Title: A Lesson in Legends
Author: Karina
Rating: PG
Pairing: Milliardo + Jamie
Notes: Challenge 230. Baby Series 4 #148. Takes place following Original Truth.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Extended Length
Many thanks to ShenLong Deb for her work betaing this set of fics.
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the Characters from the series but the baby is mine.
Title: A Lesson in Legends
"So... How would the people who dug the holes... Arc... Arceogi...How would they know what it was that knocked over the buildings?"
Milliardo watched as Duo stretched slowly, looking around the room and finally settling to watch him and Jamie. A curious tilt to his head and a slightly arched eyebrow gave away his curiosity over what they had been talking about for so long.
"Over time soil builds up and buries the past. Archaeologists dig down carefully, looking for evidence they can say with certainty comes from a particular time in human history. They have various ways of telling how old something might be. They need to dig very carefully, or they can make mistakes. They scrape the soil back millimetre by millimetre, just so they get it right. You will see evidence of that in the coming days, because I am very much afraid we will be seeing excavations dug to assess the past before we can rebuild large sections of the city. If this storm is like those in the past, then very few wooden buildings will survive, and even brick and stone construction will fail. In areas that have not been archaeologically investigated before, we shall need to bring in archaeologists to excavate and record the past history of the site before we can plan out and reconstruct the city."
"But how do they know it was a storm that destroyed the buildings?"
"This storm will enable us to examine the past records of what we assume was storm damage and confirm their accounts of the past. A building bowled over by a strong wind or storm surge does not simply fall straight down, it will fall on a slant initially and then a massive jumble of debris, wind driven or surge driven, will form. Massive hail stones will not simply bounce off a building, they will tear through roofs and walls, smashing timbers, destroying the buildings in a quite particular way. We can compare the records of the excavations they dug in the past with the destruction going on outside now, and we will know just how accurately they have read the evidence."
"But I still don't understand the dragon. Just wind in the mountains? I don't understand how people could think that was a dragon."
"They would see the storm itself as being caused by the angry dragon. The beast might have called up the storm to punish them and, in the midst of the storm, it might have come into their villages and crofts and wreaked destruction. Then, whilst the storm still raged, it vanishes back into the mountains, its need for destruction sated... At least for the most part. But the beast might come again, at some time in the future." Milliardo smiled at the boy, shrugging broad shoulders slightly "We have to remember that we don't think the way our ancestors did. We live in much more enlightened times."
"But there are no such things as dragons."
"No, there are not... But who is to say that that has always been so? Think about this... People might have found the fossilised bones of a dinosaur and they would have been huge! Much larger than any animal known to walk the Earth at that time. No human had been alive in the days of the dinosaurs, so what were they to think? People in the distant past did not go to school and learn from the accumulated wisdom of the race as we now do. Each generation learns more and leaves more for the next generation to learn. To them such huge bones would likely have meant there must be a creature out there, in the high mountains, deep in the dark forests; even if it has not been seen walking around. There is your dragon, Jamie. The bones of a dinosaur, the wail of the wind in the mountain heights and the terrible destruction of a super storm. Put it all together and you potentially get the stuff of legend."
End
Karina Robertson 2014