Breaking Out of an Ancient Locked Closet

Fweiu stopped her laughing becoming somber again.

"You know it hasn't exactly been our way, to be involved in the rest of the world. This wasn't my first choice. In a desperate attempt to do anything else, we decided to colonize Antarctica. It would stay comfortably cold year-round, and there wouldn't be many humans down there, so we wouldn't need to make such an effort to hide. But after we sent some people down to start setting up the colony, we learned we wouldn't be alone. There were other creatures down there. They didn't like us in their territory, and they were powerful enough to kill some of us."

She looked straight at Shul. She knew he would understand this, even if some of their former clanmates refused to. "I tried to call off the colony. I didn't think that territory was worth a war, or death. But some of our people insisted that we throw more lives away. They talk like the only way for our race to have 'dignity' or 'pride' is to fight for territory like savage fucking animals. I got sick and tired of bringing them in line. They were threats to our own people. They might have started a civil war. So I finally told them, fine, go to Antarctica. Start your own colony. If you want to die in that wasteland, I'm not going to stop you anymore. And so they left, and I don't know anything about them anymore."

Shul was really buttering her up, wasn't he? Trying to make her feel better, or something. Fweiu laughed softly at the idea that 'everyone knew' she was the one for this job. She wouldn't have threatened to kill him, to force him into a duel, if 'everyone knew.'

Fweiu wasn't about to send anyone else to Antarctica. "Maybe someday. But I'm not about to have anyone risk their life for that. Only if they volunteer to go look." She let out a long sigh. "I'm mostly worried about the children. What kind of a life could they have in a place like that? They don't deserve to grow up in a war zone."

Fweiu shook her head. "There aren't a lot of safe ways to reach them, and the antarctics would probably try to kill the scouts once they got there. Plus, as the scouts would see it, we don't really know how well the kids are doing. We just have our suspicions, no matter how grounded in fact they are. So, really, we would be asking scouts to put their own lives in extreme danger for a wellness check. The most I could expect is that they might send a few invitations to get torn up.

She shifted in her seat and growled. She didn't know what was worse - the idea that the scouts wouldn't help the children at the colony, or the idea of asking for that help in the first place.