[OPEN] july catcahll

[lightkeeping]

Who: Aloy and YOU
When: throughout July
Where: Solvunn, the Horizon
What: settling in, inadvisable camping, robot dinosaurs, whatever I WANT
Warnings: will list as needed

[open and closed starters in comments! If you want a custom starter or something specific, just hit me up. I’m on plurk at whitticus or on discord at whitticus#8139]

Comments

[earthborn]

Shepard's cultivated a firm handshake as a matter of professionalism. That, and you had to if you wanted to keep your handbones; some of the Alliance marines seemed to take it as a challenge, otherwise.

"Sounds uh... nice?" It does not sound nice. Well, it sounds peaceful, which is nice enough, "Not really my speed. Cadens is mostly scrubland and city."

Forgive her if she's distracted. The whole place is smooth-walled and sleekly modern; it would barely look out of place on the citadel, or any Alliance base Shepard cared to mention. But from the looks of Aloy, and indeed most of the junk scattered around...

Well, she's curious; "Hell of a setup in here. Mind if I ask a few questions?"

[lightkeeping]

"Not sure 'nice' is the word I'd use."

Aloy seems to stop herself from saying something even more uncharitable about Solvunn, but she gets the sense that Shepard does not actually think it sounds nice. Her body language is probably more than enough to discern that Aloy is not exactly pleased with any of this situation, and she doesn't seem to trust the Horizion, either. Her arms are folded, eyebrows pinched together.

After a moment, however, she seems to decide she has nothing to lose, and offers a shrug.

"Sure. Go ahead."

[earthborn]

"What is all this?" Shepard gestures once, an abrupt, encompassing hand to indicate the room around them, the walls, the tech, the facility at large, "It's some kind of science facility, that's pretty obvious. And I thought I saw something about an AI core on my way in, but the decor is a little, uh..."

She's smart enough to know not to say 'primitive,' but Shepard still gropes for a moment. It's all natural materials, woven baskets and furs and animal bones. And odd bits of metal, all in plates, with wires coiled up like salvage next to burlap sacks— with the whole lot of it piled in ways that probably made sense to someone.

"...Tribal, I guess." Something about this reminds her of the Krogan, in that way; like survival had been put together from whatever worked, building the new apocalypse on the bones of the old, "It's interesting."

[lightkeeping]

The good news is that Shepard is talking to someone who understands the strange and often tragic history of her world--why this technology is so far beyond anything its tribal peoples were able to understand, let alone replicate. So she is, at least, uniquely qualified to address this discrepancy, even if it's something of a long, complicated story.

"This is ancient technology," she says, figuring that's probably the easiest way to begin. If Shepard knows what an AI is, then that's already half the explanation. "My version of Earth had to...start over."