- huh. This place is so thin it barely exists, but if she touches it it will gain substance. Curious.
Still, she hesitates. (For days, really.) It is so much easier to merely watch...
Aka stands at the edge of a dance club for the 31st century—the corona of the brown dwarf star the space station orbits visible metres below the crystalline floor. It's scattered with knots of interesting people. Glitter, cycling lights, fountains. She eavesdrops.
"Can you cast over iron yet?" a sauntering someone asks, sparkling mauveine strands woven through her cheek.
Spiralling about her, her interlocutor answers, (silver cut-outs over his eye sockets, filigreed with diamond) "Somewhat, though purling still defeats me. Could I effect the solder to set—"
Boring. She moves on.
"Suppose you quake when the tither comes," sings a scale-clad xiething trapeezing from the mezzanine.
"I haven't a hope for soothing it with shakes," admonishes someone bird-clawed, perched bat-like beside xyr anchor.
"Suppose you quiver, nevertheless—"
Here, she decides, and Aka interrupts, "Catch you quarrelling, unsure of your fate?"
The two startle; the one hisses; they both stare. She looks perfectly ordinary for hereabouts, which herein means two-armed, two-legged, rubies set into the iron claws she taps against the side of her wiry-nest seat.