I've got a list of names | Glowfic Constellation

Afen is disappointed in the universe. He bounds back and forth across his room explaining why to his wife, his infant granddaughter, the end table, and a reporter flabbergasted by her good luck and cringing silently against the wall in the hopes he won't remember she's there.

"There is no reason to suppose that a species evolving independently of Amentans, with their own evolutionary history and living mammalian species likely related to theirs, would end up looking like us. None. Every explanation every scientist has ventured to the press has been unimaginative and unconvincing retroactive refitting of bad models to baffling data. Aliens shouldn't look like us but with different hair colors. Aliens that are not made out of carbon at all would be unsurprising; aliens with only as much physiological dissimilarity as exists between us and animal species on our planet would be mildly surprising; aliens with opposable thumbs would be truly remarkable. This is not remarkable and biologically enlightening; this is just inconsistent with everything we understand about the universe. It doesn't teach us new things about evolution; it should make us rethink evolution. - don't quote that part, they'll take it out of context."

Reporter nods rapidly.

"All of that said, I've picked up three of the languages and I'm working on building a good machine translator, it's a challenge with as little as they've produced in the way of electronic records. I'm absolutely going there to meet them as soon as the politicians figure out what to do with themselves."

"Do you have any predictions about that?"

"About politics? Why would I have predictions about politics? They deliberately obscure relevant information, for one thing, and for another it's deathly boring."

"- I mean, sir, surely you hear from your son about -"

"I have seven children and some of them are very dense indeed but not quite dense enough to try to interest me in politics."

"I was referring to -"

"I know who you were referring to. If you want a statement from Aitim go bother Aitim."

"Thank you for your time."

"I did not alter my activities in response to your presence and therefore you can't yet be said to have wasted any of my time though you should go before you do."

...out skitters the reporter.

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"Answer the question."

"I did not know that you can teleport at all and do not know why, given that you can teleport in general, you can't teleport right now. I know that technology breaks in the presence of your things but haven't observed effects in the other direction."

Chinese Chinese Chinese.

"Where's your office."

He walks towards the front door. Opens it. Points across the way. "That building."

The wizard departs the house in increments, spinning occasionally to see if he can teleport yet while consulting a device to check if he's being watched. The witch waits with Aitim.

Aitim pulls out his phone.

Her wand twitches. "What are you doing?"

"Telling people not to kill you."

Her eyes narrow.

"We learned from the rabbit incident that arresting people with mysterious abilities doesn't seem to work, so someone might get it into their head that the thing to do is to have someone half a mile away send chunks of metal flying at you very fast. That would be a catastrophe, so I'm instructing them to leave you all alone. If I wanted that to happen I would not have told you that it could, let alone described the potential mechanism in enough detail you can defend against it, but I did, so you might as well infer that I'm trying to make this meeting happen."

Her wand waves but nothing happens to him or his everything.

She is probably protecting herself against snipers.

I need someone who can understand Chinese to listen to the streaming audio file here and send me a translation, someone who can invisibly slip me an antidote to Veritaserum, and someone to get Kan and all of my children to somewhere safe. In that order.

Minor Finis Way

- he sits invisibly down in Aitim's parlor and starts playing the audio file. "Miranda he wants an antidote to Veritaserum can you go get that -"

Ebele Miranda Swan ༐

chanuphis

"From the store? Or do we have some?"

Minor Finis Way

"We don't unless there's some left from the last time we interrogated Aitim, I wasn't there though, from the store if necessary -"

chanuphis

She checks.

Nope.

chanuphis

She goes and buys some.

(Kan closes the door at the bottom of the stairs too, texts security, texts the wizards even though Aitim has presumably already done that, turns on the stream of the conversation upstairs. "Okay. There's a secret group of humans with exceptional abilities they think are magic and we've been unable to replicate. There are some all over the world; they have their own shadow government. We learned this after we decided to have children now, obviously. There were a few of them outside. They probably just want Aitim, but it'd be a bad idea to be around. Got it?")

"- magic?" says Sinkali.

"Why did you have us move near you?" exclaims Nanha. "If magic people are after him -"

"Then they might go after his children, mightn't they, and distance is no barrier for them because they fucking teleport, and here we noticed and there are also helpful magic people who are on their way."

"But they came here and never came after us before we moved here," says Nanha.

"It's possible they did, because they can erase peoples' memories. The first time they visited Aitim we had no idea, woke up the next morning with no recollection of it."

"- the babies are fine. We had our last checkups last week."