They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
Vocabulary check on 'brother'. "...huh. I don't actually know if humans do that amongst themselves... elementals do in the wild and humans will if they have elementals, sometimes."
"Will they. Charming. If we had slavery I expect gay people might get that on the side and marry for children, plenty of them do anyway."
Maurabel adds 'gay' to her dictionary! "The school elementals talked to me. Penumbra took longer than most of them, she's shy."
"Aitim said it's all really really secret - moreso than everything to do with alien stuff, I mean - but there's a tentative plan."
"Well. We spend a big chunk of our unimaginable wealth on creative ways to do violence, you landed in the right place."
"It would have been nice if you had invented a way to stop that instead but less useful for this."
"I'd rather not kill anybody over it but the humans will die eventually anyway and if I don't figure something out the elementals will be like this forever."
"Yeah. First thing they taught you in school is that you're not ready to order military operations if you're only okay with them given that no one dies. But also, you can and should work really hard to make sure no one dies."
"There are a lot of things wrong with the way we raise blues but we sure do teach them young the things we think they need to know to run a country."
"I think kings' children -" Dictionary - "princes and princesses have tutors, not whole schools."
"There are three million Anitami blues. Not all of 'em on a politics track, of course, but - a schoolful."
"Aitim wants to win an election someday and if you do reds stuff you just - can't, you're radioactive, no one will work with you or acknowledge they ever met you. So he asked if I'd do it - I don't really want a political career. And I looked into it and - yeah, someone was needed. So."
"Thank you. I would also like - advice about how to talk about it without being - 'radioactive'. What is that -"