She doesn't walk out. She struts. There is no other way of putting it.
Daniel scrambles after her, too flustered to even feel embarrassed.
"I can't believe you managed that!" he hisses, not sure if he's awed in a good way or in a bad way. Probably a bit of both.
Her mop of blond curls bounces vivaciously with every strong step she takes.
"A little bit of charm, and a good dose of official papers in working order," she says sweetly, shrugging it off modestly.
Daniel isn't fooled. Even her shoulders are smug.
"Oh, and a cleavage that could fell an ox at twenty feet," she adds, showing it off with a wicked smile and making him choke on his splutter.
He can't even argue. The guards she fooled weren't looking at her face, that's for sure.
Recovering what little dignity he can grasp at – and studiously not looking at her – Daniel protests: "You can't possibly have official papers. You're not from here. You're so not from here there probably isn't even a word to say how not from here you are."
"I told you I'm from the future," Doctor Song points out. "I came prepared."
"No." He shakes his head, doggedly insisting even if it doesn't really matter that much. Or at all. "No, you aren't from this planet, or from this culture's future, not at all."
"What makes you think so?" she asks, widening her eyes in a very unsuccessful play of innocence.
Daniel wonders if she's asking for the whole list.
Eventually, he starts with: "Your boots. All those buckles and zips – I hardly think a culture with little to no metals could have come up with them. Even in the future."
"Ah, well." She smiles winningly. "They're comfortable, practical and stylish. How can a girl resist?"
Daniel blinks.
Song grins defiantly. "Got them from trade?" she offers.
"What about your clothes?" he fires back.
She waves him off unconcernedly, however: "Fashion's about the most in-flux element of any and all cultures. The slightest thing can send it barrelling down a completely different path, and generally, without any effect on the timelines..."
She's very authoritative, projecting competence and surety, technobabbling better than Sam, but Daniel knows how to handle this kind of genius-speak.
"And you're speaking English," he says over her, with calm precision.
She's not flustered, to his very slight annoyance (Sam would have been) and her tirade is not so much derailed as skilfully switched onto another track.
"Maybe I just have a better translation circuit than you're used to," she teases with irritatingly charming self-assurance. "One that makes you hear English because it's your mother language, no matter what I'm really speaking."
Daniel stops and glares at her through his glasses. "Oh, really? Then why am I hearing British English?"
She pauses, and shoots him a look of grudging admiration. "Because I am speaking English," she admits and starts walking again, perhaps a little faster.
"But why British?" he can't help asking, genuinely curious.
"What's wrong with being British?" she asks defensively.
"Nothing, nothing!" he hurriedly raises his hands in surrender. "Wait, you mean you're actually British?" She shoots him a dark look and he scrambles again: "Don't- I didn't- I wasn't even sure you're from Earth! It's... er..."
She sniffs mock-haughtily: "I was raised in Leadworth."
"Leadworth? Seriously?" The idea of a blonde little girl from Nowhere-in-England growing up into this amazing woman strikes him as more than slightly unbelievable. "Where the hell even is it?"
She glares warningly at him.
He shuts up.
For about thirty seconds, before shaking off his thoughtfulness and running to catch up with her long strides.
"Wait. Wait!"
She pointedly ignores him.
"No, wait, look, I'm sorry and all – but what did you mean, about jumping and leaving the ground and...?"
Relenting a little – she quite clearly likes to lecture, Daniel notices – Dr. Song launches into an explanation: "The Igraians think anything disconnected from the ground is unholy. They are extremely careful to always remain in touch with the soil. The same goes for anything of theirs: they do not hang, suspend or dangle their things. You must have noticed that their art doesn't extend past a relatively low line on their walls?"
Daniel's eyebrows are rising with the fascination other cultures always spark in him. "Veneration of a natural manifestation of nature brought to an extreme, most likely a form of goddess worship – are they matriarchal? I didn't notice the signs..." he wonders aloud.
"Babies are considered the greatest gift, coming into being full of innocence, and of course, they cannot leave the ground on their own," Song continues with just as much enthusiasm. "The first movement is crawling, when you think of it... they believe learning to stand and walk is a sign of their progressive loss of innocence."
"That actually makes sense," comments Daniel happily. She raises her eyebrows and he hastily adds: "Sort of."
With an eye-roll, she goes on: "Jumping is... it's at once obscene and deplorable, in their view. Nobody is entirely sure how this particular taboo came to be, but it is easy to observe that there is only one species of birds on this planet and they're scavengers – hardly a positive image."
"Fascinating!"
"The oddest thing is, almost all insects are also wingless..." her voice grows animated and Daniel is hanging from her every word.
The more she explains, the more her eyes shine with liveliness; the more he listens, the more his admiration grows in spite of himself.
It is only when he finds himself under the thready canopy of the huge rhododendrons that grow into trees here, well past the tidy fields of peas and beets and the strange blue tomatoes that are the cornerstone of the local cuisine, that he realizes nobody so much as looked at them as they breezed out of the village.
Well, that was easy.
"I should go back to rescue my team," he thinks aloud.
"If we can find some quairwax, it'll be much easier."
"Some what?!"
"The ritual to regain the Soil's blessing requires a symbolic acknowledgement of its superiority over all other elements," Doctor Song explains matter-of-factly. "It includes pouring from a jug, breathing into the ground, offering some blood, burying some food... and lighting a quairwax stick inside a hole."
"Water, air, life, sustenance and energy," realizes Daniel. He adjusts his glasses and fights the temptation to go on and on giddily about the ethnological connotations – Jack is always giving him Looks when he does – and he should focus on the practicalities anyway. Saving the team first, research later. Hopefully. "So quairwax... it's like a candle?"
"Pretty much." Her smile is self-satisfied and he finds it irritating. But he also kind of likes it. Perhaps.
He sighs. "Fine. Where do we find a quairwax stick?"
He is seriously alarmed by the way she turns to look at him and smiles like a smug cat. "In the Caves of Mailagra," she says.
Yep. A dangerous, panther-like cat.
"This day just keeps getting better," she purrs.
Quairwax, it turns out, is a natural secretion of a paraffin-like material left behind by the evaporation of oily minerals, somewhat similar to Earth's ozokerite (but thankfully not as smelly).
It's easy to scrape it off the fissures and crevices it fills, but less than pleasant.
At least there are a lot of cracks in the mountainside they're in, which let the dark orange sunlight pour through and chase away any scary feeling the tunnels might have evoked. They're actually a rather pleasant place, these caves – except for the quairwax secretions staining everything in sight.
Dr. Song is not helping. She merely looks at Daniel's efforts, arms crossed nonchalantly. He makes an effort not to grow irritated.
"Do they find a better way to light their homes?" he wonders, grimacing at the slimy texture he's sure will not come off his skin, let alone his clothes. "In the future, I mean."
"Actually, once this planet gets to electricity phase, quairwax will become their greatest resource: it's a wonderful electrical insulator. And if mixed with rubber it hardens in whatever shape it's cast, with the same final resistance as cement. Excellent for construction work," answers Dr. Song.
Daniel's grimace widens. "Tell me again why we couldn't buy a quairwax stick from the local market instead?"
He glares at her from where he's getting his hands and clothes stained beyond redemption with the oily mineral and she merely gives him a bland smile.
"The candles for daily use are made from refined quairwax, boiled with water to make the paraffin rise to the surface and skim off the impurities, but for the ritual, the important part is that the quairwax comes straight from the ground. Just try and brush off the rocks and shale as best you can," she instructs him.
After a pause, she adds: "Also, I wanted to come to these Caves. There is no trace left of them or of what destroyed them, but the records of this period talk of an important religious site in this area. I'm curious."
He huffs in irritation.
She's moving slowly around now, her strange device tracing every square inch of the rocky area, recording or scanning or both; her voice echoes lightly in the tunnels.
Daniel wants to curse her, or at least roll his eyes at her, but he sort of can't, because – well. Now he wants to explore these caves too.
Later, while getting out of the quairwax mine with his hard-earned, slimy prize, Daniel accidentally trips over something and triggers a rumbling sound of stone scraping against stone.
It wouldn't mean much, except that every archaeologist's and adventurer's sense he has developed over the years is tingling, screaming at him to check it out, that it's important.
He glances at Dr. Song and she's got a similar expression on her face.
In beautiful unison, they turn back and seek out the door that has opened for them thanks to Daniel's blunder.
The cavern they enter is vast, stretching wide and long far beyond where their eyes can see, but the uneven, rocky ceiling is so low they both have to bend their heads. A marvellously carved floor spreads out under their feet, lovingly moulded lines etched deeply in the rocks to form a tapestry of animals and people vividly telling their stories against a detailed background of leaves and flowers.
Daniel itches to study every inch of it.
By unspoken agreement, they start with the walls, where, like in the prison, no imaging or even geometrical decoration can be found above a clear demarcation line.
"Three feet from the floor, never higher," Daniel mutters in fascinated concentration. It is, in a way, utterly ridiculous (though no more than other customs he's encountered before), but also kind of bewitching. "This really goes in favour of your theory about a religious meaning of the distance from the ground..."
"It's not three feet, it's seven markers," Song corrects in a lecturing tone, but with hidden excitement. "A marker is the unit of measure in this culture, the standard length of their most precious herb, the cleefar, once it naturally turns to stone at the end of its life cycle. Seven is the maximum number of petrified cleefar that can be balanced in a tower before collapsing, so it's the maximum distance from the ground they are allowed."
Too competent to neglect proper procedures even in their excitement, they cursorily document everything they're finding, but it is the floor that truly captivates them, of course. The level of detail and the quality of the art is beyond anything they've seen in this culture so far.
"Look at the intricacy of these plants!" Daniel enthuses. "It is possible that this is intended as an encyclopedia of sorts..."
"No size differences in the depiction of Igraians, this must not be the recording of epics or myths..." speculates Song.
The light of discovery in their eyes is uncannily alike. Lost in the wonder of this buried treasure, they call out their findings with giddy smiles, throw theories back and forth, bicker happily about different hypotheses.
"It actually reminds me more of a text book than a story book."
"Yes! Look! These could be instructions for the harvest of frufar cobs!..."
"And here! A ceramist at work!..."
Daniel doesn't even notice that sometime half-through, she becomes River, nor that she's appropriated some pages torn from his notebook for her notes and sketches as naturally as he's been using her not-quite-a-camera-but-close-enough. They really do work well together.
It could have been minutes later, but Daniel's watch assures him it's actually been hours, when they are startled out of their happy place by an explosion rocking the cave.
Everything goes quiet for a long moment, then a rattle of balancing rocks morphs into a thunderous landslide. Daniel thinks randomly that it's the kind of effect he's only ever seen in movies. And considering his experience with cave-ins and strangeness, that's saying something.
"That sounded like an explosion," he says lamely.
"Because it was," replies River, pushing her hair off her forehead and gripping her gun.
A second rumbling earthquake shakes the ground, making Daniel stagger and stumble.
"That sounded like another explosions!" he says in an almost squeaky voice.
"Again, because it was!" she says, sounding impatient.
"Hey! I may be used to stuff exploding, but usually it's Jack's fault!"
River gives him an inscrutable look: "It may well be."
And she marches off.
"...Right. I knew that!"
And scrambles after her.