treble | Glowfic Constellation

"I don't know anything about how strangers do magic. I wonder how all the humans in your land came to be magical."

"Our forests are more magical. I wonder if there's something about this area that suppresses magic. Not enough to interfere with spellcasting but enough that you didn't pick it up."

Yun blinks. "I guess I don't know."

"I'd be curious if you lot can pick up a cantrip if you tried but you shouldn't, obviously, in case it turns out that you can't."

"I think someone's checked me for magic before once."

"Your style might be different. Back home if I tried to teach a room full of humans a cantrip some of them would pick it up by the end of the day. Back home that'd be a reasonably safe thing to do, try to teach a room full of humans a cantrip. People do it for a living and die of old age."

"But here we might blow up or something because we're not magic?"

"Yeah. I don't know why you can't do it so we shouldn't try to find out."

Yun nods. "Let's stop for lunch here - then the passage is over there, you can see bits of the stranger village if you squint."

The stranger village is prettier than the human village, and oddly uniform. White, mostly, with some color on the sides of some of the buildings.

It's not even that weird, as settlements of other races go. She squints for strangers.

Too far away to make them out. "We might see some in the passage. They sit and watch people, sometimes."

"Huh. Do you happen to know anything about, like - whether your government formally recognizes them, where they're from..."

"...no? I think they've been here a long time."

Shrug. Lunch?

Lunch is rice and tofu and pickled plum.

The passage is a slightly nicer stretch of road, between two hills with stranger villages and stranger farms up their slopes. She can see strangers if she tries: narrow-faced, gracile shapes, wearing sashes and skirts of brightly dyed cloth. They have feathers, little dense ones over most of their bodies and longer ones still far short of wings on the backs of their arms and heads, but that's the limit of their birdishness; they have no beaks and their feet are in shoes that might fit Iris. Most of them are feathered white but she can spot one in drab browns and one with blue that might be artificial. The buildings' decorations are mostly paint, some chalk, of birds and flowers and clouds. There's a bridge the passage will lead her and Yun under, perhaps so they don't have to cross a human-trafficked road to get around in their own village.

A stranger stops on this bridge to peer curiously down at them.

Cool! She is pretty sure she hasn't seen or heard of this race but it's a big plane and she's probably heard of less than half of its races, if these ones are even native.

These passersby are unobjectionable boring humans. The jacket on her head is a fashion statement.

The stranger on the bridge stares, and goes to stare from the other side when they cross under it. It's hard to tell if it's a male or a female, if the concept even applies. Yun looks tempted to wave - his arm twitches - but he refrains.

Another stranger rushes onto the bridge and seizes the starer and hurries it back into the village, chattering at it. With the spell on, Iris can catch a few words - "you'll go mad", if she's hearing right.

- huh. "They build this passage for humans to go through?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"And previously people were going down around some other way that didn't go near them?"

"Still do, if they don't want to get near the strangers."