#since we're in the hiatus I figure I can do this instead of liveblog

[ks-caster]

Sometimes the Simplest Solution (Part 2)

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“Called by the anomaly indeed,” Gabriel commented excitedly to himself as he walked around the four-cubic-foot orb of light, peering into it to get a better look at Octavia, who was loosely curled in the fetal position, with all of her exposed skin still covered in glowing symbols. Her eyes were lightly closed, like she was asleep or meditating, but her face hadn’t lost the pinched, drawn, eternally tired look it had had since Diyoza had first laid eyes on her in her leather armor and red war paint. She’d hoped that the younger woman would relax more in unconsciousness, but then since she was still inside the anomaly, who could say what her mind was experiencing. 

Or perhaps at this point her exhaustion was bone deep, unshakable even in an advanced-science-magic-induced sleep.

Diyoza felt like the psychotic, drug-like pull had vanished entirely from her brain, leaving her hungover and painfully bleak. Her daughter was still safely growing inside her carefully protected uterus, right where she should be - there was no need to rush after a child version of her, and certainly no need to break Octavia’s kneecap over it. She couldn’t assess how much damage she’d done, since the younger woman was clearly not putting any weight on her left leg at the moment - but she could see that the damage to her arm had healed, so she hoped that meant the anomaly had fixed her up in general.

“So, weren’t you supposed to know better than to get this close?” she checked as she strolled a few steps away to casually circle the clearing, establishing a safe perimeter. 

“I thought I was far enough,” Gabriel responded, still observing Octavia, pulling a thick, leather-bound notebook out of his bag as he paused on her left side. The young, perfect skin of her arm had the highest concentration of symbols, arranged in a spiral pattern reaching up from her hand and wrapping around her arm up to her shoulder. He started feverishly to catalog them. “It must have extended its reach...”

Diyoza reached out and ran a finger down the comfortingly familiar bark of a tree - oak, its leaves swaying gently and recognizably above her head, acorns littering the ground around her feet. It had been the first time since waking up in orbit that she’d actually recognized a plant; all the trees and foliage on Sanctum was just a little bit diff-

“We’re on Earth,” she realized abruptly.

“What?” Gabriel muttered distractedly, grabbing a stick from the ground and gently poking it into the anomaly to see if what would happen. “No - even if we did get displaced temporally there’s no reason why we would have left Sanctum. It’s a temporal anomaly, not a spatial anoma- ow!” he exclaimed as an acorn whacked him on the side of his face.

“So did you guys plant a bunch of earth trees at some point while you were cataloging the native species in the local ecosystem and hope they’d all get along or what?” she asked, lightly tossing the next acorn so he could catch it. 

“I…” he muttered, turning the nut over in his fingers, eyes wide and confused. “But this…”

“She said she wanted to go home, right before she stepped into the big glowing circle,” Diyoza commented quietly, walking back towards the other two. “I think the anomaly might have heard her.” She stopped in her tracks, leaning her weight on her back foot and stepping down with her front again, listening to the hollow creak of what she’d bet real money was a trapdoor. Kneeling, she felt around until the carefully camouflaged wooden handle was wrapped in her fingers, then pulled it open, grabbing the flashlight out of her pocket and leaning down to view the interior.

“There’s a whole little caveman house under here,” she announced. Gabriel glanced in her direction but then (predictably, she thought) turned back to writing down the symbols. “I wonder if this is where she lived before she went all… well, Caesar,” she muttered mostly to herself. She knew that Octavia had been one of the original 100 juvenile delinquents sent down to the ground like human radiation canaries, thanks to Clarke, and she knew that Octavia had quickly adopted the local warrior culture and embraced violence as her major means of self-expression, thanks to Kane. But she realized as her eye cataloged details of the little underground house that she didn’t really know much else about her new friend’s history. The space was simple and functional, like a lone warrior lived there. Perhaps it really was hers.

“Whoa!” Gabriel shouted as a sudden rumble of sound emanated from the anomaly, and Diyoza looked up just in time to see him flying backwards across the clearing, his momentum stopping when he hit a tree and fell to the ground, the air whooshing involuntarily out of his lungs.

“Guess she doesn’t like being poked with a stick,” she quipped, closing the door of whoever’s house she’d just broken into and walking over to give the immortal a hand up.

“The stick she didn’t seem to mind,” Gabriel coughed, trying to get his balance back. “Once I saw it wasn’t petrifying, I figured I’d try to pull her out. She did NOT like me putting my hand in there.”

“Well, you were trying to kill her pretty recently,” Diyoza reminded him dryly as she inspected the back of his head for damage - nothing beyond some leaves and bits of bark stuck in his hair. He’d live. 

“Any clue when this is exactly?” he asked, clearly not wanting to discuss his recent attempts on both of their lives, or theirs on his, when there was something so scientifically exciting happening. “The air smells pure, so I’m guessing it’s after the bombs… So we’re probably getting irradiated right now,” he realized aloud, looking uneasily at her, and then at her baby bump.

“Relax, Florence Nightingale,” she said, guessing his meaning. “They didn’t give us the good stuff like you on Eligius III, but me and my guys all had a form of blood alteration* so that regular old radiation from space wouldn’t kill us in our sleep and deplete the workforce. That was pretty normal at the time for astronauts in general - Octavia’s people probably had the same thing, passed down genetically from their ancestors. No fancy color change, but enough that my kid should find the weather here to her liking.”

The air did smell pure - not the dusty smell of the post-apocalyptic desert that had permeated even the green valley last time she was here, and not the dense, bitter odor of industry that had reached even into the middle of the forest preserve she’d gone camping in as a little girl. It wasn’t like Sanctum - too humid, too sweet, too alien to be comforting. 

‘I am NOT one of those  tree-hugging hippies,’ she reminded herself sternly as the emotional thought crossed her mind that this was what that silly Tree-Crew teenagers gang had been protesting for when she’d watched them being arrested in droves on the news, scoffing that with all of the problems in the world, that was the hill they’d chosen to die on. Maybe they’d been just a tiny bit right, she decided as she pointed her flashlight into the foliage and picked out what looked like a well-used path. 

“I’m going to take a walk,” she announced, “see if I can find civilization, or at least figure out when this is. Don’t touch the glowing mystery orb again,” she instructed, raising an eyebrow and gesturing at Octavia’s still-levitating form for emphasis.

“Aye-aye Colonel,” Gabriel responded with a mock-salute, already back to scribbling in his book.

‘What the hell did I get myself into this time?’ she sighed to herself as she glanced once more at Octavia and the anomaly, and then set out to follow the trail.

Author’s Note: *Was it ever explained how the Eligius dudes didn’t have the same reaction to the (twice!) irradiated Earth as the mountain men? That should have been a real short trip, right? Please somebody let me know which episode talked about that, if it was talked about! 

If not, then I’m going with this theory that it was normal to give astronauts some form of resistance as described - it’s not as good as Nightblood as we’ve seen, but it passes down a perfect genetic replica (which is why skykru is better at metabolizing radiation than the Grounders, per the Mountain Men’s experiments, even though it was explained that the Grounders had Nightblood in their genetic history.)

Next Up on SSS: Diyoza did NOT sign up for this much teenage angst.