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Save Point: Cinnamon Dark

This tribe have the usual large cooking pot, but unlike most places it's not some cheap VOA Dutch East Indies cannibal pot. Instead, it's a vessel made entirely of some sort of transparent glass, like an enormous fish-bowl more than six feet in diameter and about waist high.

It goes without saying that this is impossible, but there it is. Condensation runs clear on the inner side of the rim and down the exterior, as the material of which the pot is made shrugs off burning and is undamaged by the expected buildup of grease and black carbon soot.

It's probably not really glass, of course, but some sturdier hardened synthetic of the sort that any required laboratory equipment would once have been made of. She analytically contemplates the entire range of possible origins for it, from Ancient Civilization to Azatlani fish pond, despite very awkward and conversation-halting prospects that they may attempt to gut her, chuck her into the tank (possibly whilst still alive; it really depends on their technical skills at innards-removal) and then hold her under with the end of a long wooden pole forcefully applied to the skull until the wriggling stops and she stays down.

A female werewolf, looking more like a hyena in her rough tribal weaves and carrying a very well made flint-tipped spear, gestures and looks confused. She seems to be questioning whether it is in fact a good idea to arbitrarily boil someone of a species they never encountered before without, oh, maybe thinking about whether it's a good idea first?

This quizzical expression is pretty much what saves her and all the rest of them when Cleo finally runs out of all patience, sizzles through the woven bindings holding her wrists and ankles to their carrying pole, and drops neatly to the ground, landing perfectly like a cat and rubbing her wrists. Instead of starting a short wicked firestorm that would obliterate them and the highly flammable jungle huts surrounding the clearing, she just draws up the flames around herself so they seethe about her tensed muscles, making sure that they'll reflect in her eyes for maximum intimidation.

She only has to catch two incoming spears and stab them into the dirt before the truly cowardly (for which read, most of the big hunters) run away. Once no-one is threatening her any more she extinguishes the flames and tries to engage the more intelligent-looking female leader with the better engineered spear in conversation.

She doesn't know much of the local languages, but even the roughest smattering combined with her extensive linguistic experience is enough to scrape together a basic vocabulary. She is able to describe what she's come looking here for, the variant cinnamon seed-pod with strangely familiar flavours, although the phrase 'genetically modified' (which is looking more and more likely after seeing that cooking pot) is probably out of the question.

The females, looking to get a better edge in the negotiation - such as not dying - bring her food. None of it seems to have previously been part of anything that walked around on two legs, always a good sign, and although they could presumably try and poison her, she got tranq-darted enough times by the hunters when she let them catch her that she has a decent idea of what substances are available to them for going after people (or each other). It's surprising that she didn't pass out entirely and wake up spread out like a lioness-skin rug on a flat table, upper jaw hooked up over a raised loop behind the canines, ready for pelt removal and skinning.

After much confused repetition of phrases, she is able to understand that they know what she's talking about and that it is delicious (possible syntax is in fact that she would have been delicious with it, but she chooses to give them the benefit of the doubt). However it does not grow directly round here, there's a (strange?) place further up the mountain with stone long-houses (ruins?).

Discussion soon founders on the pointy reefs of much confused raving about gods and ancestors. But it seems clear where they got the cooking pot, and that the cinnamon grows there, so her path is set. She confuses the hell out of the females by showing them affection instead of killing them outright, taking their hands gently, giving them friendly hugs. The one who argued against her as a potential dinner gets a kiss, mainly because it meant she didn't have to kill a very large number of people to establish a suitable status within the group. Letting her have a quick taste seems kind of fair, under the circumstances.

She would hang round and get herself a little action, but she suspects that just as soon as she fell asleep, she'd catch a spear to the belly from one of the jealous males, still stung over having been embarrassed in front of their females. She's guessing they probably have that 'separate but equal' thing going where the females are social-managing matriarchs, in charge of shared property and lineages, and the males have their own statuses based on hunting and combat (possibly with the smarter ones as some sort of rule-excerpted shamans, but if there are any, they aren't here today).

So, up the mountain it is then. She can think of worse things than catching some sleep in familiar Azatlani architecture, even if it's down to what's left of a solid nanocrete shell.

~*~

The ruins are there, but they're covered in myriad layers of fine ash with plants growing through them, which is something she didn't think of. This is a volcanic island, after all, and every century or two gets coated with a fine layer of ash, more so on the risen flanks where the the remains of the structures are. The light jungle below effortlessly subsumes another fine layer of ash, but here it has built up in drifts in the corners of rooms, and atop broken walls, consolidated by random weeds that have blown in.

At least it's not the pyroclastic sort of blazing ash that moltenly self-adheres, just a fine soil-like dust that has cooled in the air as it drifted and fell. There's some evidence that a few of the better rooms with walls and roof intact have been swept out intermittently, during eras of occupation by either people or animals going back and forth, but all that's left is the basic concrete, sufficiently encrusted with rain-wetted layers of ash and foliage that there's no way to tell how old any of it is. It could be a couple of centuries or a couple of millenia.

It's good in one way, because it means nothing to hide or conceal. There's nothing here to exceed a local story or rumour, certainly not enough to attract any serious investigation.

But she does enjoy finding the remains of their empire, even just knick-knacks of substances that haven't been re-discovered yet and don't age in the normal manner, slipped through the cracks in history to show up where they don't belong and remind her of things long forgotten. All that's to be found here is the biological heritage, the improved contents of gardens and greenhouses gone to seed and left to evolve of itself for several thousands of years, perhaps losing in the process any additional traits that might have been selected for in the first place.

It's getting not late, but dim, so she decides to begin searching tomorrow morning when the light is bright and risen again. Backtracking slightly to one of the better corners that is unoccupied by any of the islands wildlife, overgrown by a thresh of long-stemmed weeds which show no sign of crushing or trampling, and burst outward in a profusion from this slightly dry but sheltered place toward the rain and sunlight of broken walls and a partial windows, she slides up against the wall, bunching the stems away from her to keep them intact, and slips behind into the dark space in the furthest recess where nothing grows. The dried but sweet-smelling stems of the first colonizers make a comfortable bed, and she has the water she bought with her from further down the slopes in her leather flask. It's a good enough way to spend the night, since she doesn't experience quite the same risk of cold as any other traveler.