revivalproject | Of ceaslessly watching and looking for the sights!

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Of ceaslessly watching and looking for the sights!

WHO: Jon & you~
WHERE: Not!Temba
WHAT: Archivist go exploring. What will he find? What will he wake? What will he run away from?
WHEN: What's left of July.
WARNINGS: None so far.

a Let there be books... [ Not!Library? #5 ]

The moment they have reached the new city and have set foot out of the station one thing has been clear: This city is surprisingly different from Temba. Of course they weren't given a name for it, but the architecture alone already differs greatly. There are also a lot more trees in this city and a lot less flooding. Which seems promising in some ways, but comes with its own difficulties. Difficulties such as plain reaching some of the structures.

But before focusing on the difficulties and differences, Jon keeps his eyes open for similarities. He is explicitly looking for data points and signs of a written language. And he actually finds a trace of the first upon reaching the city center.

The data point is burnt out and just sitting in the center of the fountain that looks so very much like the one in Temba. The arrangement of the buildings around also seems familiar as long as one ignores the way these structures were build and of course the amount of trees surrounding them and making the entire city appear darker.

Jon takes a moment to orient himself and cautiously studies the buildings around the fountain before ultimately stepping into the one that appears to serve the same function as the library he has moved into over in Temba. It's cold and dark within these stone walls and he doesn't hesitate long before turning on his torch to move further inside, listening out for noises that might belong to some of the animals he has been hearing outside and up in the trees.

At least some beings still seem to inhabit this city.

b This looks familiar. [ Quarry #6 ]

Temba doesn't have a quarry, but this city does. And the one present here clearly has seen some ample use while beings resided here. Which isn't surprising given how many things are made of large chunks of solid rock. Jon can swear he has seen entire buildings made out of single boulders!

Having crossed through the quarry and standing in front of the massive stone wall at its very end, Jon runs his fingers over the rock, feeling the texture of the surface. It's not an unfamiliar feeling, but not one he would have expected to encounter on Agra 10.

c Alone in the Woods! [ Overgrown Forest #15 ]

A screech from the canopy above tells Jon that he has ventured too far into the forest taking up a good part of the city. It's not a sound of the sort he has been able to hear around the area with more buildings to it, but a harsher, sharper one. One that makes him spin around where he stands and peer up the stray arrangement of boulders that have drawn his attention this deeply into the forest.

"...shit." He mutters to himself as he slowly creeps closer to one of the large rocks and fishes out his phone only to be reminded that he can't access the network anymore.

Somewhere out of his line of sight something heavy hits the ground and Jon can hear it run either away or towards him. Is it circling him? Why hasn't he brought a weapon? He should have brought a weapon.

Grasping a nearby stone, big enough to feel somewhat reassuring in his hand, Jon backs against the boulder and tries to catch sight of whichever creature he can hear somewhere nearby. He also does the sensible thing: Call for help.

"Hello! Can anyone hear me!?"

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Tony started to snicker at the implication that the 'hands thing' was a long term commitment he was making and not just to stop Jon from punishing his tender palms any further, but gladly accepted, or distracted, with an arm looped around Jon's middle again to keep him in place for a tickling of kisses to his cheek while Tony reached for his bag to haphazardly repack for him. With the first aid tools out of sight again, Tony slung the bag over his shoulder with only a small wince of regret, and nudged Jon away and up so they could both get decently back to their feet and no longer reduced to the dirty floor.

"Did you make it upstairs yet? C'mon, check this out," Tony was already encouraging and making his way back the way he had come, following in the chaotic path of the spooked animal to find his way back to the stairs.

The protest those kisses are met with is mild at best and to a decent degree purely cosmetic. Tony does receive a quick little nuzzle in return after all before Jon wordlessly agrees on getting back up, but not without commenting on that wince. "My shoulders are fine, you know?"

"I have literally just entered the building, so no upstairs exploration for me until now." Jon answers Tony's actual question while following along. "I wasn't even sure if there was a second floor until now." He may not say it out loud, but he does hope that the animal does, in fact, not live here and this upstairs is where it actually lives.

"What've you been doing this whole time? Stop messing around," Tony chastised, like he hadn't been sitting on the floor with Jon, as they rounded to the spill of brighter light shimmering down the stone steps. The corners were still shadowy, and the plants still encroached to make the space feel small and dim, but the wide window at the top of the steps had survived whatever had caved in the roof here. Probably because they weren't windows so much as they were screens of strange, intricate stonework that Tony bounded part way up the steps in his excitement to share them before he stopped to also point out, "Look, the stairs--isn't that strange? Like the place where you ate that big flower." Maybe that should have put Tony more on edge, but this space was teeming with more life than those hallucinogenic weeds; if they walked into somewhere without any cobwebs in the corners, Tony might start uprooting plants.

Jon follows, not sure what to expect, but curious to see what has Tony be this excited. His attention is less with the architecture than with what may await them within the rooms they are about to enter. It's Tony's words that make him pause and blink. "... I didn't... Eat it, Tony..."

Is it necessary for him to point that out? No. Does he feel the need to do so anyway? Yes.

At least with that said, he feels more inclined to look around and up at the big window. Though now Tony's words bring up a different question. "You believe there might be one of those here as well? That we may be seeing things again that aren't real...?" It wouldn't be the first time. In fact, it tends to be a rather common occurrence on this planet, be it due to the storms, calibrations or plain magic. If they are imagining this entire city, it could be really bad.

"No--," Tony started to correct, but couldn't confidently say that they weren't collectively imagining this place and corrected, "I mean, maybe, this whole place is weird. Look at the stairs. They're not Agrii sized." A bunch of human brains producing a city would probably have made human-sized stairs. It was less likely they would have made this unfamiliar stone-screen that Tony finished climbing toward to lay a hand against, the other still twirling as he worked up what he was trying to say to Jon over his shoulder.

"And, fine, obliterated it. Scared it away. Did the sexiest thing with a flower since O'Keeffe." Mostly, he was trying to encourage Jon to join him at the window, where it overlooked the library garden. Where the one back in Temba looked abandoned and overgrown, this one appeared naturally lush with thick tree trunks and wide, flat leaves that accumulated the humidity to send it dripping down to the colourful forest floor, like natural fountains. Tony could see a massive, glinting fish drift lazily through what might have at one point been a carefully cultivated pond, and a tiny bird with antennae like a butterfly preening its scaley-looking wings on a branch. It was less expected that one of those dripping leaves started to move, making the bird go flapping away Tony stare in surprise until the colours of it shifted and mottled, and he could see the rolling eye of their curious, sticky friend as it went limping across the garden.

Learning that the creature they scared apparently has recovered will put Jon at ease, but for now he is still staring at the stairs after Tony has made him aware of the most obvious difference between these and the ones over in Temba. He even mutters a small expletive to himself before finally climbing up the rest of them and join Tony, mentally still placing the meaning of those stairs. It is true that the building where they encountered the plant has normal-sized stairs...

"This city hardly seems like it has been inhabited by Agrii, does it." He muses while finally getting to look over the garden.

Oh. That's actually pretty nice. Sure, he has done his best to clean up the garden behind the library and even set up a few pieces of furniture, but he won't deny that this here looks several times nicer even in this wild, natural state. He still finds a moment, however, to cast Tony a look that is meant to appear offended while hiding him being flustered by that comment regarding his actions towards the large plant. But instead of adding a verbal comment, he focuses on the garden below. "I doubt any of these plants will survive in Temba."

Excited that they seemed to be on the same page now, Tony grinned and welcomed Jon at the window with a lazy arm around his shoulders while the other continued to gesture with his theorizing. "Or there was a smaller race of them that was eradicated. Those ones we met survived because of the caves, right? That's what Cal said. If they were mostly segregated like this, they didn't stand a chance. The train station is like--the train itself is made for the big guys, its huge, so they had to have regularly come here. But as soon as they arrive, it's like they're in the kiddie area, tiny furniture, doors they'd have to duck through," he tried to elaborate, effectively negating any looks that Jon was trying to throw him.

He had to take a deep breath to consider the garden before he asked, "You sure? Poe brought a tree back from a whole other planet. Can't be that alien. Hey, train's gone, though, we get to stick around and enjoy them anyway."

"You notice that everything here is made of stone rather than metal like over in Temba..." Jon notes with a glance up at Tony and a wrapped hand placed lightly against the glass-less window. "I can't imagine there being a shorter version of the Agrii that specialize in working stone and building their houses up in the trees. That's too great of a difference in culture and behavior."

He lets his gaze drift back to the garden below, frowning mildly and trying to not too obviously look for that creature again. "And I don't think we should try and sleep here."

Tony wasn't sure that was a solid argument, pouting in contemplation and offering, "People on Earth live in yurts, doesn't make them less human than people in London." Especially with such a shift in climate, it wasn't entirely outrageous that a culture could be so different. Besides, the only people that Tony knew that worked in stone like this and built their houses up in the trees were from a wholly different planet that didn't seem to know anything about space travel.

Like plenty of the people living in Temba now.

Tony frowned, staring out the window as well, but at a blank, middle-distance as he tried to work through just how crazy that thought was, not tracking at all as the giant lizard-thing skulked toward a thick trunk and very carefully, very gently raised its forelegs to hug it. Jon's voice drew Tony slowly out of his reverie, his head tilting and his gaze sliding toward Jon with a wry smile. "Why, you got a date back in town? C'mon, it'll be fun. Sun's still up, we've got plenty of time to find a VIP suite, I've got connections, I'll have my people make some calls."

"But there isn't a yurt-version of London an hour north of the actual city either." Comes the counter-argument. "What I'm saying is, we know we are being seen as entertainment by the Atroma already. You heard that message as well as I did. What if-" Jon gestures out of towards the garden below. "-what if we may as well have ended up here? A different Temba. A different... Season."

Jon falls silent after speaking that thought out loud, his eyes now having settled on following their color-shifting visitor from earlier that now very slowly, very deliberately starts to climb its chosen tree. Of course it's an excellent climber. Coming down and venturing into this building may have been an expedition out of its regular dwelling spaces.

With the creature having left his sight at least for the time being, Jon is left to scan the garden again, but his tone has taken on a nudge towards the concerned. "Tony, do you believe the Agrii--" But he doesn't finish that sentence, instead falls silent as his eyes fall on something else. Something down between the plants. "There's something down there!" He points out quickly, concerned tone gone again.

It was uncomfortable how much that proposal made sense, leaving them both quiet in the abandoned library while Tony considered the implications; that this was, whether by nature or by invasion, an Atroma planet first and the Agrii had been put here as one of their experiments; one of potentially many if they could assume these weren't the only two cities on the planet's surface, or even the star system. It would explain why the Atroma had so much control over the environment, and seemed to know how to anticipate their reactions. But did that mean there were random groups of 'he rows' transplanted to these cities after the 'local' population was established, or was this mix of people an evolution? And Tony couldn't ignore that there seemed to be a very obvious weak point, and spoke at the same time as Jon, "But what about the train...?" trailing off at the catch of Jon's breath.

He rocked up on his toes to try to get a better vantage point on what Jon was seeing, but it looked like a bunch of weeds and nests to Tony. "Something alive?" he prompted to get a better idea of what exactly he was looking for. In the meantime, he threw a glance over his shoulder, trying to anticipate the best route out of the building to the garden, and if this library was that similar to the one back in Temba.

"No, not alive, just- I think it's stone!" Like basically everything here.

As Jon says this, he has already turned and is heading back down the stairs, looking around searchingly to orient himself. If this library is similar to Temba's, then there is a way into that garden and he has a vague idea where to look. But in the meantime- "And who says the Agrii were even using the train themselves? Is this infrastructure really meant to be used by the native population? Or is it more like-- Have you been to a zoo in recent years? Or an amusement park? Ever been riding those little trains they have to take you on a tour through the park?"

At this point he is just firing out ideas as they cross his mind, bandaged hands gesticulating as he turns sharp left at the bottom of the stairs and walks towards the back of the building - Roughly where he has his office in the library over in Temba.

Bewildered by the energetic response to a rock when just about everything here was strange and new, Tony was slower to move and strolled more languidly down the stairs, trailing after Jon obediently as he powered ahead of any opportunity for Tony to resist. Jon's waving hands were easy to keep in Tony's periphery and the excitement had a wry smile tugging at his lips, but Tony took the chance to shine the faint glow of his repulsor up into corners and across the hall where he mostly spotted roots pushing through the stone and ambitious cobwebs.

"Can't say that I have," he replied, starting to laugh at the implication that Jon was spending his time riding trains through amusement parks, but he could see what Jon meant. "But the size of the train--I think that was the only reason I noticed the station so quickly, the difference is glaring. Do you think the Atroma are as tall as the Agrii?" That was an interesting thought, and it left Tony wondering what else the train might be able to tell them about what the Atroma looked like. That could mean a great deal for their ability to understand the aliens.

"Really?" Jon asks, giving Tony a slightly bewildered look while he waits for the man to catch up, having reached a wall that for the most part is overgrown by plants. The vague outline of a door can be made out regardless and Jon has one of his bandaged hands lightly resting against it. It can't be that unusual to do a little tourist tour through a park. Jon even will say it's rather relaxing.

But returning to their goal to get into that garden. "Here. It should be here. No idea how these doors work, if they are meant to be pushed open or maybe they are meant to be sliding doors...?" A little shrug as invitation for Tony to take a closer look, given he currently functions as both their hands. Jon even takes a step back to give Tony some room.

"They could be the same size as the Agrii. Though after our visit to that plant-infested building I had started to think of them as human-sized. The proportions of that place seemed largely out of place within the city..." And Jon can't quite imagine the Atroma varying this vastly in size either. Even then it wouldn't make sense to have buildings and stairs only suitable for the shorter portion of their population.

"Or the train is set in that scale to match Agrii-height because they would be more likely to feel suspicious about one too small for them."

There was something about this explanation that Tony wasn't entirely sold on, either, making him hum a thoughtful noise as he stepped up alongside Jon to consider the doorway. It would be no good at all if Jon's theorizing ended there, his energy was far too cute, but while Tony made his own examination of the door and he processed the problem, he idly answered Jon's question instead; "I've got a company to run and a superhero team to feed, and a secret identity to manage. I don't have time to ride around a...zoo." Not that a zoo would be Tony's first choice of entertainment. "And my parents didn't exactly encourage that kind of activity. I'll go to Coney Island, please, a beautiful gal, a roller coaster, kettle corn, it'll piss off my dad if he finds out, it's a deal, but that park isn't very big." By then, Tony had traced his fingers along the edge of the doorframe, knocking a choke of dust loose to see how the stone sat into the wall, then searched the ground quickly for some kind of leverage because there had clearly been a mechanism at work here, but he was going to have to force it. With a withered stick in hand and braced on his foot, he managed to wedge it under the rock and get enough lift to dig his fingers under the door instead to haul it up and over, where it rolled aside into the slot in the wall with a grinding rumble that shook dust and anxiously fluttering bugs from the cracks in the walls. It rolled, until it stopped, even with Tony fitting himself into what he had managed to reveal of the opening to shove his weight against it, coughing in the stale air of the tomb he had cracked open; something was blocking it from the other side, likely a root system that had quickly filled the space this stone was supposed to slide into. They were just going to have to duck around it.

Leaning there against the door frame, squatted down under the door and looking irritated by this defeat, Tony finally produced, "You don't think that human-sized place was actually...these people-sized?" with a wave around to indicate the population of this city that would find the scale familiar. "If the Agrii were taking the train that clearly leads here, you know, goes both ways."

Jon stands by, watching Tony work on the door and listening to him. Then he makes a decision. "Aight. When we get to a planet where we get the chance to do so, we find an amusement park. And a zoo." Sorry, Tony, it's decided. You will come visit the next alien zoo with Jon.

Had Jon anticipated the door posing that much of an obstacle, he would have gone to take the long way around the building instead. Though normally this would have been the quickest way. Which he doesn't say out loud as he nods his appreciation for Tony's work to allow them to get out. "Also possible, indeed. Like a guest house. That large indoor garden might make a being from this city feel rather at home." He frowns a little. "Which only makes me hope that that plant we encountered wasn't a present brought over there from this place." Plants can be dangerous without seeming sentient, thank you.

BY then Jon has crouched next to Tony still holding the door, wordlessly asking for the 'okay' for them both to move on and get into the actual garden at last. There is a piece of stone he is eager to reach.

The insistence on the amusement park made Tony start to chuckle, but it was quickly gone with the zoo addition, for which Tony look very much like he was being offered a punishment then glanced around with a spread of a hand. Didn't he deal with enough bugs and animals and weird plants already? Of course Jon thought a zoo would be thrilling. With that, Tony ducked the rest of the way out into the garden, rocking bonelessly on his heels in the nearest tangle of grass and taking a grateful gulp of the thickly humid, but no longer fallow air of the long-undisturbed library. It smelled richly earthy outside, like freshly overturned soil, with a distant sulphuric sharpness that Tony guessed was from the marshy bubble of the pond where he saw that huge fish. Luckily, it didn't smell much like that pungent pollen that Tony had been coughing up for hours after their escape from the strange building in Temba.

"We'd recognize it this time, at least," Tony pointed out, quite optimistic about their chances against another one of those plants. "Besides, you can just..." he wiggled his fingers, not sure how to define what Jon had done to the flower exactly, just sure it had been effective. "If this library exists and is so similar, maybe we check if one of those 'guest houses' is here. Maybe it'll be Agrii-sized."

Tony won't convince Jon that he hates animals, at least. He has seen the man taking naps with the mothkittens and has gathered ample photographic evidence.

Shortly after Tony is through, Jon follows and lingers for a moment, crouched on the floor and peering around, then up at Tony when the man speaks up, raising a brow at the finger wiggling. "Huh. And here I thought you hate when I do- y'know. Stuff." His voice carries that certain degree of bemusement and he carefully stands up, making sure to keep his hands off the ground. He easily locates the direction of this mystery stone and is moving again. "It's curious that everyone seems to hate my powers until I can use them to blow stuff up. Suddenly they are- Exciting." Martin had been very much the same...

Jon doesn't get much time to dwell on that thought, as one big step over one of the swampier patches of the garden brings him right up to his goal and he can't quite hold back the little 'Oh!' noise from escaping him. It's a stone column decorated in by now mossy carvings, tipped over and on its side. Nearby a second piece of stone lies within the plants, hemispherical. Like a stone bowl cut in half. Both pieces are covered in vines and other plant life.

"Tony, can you turn this piece around?" Jon asks, stepping over to the bowl-like piece. One of its sides has a flat base and is clearly meant to be standing on it. All of it appears to be made of a single slab of stone and despite some chipping and smaller cracks, it looks largely intact.

Not sure if Jon needed help while he found his feet, Tony hovered with his hands out cautiously, but was looking away with a roll of his eyes and defensive moue without a great explanation then for his clear distaste for magic, but, just, you know, most of the time. It was far more unconscionable that anyone else would be behaving this way, that was outrageous, so Tony's personal biases would just have to go unexamined as he went following after Jon again with his eyebrows raised in shock at this implication. "Who's been telling you they hate you...?" he started to ask before Jon was enchanted by his discovery.

Tony lingered at the carved column, giving it an experimental nudge with his toes to test the weight of it, or how entrapped it had become in its abandonment to the wild growth, before Jon was asking his assistance. He wasn't sure yet if any of it looked that different from the rest of the elaborate stone work of the city that he had seen so far, at least not different enough to catch Jon's attention from the window above. When Tony went to move the indicated stone, though, he found it surprisingly resistant, making him quickly abandon his instinct to haul it up for Jon to see better and instead shove it until it tipped over onto its flat side with a whump to the ground.

Jon has come to kneel besides the chunk of stone, already trying to get a better look at it by the time Tony joins him and works on rolling the bigger piece over. "A lot of people hate me, Tony." He says softly, trying not to appear upset about sharing this. "I did doom my Earth, as you know. Destroyed many lives. Plenty of good reasons to dislike me."

It does remain upsetting that it all happened. But Jon has had months to deal with it now and that's what he keeps telling himself.

The rock falls over and Jon instantly looks up and over the piece, bandaged hand hovering as if yearning to trace the carvings that hardly look like they were actually carved and more like they were molten into the stone. Which makes him frown. "...this is not something we have ever seen in Temba. This- It- It almost looks like letters!"

Tony had to stop himself from interrupting as he crouched next to Jon because they both knew that wasn't what he meant, anyone who blamed Jon for that probably wasn't enjoying his explosions. But maybe Jon didn't know that, maybe Jon didn't really differentiate between the people he saw suffering on his Earth, and anyone he had gotten on the wrong side of here. Plenty of good reasons to dislike him. Instead, Tony watched Jon as he took in the stone, brow knit with concern and biting his tongue, not sure how to navigate that guilt when he felt like he had been blithely contributing to it all along.

Even in Jon's excitement, that left Tony slow to look back to the stone again and his focus still wasn't really on it as he took Jon's hovering as an indication to try sweeping some of the dirt and growth out of their way. It was only then as he worked some moss out of one of the indentations that Tony started to consider them, eyes narrowing, and he offered, "These ones are people, look. Like on the map." They weren't necessarily people, of course, but some of those symbols did look a lot like the kind of figures humans would draw before they had cohesive languages, too; evocative of their bodies and what they did have to communicate.

It's true, those people didn't enjoy him smiting stuff. Helen did, however, and she tried to kill him. And unless he was blowing up a different monster, even Martin had developed the habit of turning away from any part of Jon that wasn't entirely human. Which had been odd to get used to. Because it had always been him. Whether he was smiting a monster, recording a statement, even after absorbing the Eye's power, he has remained himself.

At least with Tony Jon is well aware that he doesn't like magic in general. It feels less like an aversion to Jon being different from how he is supposed to be.

He nods a wordless 'thanks' at Tony for clearing away some of the dirt and his eyes trace the uncovered marks along the round shape of the stone. "Does this look like a clock to you as well? A sun dial?" He waves a hand over one end of the curve. "These figures over here... They lie on the ground. Sleeping?" His hand moves to a different part. "These down here... Something is actually written here. I, uh.... hmm."

If Tony had come across markings like this on Earth, something like a sun dial would have been his first instinct, too, though the only comparable structure he had come across yet in Temba was the clock that Cayde roosted in. Some of the gold peeled away from Tony's fingers then, sliding back around his knuckles and leaving the tips exposed to run more carefully along those lines in case there was a textural difference in them that was harder to see, and Tony tipped his head back to glance thoughtfully around the garden for any more context on the design. It didn't look like it had been moved here, grown over as it was, so it could have been fair to assume it was the kind of thing someone would place in a library garden. "A calendar, maybe," he offered, as long as they were guessing. "A schedule. Our earliest 'written' records are people counting days and we still do it. Probably a common problem."

"Probably." Jon agrees with a nod. "As far as scheduling was even a thing when this was created. What's odd, though... These symbols, they weren't carved into the stone. There would be marks to indicate the work process. These are smooth. As if they were burned into the stone. And these little splatters here... Almost like spilled ink."

Jon lifts his eyes up from the stone and looks over to Tony. "You remember seeing this before as well, don't you." He doesn't have to ask, he knows the answer.

That answer wasn't as much of a shock to the system as it might have been if the Graq weren't already in Tony's head from their earlier consideration, though it did make him wonder if there was some confirmation bias at play. After all, Tony couldn't confidently say he had seen an exact replication of any of these symbols on the Graq planet, just that they kind of looked like they wouldn't be out of place. On the other hand, the edges of the marks were evenly smooth, instead of the sharp edges of a flat tool, too consistent to be natural wear over time, though possibly from use the same way Tony was running his fingers over them.

"Okay," Tony accepted in a breath, for now. This was enough evidence to work up the theory and see if the pieces fit. "But these guys were..." he started to say, hand twirling to encompass the architecture and, well, space travel implied, but these Graq being more advanced than the ones they had met before sounded a lot like the Agrii having technology they didn't really understand either. "Why is someone...developing these cultures?" he amended. It didn't sound like the kind of programming that went alongside whatever torture porn that the Drift Fleet was.

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