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Ramona walks through the grounds of a deserted Mythag campus. Exercise is important to keep her body in shape. Variety from training ensures lower chance of injury. Walking decreases heart rate safely after intense training.
Seeing no one around hurts the spirit, however. There’s only so much she can do. She remembers thousands of loops ago when there were still people on this campus. An entirely different lifetime, a childhood that may well be millennia ago. The mechanical eyes on her blindfold click open and shut, sorting through timeline after timeline, present and future, but can never settle on the past or a present where someone else walks with her.
Dissolution drips off of edifices and in place of rain. It burns a little bit when it touches her skin, but it’s healed over near instantly. A perk of being an Awakener properly now, she supposes. Ramona’s feet take her automatically on her rounds without her mind needing to pay any attention to where to turn. She knows every step of Mythag campus. She knew it since she was a child, and some of her memories still feature green grass and a lively buzz of living humans.
There’s not much point to think on the past. She tries not to. But walking leads to contemplating, practical or otherwise. Ramona practices breathing and focusing on the real and present. The eyes refocus on ‘now’ rather than ‘maybe’.
The statue of Phillips stands half-eroded from d-slime. He no longer has a face. This was (is, will be) Mythag’s main courtyard. Dorms to the south, classes to east and west, main administrative building north. The Black Pool beneath and ever-expanding, Tawil in her lonely vigil that Ramona inherited much of directly below. The center of all possibilities. Ramona keeps walking on her self-appointed rounds.
Before the administrative center was (is) Mythag’s gardens. According to traditional Leonian style, they were once well-manicured and laid out. Dexter loved (she cannot say ‘loves’, Dexter is long gone) roses, and Ramona remembers still: four varietals, one grown from a donation made by Lady Sorel of her personal garden’s strain. The bushes still cling to their trellises, they and a few scraggly trees all that remain. They sit in a mire of d-slime, dirt now black with dissolution instead of mulch.
Like everything else in this world. Without her thinking about it, Ramona finds herself having stopped before the bedraggled bushes. Her finger reaches out and touches a leaf, wiping a trace of d-slime from it.
Her eyes show her present, the somehow still green growth. The future, where it browns and drops. Another future, where dissolution eats a hole in it and it falls before its time. A third, rotten out. Timeline and possibilities interwoven, and she sees all of them. But right now, there is still a little bit of life left.
All efforts would be pointless. There is no practical reason to feel pity for this plant, or to do anything for it. But some part of her… some part of her misses her father, misses the child she was and the people who lived here. The past her eyes, for all their visions of different timelines, can never show her again.
Sympathy doesn’t matter. Cut out every single thing that isn’t the single beautiful future where humanity lives. Pare down all threads of possibility until all that’s left is the timeline where things don’t end in an ignoble melting, and anything but steps toward that moment are useless. These plants mean nothing.
She had almost forgotten, until she stopped here and looked, the time that Dexter taught her how to prune the rose bushes. She wore gardening gloves too big for her child hands and clumsily wielded shears, but her father was quite pleased. It’s one of the very few times she ever saw him working around dirt.
How many times does one have to prune before it becomes rote, the joyless avenue of her rapier cutting off every branch she can’t keep. Ramona kneels before the plant. Her eyes click through various levels of focus until, unexpectedly, something at the ground draws her. She brushes at the dirt and dissolution and reveals one small outgrowth of green.
Somehow, despite all the abandonment, some rose dropped a seed that managed to take. It, too will die. Nothing can live here long. But… even if it’s a waste, she expends the slight amount of effort to remember what it was like to be a human. Maybe that’s the difference. Ramona chooses not to look at the timelines this sprout has. She already knows its possibilities. But for a little moment, she can try to brush off any dirt and dissolution that would weigh the sprout down. Maybe, if she blinds her eyes to the lack of reason, a little bit a human hope will be enough to keep her. Maybe there will one day be a loop where she can make something grow.