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Ehail blinks, when she finds the bar instead of her room.
She goes in.
She looks out the window, at the exploding things.
"I don't think this is my planet," she observes to herself, tucking silver hair behind her ear.
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nonbird
"Thank you Kolya," he says, to a room that has resumed being empty by the time he finishes the sentence.
Ehail blinks at the unfamiliar magic, but follows Lazarus in and looks around without terribly much curiosity.
Ehail looks for something to sit on, and sits on it. She skims the titles of the books, quite indiscriminate about which language she is looking at from spine to spine.
nonbird
There are a lot of languages on offer! And there is not much organization to them. Although in particular, the same book will often appear in English and Russian with both copies next to each other.
"Do you mind if I read one of these?" asks Ehail.
She tips a Dostoevsky book (in the original) into her hand, and starts reading.
Ehail peers at the phone, takes it, and says, "Алло - sorry - hello?"
"Being... 'most of a dragon' is a pretty nice way to put it," says Ehail. "The central problem is that we can't fly in our natural forms. There are hundreds of us," she adds.
prima-sequentem
"I see. What are the non-central problems, then? Lazarus wasn't really clear about the details."
Ehail glances at Lazarus, mentally attaching his name to him. "Well - if we - or dragons, but it doesn't really come up, with them - don't fly for a long time, it hurts. Which isn't such an issue when you can turn into a bird or something else that can fly, because other forms aren't affected, but we don't learn to do that till we're twenty years old. And - we're contagious, if one of us and a dragon are near enough each other in natural form. So the babies all have to stay in houses that are just for us, waiting to see if their parents will take them back."
Most people wouldn't catch the slight tremor in the last clause, but Libby may.
Most people wouldn't catch the slight tremor in the last clause, but Libby may.
prima-sequentem
"...I see," she repeats. "That does sound like a problem. It might turn out to be relevant, so I have to ask: how much does it hurt?"
"Not very much to start with, but it does keep piling up over twenty years. I'm not really sure how to describe - I don't know. I could probably leap off a hundred-story building and not care about the landing if I could be sure it wasn't going to ruin my human form."
prima-sequentem
"All right," she says. "I'd like to continue this conversation in person. It shouldn't take me more than a few minutes to get there. Could you hand the phone back to Lazarus, please?"
"Okay," says Ehail agreeably. She hands the phone back to Lazarus. "How long is a minute? I know how to work out how many there are in a day, from the language, but your days might not be the same length as mine," she asks him.
nonbird
He is listening to the phone at first; then he says "Yes, okay," hangs up, and looks back at Ehail. "Um, a minute is... a shortish amount of time. I don't really know how to describe it except in terms of other units of time from my world, which doesn't seem like it would help. I have clocks you can stare at, if that would be informative."
"Do they show seconds?" she inquires.
nonbird
"Some of them."
He looks around, then gets up and goes into another room and comes back very shortly with a digital watch that shows hours, minutes, and seconds.
He looks around, then gets up and goes into another room and comes back very shortly with a digital watch that shows hours, minutes, and seconds.