From the Mouth of Babes
Who: Jasper and the NPC Babies Where: The grassy bit When: Afternoon Rating: G
Jasper sighed and fought the urge to punch the top of her nose, feeling something like a headache coming on. And she wondered if this was what her sister put up with on a regular basis. "No, Ash." She said to the girl, in answer to her question. "We're not there yet."
"But when?" Ashwin demanded. She'd insisted on carrying her little brother for the moment, and that was slowing them up hugely, but Jasper let her do it anyway. Wasn't like there was much else to do and she figured it might help her get some muscle or something. Like weight lifting. And Jasper could take him back when Ashwin got tired, too.
"I don't know. When we get there. We get to a lake, and we get to the middle of the lake, and there will be an island there. That's where we're going. Sort of like Avalon - where King Arthur was buried, y'know?" She'd already explained this. Like, four times. But Jasper was getting really sure that none of it was sinking in, because she would always ask again. "We might have to sleep out again tonight, it depends on how far we make it. If we don't make it today, we'll make it tomorrow." Assuming she didn't strangle the two children before they got there. Jesus. Kids.
"Who's King Arthur?" Ashwin looked up curiously. "Did you know him?"
"I..." Jasper shook her head. "No, he was a legend. Y'know. A story. Supposedly he did a great many fancy things, and then died when his girlfriend was a muttonhead and went off with his best friend or something."
"Oh. Did he hunt rocs? That's fancy."
"...no." Jasper gave the girl a funny look for a moment. "He was on Earth. Y'know. Where people came from."
"Oh." Ashwin nodded wisely, and stopped so the toddler could climb down. She kept a grip on his hand, though, and started walking again. "Earth. Momma told me about it, but I dun remember it. An' Corbi was born here. I remember that." Jasper nodded, and reached into one of the make-shift pouches she was wearing out of leaves that hadn't hardened yet, filled with all the few foods she could find. Honeyspines in one, bloodfruit (as Ashwin called it) in another, and so forth. She figured she could show the new stuff to the preggo or the guy, and call it quits for exploration for a couple days until she didn't feel like the walking dead again. "Momma said that they had machines that could go across any kind for land or even sea at all, and you could talk to people on the other side of the world by just talking into another machine, and even ones that could fly! But that's silly. How would a machine do that?" Ashwin shook her head, like a little adult disbelieving a child. "I think she was telling stories."
It was a bit of a shock to Jasper. They'd lost... everything. In a single generation, by just not having the equipment in front of them, they'd lost everything that mankind had worked so hard to achieve. Flight, telephones, computers, hell, they could barely garden. Within the space of a single night, every person on the planet had been transported ten thousand years in the past. Maybe even further.
Jasper checked out how she felt about that, staying silent for the moment, and decided she was okay with it right now. Maybe she'd feel differently later, but right now? It was cool. She could deal with it. Though she wouldn't have minded a new tent. That would've been nice. One of the ones you could suspend from trees or mountains. "Yeah. Earth. It had a lot of crazy stuff there."
Either Ash ignored or missed the irony in Jasper's tone, she scampered ahead to a dead log - obviously having been there a while, and Jasper couldn't figure out where it had come from considering there wasn't a stump and they were in the middle of the bloody grassland - and started examining the inside. Both came back with handfuls of mushrooms, eating them happily. And they both offered some to Jasper. She put a few in one of the pouches, and popped a couple into her mouth, figuring they'd either kill everyone or they wouldn't, but she was hungry enough not to care.
Oh, lord, I'm depending on children for food. What the hell is wrong with me? Jasper examined one of the mushrooms while chewing on another. It had a dark, smooth, chocolate-brown cap that was quite glossy, and a long stem that was nearly white. It looked almost exactly like a mushroom from Earth, but it had that difference, that undefinable difference, that made it unlike a mushroom from there. Maybe it was her imagination. The taste, however, was completely pleasant and reminded her of a slightly salty morel. "What's this?"
"Mushroom." Ashwin said. Of course.
Jasper sighed and finished up what she had, leaving the majority in her pouch that she'd put them in. She swooped Corbin off his feet. "Come on. We should keep going."