Fated Lives (Part 1)
by Allison
It took a half an hour to reach Sushi Tazo due to the traffic on Colorado Blvd. In five miles, they saw 3 multi-car accidents. Sadly, as Daniel told her, they were the norm in Denver, and she would probably see more before she left. They spent the time getting to know more about each other beyond their names.
With the radio on in the background, they talked more about what had brought each of them to Denver in the first place. Janet was a specialist in exotic diseases, and was in Denver for the annual conference on the treatment of malaria and yellow fever. She was a keynote speaker, having spent three years in the Amazon studying the various methods the tribes used to cure yellow fever. She was also interviewing with the University of Colorado Medical Center for a position as the head of their Virology unit.
They had called her, along with four other universities around the country, after her paper on tribal medicine versus modern medicine demonstrated how some of the tribal medications worked better then modern treatments. The other universities included Johns Hopkins (ironic, she said, because they had turned her down twice for medical school), UCLA, University of Pittsburgh, and Northwestern.
Daniel, on the other hand, was in Denver to study the artifact. All he said initially was that he was an archaeologist from Chicago. It took five minutes of prodding from Janet for him to tell her that he was fluent in several languages. And a few more to tell her that it was twenty-eight languages, fourteen of them ancient and unspoken in the modern world.
He was one of only ten people in the entire archaeological community who could read and translate Babylonian-Akkadian Cuneiform with out having to translate it into Latin or ancient Egyptian first. He could read it just as easily as he could English.
Janet was impressed, to say the least. She didn't think she could NAME twenty-eight different languages, much less speak them. She spoke passable Spanish, and bits and pieces of French, but that was it. Much of the rest of the drive was spent in silence, as they digested what they had been told.
Thankfully, they reached the restaurant a few minutes later. They ended up parking at the Cherry Creek Mall and walking there, since there wasn't any parking closer. It wasn't a long walk, and it was a fairly pleasant evening.
Once they arrived there, they had a ten-minute wait for a table, since it was quite crowded. When they finally got a table, it was a decent one, near the front entrance without them being swarmed by people like the closer ones were. Dinner went smoothly after that, despite Janet's limited experience with sushi causing her to order, without realizing it, seaweed wrapped around rice, squid, and salmon eggs. Daniel ended up trading his Alaskan Rolls (crab and shrimp sushi) with her, although she had no idea how he could eat the fish eggs. He shrugged it off, saying that, while on digs with his parents, he'd learned to eat what was put in front of him, no matter what it was. "'You never know when refusing to eat the host's cooking might lead to an international incident,' is what my father always said. Besides, a lot of weird food tastes like chicken," he added with small grin, before biting into yet another piece of sushi.
She grinned back at him, laughing. They spent the rest of the meal talking casually, and by the time they arrived back at the hotel, they knew the basics about each other. They parted for the night in the elevator, shaking hands awkwardly as they said good-bye.
The next two days were spent in a similar fashion, driving in to the museum together in the morning, and having dinner at night on the way back.
Janet left on Sunday evening, needing to be back in Florida for work the next morning. Before she left, however, they traded email addresses so that they could keep in touch.
Part 3
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