Fallen Angel: Chapter Eight
Nov. 6th, 2010 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanI'm on my forth beer, which normally for me isn't even a buzz. I'm kinda feeling it a bit though, 'cause I drank them really fast.
I also ate a whole bunch of really greasy fast food. Which may have been a mistake because our toilet's broken. But enough about me!
Humans are adaptable animals, or so we keep telling ourselves. I tend to believe it's true; not just because of the often-cited examples of people living in rain-forests, tundras and deserts, but because of the fact that we are still here now, plugging away at our daily lives at the end of the world.
I also devoutly believe that one of the things that makes us so resilient is our love of routine. Give us chaos and we will build little patterns of security into it. Back when all the rivers and lakes were first turning to blood and all the frogs and locusts started raining from the sky there were still people who doggedly showed up to work every day. Their office might not have electricity, but dammit, it had consistency and that helped them stay sane in the face of the unthinkable.
I had a lot of time to think about this while we were walking and by day two I could see for myself that we had built our own little routines and rolls into our journey.
Gealhaad automatically became our scout, with his ability to pretty much go anywhere with the flick of a wing. He wasn't the greatest scout, mind you - he had only the vaguest grasp of the limitations of the human body and so occasionally we ended up staring up at a sheer cliff face that he had assured us was passable or crossing easily fordable streams where he had promised us raging flood waters. He also seemed to have odd blind spots around non-humans. He could see that there was something there that was not "of God's making" as he phrased it, but he often couldn't tell us much about it. That was frequently frustrating when we were trying to figure out the safest way to travel. Still, even I had to admit that it was useful to have somebody on the trip who didn't need to sleep, especially after an exhausting day of hiking.
As much as I had initially been nervous about traveling with Sue, she turned out to be better suited to life on the road than I was. Nature had wasted absolutely no time in growing over inch of human habitat where it was not being beaten back by force, and Sue was a genius at spotting former crops and gardens gone wild. She was also a deft hand at prepping and cooking the odd fish or rabbit when we managed to get lucky. I asked her once where she had learned to do all this stuff and she flashed me a quick grin. "Girl scouts," was all she would say.
As for me, my default job ended up being the hired muscle. Oh, there was more to it than that, but there was no mistaking the fact that being forced to do my own maintenance and hauling in the house had made me a lot physically stronger than Sue. We found out the first day that Gealhaad could not be trusted to not just "forget" anything he was given to carry - a discovery that cost us a half day of backtracking - so I ended up carrying the majority of the supplies. I also got the sense that living alone meant that I had more experience dealing with strangers, especially non-humans ones. The Farm had put a lot of effort into keeping the families that lived there safe, and a lot of people who lived there never really went off the property. Certainly when we did run into other people on the road it was me who first voiced an opinion as to whether we should hide, trade or bluff, and I noticed that right from day one that the other two always immediately deferred to my judgment.
It might have almost been fun. If we had any idea where we were going.
I also ate a whole bunch of really greasy fast food. Which may have been a mistake because our toilet's broken. But enough about me!
Humans are adaptable animals, or so we keep telling ourselves. I tend to believe it's true; not just because of the often-cited examples of people living in rain-forests, tundras and deserts, but because of the fact that we are still here now, plugging away at our daily lives at the end of the world.
I also devoutly believe that one of the things that makes us so resilient is our love of routine. Give us chaos and we will build little patterns of security into it. Back when all the rivers and lakes were first turning to blood and all the frogs and locusts started raining from the sky there were still people who doggedly showed up to work every day. Their office might not have electricity, but dammit, it had consistency and that helped them stay sane in the face of the unthinkable.
I had a lot of time to think about this while we were walking and by day two I could see for myself that we had built our own little routines and rolls into our journey.
Gealhaad automatically became our scout, with his ability to pretty much go anywhere with the flick of a wing. He wasn't the greatest scout, mind you - he had only the vaguest grasp of the limitations of the human body and so occasionally we ended up staring up at a sheer cliff face that he had assured us was passable or crossing easily fordable streams where he had promised us raging flood waters. He also seemed to have odd blind spots around non-humans. He could see that there was something there that was not "of God's making" as he phrased it, but he often couldn't tell us much about it. That was frequently frustrating when we were trying to figure out the safest way to travel. Still, even I had to admit that it was useful to have somebody on the trip who didn't need to sleep, especially after an exhausting day of hiking.
As much as I had initially been nervous about traveling with Sue, she turned out to be better suited to life on the road than I was. Nature had wasted absolutely no time in growing over inch of human habitat where it was not being beaten back by force, and Sue was a genius at spotting former crops and gardens gone wild. She was also a deft hand at prepping and cooking the odd fish or rabbit when we managed to get lucky. I asked her once where she had learned to do all this stuff and she flashed me a quick grin. "Girl scouts," was all she would say.
As for me, my default job ended up being the hired muscle. Oh, there was more to it than that, but there was no mistaking the fact that being forced to do my own maintenance and hauling in the house had made me a lot physically stronger than Sue. We found out the first day that Gealhaad could not be trusted to not just "forget" anything he was given to carry - a discovery that cost us a half day of backtracking - so I ended up carrying the majority of the supplies. I also got the sense that living alone meant that I had more experience dealing with strangers, especially non-humans ones. The Farm had put a lot of effort into keeping the families that lived there safe, and a lot of people who lived there never really went off the property. Certainly when we did run into other people on the road it was me who first voiced an opinion as to whether we should hide, trade or bluff, and I noticed that right from day one that the other two always immediately deferred to my judgment.
It might have almost been fun. If we had any idea where we were going.