Bright pays attention to it, translating parts for her mom. What're they saying?

The first result for "newspaper", typed in Voan, gets the Halde Record again, which has as its headline "FEDS CONFIRM: ALIENS IN VOA" and its subtitle "Officials have provided video, corroboration for reports of extraplanetary sapients visiting Amenta". The article's substantially about the quality of the evidence (who's saying what) and includes a link to the vlog site, which is up now. There's another subsidiary article is about the statement that they do not represent immediate access to FTL but that there is "proof-of-concept and a realistic path forward".

This seems pretty solid.

Can she figure out what non-official people are saying? Either, like, editorial sections, or other journalists, or letters to the editor type things...

Some people think it's a hoax - some people specifically think it's a hoax to draw attention away from the food recall - and are analyzing her video to see telltale signs of special effects. Her vlog has been picked up by a ton of video curation sites. The comments load pretty slowly and are roughly fifty percent "she's so fucking cute! lookit the little tentacle alien!!!" by volume.

Maybe she should play as an actual sea monster at the school they send her to to make friends, so people can see she's not Amentan.

Other people are speculating about what the fairly vague "proof of concept and a realistic path forward" might be; the top guess is that they crashed and their stuff is all broken but there's hope for reverse-engineering.

That's kinda what happened, she guesses.

What are people in other countries saying, she has all the languages and can just type 'newspaper' in a bunch of them.

They're translating the Voan articles directly, some of them, and doing comparisons to other times people have claimed to have seen aliens, and wondering about what Voa will do wrt international access.

There's already a lot of newspapers! But maybe it's too early for weird editorials like human newspapers get. (She likes the weird editorials and newspaper columns.)

Weird editorials take a little bit but eventually do start popping up. Somebody's not confident the aliens are friendly, apparently because genuinely friendly aliens shouldn't be able to come across so pitch-perfect on a video, they should be weirder and more off-putting! This guy thinks they're real but can't actually do FTL because FTL is impossible; they probably arrived in a cryostasis escape pod after a thousand year journey and Voa's just playing up the spaceflight angle so nobody steals their aliens to try to get FTL out of them.

Amentans are confusing. If the aliens couldn't do FTL, why would Voa need to keep people from stealing the aliens for FTL?

Also probably other shoggoths would be weird and off-putting but Bright is a genius, so.

Still, people's weird opinions are entertaining. (She checks the comments on her video.)

this has to have been scripted, like it's a good script but I don't buy it

ITTY BITTY TENTACLE ALIEN, MY HEART

if you look at the pixels it's obviously done on the same effects engine as they use for Modern Espionage: Operation Pastel

guys if this is just being played up for cute but she's also a real shapeshifter they would have had her look like a ONE year old, THINK

why is her mom letting her do this

I read that actually they crashed and this poor kiddo has been in cryosleep for a thousand years!

What a SMILE! Don't go blue, baby alien, you've got an actor's presence! The camera loves you and so do I!

I just wanna scoop her up and snuggle her and get TENTACLE HUGS

Well technically she scripted it, so.

She tries to sort through them for stuff she can answer in another video. She can probably explain why she's shaped like a two-year-old? She doesn't know how to explain 'why is her mom letting her do this' because she has a lot of confusion about why her mom would stop her from doing something not really dangerous.

do you think they're letting her read the comments

hey aliens here is the Questions For Aliens page

BABY!!!

I wonder if aliens smell weird

they can probably shapeshift to not smell weird

is there an official rendering of the word "shoggoth" into other languages, no way can I pronounce that

figures we get a blue alien. no purple nalafe this.

She pokes the word 'nalafe' in her head but if it's misspelled she might have trouble.

What are the Questions for Aliens?

"Nalafe" doesn't seem to mean anything.

The Questions for Aliens include:

1. How can we share the galaxy?
2. What do you already know about us?

and:

45. Do aliens want to have sex with Amentans?
46. Do you think our babies are cute?

and:

87. Does Amentan music sound good to you?
88. Do aliens like our art?

and such things.

Humans think the weird sex thing they do is inappropriate around children so she's going to ignore those questions in case Amentans think the same.

This is a very thorough list. She might reference it if she runs out of video ideas.

she's so cheerful, she wouldn't be cheerful if she crashed

her name has Sorrow in it though, that's not very cheerful

her name is weird. what's the spiraling one. what's the place of ice. is binding the fire an ftl thing. what does combing the future fame mean. can they see the future.

OMG maybe they can see the future.

tentacle baby!!! I will be your friend tentacle baby!!!

who do I talk to about licensing stuffed animals of this kid

She should probably explain the name thing! Except mom probably doesn't want her explaining about the Elder God that Bright's grandmother trapped. The Elder God is a secret. So Bright's gonna have to just say something like 'an old enemy' or pretend the Elder God was actually a natural disaster grandma solved.

And in the morning they announce that they're having a contest among Halde province intercaste schools to put together a pitch for why Bright Sorrow should attend their school, and Bright can check them out and visit a shortlist and pick one to attend.

She wants to read about all the schools! What are the summaries of them? (Probably mom's also interested in the curriculum.)

Halde Province has nineteen intercaste schools that contain blue two year olds (some intercaste schools only cover year one and those are excluded from the contest, as are schools that take more than one caste but not blues; only two of the nineteen schools go all the way up to four year olds, but half of them will take three year olds). Of the nineteen, eight are "rainbow" schools which take all the clean castes, and the others do combinations like blue and green (gifted kid magnets), blue and orange and green (social science magnet), blue and yellow (bureaucrat factories), blue and green and yellow (more gifted magnets but with more computers), blue and green and orange and grey (that one's largely a military prep academy), or blue green yellow and orange (this seems to have grown out of a school for teaching oranges to deal with special needs students; the oranges need to pass certain tests to get in and everybody else needs to fail other tests to get in). The rainbow schools have values statements like "teaching interdependence" and "quality education for all castes" but there's also ones that are geared towards disabilities, one boarding school, and a gifted magnet that takes purples.

Mom wouldn't be happy about the boarding school, and Bright technically has a learning disability she thinks? 

She looks at the rainbow schools closer. Do they have any intercaste classes? What about recess? Do they say stuff about handling different learning needs? (Bright will scream if she has to go back to a sit-still-and-shut-up school; mom ended up very quickly quasi-homeschooling her by sticking her beside the desk during mom's lectures, with stuff to learn.)

The schools all teach at least some classes to all the castes that they admit, though one rainbow school limits that to math, art appreciation courses, and breaks, meals, and recess (every school has recess; some schools have two of it).

Some schools open every class to every caste if they can test in or have the prereqs; there's a picture of a purple doing some coding, captioned, Tetsaz doesn't let her caste stop her from doing her own debugging. Every school seems required by law to have a disabilities page, which says what parts of the school if any aren't accessible without stairs, their level of compliance with the Voan National Access Need Guide on things like the availability of simultaneous subtitles for the deaf and scent-free policy enforcement and colorblindness accommodations, and detail their admissions testing regimen (if applicable - one rainbow school takes anybody in its district who hasn't actually been arrested, though it's also expensive) and ability to customize curricula, shuffle around students between different teachers, provide alternate format work, supply extra tutoring with or without additional charge, and supply in-house counseling and medical advice.

This is all really complicated. 

Being able to learn all the things if she can test in to the class sounds good, though, since Bright's not actually blue and the thing she'd wanted to do as her old dream job was 'making cool buildings.'

What types of things get tested for admissions? She'll probably wanna learn those.