15th March 1996 (63:10:25)
— Contact plus 00.06.12:18.45

Acid-dried vegetation seared yellow and black and brown crunching under her feet, Beth climbed to the top of the hill nearby, shielding her eyes from the merciless tropical sun with a hand.

The features of the hills of the countryside were laid bare, smooth rolling curves occasionally taking sharp angles of exposed stone faces, slanting down toward a nearby river valley. This had been a mix of forest and cultivated land not so long ago, but now there were only skeletal spines of dead trees, twisted and yellowed and fragile-looking, ruined brown and poisoned yellow as far as the eye could see.

They'd been more or less completely isolated from the outside world while in the shelter — there hadn't been time to build in the focussing enchantments to allow safe portkey travel, so they hadn't had any access to fresh supplies or the military mail system — but they did have several of Hermione's special new magic radios down there. A couple had been set up in the civilian areas, playing music and radio dramas and news updates, to help keep people's mind occupied, but the one in the military common area had access to a channel with news updates that were rather less sanitised and more detailed than the civilian channel. They'd gotten pretty thorough descriptions of the expansion of the toxic clouds here and in India and the Amazon, daunting estimates of the people who were being killed, secondary effects like riots and, just, general fucked-up-edness in India...

And they also got updates on the project going on to fix the problem. Practically every available resource and every expert with an education in a relevant field had been thrown into it, everything they had all over the world — which was totally the correct response, if they didn't all want to suffocate and/or starve to death. And it turned out science could happen very very quickly when you threw such absurd resources at something, especially with magic to help cheat. Hermione had mentioned in the last letter that Beth had gotten that they were looking into reverse-engineering the beetles somehow (something about alchemy?), but that had been...what, a month ago now? Beth had been moving around too quickly and then had been cut off in a shelter, she'd been out of contact for a while. She probably had a bunch of letters stacked up wherever they were keeping her post...

Anyway, the beetles were supposedly some kind of magic, and they spread too quickly for actually killing them to be in any way practical — the Americans had tried to nuke the fuck out of them in the Amazon, and it'd only slowed them down — so instead they'd decided to figure out how the beetles work, and make their own beetles that, just, did the opposite of the aliens' beetles. That instinctively struck Beth as a very bad idea the first time she heard it, like, what if they got out of control, or the aliens could still... She didn't know, seemed risky.

Maybe she was just being paranoid, though, because it wasn't very long after Beth was locked up in the shelter that they started seeding the affected areas with their own beetles that hunted and killed the alien beetles. They started at the edges, and while the toxic clouds kept spreading (the beetles deeper into the affected area still going), the radio claimed that the presence of their beetles stopped the alien beetles from further spreading through the soil. Just, stopped dead, the teams planting their beetles quickly building a ring closing in the affected areas. Progressing inward from there was a slower process, since all the toxic acid everywhere made the environment rather difficult to work in — thankfully, their beetles spread on their own...and there was no reason they couldn't simply load a bunch of them up into a rocket or a fucking jar or something and lob them across the border. Hell, supposedly a bunch of beetles had been delivered by portkey, it was an easily solvable problem.

Actually fixing the air was a separate thing, involving a second kind of beetle, and...some kind of powder or spray or some shite that they'd spread through the toxic cloud. There'd been warnings before they'd gone ahead and done that, telling people to stay indoors, since the stuff basically turned the poison filling the air into extremely acidic rain that would melt you alive in seconds — not that anyone could go outdoors anyway, but thanks for the warning, she guessed. Once the stuff had fallen to the ground, then some of their reverse-engineered beetles would break it back down into safe stuff, supposedly mostly nutrients to help re-fertilise the soil to get things growing again in the aftermath.

That was another big problem, apparently — without a bunch of living roots and stuff, and the little bugs and bacteria or whatever there was in healthy soil, they were worried that just killing everything would quickly result in all the affected areas turning into uninhabitable desert wastelands. The beetles would help, designed to cover the stuff those bugs and bacteria were supposed to do until they came back on their own, but in the meanwhile they had to get as many plants in the ground as they could, quickly. That was going to be a huge project, they were still working on ramping it up as their beetles did their job.

The whole time, Beth and the others were stuck down in the shelter, following a bland, boring routine, trying to keep themselves occupied. Once Beth's break was done, she was cycled between guard duty shifts, on a rather more full schedule than most of the other military people. Beth's omniglottalism hadn't stopped being useful, after all — she was often posted in the sections for the various hill tribes and the like, since she had a better shot at being able to tell what the hell was going on than pretty much everyone else.

Not that much had really happened, most of her actual work hours were extremely uneventful, which was honestly kind of nice after fighting for months and running around helping fill shelters on very little sleep for weeks. Mostly, she just stood or sat around, intermittently chatting with the residents — picking up bits and pieces of a couple more languages while she was at it, because of course. The occasional dispute between residents did occasionally come up, Beth inserting herself to act as a somewhat ineffective mediator, since she mostly didn't speak the language(s) very well. Though, people needing to slow down and explain what was happening to the person in the room with a gun — and a wand, of course, but that was less visible from the outside — probably did more to cool tempers than anything Beth could do herself. She was not a particularly diplomatic person, after all. But whatever, none of it got that bad — a few times someone would effectively be put in a time-out up in quarantine, but nothing escalated into serious issues, at least.

Beth had no idea how long their good will would have lasted, but thankfully they'd only been trapped in there together for a few weeks. They'd probably still be living out of the shelter for a while yet, since it wasn't like they had anywhere else to go, but at least they'd be able to get some air topside when they needed it.

The reports they got over the radio had gradually grown more optimistic as the days went on — the civilian radio had even gotten the announcement that they'd found a fix once they'd proven that their beetles stopped the aliens' from spreading. There were still a few isolated pockets of alien beetles stubbornly holding on, but most of the toxic clouds had been stripped out of the air. The process of cleaning up the acids and poisons left on the ground was still ongoing, but whoever was in charge of this shite had started clearing areas as safe, preparing teams to send in more fertilising bugs and bringing in teams of muggles and mages and huge supplies of seeds and building materials and whatever else to start the replanting and building new farming villages from scratch. Sections of the affected areas were being cleared starting at the edges and working their way in, bit by bit, the process of cleaning the environment taking longer depending on how long they'd been contaminated — but they were certain the crisis was passed, only one or two weeks until the last of the poison was cleansed.

Of course, the devastation left behind would still need to be dealt with. Their shelter had been told that a team of muggle and magical experts, complete with some fresh supplies and a huge pallet of seeds and farming equipment to start the replanting, was in the process of being put together and should arrive in the next couple days. (Monday morning, they thought, but delays happened.) At that time they'd start reconnecting their shelter to proper communications and transportation and such...which Beth was pretty sure was all magical now? Whatever. Since most all of the people in their shelter had been farmers anyway, they'd all basically been conscripted to help with the replanting, but the impression Beth had gotten listening in is that they were mostly fine with that — after all, it was a critical infrastructure project, so at the very least they'd be fed and protected through the unrest certain to come in the wake of the disaster. They were all homeless now, and had lost everything they owned that they hadn't been able to carry with them, and the job came with a guarantee of a plot of land to live/farm on, so, not a bad deal, really. They'd probably starve to death in short order if left to their own devices, under the circumstances...

Beth had already gotten a turn on the radio to volunteer to help with reconstruction here. Now that the fighting was done, they were being cycled back to Britain for leave and reassignment anyway — after a brief talk with some assistant or something at the British command centre in Indochina, and a wait of a couple days, she was informed that some Major General had signed off on the loan of her omniglot-related services to the Vietnamese army being extended. Which wasn't unreasonable, she guessed, whatever experts they were sending in were probably going to need a translator to coordinate with the locals. The assignment would end with the initial phase of the work here, clearing the ruined land and getting new plants in the ground. At that point, she'd be being sent back home for at least a few months of leave, no matter what — apparently Ramsey had been quite insistent on that point, which was a surprise to Beth, honestly.

(She hadn't stopped being convinced that Ramsey was actually literally Voldemort, and that she was apparently insisting to their superiors that Beth be given a break for her own good was just...weird, just weird, she didn't what to do with that.)

It was hard to imagine they would have made much progress by the time she was pulled back home — this place was fucking ruined. There was nothing left.

Beth had been pretty ambivalent about the climate in Vietnam from the start, honestly. It'd been a mix of better and worse than the Congo, depending on which thing you looked at. It was fucking hot, for one thing, and humid as all hell — it was the dry season now, which meant it rained less (most places inland it didn't really rain at all), but that somehow didn't stop the air from being so thick it was practically halfway to steam. And there were the bugs, of course, had to be bugs everywhere. But a lot of the plants were kind of neat-looking, and the valleys in the mountains all sharp and dramatic, almost picturesque, like, she could imagine people making countless pretty landscape paintings out of this shite, and all the different peoples speaking a smattering of languages and their little villages decorated by hand with colourful embroidery and paint on the walls, and...

And it was gone. There was nothing left, just bare hills coloured brown and yellow with the desiccated remains of the forest that had been.

It was painfully sad. As in, it physically hurt, looking over the hills and the valley below a hot sharp lump building in Beth's chest and throat, forcing her breaths thick and half-strangled, the harsh sun overhead and the vaguely chemical-y tang to the air only partly responsible for the prickle of tears in her eyes...

All the aliens that had landed here had been killed, but they'd had still managed to take literally everything with them. Bastards.

Beth wasn't the only one who'd come up, a slow trickle of people appearing out of the hidden entrances to the shelter. A rather modest fraction of the residents, a few from each block volunteered to go out and see what had come of the place and report back — they'd been told that there wouldn't be much to see, the forest entirely killed, and after getting a look they'd have to go right back in the shelter anyway, so most hadn't wanted to bother. By the intensely emotional reaction from a fair number of them when they saw what the place had been reduced to — this had been home for a lot of the residents, only a month ago, farming the river valley below for uncounted generations — Beth assumed at least some of them were simple reluctant to see the damage that had been done, for it to be real.

It was hard enough for Beth to look at, and she didn't even live here.

The scene was unnaturally quiet. There was some low chatter from the people around, the occasional shout or cry, the crackling crunch of dead things underfoot. Perhaps a faint skittering sound as the dried leaves were shifted by the gentle breeze, empty branches cracking and creaking. No hissing rustle of leaves, no twittering of birds — Hedwig likely the only bird for miles around, drifting in gentle curves against the blue sky overhead — no chittering and buzzing of insects.

There was a little centre of life and activity around the shelter, but beyond that nothing, eerie dead silence.

It was hard to imagine this place would ever come alive again. Beth knew you could pull off a lot of crazy shite with magic, but...

She heard footsteps coming up behind her, glanced over her shoulder — Phương, Diệu, and Tuấn, not entirely surprised to see them. She'd ended up getting to know plenty of people in the shelter, since they were stuck together in rather close quarters, but she'd ended up spending the most time with Phương and Diệu. No particular reason, she didn't think, it'd just ended up that way. (They were some of the youngest military types here, only a few years older than Beth, and that wasn't a bad reason by itself.) She honestly suspected she might have a little bit of a crush on Diệu, she tried not to be creepy about it — especially since people did know she was gay, with Ianin around and Beth being weird about bathing the secret hadn't lasted very long — but she really had absolutely no idea if it was obvious to everyone else. Tuấn was around sometimes because he was related to Diệu somehow (Beth wasn't sure how exactly, some kind of cousins), and Phương and Tuấn were kind of dancing around each other, being all subtly flirty. She was pretty sure they hadn't actually done anything yet, since there wasn't exactly a lot of privacy down there, but she wouldn't be surprised if Phương and Tuấn ended up dating before too long...or whatever the appropriate term was for the culture and their present circumstances, she had no idea.

As they approached, Tuấn called, "I'm guessing the view isn't any better up there."

"No, there's just more of it."

"It's an awful mess," Phương agreed, nudging the stem of...some kind of bush or something — even a light impact of her boot was enough to make it crack and fall apart. She grimaced, biting out a sigh. "I knew it would be bad, but... The bombings back in the war took long enough to come back from, this is so much worse."

No one seemed to have anything to say to that, staring morosely out at the ruined forest. Beth didn't know much about the long war the locals had fought for independence, but she didn't have to to know this was worse — a firebomb burning down a stretch of forest of farmland wasn't even on the same scale as poison and acid killing literally everything, over like a third of the country. Maybe half? Beth still wasn't sure where precisely they were, honestly.

After a brief silence Tuấn drew attention back with a little hum. "We'll need to set up a spot for the replanting team to come in. By the river's better, you think?"

It took a couple seconds for Beth to realise he was asking her — she was the only mage of the four of them. "Oh, er, probably. Depending on the size of the team they have coming in, we'll probably want a clear area five metres to a side, as flat as possible. The hills are pretty uneven, it'll probably have to go down by the river." That was where they'd need most of the supplies to start off anyway, so, convenient.

There was a little bit of a chatter then, Beth only really half listening. Tuấn wanted to gather up some people to go down to the river and start preparing the landing site — antsy from being trapped in the shelter so long, she suspected, just wanted to do something. Nah, Beth wasn't coming with, she thought she'd start digging out trees. They would need to get rid of all the dead shite, and they wouldn't be able to get serious equipment in here, so uprooting the big stuff was going to require magic. She might as well start near the shelter. Before too long, Phương and Tuấn were walking off, shouting over to other people, starting to bring together a group.

Diệu didn't move, though, still lingering at the bottom of the tiny little rise Beth was standing on. Silently, just... Kind of making Beth a little self-conscious, honestly. Trying not to look awkward, she grabbed a few stems of...something — impossible to tell what it used to be — the surface harsh and jagged in her hand. A couple breaking and digging charms at the ground, a tug, the desiccated material flaking in her hand, and the dead plants came free, a fair bit of the roots coming with the stems, gnarled and tangled and equally dead-looking.

The acid-scorched and dry earth let out a puff of dust as the roots were yanked out, Beth held her breath, beetles that looked very much like the aliens' scurrying around in the disturbed dirt, blue and dark brown and green and orange. Mostly the ones designed to get nutrients back in the soil, she thought — supposedly the different colours all did different things, but Beth wasn't sure which was which. She tossed the dead stalks aside, falling with a series of cracking noises into a jagged pile. And she moved on to the next handful.

She was working at loosening up the roots of a tree — leaning precariously at the edge of the little rise, stripped bare, half of the length of the branches broken off — when she heard a crunching of feet, Diệu climbing up the little rise. Feeling uncomfortably observed, Beth tried to ignore her, cast a couple more charms at the ground under the tree, beetles showing themselves just to burrow out of sight again, the tree listing further at a push against the trunk, a couple more charms...

She twitched at the unexpected touch on her arm, just above her elbow. "It'll be all right." Glancing to her left, Diệu was leaning over a little, to get a better angle on her face. It was hard to read her expression exactly, eyes attentive, a curl to her lips that could mean anything.

Beth belatedly realised she was paying rather more attention to Diệu's lips than necessary, forced herself to look away. "Does anything seem all right to you?"

"No. But it'll come back. Not the same as it was before, true, but it'll come back. We are still here — the rest we can sort out later."

"...I know that." With a flick of her wand hand (Diệu had grabbed her other arm), Beth tossed a bludgeoning charm at the tree. The force badly cracked the trunk, dried wood splintering, but it was enough to tip it over, ponderously leaning, the roots tearing up the ground with more little puffs of dust, before finally crashing to the ground with a cacophony of twigs snapping.

"Why did you volunteer to stay behind?"

Beth twitched, glanced at Diệu. "What?"

"The rest of your countrymen are going back home, right? Why did you ask to stay?"

...Well, that was kind of hard to explain, actually. Feeling especially self-conscious with Diệu bloody well watching her (very aware of her hand on Beth's arm), she stared off over the ruined hills, shrugging. "I dunno. I guess it... It doesn't seem like it's done. We killed the bastards, yeah, but they still..." She gestured vaguely off at the devastation with her wand hand. "I didn't want to leave with the job half-finished. Felt wrong somehow."

Also, if she was being completely honest, she was kind of scared to go home. She'd been away what felt like a terribly long time, and she'd done a lot, and... And Britain was probably a rather different place than it'd been before she left — not as changed as Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia, obviously, since the damage was much less, but certainly different — and she'd only talked to her friends by letter for, like, half a year at this point. She couldn't help the feeling that she might not...fit, anymore.

Not that that was an unusual feeling, honestly — she often felt like she didn't quite fit, just somewhat out of place, like something growing in one of Petunia's bloody flower beds that wasn't supposed to be there. Which she knew was fucked-up brain stuff from her miserable bloody childhood, but just because she knew it was irrational didn't mean she could stop.

"The job is never finished. Not really."

Beth wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean.

Diệu gave her shoulder a little pat before letting go, taking a step away. "Remember to come in for tea. We're on duty this afternoon."

"Yeah, yeah, I'll remember. See you later." She listened for Diệu's crunching footsteps to move away before reaching for the next handful of dead plant.

It didn't take very long working under the tropical sun — tearing up bushes and vines or whatever, digging up trees and sending them crashing to the ground, gradually building up piles of bleached and blackened and cracking wood — before Beth was hot and flushed, sweating in the merciless dry season heat. But she kept working anyway, tearing a ring around the entrances to the shelter, moving one strand of bushes to the next, trees falling one after another, wiping the sweat out of her eyes and hitting herself with an occasional cooling charm before moving on again.

She'd bled to help save this country — she could afford to spend some of her sweat to help fix it up afterward.