Chương 72: 048 – Must Be Nice

"Is that actually fit for human consumption?" Drasner asked with the sort of professional busybody-ness all healers picked up at some point. It did little to mask his morbid fascination.

"From the smell, it's nearly pure ethanol, or as pure as you can get from distillation," Tree Season said. The old monster had gone still when he'd seen the human drinking in the dark room, and while he'd sounded as he always did—casual with a tinge of complaining about young buds, but they where his young buds so he had the right to complain—the way he had compressed into a round shape indicated he was actively getting essence ready to form some kind of reinforcement lattice or emission framework.

Despite that, there was a touch of morbid fascination to him as well. People had started trickling into the dark room one by one, and each had stopped at the door when they'd realized one of the kyuees was inside, before finally crossing the threshold. They hadn't demanded she leave. Normally they didn't have to.

Between the gloom, the fact that the room's circuit breaker had been opened to keep the light switch near the door from working, and the subtle but pointed clue of how everyone in the room wasn't human, there was usually no need for the kind of active discouragement that led to officers getting involved in an official capacity.

Unofficially, officers didn't really care how people used the unoccupied rooms as long as they were kept clean, nothing that happened in them led to official paperwork, and no one caused any trouble. So people had… well, not acted like everything was normal. Oh, they'd sat down and started laying out snacks and once Phingrui arrived he'd started horotracting the room to more comfortable dimensions, which had caused Ash to look up with some amount of interest, but no one was relaxing.

No one was bringing up nonsense topics, complaining about their day, sharing any gossip, or making the occasional joke about humans. Instead, they watched Ash as she drank from what was starting to seem less and less like something a human should actually put in their bodies.

"So," Phingrui said brightly, mouth wide and teeth showing in what might have been a smile and what might have been a threat display, "what brings you here, Lieutenant Ash?" Ash didn't say anything, simply pouring more from the brown bottle into her glass then throwing her head back to swallow it all down. She sighed.

"What's like for you in your worlds?" Before anyone could reply, she continued.

"Must be nice, just being able to do magic any time you want, not having to worry about what anyone will think because everyone knows.

No having to pretend something you've been learning your whole life just doesn't exist, having the only job you can do that even comes close to letting you use it be 'quantum engineer' and either being on the ass-end of ships where everyone looks at you like you're a lazy bum and having chief engineers drop all the scutwork on you just because they can and getting no respect, or working in a factory to put together FTL engines…" She punctuated her tirade aggressively downing another drink.

"Course, we have to hide, right? Because the human race are greedy, violent, racist idiots, so of course we shouldn't provoke them instead of burning them to death so they'll stop screwing with us!" There was a crack, and a triangular shard of the drinking glass broke off from the lip of the glass at how hard Ash slammed it down onto the table, while cracks erupted along one side of the glass surface.

Without breaking stride, the human picked up the shard, her fingertips erupting with fire as she pressed it back into place. The fire spread across the rest of the glass as everyone instinctively darted back, even as Ash used a fingertip to dab at a spot on the table, picking up a smaller shard that had chipped off. When the fire snuffed out—without the ship's fire alarms going off—the glass was whole again. Ash barely gave it a cursory glance before she poured more alcohol into it and drank again.

Falling Stillness leaned forward despite herself, intent and interested. While they knew the kyuees had magic, and that their magic had applications that allowed it to be turned towards faster than light travel, what exactly that magic was and how it worked was hearsay and speculation at best. The most they got to see them doing anything was placing their hands on the 'quantum machinery' and concentrating, and everyone did something like that!

"Was that your magic?" she asked eagerly.

"Yes," Ash said, glaring at the drink in her hand.

"Fear its great and awesome power that's completely useless for anything because we don't use it where the stupid normies can see."

"Now that you've brought it up, why is that?" Otro asked from where he and the other tiwada had jumped behind Jrevno at the sight of fire.

"Why don't you show the normies you can do magic, if you think we shouldn't be hiding?" Ash shot back.

"We all know what the normies would do to us if they found out we existed. Either they'd try to kill us, regulate us, legislate us, nationalize us, experiment on us, enslave us, or we'd have to kill most of them to get them to stop." She punctuated her words with another drink. Now that the smell of it had been spreading, Falling Stillness could make out more scents…

"Is that methanol?" she said incredulously as she finally placed the smell underlying the ethanol in the air. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Yes," Ash said flatly.

"I like my drinks sweet."

"I'm almost certain that's bad for you humans," Drasner said, but he didn't get up from his chair, simply continued to slowly chew on some dog jerky.

"For normies, maybe," Ash said dismissively.

"Fucking normies. Even when they don't know we exist they make our lives hard…"

"Ah…" Phingrui said, his voiced filled with certainty.

"This is about the Kaedekin, isn't it?" Ash resolutely filled her glass, letting it fill and stopping just short of the lip. Given how much she'd already consumed, Falling Stillness would have expected the human to be completely intoxicated at this point, not to mention poisoned. Yet despite how agitated she was, her physical coordination seemed unaffected, and her arm didn't shake or wobble as it held the bottle. Instead of drinking vehemently, the human just stared at her cup.

"Must be nice," she said eventually, her voice bitter, "never having to hide. A whole civilization of humans who don't have to hide their magic… I suppose that's what happens where they don't have any normies to worry about."

"… Is that why you're here?" Tree Season said pointedly.

"Is this your idea of 'not hiding'?" The human didn't answer, simply raising her glass to her lips with a defiant air. Finally, she said, "We have our own room, you know. The other two went to drink there, and I'm pretty sure the others are trying to pump them for information. I didn't want to just curl up in some hole and pretend I didn't exist."

"So you came to visit another hole?" Jrevno said, the rakido stirring his unsweetened lemon juice before taking a sip and eyeing Ash's bottle.

"And is it really safe for you to drink that?" Ash waved a hand dismissively.

"It's fine. Wizards don't get poisoned. I could drink bleach if I wanted to. It would taste horrible, but it wouldn't kill me."

"That's… sodium hypochlorite, right?" Nhanhaja said hesitantly. The pajhadin Nectroturgist's tentacles—resting on the bunk that had been contracted into a bench for her—were twitching slightly, clearly disturbed by the notion.

"Yes."" How?" The human finally looked up from her glass.

"Magic," she said blandly.

"Yes, obviously, but how?" Nhanhaja pressed.

"Do you heal through it? Prevent it from chemically reacting to the body before expelling it? Identify it as foreign before destroying it?" One of Ash's eyebrows rose.

"Are all those something you can do?"

"Well, not the last one," Drasner said.

"But I remember there was something like it in a study conducted on Symbols. Their magic identifies foreign matter in their bodies and concentrates energy at it until it's atomized by their magic."

"Oh, that's why…" Ash said, shaking her head.

"We don't really have those. Symbols, I mean." That got everyone's attention, and they all stopped pretending to relax.

"What?" Drasner asked, confused.

"Why not?" It was a confusion everyone shared. To date, all intelligent species had Symbols in their population… although now that Falling Stillness considered it, the Kaedekin might actually be an exception. Their method of cloning seemed to make a single form of magic actively dominant among their culture. Ash shrugged.

"Oh, we have stories about them, and maybe they're out there. It's just we don't really care to look for them, and see no point trying. From the stories, either they're uncontrollable and irrational, or they'll draw the kind of attention that will get the normies to try and kill them. Either way, we don't want them near us."

"… your old artificial gravity systems were clearly based on Symbols of Despair," Falling Stillness pointed out.

"I wouldn't know about that." Another shrug.

"Brennemann Gesellschaft developed those centuries ago, so maybe they studied a Symbol to do it. The stories made the sad ones sound like nightmares to deal with." … This woman had clearly never met a Symbol of Despair, if she called them 'the sad ones' so lightly. But then, she'd just admitted humans essentially ignored Symbols even more than the wizards who they already pretended didn't exist.

"So, which one is it?" Drasner said, filling up the awkward pause.

"How does your body deal with poison that you feel safe drinking what looks like three liters of something that should be rendering you blind?" Ash was clearly wondering how she should answer, and Falling Stillness was almost sure the human was going to evade the question. Then they glanced around the room, and seemed to see it for the first time, before looking down at their glass. A small breath, almost too small to be called a sigh puffed out from their lips.

"Our body isn't really capable of dealing with poison, any more than a normie's is," she said.

"It's our magic that deals with it. Anything that infects our bodies, whether it's poison or disease, gets burned away immediately as a function of our magic sustaining us."

"What do you mean, 'anything'?" Drasner said, leaning forward.

"I mean anything," Ash said.

"Mercury, asbestos, venom, nerve toxin, flesh-eating bacteria, viruses, even radiation… all of it is basically devoured by our magic, leaving our bodies completely unaffected." She raised the glass in her hand and swirled the liquid inside it slightly.

"No amount of methanol is going to make me blind."

"…wouldn't that mean you can't get drunk?" Phingrui pointed out.

"There's such a thing as atmosphere," Ash said, emptying her glass yet again and reaching down to her bottle for another refill.

"A wizard learns to get drunk on the placebo effect very quickly."

"…All right, that just became the saddest thing about you kyuees I've ever heard," Jrevno said. Ash grimaced at the term, her displeasure evident even if she directed the expression at her glance.

"There are worst things," she said.

"Ah, my apologies," the rakido said.

"It's just up to now we've only known you all as 'quantum engineers'. What name do you have for yourselves?" For a moment, Ash was quiet.

"We've had a lot of names over the years," she said slowly.

"Before all that quantum bullshit, we called ourselves Pyrotheurgists. Still do, among ourselves. The old monsters don't like that name. They think it's too 'modern'. Before that, we were called Flames." Falling Stillness committed the name to memory. After all these years, if was good to finally put a name to the humans' wizards.