What?

This whole situation is so terrible.

Yeah.

Found a forum. Which town?

She names it.

Five minutes later a red peeks out.

Illia waves hesitantly.

"...hello, um, alien."

Illia holds up her pocket everything.

"Hello," the text-to-speech program says in Orvaran. "We don't speak Orvaran. We've got magic translation--we're fantasy aliens, not sci-fi aliens--but it's one-way. We can understand you but have to rely on machine translation the other way around."

"The Tapai on the internet says that - we were being scammed but now you're going to put us in the arctic circle?"

"What did they tell you was going to happen?"

"...they said if purples did our jobs too, there'd be - less stigma, so eventually -"

"Ah.

Yes, you were being scammed. They--didn't have a plan for what to do with you, before I came along."

She nods.

"I'm sorry."

She doesn't say anything.

She sighs.

"Are there any ways of doing this that would be--less bad than others?"

"Doing - what?"

"Getting everyone to the Arctic Circle."

"I don't know what the choices are."

Unhappily: "One of the options presented to me was having you all packed into shipping containers. I figure we can improve on that."

"I still don't know what the choices are."

"Yeah. Um. The basic idea is that my sister flies everyone there invisibly, but there are better and worse ways of doing that."

"...there are?"

"I assume 'yoinking everyone with no explanation' could be improved upon, for example."

"I can tell people."