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.
And Ices and Glasses and an Adamant and a Stone and Woods and a Lightning and an air/stone hybrid whose halo is not usefully air-producing are one by one dropped all around the fractured empire of Maurabel's home world. Penumbra also delivers Maurabel's parents each letters.
And Amentans continue to clamor for planetsplanetsplanets and Anitam gets some documentaries on elementals that play up the 'the people now helping us terraform, horribly mistreated and enslaved by primitive humans' angle.
Penumbra is too shy but the Shines in the rainforest and a Fire and an Earth will happily give interviews.
Are they angry at humans? Are they eager to see their fellows rescued? Are there specific experiences they're willing to talk about?
They are angry at humans! Most humans. Maurabel was always very nice even when this was inconvenient for her. They want more elementals rescued, as many as possible before Maurabel is old enough to free them all at once. They will talk about being captured and tapped for magic and the Fire in particular has lurid tales of sexual use that she doesn't mind expounding on for hours.
And Amentans who would happily have participated in this can instead righteously rage about it on the internet and condemn those terrible humans.
There are some nice humans. Maurabel is thinking about bringing human children so there will be more mages available but she is concerned about how they would be brought up wrt reds and she can't just short-circuit this by giving them to reds without a lot of complications.
What why would she do that that would be terrible the poor children. Amentans would be happy to adopt mage children.
Of course they would but then they would teach them that reds were gross, and humans who aren't Maurabel are susceptible to things like being told that reds are gross or elementals aren't people and stuff like that.
Yes they do and no not really. Since their interviewers came to this red-inhabited rainforest to interview them that seems like the interviewers' job.
Wanting to shower for five hours after healing people seems like a them problem and Maurabel doesn't want little mages to have it and the elementals think she is right.
They write to Maurabel saying they are concerned that if she teaches humans to have contempt for decontamination some of them might break the law and get into trouble.
(If Maurabel looks it up, Anitam executes people for willful pollution violations.)
Maurabel assures them that she will not bring more mages to Amenta till she's sure that's a good idea all things considered, and that's a thing she's considering.
Reds themselves seem to be very responsible about avoiding pollution violations, for instance! If she gave the human children to reds they would not learn unlawful habits. She's not totally happy with this solution but it would solve the problem of thinking reds are disgusting and the problem her concerned correspondents bring up.
But it'd be horribly unfair to the human children and also they might be brought up with other bad habits. And what if they sympathized with the reds and did magic for them?