"I haven't mixed the food into the rest of my body yet so I could leave my outer layer normal and then switch out what's my outer layer."

She's mostly offering this for their sakes, but.

"Right now we don't even know if there was anything wrong with your food and there most likely wasn't," says Hadri soothingly. "We'll find out for sure, okay?"

"I'm fine. Shoggoths don't do the inefficient digestive tracts thing or the dying easily thing so our emotions don't have really a strong tie to it other than a bit of grossness? We keep clean when we're interacting with humans and stuff, but making our bodies briefly super acid or alkaline is also an anti-parasite thing so it's not a problem to do? I don't want you guys being worried, though, and I don't know how you guys keep clean?"

Humans don't do cleanness the same way but she's not gonna say that now.

"That makes sense. Anyway, you don't need to do anything for our sake, right now we don't know if we might have eaten the bad food either. We usually solve it with thorough showers if we have a problem."

She also wants to make sure the reds are okay but she doesn't know how to ask that without upsetting the greens.

"Okay." Talking to mom, and: "I think we'd be willing to go public? But mom's still kind of paranoid about that, though I think if she sees that Amentans are just excited she'll calm down."

"Amentans are all very excited about aliens," Hadri promises. "We've been hoping to meet aliens for a long time."

"Yeah. She's a mom, though, and I make her worry."

"I understand. If there's anything we can do to help reassure the both of you..."

"I'd like to have other kids to play with? From a bunch of castes, so I can talk to them? And I think if mom sees kids playing with me even while I'm sometimes having tentacles she'll be okay very fast? And I think kids get okay with things faster than adults."

"That makes sense! Of course, it's kind of hard to swear kids to secrecy, so things might leak that way."

"Yeah, I was thinking this'd be after we come forward. I want people to be okay, and I think mom'll listen to me on that? And if us coming forward fast means people will be okay sooner..."

"I think it could help a lot."

"Then I wanna do it, and I wanna learn a lot about Amenta, too. I can't really help mom with the portals but I'm supposed to be learning to be a diplomat, right? And when I get my adult name I want it to be Friendship."

"That sounds like a great choice of name."

"Yeah! People should be friends, or able to be friends, at least, even if they don't like specific people."

"We'll be where we're going in just a couple hours, and we can find out more then about what the governor wants to do."

"Okay! I can learn about Amenta and mom can learn the language and you guys can learn more stuff about shoggoths?"

"Sounds good!"

"Can you describe all the castes? And then ask me a question, I'm not sure what you guys wanna know."

"Sure! We've, uh, been over reds; you guys have been looking purple, and purples do things like farming, working in factories, cutting people's hair, building houses, delivering packages, cooking, cleaning, stuff like that. Most people are purple, there are so many things we need purples for. There are greens like us, we do science and academics and art and music and writing! There are blues, like Governor Avalor, who rent out land to people, or make laws, or do diplomacy, or are judges. There are oranges who teach, or take care of sick or old people, or look after children. There are yellows and they do computer stuff, office work, translation, library work, that sort of thing. There are greys and they're police and dancers and sex workers and soldiers and athletes."

"I think the energies are purple and orange and the knowledges are green and yellow and the wisdoms are blue and the elders are soldier and police grey but are mostly retired? And I don't think we have professional dancers separate from like theater people, and it involves a lot of shapeshifting so would look really different. I'm a kid so I'm not anything, but if I wanna be a diplomat I can make my hair blue? And mom's - she's a knowledge and probably a green kind of knowledge but 'finding out about other cultures' is kind of like diplomacy too?"

"We've got blue diplomats and green anthropologists! It doesn't have to map exactly, we know you aren't just high-density Amentans."

Then have a blue haired small! She explains the thing to her mother, who turns her own hair green with an indulgent smile. 

"It'll be nice to sometimes be a bunch of shapes around non-shoggoths. I've only been in a shoggoth colony a few times when we were visiting great-grandma... Oh I wanna learn to fly while I'm still small enough! Getting big enough wings to fly when you're heavy is very hard."

"It would be, yeah! Can you fly in space?"

"We could float! I think that's different from flying though, since there's no air."