[ text | un: oswin ]

[oddbod]

[Because it's late, and she doesn't sleep, and she misses her home, and the four metal walls are making her skin crawl - ]

Tell me about your world.

Comments

un: gunny

[marineris]

i can tell you the sunset over the mariner valley is god damn breathtaking.

[oddbod]

Oh, I can only imagine. I saw the best sunsets of my life once I left Earth, every single one different.

[Of course, nothing's a match for the one back home in Blackpool.]

[marineris]

yeah? where have you been?

[oddbod]

Hundreds of places, I guess. A new one just about every week, for the last four years of my life. They all sort of blur together, in the end.

[marineris]

how did you manage that? and why?

[oddbod]

Because someone had the clever idea to make a spaceship that was also a time machine. And as for why, I went along for the adventure. I wanted to see everything.

[marineris]

a month ago i would have thought you were screwing with me.
what was your favorite planet, then?

[oddbod]

Tiaanamat, my first. Well, my first aside from Earth. A little asteroid orbiting an old god named Akhaten. 'Course, Akhaten turned out to be a giant parasite feeding off Tiaanamat's people, and my friend and I had to defeat him, but the rest of the trip was fantastic. I'll never forget it.

[marineris]

wait
around a god?

[What.]

[oddbod]

Anything can be a god if people believe in it enough. The parasite had become theirs. They sang lullabies to it for centuries, trying to keep it from waking up and destroying them. It became their religion.

[marineris]

and it was big enough to have its own gravity well?
you know what? i'm not even surprised.

[oddbod]

Yep. It was like a big sun, with rings of asteroids around it.

But enough about me. Tell me more about Mars.

[marineris]

jesus. of course it was.

i told you mars hasn't been fully terraformed yet. that's going to take another century or so. right now, everyone lives in massive domes, and all of us are working towards the terraforming project one way or another. our cities are all connected by high speed rail lines.

[oddbod]

Oh, that sounds interesting. [And she means it. It's space, so it's up her alley.] What exactly did you do?

[marineris]

i'm a marine.

[Well... She should correct that.]

was a marine.

[oddbod]

Oh, we have those on Earth. In America, though. My boyfriend was sort of the equivalent.

[marineris]

what do you mean, sort of?

[oddbod]

Well, I'm not quite sure of the differences. And besides, he was out by the time I met him.

[marineris]

i don't know much about earth's history. not that far back. the un marines fulfill the same function we do, for the most part.

[oddbod]

Much of it is full of completely needless wars and countries not getting along, but there were some particularly needless ones when I was a teenager, and into my twenties. He fought in one of them, on the ground, doing a lot of things he didn't want to do.

[marineris]

i used to think war with earth was inevitable, even necessary, but i was wrong. it's a waste.

[oddbod]

Sometimes fighting is necessary, but never war. There's always a better way, if people would just talk to one another.

[marineris]

yeah, that'd be nice, wouldn't it? talking doesn't always work.

[oddbod]

I've got this friend who could talk the universe down from war a million times over. I'm afraid I don't quite have the talent, though. Something always seems to go sideways.

[marineris]

i'm a marine. i don't solve problems with my people skills. i don't know how people manage it.