Feathered Amazon Friends

Posted on Tue Feb 5th, 2019 @ 11:28pm by Lieutenant Mona Gonadie

Mission: Earthly Visitation
Location: Amazon Rainforest
Timeline: 2396

The Amazon rainforest at the end of the twenty fourth century was full of life and had amazing tours through several trails deep into it that were amazing and it was on Mona Gonadie's bucket list to go down one of the longest trails at least once. Not passing up the opportunity, she had spent the past week with a group of six plus a guide hiking along a trail barely wider than the people using it, spotting animals and taking pictures as quietly as possible. At night they camped in portable blinds in trees and for food they ate whatever they could find and supplemented it with the ration packs they brought, making sure to take every last scrap of trash with them on their way out. The bottom line was that if they couldn't carry it with them or find it in the forest, they couldn't use it between the beam in and beam out points, both of which were over fifteen hundred kilometers from the nearest form of civilization.

And while it had been amazing and she had even made a few friends among the trees, most notably several yellow and green parrots and even a few of the monkeys that had gotten curious, the sixty kilometer deep nature hike had ended all too soon for her and soon they were beaming back to the Amazon Preserve Foundation where she could get cleaned up, stay in the hot springs hotel overnight, and peruse the gift shop.

In that gift shop, she found several plush recreations of many of the animals she had seen as well as commemorative plates and spoons and various coins. What really drew her attention though, was a series of bird stands with holo-emitters built into them.

Tapping on one, a Yellow-naped Amazon parrot shimmered to life on it and squawked at her. "Hello hello," it said immediately, cocking it's head and eyeing her.

"Hello there," she replied, rubbing its belly a little. "And how much are you?"

"Twelve strips, twelve strips RAWK!" the holographic bird replied. It wasn't bad, all things considered, and it was inside of her souvenir budget, after all.

Clicking that one off, she studied the others to see if there were other versions of the program. Not finding any others, she shrugged and grabbed two, heading for the checkout where they disabled the demo mode and gave her a comm code for support just in case.