"Go to the Giant's Drink and I'll show you," she says.
She bypasses the Drink for six boys. They drift through the clouds, but they don't find villages, or pretty landscapes - they just find parts of the game they've already been to.
"Don't look at me, that's the same way I got here," says Bella. She's teaching her bird-people the scientific method now, painstakingly, almost comically, by mime and enthusiastic gestures. They're getting it, a little; a pink-and-gray one has put a cup of water in the sun and a similar cup of water in the shade and is staring at them intently.
By the time Bella has been at Battle School for six weeks she has tried all the games in the game room, and most of them (apart from the newly fascinating fantasy game) are now only interesting if someone will play against her. Most people won't. She's got too much of an advantage over the controls, and even at Battle School, among what really is a better crop of brains than kindergarten, it's apparently too much to ask that anyone think faster.
"Maybe it got sick of killing you?" suggests Bella. "I haven't tried dying. Not my speed. I just want to work out something with the antelope-people where we can divert a little river to irrigate all this purple grain the bird-people need without them shooting at my birds every time they show up with shovels."
"I'm trying to figure that out. So far my guesses are that they think the shovels are weapons or they need the river at its current strength downstream. So I'm sending an expedition downstream, see?" She has drawn a crude map for some attentive birds and is directing them to go thataway. "And I'm getting the blacksmith to make little trowels so they can show the antelopes what they're doing without looking threatening in case that works."
Her expedition appears to get the idea. They set off. She goes and checks on the blacksmith, picks up a new trowel, and nods at him enthusiastically. He nods back and starts making more, and then she goes and checks on the foundation being dug for a bird-person school up the hill. "This is the best game, now," she says happily.
Bella has many projects running concurrently in her bird village, since things go roughly in real time. She checks next on the birds who are learning to make paper. They have managed pulpy ragged-edged beige stuff, which Bella nods at approvingly; she doesn't know how to teach them to make anything smoother and it'll do. She's just about to start showing them how to paint when free play over comes up on her screen.
Bella does her classwork; after a few weeks the teachers have more finely distinguished ability from past training and sorted everyone into their semipermanent class levels and the difficulty ramps up. She flies around in the battle room, leveraging her cheater's exoskeleton to dance in the air like she can on a floor, to shoot straight and dodge beams with artful twists of herself. She notebooks about herself, at least half an hour a day even if nothing special happens. And she plays with her birds, and she works out that the antelopes were just threatened by the shovels and will allow river diversion after seeing mock-work done by nonthreatening trowels, and she builds a bridge between the villages.
(She's got other friends, people who'll dance the battleroom with her, even one boy two years older who'll give her a run for her money in the tunnel table game, but none of them have made it into the fantasy game with her. Suicide Fish can be her fantasy game friend.)
Her avatar can't talk, but she's been working on fine ingame motor control for a while; it's possible to draw in the dirt if you're fast enough. She's fast enough. After she gets a trap set up that she's confident will work, and nods at the birds (they're the ones who'll eat the crayfish; with this food source they'll be able to share some purple grain with the antelopes, who only eat plants) she writes HI SUICIDE in all caps.
After a minute or so of trying and failing to replicate her readable letters, he hops onto SUICIDE, scratches it out with a sweep of his talon, steps neatly to the end of the word, and draws a crude pictogram of a shield. Then he points his beak at the revised message, points his beak at her, and stands next to it, preening.
There's a laugh-emote. So this is definitely Suicide Watch, not the computer playing tricks on her. Her avatar laughs and nods, and then scratches out all the drawing and crosses the bridge to see how the purple grain mill in the antelope village is coming along.
Eventually Bella works out a twisty path that the surefooted antelopes can take without the benefit of arm-wings like the birds. She's already been over the mountains herself, and there weren't any villages within easy flying distance, so she's going to colonize here. (The birds have recently laid a clutch of eggs and almost half the antelopes are pregnant; it's spring.)
His wings stop flapping automatically when she lands them. He just stands there, animated blinking at regular intervals.
And then his colors change. Silver first, all his feathers going at once, and then there's a line of dots down his throat, appearing one at a time.
Red red blue.
Bella has no idea how this is supposed to be happening, but it's clear enough. She logs off and shuts her desk and paints a path.
And she runs.
Three of them have Suicide Watch on the floor while two stand lookout. The sixth and oldest is also on the floor, not visibly marked but screaming in pain loud enough to drown out the younger victim's quieter bawling. No one involved is emitting coherent words.
Bella's faster than them, and while she's not stronger, she does know exactly how hard she can force her hand into something without breaking any bones. Everyone else has to deal with instincts designed for conservatism in the savannah.
She bypasses the lookouts, tumbling in a sudden roll between them and springing up to strike one of the ones issuing the beating in the ear. She can't just haul them away, she's not that strong - but she can hit, she can straightarm that one in the ear hard enough to make his head spin and elbow the other in the nose hard enough to break it and force them back and then stand astride her friend, defiant, facing them all with her hands up and ready.
The screams of the oldest boy trail off; he jumps to his feet and points accusingly at Suicide Watch. "He got me!" he yells. "The fucking mutie got me with some kind of fucking mutie torture ray!"
Suicide Watch does nothing to answer this accusation. The other boys draw into a tight knot around their newly risen leader, looking warily at Bella.
"Get a teacher, tell it to him, I'll wait," says Bella levelly, not lowering her hands. (There are no female teachers. And fewer than two percent of the Battle School students are girls.) "I'll tell him what I saw, and I'll tell him how I knew to come here, too, how less than a minute ago I know my friend was playing on his desk and you've had him at least that long."
She's faster. She dodges his hands and punches him in the throat. The copper contacts on her knuckles leave little bleeding divots, but most of the damage is from the impact; he's going to have trouble breathing for a minute there. "Anyone else?" she shouts. "You want a six-year-old girl to beat you all up?"
She crouches beside him. "How bad did they get you? Do you need the infirmary? If you can't walk, I don't think I can carry you but if you took off your uniform I could maybe drag you on it." (She's gotten fairly accustomed to nudity since starting school here; little boys run around naked all the time and this was only funny for five minutes.)
"Most of the older guys, if I shit-talk them a little they think it's funny, they leave me alone," he says. "These guys I guess not. They started in on me. And then... it was like I was yelling in his face, but with my mind. Yelling how they were hurting me. But I guess he was too busy screaming to figure it out, because they all piled on me like they thought if they hurt me enough I'd stop."
"Well, I don't know, there's all kinds of mutant powers. I know you can't telepath at me; I don't know if you can telepath at smart computer programs." She hands him over to a nurse. They don't ask too many questions at the infirmary. He just starts disinfecting Suicide Watch and inspecting him for broken bones.
He gets a needle stick above the cracked rib. They have pretty advanced medicine up there. "I'll write you a note to your launch coordinator to excuse you from the battleroom for four days," the nurse tells Suicide Watch. "You can walk, but no roughhousing or strenuous play."
"If you need help again you won't be able to telepath at me, but you could try Qiaochu, he's in my launch and most of my classes and he'd be able to tell me where to go most of the time," suggests Bella. "And he's cool about me being a mutant so I don't think he'll mind you."
"Hi, Bella," he says. "Who's he?"
"He goes without a name. I call him Suicide Watch. But I just rescued him from some bigger kids, and I want you to take messages from him for me if he needs rescuing again, okay? 'Cause I can't -" She taps her temple - "and you're usually around. Is that cool?"
"Yeah, yeah, I take your messages, I your answering machine," says Qiaochu. He's taken up more Battle School slang than she has. "You owe me, though."
"I owe you," she agrees.
"Suicide Watch?" snickers another boy.
"Sue," suggests a third. "For short."
"Hurray, Bella found a girl friend," snorts the kid who suggested calling him Sue. "They can have tea parties."
"I just beat up twelve-year-olds, I beat up you you say tea parties again," says Bella mildly, dropping into slang for this purpose.
Bella paints the path. "Hey, how d'you even log into your desk if you didn't have a nickname before I gave you one?" She doesn't fall into slang naturally, only when she's trying to slot into the social framework more deliberately than average. She drops it when it's just her and Sue.