| Helena 3 had enjoyed her trip on griffin-back. Indeed, she had found
it much more exciting than her trip in a shuttlecraft, where she hadn't
been able to feel the wind rushing by. The trip to Panaras had taken the
better part of two days, necessitating one overnight stop. They had arrived
at their final destination in early evening, and the formal programme of
the visit would begin the next day. Meanwhile, Helena 3 was able to get
together with her "sister" Helena 2, Ambassador from Aqualaria to the Manimal
Nation, in an inn overlooking the sea, so that they could catch up with
each other's news over a meal and a drink or two. Helena 3's diet had been
a little lacking in variety whilst amongst the griffins, so she had been
looking forward to the meal.
As they begin their dinner, Helena 2 tells Helena 3 about recent developments
among the Manimals. Having been with the griffins, Helena 3 has not heard
of the most recent developments in firearms until now, for though Queen
Astra knows about most of them she has been unwilling to discuss them with
Helena 3 over an unencrypted radio link. With the number of high-ranking
Terrans who now have radios, the risk of one falling into the wrong hands
has increased. (Probe hadn't succeeded in persuading the Alliance to release
to natives of Terra any radios capable of encryption or frequency-hopping,
so where secrecy was important a magic mirror still had the edge.)
Then Helena 2 asks her "sister": "So what is life like among the griffins,
then?" "Well, living in a cave took a little getting used to at first.
Thank goodness for Alliance technology and my electric torch. But the griffins
are a charming people, and I've greatly enjoyed my time with them, except..."
"Except what?" prompts Helena 2. "Well, there's something about Trilling
Blackfeather that gives me the creeps. He's friendly enough, but I can
detect people's auras [5960], and there's something not right about his.
Auras are normally either good or evil, or somewhere in between. Blackfeather's
is strongly good and strongly evil simultaneously, though. It's
almost as though there's two very different personalities in there. I thought
at first that it might be because he was a griffin, and that maybe nothing
I'd learnt about human auras applied. But none of the other griffins are
like that. Disregarding those whose auras I can't detect at all - and you
always get a proportion who are like that - most of their auras are very
similar to human ones, and the one or two of them whose auras indicated
that they were bad I've subsequently found out really are bad."
-
 "So what do
you conclude from that?" "Nothing, really," Helena 3 replies with a sigh.
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