Effervescent ||Tsu'tey||

Snitches end up in ditches

The machine shut down with a heavy groan that tore through the now warm gel. In an altogether choppy process made more difficult by the guilt, Alva was bit by bit torn away from her blue counterpart and pushed back into the human one.

Alva opened the upper lid of the link unit before sitting up. The room was relatively quiet, most of the avatar drivers already working on their other projects. Grace sat on a swivel chair with her arms crossed. The scientist wasn't wearing her white coat and her red hair had been swept behind her ears, a pair of glasses resting low on her nose.

"When I told you not to do anything unusually stupid yesterday, I meant it." Grace said. "Skipping important meetings to throw temper tantrums in the corridors like a five year old, jeopardizing our entire mission here so you can run amok in the forest is stupid. . Do you know what Selfridge would do if you got hurt?"

A dull throbbing grew behind her eyes.

"Sran. Yes."

"Bullshit." Grace scoffed. "If you did then you'd have brought that Avatar right back. Quaritch is frothing at the mouth trying to find something to escalate this conflict, and if you get hurt... Well... It won't be just arrows on display in his office."

"I won't get hurt." Alva brought up two fingers to massage each temple. It did nothing. "Eywa protects me."

"Eywa doesn't take sides. She protects the balance. You are not the balance, Alva."

Alva shrugged.

Grace scoffed again as she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her shirt pocket. She lit one of them, taking several drags of it with her eyes closed before she spoke again.

"I get it. Really, I do. I was close with them once too. Closer than you could imagine." Grace pushed her chair closer to Alva's bed. "But we are not one of them. We can't be. Not after everything we've done to them. And it sucks. Seeing the world like they do, experiencing it as one of them is... addicting. But it's not real for us. Your brother made sure of that a long time ago."

"It could be." Alva denied, hopeful of a future she dreamt of.

"In a perfect world, maybe." The scientist sighed, resigning herself to something. "Relations with the Na'vi used to be amicable. Each of us stayed in our lane... mostly. I started meeting with Mo'at, the Tsahìk, to talk about the people and try and figure out how to coexist with them here. She taught me so much, but each morsel of wisdom she gave us was returned with death."

"The school." Alva said.

"Yeah. Best thing I ever did. But it began way before that. Selfridge got greedy, he wanted more mines. More territory when the resources grew scarce. They started dumping the waste in the waters, contaminating it. Mo'at finally relented and came and visited us with some of the children, but they got sick."

"Sick? Sick how?"

"Poisoned by the contaminated water. Mo'at found the cure with the Tawkami clan but our relationship with them was even worse so they refused to let us return. It wasn't just the children anymore, but the adults, and even the Avatars got sick. This poison used up important nutrients before our bodies could replace them, which is why it affected the children first. Eytukan was preparing to attack us, and I wouldn't blame him. We had poisoned their children but it wasn't intentional."

Alva felt small under Grace's gaze. "Did any of them die?"

"Thankfully no." Grace breathed out. "But they never visited again, and it took years before Mo'at trusted us enough to let me build the school."