an eight year old girl with brown-flecked white wings, looking dismayed and lost.
"The Golden Calf is a figure from Abrahamic mythology. Way back when, when Judaism wasn't even an organised thing, there were just these people wandering around in a desert who would one day found Israel and Judea, the people said, "We're wandering around in a desert because God told us to! This sucks!" and they went off to one of their religious leaders and said, "Make us a new god who won't tell us to wander around in a desert!" And then, presumably because the populace was threatening him, he told everyone to give him their gold jewelry, and he melted it down and made a statue of a calf, and the people started worshiping that. And then the religious leader's brother who outranked him came down from the mountain where he had been talking to God and completely flipped his lid. And ever since then the Golden Calf has become the iconic false god. Edie's referring to your spaceship that way because presumably the people who came to your planet and gave up their technology and stuff knew that their spaceship wasn't really God, but they told their descendents to worship it anyway."
"He wasn't making them wander through a desert for the heck of it. Before then, they had been enslaved in a country called Egypt. The desert just happened to be between where they were coming from and where they were going to. And he did make sure they had enough to eat and drink and so on. Or so the story goes, anyway"
After dinner, does she want to go back to the library, or does she want to see the clothes Edie altered for her?
"I could only find one pair of leggings in your size that no one was using on short notice," Edie says. "I didn't know what kind of thing you liked so I tried to get some variety."
Pen is slightly dubious about the frills, but too polite to say anything about them. "Thank you."
If Pen doesn't like the frills, Edie won't be offended. But Pen hasn't actually said anything about them, and Edie isn't reading her mind. "You're welcome. Is there anything else I can help with, or will you two be off to take advantage of the fact that since it's summer it's not too dark to fly yet?"
Library! And then window! Emily hops out first, on the off chance that something goes wrong and Pen needs catching. Not likely, but better safe than sorry.
Pen catches herself just fine, snapping her wings open to full span. Her bracelets and the opal embedded in her forearm glint in the sun.
"...I assume the sparkly rock in your arm is perfectly normal in some way and not to be worried about at all?" she checks. Because you can never be too careful about the well-being of a small child.
Flying! Flying never gets old.
Emily can probably pull a few swoopy tricks that involve turning on too sharp a corner for Pen's wings.
Pen's timezone of origin isn't this one, is it. It was a little after noon when she arrived. When is she likely to want to go to bed?
She is flagging already. But not so much that she can't fly for a while! She is so awake. Watch her soar. Watch her nearly crash into the building, whoops.
"Yeahaaaaaa," yawns Pen. "Am fine, am safed. Don't even skinned knees any more because very especially not liking it."