![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyYesterday's journey from California to Washington, for all that most of it was spent in a cramped metal tube sitting still, was still a dickens of an experience. Between one thing and another, Ellen was all but exhausted by the time they'd checked in. She scarcely noticed the condition of the hotel around her on the way up to the room.
This morning is another story. Ellen sits up, blinking, as the light begins to stream into the room. That much light in her house in Megaton would mean something had gone disastrously wrong with one of the walls, after all. It takes her several minutes to cudgel her brain into accepting the room before her as real, and not an extension of some dream or other. Cautiously, she braces both hands on the mattress (there is nothing this soft in her experience!), swings her legs over the side (there were carpets in the Vault but they were little area rugs, threadbare from hundreds of years of use), and pads across the floor to peek out through the gap in the curtains.
She's going to be standing there, staring, for a good little while. The sky beyond is blue, dotted here and there with cloud. The buildings, all of them as far as the eye can see, are whole and entire. Green patches of ground and tufts of high vegetation she can't identify dot the spaces between the buildings in the places where cars aren't puttering through the streets. A virtually pristine, marble-clad Washington Monument rises to the sky startlingly close at hand. And the-
It may be a while before it really sinks in that she's looking at blossoming cherry trees far below. The only blooming plants she's seen before this have all been farmed vegetation, pea plants and tomatoes grown under indoor lighting and the like. Certainly nothing that big, or that massively effusive in the amount of flowers put forth- and it's a dead certainty that she's never even seen a cherry tree, anyway, so there you are.
Like we said, she'll be staring for a while.
This morning is another story. Ellen sits up, blinking, as the light begins to stream into the room. That much light in her house in Megaton would mean something had gone disastrously wrong with one of the walls, after all. It takes her several minutes to cudgel her brain into accepting the room before her as real, and not an extension of some dream or other. Cautiously, she braces both hands on the mattress (there is nothing this soft in her experience!), swings her legs over the side (there were carpets in the Vault but they were little area rugs, threadbare from hundreds of years of use), and pads across the floor to peek out through the gap in the curtains.
She's going to be standing there, staring, for a good little while. The sky beyond is blue, dotted here and there with cloud. The buildings, all of them as far as the eye can see, are whole and entire. Green patches of ground and tufts of high vegetation she can't identify dot the spaces between the buildings in the places where cars aren't puttering through the streets. A virtually pristine, marble-clad Washington Monument rises to the sky startlingly close at hand. And the-
It may be a while before it really sinks in that she's looking at blossoming cherry trees far below. The only blooming plants she's seen before this have all been farmed vegetation, pea plants and tomatoes grown under indoor lighting and the like. Certainly nothing that big, or that massively effusive in the amount of flowers put forth- and it's a dead certainty that she's never even seen a cherry tree, anyway, so there you are.
Like we said, she'll be staring for a while.