Inktober19 04 Spell

a/n: Another mission where nothing happens, this time in Sylvalum. Two guys, talking about the past and the future.

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft (now hiring squeee what are they making?), but Kadzyk is mine.

"How do you spell it?"

"Why do you care?"

"Don't you want me to name this after you? Come on. How do you spell your name?"

"Kadzyk." He spelled it out, letter by letter, without looking up from the ground.

There was a slight tapping. "Huh. Where's it from?"

The speller stopped what he'd been doing to glare at his questioner. He set the slender hand trowel next to the growing trench he'd been digging, got carefully to his feet, and brushed the silvery dust off his knees.

"Earth. Duh."

"But where?"

"Jesus, Mathias, does it matter? It's gone, just like everywhere else."

"But we need to save as much of our past as we can." The Curator on this mission had an anxious face and blonde hair that almost faded into the bone white environment. Kadzyk could probably throw him a couple meters and not break a sweat.

"Dude, the whole planet got funneled through one launch pad. You think I care which acre my family had to skip out of back in the day in order to get me there?" Kadzyk paced a little, stomping his feet in the soft sand, trying to shake the stiffness out of his knees.

"Still, knowing our past helps understand our future," recited Mathias.

"How? I'd throw more energy at understanding the junk in Cauldros. That's what's gonna keep us alive, not the story of the Battle for Saintly King Ivan's River." He stopped and looked down at the Curator, now paused from carefully measuring the helical root specimens that Kadzyk had unearthed. "And another thing. This planet is chock full of life. Why do we have to start throwing Earth animals at it?"

"If you mean Aisha," Mathias said defensively, "she's a full member of BLADE. She's an amazing scout."

"She's a cat. How many small indigen has she dragged back to you?"

The curator shrugged uncomfortably. "A few."

"Make a bunch of cats, and there'll be a lot fewer native mice to drag back. Maybe some not at all. You want to remember Earth? Remember rabbits in Australia, snakes in Hawaii, whatever ate all the dodos."

"Hey. We can be careful. Selective."

"Or maybe we can leave well enough alone." Kadzyk looked across the gently rolling dunes, each ripple whiter than paper, then dropped back to his knees and picked up his trowel. "Ah, don't mind me. It's nothing that hasn't been yelled about at Prospector's meetings. Do not get us started on miranium stocks and all the mining probes. My ears are still ringing from Monday."

"You could always switch over to the Curators."

"Nah, I like digging." As proof, he dug up a smile and shot it at Mathias. "Don't bother naming that radish after me. It won't help anybody understand it better."

a/n: Not the most exciting, but I've been worried about this topic for a while. Maybe there will be weaponry in the next one.

Next up: Chickens. Oh. Maybe not.