Not wearing our uniforms was reasonably effective at muting attention – though walking around with four seriously fit guys isn’t exactly the best way to keep a low profile. Some of the gawking was down to me, some to Setari recognition, but much was down to ogling. Most of the Nuran kids, at least, had no idea who any of us were, and the Tarens and Kolarens simply stared or waved. Sen went into puppy mode, bouncing about, scampering off the path and bringing things back to show me or Kaoren. I ended up weaving all the flowers she kept bringing back into a little coronet for her, which she has yet to take off, crushed and wilted as it’s become. Ys and Rye continued to act seriously worried about something, paying a good deal more attention to Kaoren explaining to the other captains his theories on enhancement than on the beautiful day around them. I didn’t notice when they separated Maze out from our group – it was a quick sharp glance from Sen which tipped me off.
Sen is very much a sweet and joyful girl, but that doesn’t stop her Little Miss Machiavelli moments. Rather than go and find out why Ys and Rye had dropped behind, she held up her arms demandingly and when I picked her up kept taking peeks over my shoulder. I exchanged glances with Kaoren, then decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed. Ys and Rye’s conversation with Maze took a good hunk of our walk, while I tried to decide whether it was a good thing they’d decided to talk to someone, or a bad thing that they didn’t feel they could talk to me or Kaoren. It says something about how innately and obviously nice Maze is, that the brief conversation he’d had with them the other day had impressed them enough that they were willing to open up to him.
They looked inordinately relieved when they finally decided to catch up with us, took a few sidewise glances at me, then finally started paying attention to their surroundings. Sen wriggled to the ground and went and tucked herself between them, and I gave Maze a really need an explanation look. He opened a channel with Kaoren and I and asked: "Have you looked at the news feeds this morning?"
I hadn’t, but immediately looked, and could hardly miss the feature article titled: "Killing Caszandra Devlin". It was actually a pretty good article, discussing KOTIS' dilemma in trying to use me to find solutions to problems both major and minor. Because my talent set and connection to the Ena is so little understood even now, and yet so useful, they’re torn between poking Devlin at it and the repeated close calls I’ve had. The reporter had pieced together a pretty accurate summation of the injuries I’ve received since being rescued, which was impressive in a single list, and discussed the morality of almost inevitably getting me killed for the greater good.
"When did Ys and Rye get access to the main news services?" I asked, embarrassed not to have known. "That seems a little complex for the filtered, age-appropriate information the technicians described."
"It would fall in the challenging content area for children in their early thirties," Maze said, shrugging. "It’s the language differences which were causing most of the problem here – using a reader for a complex article in a different dialect. They wanted to know if the article meant that the leaders here were planning to kill you, and if you knew and had any chance of getting away." He gave me a wry smile. "They seem to have not wanted to ask you directly, since being marked for sacrifice would obviously be an upsetting thing for you to talk about."
"They don’t yet talk to Cassandra because they fear that as soon as they accept being a part of our family, we will reject them," Kaoren said, frowning as he studied the kids' backs. "They’ve been taught that they have no value, and won’t allow themselves to trust anyone treating them as important. But it’s a good sign that they’re becoming protective of you," he added to me. "For all we can do little to deny the dangers. I’ve found the steps we need to follow to ensure their care if we’re both lost."
Maze, though he looked sad at the blunt pragmatism of preparing for the possibility of us dying, only said: "I suspect that you might find more than a few among First and Second who have taken an interest in their future."
I just wanted to hug them all, but settled for catching up to them to point out the tower I’d lived in – well off to the north – and agreed to take them there after lunch (a trip made much easier by having a Setari escort who could fly us there). We headed down the stairs to Moon Piazza, where many of the buildings in the bracketing half-circle have been completed, and the residential areas just beyond are far less raw and un-lived-in, more like a place which might be a living town. The interiors of the museum and the art gallery were coming together, and some of the fancier shops. The area beyond the Piazza particularly surprised me, since it had just been paths and residences when I’d last been here, and now there were several new buildings in places which had been reserved for non-residential structures.
The biggest change was a school just past Moon Piazza’s outer circle – they grew an entire huge school in a week. Maze says there’s actually four of them, spaced out among the sprawling residential sector (and that’s still two thousand students per school – the closest one was for the oldest students). It’s something of an open-air school because they haven’t fitted the windows yet, and it follows the circle theme of most of the new structures in Pandora by being a full crescent shape, with rising smaller tiers going up five levels – once again merging with the slope of a hill. The circular school yard and the open part of the crescent face south so it will get a lot of sunlight during the day. Opposite the building is a much lower structure in the same shape – a huge two-tiered crescent around a lot of what will be flat, grassy areas once they finish removing boulders and bushes. This seems to have been designed as a youth recreation centre, with sections marked out as courts for different games, a small amphitheatre, lots of whitestone benches and tables, and – the entire reason for our trip – Pandora’s first store and café.
The store part was larger than the café part, and still mostly unstocked – just whitestone shelving everywhere. The café had opened two days ago (with plenty of teething problems, but a lot of good-humoured support), and I liked it straight up because it was playing actual music – from speakers instead of over the interface. It just makes all the difference. Whitestone everything does lend a certain sameness to the décor, helped along a little by a gorgeous desert scape filling one long wall in the interface, and some decorations hooked on the wall above the servery hatch. There were also a seemingly random bunch of painted handprints on the other wall, but before I could get a good look at them the fifteen-ish boy (impressive in an ankle-length black apron) who was seating people saw Raiten.
He whooped, reminding me of when I visited Isten Notra’s house, then reeled off welcometoMuina’sfirstcaféandpickanytableyoulike in a single stream of noise before turning and running into the kitchen. This was soon followed by a rather large crash. We all had to laugh a little at that, except Ys and Rye, who looked highly suspicious.
There were only a couple of tables which could seat a group our size, and we slid around one, ignoring the handful of other restaurant patrons, who were almost all openly staring. The tables were covered with the thin plastic tablecloths which were the next generation along from flat screen computer monitors – Kolar’s current level of technology. Each table cover was running a fancy patterned screensaver, but when we touched it, it shifted to a "Welcome to Café Crescent" message and then showed us menu selections.