Locations!
Dorim Iduinath wasn’t anything to look at, either. It was an elvish town, obviously from the name; but it was weirdly elvish, too. Most places in the Elf-lands, humans and elves are pretty mixed together, down to families. Here? Well, I wouldn’t say I was the only human, but we were looking pretty thin on the ground. I was wondering if there had been a, ah, situation in the past.
Turned out there had been, but not the one I was expecting. The humans had simply left almost as soon as the goltrain line went in. “The original inhabitants were eager to hand this place over to the elves,” Mahota told me as we checked our field packs. “In fact, most of Cuba east of here was empty by then. Dorim Iduinath was the last holdout. The locals were adamant about not abandoning the town.”
I looked around. Dorim Iduinath was the kind of place where you could see the outlines of the big city it used to be. The Old Americans — Old Cubans too, I guess — loved them some rectangular streets, and it was easier to follow those than dig out new roads. If there was one twentieth as many people living here now than then, though, I’d eat somebody else’s hat. “Interesting,” I offered, in lieu of asking Why? “I guess they had some superstition about the base?”
“Not at all,” Mahota told me. “A superstition is when you wrongly believe that an action will have a causal effect on a situation. The original inhabitants were quite plausibly worried that if there were no people here, the ghosts from the Old American garrison would take over the whole area.”