003 - Video

[devilofohara]

[The feed starts, as Robin holds her MID out away from herself a bit, giving the crew a good look at her.

It's weird, putting herself on display like this - she'd only made a few other posts on the network, but they had been text. Now, though... she's made the decision not to hide her face anymore. Besides, if someone wants to contact her in person, it'll be important that they know what she looks like.

What she looks like is a small child with black hair and... three arms. Even as she starts recording, she's multitasking - scribbling down notes with one hand in a notebook, about some pamphlets and brochures she's gotten from the planets that she's leafing through with another. Her third arm is, of course, holding her MID up.]

I'm busy, so I'll make this quick. My name is Robin and I became the ship's historian a few weeks ago.

If any of you come across any useful or interesting information about the ship or this planet's, please let me know. Send me a message, or come see me in my office on the Nomo deck.

[She only glances up at the camera occasionally as she begins to speak.]

Also if you're planning on doing some exploring and you want some help, you can send me a message as well. I can get past most locked doors, and I don't mind helping you if I can learn something from it.

[Maybe not the wisest thing to advertise over the network, but Robin doesn't mind breaking rules or getting in trouble in search of the truth.

She stops writing for a moment and looks directly at the camera, wearing a serious expression. Time to address the possibility of someone from her own world being here:]

...lastly, if anyone recognizes my name or my face from the posters back home, don't bother contacting me. You can just go to hell instead.

Comments

[devilofohara]

They're immortal?

[As in can't die? At all? That's... pretty amazing, if it's true.]

Maybe they're jealous?

[ersatzeverything]

More like, they don't age. They're still human. If you shoot them or throw them off a cliff or whatever, they'll die. But some of them are over two hundred years old and lookin' not good but amazingly okay for two hundred.

[When Robin suggests jealousy, Deacon thinks of people like Mayor McDonough.]

Nah, jealousy would be a logical reason; I'm pretty sure some people are just arbitrarily awful.

[devilofohara]

That's amazing. Think of how much they might know about history!

[She isn't even a little bit surprised at the idea of people being terrible to one another for no real reason, so she doesn't comment on that.

The thought of meeting people who had actually been alive during the periods she wants to study is an absolutely fascinating one - but it leads her to another question.]

...only two hundred? If they don't age, how come there aren't any older than that?

[ersatzeverything]

Wiped out by an asteroid maybe? Or a volcano? Like the dinosaurs.

Nah, it's that basically two hundred years ago the world ended in radiation and fire and death. The only people who survived were either in, like, vaults, or people who got this mutation triggered by the high radiation so that rads don't kill them, they just make them stronger. And not aging.

A lot of them don't like to talk about before the War, but the ones that do, what they've lived through, it's incredible.

[devilofohara]

Oh. Sine told me a little about radiation, but I didn't know it could do that. We don't have anything like radiation where I come from.

[Not that she's disappointed, mind you. Radiation sounds awful and scary, the way the Girl described it - and anyway, her world comes with its own methods of obtaining powers, as Deacon can clearly see.]

It sounds like it! I'd love to learn more about where you came from, if you want to talk about what you know.

[She is just completely enamored with this idea, for the record.]

[ersatzeverything]

Absolutely. I love Old World history. There's gonna be a lot of holes in what I know, though. Intact books are hard to come by.

[And he will have to curb the urge to embellish or invent things where his own knowledge flags. That's going to be hard.]

[devilofohara]

Really? That's great!

[She quickly closes the notebook she had been writing in and grabs a blank one from a small pile near her. She quickly scrawls 'Deacon's World: History' on the cover, before turning her attention back to her MID.]

Let's start with this war - do you know what it was about, or what year it started?

[ersatzeverything]

Sure, the big war started on October 23, 2077 and it ended October 23, 2077. But there were smaller wars and military actions and stuff before that. The conflict started either because of world-wide resource scarcity or because Communists hate freedom, depending on who you read. Or because America wanted Chinese noodle bowls and China totally refused to give them any.

[devilofohara]

[She's going to write that noodle thing down, but she's pretty sure it was a joke. Gonna have to double-check with someone else at some point.]

...it started and ended on the same day?

[She's pretty clearly confused by that. She comes from a world without missiles or nukes (or even airplanes for that matter) so her knowledge of the kind of devastation caused by such things is rudimentary at best.]

How big is America?

[ersatzeverything]

People say the war lasted about five minutes. That's how long it took for two countries to destroy basically everything. It was fast because by the end of those five minutes there weren't enough people left alive to keep the war going.

America was super huge. Enormous. [But he doesn't know miles, or square acres or any objective measurement. Only that it was big enough that few people cross the entirety of the land that used to be America.]

It takes, like, a year for a caravan to cross it. And even back when people had cars and tame pteranodons and shit--minus the pteranodons--and could travel really fast, it was still a four day journey from one end to the other.