vaultexile | IC Inbox

[Attachment: A picture of a photo album open to a page with photographs of a large town hall with protesters gathered outside.]

I'm sorry I didn't send this earlier. If Alphonse didn't already show you, this is the building I was talking about.

[He was too paranoid of tipping his hand to the person behind this to send it before. While that feeling hasn't gone away completely, it's only the cabin fever now and not...whatever that was before on top of it.]

Thank you. It looks like a town hall of some sort. I can't make out what the people are protesting though. Maybe if anyone finds the building there might be more information.

That is what I plan to do. So far I've been able to find no information on where it might be, however. You said it might be in the center, but, once again, as you said, we don't know where the center is. I should ask on the network if anyone has seen it, but I can't rid myself of this feeling that if I do so, our captors will see it, too, and protect themselves from whatever we might find by sabotaging the site.

....that's a really good point. I didn't think about that. You'd think they wouldn't have left any clues behind at all if that were the case though and we do seem to be finding the odd items around.

They might have been overlooked. This place makes me uneasy. I know I should take that risk, because otherwise we are only three searching for a building we've no clues to find, and yet, I find myself hesitating.

Maybe it's the isolation. People tend to be less trusting when they're alone in a wasteland.

[Hope meanwhile felt it as well but she just put it off as her common sense kicking in, and she's trying to kick it back because trust is important.]

I should think it would be the other way around. The lack of other people near should encourage trust when we do meet.

[And this is exactly why he feels the paranoia and recognizes it as unsettling and alien. It absolutely is.]

On the other hand, I suppose I have never been alone like this before.

Really? Well we're I'm from strangers tend to be people who want to kill you more often then not. So people tend to be nervous around new people.

What sort of land do you come from, where there is such hostility? We wouldn't be able to survive if we did not cooperate and trust one another.

That's true....but also not all the time. I mean I like people but I'm from a wasteland. Everything is valuable and people will kill you for your things. Or sell you into slavery for caps.

There will always be those who will do others harm, but I lived in a desert for most of my life, and while there is ideally enough food in times of harvest, it is not always the case. Rather than everyone being at one another's throats in harsh times, I can tell you that most places I've been have laws, or if not laws, then guidelines of conduct, protecting travelers in need precisely because of this scarcity. If someone asks for shelter, one must give it to them if able, because one never knows when one will find oneself in the same situation.

The societies I have seen are not perfect by any means, and I can't say rules of hospitality always worked, but I do not understand how one could behave so differently from anything comparable I know.

Because our world broke. It broke years ago. I'm not joking when I say they came pretty close to killing everyone on the entire planet. The war was that bad. So when I say we lost everything? I mean we lost everything. We lost our laws, our governments, our culture, our agriculture, our ability to travel very far...everything.

Everyone has been rebuilding and trying to create a place to live in the hell hole we ended up in. Those of us who see good in the world still. Yeah we try to protect people but we're still just a bunch of people. People lose hope when they're stuck in a world where they can die from drinking the water they need to live at the same time. People lose their mind when they have nothing to keep them going and some people are just finally free to take whatever they want. And what they want is to take what other people have.

It's not a great world, hell it's not even one I've lived in for very long. But it's a world rebuilding.

[He doesn't understand. He doesn't know how a war could kill everything like this. What happened, did every side set fire to their immediate enemies? Or...

Azazel's world flickers through his memory. The forced future, given instead of earned. The battle machines, firing projectiles that exploded into fire on impact (missiles. he doesn't know the word). He knows from the pain they caused it would have killed him if not for his armor. If that is what will come of refining projectile weapons, if that is the ultimate evolution of slings and arrows, and if the entire world all began warring at once, all in possession of these things...

He can kind of see that destruction.

He still cannot see the inhospitality.

Lingering resentment from the war? Maybe. It still feels wrong on a very basic level. Humans described as acting in ways that sound inhuman. She speaks of rebuilding but the societies he described grew directly out of creation - were built for the very first time. Not in such unfavorable conditions, but...

In fact...]

Is your world called Earth?

[If this is the home he has been trying so hard to protect for so many years, he will do his best to help. He wouldn't be able to use Heaven's resources, nor would he want to. He would be no better than the Grigori if he did. But coming from the seventh generation of humankind, so close to the foundation of society itself, he surely could teach.]

Yeah. Are you from an Earth too?

[Hope meanwhile sort of gets it. She thinks it's mostly denial though. It's hard to come to terms with the wasteland until you experience it for yourself.]

[He'd only just begun to grasp the existence of other worlds, and he didn't know enough about his own to really tell them apart unless something existed in them that he was certain was not in his own. He tended to assume everyone from Earth was from the same Earth, unless there was a blatant contradiction somewhere.]

Yes. Don't ask how, but I believe I will still be there to see it. Tell me what you call your home and how you define your time. I cannot bring more tangible aid, but some of the things I learned from my own life among the earliest men may be of use to your world. I wish to at least try to help.

[Yes, he just admitted he's ancient. And immortal. Actually, he wouldn't be there for it even if their worlds were the same, because he is, in fact, going to die, but there's no way for him to know that.]

The Capital Wasteland, or Washington DC, Pre-war America. The year is 2277

[She's not sure how he thinks he'll be able to help but she's not one to call someone else crazy. She's gotten enough of that herself here.]

[Know what else he doesn't know about? The different calendars. It doesn't matter, because either way, he sees it as "a very long time away" - he doesn't know what year it is at home anyway and he estimates that's about a thousand years away, give or take a few centuries. He probably wouldn't be able to wrap his head around the scope of the actual amount of years between their times.]

I will make a note to myself when I find a writing implement.

[Which he will, the next day.]

IC Inbox

ID: Enoch; Text file/image attachment, day 3

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