68:10:1 (5th March 2001)
— Contact plus 05.06.03
Beth's ability to quickly absorb information continued to be strange even by omniglot standards, so when their hosts had questions about just what the hell was going on with them, they asked her.
Practically from the moment Beth and the other omniglots had stepped foot on Uq̄aru-ɬöjp̄ija they'd immediately begun intensive language lessons, which had basically never let up for a moment since, so far the omniglots having done little but study, eat, and sleep. There were some breaks now and then, hanging around chatting or playing board or card games or whatever, or watching alien television programmes, but obviously the programmes would still be in Minnisiät, and they spoke the new language with each other as much as possible for practice, so in a way even their leisure time counted. This wasn't exactly a new experience for Beth — she'd been dumped into language study like this several times in the past, in preparation for her unit to move in somewhere or ahead of a diplomatic visit of some kind she was playing bodyguard for — but she could tell it was dragging on the other omniglots a little, some of them seeming very tired by the end of the day. Beth did manage to push herself into a few migraines, but honestly it wasn't even that bad. She'd had worse, and alien medicine was incredible, just a little quick painless jab and her headache went away, fuck...
(Whatever drug that was didn't fix the way she could get all nauseous, and sensitive to sound and/or light, so she normally had to go lie down for a bit anyway, but still.)
It was obvious that their instructors had intended for them to be taught at least partly through technology, with recordings and readings and educational programmes and the like, but omniglots learned no more quickly than normal people that way. (Or, in Beth's case, less quickly.) They'd make a point of trying to get their instructors to talk them through things directly — honestly, Beth half-expected that they assumed these poor primitive people weren't sufficiently comfortable with advanced technology to use it properly, but they did cooperate easily enough, so she guessed what they were thinking about it didn't really matter. And it was obvious that the Earthlings were picking up Minnisiät more quickly than expected, Beth occasionally caught their instructors giving them funny looks and muttering to each other, speaking to the support staff in the language sometimes getting a surprised reaction. She had a feeling they suspected some weird magic shite was going on here, almost from the beginning — it was obvious these people were at least familiar with the existence of magic — even if this particular thing was a surprise to them.
But, well, the omniglots had also fallen into the habit of apparating around to get places (if only to avoid the university foot traffic, and being stared at), and apparently their guests thought being able to teleport around at will was fucking wild. One day Thisaku explained to her that the monatšeri had heard of this kind of magic before, but it was the sort of thing that came up in, like, ancient legends and shite, not something anyone in real life could actually do. It didn't take very long before their hosts just started expecting them to do weird magic shite now and then — they clearly still thought it was fascinating, but it pretty quickly stopped surprising them.
Beth really shouldn't have been surprised that magic ended up being the first thing about Earth that the aliens really wanted to know about, once they were caught up enough on the language to explain.
Anyway, Beth picked up the language noticeably more quickly than the other omniglots, even more than would be expected from her small head start — they asked her how she was doing that, if she was cheating with active mind magic to copy extra on the side, but honestly she still had no idea, she was just like this. After maybe a week and change, Beth was already more or less conversational in Minnisiät. She was still picking up vocabulary, she wasn't done, but she was pretty comfortable with it at this point, enough to start absorbing knowledge about other things.
It helped that Minnisiät wasn't a really a normal language, she learned talking about it with their instructors. Much of this region of the galaxy had been reasonably developed, but disunited — occasionally one empire or another would gobble up significant fractions of it (including one ruled by the kharson, thousands of years ago now), but they never lasted long, crumbling back apart into countless smaller polities again and again and again. Unlike in various other regions of the galaxy, there was no dominant cultural group, the various peoples here left divided and disconnected. There had always been trade, but that had been done in a smattering of languages, different ones common in different regions, it could often be difficult to range very far, neighbours limited to dealing only with neighbours.
Minnisiät had been such a trade language, one among many. It was a sort of creole, pieced together from various languages due to diverse peoples trying to figure out a way to communicate...but it was hard to say exactly which languages those were, exactly. On Earth, it was normally obvious which languages had contributed to a creole, since the borrowed words were normally still recognisable and there were still written records from the time, but Minnisiät was thought to have formed thousands of years ago. They weren't even sure how many thousands of years, exactly. They had a pretty good idea of where, just based on where use of varieties of the language was most widespread — in a band much nearer to the centre of the galaxy than they were now, passing through Inapu-Itarisan but extending beyond its borders to both sides — but the language had evolved in that time, developing a character of its own, and making it much more difficult to tell which bits were from different source languages, the sounds changed enough to be unrecognisable.
It still had the vibe of a creole to Beth, though. For one thing, it wasn't very particular about how the different sounds were actually pronounced, so long as they were distinguishable from each other. It had only a handful of vowels, and relatively few consonants, but, these weren't specific, identifiable sounds so much as the general idea of a sound, and you could pronounce it however you liked. If you were meeting a member of a new species you were unfamiliar with, who had different biology where making words was concerned, it might take a little bit listening to figure out where they were drawing the lines exactly, but normally people only needed a few minutes talking to figure each other out. The pronunciation they were being taught was thought to be the plain, culturally-neutral version, what automated electronic voices and shite would say and what was taught in military schools and the like, but it really did vary a lot, between species and in different regions. The way it avoided complicated consonant clusters and stuff, the syllables very very simple, also suggested a creole to her, a previous mish-mash of languages boiled down to the lowest common denominator.
The grammar was also super simple...and sometimes kind of optional? You could add suffixes and prefixes and shite to make different meanings, the way it worked kind of reminding Beth of, like, Arabic, or maybe more like Swahili, with the way verbal agreement worked. Anyway, you had verbs at the ends of sentences, add things to the different parts of the sentence for how they related to each other, blah blah. It could get kind of complicated, because there were often multiple different affixes that had overlapping meanings (maybe pulled from different source languages?), and also you could just attach basic vocabulary to words to get grammatical ideas across, and if the meaning of what you were saying was obvious you could just skip doing that entirely, and say something like here noun verb, and people could probably guess what you meant from context. The default, 'official' language they were being taught had certain complicated agreement rules and lists of affixes that went in certain orders and everything, sure, but in colloquial speech it tended to be much looser and improvisational, just, whatever made sense in the moment.
That made Minnisiät kind of complicated to learn, since the list of affixes was actually quite long, and everyone didn't use them the exact same way, but also very simple, since a lot of the times all that shite was optional anyway. It was better to be as precise as possible — especially in writing, when you couldn't be there to clarify what you meant if someone got confused — but the grammar really was very forgiving.
Almost like everyone was learning it as a second language, and might be coming from native languages with wildly different grammar, being completely alien to each other and all. Funny how that works.
Minnisiät wasn't the official language of Inapu-Itarisan — technically, they didn't have an official language, like as a matter of law — it'd just ended up being chosen as the language of administration thanks to its conveniently culturally-neutral position at the time. Though explaining why that happened was kind of complicated. See, a few decades ago now, there'd been a country that in Minnisiät was called simply the Law of Colussan, which had controlled about half of the whole galaxy at the time. (Colussan was the name of the capital world, and "law" in this sense meant the territory that a certain legal system applied in, somewhat similar to the Danelaw in British history, it was just how they talked about countries.) The Law of Colussan didn't actually exist anymore, the larger share of its territory now controlled by something they literally called the Republic ("Common-Law") Beyond the Rift, which was, er...
Well, Beth didn't entirely understand what the Rift was — it depended on things to do with their faster-than-light travel that went way over her head. Basically, the galaxy was split in half? It wasn't literally half, the other side was noticeably bigger than the one they were on but, you know, two pieces, at least. There was a thing that ran all the way through the galaxy that made FTL travel across it extremely difficult, for reasons, and that thing was called the Rift in Minnisiät. The two parts of the galaxy had been more or less entirely isolated for all of recorded history. As FTL tech advanced, in the last couple centuries there'd been a slow trickle of contact between the two sides, but it was still extremely difficult to chart a safe path through the Rift, so communication between the two parts of the galaxy was still minimal. Apparently, most of the space on the other side of the Rift had been united under a succession of republics and empires, more or less continuously for going on ten thousand years now — their level of technological development was more or less equivalent, but the other side were, in a way, more socially developed, had had an advanced galactic society for ages and ages, and had a far higher population and industrial base, so it was probably a good thing that the Rift kept them from fucking with people on this side. Especially since they'd apparently had big genocidal slave-holding empires crop up now and again?
Anyway, the ruler of the Law of Colussan (some kind of dictator, Beth was pretty sure), had been aware that the scabs were on their way — there'd been early scouting parties exploring the galaxy decades ahead of time — but the less united part of the galaxy on the other side of the Rift made a weak target. The scabs were from some other galaxy, apparently, and letting them get a beachhead unopposed from which they could invade the rest of it was obviously a bad idea. So, he'd given Mítth-räw-nuruodo a sizeable fleet and ordered him to go conquer it for him, there's a good lad.
The specific orders he'd been given were a bit more broad than that made that sound — Mítth-räw-nuruodo had been free to deal with the problem in any way he saw fit. Back when he'd been a commander in the Chiss fleet a good decade or two previously, he'd gotten himself court-martialed and exiled from the entire country for breaking some isolationist policy the Chiss had by picking a fight with the wakali well outside of their borders. (He'd actually gotten the Chiss into a whole big war with them single-handedly, which sounded like a good reason to punish someone, but the wakali were absolutely horrible murderous slaving bastards, and the Chiss had been the only people in the region with the firepower to stop them, so Beth was on Mítth-räw-nuruodo's side on this one.) Since he hadn't been a power-hungry fucking idiot, Mítth-räw-nuruodo had realised just showing up with a fleet and telling people they had to obey him now was an excellent way to get countless rebellions on his hands.
So instead, he and his fleet from beyond the Rift had jumped straight into the dragging, miserable, generations-long war against the wakali. The fleet he'd been given hadn't been huge by the standards of the Law of Colussan, but over on this side of the Rift, it'd been enough to turn the balance in their favour — Mítth-räw-nuruodo had also been, like, a once-in-a-generation tactical genius, which helped. As they went, they'd gathered up allies in the region — plus a steady stream of Chiss defectors, as frustrated as Mítth-räw-nuruodo had been with not being able to fucking do anything about the wakali — gradually crawling their way through this segment of the galaxy from near the centre outward. Eventually they'd reached the monatšeri, split up into several independent republics at that time, and in the middle of their own miserable bloody war with the wakali. The monatšeri, controlling some of the more populous, developed worlds in the region, would be a big ally to pick up, but they'd insisted on figuring out how their space would be administered before signing on.
That was when the structure of the Inapu-Itarisan government had been designed, but in order for that to really work, everyone needed to be able to talk to each other. At that point, Mítth-räw-nuruodo's fleet still primarily spoke the language of the Law of Colussan, which nobody on this side of the Rift spoke at all, and then they had their Chiss defectors, and the eclectic mix of allies they'd picked up, all of whom spoke their own languages, dozens and dozens and thousands of them, none really common enough to be useful. In the space they controlled at that time, the most commonly-spoken language would probably have been a monatšeri dialect, but it wouldn't have been spoken at all outside of their borders...and also there was that time in the past where the kharson had conquered themselves a big damn slave empire in the region, so using one of their languages wouldn't have exactly been politic, to put it mildly.
But, the space in their control had still been hugging pretty close to the centre of the galaxy at that time, and that happened to be where Minnisiät was most common — Mítth-räw-nuruodo, coincidentally a fluent speaker from back in his time with the Chiss, had suggested it as a culturally-neutral compromise, and they'd quickly run with that. Though it had been a bit of a pain to implement. For one thing, there were a bunch of different varieties of Minnisiät, and Mítth-räw-nuruodo was practically the only person in the fleet from beyond the Rift who actually spoke it. Some of their Chiss defectors did, and a few people here and there among their allies, but it was more rare by the time you got out to the monatšeri, and once you got past them, more out toward the edge of the galaxy, it was completely unheard of, nobody spoke it out there at all. So, it'd been convenient at the time, but as the war against the wakali progressed, they basically had to teach the language to every new people they came across before they could actually talk to each other. This made signing formal treaties to admit people into Inapu-Itarisan a slow process, but really there was no language they'd be able to use that would be better, so that was just what they were stuck with.
One thing that she kept noticing learning that stuff was that Inapu-Itarisan was very young — Mítth-räw-nuruodo and the original fleet had crossed the Rift less than forty years ago, and the treaty to officially create the government had only been signed thirty-two years ago. Advanced, star-faring society in the galaxy was unbelievably old — apparently faster-than-light space travel had been around for over twenty-five thousand years — but their project here had only been around long enough that the first generation of children born into it were not that much older than Beth. Maybe had something to do with how how optimistic and enthusiastic everyone still seemed about it? The shine hadn't worn off yet.
Anyway, Minnisiät was what they used for basically everything now. Colussat had been common in the military once upon a time, but the people who'd come over from beyond the Rift had mostly retired out over the decades since — there were still some senior command staff around, but they'd all learned Minnisiät by now. Sometimes you'd hear some Kisaät, but the Chiss in Inapu-Itarisan almost always also spoke Minnisiät, they normally only used it speaking to each other. Of course, monatšeri people were common enough that you'd hear their languages around sometimes, and the colloquial language used in, like, media programmes and social settings and stuff was increasingly absorbing monatšeri borrowings and slang as the years went on, but monatšeri were generally polite about using Minnisiät when talking to people outside of their culture. So, while it was the dominant language in Inapu-Itarisan, basically nobody spoke it as their native language. There were some people who did, mostly the children of the people who'd come across the Rift, but ninety-nine per cent of the time it was a second language, and a second language only.
Which Beth thought was interesting, at least — she didn't think she'd ever learned a language that was only ever used as a second language, with no native speakers whatsoever. A handful of languages which had more non-native speakers than natives, sometimes by big margins, but still, she thought that was neat? It made Minnisiät really, er, flavourful, how the sounds were pronounced and what people did with the very loose and improvisational grammar influenced by whatever their native language happened to be. Or even, like, where they'd learned it from, and how their teachers had spoken it? Just, it was a very straightforward language on paper, but the way that it was actually spoken was just so colourful and interesting, Beth didn't know, she liked it.
Of course, since she learned stupid quickly even by omniglot standards, she'd already started absorbing bits and pieces of the local language, and also the monatšeri language Thisaku and his staff spoke. Apparently, Thisaku's staff and Quńalhi actually spoke different but related languages? The kitchen staff all came from a planet called Tšusomaš — Thisaku ran a chain of restaurants, the staff he'd brought with either worked with him there or were just people in the business he knew for whatever reason — but Quńalhi came from Tommutškas (the old capital world), and their languages had diverged in the millennia since the collapse of the old empire. Tšusomaš had ended up being very culturally influential in the modern day, for reasons, so Tšusomalhańath was probably the most commonly-spoken variety, not a bad one to learn...but it was the wrong one if she wanted to talk with Quńalhi in particular...she guessed they could just keep using Minnisiät, but Beth liked talking to people in their own language whenever possible...
Yeah, turned out, interstellar civilisations could get very linguistically complicated, very quickly. There was no reason Beth couldn't just learn everyone's languages, since she was an omniglot and all, but she should really avoid trying to pick up so many at once. If only to give herself fewer migraines.
One morning over breakfast, Beth had an entire (if rather basic) conversation in Tšusomalhańath with Qanšalhu — a human member of the kitchen staff, Beth was still working up to asking what the hell humans were doing everywhere out here — and apparently that'd tipped off their instructors that Beth was learning shite stupid quickly. She was making the quickest progress in Minnisiät, and now she was speaking full sentences in Tšusomalhańath too, she realised that was fucking absurd by the standards of people who weren't omniglots. She'd guess starting to pick up other languages was a sign that she she'd learned Minnisiät well enough to ask her what the hell was going on.
They were at their classroom again, the same one they went to every day. The rest of the omniglots were in a lesson with the instructors, while Beth was at one of the computers off in the corner on her own — she already knew all the shite they were talking about today, so she might as well make progress in their project here while she didn't have anything better to do. With all their super-advanced computers and shite, they did have programmes that could automatically translate between languages. When it came to important things, like negotiating/writing treaties and whatever, they did prefer to use real living interpreters, but for, like, quickly translating less sensitive documentation or for putting subtitles on television programmes or whatever, the automated stuff was fine.
Though, their computers couldn't just magically do that on their own, they needed something to work with. One of the things Beth and the others were supposed to do while they were here was, sort of, train the computers how to translate for Earth languages. Since context could mess things up pretty easily, they were given, like, segments from news programmes, or brief little stories, like episodes of a television series but only a few minutes long — they would translate what was being said, both writing it out and speaking it out loud, bit by bit until they'd finished the whole segment. Beth normally watched through the whole thing once, to make sure she knew what was going on, before going back and constantly having to pause and rewind back and forth to mark out the bit she was translating, over and over again. It was super tedious, but it wasn't really difficult, just something to fill her time while she was bored in 'class'.
This was something their hosts had done before, so they had pre-prepared a list of stuff to translate that they knew would be enough to properly train their computers. They wanted every sample to be done at least twice, independently — the two people who'd translated that sample were then supposed to talk out the differences in their versions, and settle on a final one they both liked. Since this was all on computers anyway, Beth could immediately check how much progress they'd made so far...which was very, very little. She was the only one whose grasp of the language had developed past the basic kiddie stuff, so, she was slowly chewing through the first pass on them on her own, but she actually needed to wait for people to catch up and do the second pass before the percentage of translations they'd finished could start climbing.
Beth was translating into Russian today. After some talking about it, they'd decided that their omniglot cheating meant they'd be able to get through this process way more quickly than expected, so they could go ahead and train their hosts' computers to translate multiple Earth languages. She thought their hosts sort of expected that the new planets they came in contact would already have a single dominant language, but of course that wasn't the case on Earth, which made this whole thing slightly more complicated. They'd settled on a small handful of big international languages that enough of them spoke well enough to not lag behind too much: English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French. (And they might add Arabic, if it turned out they had time for it.) Their instructors had been a bit bemused at Beth's request to set the computers up to train for five languages, but at that point it'd already been becoming clear that they were learning far more quickly than expected, so they'd gone ahead and done it without too much arguing.
Of course, that meant her work seemed to be going much more slowly than it would if they were only doing a single language, because all five were tracked separately, but still.
Beth had been sitting at one of the computers, slowly poking through the little translation jobs and mostly ignoring the lesson going on behind her, for some hours at least — she didn't really know, time had an odd habit of just sliding by when she was occupied with something — when she was interrupted. She could tell Soqhuńe was there, hovering a few steps behind her back, but he waited until she'd closed out the job she was on before saying anything. "Hello, Beth." He didn't quite pronounce her name correctly, that TH sound wasn't in any of the alien languages she'd come across yet, but it was close enough she could tell what he meant. "A few of my colleagues and I would like to discuss something with you over lunch, if you're willing."
"Sure?" She'd gotten back into the habit of skipping lunch — the meal was normally somewhat token here anyway, and when she wasn't doing anything particularly active she often wasn't hungry by then. "Is that now?"
"We can start whenever you're ready."
"All right, just give me a minute to save this..."
By the time she was standing up, the other omniglots had already left to grab a snack or just take a break, only Ḑiguqhȧnna and Ch'uk'aq still in the room, paging through written materials on their handheld computer things. (How awful Beth was at book learning wasn't actually normal for omniglots, the others were doing plenty of reading.) Most of the staff were gone too, but Beth was waved over to the conference room — they'd set up a little lunch in here, with the snacks and stuff that were normal for the little quasi-meal, including a carafé of muqsa, the vaguely tea-like stuff they drank around here. Honestly, she wasn't sure if tea or coffee were the better comparison, the taste wasn't really close to either, but hot caffeinated drink, anyway...not that the stimulant in it was actually caffeine. Whatever. Soqhuńe was in here, along with Quńalhi, Kella, Akśuqha, one of their language instructors, and—
"Oh, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe." Her understanding was that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was some sort of diplomatic officer attached to the fleet that'd 'discovered' Earth — he'd stick around for some Earth-related things, since he was their first point of contact, but he had better things to do than just hang around while they learned the language. He'd arrived here with them, but he'd left the next morning, and Beth hadn't seen him since. "Decided to drop in on us again?"
Because he could be a quite formal sort at times, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had stood up as she entered the room, waltzing over to shake her hand all proper. Beth now knew for certain that handshakes weren't really a thing they did here — they did have gestures similar to bows and curtseys, but not handshakes — but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe wasn't a diplomat for nothing, he'd picked it up pretty quickly at that first meeting in the middle of the desert. "Pót-tari-lizabïʈ, hello again. Though, if I understand correctly, a more appreciate form of address should be Princess Beth, no?"
Beth grimaced, not at the mispronunciation of her name — Chiss tended to get it closer than most people — but that they were doing this again. There'd been a brief thing about that a few days ago here at the university, the staff concerned they might be fucking up with the protocol. Someone had told their hosts what her actual title was, she didn't even know who, it was a fucking pain... "If we're bringing titles and such rubbish into it, let's stick with Corporal Potter, please."
Lips pulling into a toothless smile, he said, "I see your grasp of Minnisiät is coming along wonderfully. And that is what we wished to discuss today — but let's all have a seat first..."
Their lunch was mostly finger food, which was perfectly normal for the light not-proper-meal, bread and crackers and fruit and vegetables with spreads and dipping sauces, which were all familiar by this point, but there were a couple of new things. Some of the spreads and sauces Thisaku's people made did have a sort of creamy texture to them, but they weren't actually made with dairy at all, instead from certain plant sources. (Nuts, mostly, but apparently there was also a kind of fruit?) One of the sauces in the spread laid out on the conference table was definitely made out of cheese — a rather sharp, bitter, intense cheese, but still identifiable as real dairy — and there were little wedges of battered and fried fritter sort of things that were also filled with cheese, the first dairy she'd had since leaving Earth. She didn't like the sauce so much, but the fried cheese was pretty good, actually.
Talking while they got themselves set up, transferring things to plates and slathering sauces over bread and pouring muqsa, Beth finally learned why the food they'd been being served this whole time had no dairy whatsoever: kharson were universally lactose intolerant. (Well, Beth didn't know if it was lactose specifically that was the problem, she had no idea what that'd be called in Minnisiät, she was just told they couldn't have dairy.) It wasn't just the kharson either, the vast majority of humans were as well — and that was actually a big deal because, it turned out, humans just so happened to be the dominant species on the other side of the Rift. (Beth was still waiting on an explanation for how the fuck that happened, but she wanted to wait until the rest of the team were caught up so they could all participate in that talk.) Since it was normal for people to not be able to have dairy, they didn't have a history of keeping the stuff around, so they'd simply never invented cheese in the first place. Kella, whose parents were from beyond the Rift, said that they did have dairy products over there now, but it was a relatively recent development...and most of it was actually made from the milk of various exotic alien animal species which didn't even contain whatever the problem chemical was in the first place.
(She still wasn't certain the problem was actually lactose, or wasn't necessarily always the problem, but it sounded like lactose intolerance, anyway. Close enough to run with, she guessed.)
Lactose tolerance was unheard of among kharson, including the humans in their society, and a tiny fraction of humans beyond the Rift could have dairy, due to rare freak mutations...but the entirety of the Chiss species could. Dairy was actually quite common in Chiss food, and cheese in particular was popular, apparently they had literally hundreds of different varieties — this stuff had been imported from their country, as a surprise from Thisaku for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe during his visit. The fritters were also a Chiss thing. Pan-frying things in oil was perfectly normal for monatšeri, but battering things first and then deep-frying them was introduced by Chiss defectors. You did see it around sometimes these days, mostly as street food, but Thisaku was a proper professional chef, so, too classy for that, Beth guessed. He'd only arranged it today as a special treat for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe.
Honestly, Beth didn't even know how many people in their team could have dairy anyway — she hadn't realised before she'd started being sent all over the world that dairy was a white people thing? Lactose intolerance was normal outside of Europe (and America), with just a few exceptions, like some Arabs and Indians. Brân and Hlynur and Cionaodh probably could have dairy, and Meñaśi (all elves and goblins ate dairy), but besides them...maybe Farrokh or Nāgamaṇi? She didn't know, maybe half of their group could even have dairy anyway, but she hadn't asked. It probably wasn't worth the effort to bother adding dairy stuff to the food, if it were up to Beth she didn't think she'd even tell Thisaku about it. The food's been pretty excellent so far anyway, if a bit weird at times, it's not as though she were really missing it...
The fried cheese was pretty damn good, though, she did steal a fair fraction of it.
They went on talking about food for a few minutes, as everyone got settled and had their first few idle bites. But it wasn't very long before that topic trailed off, and Soqhuńe said, "So, then. There was something we wished to discuss with you, Beth. Have I ever mentioned that this is not the first time that I have directed the education in Minnisiät of a group such as yours?"
"It hasn't come up, but I'm not surprised." They did have the process quite streamlined, the teaching staff very confident in what they were doing. It'd never occurred to her to wonder, but if it had, sure, she might have guessed Soqhuńe had done this before.
"In fact, this is the ninth such project I've been involved with — five as an instructor, and now this is the fourth I've directed."
"Wow, that many? I guess space is big, but I didn't think you'd be coming across so many pre-spaceflight planets in such a short time." How long did one of these projects normally take, anyway?
"Not all of my projects have been with pre-spaceflight peoples. Especially as the Law has expanded rimward—" Inapu-Itarisan, he meant. The name was literally Law of Five, the sense of "law" here the same as in other country names — in conversation it was pretty common to shorten it to just Itarisan, since everybody knew which country you were talking about anyway. "—we have come upon more and more peoples who, yes, may have access to hyperspace travel, but have no knowledge of Minnisiät. Sometimes they may know some other language common enough we may work on an arrangement in the meanwhile, but it is very common for our programme to be necessary with all contacts. There are three others ongoing as we speak."
"Oh, well, okay then." There'd been a few words in there she hadn't quite followed, but, omniglot cheating, she got the general idea. It probably should have occurred to her that they had other groups being taught Minnisiät at the same time for the same reasons they were, but it still came as a little bit of a surprise — Beth knew that space was fucking big, but sometimes the implications of that didn't quite click. "You were saying?"
"Yes." Soqhuńe paused for a second to take a sip of his muqsa, quick glanced around the others at the table with them. "It is typical for these projects to last half a year, perhaps? Between first contact and the signing of a membership agreement might be, oh, seven to nine months is not unusual."
One of the basic things they'd done in their language lessons was learn how they kept time out here — Inapu-Itarisan used a calendar and clock inherited from Colussan, despite Colussan being on the other side of the Rift, Beth wasn't sure why that'd happened. (If she had to guess, Mítth-räw-nuruodo's fleet had already used it, and it was easier to just keep using it than reprogramme all their big complicated computers.) The official time was even synced to that of the central government buildings on Colussan, which seemed weird to her, but whatever. The calender was split into ten months of exactly seven five-day weeks, for thirty-five days total...plus a few holidays stuck in between some (but not all) of the months — some holidays were single days, others were a week-long festival — which didn't count as part of any month, their own thing, very confusing. The holidays mostly weren't observed here, just by the small minority who came from beyond the Rift, but the military had retained the practice inherited from the Law of Colussan of giving personnel bonuses and leave on those days, which had kind of spread to other government institutions...so they were kind of a thing here now? They didn't celebrate the holidays the way people beyond the Rift did, since those were a totally foreign thing, but people tended to get those days off work, it was becoming increasingly common for there to be special events and stuff, just because people would have the free time and extra pocket money.
The official day was actually very similar to the day on Earth — their clock split the day into twenty hours, but add it up and the length of a day was very close to the same, within a few minutes — so a month on the space calendar was pretty close to exactly thirty-five days on Earth. So, seven to nine months would be, um, shite, maths...like, er, eight to ten, ten and a half months on Earth? something like that? Most of a year, was the point.
Maybe it would take half of the aliens' (slightly longer) year for people to pick up the language well enough to even begin to work out a treaty, but Beth would go out on a limb and guess it wasn't going to take nearly that long for them. "Let me guess, we're ahead of schedule."
Soqhuńe's funny chin-tendril things twitched, his head tilting, a gesture Beth read as a smile. "Good guess. I have developed a feeling for these things, from experience, and at the rate you and your fellows are proceeding, I expect you may begin negotiations for full admittance into our Law as early as the New Year."
"That soon?" Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe blurted out, his eyebrows arching up — the others at the table weren't surprised, presumably having already known about Soqhuńe's prediction, but the diplomat must not have been read in yet. "I hadn't... Well, in your message to me, you had said you believe we should accelerate arrangements, but I did not realise they would be ready that quickly."
"Yes, it is quite remarkable. I have never seen anything of the like myself, nor encountered any similar cases in the literature. I assume it must be achieved through magic of some kind."
"It is, but— Wait a second, you said we'll be ready by the New Year? That can't be right, we barely even started on the translation...training thing." Today was the first day of the tenth month, so the New Year was only thirty-four days off. That was more than enough time for the omniglots to learn Minnisiät to fluency — and Beth could probably pick up a couple more in that time, because she was ridiculous even by omniglot standards — but the bank of segments in that translation programme was huge, and they were doing it for five languages, there was no way they'd be finished by then.
While Soqhuńe was distracted by Shar-ÿkl-korlåe leaning over and muttering something to him (in Kisaät), Akśuqha said, "It isn't necessary to finish all of that before the conference. To negotiate with our Law on behalf of your people, you and your fellows need only be able to speak the language well enough to translate, and to have some understanding of the basic shape of our society, so you may better inform your delegates as to how to represent your people's interest. The translation programme may be finished at any time — so long as you will have access to our network on your world. Ambassador?"
Shaking his head, another quick exchange with Soqhuńe, Shar-ÿkl-korlåe straightened again. "I'm sorry, what was that?"
"Will they be linked up to the network by the New Year?"
"They're connected now, though I understand this was only managed by relaying a signal through multiple repeater drones — their isolation presents some difficulty there. The lag is quite bad and the bandwidth is hardly impressive, but I'm told they're working on it." Turning to Beth, Shar-ÿkl-korlåe said, "We are close to having a channel in place which will allow your team to call home, you should be hearing about that in the next week. But never mind that now, you said this is magic? that allows you and the others to learn so quickly?"
"Sure. We're all, er." Beth obviously didn't know how to say omniglot in this language. "Well, the word we use for it in my native language means all-tongue. I don't know if I can explain how it works in Minnisiät? Back home we have, er...special words."
"Jargon?" Akśuqha suggested.
"Right, that's it, thank you. There's magic jargon, it's hard to talk about these things without it. But, in simple words, I guess, we can copy knowledge from people's minds. It's not something we do on purpose, it's simply how our minds work. If you speak to one of us in Minnisiät, and you use a word, we will understand it as you understand it, and so we learn languages very quickly." Once she was done babbling, Beth popped another of the cheese fritters in her mouth, at least in part to force herself to shut up. Being an omniglot was fucking weird sometimes, so she could go on about it forever if she let herself.
While most of the aliens processed that idea, Quńalhi and Kella sharing some kind of sharp, significant look, Soqhuńe asked, "Is this why you asked for more direct instruction time? A computer has no mind to copy from."
Beth nodded, quick swallowed her bite of cheese. "Exactly. We'll learn no faster than normal people that way, we need to be talking to someone who already knows the thing we're learning for the magic to work. I'll learn slower than a normal person, in fact — I learn from people even more quickly than others with this magic, but I'm very bad with book-learning. Honestly, it's bad enough I thought I was just stupid before someone explained it to me."
"So this isn't a magic you're taught, then," Quńalhi said.
"No, you're just born with it. It's pretty rare, like, two per cent of mages? I'm not sure."
Quńalhi's eyes narrowed, her funny lip-tendril things seeming to curl a little. Then she turned to Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe. "I've never heard of magic like this before. There are stories of people being born with special abilities, but this one is new to me."
"Are you a mage?" Beth had gotten a vague feeling Quńalhi might be magical in the past — she suspect that knife she carried everywhere was enchanted as well — but she'd, just, never been quite sure how to ask. She didn't actually know a word for "mage" in Minnisiät, she'd improvised one on the spot, literally just magic-doer.
Because Minnisiät was neat like that, Quńalhi obviously understood her made-up word without needing to ask. "I wouldn't say so, no. The gift runs in my family, but the old arts were all lost in the Revolution." When the old kharson empire was destroyed from within by probably the single largest slave rebellion in the history of the entire bloody galaxy, she meant. "Some have tried to create new arts, but it is...difficult, building from nothing but old stories. There are a handful of small things I can do, but nothing I would call true magic."
...So, they'd managed to pull off a successful slave revolution against a ruling class, which just so happened to include all the mages? Fuck, that was impressive, apparently the monatšeri didn't fuck around. "I can try to teach you some, if you like."
Quńalhi's eyes widened, rearing back in her seat a little. "What? You don't mean that."
"Er..." That had been in Quńalhi's native language, which wasn't the monatšeri dialect she was best with, but she was pretty sure she'd understood that. It was just an...odd reaction. "Sure, why not? It might be a little difficult, since you don't have, um..." Beth couldn't think of what word to use, so she gave up and drew her wand, giving it a little wiggle. "...one of these. Unless that knife of yours works as a, er, lens, I guess." That was the best word for focus that she could think of off the top of her head, got the right idea across, at least.
"I think Quńalhi means to ask," Akśuqha said, "you don't think your masters back home would have a problem with that?"
Beth frowned. "What masters?" The word she'd used was the same for slave masters, but that couldn't possibly be what she meant — everyone at the table was apparently well aware that she was a bloody princess and everything...
But for some inexplicable reason, Akśuqha and Quńalhi looked just as confused as Beth was, even Soquńe and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe seeming a bit taken aback by her tone. After a second, Akśuqha asked, "The masters of your order."
"...Do I look like a monk to you?"
Kella scoffed, breaking the weirdly uncertain mood around the table. "I think I can solve this one for you. Beth, unless I misheard, a moment ago you said this 'all-tongue' thing is found in about two per cent of Jedaj."
"Mages — I still don't know what a Jedaj is."
"That's what they call magic-users in Colussat." Oh! Okay, she guessed that explained that, then — the Republic Beyond the Rift was the largest, oldest, most powerful civilisation in the galaxy, so it made sense that their word for it had seemingly gotten around. "So, you are two per cent of magic-users. And there are nine of you here. How many more do you think there are back home?"
Beth shrugged. "I dunno. Thousands in total, probably." There were a few little gasps, Quńalhi hissing out something Beth was certain was a curse of some kind. Blinking around the table, she muttered, "What...?"
Kella ignored the surprised reactions from the others, asked, "How many people are there living on your world?"
"...A little less than four billion, I think. Why?"
"If this all-tongue thing shows up in two per cent of mages, we'd expect... Oh, powers of ten, easy maths. Eighty, on the entire planet. And that would be a high estimate."
"What? No, that can't be..." Beth ran the maths backwards quick, shook her head. "Are you saying you think mages are one in a million? No, that's ridiculous."
Kella shrugged. "I told you, one in a million is a high estimate. There are worlds settled by tens of billions of people which have no tradition of magic at all."
"...You're fucking with me."
Kella smirked a little, darkly amused. But he didn't say anything, Beth's attention drawn back to Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe when he said her name. Watching her, funny red eyes narrow and sharply attentive, his fingernails tapping at the table. Finally, he asked, his voice low and slow, "What proportion, would you say, mages are on your world?"
"I'm not sure," she admitted. They had had pretty good numbers before the invasion, but the war and the following outbreaks of famines and diseases, not to mention a bunch of governments falling the fuck apart, had made things complicated. She was pretty sure the percentage should be higher now — mages should have had better odds of surviving all that than normal people — but she really had no idea how much of a difference it would have made. "About one in a hundred, maybe a little less?"
There was a brief, stunned silence, before Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe repeated, "One in a hundred. About forty million, in total."
Beth shrugged. "Something like that, sure." The silence stretched on for a little bit, the aliens at the table either glancing at each other or blankly staring at her. After a few seconds, she blurted out, "Oh come on, that can't be that big of a deal, you've got fucking quadrillions of people out here." The galaxy, it turned out, was very big.
Giving her a very funny look, Quńalhi drawled, "Beth, the number of all of those with any aptitude with magic whatsoever — in total, throughout all of monatšeri space — is in the tens of thousands."
"There are only fifty to sixty Jedaj beyond the Rift."
Beth gaped at Kella a second, that— But the Republic Beyond the Rift was fucking enormous! Literally a hundred quadrillion people, that— "You're fucking with me."
"I'm really not," Kella said, with a thin, crooked smile. He seemed rather amused, for some reason, not taking this discussion quite as seriously as everyone else. "Or, there were a few years ago, at any rate — fifty to sixty survived the war against the jusannu over there. We've heard they're focussing on recruiting now, there may be more soon. The old order was destroyed by the Law of Colussan going on fifty years ago now, but even at their peak they numbered maybe ten thousand."
...That was fucking absurd.
Beth had gotten the impression that people around here were familiar with magic but didn't know much about it themselves, but she'd thought just... She'd thought the mages were just somewhere else, for whatever reason, and, maybe their magic was different. Like, they obviously didn't know about transfiguration, or apparation, or...
Turning over what she'd just been told, the little hints she was picking up from their heads — not so much information as, just, instinct — she was suddenly having a very weird thought.
"Order."
"Excuse me?"
"You keep saying order. Like, talking about mages, you keep saying order, and masters earlier, and... You mean order like monks or something, right?"
"Precisely like that, in fact," Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said. "In every society which has such a tradition, it is typical for the source of their power to be thought of as...if not literally divine, at the least some spiritual force. Something beyond physical reality as we know it."
Still staring steadily at Beth with what she read as a thoughtful, considering sort of look, Quńalhi offered, "The kharson long ago believed that mages were the descendents of...a sun goddess, I suppose. Some still do."
He quick nodded over at her, a nonverbal yes, just like that. "Among Chiss, a small number of us, perhaps one in ten to a hundred million, are born with an additional sense of a sort. They are known to be able to feel out the truth, may know of events without witnessing them, will have dreams of the past or the future. It was commonly thought that these people were prophets, of a kind, gifted with wider perception by spiritual entities of a sort — it is difficult to briefly explain more specifically than that. They were once deeply revered in our culture, though such superstitions have declined in popularity in more recent millennia."
"Seers, you mean," Beth said.
"Ah, you have such a gift on your world too?"
"Sure, um, those who see, we call them." She'd said the word in English without thinking, oops. "They can do all of what you said — tell when someone's lying, see the past or the future, sometimes they just know things, even speak to the dead — but it can kind of suck to be one sometimes. I mean, sometimes what they see is...a lot, or unpleasant — a lot of them won't eat meat at all, because they can feel the animal being slaughtered when they do. The more sensitive ones mostly end up living off in a shack in the forest by themselves, or something like that, you know."
And apparently Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe did know, nodding along with her explanation. "Yes, exactly like this. It does seem to be the same phenomenon."
Except Seers were much more common than one in ten to a hundred million...but then, the Sight was heritable — maybe the Chiss hadn't gotten enough of the genes for it, or whatever. "And yours are also mages."
"Not so far as I'm aware, no. Though, according to the stories, when one is especially distressed there may be...outbursts. Some of the effects may be violent, or peculiar, changing things in a way that sometimes evades description. But of this power, they never have any conscious control, very few on record have been capable of any true magic whatsoever."
"Yes, they are mages — we call those 'outbursts' accidental magic, and only mages can do accidental magic." Beth let out a sigh, frowning at her cup of muqsa. She was now very certain her funny idea was correct, she just wasn't sure how to explain it. "Look, okay. You lot had these religious orders of rare people with special magical abilities. We had those too, a long time ago, complete with stories about being children of gods or being chosen by something, whatever. Back then, mages might have been more rare — not one in a million, or whatever, but more like one in ten thousand, sure. But not because they were actually that rare, but just because we were bad at finding them. Magic isn't...
"See, just doing magic, out of nothing, is hard. Like this..." With a flick of her wrist, she cast a quick basic fire spell, a ball of flickering orange-red flames hovering over her palm. There were a couple twitches and gasps at the fire appearing out of nowhere — their hosts still weren't used to them just whipping out magic without warning. "This is difficult to do. I'm more powerful than average, and I've gotten a lot of practice with fire spells, so I can do it, but most people can't. Maybe something like one in ten mages have the raw power for it, but it's not something most people practise — walk up to a mage and ask them to do this," bobbing the fire in her hand a little, "and almost nobody will be able to. Maybe one in a thousand, or less, it's not easy.
"But on the other hand..." Beth dismissed the fire with a wave of her hand — then she drew her wand, and cast another identical fire spell, merrily crackling hovering over the tip of her wand. "This," pointing up at the flames with her free hand, "is easy. Those forty million mages, more or less? All of them can do this. Because we learned how to make these." She let the fire lapse, held her wand out over the table where they could all see it better. "Like I was saying to Quńalhi earlier, magic is easier if you have the right tools for it. I called it a lens, before, because that's kind of what they are — it takes the magic coming out of you, and focusses it, so it will go to what you want it do properly. I can only do a handful of things on my own, but with this I can do hundreds and hundreds of different magics."
"You are suggesting," Quńalhi said, voice low and slow, "that you believe mages must be far more common among our peoples as well. But most go undiscovered, because their power is insufficient to perform obvious magic without one of these lenses of yours."
"That's exactly what I think is happening here, yeah. Sure, maybe magic might be a little bit more common back home than other places, for whatever reason, things happen sometimes, but it shouldn't be that much. I don't think we're that special." Sheathing her wand again, Beth said, "There didn't used to be very many people who could actually do magic, but in time they better learned how, made tools like mine. And then they figured out that a lot of other people could use those tools just fine, that magic was a lot more common than we thought. The tools were still expensive, and most people were, you know, farmers and stuff, who didn't have the time or opportunity to study magic. But that changed too, over time.
"You kept saying order, like you expect mages are monks or something, but back home mages are just normal people. I didn't have masters — I had teachers. When I was eleven, I started at a school that taught magic, in a classroom, with classmates my age, teaching a standardised course. At the end of school, there are exams, to prove how good you are at different kinds of magic, so you can get a job."
"You have formal certifications in magic?" Akśuqha asked, sounding very bemused.
"Well, no, I don't, honestly — I dropped out and joined the army when the scabs attacked, and I never went back to finish. I never had any reason to because, you know, princess, not like I need a job. But my best friend has a university degree, in magic. I'm telling you, this stuff is just normal where I come from, it's not about orders or whatever."
With a little curl of a smile, an attentive gleam in his alien red eyes, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe asked, "So, if the study of magic is considered an academic field like any other on your world, do you expect this is knowledge your people may be willing to share with outsiders?"
Beth shrugged. "Sure, I don't see why not. You might want to recommend your diplomatic types bring up the idea of founding an international school or something as part of the deal. These lens things are made with special materials, so, at least for now anything like that would have to be back home."
"Yes, I will certainly do that." Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe seemed very enthusiastic about it, grinning, a sudden energy about him. But then, Beth had just dangled the prospect of Inapu-Itarisan gaining easy access to magic in front of his face, so...
"This is how your world survived invasion by the jusannu, isn't it," Kella said — it wasn't really a question. "You fought them with magic."
"Magic helped, sure."
"Given how much Jedaj got around in the war across the Rift, I'd imagine so."
"From what I've heard, the Tśetai—" Quńalhi said the foreign word differently, Beth guessed that was how the monatšeri said it. "—were less useful than you might think. The jusannu are said to be immune to many of their arts."
Her voice in a low drawl, Beth said, "They have some serious magical resistance, sure, but throw enough fire at something and it'll burn eventually."
Quńalhi's lip-tendril things twitched. "I don't think the Tśetai can make fire at all."
"Seriously? Starting a fire is basic magic — I learned that in my first year of school."
"I'm telling you, Beth, calling fire is not a power Tśetai are known to have, in any story I've heard. It's said some of the ancient mages of my people were capable of magic such as that, but not Tśetai. Your magic is very different from anything we've ever heard of before — that is why we are having this conversation in the first place."
...Good point. "Well, I don't know what to tell you, but it seems to me that all you lot out here just suck at magic." Which she guessed did make sense if everyone was treating magic like a solely religious thing, and didn't even have anything like wands at all. Modern magic was developed over millennia of experimentation and people sharing ideas and shite, places that got too stuffy with doctrine and whatever quickly fell behind, and got their arses kicked by the first other mages they had to deal with. And, hey, if they didn't have wands or anything like that, she guessed it made sense that they thought mages were far more rare than they really were — wandless magic was hard, and even accidental magic was more rare than her own childhood had made her think, they could easily just be missing the vast majority of mages. Or, like, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's people thought magic was just the Sight, so, if a mage wasn't powerful enough to just make random shite happen, and wasn't a Seer, they might not even notice them at all...and, if these religious orders had rules about having families and shite, like Christian monks, well, magic was heritable, they might be fucking themselves there and not even realise it...
And Kella had said that the Law of Colussan had fucking slaughtered all the Jedaj just a generation ago — if something like that happened every once in a while, well. Put everything together, and maybe it wasn't a huge surprise that these people were actually kind of shite at magic.
"It really is just— Hey, I have an idea, one second." Beth stood up, plucking one of the remaining cheese fritters off of the plate, and walked back into the other room. Good, she was still here, sitting in one of the chairs with her handheld computer. "Hey, Ḑiguqhȧnna, you've been trained to duel, right?"
The lilin woman blinked up at her, her confusion lurching through Beth's chest. "Of course." Beth had assumed as much, she did carry a sword — she'd never actually asked, but she thought Ḑiguqhȧnna was one of those special soldiers the veela/lilin had, the ones Beth had first encountered over Paris and only sporadically since.
"Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and company are asking me about magic — turns out aliens are shite at it, and have never even heard of foci before. Want to put on a show with me?"
A little bubbling in Beth's stomach, pleasant prickles crawling over her skin — excitement, she thought, amusement...maybe a slight hint of lust — Ḑiguqhȧnna smiled up at her. "I'd love to. I can go find Brân quick — he should be able to put up some solid wards, for the spectators."
"Good thinking. Meet us out in the courtyard down there?"
And so Beth and Ḑiguqhȧnna put on a little exhibition for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, their instructors, and dozens and dozens of random bystanders who just happened to be going by. Brân did quick set up some very impressive duelling wards, even catching some pretty serious dark- and light-tinted curses, and covering rather more space than Beth had expected — obviously Ḑiguqhȧnna could firewalk, he'd probably guessed she'd want to be able to move around a bit, Beth matching her with apparation, the two of them teleporting throughout the warded-off space, tossing off spell after spell.
It wasn't a real fight, just showing off magic for the aliens — neither of them were trying to win, the exchanges of spells a bit slower than Beth would normally do, and with more big flashy elemental magics and shite. Though, even just playing around, she did manage to catch Ḑiguqhȧnna by surprise a couple times. Spell deflection was difficult, and not something most people bothered learning, but she and Sirius played around with it in practice duels just for fun...and even most people who could deflect curses could only do it with neutral spells. Ḑiguqhȧnna's mouth actually dropped open when Beth slapped aside a seriously dark one. The first time Beth cast a fire spell, Ḑiguqhȧnna made a joke about fighting fire with fire — lilin had absurd skill with and resistance to fire magics, of course — but then was surprised by Beth actually being able to keep up — Beth was also sort of absurdly skilled with fire magic, so — the space under the wards half filling up with flames again and again, red and yellow and blue and lilin black and purple.
Though, she'd seemed dumbfounded by the deflection, but more than anything seemed thrilled that Beth was so good with fire magic, grinning, as the fight went on laughing out loud. But Beth could hardly judge, she was having fun too.
Their audience had started just with the five Beth had had lunch with and a few of the other omniglots, but they quickly started drawing a sizeable crowd. She'd sort of expected that would happen — she knew, now, that nobody here would have even heard of magic like this. So long as they stayed safe on the other side of the wards, that was fine, Beth just ignored all the aliens watching.
(She hadn't counted on someone recording it, and putting the video up on their network thing, where literally all of Inapu-Itarisan could see it. Oops.)
They played around for a while, Beth wasn't really keeping track, maybe as long as half an hour before calling it quits. By that point, her wand arm was a little shaky and tingly — battlemagic was pretty power-intensive, even just playing — her hair and her clothes plastered to her skin with sweat, from the heat of the fires. Ḑiguqhȧnna seemed kind of giddy and giggly, the lilin magic pushing the feeling out at everyone around, all smiles, a few people acting slightly silly, but that wasn't exactly a bad thing.
There was a brief talk afterward — Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe seemed very intense, probably enthusiastic about Inapu-Itarisan getting their hands on magic that was actually worth a damn. If showing off a little bit — and telling them about all the other things magic could do, of course, but Beth would leave those talks up to people who weren't useless with literally everything except blowing shite up — made their new alien friends more willing to give Earth a better deal just to get them on their side, well, then Beth would argue this little play duel had been more than worth it. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe would probably be bringing this shite straight to his superiors, so.
Kella point out that the sudden appearance of forty million mages was going to drastically alter the balance of power in the galaxy. Trying to hide a grimace, Beth explained that combat skill like this was rare, it took years of training most people didn't have — but, yes, she did realise that. Though, she guessed magic probably wasn't very useful in space battles between big damn spaceships or whatever the fuck, so, maybe it wouldn't be that big of a difference?
...At least, not until the Hermione types figured out how to make enchanted spaceships.
Beth really hoped that Inapu-Itarisan kept seeming like the good guys, because she was having a sneaking feeling that Earth being introduced to galactic society was going to have consequences. But it was both too late and too early to do anything about that — she really couldn't guess what those consequences would be, and they were already dealing with Inapu-Itarisan now, so. Really nothing Beth could do but do her job, and watch to see how things turned out.
Besides, it really did feel like these were the good guys — it was hard to imagine evil bastards zealously hating slavery as much as the people here did.
Beth did her best not to worry about that just now, though. She and Ḑiguqhȧnna were both a bit sweaty and gross, so they popped back to their rooms to clean up — they didn't come back out until dinner. Apparently the play fight had gotten Ḑiguqhȧnna a bit worked up — as good as spending the same amount of time dancing all close and sexy, Beth guessed — and that lilin soul-vampirism stuff really wiped Beth out sometimes.
(Of course, when she was knocked the fuck out she couldn't worry about the inevitable consequences of Earth magic getting out into the galaxy, so, she'd take it.)
As a reminder, there's been a Discord server for going on a year now. There's a link on my profile to my AO3 profile, where you can find an invite link.
Anyway, I'll be doing two more chapters for this before jumping back to TGW. See you next time.