Lodi ficlet im forever emotional
Lodi had once participated in a prank at the DEO offices.
A coworker had gone on vacation, and a few of the linguistics guys thought it would be hilarious to swap every item in his cubicle with another's. When said coworker returned, he'd sat down at the desk, stared strangely for a few minutes, before finally asking where his plant had gone, and why there was an unfamiliar family staring at him from the picture frame. The linguistics guys laughed for days. It was the same cubicle, physically, but it also wasn't, because every personal touch was somewhere else, every identifying item taken away.
Earth was like that, now.
Logically, he knew it was the same ball of dirt he'd always known. Big oceans, big continents, lots of mountains and valleys and rivers and streams. But at the same time, it was alien. The denizens of the Last City were human, yes, but the culture—their way of life, their speaking mannerisms, even something as benign as the fashion—was so foreign to Lodi it was like stepping into some mirror world.
He liked to think of himself as a well-traveled guy. He'd dipped his toes into a whole host of lifestyles, had memorized a lot of their languages. But Earth as it was, after the Collapse...
It felt a lot like that prank, so long ago. Same space, but devoid of all familiarity.
Lodi knew he should be grateful that humanity had survived at all. That the species stood any chance whatsoever of continuing to exist, after such a calamitous event. But the thought of everything that had been lost wracked him, constantly. Saint's accent belonged to a country that hadn't existed for hundreds of years. Osiris was named after a god that most had ceased to believe in even during Lodi's time. The people eating at the ramen stall would never know the origins of the dish. Ana, being short for Anastasia, originated from the Greek Anastasius, which meant "resurrection."
... Louis, after many iterations, started as the Proto-Germanic and then Frankish Hlōdowig.
A man out of time, indeed.
