We're All Human

>I have something to tell you

I have something to tell you

Private Message from Vlad [REPLY]

>Atai, can you call me up?

>All of this

>Eugh

>Look it's about Glass and me and

>jesus

>I'm too nervous to finish this can you just call me please

Atai saw the message shortly after she had finished responding to the thread she'd created. She called Vlad with no small amount of trepidation and waited for her to pick up with a familiar spiraling sense of dread.

"Hello, Atai," Nadeshiko said on the other line, in French. "I'm here to corroborate everything Vlad is about to say and absolutely nothing else.

"Atai," Vlad said. "I'm... this is... okay, like, toss out everything you know about how the world works for a moment please."

"Okay," Atai said. Her dread magnified.

"Imagine science was inexplicably wrong."

"Okay."

"Imagine that there's weird shit going on every day that nobody can explain."

"Got it."

"Imagine I'm, uh. Imagine being me, living a regular life given the fact that my parents are obscenely wealthy."

"Yes?"

"And then imagine one day learning that you're, uh."

"What?"

"...Nade can you tell her?" Vlad said quickly.

"Of course," Nadeshiko said slowly. "Vlad is a faerie."

"We already knew that," Atai said slowly. "She'd hardly be dating you if she weren't."

"I don't mean 'Vlad is a homosexual'. Everyone /knows/ Vlad is a homosexual. Vlad is an honest-to-god faerie with wings and everything."

"...No."

"Atai do I joke?"

"There's a first time for everything." 

"That's not today. I mean it. I can't really... show you but she has great big translucent butterfly wings. I could take a picture and you could post it somewhere and get consensus opinion on what it looks like and how fake it is but this is the age of Photoshop and so--"

Atai thought about the world as she understood it, thought about her friends as she understood them, and decided that one was truer than the other. "I believe you."

"Good to hear."

"I literally am a robot," Atai said spontaneously. Words that she'd kept inside herself for seven years, perched at the edge of her voice, ready to spring free-- and then they had, simply as that.

"Well duh," Vlad said. There was a dull thump.

"What she means to say is 'Oh my goodness I had no idea'," Nadeshiko said. "Or possibly 'are you serious?'."

"...Did you guys really know in advance?"

"Yes," Vlad said. "We promised not to tell you why we know, though!"

"...I feel kind of dim right now."

"Happens to the best of us," Nadeshiko said. "Vlad?"

"Oh! Right. Anyway. I told you this because, uh, being a changeling or whatever actually gives me exactly two things: Wings all the ladies fawn over--"

"I'd say."

"--And I can... well, it's hard to explain."

"Around Vlad, people act like they do in stories. This probably makes it really easy to break into the Church of Us, let's be completely honest."

"Nade?" Atai asked. "Are you--"

"I was convinced that your fears have some validity," Nadeshiko said. "So yes, I'm on board."

"So! I'll go snoop around in the air ducts and of course not get caught and take notes and send them to you?"

"That... sounds good."