'Why do you have a perception filter?' asked Lt. Castillo, the day after the Doctor informed them of her actions. She, Lt. Castillo, refused the cooling pack for her bruises. But later would ask for one when no one else could see. Dr. Chen knew it wasn't a simple amount of pride, but that as the team leader she had to wear her injuries well to keep up morale, especially if they were sustained in combat from a subordinate opponent.

'Easier than make-up,' Dr. Ruth Clayton said off-handedly. She caught Joshua's eye and he looked away too quickly.

She can't know, he thought, all she knows is I use one, she can't know why—no one could know why.

Everyone else gave a polite chuckle at her remark and dismissed it.

Diana was alone in the study room. It reminded her of study halls, a more intimate and less comfortable one, but the quiet and soundproofing gave her peace. Even when the others came in together, they paused briefly in the threshold and met her gaze. Chitra felt the embarrassment of being caught, aware it would look like they three were hanging out without her and coming her to avoid her. Icrel, too, and believed himself capable to being more socially fluid to join Diana and talk to her with the others. Orlo did not think about these things—no, he did, he just chose to ignore them and be more logical. This isn't a cultural thing, he's just like that, even amongst his own species they find him a solitary and slightly arrogant thing.

Orlo was the first to move, sliding between Icrel and Chitra, over to the one seat designed for his comfort. He took a data pad and began his work in silence. He did not pass a remark of greeting. He managed to convince himself later that it wasn't rude, and if it was, rudeness was just a social construct and therefore not real.

Icrel sat with Diana and she could feel the pity from him. She wasn't sure if she liked it, he was the weirdo, to be pitied by him was to mean she had been brought low from a height she didn't mean to acquire.

'Did you hear about the time differentiation?'

'Doctor Clayton's proposed theory of layered chronology?'

'Yes, but we've found more evidence. Captain .973 got bored I guess—'

' .937,' corrected Orlo just because he had to be right and felt like he needed dialogue.

'The Captain got bored I guess and requested a job to help the research. They did a little digging and it shows that outside the boundaries, that Beyond area, isn't just a few hundred years over, but millennia! Yet, crazy thing, the flora we've found, the stuff in the clusters is so genetically varied and millennia more developed that those outside.'

Diana looked up from her work. She had not noticed Chitra move into the room and begin her own work. 'How can that be?'

Icrel shrugged. 'The Doctor said something about distortions within distortions. If one tree was at ten seconds to one for us, and then the forest is under a different distortion of three centuries to one minute, then the tree inside might continue at ten to one with out time, or adapt to the three centuries to one minute bubble. She also said it might give out at any moment.'

'Interesting. And she did say about wormholes, not just temporal ratio fields.'

Icrel laughed and patted Diana's hand. 'Sorry, you just said that so fluently.'

She laughed too and Chitra focused hard on her research, tensing.

We are not having a love triangle, or love corner. I tried to avoid the drama, but its either young adults acting like teenagers, or an awkward rom-com between Dr. Matsumoto and Hestamoloc with Dr. Zimorax as the straight best friend and I don't care to subject myself to that any more than this.

'What was your point about wormholes?' asked Chitra, pleasant, chirpy, the class clown who would never dream of being petty or threatened because she was not in the arena.

Icrel pulled back his hand and turned on his chair to let to the two women face one another. Only Chitra felt like this was an argument.

'That any number of seeds or bacteria or even fully grown life could have moved from our future to that past and caused a jump in evolutionary development.'

Chitra shrugged, not quite understanding or seeing how important this was. 'And what are you working on? I haven't seen you at the event site since we went exploring.'

Dian sat straighter and forced a smile. She understood now, although Chitra tried to mean it like a peace offering. Diana knew they would think she was requesting indoor work, that her hands were too delicate for the manual work of digging in the dirt, or carefully climbing rough and weathered rock for interesting features.

'Iconography. Everything you have all found that is discernable I am sorting through. Right now I'm categorising into iconography mural, iconography symbol, and iconography writing. The easy ones were the faces at the mausoleum and auditorium. I've categorised numeracy in with writing because it will follow an ascending pattern more obviously. Actually, more of an increasing, not ascending.'

'Don't you think its weird the faces look human?' asked Icrel.

Diana answered: 'No. It's considered a good evolutionary pathway for most species and we actually don't know what happened to a lot of those early colonists once they left the Earth solar system. And also considering what Doctor Clayton said about this place being something of a sink hole for time-space anomalies, it is entirely possible these are humans.'

'Yes, the half-face is similar to some Old Earth deities Hela, the daughter of the goddess of spring and god of death. But humans accidentally travelling through a wormhole safely and getting to another planet and time is entirely silly, no?' added Chitra, because she had to say something.

'No, there are coincidences and the collective unconscious of the universe,' Diana said this as if it was just another theory and not something she was brought up to believe, faith and science are much the same, but throughout societies they do divide and bicker, in her life, she understood they were rivals and tried her best to be an intermediary. 'Look at Song's Playground Theory.'

'What's that? I'm xeno-biology,' said Icrel feeling like he was being assaulted by theory and his defence was flimsy.

Chitra took the reigns, seeing him shrink away and worrying briefly if her alliance with Diana would come at the cost of her… whatever with Icrel. 'Stories of monsters are passed down through generations, dangers that occur in cycles. Song's theory suggests these devolve into games that children play as they are more connected to a primal experience while developing higher thought preparing them for real dangers, passing down the information.'

'Like Dalek Eye or… and I know the old name is offensive, but Remember Me Missus Slitheen?'

Icrel shook their head, he hadn't experienced things like that. And then to quickly move on from that uneasy area, he looked at Diana and asked, 'What about the language? Any luck with that?'

Chitra would later hate him for that. She would forgive him eventually too.

Diana looked at Icrel and tried to gauge whether this was just a joke, or a serious question. She decided it was serious and so answered seriously: 'Language is more complex than what I can decipher. People spend whole lives just trying to understand one lost language. We might never know what any of these say.' Diana flicked through the various recorded image data. 'Although, I can guess this one is a sexual slander,' said Diana identifying one.

'What, and how?' Icrel was loving this.

'The icon beside it is similar to what we assume is the hospital, one of the… wards,' odd choice of word for such a small room with the scant remains of wooden cradles, 'has this to mean new life, or children. And typically graffiti is a slander. I believe on Unoc Major that they translated the lost language of Yrr from three different graffiti with sexual slander.'

Chitra took over, because this was funny and she was the class clown, Diana was of course too prim and proper to say these things aloud. 'Desmi's has her mother's weak knees; a sad husband has no friend, a sad wife has no husbands; Regyrr has a tight hole.' Chitra and Icrel laughed mightily at this. Chitra committed a few more to memory to relay on such occasions, she told of old Earth where a drought caused a European river to display the words in an ancient language, 'If you can read this, you're doomed,' or the impossibly high cliffs that were once icy had been graffiti with 'this is really high.' People are people every when and many of them think themselves funny.

The hydroponics station shone a light blue, Aumegden found the glow calming. It had been a quiet day, it was a quiet night. No one ever wanted the hydroponics duties when they were on an alien world, everyone wanted to be exploring. Aumegden too, but she was happy to do her duty for others. No one else liked it and she didn't find it that bothersome. It gave her time to be alone and listen to her music. It was nothing fancy, just simple harp and guitar pleasantly plucked. The device wasn't powerful or loud, but built to last. She performed the old engineering of placing its speaker in a cup to amplify the sound.

Just Aumegden, in the glow of pale blue light, sitting on a stool, over-looking the water. The grills that held the vegetation in place were webbed with roots and the suggestion of greens shoots.

Readings showed that the minerals found in the local water supply are within an acceptable range of hydroponic. Meaning they don't have to ration the freshwater taken from off-world.

The others had yet still to report any vegetation that was able to be consumed, let alone designed for consumption. It was something Aumegden had suspected for a while, but Dr. Matsumoto confirmed it: The planet plant-life, outside the event site, had not evolved for consumption. If they searched for life, they might find some in the hot bog-lands in the south-west hemisphere. But as is, the world was empty of life, no need for strawberries to grow juicy and delicious to mammals, to be digested and then excreted with seeds and fertiliser, to grow again elsewhere. Most of the seeds and flora on this planet, as you have seen perhaps, are carried on the wind.

Besides, this is like being back home. Home being Orbit 2, not whatever planet she was rehabilitated on. Orbit 2, minor gravity, the quietude, the hum of the engines. Everyone had a duty to maintain the others, this was her job, this was her duty, this is what it meant to part of a team, a family, a peoples—your duty to protect and ease their lives, even if it was a bother or boring. Sometimes that meant being alone for a long time.

Vazican Zimorax played a version of solitaire, she was frequently unsuccessful, but the patterns and games were good for her mind. It allowed her to think about something other than iconography. She had given Diana the task as something towards an apology for the argument, but she also wanted to oversee some of it herself. She knew that if she was at the point of seeing patterns that couldn't be there, so was Diana. Doctor Clayton was with her, sitting on another bench, calculating. She was using pencil and paper. The paper was landscape and filled with tiny equations that resulted in diagrams that spanned on to another landscape page beside it.

Vanessa joined them and Vazican almost flinched to hide her cards and get back to work. Then she reminded herself she was an adult and was doing her work, relaxing was part of her job, to keep her focused.

Vanessa sat by her and began to leaf through the data pads containing the most of the iconography.

'May I?'

'No, please don't,' said Vazican with no effort to stop her.

Lt. Vanessa Castillo paused briefly to gauge Vazican's emotional state and then continued shifting through the images

'How is your progress?'

Vazican continued to play with the cards. 'Slowly. Unfortunately we have no certain context for what anything could mean. Although we have discerned for definite two forms of written language.' She paused to remember and example. 'Image a-t thirty-one, is blockier, not having visible curvature, only straight lines and infrequent angels, with accents surrounding shapes; and image b-r twenty-five is curved, almost like a type of cursive. The cursive is more frequently found indoors and in the well-preserved buildings, rarely any of the apartment towers. While the blockier writing is everywhere, like graffiti. I suspect its a difference in class languages. We've noticed the blockier writing is exclusively on the dams, so we suspect it originates, or was primarily used, for labourers.'

'This one looked Peladonian,' said Vanessa, vaguely. She tried to sound more certain but couldn't muster it, there was something vaguely familiar about the icon. 'I can't say for certain, I'm third-generation off-world, but it does look like some broach my grandmother had.'

She returned the data pad to Vazican who took her time getting to it. She had no idea how Lt. Castillo didn't see that she was out of office hours at that moment. She looked at the image and feigned interest.

'Is it possible Peladon made contact? They were very advanced in their space-faring, they took initiative to explore planets.'

Vazican Zimorax swore to herself and sighed deeply. 'That is unlikely.'

'Or maybe even a thought parasite,' Lt. Castilloa suggested a little more sharply.

'Are they even real?'

'Oh yeah,' said the Doctor, the two women looked at her. 'Thought parasite is a bit of a nasty interpretation. Metamememorphics. I'm trying to remember their names. Hervoken I suppose… Like any form of life they can be kindly or dangerous. If they did come here and wanted to be known, we'd know about them. As they are psionic energy they can only be registered if they want to be registered, although being vaguely registered grants them their life usually. Calling them vain is like calling us greedy because we need to breathe.'

Well, isn't that magnanimous.

The Doctor continued: 'It's unlikely to be Peladon, they never reached this far before they were regulated. It could just be coincidence. It happens, they even have a name for it, multiple discovery.'

I think you might be expecting a Dennis the Menace reference from her, from Dr. Who, the Doctor, but not this one. Not yet. She has kindly, quietly dismissed their theories and returned to her own calculations. Perhaps to think of her as a rebellious child under abusive parents, they still snap and bite every so often when they feel their soul being encroach upon, but otherwise will endure and keep unimportant.

'I suppose we should move on from defining them and return to context analysis.'

'Why does defining come first?' This had a dismissive tone Dr. Zimorax didn't appreciate, but she was off duty and entirely stopped herself from clocking in just to argue.

'I meant categorisation. And it doesn't, context is part of the classification. But we try to focus in phases. We've found some fabrics that can be compared. Some of them have the iconography.'

Lt. Castillo rose. 'Then I will leave you to your phased work,' again this was said like some sneer.

Dr. Zimorax clocked back in and leaned back to address Lt. Castillo as she left. 'Thank you, Vanessa. I greatly appreciate your motivating talks.'

Lt. Castillo stopped in the door way, turn a little, but not enough to give Dr. Zimorax her full attention, she still addressed her back. Lt. Castilloa gave a slight nod and walked on.

When the door closed and she was out of earshot, Dr. Zimorax had some harsh words for her aloud. She didn't expect Dr. Clayton to rise to it, or agree with her, but she was certain the pointed 'Yep' was holding back her own harsh words for Lt. Castillo.

Examination of the fabrics and tapestries helped in further categorising the differences in writing, icons and the difference in the lower and higher writing system. In all of the tapestries, only the oldest ones had any indication of the lower writing system, they were brief articles, suggestive of a chyron or a title card. Some vestments that hung loose had metal jewellery worn on them. The most preserved were those with the half-face. These were found outside the mausoleum, the one with the black dome. They reasoned a mausoleum because scans showed a deep cavernous lower level full of biological matter. Combined with the oils, fats and dried perfume powder jars that hadn't spoiled in the many years. It was understood that this was where the dead were sealed away. Although they couldn't be certain, the theory came that the half-face was a goddess of death, a representation that life and death are not a binary, but a process. You are not alive and then dead, you are alive and dying, you are dead and made of living things.

And so they began their voyage into the underground mausoleum to see how well the bodies were preserved, to see what peoples had lived in one spot for so many millennia on a forgotten world.