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There is only so much time Irian can spend in her quarters, doing what amounts to nothing. For several days now, she's been wasting time on a little amateur programming — getting a Rihannsu tricorder to interface with a Federation database, even a publicly accessible one, has been a little more work than she expected. If she wants to be able to access the Federation public database remotely, given she is likely to be trapped in Federation space for the foreseeable future and may someday be in need of information not stored in her own tricorder's database, then she would prefer to be able to use her own equipment to do it. But it's stubborn, and Starfleet remote-access protocols seem more byzantine than she remembers.

Eventually, she gets frustrated and puts it aside. Truth be told, she's bored — and a bored Romulan is never good. With the restrictions put in place on all of the involuntary passengers on board Enterprise, there are only so many places she can go. She considers the gym, where she could at least let off a bit of tension; there's the arboretum, which is no doubt a peaceful setting but which probably, in the end, would not provide her much benefit.

And then there's the holodeck. A Galaxy-class starship like this has several, she remembers that from the publicly available class specs and from what she's been told since she's been here. The Republic Fleet installs no such things aboard its ships; neither did the Empire, wishing to avoid distracting its soldiers. Yet she's familiar with the technology itself; it doesn't take much work to write a holoprogram, or edit an existing one — and she has, once or twice, been a little curious about one in particular.

An empty holodeck is simple enough to locate, and she spends the next couple of hours editing together a simple program using a combination of the Federation's own resources — paltry, where this subject is concerned, though it's no wonder — and the geographical and architectural data in her tricorder's tiny library computer. When she's satisfied with the results, she saves the program, then lets it run.

The moment the setting she's so carefully crafted materializes around her, she's almost certain she's made a mistake. It's too much like her homeworld — the world she knows, knew as ch'Rihan but which the Federation in its willful ignorance still prefers to call Romulus. She's standing on a cliffside, treacherous but for the trails and pathways some enterprising soul carved along its heights millennia ago. The Valley of the Firefalls is a well-known landmark, the only real passage by which to reach the Rihannsu capitol, Ra'tleihfi, on foot or by groundcar. The cliffside paths are not fenced or bounded; there's a matter of only several dozen paces between her and a sheer drop to the valley floor. The Firefalls themselves are a ways off; the glint of the yellow sun rising over the broad green-gold horizon catches and commingles with the bright flash of the fires spilling over the mountainside, visible even from this safe distance. Winding through the valley below is a broad river; as the valley opens up, the river does as well, its course flowing toward the sea. The city's towers and edifices are visible only faintly from here: some newer, some hundreds of years old or, in the case of the Senate Chamber, over a thousand.

It's hard to look on that vista and not feel something, especially knowing that in her own time, all of this has been reduced to so much dust. Irian has told herself time and again that it is long past time to stop grieving; twenty years is long enough to mourn a dead world. But, time and again, the feeling comes back to her as if it were fresh: anger over the loss of the homeworld her people built with their own hands. Sadness, and a longing so deep it's like pain. Rihannsu have a great and abiding love of place; as much as she has come to think of the colony the Republic has settled on Mol'Rihan as something like a home, it's not anywhere close to the same thing, not for someone who remembers when things were different.

She should end this program right now and leave; this is too personal, too close. But Irian is not always very good at doing what she should do. She sits down on the edge of the cliff, one leg hanging over the side, the other knee drawn up, arms crossed loosely over it, and watches the view a moment.

She'll go, when it's right. But not just yet.

[ ooc: Open to anyone who wants to stumble on Irian reminiscing over her home. Hope you're not afraid of heights. ]

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"This is pretty," murmurs a young voice, belonging to a young human girl who is fearlessly venturing to the edge of that cliff Irian is sitting on. Her blunt-cut hair is getting a little shaggy, but it suits her no less as it swings over her cheek from where she keeps brushing it back.

"Where is it supposed to be?"

Irian looks up when she hears the voice from behind her, watching the girl approach. There might be a very slight frown in her expression, not disapproval so much as slight uncertainty; the look is odd on a woman who seems so self-assured. It's not Sinthia's fault; Irian simply has very little experience with children, though living with Henry may have taught her a thing or two.

The girl sounds and looks young, but there's a quality of intelligence and maturity to her manner of speaking that surprises Irian slightly. She considers, for a moment, then decides to answer the question straightforwardly.

"This was my homeworld," she says. "My people named it ch'Rihan; the Federation called it Romulus."

The past tense is certainly distinctive. In this time period, this reality, the planet is still there, a fact that is a little bitter to her because she cannot go there. It doesn't matter, in any case; it won't be the same. She knows just enough about temporal paradoxes and time travel to know that all sorts of small details might be different. This ch'Rihan, the one she's duplicated here, is long gone.

Irian doesn't really need to worry; Sinthia, though through no fault of her own, acts very little like a child. It happens when you're not treated like a person, much less age-appropriately, for most of your life. (Thankfully she rarely brings that up without reason.)

"What destroyed it?" she asks. This is worded such for two distinct reasons; the way Irian emphasizes the past tense implies something happened to it that could have been prevented, thus (in Sinthia's mind) exempting all natural occurrences. And the way her thoughts feel on it, though the girl makes no mention of having overheard them save for a slightly eerie feeling as Sinthia wathes the Romulan woman. "You were from there."

That one isn't a question.

Irian can't explain it if she tried, the chill that runs right down her spine just from the way the girl looks at her. She isn't fond of being caught off guard like this — though she does her best to hide it. Either this child is extremely intuitive, or... there are other possibilities, but they don't occur to her just at the moment.

The look she gives Sinthia is carefully assessing; she's obviously trying to figure something out. Evidently, she doesn't get whatever it was she was looking for; she exhales a breath, almost a sigh, and pushes herself up onto her feet, lingering a few steps away from the edge of the cliff.

"A star exploded in a nearby system," she explains, quiet-voiced, but steady. She doesn't really expect Sinthia to know much about astronomy, doesn't know whether supernova would mean anything to her. It isn't as if this particular supernova was typical, either. "The shockwave destroyed our worlds."

Irian doesn't feel the need or desire to go into more detail, partly because she isn't in the mood for a long-winded explanation, and partly because she doesn't like thinking about the supernova, knowing what — or rather, who — caused it. Thinking about what Taris did makes her feel almost physically sick.

"Was it an accident?" she asks, brows creasing as she follows Irian's motion to the edge of the cliff.

"Where does this valley go?"

"No."

Irian doesn't see any reason to dissemble about that answer. It wasn't an accident; she wishes she could say that it was. One of her own people intentionally caused the explosion of the Hobus star. To say Taris is a traitor is putting it more lightly than she deserves.

She watches Sinthia, carefully, as the girl follows her. Irian doesn't think she's been asked so many questions in a single conversation in quite some time, but they're not personal or private, and she's not uncomfortable with answering them. It is unusual to her to have a human so interested in her world, but that is hardly a bad thing.

"This is the Valley of the Firefalls," she says, and signs with a jerk of her chin — the Rihannsu equivalent of pointing — in the direction of the falls themselves. From here, they're visible only as a bright orange-yellow glow and a great billowing of smoke produced by the burning hydrocarbons. "Our capital city is on the far side, near the river."

"But fire has no weight, how can it fall?" she asks, more of herself than Irian, brows knitting and then lifting as she scoots closer to the edge of the cliff to look in the direction of the glow.

She's fascinated by the landscape, so different from her own. She's never seen anything like this, though then again she's never seen anything very different from trampled mud and monochrome steel and black, shot with bright unnatural blue--though exceedingly rarely, that--and blood red. "What's the capital called?"

She ignores that first question, because truly she hasn't studied the physics of it, and because what little she does know — well, she's still thinking of Sinthia as a child, albeit a very precocious one. She doesn't expect to be able to explain and have her understand.

The cliff they're standing on is all dark gray, shot through in places with deep green, patched in places with teal-colored moss. Farther down in the valley are trees like willows with long sweeping branches, but with bright red leaves that make them look like tongues of fire; the grass, spread through the valley's broad width, is more blue than green. And then there's the sky, not Earth's blue, but green-gold. If nothing else, it's certainly not lacking for variety.

"Ra'tleihfi," Irian answers. "It stood on the same spot for more than a thousand years. One of our rulers had it built as a show of her power and wealth." That's a longer story than she can tell here, although the tale of the Ruling Queen is common knowledge among her people. She was one of those women whom people hold in equal amounts of admiration and fear, even many centuries after her death.

Irian glances over at Sinthia, and there may be something almost like a smile starting to form on her lips. "Do you always ask so many questions?"

Edited 2014-10-19 23:20 (UTC)

"Yes," she answers flatly.

The colors are like nothing Sinthia has ever seen on-world, and she's entranced by them, but not surprised at it; why would another world have earth's colors? "It's pretty here. More colorful than where I come from."

Edited 2014-10-21 20:18 (UTC)