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Save Point: Closing Ceremony

Jynx leads her by the hand, to what is a very public private surprise. She was taking a shower, as put together by one of the sethura using local and imported components to make a sort of gently solar-warmed black-plastic water-sack that would then run through a sieve, when Jynx pulled her out and insisted with an excited gleam that she come right away, no time for clothes, darlink!

Amused by this parody of the director of social events, she let herself be talked into it.

Since casual nudity isn't that rare among the Khemi, and the sethura casually go topless under all conditions that allow, it isn't like she really stands out that much except in the inevitable way that she always does by being a lioness. She's dry by the time she's strapped herself in to the distinctly retro, compact little high-suspension vehicle that the sethura use for dashing around the local city and environs, and Jynx can hardly complain about her bare wet ass on the seats, since she's only wearing her own usual trademark gold loincloth-thing with no underwear, and paired decorative nipple-shields for her primary breasts with chains strung between them.

It's a brilliant sunny day and pleasantly warm, although she gets a certain amount of dust in her fur and will need to brush off again later. The little four-wheel drive bounces and leaps madly as Jynx drives like a maniac, in a manner after her own heart.

The thrill of having no overt safety systems tends to tempt them to excessive speeds.

It rapidly becomes apparent that she's been abducted to yet another meeting of the Jiargnei Club, this one in the shallow rectangular dry-dock around the plinth which was to have held a suitably monolithic sculpture commemorating the first contact. Simple, firmly assembled coffer dams hold out the water, at least for now, letting in only a fine trickle through a few algae-green cracks in the base, which dries before it can progress. But they are chocked and have lines attached, ready to be pulled when the time comes. The main difference between now and before is that there is a fine thick layer of oddly colorful sand in the bed, into which the water slowly oozes.

The Jiargnei club have some tables out, and assorted foods local and otherwise, and a great many bottles of what are surely wines and mixers, and are having themselves a party. But what catches her eye, as she descends the lightweight wood-framed removable staircase into the pit, is that the plinth isn't empty anymore and that there's a statue of her on it.

Well, sort of her. The overall stylistic approach, to accommodate the size of the outcrop and other tedious technicalities, seems to be the rigidly balanced stylism of a primitive culture, everything all symmetrical. But within the limitations of this they've worked wonders, making up the shape of her crouching like a feral lioness, muzzle looking out, shoulders hunched and ready to spring.

To simplify the shape, she's wearing her weighted hair-net, draping down to either side, but her ears are proud and pointy. In front, her extended fingers dig down into the 'dirt' complete with claws, and at the back her tail, held close, flows down her butt and off the edge to curl toward the ground, hanging curved and suspended in wait like a house-cats. Her boobs squeeze up firmly in front, between her upper arms, making her look solid and strong-chested.

And the colors, the colors are magnificent! She assumed they were planning a sort of stark civic monument, just the sandstone, but it's been sprayed with several well-defined pigments plausibly originating from local sources, charcoal black, malachite green and gold ocher for the eyes, and a paler shade that might be a chalk or white ocher to emphasize the contrasts around her eyes and eyelids, and the whiter patch beginning faintly at the front of her muzzle and running down under her chin as temptation to her breasts and belly. The colors aren't single tones, either, they've been applied more or less intensely to let the natural color of the underlying stone represent her furry body and muscles, like the final texture layer airbrushed to a model.

Suddenly it becomes apparent just why Jynx has arranged to intercept her in the midst of her daily shower, so they can compare and contrast the musculature of the real deal against their final product, and maybe take a few pictures, or enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of witnessing the result in its contrast and composition. It's her and a statue of her, in the altogether.

"We are calling it Re-Horakhty, the double-lion of the two horizons, the past and present, the then and the now," explains the primary technical designer, seeing her approach and smiling and giving her an inappropriately friendly hug whilst feeling up her ass. Tryanya never misses a chance at an intimate contact, but it's part of her charms. "It will symbolize a contact made and a contact lost, a pair of civilizations that never met properly, because they went in opposite directions. Also, it is a big-ass lioness and looks really cool."

Jynx obligingly takes over as the voice of reason.

"Okay, so how we worked this," Jynx explains proudly, "is that we'd already prepped the outcrop and cut it all square and stuff, and also leveled and paved the whole plateau. All pretty easy with a suitable range of tools. Since this left us with plenty of matching stone, we cut it up into standard-sized blocks, each with the same cross-section but various multiples of length. Then we stacked it all up so the blocks would overlap, with the long bits under the muzzle to make it self-supporting. It was actually rather simple once we'd planned where everything should go, like being a little kid and making something out of blocks. Only, you know, much _much_bigger."

"But how did you finish it this quickly?"

"Well, I mean, obviously we didn't carve it by hand. No, we just used a water-blasting arch fed off the river, on a couple of sliding rails either side and with a six of nozzles, so it'd work faster. It was totally automated, didn't need anything except someone to keep an eye on it. As a bonus it gives it a great natural patina, like it's been sitting out in the rain for the last ten thousand years and just happened to weather into the correct shape, complete with convincing natural erosive curves and irregularities. It'll make it look like it was standing there since the start of time."

"The_zep tepi_," intones Cleo, letting the pronunciation curl off her tongue.

"The what?"

"One of the local phrases I picked up. It means the first time when the gods created the world and all things came into being. Some of them are arguing their calendar should be revised and that the zep tepi should should be reset to, well, now. Starting with your arrival."

"Everyone always likes to think that their now is special," shrugs the sethuress.

"There were some idiots back in Azatlan who wanted an additional geologic age," Cleo continues conversationally. "Well, that's what Terrowne says, anyway. Starting with technology reaching the particular zenith that impressed them the most, usually electricity or general-purpose computers or nuclear explosions, thus placing the entire significance of all history comfortably in their back yards. He made scathing comments about how they missed the point of calling it geologic time."

"They could at least have picked something really cool, like -"

"We never figured that out, remember?"

"Oh, yeah. Sorry. I forgot."

Cleo leans back and looks up, changing her angle so-slightly to intersect the shadow and keep the scattering of the sun out of her eyes, as three of the sethura planetary transport vehicles, elegant-detailed black and gray triangular wedges with blue highlights where the drive systems are going, shoot past at speeds more like fighter-jets and then branch off, splitting out into the three arrow, trident-like symbol that once represented Azatlan and was a stock spectacle at airshows, usually done with streaming chemtrails of a murky yellow signal-flare smoke, each terminal point tipped off with a burst as they toggled the afterburners.

The sethura have used something more classy, a sort of sparkly golden glitter, maybe metallicized chaff or something, probably designed to biodegrade handily once settled to the earth. There is a distant sonic boom as all three flyers simultaneously accelerate and seem to vanish.

If pressed, she will say that the wetness in her eyes is from the sun.

"I hope ve haff cheered you up, after vhatever happened," comes a voice. It's the Director of Social Activities and her silly accent, which would probably allow someone with enough linguistics skills to extrapolate what sort of dialect she used back home and how it compares to Azatlani or Khemi, but you'd need to know more languages than Cleo has yet picked up, despite her natural talent for it. "If you don't vant to talk, I qvite understand."

Cleo is deeply touched and wipes back her whiskers. She can understand how it might seem like an act of enormous ego to put herself forward as the monument, but the Jiargnei Committee seem to have taken it as though she was the one helping them out, possibly because it clears them of all accusation of cultural bias, and now they're just trying to return the favour.

From their point of view this probably counts as some sort of transient art, something to be seen in its full glory just the once, and then left behind to suffer the erosion and effacements of an alien world. But they've tried to cheer her up with it, and make it a commemoration of something that would surely otherwise count as a failure, a falling-through. What should've been a huge opening ceremony, an opening of the way, has instead become a closing ceremony of sorts.

Terrowne, she notes, has not been invited, nor have any other boys, although there are a number of casually bystanding types loitering about at the edges of the pit, who must live or work nearby and are able to spend the time to wander over and check in on the progress of the magical statue. None of them have been daring enough to come down the steps and intrude, so the attendance is entirely female, though whether by choice, some form of Wolfmother-esque religious observance, or for some other reason entirely, she doesn't know. Perhaps the consecration of water-sculptures is for some reason a female-specific affair.

The party goes on for several hours. It isn't as though she's left a note, but if Terrowne trusts her ability to look after herself, he shouldn't need one. There are presumably lots of girlfriends, wives and lovers absent at this given moment, so if he needs her, he can ask around.

She prowls around playfully in the colorful sand, which she realizes must be the heavier fraction of the gritty limestone sand produced by the waterblasting, which has then been stained in a mix of assorted shades when the same nozzles were used to apply colour. The majority of the water in use would have been pumped back out over the dam, taking the lighter grit with it, but the larger particles have remained, catching up the residual pigments. There are even bits of fossils from the limestone mixed in, coiled numalite foraminifera, like the seashore of some ancient ocean.

They may well have planned this deliberately, in fact, as though it was some sort of art happening or staged event. When she bounds through the sand, taking up her own repose as reflected in the larger statue, there are quorum sneezes in the style of applause from the sethura participants and the position of some of them suggests that they are recording the event by various means.

Once the whole thing has started to wind up naturally, as such occasions do, with the better food having all been eaten and the less edible bits all left behind, as people start to make excuses about having to go soon, and start to get tired from being there too long, or standing the bright sun (not an issue in this case, given the sethura seem to enjoy the brilliance as a reminder of home, which might be why they picked Khem) the time comes to tidy up first before pulling the floodgates. She helps the sethuresses lift up the tables and fold up the legs, which collapse cleverly so they can be transported and stacked, and remove plates and the sethura take on dining cutlery.

After everything is removed, and the sand, for some reason, has been given a brief raking, Cleo is handed the end of the line which is attached to the chock in the coffer dam. It's quite the long line and seems to be intended to be carried all the way up the stair, so that it can be pulled from a safe distance, by one person or more likely a team. It seems she's been given the honor.

Logically the angle would be better if they pulled from behind the statue, or even maybe had two chocks placed at either side, upstream and downstream, to even up the flow. But the sheer size of the statue makes this pleasing symmetry impractical, and whilst yanking it out up close and then running for the stairs would be quite exciting, it hardly seems worth the risk. After the pressure has equalized, any remaining bits and pieces can be removed with much less danger.

The coffer dam was built dry, inside the excavated space, before they dug the channel all the way out to the river, where the waters were kept out by a more temporary, semi-circular structure that was sunken into the mud of the riverbed. The sethura know their engineering and got it all done, then let this temporary embankment collapse back into the river, to be scoured away by currents and flow, while the coffer dam kept the water out in a more reliable, longer-term manner. Now it's this dam's turn to be breached and let the water in, admittedly in a more orderly progression.