kore_logs | Tunnel Vision is Not Always Helpful

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Tunnel Vision is Not Always Helpful

Who: Martha Jones and Open
When: Day 121
Where: The destroyed clinic and eventually the tunnels
What: Saving medicine

Martha heard the service announcement. She would make her way to the tunnels, after she A) gathered up as much medical supplies as she could carry and B) make her way out of the partially destroyed pharmacy.

So she continued to grab every bit of supplies she could as she packed bags. Somehow she'd figure out a way to carry it all.

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"I heard it from someone after arriving. I think the scientists had left some paper lying around back there," Meja recalls. "But that was about all of it. Nothing too significant — at least, until we —"

And then the tunnel hits her, really hits her, and once again she feels cut off, as when she'd arrived in the Cape. But this is worse. Her strength fades away from her, her senses dull, and things she isn't even aware of vanish. Meja stops and stands still a moment, staring down the tunnel, and she feels...

...human.

It's disconcerting. She blinks.

"Do you feel anything?"

"Until we...?" Martha began, wondering what Meja was going to say. She stops so as to not get so far ahead and turns back to the woman.

"Feel anything? Other than cold, dank tunnel air? No."

Her brow creases. "Is everything all right Meja?"

Meja shakes her head slightly, beginning to walk again to catch up. She hopes that this won't last to the end of the tunnel, or out of it. "It's like there's a... block. I can barely feel anything."

She spends most of her time being able to sense the trees around her, at least, or in this case their roots, and now everything is dull and quiet. As though she's wearing ear plugs.

"Nothing life-threatening, however," she adds. She still has her weapons and her seven hundred years of combat experience, if things suddenly become hairy. But she hopes that they won't.

Martha holds out her hand to catch the other woman's as Meja walks by. There's nothing romantic in the gesture. It's just sort of second nature from traveling with the Doctor. Harder to get separated that way.

"Well, I don't sense anything weird either, and as I've said before, I've spent way more time in tunnels than any normal person should.

"Still, knowing there's nothing life-threatening at the moment is good. Running in the dark is never fun."

It's a connection to something, which she's sorely lacking at the moment, and Meja's grateful. It makes her feel a lot less unnerved about the sudden change in situation. Valkyrie are, at home, connected to both Yggdrasil and one another, if only in an abstract mental sense. She has neither, here in the Cape.

"That's not quite what I meant," she has to admit. "I feel human again."

"Well... that's good too. I'd rather my only companion in the tunnel didn't drop dead from being human. I guess we'll just have to be prepared if there is something life-threatening in the tunnel then."

She grinned and started forward again, listening carefully for any clues.

Meja chuckles. Martha's right — she may be more limited, at the moment, but she's only as 'limited' as Martha. And humans, really, aren't limited at all, when they put their minds to it.

"It's simply been a while, that's all." She keeps a close eye on the ground, for anything that might be problematic. "This place does love to change people, or so I've heard."

Martha's paying little attention to the ground and instead looking around the walls and ceiling. The ground is ground. It'll likely stay there.

"We don't know what this place is," she replied. Now that they were in the tunnels, there was no telling where they were or what they'd meet with.

"Someone told me about waking up a different species, one morning," Meja muses. She's concerned for rocks that might trip them, for the most part, or for unstable patches of ground. "It suggests a great deal of power in... whatever is keeping us here."

"Fascinating," Martha remarks. "Everyone I've met seems to be who they were from the start. The angels, the aliens... you. Well, until now at least."

"I wonder if it's the tunnel causing the issues or something else entirely."

"It was temporary, which gives me hope for this." Meja runs her free hand through her short hair, an unconscious indicator of being on edge. "Hopefully once we leave this tunnel, things will be restored."

Otherwise, it would be all too easy for them to be caved in here and killed. But she doesn't say that.

"There is an interesting variety of beings here."

"I'm sure everything will be fine," Martha reassures the other woman giving her hand a gentle squeeze.

"Whose the most interesting you've met so far?" she asks curiously. Since Meja is not human, Martha would like to know what she finds most interesting.

Meja smiles slightly. "Most interesting... hm."

There are many kinds of 'interesting', and everyone here is from worlds far different from the Realms she knows. But Meja sticks to the person who's farthest from her previous experiences.

"I would have to say Shiala, I suppose. Talking to her about where she comes from is never dull."

They'd gotten off to a bit of a rocky start, what with Yggdrasil's cosmetic resemblance to something dire back in Shiala's world. But Meja had had her as a neighbor, and she'd appreciated the experience.

"Shiala's brilliant! I've only met her once, but she was wonderful." Martha had been patching the woman up after the sea monster attack. The other woman could obviously handle herself. It was incredible.

"Everyone here seems incredible to me, but then there seem to be a number of non-humans.

"There is a large collection of us. It's a little bizarre, but perhaps we're being summoned at random." Meja glances curiously at Martha. "Who do you find to be the most interesting?"

"I can't figure out the angels," she said after a moment's pause. "We had angels in my world. Well... they were statues. The Weeping Angels. They only moved when no one was looking at them, but they turned to stone at the moment someone did look at them. They fed by sending you back in time and feeding off the potential life lost."

She shrugged. "Imagine my surprise when I found out there were real angels here. And I hear such differing accounts of them I can't make them out at all."

Meja smiles, chuckling. "We only have them in legends, back home, and I don't know much about those. I've never even read the Bible, but from the sound of it these angels are very different from the ones described there. And I'm glad we don't have the Weeping Angels, from the sounds of it — there's enough trouble going on already."

"No, no one ever needs to meet the Weeping Angels. They were some of the scariest creatures we met." She grins a little. "Still there was definitely an adventure there. And the Doctor had to live the slow path for once. It was very interesting watching him figure out how to do it."

"He does seem the springy, erratic sort of person," she has to admit, thinking back on their previous conversation in the garden. ...she's going to miss that garden. She's brought some of her stones, just in case, but still. "Did he manage?"

"Springy and erratic with a time machine." She laughed. "Somehow he did. But not without pissing a lot of people off first. And then I had to be the one to put out the fires. Not exactly easy looking like I do back in 1969."

Meja raises an eyebrow, turning that over in her head. Her last year on Midgard, as a human, had been in 1971, but she knows that her Earth had turned out very differently than most of the others represented here. Racism isn't unexpected in the Nine Realms, but it has more to do with species — Dwarves look down on humankind, Light Elves despise Dark Elves, and the Aesir and Vanir look down on everyone else. And sexism is rare, as men and women in all of those races are expected to pull their own weight.

"I'm certain you put them out well. Or the Doctor would be a great deal skinnier, and full of pointy objects," she jokes.

"Oh certainly," Martha laughed. "He made this device... he called it the timey-wimey device. It detect odd time issues. I think. It didn't always make sense. It also cooked eggs at a moderate distance. All of our eggs exploded. So did the neighbors. And this was after they had figured out that we were always at the epicenter of the weird stuff. The interracial couple where the woman supported the family."

She grinned.

"We were quite scandalous for 1969."

It's hard for Meja to imagine that a nuclear-devastated Earth had been better along in social issues in 1971 than another Earth from 1969. Then again, the Cold War had made everyone re-focus their priorities. Survival, not gender or skin color -- though pockets had probably persisted, it wasn't a thing that had been often brought out into the open.

"I suppose so. I can't really imagine, anymore. I've been in an all-female militaristic group for hundreds of years," Meja chuckles.

"Yes, I can see how that would make imagining scandalous couples difficult." Martha shined her torch behind them for a moment, looking or listening for others.

"Do you know if there were other stragglers aside from me?" she asked.

"I didn't see any." Meja had lingered as long as she felt was safe, and then some, before finding Martha, to ensure everyone could get out. But there was no guarantee. "But I imagine there must have been one or two."

Tunnel Vision is Not Always Helpful

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Sorry... the notif for this definitely disappeared to the other page.

<3

Re: <3

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