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.
Yep! Working out plans to imprison people who are currently less than a season old is probably not the way to do it. Maybe they could come up with safeguards to make sure the imprisonment can't be exploited?
Well, the big problem is the thing where it's inherently permanent unless someone dies ending it.
That varies a lot country-to-country. He would know; Anitam is on the unusually execution-happy side.
"They could keep track of capital crimes, I'm sure."
"But what caste would we try them as, what caste are they -"
"They're aliens, they've got the element categories, they're not a caste - this is why we should have a single oversight board with laws consistent everywhere -"
Shadows who are interested get a long list of candidate planets they can see through a sufficiently sophisticated telescope. Hopefully some won't require tons of terraforming.
The interested Shadows find it easiest to be looking straight at the thing they are looking at, with no reflection or any other intervening complications, which limits telescopic sophistication, but they can still check out most of the planets and take pictures and samples.
And are any of them interested in dropping off the supplies to set up an arcology, and a few dozen people who can set it up and start a colony project?
Sure.
"If there's ever a Shadow/Glass hybrid they wouldn't have that problem with the weird telescopes," one remarks.
"Might take a little longer, but - at this rate within ten years there'll be millions of them."
There are in fact all kinds of interesting hybrids popping up at a rate of about 5% of elementals. The wild elementals are mostly just staying wild, especially the ones who can hang out in the ocean or the sky.
One day a Wood/Earth wanders into a garden on somebody's estate to look at flowers.
The gardener is not sure if it is allowed to be there. "There are public gardens in the city, sir. Or ma'am."
"I'm a girl," says the Wood/Earth. She keeps looking at flowers. She has purple hair and a twiggy halo growing out all over her.