Parrothead in Paradise

by PastCat

Chapter 11

We decided to split up for the next few days. Doc and Emmy wanted to go back to Diamond Head and continue to decipher the riddle of the message and the names. The rest of us planned on raiding the remnants of the Ala Moana Shopping Center. Given that half of the place had been full of luxury stores or touristy knick-knack shops, we weren’t sure that there would be much left to find, but the restaurants might still have more cooking supplies and there was at least a few sporting goods places and housewares shops that might still have something we could use. It would be hit or miss no matter what, but better to search the mall and find nothing useful than to not search and miss out on something that could prove vital later.

Doc’s only request was that if we found more gems, he would be happy to have them. I suspected that would be an understatement, given how gaga he had gone over the crappy stuff from Walmart, but whatever.

After this, our next goal would be to check out the area to the west of Honolulu, especially around Pearl Harbor and the various military installations that ringed that side of the island. We thought there might be more intact stuff there due to the general ruggedness of military hardware. If anything could survive a long time, I would bet on something made for the military over most civilian stuff that did not cost an arm and a leg.

We decided as a group to meet up back at Home Base each evening to share whatever we found. The only bothersome part of all this was that we would have trouble communicating between the groups. We were down to just three working walkie-talkies with dubious battery life. We were not sure if we could recharge them without zapping someone, though Nic thought he might be able to rig something up using the battery from the van. (He was going to check whatever electronic stores we found for anything useful; it was a long shot, but why not?)

Our raid on the interior of the mall was rather disappointing. It seemed that most of the space was given over to fancy clothing stores that were of little use to us. We were able to build a nice stash for Doc (though why a mall needed twenty plus jewelry stores was beyond me). The food court and a few other eateries brought in more cooking materials including a couple more woks. Another place had something that made Emmy’s eyes bug out: a hand-cranked coffee grinder. We figured we could use it for seasonings, like sea salt or something, but she claimed that coffee grew wild in some places around here and she wanted to try and roast the beans. I don’t like coffee much, but the others greeted that with enthusiasm.

Exploring the big department stores was more useful. Some of the big ones had sections full of housewares and useful kitchen things. After washing, any flatware and plates and things like that were good as new. Surprisingly, we even found tupperware style containers intact. Otherwise it was more of the same that we had found at the Wal-Mart. Most fabric had rotted away, leaving empty hangers clanking together in the wind. Wooden stuff was fragile to the touch and liable to fall on you. We couldn’t reach the third floor in most cases, as there were holes big enough to see light through on the floor and roof above us. Adam and I did all the searching on the second floor, while Trish and Nic kept their hooves closer to the ground.

The only major sticking point we ran into during our hunt was when Trish had her own moment of awe. Adam and I were discussing the viability of moving one of the merchandise carts to the ground floor and thence to Home Base as an extra set of wheels when we heard Nic yelling for help from down below us. We slid down the escalators as quickly as we could to find him trying to draw Trish away from one of the stores. She was rooted to the spot, staring into the dark storefront. Nic was tugging at her and trying to get her to move as the floor above creaked. While Adam tried to lend a wing to Nic, I squinted into the remnants of the shattered window. Something seemed to shine despite the darkness, but from out here I could not tell what it was.

I took the flashlight from Nic’s pack and shined it into the store. Although it was a grimy and dusty as all the other places we had investigated so far, the glow of the flashlight illuminated a familiar shape. “Guys.” I said to the ponies standing behind me. They paused and looked at me. “Hold the light will ya? Something tells me she is not going to move unless we bring that out.” I passed the flashlight to Adam and carefully climbed through the broken window. I picked my way through the fallen display stands and other debris that covered the floor to find myself standing next to a display case still, by some miracle of fate, intact. Though the paint on the outside had mostly flaked away and the hinges and lock were rusted, I could still tell that the former had been bright blue and that the case had been done up to look like a phone booth.

I wanted to facepalm, I really did. But doing that after I had disappeared to rescue my Jimmy Buffett record would have been the pot calling the kettle black. I pulled the door off the display case, the old hinges giving way with a few tugs. The memorabilia inside the case had not entirely survived the test of time, but the object that I thought had Trish’s attention was intact. I wiped away some grime from a metal plaque to read: Eleventh Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver, Doctor Who Season 6 used in episodes 4-9. I picked up the movie prop and carefully brought it into the light. I caught a glimpse of Trish’s face as I tucked it under a wing and picked my way out of the fandom and comics store. If she still had hands, she would have been making grabby motions with them. “You owe me one.” I said as I passed it to her. She wrapped her legs around it and cuddled it like a stuffed animal.

I saw the guys exchange glances. I would have bet my dinner that they were both thinking: Is that going to happen to one of us next? You first. Nope, you. Neither of them was going to come out and say it, of course, but I suspected it would happen over something as frivolous as what we had found.

The most surprising thing that I remember from our raid on the shopping center was that there were a few useful things in the sundries and souvenir shops after all. It turns out that when people made manly jewelry with shark teeth and Polynesian fish hooks, those things tend to survive, even being buried under a layer of sand. I, for one, intended to make good use of those fish hooks. After all, if the ancient people of these islands used them for a long time, we should be able to do the same. I planned on having a word with Doc about where we might have the best luck testing out our new toys.

The hike back to Home Base was both strange and satisfying. Strange because we all carried so little, but satisfying in that the stuff we did salvage was useful. We met up with Doc and Emmy around the campfire as usual. Emmy was trembling, though whether it was with shock or excitement at what she and Doc had found was hard to tell. We waited until after dinner to give Doc the results of our jewelry store raids, as we wanted to find out what he had discovered before the additions to his hoard sent him back to cloud nine.

“I’m not sure where to start, other than that I began by taking samples of the rocks around each set of names. I also took a few on the wall away from them as a control. I was able to identify three distinct groups at different times who left their marks. The oldest one is the one with the long message. As best I can tell, that group consisted of the writer of the message and four others scattered around the tunnel. They didn’t write their names as a group, so it took some searching. The second group is the seven names written in Japanese on the southern wall. Emmy helped me interpret. In addition to their names, that group made a note that they had arrived via a touring boat probably about a hundred to two hundred years after the first group vanished. Their message also warns to be wary of the sea. Below their inscriptions we found a carving under the moss that was similar to the Great Wave from that famous painting. A tsunami.”

Doc paused to gather his thoughts. I could see Nic’s eyes widening in the firelight. “A tsunami? That might explain the damage done to the plant life down below. Not to mention all the water damage in Honolulu, especially the way the water lines stretched up a storey or two on some of the waterfront.”

Doc nodded. “It’s a plausible theory. A tsunami or similarly large wave could do a lot of damage. It could also account for why we have not been able to find much that is not at least partially buried in sand and other debris. Whenever this event was, though, it was still a long time ago. After all, there was the third group as well. It must have been the largest. Twenty names suggests that there had been a rather large group here at one point, or at least that they added every member to the list whenever they Returned. The most recent one was cut about seven hundred years ago by my best estimate, though it could be off by fifty years either way.” He hesitated before adding in a small voice. “I missed her… by seven hundred years. Jennifer came back and I missed her completely.”

There was silence at that. Seven hundred or so years since Doc’s daughter’s group had left their names at Diamond Head? Yet we had found no evidence of ponies or other sentient creatures in this area through our wanderings over the past couple of months. Unless they or their descendants had moved to the other side of the island or over towards Pearl Harbor, we were the only sentient beings on Oahu. If anyone else had come back before us and after that last group, they were probably alone, like Mary appeared to have been, and had either not found the name tunnel or had not survived long enough to leave a trace there.

It was a depressing thought. When the silence got too oppressive, Adam broke it by talking about what we had brought back from the mall. The kitchen supplies were added to what we had salvaged from elsewhere. I caught a gleam in his eye as he mentioned offhand “oh, and we had another zone-out moment. Trish decided she could not leave the mall without bringing back a little toy.” He waved a wing at Trish, who looked slightly embarrassed.

“It’s not a toy, Horsefeathers. It is a collectable. It’s a prop from one of my favorite television shows, used by my favorite actor of all time.” She sighed. The sonic screwdriver was cradled in her foreleg.

Adam looked like he wanted to make more fun, but I spoke up before he could get a word in. “I think it’s not a bad idea. Think of it this way: each of us who finds something special like this is, in their own little way, preserving a little bit of the pop culture that made humans, humans. Terry Pratchett once defined humans as ‘Homo narrans’, or ‘the storytelling ape’. Well, we no longer look like apes, but we can do our level best to remember what people built and created. So what if it seems frivolous to keep a record that no one will be able to play or a prop that only worked in the movies! These are bits of our cultural heritage and reminders of the creativity that we once held in our hands.”

I looked over the others as they sat around the campfire. Adam was looking down at his hooves, blushing slightly. Trish was stroking the prop with reverence. Doc was staring into the fire and poking at it with a stick. Emmy scooted closer to Trish to get a better look at the sonic screwdriver. Nic was watching me. He saw me staring and looked away, up towards the stars. I wondered what they were all thinking. How could six people who were not even people any more preserve humanity? All we had were a basic knowledge of survival and a few odds and ends that managed to survive the collapse of civilization as we knew it. What did we have of literature? Of art? Of science? The answer was depressing: not much. We had Emmy’s copy of Harry Potter and my Jimmy Buffett vinyl and Trish’s movie prop. We had Doc’s locket and his stash of cut gems and jewelry. We would probably find more odds and ends over the coming days too, but it would be like if someone mixed together a dozen different jigsaw puzzles in the same box and then trying to assemble one of them when you could only grab a few pieces at random.

“Six beings may not a civilization make,” Nic mused, “but they can make a clan, a village, a community. If we continue to work together, we can make a go of it. I don’t know if our best efforts will be enough to make this place paradise, but we can make it a place we can live on and remember the way things were. I say when we find things that we want to keep safe, we should store them where they will stay cool and dry. We should preserve what we can of the stories that we told ourselves long ago. If anyone still has a way to write down what they remember, they should do it, or at least tell it to someone who can.” He nodded at Doc and me, since we had the closest equivalent to hands. He saw that I had my journal on the bench next to me. “If you want, we can start with me. I don’t really want to start with something personal. How about something older. Do any of you know the stories behind the constellations?”

We spent the remainder of the evening discussing the stories from ancient Greece that had named the stars and planets above us. With the only light coming from our campfire, it was easy to see the pale ribbon of the Milky Way as it stretched across the horizon. With the light pollution of the city below us a distant memory, the sky above sparkled with millions of stars. It was a fitting backdrop to the stories of heroes and gods. I could pick out a few: Orion and his dogs, Ursas major and minor, Cassiopeia and her court, and a few more. Not long before we all started to drift away to our sleeping places, I saw one last constellation that I recognized crest the trees. It was the Great Square that formed the body of Pegasus. I gave the original winged horse a salute with one wing before heading to my nest for the night.

Comments

[Dances With Unicorns]

I was entertained by your wonderful story and hope you can find the time to continue your adventure.