Hope you are enjoying this excursion into a different aspect of Pern. This isn't canon at the moment, but I will take you to meet some dragons in due course.
When Saska woke the next day she spent some time revelling in the familiarity of her surroundings. This was home, the way everything was arranged, the very cool neutral colours splashed with her own personal collection of trivia.
That stone had come from the far side of Benden, from a shore lapped by an acid green inland sea where it seemed impossible for life to flourish, yet her father had very gently turned over a stone and shown her the mass of life underneath it. Not the stone she had in her collection, that one had come from an area devoid of life; her father had allowed her to use his spectrograph to make sure of that before she would pick up the stone.
That piece of inexpert weaving had come from something she had seen in a vid, and tried out with sticks and bits of vine stem; her mother had encased it in an inert dome to preserve it for her.
Over there, her collection of hand copied texts; she had seen something about it and wanted to try it out, and spent months laboriously copying from the computer interface before tiring of that craze.
Saska came out of bed and peered at herself in the mirror.
- you look lovely
Saska jumped into the air and whirled around, and then looked back at her reflection in the mirror.
"Laroth?"
- yes I am at the Weyr. The big man is very excited about you
"So you keep saying. Do you know the dragon that transported the ship I came in?"
- Modeth is a very powerful bronze. He has never flown me.
Saska had a dizzying image of two dragons flying unaided and intertwined, and found she was blushing.
"Who are you talking to?" her father called from the corridor.
"The green dragon Laroth."
"You shouldn't need to speak out loud, she should be able to hear you if you project to her."
"That's right, I did that before."
Saska finished dressing, and then came out to find some breakfast in the kitchen, mixing berries with cereal, and pouring tea.
"That's better! I've avoided tea since I left here."
"I could have sent you some," her mother said. "Disguised as research material."
Saska laughed and shook her head. "There was a lot of that going on," she admitted.
Her father looked up from the papers he was shuffling together.
"This green dragon - Laroth - did she give any indication about you visiting the Weyr?"
"No. She just said the big man was excited. That's all she says about him."
"Hmm. We might go and visit, I think. I could do with checking on how the imposition of an alien life form has impacted on the evolution of the place."
"And I could do with some nice shards of black glass to polish and put into my mobiles," her mother said with a nod. "Good. We aren't expected back at the project for a while, so I think we might just take a little trip out together."
Saska looked from one to the other with fond exasperation. This was the way all their expeditions started, and yet somehow at the end of it there was always food and clothing, shelter, and the scientific instruments they needed.
"You've some messages, by the way," her father said, indicating the computer interface. Saska switched it on and checked her social pages, ignoring most of the comments, glancing at the appeals and chain letters, and then clicked into her mail account.
There was a note from Ron hoping she was OK. Saska sent him a brief answer to thank him, and then read the other messages from old college friends, one from a girl she had met briefly on A-Zed-One. She did not make friends easily, but she replied to that message, reading about her teaching classes.
"Anything interesting?" her father asked.
"No, not really. I made some friends at Uni, Dad, but I've not kept up with them somehow. They were all very - earnest."
He laughed and shook his head. "That's not what Uni is for! Earnest is for when you're trying to get a job, because you know you frivvled your time away at Uni."
Saska grinned at him. "Did you frivvle, Dad?"
"Oh, I was definitely head frivvler in my year," he replied, and Saska made a face at him and closed the computer down, realising that she was one of the very few people who did that; most people kept their personal messaging interfaces open all the time and responded to them in real time.
By midday they were travelling out of the city. This was not wilderness anymore; the area around the City was intensively farmed under domes, recycling in the efficient manner that marked all of Terrvert's planetary ventures. Nothing was wasted, and nothing was left over, Saska thought, staring out at the expanse of domes. Thinking of her father's laughing comments, she decided that if there was a frivolous side to the colonies Terrvert founded, she had yet to experience them.
"That's why I left everything in my room," she said aloud, involuntarily, and her mother glanced across at her.
"Your room is your own space, that's one of the founding rules of Terrvert," she replied. "Anything outside is fair game for the recyclers, but inside - you can pile it full of the most dreadful things, no one can gainsay you."
"Is it the same on Pern?"
"I doubt it. They have different rules, I'm sure."
Saska thought about two different colonies suddenly finding each other in the midst of space.
"Was it a shock, d'you think? Meeting up?"
"I shouldn't image it was very easy," her father replied. "They both knew they'd come from Old Earth, of course, but from completely different directions and with different aims, one as a semi-agrarian low tech response to some pretty dreadful fighting in the Nathi wars, and other as a scientific response to that war."
"That was what founded both colonies?"
"So they say. The Pernese had history, medicine, agriculture, science, all the basic instructions built into their AIVAS of course, as Terrvert did. The colonies took completely different courses but then - a dragon-ship touched down on a Terrvert world having detected speech patterns the dragon recognised."
"And the rest is history?"
Her father laughed and shook his head. "We are history, my dear, all of us with our own stories to tell. Now then - look over there - just rising over the horizon - that's the Weyr of Benden."