So ends week one of the NaNoWriMo. More excerpts, because besides snuggle-breaks with Marcel, it's what I'm doing now. (Okay, okay, we watch STTNG dvds when I'm feeling like a total hack... it makes me feel moderately better.)

Meanshile on Archival-Beta...

Bright orange banners fluttered across the immaculate blue dome of sky, long streaming banners that caught the light of a lemon-yellow sun. It’s strange to move beneath a celestial body just a fraction off the one you were born under. It lends itself to the surreal quality of treading on a new land, one that is not hanging blythely between Mars and Venus. One that doesn’t have a Big Dipper or an Orion to console the ranger that no matter how deeply into the wilderness she wanders, the same heaven watched over her. The nights in Cres Chaeb struck me with loneliness when I glanced up to find Polaris wasn’t were I needed it to be.

There was a wide plaza in front of the impressive facade of the Library. The guide book warns travelers that the plaster is not the clean, stark ivory that the original ruins might lead us to expect. Those clean white pillars and sun-parched arches had been bleached by millenia. The originals were painted and strewn with colour. There were even pictures. Archival planets are not in it to cater to expectations. They pride themselves on being accurate representations of former times. If it was established that Library housed nothing but ancient comic scrolls about a marmot character named “Scrunch,” they would remove every venerable replica parchment and replace it with the rodent series, legend be damned.

Even still, I wasn’t ready for the carnival of colour adorning the statues and frescoes—images that had impressed themselves upon my childhood imagination in towering ivory. It took me awhile to see it and think: "Alexandria," instead of: "Circus Circus." That’s not totally accurate; the architecture maintained its imperial disposition despite a kaliedescope having been detonated over it.

Another dress code planet, tourists were given togas (usually included in package tours, but for the shoestring travelers, we had loaners) and lessons of the proper way to enrobe. Cloth satchels slipped over modern purses and bags. The regulars could be distinguished from the others by their custom-made costumes, most from other coutries of the same period—but only those that had been verified as having had business with Alexandria.