"There's...no one here." James kicked at a clod of mud, grimacing when it clung to his shoe. "I told you it was uninhabited." He gazed at the reddish skyline, but his eyes first traveled over the miles of barren desert.
"I told you, I saw a house just over that ridge!" Sirius insisted, pointing. "Granted, it was worn and looked abandoned…"
"Perhaps it was left behind by the original owners when they evacuated," Remus suggested. "It doesn't hurt to look, though." He adjusted his helmet and started the trek, and after exchanging looks, James and Sirius followed.
The journey took longer than they expected — trekking through a hot, muddy desert was not easy, and they had to keep stopping to extract themselves from the sticky mixture. Thankfully, their suits had thermometers, so they were able to keep themselves cool, but whoever had designed these suits had not thought of mud-resistant boots.
"How far?" Sirius whined, glancing up at the sky; the orange sun was beginning to set.
"Look," Remus said calmly.
Just a half a mile away lay the house that Sirius had noticed and just like he'd said, it was dilapidated. But they were so relieved to find a shelter that they did not care how it looked, but they did care when they saw a lone figure in the distance, walking towards the house. It looked like...a girl?
And then they picked up on the sound of voices.
"...There are people?" James was the first to voice his disbelief. "I thought Earth was unlivable!"
"Apparently not," Remus said, awed. "I guess they're descended from people who didn't make it out — perhaps the planet is not inhabitable after all."
They gawked as the girl raised her hand in greeting — she was smiling knowingly. "Not from around these parts?"
"How can you tell?" James couldn't help himself.
The girl smiled. "I'm Lily," she said simply. "Follow me. I think you'll find that Earth is still a home for the forgotten."
335 words
Sci Fi September Day 24 - Before the Earth was made uninhabitable, a group of survivors evacuated the planet on a spaceship. Generations later, it's finally time to send a team down to test for habitability, but upon landing you discover that there were survivors who never left.
