---Ruins---
---Emiko’s perspective---
“I love the new outfit, Your Majesty!” I say to the incredibly dressed warrior queen I’m sharing a shuttle with.
She rolls her head to me, looking unimpressed “Emiko… for the love of the Weaver, please don’t start calling me ‘Your Majesty’… You can continue calling me ‘Khr’kowan’ and I’ll continue calling you ‘Emiko’, alright?”
I smile back “Alright, Khr’kowan… Did you sleep well last night?”
She gives a contented exhale and confirms “The sleep of the dead!… Whatever your sedative [app] did to me, it did it well… Thank you for your little treason(!)”
“I certainly wanted to just tell you you needed to rest… I just doubted you were in a fit state to listen!… Having Master Yuán show you how your tiredness was affecting you seemed like the only way.”
“You’re probably right… I probably wouldn’t have listened… I didn’t listen to Haorken or Kurkhuw telling me the same… Though, any newly married woman ought to be at least a little suspicious of her broodhusband inviting her to bed(!)”
“Well… would you really blame him for being eager to get a 24 karat babe like yourself locked down? I probably would be too in his position(!)”
Her only response is a tensing of her body and a look of mild alarm.
I burst into laughter “*hehehehehehe*…I’m… *hehehe*… I’m sorry, Khr’kowan! Your expression was just priceless! I won’t…*hehehehe*… I won’t flirt if it makes you uncomfortable!”
“I’m… I’m not uncomfortable… I’m just… still getting used to your people’s ways being… strange to me.” she says, haltingly.
“Yes…*hehe*… explaining what ‘bisexuality’ was to you was fun(!)… Not to mention ‘xenophilia’(!)”
“Indeed(!)… A young lady who began expressing such thoughts in Vrakhand society would be firmly encouraged to keep them to herself if she ever hoped to find a match!” she observes with a tint of haughtiness.
I cock an eyebrow “The fact that you know that makes me think that, perhaps, bi and homosexuality aren’t as nonexistent among your people as you led me to believe, Khr’kowan(!) Did someone have to have that talk with you at some point(?)”
Her face twists like she’s just sucked on a lemon “You know, Emiko… not many people could get away with mocking an [Empress] to her face the way you are…”
“Not ‘mocking’, sweetheart, ‘teasing’(!)” I tease with a grin.
“3 minute warning.” comes Twila’s voice over the shuttle’s speakers.
“Ready Soo?” I call over to the transparent blue woman.
The Suigu taps her drone with a gelatinous hand and answers “Absolutely! Just…” she turns her face to Khr’kowan “…please try not to look out of any of the windows as we approach, Your Majesty. I really want to capture your authentic initial reactions to everything!… I know there’s nothing more annoying than a camera wielder saying ‘Oh, could you do that again? I wasn’t recording!’(!)”
“Not something I’ve experienced in the time since I became aware of what [cameras] are but I’ll take your word for it and do my best to focus on the inside of the craft.” agrees Khr’kowan.
“I believe we’re going to be landing on the West side of the city so, if we stand facing out of the portside door, you should only see desert until we disembark.” I suggest.
She gives an incredulous chuckle and remarks “It’s quite amusing that, even with a flying ship, you still need to use a nautical term like ‘portside’!”
I smile and shrug as we walk over to the door that I suggested “Even in space you still need a way to talk about different parts of a ship without getting confused about ‘whose left’. We did the work of coming up with appropriate words back on Earth. No need to reinvent the wheel(!)…It can be a bit confusing on ships with no consistent down though…”
She laughs heartily “The idea of ‘no consistent down’ would have utterly baffled me half a year ago, Emiko! I’m not sure if beginning to understand your peoples’ brain breaking magics is entirely a good thing(!)”
I gesture out of the window at the scorched desert landscape which extends to the horizon and say “It’s those ‘brain breaking magics’ that might mean your people get to return to this place in your lifetime, so, I’d say, the more you understand them the better, personally.”
“True. True!” she acknowledges.
“30 second warning.” comes Twila’s voice again.
“Excuse me, Emiko. Excuse me, Your Majesty.” says Soo as she squeezes past me into the gap between us and the door.
She activates her camera and starts “This is Correspondent Soo, aboard a shuttlecraft with…”
I see Khr’kowan’s three fingered hand reach out for Soo’s shoulder.
“Lady Soo… Wah!!!” she cries out as her solid, armoured, deathworld hand sinks into the journalist’s viscous, insubstantial flesh in a way she was clearly not expecting!
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Entirely unbothered by the way her shoulder is mangled by Khr’kowan’s hand right now, Soo swivels her head around and asks “Yes, Your Majesty?”
Uncertainly, Khr’kowan withdraws her hand, which comes away clean, and Soo’s shoulder ripples back into an approximation of the shape of a Terran woman’s.
I do my best to hold in my amusement at the face of dismay she makes before collecting herself and continuing “I… was just wondering if you could wait until after I’ve removed my boatshoes to begin [filming]…? I feel I don’t cut a particularly respectable figure while in the process of removing eight squashy booties(!)”
“Oh… of course Your Majesty!” smiles Soo as we touch down.
The ramp lowers and a positive wall of heat slams us in the face!
“So warm!” observes Khr’kowan, clearly appreciating the higher temperature that her people presumably evolved for.
Homo sapiens trace to the highlands of Ethiopia which, despite also being an equatorial region, only experience an average temperature in the low twenties… so I’m a little uncomfortable with this oppressive heat.
I don’t say that however, instead smiling “I’m glad you approve, Khr’kowan.”
Soo chooses a spot to move to to introduce her dispatch.
Khr’kowan steps off the ramp and quickly begins pulling off the sheaves we made her so that a) she won’t blunt her feet on our metal floors and, far more likely, b) she won’t rip up any more of our floors with her thanatite feet(!)
Once both hands are occupied by rubbery, transparent green, point protectors, shaped like large eggs with only the tiniest suggestion of the foothole at the top, she looks around for somewhere to put them.
“Give ’em to me, Your Highness.” instructs Victor, placing down a rigid container and holding out his hands for them.
Khr’kowan hands the first two to him before removing the next ones while he places them into the box.
“‘Highness’ is for princes and princesses, Victor…” I smile “…it’s ‘Majesty’ for kings and queens… Honestly, I’d have thought you’d have known that… given that your country was one of the last remaining monarchies at Unification(!)”
“Unification was more ’an 600 years ago and, even if it weren’t, I somehow doubt I’d ever’ve been invited to tea with Queen Charlotte(!)” he quips, not taking his eyes off the large objects he’s transferring from Khr’kowan’s hands into the container “Japan was also a monarchy at Unification, Emiko.”
“Yes it was… and I used the correct form of address(!)” I giggle.
He gives no answer but an incoherent grumble as he places the last of the boat shoes in and seals the box, hefting the (now quite heavy looking) container back up the ramp, past Strik, Samus, Yasmin and Thran.
“Everyone ready?” asks Soo.
“I’m ready, Lady Soo.” confirms Khr’kowan.
“Alright…” she answers, activating her drone camera and speaking into it “…This is Correspondent Soo, standing in the equatorial desert region of the planet Graom-Wakhkort with the newly crowned ruler of the Vrakhand, [Empress] Khr’kowan, on her first official state visit to the ruins of a city, built by her people’s ancestors, the name of which is not yet known…” she moves a little closer and morphs her hand into the shape of a hand holding a microphone “…[Empress] Khr’kowan, could you tell us a little of what you’re feeling right now?”
“Well, this is a momentous occasion for the Vrakhand and I feel uniquely privileged to be the first of my people to set foot in this city of ours for thousands of years.” answers Khr’kowan, projecting a dignified aura.
“That’s fantastic to hear. Now, I believe the tour will be primarily given by this expedition’s archaeologist, Strik, so I’ll let him take over.” smiles Soo with the ease of a woman who’s spent her entire working lifetime on camera.
The owllike man (wearing heavily tinted goggles to protect his large, sensitive eyes from the bright sun) steps forward on his taloned feet.
He’s clearly a lot less comfortable having his image recorded than Soo or Khr’kowan as he awkwardly says “Err… yes… Your Majesty… so, I think… where we should start… what we should start with, I mean… It should be the monument… just behind us, on the other side of the craft and a canyon from the plateau where the craft, the craft that we came in that is, erm… is.”
“Yes, I’ve seen images of this monument, Sir Strik.”
“Err… indeed… right this way.” he says, leading the way around the front of the Swift Claw.
Khr’kowan follows, herself followed by me and the others.
Soo takes up the rear with her drone, filming the procession from our left.
Strik exceeds the front of the shuttle by some metres and turns, extending his strigine wing to his left up to where I know the monolith to be.
Khr’kowan turns her head right and audibly gasps as her view becomes unobstructed.
Looking up at the weathered face of a woman her ancestors deemed worthy of carving a mountain to resemble, she breathlessly asks “My people… built this?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. We’re relatively certain.” answers Strik.
“How?”
“Oh, well, if you look down there…” he points his primary flight feathers at the base of the statue, his awkwardness evaporated now that he’s on his specialist subject “…scans show squared holes carved into the bedrock. They’ve since been buried by sand of course, so there’s nothing to actually see, but they’re nearly certainly the bases of a scaffolding tower that your ancestors built around a preexisting spire of rock, to carve it into this shape. Based on the computer modelling of thanatite, I conjecture them not to have used thanatite tools to work on the rock and instead to have used a mixture of bronze and iron tools. This is perhaps due to the risk of their loss through wear and breakage. I believe the entire monolith to have taken some [decades] to complete.”
Strik seems rather oblivious to the near religious experience that the Vrakhand woman he’s speaking to is having as she asks “And… where was this city?”
“Well, if you look that way…” he gestures South, across the dunes “…you’ll see that sandstone point which protrudes from the desert? That’s the top of a pyramidal structure… which roughly marks the far end of the city in that direction. The city extended from here to a little past there. There was a river that flowed from this canyon and provided water for your people to irrigate the crops which fed their livestock… though I don’t believe they drank that water, as the scans reveal numerous wellshafts dug about the city from which, I would conjecture, they drew their drinking water.”
“So far?” she asks, still clearly awestruck by what she’s being shown.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“How many of my people lived here?”
“Difficult to say for certain but, based on the scans of the surviving roads and foundations, I would estimate somewhere between 60,000-120,000. It does rather depend on how much of the surroundings were occupied by less permanent tent structures, similar to the ones your people mainly inhabit today.”
“And… when?” she asks, her voice trembling.
“Well, a combination of [Dr] Petrikov’s orbital analyses and [Dr] Lamark’s genetic analysis place the abandonment of this city at around [12,000 years] ago. That’s about the time of a population bottleneck where your people seem to have been reduced to 150 individuals or so.”
“Everything we have now… comes from only that few survivors of this place?”
“Oh, well we don’t know if they were all from here… this subcontinent is scattered with cities like this one. This is simply the largest of them…”
Seeming to sense something, Soo directs her drone to pull in on Khr’kowan’s face.
“I vow…” growls the woman as she grimaces down at the desert below us “…that we will return here! This place will be ours again!”