"None of the literal fires are me!" she assures him. "Just. Sometimes you need to demolish a building to let the prisoners out, you know? Only apparently there is less need for that here."

"There is less need for that here," he agrees vehemently. 

"Right. I'm going to deal with the coffin now," she says, and turns both of her arms into claws and uses one to shovel most of the earth out of the way while the other puts the coffin back in the hole. Then she turns her arms back and shoves most of the pile of earth back in before doing her best to arrange the bits with grass on them on top so it's less blatantly obvious just how fresh this soil patch is right now. 

(that's so cool (get ahold of yourself Isabella))

"Anyway! It took a while to walk here and I'm hungry."

Lucy stands up and brushes the dirt off her dress, leaving it as pristine as if it hadn't just been literally covered in dirt, because cheating bullshit. 

"Food sounds good."

"Your first task as our native guide is to recommend us a restaurant, Prof."

"Where are we? I don't spend a lot of time in graveyards and I think we probably want somewhere we won't have to walk too far." 

Lucy explains their location. 

"Alright, I happen to know a decent place not too far from here."

"Perfect, lead on." 

He leads on. The place is smallish but not quite a hole-in-the-wall and if the food has a coherent theme it's not one the twenty-first century would recognize. 

Isabella winds up getting something cheese-oriented, slightly dubiously.

"I have never before regretted being too old to order off the children's menu. What is all this -"

"I dunno." She picks something with vegetables, those are pretty rare in the Neath and she might as well take advantage. 

Alex finds something that has a similar name to an item on the children's menu and gets that; it turns out to be noodles in a broth that he pronounces "weird but like, fine".

"I think that's probably the best we can hope for, under the circumstances," Lucy comments dryly. 

"Maybe I will learn to cook. And just have to get... a kitchen and groceries wherever I go. And then I can have mac and cheese."

"What is 'mac and cheese?'"

"Noodles like this but like, curvy and tube shaped and short, with cheese on them."

"Huh." She considers this. "It's probably more interesting than it sounds...admittedly, I'm disproportionately impressed by vegetables, on account of having grown up underground." 

"Is that why you're all white?" Professor Dui asks. 

"No, my mother has that too and she's from the Surface originally." 

"I will probably want context for that later," the Professor warns. 

"Yeah, that's valid. Anyway. This universe used to have an Earth and now it doesn't. That was your area of expertise, right?"

"Yes...it would be inaccurate to say Earth doesn't exist anymore; it's just that that isn't where humanity is located. The planet itself should be fine. There's probably still life on it, even. Just not human life." 

"What happened?"

He leans back and sighs. "It's a very long story. The short version is, humans destroyed the Earth's ecosystem to the point where Earth lost the ability to support human life." 

"Like... any human life? Even underground or whatever? What happened?"

"You said you and your brother were from the twenty-first century, yes? Tell me, are you having problems with your climate?"

"There's a hole in the ozone layer? Even if the weather gets really bad it's a far cry from there to can't support human life."

He nods. "The problems started becoming apparent in the early twenty-first century; what happened was that everybody completely failed to reverse course. It wasn't until later that it became clear the damage was irreversible and accelerating. In 2027, Earth astronomers discovered this star system, and its wealth of potentially terraformable planets. People tried in-system terraforming, but a dearth of native resources on the planets it was tried on led to discouraging results. Beginning in the late 2040s and into the early 2060s, the Global Exodus Alliance formed and ultimately took over Earth's collective governing power in exchange for space for each country's citizens on the generation ships. By the time the ships were ready to board, in the last years of the twenty-first century, the global population had dropped to about a billion."

Not everyone on Earth made it aboard the Ark Ships. Telemetry data from Earth was lost in the year 2110. That's the official date at which the population of Earth is assumed to have reached zero." 

"...how were there enough resources to build generation ships and not enough to terraform Earth?"

"Well, I'm a historian, not an engineer, but if I had to guess I would speculate that it had to do with the fact that the generation ships were built to hold a relatively small population under fairly tight, rationed conditions, not the massive unrestrained population Earth had at its peak."

"Still sounds weird to me but okay..."

He shrugs. "Like I said, I'm not an engineer. You'll probably get a more sensible answer out of one of them." 

"Yeah. So now humanity is here in this - system-cluster? And seems to have bounced back all right."

"Yeah, humanity as a whole is doing fine. Things aren't as great out here on the Rim as they are in the Core, but there's no risk of human extinction anytime soon."