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When they landed on this plane on the first day of the new cycle, they were not greeted with arrows or lasers or magic attacks. They were not met with suspicion or hostility, nor were they met with any real level of hospitality. They docked, set out to explore, and were greeted by a species that was thankfully familiar.
Elves.
It was hit or miss with these things, really. Some planes they visited had elves, some had humans, and some had dwarves. Some had none at all. Some had all three, or more, and those planes were familiar in a way that ached deep in everyone’s chest and made it a little hard to sleep at night.
This particular plane was elves, two of which greeted them in the rolling fields of the countryside outside a towering, glistening city and lead them into town. The two were stoic and serious, fairly silent and choosing to communicate more with pointed looks than with language. They didn’t move their ears at all, which Lup thought was fairly curious, but she was tactful enough not to mention it. She knew how to read the room.
Once in the city they’d quickly realized that elves were the only species inhabiting this plane outside of simple fauna. They walked tall with their heads held high and the most intricate and ornate clothes the seven birds had ever seen. If you asked Davenport, he would tell you he found the whole thing fairly ridiculous, and he wasn’t pleased with being three feet tall in a world of willow tree giants. If you asked Lucretia, she would tell you that she found it all very lovely, if a bit impractical. If you asked the Twins, well, they wouldn’t be able to answer you. They were absolutely enamored with it all.
The clothes. The architecture. The beautifully designed brickwork of the roads. If they had been counting, they would have been able to spot seventeen different style of braids four blocks. The shops sparkled and taunted, the people walked with an air to their step and a clack of heels against the smoothed down cobblestone, and the food….
The food smelled heavenly.
Taako and Lup decided rather quickly that they loved this place, that it was going to be a good year, and that they’d better locate the light of creation rather quickly so they could spend the year immersing themselves in this world rather than floating about peering through binoculars and charting quadrants.
If you asked Davenport, he’d agree that finding the light promptly would be optimal, if only because he didn’t feel like spending the entire cycle wrangling pouting elves back onto the Starblaster for the sake of science and a better prognosis for this world.
Who could blame them, though, in a world full of elves? And fancy ones at that? Much of what the Twins knew about elf culture they learned from their uncle’s book, though they were intelligent enough to realize that “7 Habits of Highly Effective Elves” wasn’t choice elven literature. But even before they’d been homeless, they’d been dirt poor. Their first two decades with family had been spent on farms and orchards where hard work overruled philosophy and reflection, and the eighty years that followed had been spent on their own, with no one to teach them but themselves. Far into the future, once Taako has forgotten Lup and the life he led on the two sunned planet, he’ll blame his inability to meditate properly on his lackluster upbringing. He’ll realize several years later, after the end of the world, that elves from his world were biologically designed to sleep.
But for now, in the present, the Twins realized several things very quickly. They realized that the elvish spoken on this planet was far different than that spoken at home-- to draw proper comparisons, one might think of two sunned elvish as American english, and this world’s elvish as english spoken by the Anglo-Saxons in 1109AD. They realized that these elves didn’t believe in things like body language, facial expressions, or flicks of the ears. They realized very quickly that they were in far over their heads, and they would realize later that these elves were total assholes.
The elf in charge, a governor of some sort named Evelandra, stood proudly at the front of the room and beckoned them to enter. Once they’d reached the front of the room, moving in a bit of a disorganized cluster that felt far more out of place in this pure marble palace than any other plane before it, she motioned for them to halt and stepped down from her platform to regard them properly.
Evelandra looked utterly unimpressed, but was as polite as they guessed someone on this world was capable of being. She promised Davenport the chance to speak with the nation’s scholars and artists and other such leaders. She touched Magnus’s ear with one finger, making the young man yelp and flinch away in surprise, and asked what purpose they could possibly serve being shaped the way that they are. If Barry reached up reflexively to cover his ear, the bridge of his nose tingeing red as he did so, nobody commented on it. They were too busy watching the elf interact with the twins, watching her look them over in a way that felt nearly predatory, like she intended to snatch them up and steal them away.
Although nobody could tell and he would never confess to it, Merle had fought off the urge in that moment to summon Magnus-like strength, scoop the two of them up, and spirit them out there. She spoke to them in words that none of them understood, in words that Taako, Lup, and Magnus (Mr. I-Minored-In-Elvish-For-Fun himself) barely understood. The twins blinked up at her owlishly, and her mouth pulled ever-so-slightly into a frown.
“Oh stars,” Evelandra spoke to the two of them, and the twins ears immediately flattened in suspicion, which only made Evelandra’s frown grow. “You mean to tell me you’ve brought elflings on this mission of yours?”
“You mean elf-larvae?” Magnus asked and caught three different elbows to the ribs.
Evelandra ignored him. Taako asked, “Um, what?” and was caught by surprise by Evelandra stooping down to press a thumb under his front teeth and peer into his mouth. He squawked and stumbled backwards, and anyone paying attention would notice the way Lup shifted her stance slightly, just enough that she was standing between the two of them. Evelandra was unbothered. She took Lup’s jaw in her hand and inspected her ears and her eyes, despite Lup glaring at her and Taako inching forward to wrap a protective hand around the back of his sister’s robe, as if he was getting ready to grab her and run at the slightest further provocation.
Evelandra let Lup go with a relieved sigh and said, “Not children, then.” The twins squinted but nodded. Taako pulled a bit more insistently, and Lup took a step back to bump into him. “But not past your second century, surely.”
Taako and Lup didn’t expend much energy thinking about their age. The laws around legality on the two-sunned planet had been very lax, with most systems failing to recognize the elven timelines of maturity beyond a subtle nod to the idea, and since Taako and Lup had been on their own since half-way through their second decade they’d abandoned the idea of reaching adulthood at the turn of a century at a very young age. They’d been full grown by fifty, growing into gangly limbs and losing their giant doe eyes. Their ears sharpened, and the magic they’d managed to learn became more controlled, more refined. As far as they were concerned, that was all that mattered. Playing at adulthood had been the closest they’d ever managed to get.
They’d joined the academy at one hundred nine, and they were nearing their twelfth decade when the Starblaster had taken flight. They hadn’t been children for a long, long time, but even by traditional elven standards they were old enough to be out adventuring by themselves, old enough to be seen as adults.
Magnus had made them all sit down and work the math out one night, driven by both boredom and curiosity, and they’d decided after quite a bit of arguing and calculating that if the elves were to place their age on a human timeline, they would be about twenty-five.
So rough childhood or otherwise, the twins were far from being considered children. They told Evelandra as much, and answered the questions that followed. She asked them to try and speak elvish, and when they obliged she questioned why they hadn’t adopted an adult dialect. Magnus was happy to learn that the elvish he’d learned in school was indeed proper elvish, despite how much the twins had argued with him on the matter. She asked why they hadn’t been trained away from body language, why they so openly displayed emotions on their faces and their ears, and they didn’t have an answer for her. Try as they might, they couldn’t remember whether ear wiggling had been a common occurrence in their adult relatives all those years ago. She asked about their schooling, about culture from their own planet, about their “meditative focus.” She was less than impressed with Taako’s philosophical input.
She said, “My word, I would bet you haven’t even attended a proper orgy,” and both Magnus and Merle immediately choked on their own spit. Lucretia, who had been scribbling a transcript of the entire occurrence, stuttered briefly in her writing before giving a tiny shake of the head and continuing on. Barry turned a spectacular shade of red. Davenport decided it was high time they head back to the Starblaster.
“Excuse me, a proper what now?” Lup asked, while Taako leered over her shoulder with an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm.
Evelandra began to describe such an event, in great detail, and Lucretia once again tripped in her scribing. At risk of offending their new planet mates, but not willing to endure another minute of the situation at hand, Davenport made quick work of dismissing them and ushering his team back out the doors of the main hall with barely concealed urgency.
“Oh we have got to come back for one of those parties,” Taako said, failing to read the room and Davenport marched ahead, grumbling and rubbing his temples.
Lup winced, not particularly loving the idea, while Magnus and Merle answered in unison. “Agreed.”
Then, moving as one, Magnus and Taako both turned to Merle with matching grimaces.
“Maybe not, actually,” Magnus corrected, and Taako was quick to agree.
“Yeah,” he said. “Taako’s good out here.”