fandomhigh | Club Fair, Gym, Friday Afternoon

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!event: club fair

Club Fair, Gym, Friday Afternoon

Jackson got to the gym early. He took his mission of establishing a sports team in Fandom pretty seriously, see. That involved making something of an effort, and showing up early to check out the competition (yes, he viewed the other clubs as competition, deal with it) was the least he could do.

He grabbed a copy of the club schedule for himself before he went to set up his table.

[ocd ~~incoming!~~ up! have at!]

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"Ooooh." See Evan. See Evan look utterly enthralled. "I've never been on a dig myself, but I've been studying anything I can find on ancient Egypt lately. I'm... not really well-studied in archaeology, but it is really fascinating, isn't it?"

"It is!" Did you hear that? That was the sound of a conversational dam bursting. "There is so much we can learn from our ancestors - what they were like, what they created. Most would rather look to the future as if many of the issues we deal with have never occurred before, but that is very far from the truth. Just look at your ancient Egyptians, who mastered perspective and facial proportions well before your western peoples rediscovered it."

Sure, Liara. Of course it would be the old parts of local culture you actually bothered to memorize.

"Looking at history, it seems like a lot of what we have now is the result of discovery, and rediscovery. It kind of makes you wonder what people will see when they look at us, thousands of years from now," Evan mused, thrilled that he'd found a topic they could both relate to. "Art, astronomy, things that we take for granted as basic, and things we don't even understand when we dig them up. Evolution really is about so much more than genetics, isn't it?"

Oh, Evan. Honey. Don't go and get hung up on evolution. It just couldn't possibly end well.

"Evolution has very little to do with it," Liara said, shaking her head. "It is not biology that drives us to change culturally. As a scientific concept, it is not applicable to the patterns of sentient culture. But... yes, our successes as sentient species are heavily reliant on so much more than simple biology."

"I suppose maybe it depends on the culture you're talking about," Evan offered, thoughtfully. "Where I come from, evolution isn't always the slow rolling process that comes from natural selection and slight mutations over time to adapt. Every now and again, a race changes drastically, biologically speaking, and the clash between the new genetic strain and the old can lead to some very significant shifts in the culture of the species."

Because Evan came from Special Land.

"But... even seeing how people react to something as severe as a complete genetic restructuring of their race can kind of indicate who they are, as a people. Where they stand, culturally."

"With a change so sudden," Liara mused, "The actual culture cannot be changing that much. There would be heavy clashes, of course, but they would still take place within the same discourse as the old species established. Genuine cultural change does not simply happen across a few years."

"No, of course not," Evan replied, "but one big change with clashes like that... they can cause ripples. Little things, little seeds that grow and get bigger as time goes on. Sometimes you can trace the growth of technology, of a cultural norm, right back to those clashes. Whether people are willing to accept the new, whether the new is willing to live alongside the old, or if one or the other has it in them to try to completely eliminate a group of people that could very easily be their brothers, their children..."

He frowned a little, not meaning to go on about something so unpleasant, really. He just... kind of got carried away, sometimes.

"We're kind of in the thick of something like that back home," he attempted to explain. "And we've had people from the future giving us different examples of the direction things could go, things that would irreversibly change the foundations of the entire species."

Liara paused, because something about that sounded odd to her ears.

"You had people from the future," she echoed. "There is a teacher here who claims to be from fifty years in my future-- is it something like that?"

"Nah," Evan replied, shrugging his shoulders easily. "We've got actual time-travelers back home. I mean, they're all pretty much always from the future, but they pop up from time to time. Here it's more a matter of parallel realities running at different speeds, or from different starting points. Which... we have some of that back home, too, of course."

A beat.

"You kind of get used to it."

"It sounds..." Liara groped around for a word. "...Bewildering."

"It can be," Evan agreed, nodding a little. "Especially when you get different people from different timelines, all coming back trying to stop some major event that left everything some kind of nightmare dystopia."

He was still trying to puzzle out whether or not there were any good futures out there. But he imagined that people didn't tend to travel back in time to change anything when the world was a happy place.

"...This is a frequent occurrence."

Funny how she didn't make it sound like a question.

"... Kind of, yeah." It was definitely an answer! "I don't know if any of my teachers at my last school haven't had some sort of experience with time travel in one way or another. We had a whole class about future history, in the spring."

Yes, he was aware that the phrase was weird and wrong.

Liara looked like her mind was making a few important adjustments. "Future history," she echoed. "The history known by those who live ahead of us. I... suppose that would be necessary. To have a class on, I mean."

"When you're a member of an endangered species only a few hundred strong, it kind of is," Evan answered, his voice softening a little. "There aren't enough of us left out there to continue a population, so... we have to be careful, you know? And anything we have to work with really matters."

Liara's eyebrows knitted together. "There are only a few hundred of you?" she asked.

"They estimated there were only about 198 left, once," Evan replied, nodding. "I think the number has changed since, some that weren't counted, or a few new people manifesting as mutants. But I don't think it's too far off, in one direction or the other, yeah."

He fell silent for a moment more, and then added, "There used to be millions."

"What happened?" Liara asked.

She was fiddling with her fingers because she wasn't sure what else to do about that.

"A few things," Evan replied, doing a bit more fidgeting of his own. "Some of it was humans, some of it was mutants... There was a major attack on a huge city that was supposed to be a safe place for mutants to just... live a normal life, in peace. And there was one person who had enough power that just saying the right words nearly finished the job across the rest of the planet."

There wasn't a student at the Jean Grey School who weren't at least somehow aware that the Scarlet Witch was responsible for the mass extinction.

"I am sorry," Liara said after an awkward few moments. "I cannot even begin to conceive of such a genocide - it's monstrous."

"I... don't remember much of it, myself," Evan admitted, figuring things had just been pretty quiet in the backwater part of Kansas that he'd grown up in. "But the aftermath is... difficult to handle, sometimes. People really wear what happened on their faces for the world to see. There's no denying that most of who's left is desperate."

"I... hope things will get better for your people."

Liara felt helpless and out of her depth.

"Thank you." Evan fidgeted a little more, and then offered Liara a tentative smile. "Sorry, I didn't mean for the conversation to turn into something so bleak."

"It is all right," Liara, making a valiant attempt at smiling back and mostly succeeding. "I understand these problems must be troubling you."

"I... guess. But still, it's kind of a lot," Evan mumbled. "I'd only meant to give an example of where evolution might have some effect on cultural change, and I got a little carried away, and then wrapped up in it."

Evan was pretty good at getting wrapped up in it.

Club Fair, Gym, Friday Afternoon

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