Savage Sketch

"I hate maps," said Linka, passively. "I hate having to draw them."

"You don't visualize directions well?" replied Panacea as she rolled up yet another distant colony schematic, shoving the tube back into its rightful alphabetical placement. Not this one, for Teacher's son...

"No, I do, I just don't like the blobs on the map. I'd rather just explain to someone freehand. In the air, I mean."

Scribbles. Sea level. Bumps and contours and lines. Linka did have that accommodating way about her that allowed her to give excellent directions to any, soldier or liberator, who entered or exited Yesterdale, on a whim, no matter which turn of the compass she faced.

Panacea herself didn't quite have the patience. Linka would get them there, in order that Panacea would tell them who they were there to see, and what the hot-button issues were to be addressed (which Linka would help address without so much bite as might otherwise be seen).

I'd be lost without you, then, she should say. But she won't. After all, she tries not to act too too much like her mother.

"Giving directions...much more common in Alrest, as a cultural fixture, wasn't it? Considering that there were so many more titans, and thus modes of approach. On the Bionis, everyone just knew up from down. Or at least, that's what Mum and Dad always told me."

Maybe Panacea didn't sound just like a textbook. She often got close, though.

Travelers across the leg were rare, and as that was the vastest region of the Bionis, navigable by outposts and bridges and statues and gogols, everything else seemed to remain insular.

Or maybe Mum and Dad had just never lived with the total proliferation of colonies that currently populated Aionios, a world so young it hadn't yet outlived its maker(s).

Linka just nods along, correctly parsing the question as roughly rhetorical. "I'm glad my dad was just clumsy and unlucky, without being starved of a sense of direction, too. I doubt they'd ever have made it out of Tantal otherwise." Even with Mom to guide.

"And you wouldn't be here," Panacea concludes smartly. "Meanwhile, it's not supposed to matter much one way or t'other if we get lost and shrivel up here. Things will just repeat."

"Pessimistic of you," remarks Linka, frowning. Not that it's not like her, necessarily, but she's been so pleased with the progress of trainees lately, and always so proud when former Cityfolk take well to the Liberator way of doing things. She's gotten to grips with the moment-to-moment sequence, namely.

A sigh comes from Panacea just then that completely avoids her usual fare of unimpressed or weary. Again, something sideways of a passing thought.

"It's been, what, ten years? Fifteen? And of course we look the same. That's hardly the issue. Teacher's changed enough for the both of us, I think - and for your Boss, too. But the worlds..."

"They're frozen as well," says Linka, refusing to cotton on to misery (she brands it as such before remembering a choice comment from a certain someone, somewhen). "Right? It would only make sense."

"Well, yes, but that's the point. They're not worlds if they're not alive, are they? They're not the places we were born. When we were there, we didn't know anything but...there. Now, we don't know anything but now."

Now...

Linka starts drawing a map.