Crouched under a dinner table amidst feet in unfamiliar styles of sandals and the sounds of clinking silverware and alien conversation.

...Oops. Under a dinner table, seriously?

Her sister seems to feel the same way, based on the look she's giving her.

Sure seems like it. Small feet with painted toenails start swinging and may kick Illia if she's not careful.

Odette spreads her hands in incomprehension--I don't know either--and then, still embarrassed, sucks it up and starts crawling out from under the table.

"Eep!"

Chattering in unfamiliar languages. Brightly blonde people peering down at them.

Gosh that sure is an intense blonde.

"I'm sorry," she says, hoping her tone will get across even if the words don't.

More chattering. One of them tries another language.

She shakes her head and tries the other four language she's fluent in.

Nope.

Kid with painted toenails reaches for Odette's hair. A word from one of the adults stops her.

Illia crawls out from under the table and tries snatches of languages they're not fluent in but know a few words of.

One of these has enough false cognates to elicit a sentence back. But: no.

Mmkay time to try something else.

What did they say?

Most recently, "Is that Litholeen?"

Hm.

She shakes her head, points to her ear and snaps her fingers, sending up a small shower of multicolored sparks.

They are startled!

This is reasonable. She waits for them to say something else, still magically listening for meaning apart from words.

One of the adults looks at another and says, "I still don't understand how they got here. We don't even have a basement."

"They're aliens, obviously," says the kid.

"They've probably just got hair dye," says the other adult, "and maybe we've got some kind of tunnel we didn't know about?"

Huh.

She repeats the words that seemed to go with "hair dye" with a querying tone and a terrible accent.

"You got alien hair," says the kid. She looks about five or six.

"They can't understand you, Alaior, we just established that."

She snaps her fingers again, sending up more sparks, and repeats "understand you."

"She can, she can," says Alaior.

"We just determined they don't speak Oahkar or Tapap or Litholeen," says an adult, "she's probably just mimicking."

"What's with the sparks -"

"No idea. Doesn't look like she's wearing pyrotechnic gloves."

...They're not getting "magic" from the sparks, okay.

She levitates a few inches off the floor.

"She's floating," says the kid.

"...okay, maybe she is an alien - I wonder how it works -"

She turns her hair yellow, then reddish-orange, then black, then back to brown.