He's going to kill them they have to get away--
she commands it--
and then they are away and it occurs to her that she never specified where to. She slowly unclenches her arms from their death grip around her sister and looks around.
He's going to kill them they have to get away--
she commands it--
and then they are away and it occurs to her that she never specified where to. She slowly unclenches her arms from their death grip around her sister and looks around.
"Yeah."
"- it might confuse someone," says the more attentive grownup, "it's ambiguous with red..."
"...can you actually understand us or are you a parrot alien," asks the adult. "Uh, turn around twice if you can understand."
"- the alien understands Oahkar," the adult tells the other adults, and now Odette has a lot more attention.
She considers.
She conjures an illusion of two people talking, one with yellow hair and one with brown. Both have their mouths moving as though they were speaking, but no sound comes out. Different scripts scroll underneath them. They clearly can't understand each other. Then the brown-haired one waves a hand, throwing sparks, and the script under the yellow-haired one turns into pictures that show what objects the yellow is talking about, and the alien nods along in understanding.
"Oh, she's got fancy translation that works on languages she doesn't actually know," concludes a yellow.
"I'm still in the call queue," says Luta.
"Well, now you'll have more to tell the senator."
"She doesn't have an everything or anything maybe it's ear implants."
"Weren't aliens supposed to be listening to the radio?"
"They appeared under the table, they're not TV aliens."
"Understand," she says patiently. She pulls up the illusion of the yellow and the alien again, this time with a pocket everything in the yellow's pictogram slot.
"I wonder how she does that."
"Hologram projector or something."
"Where, up her nose? Anyway, uh, not sure how to give a tutorial on pocket everythings -"
She sighs.
She calls up more illusions.
This is her healing a sick person, this is Illia making a diamond out of ash, this is Atennesi raising the city into the air for the first time, this is a glassworker making molten glass flow through the air...
"You're a movie," says Alaior again.
"Sure is, kid," chuckles a grownup, patting her on the head. "Movie aliens. Sufficiently advanced and all."
"Mother do you have any way to jump the call queue," asks Luta.
"Not from outside the office."
"How does the translation not - I don't know any synonyms for 'call' -"
"Phone?"
"Sure, bust out the period piece vocabulary."