"Tremendous." Neil replied in an extravagant and ostentatious accent. He almost felt like he was in one of the holodisks he sometimes viewed back before he joined the crew when he actually had free time. Ancient humans of the 'Victorian' kingdom dealing with savages at the edge of the known world. Well, at least when he appeared before the tribesman, they only gawked at him a bit before he was sure they were not going to stick him like a pig. 

Once Taya stumbled out of the ship with a bag, a few of the tribesmen turned around, spears leveled. She squeaked and nearly dropped the sack. Neil was nimble enough to catch the drooping bag and help her yank it level again. "Nothing to see here. No firewater here." He said, hand in the air to halt anyone coming closer. 

"Thank you," she whispered, nervously glancing about. "Do things like this always happen with you two?" 

Neil placed his hands in his pockets, giving the fierce spears and wild eyed stares from the locals a cursory look. "...I'm noticing a pattern." 

With a wave of the lead one's spear, the small band of hunter gathers and the three [i]Highlander[/i] crew members made their way deeper into the temporal forest, soon looking a bit more like a subtropical or even tropical jungle as they moved. Mostly the tribespeople seemed to look outwards, as if expecting some sort of attack. Neil was hoping that they just felt awkward looking at the crew and decided to look elsewhere. Not that he wasn't against excitement, but he had just gotten out of a lot of hairy situations. Oddly enough, the alien mark on his palm from his and Junebug's first mission was itching a bit. 

Within the hour, the treeline thinned, and though the area before them was still forested with copses of trees and brush, there were islands of stone and wood that rose out of the ground between them. Primitive ziggurats with oddly alien pictographs chiseled at their sides dominated the low river valley they now found themselves entering. A stout stream flowed across a Grand plaza, filled with trees with surprisingly spaced out and neatly swiped dirt travel paths. On second inspection, the stone and wood ziggurats did not go high in the air. Maybe three stories, and soon they found smaller huts. But it was impressive nonetheless. They sometimes crossed under small roadways of vine bridges above them, and disturbingly, there were times when corpses hung by their impaled wrists and naval cavities swayed lightly below some trees, being picked at by the local birds. 

It was past the Plaza and over the river on one of the vine bridges when they made it to what looked like a meeting hut. It was circular and made of wood, and upfront there was a guardsmen who seemed to give a disapproving look to the leading tribesmember, before fingers were pointed at Junebug and the others. Immediately they were allowed inside, where they found a few slaughtered beasts strung up, some still bleeding. There was a firepit in the center. 

It took Neil just until this moment to think of it. Yes, the settlement of city they had just walked through was not impressive by his standards, but it was impressive for these people. Yet, it looked nearly deserted. He had seen only a few dozen other villagers since they had come here, other than the close to two dozen who led them. He wasn't good with demographics, but he expected there to be thousand or two people here, not a few hundred. 

What happened here? 
[@Penny]