does not anymore work

[campanas]

Here, in a place where she is quite an unexpected sight, is:

an eight year old girl with brown-flecked white wings, looking dismayed and lost.

with Prime (Aestrix)

with Edie and Emily (Maggie)

with Gloria (Maggie)

with Gren (Rockeye)

Comments

[whatamithinking]

That is not exactly a helpful answer to most of these people. Edie can send a basic summary while explaining some of the details aloud so that Pen understands what she's communicating to her friends.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Her friends will be fairly impressed.
Jean noticed the conspicuous flatness to Pen's mind that her wished mental defenses are producing, and comments on this; this brings up the topic of her safeties.
Various people start discussing whether she would be impervious to Scott's eyebeams. The general consensus seems to be, "quite possibly, but we should never ever in a million years test it."

[campanas]

"Eye beams?" asks Pen quizzically.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Scott taps the visor he's wearing. "If I don't have this on, my eyes shoot uncontrollable plasma beams that punch through most materials."

[campanas]

"Oh. Dunno, but am nuke proof."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

There is staring.
"...Did you test that?" someone asks incredulously.

[campanas]

"No? But Shell Bell got nuke one time and then everybody make better wards and have better kind."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Wow."
"Poor Shell Bell."
"Who is Shell Bell, and why were they getting nuked?"

[campanas]

"Shell Bell a one Mommy, from Atlantis, and somebody mad about her taking over the world. And then her girlfriend bring her back but also Downside keep her so there two for a while and this before the Mommies fixing Downside so that one very unhappy but then they magic back together after she find her way Milliways."

[whatamithinking]

Edie sends any context for that that she has that didn't get covered by the summary.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Everyone is kind of stunned.
Eventually Jean says, "You realize this is the biggest thing that's happened ever, right?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"We kinda got that."

[whatamithinking]

"I'm still Jewish," Edie says sedately. "I don't care if religion turns out to be completely irrelevant, I'm still Jewish."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"This surprises absolutely no one," Jean comments.

[campanas]

"What is?" wonders Pen.

[whatamithinking]

"Jewish is what you call a member of the religion Judaism. Judaism is one of a set of three religions, called the Abrahamic religions, that your world's aesthetic seems to have been based off of."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Judaism's the oldest one, Christianity's in the middle, and Islam is the most recent."

[campanas]

"Oh. My world only having one religion. Edori do sort of differently, pronounce Yovah instead of Jovah, but mostly same. And Jovah actually a spaceship."

[whatamithinking]

"More like the starship Golden Calf," Edie mutters.

[iamnotpolaris]

"She's probably not going to understand that reference, you know."

[campanas]

Pen indeed does not understand that reference.

[iamnotpolaris]

"The Golden Calf is a figure from Abrahamic mythology. Way back when, when Judaism wasn't even an organised thing, there were just these people wandering around in a desert who would one day found Israel and Judea, the people said, "We're wandering around in a desert because God told us to! This sucks!" and they went off to one of their religious leaders and said, "Make us a new god who won't tell us to wander around in a desert!" And then, presumably because the populace was threatening him, he told everyone to give him their gold jewelry, and he melted it down and made a statue of a calf, and the people started worshiping that. And then the religious leader's brother who outranked him came down from the mountain where he had been talking to God and completely flipped his lid. And ever since then the Golden Calf has become the iconic false god. Edie's referring to your spaceship that way because presumably the people who came to your planet and gave up their technology and stuff knew that their spaceship wasn't really God, but they told their descendents to worship it anyway."

[campanas]

"Well, it not make anybody wander deserts," Pen says. "Put rain where asking."

[whatamithinking]

"He wasn't making them wander through a desert for the heck of it. Before then, they had been enslaved in a country called Egypt. The desert just happened to be between where they were coming from and where they were going to. And he did make sure they had enough to eat and drink and so on. Or so the story goes, anyway"

[campanas]

Pen shrugs and applies herself to dinner.