad enough and deep enough that no one in their right mind would attempt to cross it on foot, and indeed, a road once arched over it. There's only about half that arch left now. Most of the rest's visible sticking out of the water, or just under the surface, worn down by time. There's a haze of green along the shores of the lake, as of plants that've only been growing in a place a little while. No trees to speak of, save for the burnt, stubby trunks of trees that gave up a very long time ago. Bushes, though- low scrubby ones here and there, hay-tinged amongst what green leaves they have. This place has been a desert for a long time, and it's only starting to put on green again.

[tu_vas_triompher]

It's too harsh a landscape for him to do justice to, Feuilly thinks. You'd need a real artist to convey the feeling of that broken bridge and the ruins all around. But still, he takes in the rare hints of green and gold and blue as best he can as they go along, pauses once to pocket a sprig that has broken off from one of the scrubby bushes. Now that he's out of work, he finds himself wanting to paint again. He'd like to try to convey some of this scenery--when he has a chance.

[calmhrtprevails]

The wind shifts a little; Fawkes sniffs the air. "I don't think they're remaking any paper today," he says. "Normally you could smell that even this far away. All I can smell right now is the Brahmin herd."

Which is to say, for those who recognize such things through experience, that there's a distinct whiff of cattle on the wind.

"Ah, but we're very close. Do you see that brick building, there, on the left?"

('Brick' may be too kind a term. Building may be too kind a term. But at least someone's been starting to repair things, or at least put up tarpaulins and assemble bricks and the like in such a way that later comers will be better able to repair the visible parts of the building.)

"That would be the Springvale school."

[tu_vas_triompher]

Cattle farm smells better than paper mill, any day.

"Is it--is it now a school? One builds again for it to be a school?"

[calmhrtprevails]

"Some rooms are used for classrooms," says Fawkes. "The children live in the others, mostly. They spent most of their lives in caves, living in groups. This is how they get used to living in proper buildings before joining the adults in the rest of the world."

[tu_vas_triompher]

"The children live apart--not with--the adults?" He wants to be sure he's understanding. "This is always how one lives here? Or this is a, a thing, that is singular? They are orphans, maybe?"