19th February 2001 (68:9:27)
— Contact plus 05.05.17:06.15
When the announcement that their ride was coming in, Beth felt herself relax, just a little. Normally, she might be a little nervous at the thought that she'd be boarding an alien spaceship soon, but this whole thing was just tedious — she'd be happy to just get the fuck out of here.
It made obvious sense to pick omniglots for their translator team — the quicker they learned the language, the quicker they could negotiate a proper treaty, the quicker they could gain whatever benefits would inevitably come of joining advanced galactic society — but actually doing that was somewhat complicated. Of course, there was the diplomatic nonsense that would have gone into it regardless. They would be the first people to leave their planet and visit these new aliens, the first representatives of their entire civilisation to their new neighbours, which was kind of a big deal. A spread of people from different countries, a balance of different regions and allegiances, would make sense, just to be fair. To streamline the process of translating alien materials to distribute all over the Earth, they wanted their omniglot team to cover as many languages as reasonably possible — all the major languages, at least.
There was a very obvious problem with both of those points: omniglots were not evenly distributed, not even close. The vast majority of human omniglots had known British ancestry — the theory was that omniglottalism among humans had a single origin point, an effect of rituals performed by old druids on Anglesey dating way back before the Roman period that had then slowly spread elsewhere. Omniglottalism was most common within magical Britain, by a large margin, and also turned up in countries whose mages had history with Britain, like in Scandinavia. Omniglots anywhere else were either the descendants of British migrants, or an omniglot who'd been wandering the world collecting languages and decided to settle elsewhere for whatever reason — they weren't unheard of in most of Europe and the Mediterranean, very rare in Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, and simply didn't exist in America at all. Well, there was a tiny population descended from anti-Statutarian defectors from Europe, but practically none, anyway.
Even in Britain, the vast majority of omniglots could trace their ancestry back to the Babblings specifically — the same Babbling as the Runes Professor at Hogwarts, she was an omniglot too. (Beth had hardly had anything to do with her, though, since she hadn't taken Runes.) That wasn't a coincidence, the theory was that the priesthood the Babblings were descended from were the same druids who'd (accidentally) created omniglottalism in the first place, the trait was more common in that family than literally anywhere else on Earth. Which was interesting, because as far as Sirius knew neither the Potters nor the Blacks had any connection to the Babblings at any point in the last, like, dozen generations or so. His personal theory was that Beth had actually inherited it through her mother, who might have a squib grandparent or something, which made sense enough.
How very concentrated omniglottalism was in Europe made picking people to send rather difficult. They'd settled on two from Britain — Beth herself, of course, and a Gaelic bloke called Cionaodh, who'd been an ambassador from the ICW somewhere in Africa before the war — but even two was pushing it. (Proportionate to population, Britain technically shouldn't even get one.) The only one Beth had met before was Hlynur — he'd been one of the people she'd started learning Vietnamese with, ages ago, had spent a lot of time in India and Indonesia in the years since, picked up a lot of the languages around there. Indonesia and the islands in the Pacific didn't have any of their own omniglots — not even Australia, which Beth guessed probably shouldn't be a surprise — but India did. Nāgamaṇi patched up some of the holes they had left in India, and further north in the Himalayas and central Asia. They had one of the very rare American omniglots, and one from Persia, and then there was Brân, who didn't really consider himself a citizen of anywhere in particular — he was originally from Britain, but he'd left the Isles when he'd been only fifteen, had been randomly drifting around the world throughout the century or so since. (He was technically here representing some Americans, where he'd been staying most recently.) Seven was probably fewer than what the aliens were expecting, but there simply weren't that many omniglots, and especially omniglots who didn't just live in northern Europe. If they added any more, they'd just be duplicating target languages at this point — it'd be more useful for their batch of omniglots to learn the alien language as quickly as possible, and then come back and teach more omniglots, so they could then help with the translating.
(Beth was probably going to be stuck on translation duty for a long time.)
Though, that wasn't actually the whole team, just the humans on the team. Human omniglots all ultimately originated from Britain, but there were omniglots among other beings as well. Veela and lilin also had the trait, though it didn't function quite the same — theirs seemed to be a special variation of the mind magic all of their people had naturally, affecting something like flve per cent of their population. (Actually a higher proportion than omniglots among humans, but there were fewer veela and lilin, so it worked out to a smaller total number.) They had a lilin with them, a woman named Ḑiguqhȧnna, which Beth was only mostly sure she was pronouncing correctly.
Goblins and elves also got omniglots, apparently, which Beth somehow hadn't even heard about until they were organising this thing. They'd asked the goblins if they wanted to send someone, which had gotten a hard no — goblins preferred to stay underground whenever possible, and they found the idea of going up into outer space extremely unnerving. Instead they'd found an elf volunteer, an older woman from a mixed community of goblins and elves somewhere in west Asia (Beth didn't know where exactly). There were a lot of enslaved elves living with the goblins — capturing them during wars with the local goblins was how European mages had gotten house-elves in the first place — but apparently goblins, just, had slavery as a thing in their society, it wasn't necessarily racial. Apparently Meñaśi was, like, some kind of clan chief or something (concepts didn't quite translate, but close enough), and also some famous glass artist or some shite, which was culturally a big deal to goblins/elves? Beth didn't follow exactly, but, she did get enough to understand that the goblins hadn't, just, sent a slave out to do the job, she was actually a big name back home.
All nine of them had been brought in to the UN headquarters in New York by yesterday afternoon — which was rather late in the evening or early in the morning for most of them, Beth knew a few had even taken sleeping potions overnight to force their sleep schedule around. There'd been a briefing, which had included a lot of open questions, since they didn't actually know much about what this trip would look like. Beth ended up answering a bunch of questions from the others, since she was the only one who'd talked to any of the aliens much. One of the important ones was asking whether they'd be allowed to have weapons on them — Hlynur, Ḑiguqhȧnna, and the Persian bloke all wore ceremonial knives, some kind of religious thing (though for a different religion in each case) — but Beth remembered that Quńalhi, the red-skinned woman assisting Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, had had a knife of her own, so that was probably fine? The food might also be difficult, especially for Meñaśi (elves had different dietary requirements than humans), but Beth didn't know anything about that. There'd been a dinner after that, for their group to get acquainted, but Beth hadn't been able to talk to all of them, honestly didn't even remember the Persian and American blokes' names — in her defence, it'd been very late for her by then, most of that dinner was a blur.
Irritatingly, Beth had been made the 'official' leader of their team, or delegation or whatever, being the highest-ranking person out of the nine of them. Not military rank, Hlynur and the Persian both outranked her, but she was technically a head of state, so social rank, yeah. Though she did have to admit, thinking about it, that it wasn't a terrible idea to give her the 'authority' to speak for them — she learned more quickly than other omniglots, so she'd most quickly get to the point where she'd be able to talk to their hosts about their accommodations or whatever, if it ended up being necessary. It was still annoying whenever anyone made a big deal about the bloody princess thing, but it also just made practical sense, so whatever.
Over breakfast in the morning, Beth sat with Meñaśi and a couple computer types talking through what exactly elven dietary requirements were like. They were basically carnivores, turned out? They primarily ate meat and nuts, though they also needed some ruffage (either greens or grains worked) for digestion reasons...but only complex carbohydrates — they were basically diabetic, too much sugar was very bad for them (and it didn't take very much) — and only certain complex carbohydrates — too much starch would make them ill. They managed to put together a little booklet, mostly done with pictures and diagrammes of molecules (which they assumed would be recogniseable to advanced aliens), which Beth would be responsible for handing over and trying to explain what it was about and answer any questions, if possible. (She only had extremely basic knowledge of Minnisiät at this point, having helped with talks with Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, but that still made her the best equipped for the job out of the nine of them.) Lilin also tended to have rather different diets from neighbouring human cultures, but that was a cultural preference and not based on different biological requirements, so they didn't end up making a booklet for Ḑiguqhȧnna, just Meñaśi.
They left the rooms they'd been kept at overnight (some fancy hotel converted for diplomatic purposes, Beth thought) as they approached midday, and were moved over to a fucking stadium of all things. She'd known this was coming, but she still couldn't help the exasperation when they actually got there, trying not to grumble aloud. A little stage was set up on...the pitch? was that they were called? Beth had no idea, apparently this was a baseball stadium and she didn't know shite about baseball. The place was weirdly lopsided, a narrower part at one end opening up in a cone shape as it went, before bulging out into a big more open area at the opposite end, the stands built up high at the narrow end (where the batter would be?) and along the sides of the cone, two tiers stretching high overhead topped with a white fence shining bright in the midday sun, but toward the more open end there was only a single tier of seats, the higher walls dropping off past where it flared out after the edge of the cone shape, which was...odd. It was such a weird lopsided building, she didn't know what was up with that, but presumably it would make sense if she knew shite about baseball.
Anyway, they had a little stage set up around the middle of the cone, where the nine of them were directed to when they got here. By the time they arrived, the stands were shockingly full, crammed with tens of thousands of people. That might seem kind of ridiculous, but, Beth guessed this was sort of a big deal? Like, historical events and shite. It was just a little exasperating to deal with, honestly. They were all introduced to the crowd, oversized illusions being projected up over their heads so everyone could see properly — probably also being broadcast out who knows where, because of course.
It was clear they weren't exactly certain when the aliens would be arriving, because they didn't have a programme planned out or anything. After quick introducing all nine of them, asking them a few basic questions — Farrokh (the Persian bloke, that was it) translated for Meñaśi, since she didn't speak English at all — they just kind of stalled, wasting time until their ride showed up. There was music, some American pop singer Beth was completely unfamiliar with, between songs the omniglots asked random questions that must be coming in from somewhere — mostly silly inane things about their personal lives, though some of it ended up being about their history doing whatever (several questions to do with the war directed at those of them who'd fought in it), Ḑiguqhȧnna and Meñaśi explaining some basic shite about lilin and elves. At this point, muggles were aware other beings existed, of course, but their populations were small enough most would never have met one before...and Beth was pretty sure lilin and elves hadn't come over to this side of the Atlantic at all, so. It went on long enough that they were even served food, though Beth couldn't say she was impressed — she was sceptical that the cheese sauce that came with her chips actually included any real cheese, and fucking hell the tea was awful, what even was this shite...
It was extremely tedious. Beth had been dealing with the reality of being a bloody celebrity for a decade by this point, but it was still annoying how fucking nosey people could be. Especially when questions about her love life came up — because some people (more muggles than mages) still gave a damn that she was a lesbian, which was always vaguely baffling when it came up. She didn't know why so many people seemed to feel entitled to know shite about her personal life, she'd never gotten a good explanation for that. It wasn't really surprising anymore, but it was still annoying.
At some point during this whole nonsense, she started developing a headache — she didn't know if that was from the noise of the crowd or trying to swallow her frustration enough to not snap back at the woman asking the questions in front of who knew how many people. Millions, probably, since they must be broadcasting this out? She'd really like for this to be over, thanks.
So when the babble from the interviewer was cut off with an announcement that their shuttle had arrived in orbit, Beth let out a relieved sigh, her head tilting limply over the back of her chair. Fucking finally.
The announcement had a wave of anxious muttering ripple through the crowd — it wasn't every day you saw a literal alien spaceship come down for a landing right in front of you — the noise made by any particular person probably not very much, but with tens of thousands of people together it was still stupidly loud. They were sitting around waiting for some minutes, though, because getting all the way down here from orbit wasn't something you could do in a blink. Though, these aliens did still do it fucking fast, it should only take a few minutes — Beth knew enough about flight to know that the stresses their ships would be under diving into the atmosphere at those kinds of speeds were fucking absurd. With the little bit of space travel muggles had done, they had to be very careful about how fast they entered the atmosphere, and at what angle, to prevent their ship from being incinerated on the way down, but apparently these aliens didn't have nearly as much of a problem handling it. The materials their ships were made out of must be very strong and impossibly heat-resistant, because that shite was just ridiculous.
(Honestly, she suspected magic was involved somehow — it was on the list of questions Hermione had given her she was supposed to find answers to at some point.)
After at least a couple minutes, there was another announcement, that their first escort had made contact with the shuttle. The process for today had been explained to the omniglots last night, there would actually be two layers of escorts: a few fighter jets would meet the shuttle way up in the air, and guide the aliens in toward New York, where a group of broom-flyers would take over to direct them down into the stadium. There was a short pause, and then an illusion flickered into existence overhead, relayed from a camera on one of the planes. This one was different from the diplomatic shuttle Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe used, or the simpler, boxier ones they brought down supplies in — though like the supply shuttles, it didn't look like something that should fly at all, didn't even have wings. It was rather cylindrical, tapering to a somewhat blunt, down-turned nose at the front and wide at the back, engine nozzles sticking out over there (inactive now, but still visibly glowing along the rims from the burn over to Earth). It almost looked like it could be the central body of a plane, except the bottom surface was flattened — and glowing a little from reentry, though quickly dissipating already, the material very efficient at bleeding off heat — so maybe more like one of those super-fast trains they had places? It didn't look like something that should be in the air at all, but Beth guessed their anti-gravity stuff was cheating...and it wasn't like you needed wings for lift in space.
As they watched, panels on the side of the shuttle seemed to pop out an inch or two, and then start sliding out forward and back — once they'd opened far enough Beth could see clear through the ship, the side panels must be folding out of the way on the opposite side too. Once the panels were tucked out of the way, a good two-thirds of both the left and right walls of the shuttle were only...well, probably not glass, but a transparent material of some kind, at least. Inside, Beth could make out columns of padded chairs, two seats in each row and a hallway down the middle, looking very much like the seating on a commuter train or passenger plane or something.
"Hey," Hlynur muttered, leaning closer to Beth and pointing up at the illusion, "is that Ambassador Shar?"
There were a couple people visible in the body of the shuttle, one of them a very familiar blue-skinned figure dressed in familiar robes. (Some kind of official uniform, Beth suspected.) Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe wasn't the only one of the blue-skinned people she'd met, but, "Looks like him, yeah."
He turned to give the plane out the window a cheerful little wave — Beth didn't think Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe realised he was being recorded, necessarily, just being friendly.
They were a couple minutes out, now, so Beth and the other omniglots started moving. All of them stood from their chairs, picked up their luggage — they'd limited themselves to a single bag each, since they didn't know how much available space there would be — though Meñaśi didn't actually carry hers, setting her ceramic-sided trunk to float along behind her with a snap of her fingers. Beth's bag was actually significantly bigger on the inside than the outside, to a degree that was quite difficult to do with a soft, cloth-sided thing like this, the expansion was more than you could get in things that were sold in shops. But, you know, Hermione had enchanted it for her, and Hermione was Hermione. They stepped down off the little stage, walking down the cone toward the wide open end, which would be serving as their landing field — Beth at the front, since she was the only one who could speak any Minnisiät at all.
By this point, their guests were being handed off to the second set of escorts, the illusion winking off as the fighter jets left the shuttle behind. They actually flew directly over the stadium, streaking across the sky overhead, but they were still quite high up, the buzz of the engines audible over the anticipatory chatter of the crowd but not too loud. Supposedly the broom-flyers would be leading the shuttle on a short loop around the city, in whichever direction made sense for the angle they were coming in at — New York City had been hit in the initial attack, of course, but the Americans had done a relatively good job of defending it, and they'd had years to rebuild it with magical help, so it was actually in pretty good shape again — but at the speeds they'd be going at that should only take a couple minutes. The noise of the crowd died off somewhat as the moment approached, the entire stadium almost seeming to hold their breath.
A murmur ran through the crowd as the shuttle came into view — still a few dozen metres up in the air, coming in on a gentle, curving approach, boxed in on all sides by people on brooms. (These new aliens still didn't know much about magic, they probably didn't realise that those mages could turn around and slice that little ship into slivers hardly before they could react.) As it got closer, Beth realised the ship was rather larger than she'd expected, maybe...forty to fifty metres long? Hard to say, exactly, with the distance and the angle it was coming at. The broom-flyers were wearing fluttering cloaks and scarves in bright colours and embroidered with beads, judging by the glittering as they caught the sun, which meant they were probably Virginians — the magical countries of Massachusetts and Virginia were really the only ones within the United States to have quidditch teams, so were most likely to be familiar with brooms at all, but Virginia had a much larger American Indian population, had had a bigger cultural influence on their aesthetics. Mages from Massachusetts tended to just be English people (if often kind of weird conservative Christians), but most of the Virginian mages Beth met on previous trips to America were actually Indians, so.
(Most of the American mages who weren't muggleborns and their families, or from a few specific places like Massachusetts or certain states in Mexico, were still indigenous people, sometimes even nations that had been completely wiped out on the muggle side. Apparently there'd been some very complicated politics to do with that since the end of Secrecy, it was a whole thing.)
The broom-flyers peeled off to start making a little loop over the stadium, the shuttle continuing to drift on down to the ground, following the illusions the mages had cast to outline their approach and their landing spot. The shuttle was quite long, and narrow, like a couple train cars stuck together — and magically floating as smooth and gentle as a leaf fluttering down to the ground, honestly looked slightly surreal. There was a heavy thrum as the shuttle actually passed over the edge of the bowl to hover over the stadium, the magical weight of their antigravity tech tingling against her skin. The shuttle gracefully spun around, turning one of the long sides on to the omniglots, the frame of a door visible almost straight ahead. As it neared the ground, skeletal landing struts unfolded out from the flat bottom, bending under the weight of the shuttle as it settled, the pressure of their anti-gravity stuff abruptly cutting off.
There was a brief pause, mutters from the crowd making a constant low background noise, before the door abruptly lifted a couple inches out of its frame, and started sliding up out of the way, a ramp simultaneously telescoping down toward the ground. Beth started stepping closer to the shuttle, the omniglots following along several steps behind her, and a blue-skinned human-looking alien appeared in the doorway — yep, from this close Beth could tell that was Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe. Once the door was fully out of the way, the ramp meeting the ground, Shár-ÿḳl-korlå started stepping down, wearing the same deep red robe over a long black tunic he'd been in at their previous meetings.
There was some sporadic cheering from the crowd, which Beth certainly hadn't expected — if Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was at all surprised, he didn't show it, as he reached the bottom of the ramp he stopped to give a little bow toward the stands to his right, and then to the left. A couple of aides were following Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe off the ship, but he didn't wait for them, continuing on to meet Beth.
As they approached something like a conversational distance, Beth said, "Ani, inatoka kolaj ismisa sa, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe." She was only mostly certain she'd just said good to see you.
"Pót-tari-lizabïʈ, misanuänu inatoka kolaj ïssa." The way he pronounced her name was still a little peculiar, but she'd gotten him to understand which was her surname and which was her given name, which she'd decided was good enough. Beth didn't think they did handshakes where Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was from, but he'd picked up the custom easily enough, smoothly taking her hand when they met some metres off of the ship, sparking a somewhat more enthusiastic reaction from the crowd.
(As much as nobody really knew anything about these new aliens in general or Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe specifically, they were pleased that they at least seemed more friendly than the first bunch.)
From there, Beth quick went through and introduced Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe to all the omniglots — a little awkward at one point, because she'd forgotten the American's name again, sorry about that. She wasn't entirely sure Anija, (name) akahari ham was quite right, but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe didn't correct her, so. He had questions about Meñaśi, which Beth didn't quite follow, and didn't know enough Minnisiät to even attempt to answer. Surprised they had people besides just humans on Earth, maybe? She wasn't sure if Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe would have encountered any other beings yet.
In turn, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe introduced the pair of aides with him. One was Quńalhi Ekkhareš, the same woman with the deep red skin tone and bony ridges on her head and funny fleshy tendrils dangling from her lip that normally tagged after him — the feeling Beth had was that she was some kind of immediate subordinate, or a trainee for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's job, or something like that. Interestingly, Quńalhi's name — that was her given name, actually, but Beth got the impression her culture was rather informal, at their last meeting they'd (awkwardly) gotten to first-name terms — wasn't Minnisiät, but wasn't whatever Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's name was in either. She'd heard only a few snippets of Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's native language, and nothing but Quńalhi's name in hers, but the sound of them was obviously distinct enough to tell...and also Quńalhi's people seemed to put given names first, so there was that. But she guessed it wasn't really a surprise that interstellar society was linguistically diverse — she thought Minnisiät was some kind of common language everyone in Inapu-Itarisan learned to communicate. The other aide was a blue-skinned woman, the same species as Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe — somewhat younger than him, bur very straight-laced and stiff and formal-seeming — named Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý, who Beth hadn't met yet.
After the introductions were done, Beth was mostly certain Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe asked them if they were ready to leave. Or, maybe if there was anything else they'd intended to do first? There was this whole crowd here, after all. But no, they hadn't had much in the way of plans — her impression was that the organisers on their side hadn't known what they meant to do, so. Beth just shook her head, and gestured toward the ship.
Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe led the way up to the shuttle ramp, Beth a couple steps behind him, the rest of the omniglots trailing along behind her. This shuttle was made out of a somewhat different material from the one Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe usually came on, more of a pale, slightly tannish grey colour — some of the cargo shuttles bringing food down had looked more like this, their feeling was that the dark silvery colour they'd seen at first was some kind of armour for military craft. The ramp itself was made out of segments, black rectangles two feet wide and maybe six inches deep, presumably designed to extend out and lock into place at whatever length they needed the ramp to be. What she could see of the inside of the shuttle from here seemed bright, white walls almost glowing, but she didn't know how much of that was just because of the sunlight coming through the open sides.
While Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe bounded up the ramp ahead of her, Beth paused, nerves prickling along the back of her neck. This was a fucking wild thing she was doing, was all, boarding a fucking spaceship to visit an alien planet for who even knew how long — with how long it could take other omniglots to learn a language, a month and a half at least, maybe two? They'd be the first people on Earth to even leave the orbit of the moon, much less another entire fucking world, and it was a big fucking deal, their delegation of omniglots basically Earth's first representatives in an advanced galactic society that apparently existed, who the fuck knew what they were going to find out there...
Beth took a long, slow breath in through her noise, let it out in a sigh. And she stepped onto the ramp.
Stepping through the threshold was like passing through a ward line — there was a thin curtain of magic, on the other side a faint, constant pressure, tingling against her skin. Their gravity tech, she thought? The aliens must make artificial gravity inside of their ships with the same stuff they used to make them float around. If her weight was any different on this side of the door, it was too small to be noticeable — either they'd tuned their stuff to Earth gravity, or their standard gravity was so close as to be indistinguishable. There was a little empty space on the other side of the door, the floor smooth black tile, the walls some glossy, almost plastic-looking material a creamy off-white. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was waving her up and to the right, the rows of seats starting only a few steps that way, to the left only an open doorway. She leaned around to look through the door, finding what was obviously the cockpit — a couple padded armchairs surrounded by panels absolutely covered with levers and buttons and switches, colourful display screens set into them here and there, a wide window looking out into the stands in that direction. There was an unfamiliar alien sitting in one of the chairs — bright orange skin with some greenish speckles here and there, eyes large and slitted and nose and ears flat, with a wide, stiff, lipless and toothless mouth — wearing what looked to be a military uniform, stiff trousers and high-collared jacket in black and vibrant deep red. He(?) noticed her looking, gave her what she took to be a friendly wave, so she waved back before turning back to the right toward the rows of seats.
The rows of seats looked perfectly ordinary, if shaped a little strangely — maybe to comfortably accommodate various alien body types? — and plenty comfortable-looking, thickly padded. Though she couldn't quite tell what the material was, some kind of rubbery plastic, maybe, but without a noticeable sheen in the sunlight, odd. Dropping her bag on one of the chairs, she turned back to Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, leaning a little around Hlynur and Ḑiguqhȧnna. "Do we need to sit down?" Some of the manoeuvres the aliens made (both the scabs and these new people), it was assumed that they had to have some way to zero out the effects of inertia within their ships, or else they'd all be battered into bloody pulp from the force. The chairs did seem to have restraints, but she thought they probably weren't necessary, and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had been standing up by the time the side panels opened...
Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe turned at the question, his eyebrows stretching up — she had asked in English, obviously he wouldn't have understood it. Beth reached over, grabbed at one of the belts fixed to the chair, obviously meant to come down and cross over the passenger's chest. Then he seemed to get what she was asking, babbling off a short answer in Minnisiät. She didn't follow it word for word, but she did understand that the ride would be smooth enough that they didn't have to strap in if they didn't want to.
It didn't take long for their whole team to board the shuttle, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's subordinates bringing up the rear. Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý stayed toward the front — operating the controls at the door to retract the ramp and close up, by the look of it — Quńalhi coming by to double-check that Brân's restraints were done up correctly. Brân was the only one who'd decided to sit down, the rest of them milling around, poking at the seats or looking out the transparent sides of the shuttle, but that wasn't a surprise — he was the oldest of their group, not quite proper elderly for a mage but still slower and more fragile than the rest of them. Once all their bags had been dropped in seats, the hatch closed up again, and Quńalhi confirmed for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe that Brân was properly belted in, he turned to Beth and asked a question. If they were ready to go, she was pretty sure.
"Sure, let's get the fuck out of here," she said, making a gesture she hoped would be readable as the ship taking off. "I've been stuck in this bloody place long enough, honestly." There was a little bit of (slightly nervous) chuckling from a few other people in the group — it was very obvious to everyone that Beth hadn't enjoyed this whole bit at the stadium at all.
The take-off was so smooth that Beth didn't even feel it. There wasn't even the slightest sensation of movement, if it weren't for the transparent walls to both sides of the shuttle she wouldn't be able to tell they were moving at all. It was a little disorienting, even, as the stadium outside the shuttle started to drop away, her view of the stands shifting as the shuttle turned in place, but it felt like she was standing perfectly still, making her a little light-headed...
As they rose above the sides of the stadium, Beth shuffled between a row of seats to stand right up against the wall — and she wasn't the only one, Ḑiguqhȧnna on her left and Cionaodh to her right, most of their group pressing closer against the walls to peer out. The shuttle drifted over the river before turning, the nose tilting up as it started to rise — the floor still felt perfectly even to Beth, the environment inside detached from the world outside the shuttle's walls — the tight grid of streets and the tall rectangular buildings of Manhattan laid out in front of her, canted at an odd angle, her view rapidly broadening and the buildings shrinking as the shuttle silently and smoothly ascended. Beth leaned closer against the barrier, her hand pressing against the surface — it felt like some kind of metal, smooth cool steel, though obviously it couldn't possibly be, a subtle physical vibration and an electric sizzle of magic...
The shuttle rose very quickly, turning out over the ocean, leaving the city behind, Beth could see the grey-green curve of the shoreline behind them, growing more and more indistinct by the second. They could barely have been in the air for five minutes, and they must have already travelled miles, out and up, how fast were they moving? Beth could hardly even make out the shore anymore when Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said something — she nearly missed it, not paying attention to him, but she thought he said something along the lines of, "They're about to hit the engines, might be a little bump."
A couple of them plopped down into seats — not strapping in, just getting off their feet — but Beth noticed that the locals were still standing, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe up at the front of the seats and Quńalhi walking up the row pulling seatbelts over their bags, presumably to make sure nothing was shaken loose. (She'd lost track of Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý, maybe up in the cockpit?) So she just widened her stance a little, bent her knees slightly to help absorb whatever shock they were about to get.
Thirty seconds or so after Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's warning there was a shuddering jolt, first one way and then the other, a harsh vibration settling in, the floor under Beth's feet and the transparent wall against her hand seeming to buzz. That was it, the hard part only lasted for a second, it wasn't that bad. There was a subtle roaring sound coming from Beth's right — toward the back of the ship, where the big damn rocket engines were — but it was honestly even quieter than the jet engines on a plane, the inside of the shuttle mostly cut off from whatever was going on out there. And the aliens' big damn engines were stupidly powerful, of course, it wasn't very long later that they were rising through the cloud level, the windows temporarily shrouded as they passed through one, nothing but a featureless white glow, but then they were through it, a blanket of fluffy white shapes spreading out below them, wider and wider as they rose, patches of the sea visible beyond, to the other side a few streaks of thinner, more delicate clouds here and there, but besides that just the solid vibrant blue of the sky...
And it wasn't very much longer before that blue began to visibly darken.
The clouds growing smaller and smaller below them, shining brilliantly with reflected sunlight, straight out the side of the shuttle and ahead the colour gradually fading away, darkening like the sky after sunset, despite Beth being able to clearly see they were still in daylight — until, looking straight ahead out the side, she could see the curve of the Earth, still subtle at this height but definitely there. A familiar darkness and a familiar curve, she'd been this high before, in some of her test flights. But they swiftly rose beyond that, the curve turning sharper and the darkness growing deeper, fading out of blue and through an odd muddy purple, approaching blackness, back to her right the sky a soft blue-white glow, slowly fading...
Tiny little pinpricks in the dark, she began to make out stars.
"Oh shite."
The darkness fading further, solid black, the speckles of stars turning sharper, clearer, the blue-white glow falling back, until they were all she could see, black sky and stars, countless specks of light scattered like dust.
"Fuck," she muttered, "we're in space."
Her voice low and breathy, Ḑiguqhȧnna said, "Fuck yeah, we are." She whispered something in her native language, Beth didn't quite catch it — her vague feeling was that it was some kind of religious oath or something. "It's beautiful, I didn't know there were so many stars..."
"Mm." Beth did know that, of course — with Hermione for a best friend, she could hardly get to this age without having absorbed a fair bit of random facts about space — but knowing it was a bit different from seeing it. Much denser and clearer than she'd ever seen before, countless little speckles absolutely filling the blackness, even in noticeably different colours, some more reddish or blueish than others, subtle with how tiny they were but visible, and more and more and more of them, slowly panning across her view as the shuttle moved...
Then the stars started swaying upward as the shuttle rolled. First a blueish glow started to appear at the bottom of her view, and then the Earth rose in front of her. A curved band of translucent blue, glowing white from clouds toward the bottom, and it rose higher up the oversized window, a complex blanket of clouds in streaks and blobs, Beth spotted a couple curls of storms here and there, patches of deep blue of the ocean peeking through. There wasn't a whole lot to see, clouds and the sea — she was pretty sure they were over the Atlantic, there was a murky shape near the horizon that she thought might be the distant coast of South America — but it was still so bright and colourful and vibrant, Beth could only stare, her heart pounding in her ears and her breath thick in her throat, soon her side of the shuttle was facing straight down, her view filled with glowing clouds against the backdrop of the sea, visible streaks of colour (from currents, maybe?), she could see shadows extending from one side of the clouds, cast over the clouds 'behind' them or the sea below, fuuuuck...
Beth thought just flying on a broom was pretty sometimes, but this was ridiculous.
The Earth below kept panning slowly in front of her, Beth staring wide-eyed, until an arc of sky appeared below the floor again, started rising across her view. By this point, they were nearing the night side, the clouds below throwing long narrow shadows, their right sides burning yellow and orange and red and pink. Land came into view — Africa, the western edge of the Sahara, she thought — burning golden-yellow and muddy blueish-greenish grey, a swath of brighter green toward the top of her view, patches of an odd purplish colour, grainy texture of craggy mountains throwing long shadows, their western faces afire, red and orange, maybe the natural colour of the sand or maybe an effect of the sunlight, to her left side rapidly dimming toward night, dense spiderweb speckles of city lights visible in a few places. (Not a lot, though, most of her view was taken up by desert.) She'd had no idea the Sahara would be so fucking colourful, greys and reds and whites and yellows and blueish- purple, what even was that...
The ship still rotating, the view scrolling past her, the Earth gradually 'set' under the top of the window — Beth leaned forward to watch as long as she could, lights from more cities beginning to show themselves over the horizon, but soon it was gone, entirely blocked by the roof. She spent a moment just standing there, her forehead resting against the odd cool not-metal of the wall. (How thick was this? The harsh vacuum of space should be just on the other side, which was sort of freaky when she thought about it.) Endless star-strewn blackness filling the view in front of her, she took a few long breaths, trying to calm the odd tingly shivery feeling running through her.
Just, fuck, that was all.
Of course, the Earth should be visible out the opposite side of the shuttle now, but by the time she gathered herself and turned around the shuttle was angling away from the planet, the dark continents strung up with tiny lights swinging toward the back of the window, nearly disappearing out of view. There was another warning from Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, Beth relayed it to the others — it took her a couple tries to find her voice, her throat not quite cooperating. They'd be kicking the engines on again, she didn't entirely follow what he was saying, but probably heading off to the moon? Presumably the FTL-capable ship that'd be taking them to wherever they were going was out there somewhere, their new friends polite about not bringing anything big and potentially threatening too close to Earth. At least, she assumed they weren't going all the way to... wherever they were going in this little thing, but she guessed she really had no idea how long the trip was going to be...
This jolt was sharper than the first, but not really by that much — the buzzing vibration was much stronger though, presumably this burn was rather harder than the previous one. The arc of the Earth still visible in the left-side window disappeared almost instantly, it went on for, like, a minute or so before dying off again, the inside of the shuttle going still and quiet as ever. There wasn't any air friction to slow you down in space, presumably they just meant to coast the rest of the way there.
Since the scabs had retreated out to the Jupiter system, Beth had learned a fair bit about the solar system. (Mostly limited to the area around Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, but still.) The moon was the closest thing to the Earth in space, obviously, but that was still stupid far away — something on the order of, like, 380 thousand kilometres or so? Something like that, anyway. The experimental spacecraft scientists had gotten up there got to speeds that were absolutely absurd when compared to anything that they used on Earth. Manned flights out there would take, like, three or four days, averaging something like four and a half thousand kilometres per hour, over four times the speed of sound on Earth...and that was the average, sometimes they'd peak several times that, blowing the speed records achieved on Earth out of the water, not even close. Like, try to pull off that shite in the atmosphere and your plane would just incinerate from friction, we're talking those kinds of speeds.
The trip from the Earth to the moon, from the beginning of the burn leaving orbit to the end of the braking burn on the other side, took...maybe seven or eight minutes?
After coasting along for some minutes — a little bit of low, almost whispered chatter between their group, nothing out the walls but blackness and endless stars — the countless little colourful pinpricks out there suddenly started to wheel around, just for a couple seconds before going still again, the shuttle flipped over head-to-tail. (Beth didn't feel the manoeuvre at all, which was still slightly disorienting.) A minute or so later, there was another warning from Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe that they were kicking the engines on again, followed by another jolt and a hard rattling vibration carried through the floor, buzzing in Beth's chest. Unlike the other times, the vibration didn't suddenly cut out as they switched the engines off, instead quickly building up hard and then slowly tapering off, the stars out the window shifting and swaying as the pilot adjusted their course...
And then, in her window overhead and toward the rear of the shuttle, the fucking moon slid into view — already huge, rising to fill her window, the other omniglots crowding around her side of the shuttle to watch it approach. The shape of some of the craters and dark patches were familiar, just, much larger than normal, and in much more detail than she'd ever seen in pictures, tiny little curves and jagged edges of hills, and there were colours! Not a lot of colour, sure, mostly the familiar bright grey, but it shaded more toward a pale almost reddish-tan in spots, the dark patches more brownish, and in some places even a deep blueish- green, what the fuck was that? That was just wild, she'd had no idea there were fucking colours on the moon, what the fuck...
Beth spotted a wide sliver over the moon, shining metallic in the sun — that'd be their guests' flagship, she guessed. It didn't seem like they were heading that way, though, so Beth ignored it in favour of the moon itself, watching the valleys and craters and mountains pass by, streaked with low shadows and the occasional patch of unexpected colour. Mostly filling her entire view, the horizon curving along down and to the right showing only a smallish patch of sky.
Just, this was so fucking cool, that was all. Who knew the moon had colours?
The view outside of the window swayed around as the shuttle rotated again, and suddenly there was an enormous spacecraft outside of the window, in orbit over the moon. Woah, when the hell did that get there? After a few seconds, she decided it looking fucking huge was at least in part an illusion of being very close to the thing — it was hard to tell how big or how far away it was, with absolutely no available reference points of any kind. It didn't have the long, sharp, needle-like profile of most of the larger Inapu-Itarisan ships they'd seen so far, more of a vaguely rounded, bulbous sort of shape. Roughly cylindrical, but with the head (opposite the large engine nozzles at the back) swelling out a bit, and with little features here and there rising from the surface like outgrowths. The hull was mostly a white-grey, but it was painted with curling streaks in red and black, accents done here and there in yellow — as they neared, Beth noticed a reproduction of the familiar insignia the Inapu-Itarisan used, the ring of stars with an open hand held palm-out, with some kind of additional markings around it that she assumed must be the name of the ship, but she couldn't guess what it actually said.
The entire surface, she noticed, was speckled here and there and everywhere with windows, shining yellow-white or vaguely blueish. Beth didn't know shite about alien engineering, but she had to assume that putting in windows was a structural weakness — this must not be a military ship. Some kind of diplomatic vessel, maybe?
The huge ship got closer and closer and closer, filling her entire view, before the shuttle rotated again, showing Beth the moon to one side and star-filled space to the other...the Earth visible as a fat glowing blue crescent in the distance, woah. There was a subtle rattling noise, a shiver running through the shuttle. She could make out the big ship on her left side, in front of the shuttle, growing bigger, and bigger...and then the shuttle began to pass inside of the big ship, the outer wall — maybe a couple metres thick, a band down the middle intensely glowing reddish-blue — sweeping across Beth's window, blocking out more and more of the moon and the stars...
It was some kind of landing bay, the walls plain white and the floor black, unfamiliar equipment stacked on the floor or against the walls or hanging from the ceiling. Beth couldn't actually see much, though, the wall on this side wasn't very far away, probably only a few metres — she was guessing it was a pretty tight fit. She didn't feel the shuttle settle down at all, but she could tell it must have, the walls outside the window rising as the shuttle sank, and then swaying up and down a little as the hydraulics in the landing gear settled into balance.
Well. Beth's first trip on a spaceship ever had been...interesting, at least. She was a little light-headed, honestly, she thought maybe she'd been forgetting to breathe...
Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý reappeared from the cockpit, moved toward the door — so Beth guessed it was time to get going, then. Her knees feeling a little weak and shaky, she walked over to the chair she'd left her bag in, unbuckled the strap Quńalhi had pulled over it, slung it back over her shoulder. Beth wasn't the only one looking a little shaky from the trip — or the view anyway, Jesus Christ — people moving a little clumsily, faces alternately pale or flushed. Meñaśi in particular didn't look to be in great shape, her breathing noticeably harsh and shallow, skin going unnaturally greyish. Worried, Beth walked over, quickly joined by Ḑiguqhȧnna and Farrokh, crouching down a little to mutter a question whether anything was wrong. In elvish, reflexively, even though Meñaśi's native language was significantly different from the Potter elves' (though obviously related somehow) — she got what Beth was asking anyway.
Elves were far more sensitive to the magical environment than humans were, and the magic in space was very very thin. Meñaśi had mostly been fine during the trip over, since the auras of the people crammed into the shuttle had been saturating its internal environment — the metal of the shuttle acting as a reasonably effective insulator, concentrating the effects of their auras — but it still wasn't ideal. And as Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý opened the door with a faint hiss of equalising pressure, the magic of the shuttle and the larger ship quickly equalised as well. There was likely a similar effect going on, the auras of the people on the ship concentrating enough that it wasn't totally barren, but it felt stiff and harsh and inorganic, making Meñaśi feel somewhat ill and very cold.
Beth was rather concerned, mentally weighing the pros and cons of asking their hosts to send her back, but Meñaśi insisted she would be fine — the thin, unpleasant magical environment wasn't unhealthy for her, just unpleasant. They were pretty sure they were being brought to a proper settled world, where the magic should be far more hospitable, she could stick it out that long. Beth wasn't happy about that — she really did look very miserable — but Meñaśi was obviously in a position to know what she could tolerate better than Beth, so she'd just have to trust her on that.
Frowning as Meñaśi insisted they get on with it — calm and firm and dignified in a way she wasn't used to seeing from British elves — Beth offered that Meñaśi could pull directly from her aura if she needed to breathe for a moment. The woman blinked up at her, obviously taken aback — it wasn't very often that a human mage suggested a nonhuman could just go ahead and perform vampiric soul magic on them if they felt like it. She'd had a few frank conversations with the Potter elves about, you know, how house-elves worked, things that weren't exactly common knowledge among humans, who probably wouldn't be very pleased about it if they did know. (She'd said "aura" instead of soul for a reason, and by the looks on their faces, Ḑiguqhȧnna and Farrokh had no idea what she was talking about.) The ancestors of modern elves had been deeply rooted into the natural magic of their environment, basically drew on it to sustain themselves, a dependency that the goblins had exploited to enslave them in the first place. Elves were normally tied into wards, which could sustain them in the same way the ambient magic of a forest had their distant ancestors, but it was possible to instead tie them to a person, directly. Normally this was achieved with oaths and binding magics, but Cediny had admitted it was possible for an elf to consciously latch on to magics (or people) in the environment to sustain themselves, though it was something most enslaved elves weren't familiar with — but free elves, like Meñaśi, would be.
A person directly drawing magic through your soul like that could be draining, and would limit the power of spells a person could cast. (Though an elf who knew what they were doing could actually tweak the connection to allow the human to draw power from them too if necessary, by the same means ancient forest elves would encourage the plantlife of their home to grow, symbiotic more than parasitic, it was complicated.) But Beth had more than enough power to spare, especially since she didn't plan on fighting anyone at the moment — Meñaśi confirmed Beth knew what she was offering, before agreeing, yes, if it got bad enough that she thought she had to, she would do that, thank you.
The shuttle had already halfway emptied by then. As Beth straightened up again, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe asked if something was wrong, she just brushed him off. (With how basic her Minnisiät was, it'd be too difficult to explain.) The hatch left open for a minute or two by now, the quality of the air in the shuttle had changed — harsh and artificial-smelling, almost industrial, metal and oil, with a sharp tangy note to it Beth associated with intense magical combat, after-effects of powerful curses and shields. Still looking slightly sceptical and concerned, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe waved the people remaining on the shuttle toward the door, Beth stepped past him up to the threshold. The landing bay was somewhat wider on this side, but there still wasn't much to see — unfamiliar boxy equipment, the ones against the walls might actually be storage cabinets of some kind, a few of the flat platforms she recognised from the aliens offloading supplies, to levitate cargo around, a bundle of thick hoses hung in a loop against the wall over to her left, maybe for refuelling?
She stepped down to the solid black tile floor, the walls and ceiling white, featureless save for the equipment here and there. It was hard to tell where the light was coming from, the space seeming to be filled with a uniform glow. It looked almost magical, in fact, how environmental wards would evenly illuminate a room, though she could tell it wasn't — magical light she could feel as a very faint warmth on her skin, but that effect was absent here. There was a wide door set into the wall to her right, just in front of the nose of the shuttle, and to her left the oversized room was open to space, a faint, translucent reddish-blue glow the only barrier between inside and outside, showing stars and stars and stars, a curve of the moon to the left and a glowing blue arc of the Earth small in the distance. She assumed these people must know what they were doing, but that was still unnerving to look at.
It also looked very much like a magical barrier of some kind, like intense defensive wards. But it couldn't be, could it? The feeling she'd gotten was that, yes, their friends here were familiar with the idea of mages existing, but didn't actually know that much about magic. Oddly, considering their anti-gravity shite was obviously magic — as absurd as it sounded, Beth honestly suspected they didn't realise that. Like, their technology was so advanced that it worked through magic, but they didn't conceptualise whatever science they had behind it and magic as the same thing, if that made sense? It did seem like the barrier was being emitted by something built into the wall all the way around, shining much more brightly than the barrier itself. Beth couldn't feel the magic from here — but she wouldn't, necessarily, if the ward was tightly-focussed — so maybe the similar appearance was only a coincidence, but maybe that right there was another bit of tech that operated through magic, whether their hosts thought of it like that or not.
Beth had a feeling that Inapu-Itarisan scientists and Earth engineers were going to have some very complicated conversations in future.
As she looked out at the barrier, the stars started slipping to the side, the arc of the moon vanishing to her left, a moment later the Earth dipping out of sight as well. A couple seconds later, there was a clunking noise, and a pair of big, heavy metal doors started sliding out from the sides, their view outside into space gradually narrowing inch by inch. Beth guessed they were on their way, then.
Turning back to the rest of the group, Quńalhi had retrieved one of those levitating platform things, gesturing between them and it — offering to carry their baggage for them, she guessed, but there was really no reason to do that. Beth assumed all of their luggage was expanded on the inside, so they weren't carrying much to begin with, and they were all mages, so it was easy enough to lighten the load with a spell if necessary. Ch'uk'aq Bĕtz — the American, Beth still couldn't quite get his name right — picked up Brân's bag for him, but everyone else just carried their own things (or levitated them, in Meñaśi's case). Seeming a little bemused, Quńalhi floated the platform back over with the rest, and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe led their group through the door.
The hallway was little different than the landing bay, white walls and ceiling, black floor — though the harsh industrial smell was much milder, and softened further with each step down the hall they took, fading in favour of, just, nothing, the air clean and blank. The thing that was really jumping out at Beth was how empty it seemed. The walls were blank, no decoration or interruptions of any kind, and she didn't see any other people around, just their group of omniglots and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Quńalhi. That seemed...odd.
Though she didn't have to wait very long before she got an explanation for that. The walk down the hall was short, maybe only ten metres or so, before Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe led them through another door — though smaller than the large one into the landing bay, maybe slightly over two metres high and wide enough for two people to slip through side-by-side — Quńalhi standing just past it to wave them through. (Beth had lost track of Chaf-aṛ-nissåltý again, maybe back at the shuttle still.) This was very obviously a medical clinic. Eight beds in total, adjustable, all currently angled up into a reclining seat, a stack of unfamiliar equipment next to each, overhead lamps on swivelling jointed frames, cabinets set along both walls, everything cast in soft, sterile whites and blues. There was even a medical smell to the place, a harsh antiseptic tang, very familiar despite the alien equipment not being quite recogniseable. There were five people waiting for them here, standing in a row a third of the way into the room — wearing thin medical-style facemasks, trousers and a jacket similar to the Inapu-Itarisan military uniform, but in black and white instead, with blue-violet trim along the hems and lapels. Medical officers of some kind, presumably.
One of the medical officers, Beth noticed, was human — a dark-haired woman perhaps in her mid-twenties, would look perfectly unremarkable were they not on an alien spaceship right now. If she were at all surprised to see humans being found on an uncontacted planet, she wasn't showing it, though Beth definitely wasn't the only one of their group giving her curious glances.
Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe wheeled around a stand, and once they were all in the room started pushing buttons. In a blink an illusion appeared in the air — or, not technically an illusion, she guessed, a hologram or whatever. This was clearly a pre-prepared video, done in colourful, somewhat cartoonish animation. Some unfamiliar greenish aliens — the cartoonishness didn't carry through many of the details, it was hard to tell what kind of being that was supposed to be, exactly — were flown up off of a planet onto a ship, and then they were talking to a group of blue and red aliens, presumably meant to be Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Quńalhi's species. The video zoomed in on two of the figures, standing close together, and then in further to focus on a group of blobby, spikey little things moving from the red alien into the greenish one. A cut, and the greenish alien was in bed, with red and yellow patches on his skin Beth took to be sores, looking to be very miserable, the animation again zooming in to show a bunch of the blobby, spikey things inside of him.
Then the video seemed to start over, the group of greenish aliens being flown off the planet again — but this time, they were met on the big ship by a group of red and unfamiliar yellow aliens wearing the medical uniform, complete with facemasks, in a cartoonish version of the same room they were standing in now. There was a cut, showing one of the greenish aliens sitting on one of the reclining beds, one of the red-skinned medics pressing some kind of device to an arm, the image zooming in further to show some sparkly blue stuff being injected into the green alien. There was another cut, the greenish aliens sitting in rows of poofy armchairs, wrapped up in blankets — drifting snowflakes were animated over the scene, making it more clear that they felt cold. A cut, and the greenish aliens were speaking to a group of red and blue ones, like before; the video zoomed in, showing the spikey-blobby things try to jump from a red-skinned alien to a green-skinned one, but the sparkly blue stuff in the green bloke attacked them, the things dissolving away. It showed the green and red and blue aliens all talking for a few seconds before going dark again.
"Vaccination," Nāgamaṇi said — in French, one of only a couple languages that the whole group spoke decently well. "They want to innoculate us against diseases out here we haven't been exposed to."
With a low, deep drawl to his voice, Ch'uk'aq Bĕtz said, "I would strongly recommend we cooperate. The contact of the West with the East was devastating for our people, and we were only isolated for some ten, twelve thousand years — mages are more resistant to infection, but we are not immune."
"And they clearly do have humans among them, so presumably the vaccines will be safe for us."
"Precisely. Though we may need to work something out for Meñaśi."
That all sounded reasonable — Beth would rather not get ill from alien diseases she wasn't likely to have any immunity to, thanks — so she quick glanced around their group for any objections before agreeing for them in her clumsy Minnisiät. Then she pointed at Meñaśi, and just raised a questioning eyebrow. One of the doctors took a step forward, his answer slightly muffled by the facemask, Beth closely listening, frowning in concentration. "Er, I think he's saying they can do a blood test and adjust the vaccine for you. If you'll be comfortable with that."
Meñaśi scowled, her curling lip showing pointed elven teeth — lots of magical people could be very sensitive about anything to do with their blood, which was perfectly reasonable given the dangers of blood magic. But after a moment she gave a sharp nod, the dangly glassy piercings in her ears clicking and tinkling. "Very well. I can annihilate the blood myself regardless."
...Beth wasn't sure what she meant by that, but the important thing was that she'd agreed.
The whole process was very quick and painless. Four of them were waved forward — one of the medical officers was focussed on Meñaśi — were directed to sit on the bed. Their sleeve was pulled up to bare skin — Beth was in her dress blues at the moment (as vaguely stiff and uncomfortable as it was, she'd thought it appropriate for the occasion), she had to take off her jacket to get her arm properly uncovered. Her officer tried to get started on her forearm, but her wand holster was there, enchanted to be unnoticeable to everyone else, she had to point him further up her arm. (He seemed a little confused, but just played along.) He tore open a little package, taking out a wipe of some kind — it smelled antiseptic, but Beth suspected it was dissolving body hair out of the way too, judging from the residue it picked up just being brushed over a patch of her upper arm. He opened another package, revealing a tiny little stiff-bristled brush, which he...scraped over her skin?
Some kind of allergy test, Beth and the other omniglots would decide later, to make sure they wouldn't react badly to anything in the vaccine — none of them had reacted, but it was a reasonable precaution to take. Her medic stood there for a moment, watching the patch of her arm he'd scraped the brush over. After a minute or two, he picked a little handheld device up off the tray, pressed one end against her arm. This must be the actual injection part, but she didn't feel anything at all, no prick or pressure or anything — there was a very faint hissing sound, but that was it. Lifting the device away, the medic opened a third package, rubbed the wipe in that one over that part of her arm, and then stepped back and gave her a little nod, waving back off the direction she'd come. That was it, apparently.
The four medics took a quick moment to throw away the packages they'd used, tossing them into some kind of chute fitted into the wall, and then the other four were waved up. (Ḑiguqhȧnna wasn't human, but she'd say later that their biology was similar enough that it didn't make any difference for this sort of thing.) The process went just as quickly for them, only a couple minutes and they were done.
They did have to wait for Meñaśi, but even that process went remarkably quickly, given the complexity of tailoring a vaccine for a completely unfamiliar immune system. All in all, from drawing Meñaśi's blood, to testing it, to mixing a custom vaccination, to getting it in her arm, the whole thing took maybe fifteen minutes, max.
(Beth honestly didn't know enough about medicine to understand how completely absurd that was, but Hermione would be amusingly dumbfounded when she'd tell her about it later.)
And apparently that was all they had to do here — they were directed back out into the hallway again, the medical officers sending them off with friendly waves. A short walk brought them to what was obviously a lift, a box with black floor and blue and yellow walls, a display to one side of the door that apparently functioned as the controls. Thankfully it was big enough to fit all eleven of them — the omniglots with their luggage, plus Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Quńalhi — without feeling overly cramped. Once they were all inside, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe poked at the display, selecting their destination. At one point, what looked like a warning dialogue came up, disappearing again after Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe held his entire hand, palm and fingers, against the screen for a second and then punched in a quick code on what looked like a number pad — a security check, maybe? Where their hosts would be keeping them through the trip must be open only to authorised personnel.
The lift started moving once Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was done fiddling around, which was immediately obvious, because Beth actually could feel them moving. She guessed that the environment inside of the ship was magically isolated from the outside, but motion within the ship still behaved like usual. Maybe they could do their momentum-fuckery shite inside of the lift, but it just wasn't cost-effective to do so? Whatever. Interestingly, they didn't just go straight up — they rose for a bit, Beth's weight pressing noticeably harder downward, but then they moved forward, a couple of people in their group teetering a step at the unexpected change of direction. After a short distance sideways, they started rising again...but then, their direction of travel seemed to curve, Beth leaning a little forward against the force...
The lift slowed to a stop, the doors opening up into a wide, open space — it looked more open than it really was, since there didn't seem to be a solid ceiling. The harsh whites and blacks of everything they'd seen before were abandoned in favour of deep, pleasant blues and greens and oranges, the lights tinted noticeably yellowish. Some sort of common room, perfectly circular, a carpeted floor ringed by walls two, maybe two and a half metres high. The ceiling was a smooth, uninterrupted dome, the material entirely transparent, like the sides of the shuttle they'd taken up, revealing the star-strewn blackness beyond.
That was still, just, breathtaking, Beth had to force her gaze downward so she didn't get distracted.
This was obviously meant to be a common living area, what looked like a pair of dining tables lined with chairs here, an array of poofy-looking armchairs over there. It looked like their hosts had expected a significantly larger group, the space set up for something more like two dozen or so people. The array of armchairs was facing what looked to be an oversized display screen of some kind, almost like from a cinema or some shite, the upper parts of it curving up along the dome — right now, the display was only showing the ring and stars and the open hand held palm out of Inapu-Itarisan against a deep blue background, presumably some idle image or something. The wall all around was set with doors every so often, most of them hanging open, Beth couldn't pick out details of the rooms beyond from here. Bedrooms, probably?
There was a handful of staff waiting for them here, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe led the way over — they made introductions, with a combination of talking directly to Beth (the only one who had any hope of understanding anything) and showing images or video clips on those handheld computers of theirs trying to explain what their responsibilities were. One woman (Beth was pretty sure) — a rather peculiar-looking being covered in colourful red and blue feathers, with an overlong neck and a pointed, scaly, beak-like face and back-bending knees, clearly bird-like (though the proportions and the structure of the arms and hips and face were obviously different, similar by coincidence and not due to being directly related) — would be in charge of their accommodations...not just on the ship but through their entire stay, Beth suspected. Hard to say exactly, she didn't quite follow every word Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said, obviously. The bird-looking woman, Aq̄hija Punc̄alĕ Ihaseăq (multiple clicky sounds in there, like in Gobbledegook or some African languages), had an accent in Minnisiät that was obvious even to Beth — she guessed it might be difficult to pronounce for her species.
There was a medical officer here too, in the same uniform as the people downstairs but without the mask part, who would apparently be responsible for making sure none of them dropped dead while in their new friends' care. Eqathi Rinšakšu — Beth suspected that was the same language as Quńalhi's name — was a tall, slender being with a mostly humanoid body plan, though with long ears and pointed teeth more reminiscent of elves or goblins, except for being entirely covered in downy white fur. Her voice was calm and soft, her gestures slow and smooth and gentle, something about her giving Beth strong maternal vibes.
And then there was their chef, a brightly grinning bloke named Thisaku Arqšatsami, which sounded like the same language again — Beth remembered the map of the member states of Inapu-Itarisan had featured a long snaking one that seemed significantly larger than most, she was guessing this was their language. Curiously, Thisaku was also very human-looking, like Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's people, but with deep red skin, his lips and his hair a faintly purplish black, hair subtly glimmering in the light. Their assumption was that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's people were some kind of human off-shoot, Thisaku's people must be another example of that happening. Interestingly, Beth could feel warm, soft pleasure and tingly excitement pulsing off of Thisaku, the feel of the magic very similar to the emotional influence veela and lilin had — she noticed Ḑiguqhȧnna was watching him with her head curiously tilted, probably wondering what that was about. Beth guessed it wasn't too much of a surprise that some people out there might have developed a similar kind of magic, but it was curious.
Since they had the person who'd be in charge of feeding them right here, Beth pulled out the book they'd put together about Meñaśi's diet. Thisaku flipped through it with her quick, nodding, occasionally asking a question, which Beth followed less than half of the time. It was a little interesting, talking to Thisaku, constantly getting flickers of feelings from him, the man speaking with big, wide gestures, very gregarious. Handing off the booklet to one of his subordinates — there were other staff around, they were mostly just being introduced to the people in charge — Thisaku rambled off at Meñaśi, a sense of calm reassurance dribbling through Beth, the empathic magic getting his point across where the spoken words didn't quite. Honestly, at this point Beth wasn't really worried about it — both Quńalhi and Eqathi's species looked like they might be primarily carnivorous, the same as elves and goblins, it shouldn't be a problem.
Once the introductions were finished, they were shown the rooms they'd be staying in for however long this trip was going to take. They were rather plain, but comfortable enough. The one Beth was shown to, presumably the same as the others, had a couple bunk beds, a long desk with what was obviously a computer of some kind built into it, everything done in the same blues and greens and oranges as the common room but in somewhat darker shades. There was an attached bathroom too — the toilet was shaped somewhat differently, though recognisable for what it was, and that was definitely a shower. It looked like the rooms were designed to sleep multiple people, what with the bunkbeds, but their group was small enough that they could each have their own. Beth dropped her bag on one of the chairs at the desk and stepped back out into the common room.
Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe waited for them to all come out, before starting on a little ramble, pointing between their rooms and the array of armchairs — frowning, Beth concentrated, trying to follow what he was saying despite her basic Minnisiät. When he was done, he turned to Beth, and asked if she'd caught all that. "I think I do," she said in Minnisiät, before turning back to their group and switching to French. "The side-effects of the vaccine are going to start hitting before too much longer, and they want us out here in the armchairs while that's going on. So they can keep an eye on us in case something goes wrong and we need help, you know. I think he's suggesting we change into comfortable clothes first — we might end up sleeping out here the first night of the trip."
There were a few scowls at that, nobody looking forward to feeling miserable for however long this was going to take, but everyone turned back around to their rooms without arguing about it. Beth closed her door behind her, before sitting down on one of the beds to unlace her shoes. Stripping down to her pants, she hung her uniform off of one of the upper bunks, drew open her bag to go digging for something suitable to wear. There was a thick fuzzy Gryffindor-themed jumper here near the top — Molly's work, made it for her one Christmas years ago now — and somewhere in here there should be... ah, there were her pyjama trousers, good. (At some point in the last few years she'd grown accustomed to sleeping naked, in fair part due to regularly spending the night with someone, she'd needed to buy pyjamas specifically for this trip.) She tracked down a pair of thick, warm socks, and there, that would do.
Coming out of a room near hers at more or less the same time, Hlynur gave her jumper a raised eyebrow. In Gaelic, he drawled, "I will never understand the attachment former Hogwarts students have to your school houses."
Beth shrugged. "It was a gift."
"Didn't you drop out? Are you sure it wasn't meant as an insult?"
"Get fucked, Hlynur."
"Is that an offer?"
"Did you bring a sex-change potion with you? Maybe then I'll think about it."
"Alas, I didn't have that kind of foresight..."
Their group trickled back out of their rooms, now in less formal clothing — Ḑiguqhȧnna's loose, flimsy slip dress was rather distracting, Beth had to try not to stare. They were directed to the armchairs, with the suggestion to get comfortable. She still felt fine — maybe slightly light-headed, but that could be anything — but by the sound of it it seemed like these side-effects could hit very suddenly, probably wouldn't be fun to be caught too far away from somewhere warm. There were more armchairs than they needed, they concentrated to the centre of the grid and the front, near the oversized display. She assumed there'd be something playing on here to keep them distracted from feeling miserable, so.
Meñaśi transfigured her chair to an appropriate elf size with a snap of her fingers, getting amusing full-body surprised twitches and little gasps or squeaks from their hosts. Apparently some of them hadn't been read in on what Earth magic was like — the feeling Beth had gotten was that floating things around was something these aliens were familiar with, but transfiguration was new to them. Quńalhi gave some of her more badly-startled peers a toothy smirk — somewhat different from the expression Beth was used to, lips tight and pulled straight back, eyes narrowing, but omniglot instincts were cheating — seeming almost as amused as Beth was.
(Her species had visibly pointed teeth, giving the expression an almost goblin-like quality, which was interesting.)
They were still waiting for the last couple people to show up when there was a vibrating shudder through the floor carrying up to Beth through her comfortable poofy armchair. Overhead, the stars seemed to stretch, the single points smearing into narrow lines, and then, with a snap-clunk echoing through the ship, there was a bright flash of blue light, sweeping over the dome from one side to the other, blotting out the stars and the blackness of space. The shivering and shuddering abruptly stopped — all that was left was a faint buzzing, like a ringing in her ears, subtle, Beth might just be imagining that — the view outside reduced to... something. Blobs and swirls and waves, blue and white and purple, poofy and graceful like clouds but seeming to spread and roil like fire, each formation brushing across the dome in a blink, each shape subtly different from the last, a constantly evolving tapestry of cool colours and random curving shapes, the same sort of thing but never looking quite the same one second to the next, the lights flashing down through the dome painting everything in cool deep blue light, throwing soft shadows at funny angles...
Woah. What the fuck was that?
She could at least partially answer that question herself — she was pretty sure they'd just jumped into the aliens' faster-than-light thing — but still, that was...
Well, it was kind of eerily beautiful, honestly. The colours were soft and cool and pretty, and something about it was a little hypnotising, almost like cloud-gazing, but faster, couldn't quite keep up with what she was looking at...
After they were all settled in, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe tapped at his handheld computer thing, and the insignia on the big display winked out. Beth had to forcefully tear her eyes away from the lightshow through the dome, focus on the display. An image of the Earth from space appeared — huge and extremely detailed, colours bright and vibrant, their camera quality obviously much better than muggle or even magical ones — zooming out to show Earth and the moon, hugging close to the latter the silvery sliver of the alien flagship and the fatter shape of the one they were on right now. This obviously wasn't a proper image, everything disproportionately large for the distances between them, but you kind of had to do that to fit everything on a screen in a way that was comprehensible at all. (Space was big, and empty.) A circular indicator flashed over the bulbous ship as it pulled away from the moon, leaving a blueish-greenish dashed line behind it.
The image zoomed out in a blur of indecipherable colour, now showing what Beth had seen enough times by now to recognise as a map of their neighbourhood of the galaxy, blobs shaded in different colours to indicate the members of Inapu-Itarisan, a circular indicator in the blank star-speckled blackness at the edge of the map marking the position of Earth. The shading of the various states turned more transparent, a dense web of pale gold lines stitching across the map — even spreading through the unclaimed black parts, though the lines there were thinner, in some spots reduced to hashes or dots, which presumably meant something to people who knew how to read maps like this.
...Were those roads? Well, not roads, but— They suspected the aliens' faster-than-light travel always went in straight lines, and they assumed there must be other limitations to it, but it was really all guesswork at this point. Talking about it once, Hermione had pointed out that they didn't know what this stuff was doing, exactly — were they moving through some kind of extradimensional space, like in apparation, or would they just slam right into objects along their path? Running into anything at those kinds of speeds could not be good for you. Just guesswork at this point, of course, but Hermione's theory (shared by some of her fellow science nerds) was that the aliens hadn't already explored the entire galaxy because they did have to be concerned about things in their path, had to carefully map out where they were going or else risk blowing themselves up or some shite. Just a guess, of course, but a pretty reasonable-sounding guess to Beth.
Now this was Beth just guessing, but this map looked like Hermione's theory was correct: this web of golden lines showed safe paths from star to star that they'd charted out. Maybe the dotted lines were ones that they'd travelled across before, but hadn't mapped as well, so there was still a risk of something drifting into the way when they weren't paying attention? Not a bad assumption, she didn't think, yeah.
Anyway, Earth wasn't directly connected to this network at all, a single dotted line reaching them, the other end of that dotted line itself only joining with other dotted lines — which wasn't a big surprise, since apparently Inapu-Itarisan had had no idea Earth was here until they'd stumbled across it by chance hunting down the scabs. The same blueish-greenish dashed line left behind by this ship a moment ago was sketched down one short dotted line, and then a second one, and then a somewhat longer dashed line before it reached the end of a solid one, shortly leading to a junction of multiple solid lines. The blueish-greenish dashed line Beth assumed indicated their flightplan paused there for a moment, a box sprouting out of that point, spreading out to show an image: a vaguely cylindrical structure, the surface done in that dark silvery metal they used for their military craft, delicate-looking branches spreading from it here and there, a handful of ships docked onto them. Beth noticed what looked like satellite dishes and antennae sticking out of both ends of the cylinder — a communications hub of some kind? The closest outpost Inapu-Itarisan had to Earth, she guessed, actually still outside of the borders of the nearest member state. Something they'd put here to help coordinate and supply their war against the scabs, maybe?
Actually, Beth thought it was close enough it might still be inside of the speculative borders Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had drawn for Earth's territory at their first meeting, that might end up needing to be part of their negotiations later. It'd make sense for the national (or whatever term was appropriate) military to have bases inside the member states, but, you know.
The box showing the station disappeared, and the blueish-greenish dashed line continued on, following along one golden line after another. Their flightplan passed inside of one of their future neighbours — their border flashed a couple times, another box popping up showing an insignia Beth assumed was some kind of national symbol, disappearing again after a few seconds — and passing through it into a second state, with a flash of their border and another displayed insignia. Their flightplan passed through a third state, and then entered a fourth, a circular indicator blinking around one of the junctions within it.
The map disappeared, showing an unfamiliar planet from space...for a certain definition of "unfamiliar", anyway — it looked very Earth-like, with large patches of blue seas and a blue-tinted sky liberally speckled with white clouds, but it obviously wasn't Earth, the shape of the seas and continents entirely unrecognisable. Though, after her initial impression, she noticed it was less familiar than she'd thought: there was a faint greenish tinge to the oceans that didn't look quite the same, and the landforms seemed muddier, browns and greys and tans, silver-blue and purplish-red, without any obvious green of vegetation. Or maybe the plants here were just a different colour? Who knows.
The display held on the view of the planet for a moment, before switching to a video of craggy mountains scrolling by, presumably filmed from a ship flying down there. Looking closely, Beth thought she spotted structures here and there, little round houses, and there were plants, especially dense in the deep valleys between the mountains — nothing she recognised, though, and the colours were off, dark brownish-green or vivid deep purple or bright red. After a few moments they came over a wider valley, surrounded on all sides by bare greyish exposed stone of mountains, some of them tall enough they were even capped with patches of snow.
Nestled in the valley was what was obviously a city, though an alien-looking one — instead of building structures and planning cities in rectangles and blocks, these people seemed to build in circles and rings. Graceful cylindrical towers made of metal and brightly coloured glass, neighbourhoods arranged in concentric circles, the towers separated by gardens and courtyards, the neighbourhoods connected to each other by roads curving through greenery (or, red-ery?), some patches of which were obviously cultivated crops, grown in carefully-stacked terraces. An alien-looking place, of course, but it still looked very pretty, the sunlight playing off of the stained glass walls of the buildings, plants growing here and there and everywhere, red and purple and green, speckles of more colourful flowers in some places...
The view coasted over the city for a short while, before closing in over one neighbourhood in particular. This one was mostly lower to the ground, and while there were a few round structures of metal and glass, there were some more blocky ones too, made out of brick or some kind of synthetic siding Beth couldn't identify. Their aerial view cut out, replaced with a brief video of some open courtyard somewhere — garden spaces filled with brush or crawling vines speckled with flowers in yellow and green and blue, stitched through with paths going this way or that, aliens walking about...the majority of, er, their bird-looking host's species (forgot her name), but there were a few other kinds around too. A couple more external shots like that, and then some internal ones, a sunny hallway, a cafeteria of some kind, what was obviously a lecture hall...
"A university," Nāgamaṇi blurted out. "They're hosting us at a university somewhere — or something like one, anyway."
There were several more images from the complex — including shots of what Beth was pretty sure would be their dormitories, the only shots totally empty of aliens wandering around — only making it more clear that Nāgamaṇi was on to something, before they apparently reached the end, the display hanging on another aerial view of the alien university. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had been speaking pretty much the whole time, Beth only half listening, now he gestured toward their bird-looking host (really must ask for her name again), the woman dipping her head, the length of her neck exaggerating the gesture somewhat.
When Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe paused, Beth said, "Her people are hosting us, I think." Switching to her best Minnisiät, "I'm sorry, who are you?" She openly pointed at the bird-looking woman, hopefully that wasn't too rude to them.
Beth didn't think the woman was capable of smiling, exactly, her beak-like mouth too stiff for that, but she read the head bob and slow blink of her eyes as an equivalent. "Aq̄hija."
"Er...Aq khija?"
"Aq̄hija. Q̄h, q̄h, q̄h."
Fuck, that was a hell of a sound — Beth had picked up a language or two with click consonants, but they were still a bitch to get used to. It wasn't quite like the x in isiXhosa, but... "Aq̄ija? No, A q̄hija."
Aq̄hija gave her another blinking head-bob, so she must have gotten it right that time. She'd try to remember that...
Apparently that was all that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had to tell them today. There was a comment (Beth translating as well as she could) about talking to Aq̄hija or her people if they needed anything, like, more blankets or whatever — or even just to retrieve their things from their rooms for them, as they wouldn't really feel like leaving their burrows once the side-effects got really bad — or to ask Thisaku or his people if they wanted anything food- or drink-related. Thisaku did say that, um... Beth thought they'd be making, like, salty snacks and throat-soothing drinks available for them — they probably wouldn't be in the mood to eat much for a while, so. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe left not long after that, setting the display to cycle through images and video presumably arranged beforehand — glimpses of places in Inapu-Itarisan, by the look of it — leaving Beth and the other omniglots in the hands of the rest of the staff.
They spent a few minutes just chatting about the trip up or the ship or whatever else, watching the display or the colourful chaos overhead. But it didn't take very much longer for the side-effects to start hitting — slow and subtle at first, but then quickly worsening. Beth's light-headedness developed into proper dizziness, a headache starting to grow, like slowly building pressure somewhere in her head. She felt vaguely sore and twitchy, like after a hard workout, whatever was going on in her head getting bad enough that it was a little hard to make out the video playing on the display, occasionally blinking or squinting to force it into focus.
And then — abruptly, perfectly fine one second and then intense in the next — she was shivering, hard. It actually took her by surprise, hitting her in a blink, letting out a muttered ugh fuck, pulling the blankets pilled up on the arm of her chair up over her shoulders, kicking to get them over her feet...
She didn't actually start feeling properly cold until she'd already been shivering for a minute or two, which was a little odd, but whatever. By this point, Beth had gotten quite good at handling heat, having spent a lot of time in tropical places back during the war and over the year since, but she was less experienced at dealing with cold — especially cold that was a her problem and couldn't just be avoided with a warming charm. She'd actually cheated, speeding up the accumulation of warmth under the blankets with a wandless charm, but it didn't really help much. She could feel the heat under the blankets, close and muggy against her, but yet she was still cold, to the point that her skin felt stiff and numb with it, shivering so hard her teeth were chattering, her breath turned thin and fluttery, after a few minutes it started to hurt, her joints stinging and her limbs aching...
And now she was developing a sore throat. Great.
She'd been sitting here shivering for a few minutes, hugging her legs to her chest under the blankets to minimise her profile in an attempt to get fucking warmer, when one of the medics came by, gave her a quick check-over. When he was done, the man gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder and just moved on — so apparently this level of misery was perfectly normal. Awesome.
And this was going to last how long? Uuuggghhhhh...
(She realised getting ill from alien diseases she'd have absolutely no immunity to would be much worse — possibly even lethal — but this was still shaping up to be fucking awful.)
The random videos on the display were eventually swapped out with what Beth took to be some kind of film or television programme or something? There'd been what was obviously a title sequence, complete with music and everything, audible dialogue. It was in Minnisiät, but since it was a recording she couldn't lean on omniglot shite to cheat — seeing what alien media was like was an interesting idea, and the architecture and fashion and shite it was showing was pretty neat, but she couldn't understand much. (More than the other omniglots in the room, sure, but her Minnisiät was still extremely basic.) Beth was distracted from the programme, though, when she noticed a few medical staff people gathering around one of the armchairs, trading worried-sounding mutters. Carefully hugging her blankets around herself, she leaned forward, trying to get a better look.
That was Ḑiguqhȧnna's chair. She was shivering like the rest of them, of course, but she actually looked cold — as in, cold enough to change colours. She had a sort of light brown, bronze-ish skin tone, with some of the colour leeching out of it gaining an almost greyish-greenish tinge, Beth could make out veins around her eyes and along her throat. Her lips were swiftly darkening to purplish-blue, and between her breaths she was letting out little pained moans, gritting her teeth and...
Beth frowned. Veela and lilin were similar to humans, yes — they originated from humans altering themselves with some kind of ritual magic a very long time ago, literally prehistoric — but they had some magical attributes that made them react to things differently from human mages. Some healing magic didn't work the same on them, they were almost completely immune to being burned by fire (though some magical fire could still hurt them). They absolutely hated being underground, or in enclosed spaces, though Beth wasn't sure how much of that was biological and how much was cultural.
Also? They were more sensitive than humans to the cold. Which was sort of playing with fire (hah), since they liked living in mountainous areas, but they mostly did that in tropical regions, at elevations it likely wasn't going to get below freezing very often — and even when it did, they used special environmental wards to saturate the area with elemental fire magic. Not, like, actual fire, but sort of colouring the ambient magic within the bounds of the wards with something they found pleasant. It wasn't the temperature that mattered quite as much, seemingly, as long as there was enough elemental fire magic (or elemental sunlight) in the ambient environment then they'd still be comfortable.
There would be no elemental fire or sunlight, in the magical sense, on this ship.
But Beth knew how to fix that.
She grimaced, gritting her teeth — this was going to suck.
Hugging her blankets tight around herself, she forced her legs down, her muscles protesting from being held up close to her chest for however while also shivering, pinging and spanging with little needles of pain. It took Beth multiple tries to stand up, the dizziness and the shivering fucking with her balance, her legs numb and not quite wanting to cooperate — it didn't help that one of the blankets was weighted, surprisingly heavy. The air let in around her legs making her feel even colder, a shock to the system making her shiver all the harder, aaaahhhh, ouch...
Not long after she got to her feet, breathing hard and shaking and trying to force herself to move, one of the medical staff came up to her — one arm light on her arm, she said... something, not sure what. Beth nodded toward Ḑiguqhȧnna. "I can help her." She spoke in French, which obviously the alien wouldn't understand, but she forced her stiff numb legs to take a clumsy step in that direction. The medic didn't seem happy about it, but she didn't try to stop her, walking alongside her with a firm grip on her arm through the blankets.
The staff gathered around Ḑiguqhȧnna giving her funny looks, Beth lurched to a stiff stop in front of the chair. "Budge up."
Her gaze wavering, it was obviously difficult for Ḑiguqhȧnna to even focus on her, blinking and frowning. "B-B-Beth? What?"
"I c-c-c—" She accidentally bit her tongue, fuck. "Fire mmmagic. Move."
The lilin woman's eyes widened, her mouth dropping open — immediately understanding what Beth was getting at, she thought. It took a little doing, Ḑiguqhȧnna clearly cold and numb and sore enough that it was difficult for her to even move that much, but with a hand from one of the staff she managed to shift over toward one side of the chair. Beth squeezed down next to her, unwrapping her blankets from around herself — cold, fuck fuck fuck — and then back over Ḑiguqhȧnna as she squirmed onto Beth's lap. Letting herself sink limp into the chair, her arms loosely looped around Ḑiguqhȧnna's waist and her forehead resting against her shoulder, Beth let her eyes drop closed, concentrating.
It took a moment, the shivering and the dizziness and the cold making it hard to focus, but eventually she managed it. She gathered up her magic, twisted and coloured it the way she would to make a certain dark fire spell she picked off the top of her head — but instead of pushing it down her wand arm, like she would to cast it, she just loosened her grip on it, let it spread out. If she did it right, it should leech out to colour her aura, like steam lifting off of a pot, and...
Almost immediately, Ḑiguqhȧnna relaxed, the tension dribbling out of her body to slump against Beth. "Ohh... Oh that's much better — thank you, Beth." She was still shivering, but as her head turned to lean against Beth's shoulder, she could see the colour was already starting to fade back into her face, the unnatural blue of her lips lightening.
Her surprise and relief thrumming through Beth in that way lilin and veela did, soft and warm and comfortable, was honestly making Beth feel a little better too, so. "Sure. I mmmight lose hold of it. Tr-tr-yy to keep it up."
"Mm. If you can't hold– hold it all the time, that's okay. Just the break is nice."
The group of concerned medics hovering around Ḑiguqhȧnna seemed very confused about what was going on, but they could obviously tell that whatever crisis they'd been facing was solved for now, started dribbling away. They went silent, Ḑiguqhȧnna loosely curled up in her lap, the both of them just idly watching the programme on the display, Beth keeping part of her attention the magic. She did still feel horribly cold, shivering and dizzy and headachey, a sore throat starting to make itself known, but the pain in her joints and limbs was noticeably better at least — pretty sure the soft soothing feelings Ḑiguqhȧnna was pushing on her had something to do with that. Normally she'd be a little annoyed with someone fucking with her head — one of multiple reasons the students from Beauxbatons had made her uncomfortable way back during the Triwizard Tournament — but it was kind of relaxing and was taking the edge off, so.
Some time later — Beth wasn't sure exactly, there weren't any clocks around (and she probably wouldn't be able to read alien time anyway) — some of Thisaku's people started coming around with snacks and drinks. That probably wasn't a bad idea, especially the drink part, her throat was really starting to hurt. But, well, she would need her arms to do that — not really, she could get away with eating through wandless magic if she was careful, but not while also holding the spell keeping Ḑiguqhȧnna warm. When they were coming up Ḑiguqhȧnna leaned forward a little, pulling the blankets out and, ah cold, Ḑiguqhȧnna might feel okay but Beth still needed that...
The solution they came to was a little embarrassing, honestly, but at this point Beth was too miserable to care. Ḑiguqhȧnna wormed one of her arms out, keeping the blankets wrapped tight otherwise, keeping herself close in Beth's aura and their combined body heat contained. And since Ḑiguqhȧnna had a hand she could use, she'd just bring Beth's cup up to her lips for her — which, yes, embarrassing, but it was probably a little silly to be concerned about that under the circumstances. Especially since she and Ḑiguqhȧnna were already in a rather compromising situation, and Ḑiguqhȧnna didn't seem to mind, so, you know, whatever.
Beth couldn't identify what the drink was, exactly. Warm and sweet and vaguely flowery? She had no idea what that floweriness might be, it didn't taste like anything familiar, that was just the best comparison she could think of. Some kind of alien tea, maybe? She didn't think it was made with water, some kind of smoother...cream or oil or something, not sure — and she thought there might be medicine in it, cool and soothing on her throat, little tingly numbing prickles that actually made her cough a little, ticklish. Made a surprisingly big difference for her sore throat, though, so whatever it was didn't really matter so much, did it.
Something else slipped into the feelings coming off of Ḑiguqhȧnna, as she settled back into place after helping Beth with another sip — a tension in her chest that had nothing to do with the shivering or the coughing, feeling weirdly squirmy, despite the tension from the shivers that still hadn't eased off any. And also sort of...exposed? Very aware of her clothes against her skin, and Ḑiguqhȧnna against her, could almost feel her attention, like the hairs at the back of her neck standing up, but not really in an unpleasant way, almost excited...
She turned to meet Ḑiguqhȧnna's eyes, her face only a few inches away, tried to force an exasperated frown. "Not the time."
"You mean there'll be a time later?" she drawled — the teasing tone not coming out quite right, hoarse and wavering.
"When I 'on't feel like I'm d-d- dying, sure." Not exactly in a sexy mood at the moment, to say the least...
Ḑiguqhȧnna let out a long slow hum, her warm amusement bubbling in Beth's chest. "I thought you had someone. I woul...wouldn't want to make trouble." Because of course Ḑiguqhȧnna had known enough about Beth to know she and Katie were a thing, despite never having met before — being absurdly famous for stupid reasons was just like that sometimes.
"We have an arr-arram... It's fine." When Beth was in the country and they were both available they didn't see anyone else, but that wasn't always the case. She was aware that Katie had friends she screwed around with when she wasn't around — she'd even met a couple of them, which was always vaguely awkward — and when Beth was out of the country for whatever reason she tended to, you know, get around.
There'd been a brief period a few years ago now she'd felt...well, a way about that. She'd been in America for a couple weeks — related to some UN thing, the details weren't important — and someone had gotten some photos of her in a club, dancing with a woman she'd ended up spending that night with, the pictures very obvious about what was going on there. It'd been splashed all over the papers, blown up into a very annoying scandal, heard about it constantly for weeks — even got some hate letters through owl post, a few of them cursed or poisoned, in the day or so before she fixed her filtering spells. While Beth had already been stupid famous for a while by then, and not just in the magical world, people had mostly left her love life alone? There'd been some speculation about who she might be dating, and some of it had been kind of crass, but for the most part they'd left it alone. It might help that she'd been pretty private about it when she was younger, you know. But apparently that grace was over with once she was old enough for muggles to not feel too gross openly speculating about who she might be fucking.
Beth had been pretty miserable about it for a little while, honestly — when she got back from the trip, she'd spent some time holed up at Rock-on-Clyde, feeling...disgusted with herself, she guessed? Eventually, Hermione and Ron had basically dragged her out of the house, Ron constantly joking around in an attempt to cheer her up — including sarcastically playing up jealousy over the 'birds' she got with (because of course) — Hermione going on a long, angry, passionate rant about the misogynist bastards being awful to her (because of course). It'd taken a little bit to sink in, that yeah, Hermione was right, it was stupid to beat herself up about it, obviously the correct thing to do was to live her life how she wanted and tell everyone who didn't like it to piss off — which was basically what she'd been doing already, just, it'd gotten to her, that time.
Shite about her did turn up in tabloids and shite, still, but she just ignored it now. If people had nothing better to think about than the sex life of some woman they'd never even met before, that sounded like a them problem.
So, yeah, if Ḑiguqhȧnna was interested, she'd be open to it. Lilin and veela could be kind of, er, intense — they had some weird mind magic shite they did during sex, it was a long story — but intense wasn't really a bad thing, so. But, when she was dealing with an increasingly terrible headache and couldn't stop fucking shivering wasn't the time for it.
Ḑiguqhȧnna let off on the sexy feelings, going soft and warm instead — still with an edge of amusement, subtly bubbling in Beth's chest and tingling over her skin, clearly found something about this funny. "Mm, I see. I'll keep that in mind." She finished taking a sip of her own drink, before leaning over to press a slow, lingering kiss on Beth's cheek.
Um, okay?
Adjusting herself in Beth's lap a little, she pressed closer, tucking her face into the side of Beth's neck, fingers of one hand idly wandering along Beth's side, seemingly unconsciously. She was numb enough from the cold that she could only half-feel it anyway, any twitches from ticklishness hidden by the shivering. Beth just puffed out a sigh, and kept blankly watching the display over Ḑiguqhȧnna's head. Perhaps surprisingly unexcited to have an insufficiently-dressed woman — she suspected Ḑiguqhȧnna wasn't even wearing pants under this flimsy thing — being all snuggly and handsy curled up in her lap, but she was simply too miserable right now to summon any lustful thoughts at all. Not really complaining, honestly, the closeness was rather nice? Not sure how much of that was the lilin mind magic stuff, but.
Though, she hadn't realised it was possible to feel rather flushed and terribly cold at the same time...