"Alasseik..."

"It's pretty."

She walks through the portal onto the greys' beach, giggling as she passes through the fizziness, and looks around. 

There's greys. There's piers. There's boats. There's fish processing plants and a handful of grey children who were running around but are now being held back from the portal.

Privately, she thinks the view on the other side was prettier. 

Awww, children! She waves at the children.  

"I'm pretty sure the portal is safe to go through. Does anyone want to try it?" 

"We should wait for the Princess's office to get back to us -"

"- I wanna try it."

"- we should -"

"I do though."

"I don't want to get you into trouble," she adds quickly.

"One of my people can be the first to try it, instead." 

She asks the motu for volunteers. An older man, with streaks of white in his hair and sideburns, agrees to try his luck. He stumps up to the opening and cautiously steps through, then immediately turns and goes back. The portal continues to be harmless. 

"Finally," says the person on the phone, "look, there's a portal, with aliens, one of them is magic, she came through it and is standing here on this beach - uh, the fishery at Shell Beach - don'tputmeonholdagain! - damn."

Puna laughs. 

"Why are you calling us aliens?" she wonders. 

"...because you're not Amentans," says one.

"Amentans?" she repeats.

"Is that what you are? I thought you were humans!"

She takes a few dancing steps on thin air, bringing her head level with theirs for a better view. 

"Ooooh, you're a new species, I can tell now! What are Amentans like?" 

"We don't know what, uh, humans, are like," one points out.

The one who is on hold starts taking pictures of Puna and the portal and the motu beyond.

"Hmm, well...humans look like you, but they have brown or black or yellow or orange hair, and it only goes grey when they get old," she rattles off.

"They live about eighty years - wait, let me check how long a year is..."

The sense of this-is-a-god briefly increases, and her eyes glow green. "Oh, that's only twenty of yours, wow your years are long!" 

"...okay. We live about forty years and greys have grey hair. Or dye it grey if we don't. Nobody has brown or black hair. Yellow or orange sometimes though. Blue or green or purple too."

She giggles in delight.

"That's a lot of colours! No-one on Corth has blue or green or purple hair, it sounds fun!" 

She looks over at the children again. "So do you grow slower than humans as well? How old do I look in your years, if I were an Amentan? A human who looked like me would be...four?" 

"You look about four," one confirms.

"Okay! So you grow like humans, but live twice as long. That's cool!" 

Puna tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, then pulls it back out to look at. 

"Should I change my hair to be like yours?" she wonders. 

"...only if you're grey," one says.

"That makes sense," she agrees.

"But how do I know if I'm grey? What things are grey things? What do the other colours mean?"

"You probably aren't an Amentan caste since you're an alien," a grey says. "Grey things are like boating or dancing or playing sports or policing or fighting."

"What a strange set of things to put together! I like dancing and sailing, but not policing or fighting."

She dances through the air to prove it, ending up back on the ground.

"You're probably right. I don't think I fit in this system at all."

"...well, usually people pick one. Blues run things and greens do art and science and stuff and yellows do programming and are secretaries and things and oranges do people jobs like teaching or doctoring and purples make stuff or drive buses or whatever."

She listens, and makes tiny illusions of people with the appropriate hair colours as each one is mentioned. 

"What's programming?"

"- yellower than that - uh, computer stuff."

"Thanks!" She corrects the illusion's hair from blonde to bright yellow. 

"What's a computer? And is that all yellows do? Grey had lots of different things."

"There's more stuff but we're grey so we don't look at yellow job ads..."

The one taking pictures on the pocket everything says, "Like this thing."