Wands and Warframes

Tea and Cake

Tea and cake

"No!"

Kitty whines, "But why? You know you need to, so why put it off?"

Pandora pinches the bridge of her nose, "Kitty, we still have no idea what could happen to you. Until we are reasonably sure it won't out right kill you, or drive you insane, the answer is going to continue to be no. Once Harry and Hermione return to school, Natah and I are going to head to earth and capture a few wild Sentients."

"It still sounds strange when you say that."

"By all reports they're thriving and helping to keep the remnants under control."

"What about the Grineer?"

"Them too."

"That's not. You know, I don't care. Why are you going to capture them?"

"We want to see if they've inherited the artificial Oro, and check them over to see how they've adapted to having a soul. If they have an Oro then we're going to take pairs and transplant them to each other. Give it a few years to see what happens, and then we should be able to make a decision."

"Years?"

"It won't feel like that for you, as you said you're going with Harry. Besides, if we're not done for the Christmas Holidays, then we probably won't do it until the Spring Break when Harry has two or three years to recover here before returning to school."

Kitty's face falls as she realises she's getting the same answers as The Lotus gave her.

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Aurora sits staring sightlessly at a wall, her thoughts millions of miles away on Venus. She startles when Amelia sits down awkwardly next to her.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"Huh?"

"It's a saying, means I'm interested in what you're thinking."

"I don't. It's just. They've got all of this magical technology, and there are people living worse than house elves."

"I confess, I have no idea what a house elf is."

"They're a servant species that loves to work. They bond themselves to a household and remain loyal no matter what. Some purebloods treat theirs as little more than slaves. Others treat them as treasured members of the family. But even the worst families make sure that they're at least nominally healthy and never take more than they can give. Far too often the reverse is actually the case, where they're trying to get more work than you've got. But on Venus, people were living. That's really all I can say about them. The Corpus, when someone can't give any more they start to take body parts. There's no debtors prison, you just keep getting bits taken away until you can't afford to live. They've even turned sleeping into a profitable venture.

"Did you know their debt contracts are 100,000 pages long. I asked the invisible voice, Cy how much parchment that was. He took me to a room and made an illusion that was taller than I can reach."

Amelia puts her hand on Aurora's, "What's really bothering you?"

"I'm afraid I'm going to end up like them. Treated like cattle, and then discarded when I'm no longer of any use. I...I...I gave The Lotus a signed marriage contract. I can't help imagining being plugged at each end while I look at the stars forever."

"The Tenno aren't like that, and The Lotus is their mother. If you saw all of that, it was probably as a lesson. Dan and I, we're just Dentists from Crawley. This world seems amazing, and it is. The technology here, it might as well be magic. The social issues are exactly the same though. Can you honestly see the people at the top, treating the people at the bottom well?"