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There's a rueful tinge to his expression when he sees her because, yeah, stupid question. He moves a little to make some room for her, waves off her silent offer with one hand and drops it back to his lap with the other. Not unlike the last time they spoke; but the truth is, he gave up trying sleep aids, chemical means to relax, a long time ago.

Instead of answering, he looks up, says, "You have a clear view of the stars here. Not too much light to obscure the sky. Where I come from, the cities are so crowded and lit up, it's hard to see anything even at night."

It'd been one of the first shocks, after leaving Montana, to look up at the sky and find the Milky Way hidden from view.

"Really?" A dumb thing to ask, but it practically asks itself without Athessa's bidding. She looks up at the sky, her spooky elven eyes reflecting the stars and any available light that filters in. Like a cat strolling across the lawn at night, looking towards the sound of a sliding glass door opening.

"I don't think I could handle not seeing the stars at night."

So much about how elves are built reminds him of Belters, just smaller and better adapted to gravity. But the eyes take him back to being eight and watching a bobcat stalk across their property in the darkness, his hands on the cool glass of the window.

He shrugs.

"They don't know anything different. And most of them never get the chance to. The only ways to see the stars are to go somewhere more remote or get off-planet, and neither's an easy thing to do."

"Off-planet?" She echoes, but this isn't one of those Rifterisms that mean absolutely nothing to her. Athessa looks at him with wide eyes and dawning realization.

"You mean you go up there? Back where you come from, you can reach other planets?"

"You asked if I was a sailor," he says, looking sideways at her. "I've never sailed on an ocean. Our ship, the Rocinante, sails through space."

That's information worth scooching an inch or two closer to him. Scooch, scooch.

"How? Does the ship have sails? Have you touched a star? What do they look like up close?"

That entire reaction is enough to make him laugh, not unkindly.

"The ship has an engine." Christ, would she know what an engine is? Rockets isn't any better, and nuclear fusion is far and away worse. "Firepower," he tries, and sees how that lands. "And if I tried to touch a star, I'd be burned to a crisp, and the ship would go with me."

Trying to go further sunwards than Venus would pretty much be suicidal, even in the Roci. He opens his mouth to say something else, pauses, and then looks at her. It's so easy to forget the knowledge gap between here and his system, somehow.

"Did you know the sun is a star? The closest star in the universe."

Whether or not she knew the sun was a star doesn't get addressed, as she's too busy thinking about engines, firepower, stars that burn, and so on.

"The Qunari use some kind of firepower to sail their dreadnoughts," she muses, then snaps back to attention to ask: "If your ship runs on fire, and stars burn, can you use stars to make the engines go? How many people crew a star ship? How many other planets are there where you come from?"

Perhaps this is too many questions. It's definitely too many at once, which is a realization that has her looking a little embarrassed, reigning in her enthusiastic lean. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize. It's not that often, lately, that I'm answering questions."

His tone's all easy, self-deprecating, sincere. Since early after arrival, he'd consistently worn Riftwatch-offered gloves, but he hasn't replaced the pair he lost somewhere between the Pickney house and the murder inn. His shard glints in the darkness, and he worries at it idly with his other hand.

"You have the right idea, actually. Engines run on the same kind of physics as what powers stars." Pretty close, anyway. "How many people depends on the size of the vessel, and eight major planets in our solar system."

Mentioning dwarf planets would probably be confusing on a planet with actual dwarves, and he deliberately leaves out the worlds reachable through the Ring gates. 1,300 habitable systems, and they've barely scratched the surface. With as much as they still don't know, it's hard to say if they really should.

Athessa smiles, still self-conscious but reassured that she isn't being too annoying.

"People tend to get kinda annoyed with my questions around here," she explains. "Though I think that's because magic isn't really a popular subject to be questioned about."

The mage-Templar war is far too recent for anyone to feel like it's truly over; merely put on hold while there's a bigger threat. Once Corypheus is gone, who's to say that the Chantry won't just go right back to terrorizing mages?

"So... people live on other planets? On the moons?"

Thedas has two moons, don'tcha know.

"I'll have to keep that in mind, myself."

He's still working on educating himself about events just like the mage-Templar war, but he's heard about Circles from Amos not too recently, and. He isn't a fan.

"They all came from Earth, originally. Once humanity developed the technology for space travel, we colonized our moon and one of our nearest planets. When that tech got better," thanks Solomon Epstein, "we moved out even further. People live on Earth, Mars, and throughout the Belt — in space stations, asteroids, and on other planets' moons."

Edited 2020-11-08 23:22 (UTC)

"What about the other people?" She asks, breezing past her confusion over what the Belt is, what an asteroid is, or a space station, and assuming wrongly that when Holden says Earth, he means earth. Like dirt.

"Do you have other kinds of people there? Like... Sister Sara, or me?"

He hesitates a moment too long before shaking his head.

"We're all humans. I'd never met an elf or dwarf before Thedas. And until pretty recently, we thought humans were all there was."

Edited (words) 2020-11-10 00:06 (UTC)

His isn't the first world she's heard of that only has humans, but she always has to ask.

"What happened to change that?"

He breathes out, long, face turned to the sky. As he considers how to answer that, his eyes close.

He hasn't even come close to mentioning the protomolecule around anyone here. But it's dreams of the Ring builders that shook him awake not long ago tonight, and lying about them seems impossible.

What happened to change that?

There are flickers behind his eyelids, never very far, of the garish lights of a pachinko parlor, of crystalline blue snaking across corpses, of an asteroid swinging through space straight for Earth. Nearer to the surface, lately; despite the lack of surface similarities to the experience, the Silver Lamp had reminded him of the visceral sensation of being trapped, and dying.

He opens his eyes, and speaks to the stars.

"We started finding the things left behind by an ancient civilization. They're long gone, but their ruins aren't."

Athessa watches his expression while he thinks, trying to read something about him in the comportment of his face.

There's the deep set of his eyes and the dark circles under them, suggesting sleeplessness that she'd guessed at before. But also the way his cheekbones stick out, gaunt not from malnourishment but from something else. Nerves, maybe. The lines on his forehead, a faint crease between his brow, say maybe he worries a lot. (She's seen him frown the same way Derrica does when she's healing one lapse of common sense or another.) But the lines at the corners of his eyes show good humor, a tendency to smile (like Bastien, she thinks).

And even just the act of closing his eyes to think, opening them and looking skyward, that says something.

"Have I stumbled on something you don't want to talk about? Or don't know how to?"

The question reminds him of Monica Stuart, actually. The woman was half stalker and half psychologist in her pursuit of filming an award-winning documentary; and in the months she stayed aboard the Roci, she so often used prompts like that. It was her job, of course, and she was a consummate professional. He didn't hold any of it against her.

This is, of course, different. Athessa asks because she's curious, and because she cares. What he does is slant a look towards her that's full of a soft, wry humor.

"As you can probably guess," he says, both in answer and not-an-answer, "finding evidence of alien life came as a shock. It challenged everything we thought we knew."

(First proof of extraterrestrial life.

And it's just more death.)

To her own surprise, she actually laughs. Not a full-blown guffaw or anything, but a relieved little chuckle.

"Phew. I thought it might've been something traumatic."

He doesn't smile.

Talking around his own experience is one thing, but —

"A hundred thousand people died for first contact." Not accusatory, just exhausted; his own fault for not being clearer. "And a lot more after. That'd only been the beginning."

There was Ganymede; there was the war; there were the catastrophic speed limits in the slow zone; and there was Ilus. So much of it counts up, for him, as blood on his own hands.

"Fear of the unknown didn't exactly bring out the best of humanity."

That, he thinks, is probably an old story to her.

"Fuck."

Four letters that cover all manner of sin. Fear of the unknown is a familiar source of misery for her, for people in Thedas at large, but that's an unfathomable death count for finding an old ruin.

"I'm sorry."

He considers, you don't have anything to apologize for, or it's not me who should have your sympathy, or me too. Instead, he's quiet.

At length, he looks over at her, all dark circles under her eyes and elfroot smoke swirling, and asks with a slight nod, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Murderhaus. Anything else that might be troubling her.

Rather than answer, she blows a few smoke rings into the chill air and watches them drift away. The voices of every person who has ever told her that she can talk to them start to overlap until she can't tell whose voice she's remembering anymore. She glances at Holden.

"Do you?" Surely he has questions beyond the obvious why and what the fuck.

He pulls a face.

"Not really."

The thing about murderhaus is that it's a horrible thing that happened, had been happening, but Medrod is dead. And he was just a lone, crazy, cruel person, not part of some larger conspiracy or organization. There aren't any more leads to track down. There aren't more people who need saving. So he can shut the door on this experience, do what he can to help the others, and move on to the next thing.

(He is not, of course, the captain; and this is not, of course, his crew. But God knows he wasn't any help at the inn. And he didn't need to be, and they didn't need him to stop the murderer, and that's fine. But something he can do, now, is carry his own weight.)

Athessa nods. Well, there ya go. She takes another long drag off her joint and snuffs the roach on the ground, freeing up both hands so she can unfurl the blanket she's wearing and drop one end of it over his shoulders, since it's plenty big enough to share. Then she points up at a specific set of stars, drawing lines between them in the air.

"See that constellation there? That's Shadow, Falon'din's owl. Which means nothing to you, I know. But. Look. Owl."

She just thinks it's neat.

He moves in closer when she pulls the blanket around the both of them, to stretch it that much less. Lets himself lean against her just a little bit, sharing some warmth, as he follows the point of her finger to the constellation.

"Huh." His interest is genuine as he asks, "So who's Falon'din, and why does he have an owl?"

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