The Grand American Tour

The sight of the Petroglyphs weren't worth being in New Mexico.

If there was a central seat of human agony on this mortal coil, it was Atlantis. If there was a second place, it was the American southwest. Woe unto them who found themselves there. All but the coastal areas were a continental flat expanse of sand. The air was never still. When the wind was a mild couple dozen kilometers per hour, the dust moved about like grinding tectonic plates in the air. Not so thick as to usually be visible but enough to be . When the wind picked up it grabbed pounds of the stuff out from the vast reaches of the armpit of the desert and flung it into the faces of anybody who happened to be out. The tortures of Atlantis almost paled in comparison to being caught in what the locals called a haboob. Woe unto them with sensitive lungs. Sheer desert sand mobilized by unchecked wind struck the skin like it could peel flesh from bone and choked all breathing, mask or other coverings be damned. The fortunate reality was that these storms only came once every couple of days. The rest of the time the sun beat vindictively down on you. Woe unto the fair skinned. It sat almost uncontested in the sky and screamed a still dry heat that pooled sweat as if it were the standard mode of life. Single clouds didn't challenge it, you needed to blot it completely to stand a chance. So the solitary solace sat where the watery blue of the horizon reached into the deep loam of the oceanic high sky, where with the right eyes it looked as though the grand capstone of the world had been ripped away. The longer you were out, the closer the sun got to you as the ground rose up to meet the towering black. The whole area conspiring with celestial bodies to make any tourist feel as though the now-rankled dignity of the Earth would cause it to jettison both visitor and offending territory alike into the sun. Every meal came spicy. Nobody knew how to make a decent cup of tea or coffee. Woe be to the temperamentally-stomached. The jet-lagged sensations of people and places blurred past her sunglasses in a singular ochre melange, none so memorable as to punch through the malaise that had clung to her since landing. Woe unto those with functioning nervous systems. The area clattered like marching drums timed to an inhuman sprint against each nerve in each of the five sensory capacities at all times.

Atlantis had been worse, but Atlantis also might not have been "on this mortal coil." The argument, ultimately, was one of semantics.

Some of the psychopaths who made their home here walked about the place in jeans. Jeans! Shorts weren't short enough, t-shirts weren't spare enough. When she'd slipped to the pool of her hotel, her bikini hadn't been spare enough even as the sun set and cast the far hillsides in watermelon-pink. That had been one of the high points. At moments, for just a second or two, everything came together. In the water, cool in a relative sense, sipping a cold drink and watching as the devil sun made the countryside light in a way that seemed alien on the Earth. Time would sit still in the moment as if she was caught in some great meditation, suspended at hellish room temperature as a traveler through the kind of country mankind was meant to see and not to conquer. That was not a foreign concept, and she'd been on the other end of the spectrum. Both high in the Himalayas and down near the south pole. Where the air scraped thinly enough to breathing in its own right and the cold seemed to slip like tendrils where it couldn't stab like knives.

What then, was the difference? Why was this place so much worse?

Well, some of it was always going to be what she was used to. Even if British summers were more likely to tan you from acid rain than sun itself, they could get hot. But they were wet hot. It wasn't that humidity was some great experience she was going to endorse, but it didn't you with dust. If she was going to be choked, she preferred it to be with something that did so consciously. You could make somebody you stop. You couldn't make something you stop. At a certain level, it was just how much advertising she was taking in on a daily basis. Any amount of complaint about sweat and dust versus shivers and ice paled in the face of the simple fact that nobody south of the Antarctic circle had put up a billboard for car accident lawyers. Somebody would, eventually, given enough time. But some small places on earth remained relatively innocent.

She'd gotten too used to traveling to remote places, it had been a while since she'd been in a populated place like this. Even when she did go, she usually traveled in the lap of luxury. She was... still doing that, at least a little. But she actually saw strangers, had actually had to talk to a few of them.

Poverty cosplay was an impolite term. It wasn't exactly what she was doing. But she could also see the case for it. All of the various things that her parents had tried to instill into her at a young age were valuable, real-world things. She needed those things... She just usually didn't need to engage with them. She almost never had to properly budget, go out and deal with people who didn't sleep in the same house as her. If she wanted to, she could spend the rest of her life in Croft Manor. But she left for her job, again a thing she didn't technically need to do. And you could never be sure how the dice would turn, so sometimes it was good to practice these things. She'd set an amount aside, enough to get through but not that much more. It was cosplay, of course, she had her black card if she was in an emergency. She would rather face never really living like common people than having some kind of unfixable emergency on vacation. It was the illusion of danger. Life was all about illusions.

Your drink cost five dollars, which is cheap for drinks. Your hotel room will be one hundred dollars each night you are here. Your breakfast was fifty dollars, which was decently expensive. You've spent about twenty more today than you meant to and you still have dinner to go. Sloppy. Her father had started forgetting what things cost. Some extended family members too. She couldn't afford that, not so long as she was going to keep working.

She'd made her way out along the hike to the petroglyphs just before noon local time. It had been a mistake, but a relatively small one. The walk back had rubbed elbows with peak hot hours. Even with shaded paths, if she hadn't been properly sun-screened the hour of walking would have resulted in her coming back to the hotel looking like a lobster. She didn't burn, usually. But that meant that when she burned she burned badly. She'd looked the part of the tourist with the big sunhat, khaki shorts, and simple t-shirt. But she'd also enjoyed more or less privacy the entire way. It was probably the first thing she'd done since arriving that wasn't a pure tourist trap. Tourist stuff usually tried not to be something you walked through the desert for.

At the site she'd walked about the carved-out dwellings where she was allowed and respected where she wasn't. She wasn't on-job, she didn't have permission even if she wouldn't be punished for it. The fact that the whole of what she was there to see was largely superstructure helped quell any fascination or investigative urge. It wasn't even bones, really. It was a single bone of what had once been a civilization both uniquely advanced and unadvanced relative to the understanding of their peers. A bone so past picked clean by age after age of travelers, gawkers, and conquerors before her as to be little more than the remaining toe of an unintentional statue of Ozymandias. No meaning to be derived, no warning or message left behind. Now just an effective demarcation of where humans once were and no lived no longer. On one of the buildings a set of scratches had been etched. The romantic archeologist in her cried that it was now nothing but the receipt of a meaningful gesture made by an effective nobody in the middle of no-mans land. The realist in her argued vandalism.

"What are you looking at?"

She almost responded, but a quick glance showed her that it wasn't meant for her. Two Americans, talking in their flat little barks of accents. One kneeling right on the tape line of what he was allowed to touch, the other standing over him. The kneeling one stood up and shrugged.

"Kinda just rocks, same as the rest of it."

"Yeah, but they're cool rocks." He sounded almost defensive.

"I mean, sure." The other dusted himself off, "But what do I do with that?"

"I don't know man, the Grand Canyon is just rocks. You go there so you've seen it."

"So what do I do when I've seen it? I mean, if there was gold or something, that would be one thing."

Lara cleared her throat and interjected.

"Actually, since these places were Ancestral Puebloan dwellings, you would find pottery instead of gold."

Both of them looked at her like she had grown a second head, she took off her sunglasses.

"Most of the terrain here is ancient volcanic ash, so you wouldn't find any gold no matter what era you came here during. But the cave up there would have been used as a kiva. We're not entirely sure what kivas were used for, but we think they may have been meeting places that the whole town was built around. That's why most of the pottery we've found in the area tends to be closer to the kiva than the homes, as the pieces of higher quality would have been for public use and observation."

The kept looking at her in silence for a moment, as if waiting to see if she'd continue. When she didn't, they both nodded.

"That's cool," One of them said neutrally.

After another moment of silence they went back to talking amongst themselves. Lara slid her sunglasses back on and stormed up to the cave mouth. She trailed a bit inside and glanced around. After a moment, she stepped back out and sighed. The joy in it was gone. She walked a bit out off of the trail and pulled out her PDA. After a moment, Winston picked up.

"Are you enjoying your time away from home, madam?"

"Winston, I have a question for you."

"I am all ears."

"Am I actually very old and very dull?"

He looked at her from under his bushy eyebrows and then glanced around the room. He turned his camera toward his desk.

"Well I don't happen to think so, but you did catch me in the middle of constructing a ship inside of a bottle."

"Oh, is that the HMS Grafton?"

"A keen eye, as always madam." He refocused the camera on himself and looked at her. "Whatever makes you ask?"

"Well, I had been told that Americans in the south were a very hospitable bunch. Friendly enough to make both my father and my mother uncomfortable when they visited. Yet it feels like I've been treated like a plague carrier since I've arrived. All of the staff have been kind, but everybody who isn't being paid to be kind to me has been quite standoffish."

"Well," Winston tapped his finger on his chin, "It could be that you just haven't found the right audience. It could also be your accent putting people off. I'm afraid I'm not certain. I try to avoid speaking to people from the colonies when I can avoid it. Do you usually have people coming up to you in public elsewhere?"

Lara sighed.

"I guess not very often. Perhaps it's just a matter of expectations. I thought that everybody here would greet me with a "Howdy" and a tip of their cap and instead they're just... ordinary human beings."

"Give or take being American, of course."

"Alright Winston, I'll call you again when I change states. Do you want anything from New Mexico?"

"Is there anything from New Mexico worth bringing home?"

"I haven't seen anything. I suspect I'll be coughing up roughly a pound of the sand from this state on one of our rugs whether you'll ask for it or not."

"Then perhaps a dustpan, madam."

"Alright, Winston." She closed the connection.

She stepped back out of the sun into the cave, taking the broad sunhat off and letting it hang back against her shoulder blades. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead and brought her face close to some of the wall carvings. Starting to note them down on her PDA. Some of them wouldn't be translatable, some of them would. The Puebloan language had changed a lot, but bits and pieces could be picked apart. Some of them would be drawings too, and that made things more complicated. Even if it was purely for her own interest, getting good scans and seeing if she couldn't get working on making a proper cypher would be positive press and a way to kill time.

"Hey, lady?"

She turned around, the two young men had entered the cave. She had a quick, instinctual moment of scanning them for weapons. Making an escape plan on top of a plan of action. But neither of them seemed to be armed and they were both standing relaxed.

"Are you referring to me?"

"Yeah, you're the one who told us about the rocks earlier. The... kuva?"

"The kiva, yes." She gestured at the circle dug into the stone. "Is there something you need?"

"Are you like an archeologist or a tour guide or something?"

"In a sort of way, yes. Peubloan isn't one of my more researched cultures, but I know enough to be able to say what most of what you'll find at this place is."

"That's cool." One of them responded in the same flat tone of voice. Then, after a moment's hesitation, "Can we see your titties?"

"I'm sorry, what?" She blinked.

"You can tell us about the ruins and stuff, but we want to see your tits when it's over."

She stood in silence for what felt like a truly long and awkward moment before she sighed.

"So let me get this straight. You want me to give you a guided tour of the ruins, as in, something that a park ranger or tour guide would normally be paid to do. And then, as compensation, you expect to see my breasts at the end of the tour?"

"I mean, you don't have to do the tour if you don't want. We mostly just care about the titties thing."

"The two of you... where are your parents?"

They looked at each other confusedly.

"We're both adults, lady."

"Then I simply do not understand how you came to conclusion that I would respond positively to your request."

"We can pay you if you want."

She started to respond and then caught herself as she processed what they had just said.

"You... you're offering to pay me? For me to flash my breasts at you? Seriously?"

"We're bored," One shrugged, then the other did. "We've got twenty bucks."

Lara started to respond and stopped herself again. After a moment's frustrated deliberation, she pulled her shirt up. Her body was paler than her face, even with sunscreen. She didn't have anything on under her shirt, so she gave them the full view of her chest, as well as the tight bulge of muscle on her stomach.

"Told you she wasn't wearing a bra."

"Why would I wear a bra while out on a hike?" She shrugged. "Have you noticed how hot it gets in this climate?"

"How much for us to squeeze them?"

"You do realize I'm not a prostitute, right?" She sighed.

"Just this and showing your ass, that's it. We'll pay you sixty bucks for the whole thing."

She swirled the proposition around on her tongue for a moment. She didn't need the money... but she hadn't needed the twenty either. At a certain point, it was just equal parts getting them to leave and for her own amusement. Of course, all money was good money. And she had spent more today than she'd meant. If she made positive money today, that meant one fewer day where she'd herself to go lean to stick to budget. It wasn't outrageous. She pushed her luck.

"To feel them? One-fifty."

"One fifty? You're crazy, lady."

"You get to feel both my chest and my ass. But don't try anything funny."

They looked at each other.

"One-twenty."

"One-fifty," She shook her head.

"I get to suck on your titties if it's one-fifty."

"Deal," She said it almost too fast. She must have seemed properly .

She undid her pants and slid them around her knees, then lifted her shirt again. One elbowed the other in acknowledgement that she wasn't wearing panties either. They stepped to either side of her. She felt the pair of hands on her ass first. then the one in front of her crouched slightly to squeeze her breasts directly in front of his own face.

"Holy shit, lady, you've got a great ass."

"Thanks?" She responded almost confusedly. She wasn't exactly sure how you were supposed to respond to a comment like that.

A second later she yelped as the one behind her slapped her ass a little too hard to come across as playful.

"Watch it!" She barked.

"Are you sure all I can do is feel it? My dad is pretty rich."

"I'm not that kind of girl, young man."

The one in front of her wrapped his lips around one of her nipples, the bright pink bud of flesh vanishing into his mouth. She stifled a gasp as his tongue flicked across the tip of her sensitive skin, either of his hands squeezing one of her breasts. She felt her nipples getting hard, one in his mouth and the other being pinched and teased by his fingers. In spite of herself, she could feel a dull throb starting to make itself known between her legs. This was... a new experience. She hadn't expected to get anywhere near as horny as she was.

The walls of the cave had shielded them from the sound of people approaching until it was right on top of them. She heard the voice of the tour guide first, then the assembled shuffling of feet and clicking of shutters coming closer.

"Shit!" She hissed out a breathy whisper, "Back up! Get off!"

They tried to keep on her, but she managed to push both of them away and yank her pants back up and shirt back down seemingly just the millisecond before the first person came into view in the cave mouth. She felt her heart pounding in her ears. The people barely looked at her or the guys with her, glancing around the cave and shuffling about as the tour continued. They were effectively safe, but they were also surrounded enough that they needed to break off.

She felt something budge against her open hand and her fist closed around a wad of dollar bills. She counted them out discreetly and then pushed her sunglasses back down and hat back up. She tipped her cap to the young men as she left, leaving them to adjust the bulges in their pants. A couple of people stared at her, catching glimpses of the hard nipples poking through her shirt, but she was out of sight a few seconds later and moving back down the trail.

She made it just out of sight of the cave entrance before a giant, full-body shudder ran through her. Her heart had started to fade from her ears, and a sort of giddy elation was left. That, and a wetness between her legs. She shoved her money into her pocket and started back up along the trail.

Your drink cost five dollars, your hotel room will be one hundred dollars each night, your breakfast was fifty dollars. But you make a clean hundred and fifty dollars by letting some strangers grope you in a cave. You've got a lot of vacation spots left on your to-do list and every day that you can avoid spending more than your expected allotment is another one you can get done before going home. Living like common people indeed.