Blagofest #2: better catch up fast

Well, this is pretty terrible! It’s been two weeks to the day since my first blagofest post – just over half of August has gone by and I’m basically without content. Oh well, I guess I’d better get my act together.

So, here we go: words! The character here isn’t named because I don’t actually have a name yet (and he’s not the type to think of himself in terms of the labels other use) – I guess if I get one then I might add it back in here. The piece is a bit scrappy, but at least it’s something, right? :P

I’m afraid that Thom will have to wait on dames for a little longer – this piece isn’t in Tretton City and probably will never connect to it short of some truly horrendous short-circuit in my brain.

Probably.

—

Paris confused him. The disorientation itself was nothing new – his life forced him to constantly adapt to the unexpected – but it was coming from the complete opposite direction from the one he was used to. Normally, he had to deal with a sense of loss when places he’d been a mere decade ago had changed beyond recognition – but this city felt like it had gone through a mere thirty years during his absence. He knew better, of course – it had been closer to three centuries since his last visit – and he had to constantly remind himself that those long years had indeed passed on Earth and that he hadn’t somehow cheated Einstein.

The city was not even part of the heritage zone, despite being inland – and whenever he went indoors or looked up to see the sky unobstructed by cables, he got a fresh reminder that the place hadn’t been sealed away from time. Nevertheless, he could count on one hand the buildings he didn’t recognise. If the stubborn attitude he’d seen throughout the city ran as strongly as he suspected, it was likely that many of those were the fault of his ageing memory rather than urban redevelopment.

The architecture wasn’t the only thing left intact from his previous visit – Earth seemed to have hung on to memories that had never taken root among the diaspora. Some of them were common sense – the planet remained politically divided, after all – but others made him feel that the world was going out of its way to haunt him.

There were war memorials everywhere he turned. It was funny how thoroughly he had forgotten while he had travelled; even the wars of other worlds hadn’t triggered his guilt the way these monuments to the dead of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries did. He had visited the battlefields of the world wars and paid his respects to the dead, but when the others had gone to inspect the newer memorials he had been unable to follow. He was afraid he would find his name there.