::: subchapter You do not go unnoticed. If you're close enough to see the crowd in the schoolyard, it means, even fascinated by the vesperbanes, everyone can see you approaching without turning their heads. Still, some do. Remna glances over and smiles, a boy with long antennae regards you with a pinched, confused expression, and a fifth instar girl with white and green chitin glances over for one moment. Her antennae curl up and palps curve downward like fangs. It's one moment, then she looks away -- throughout, you don't meet her eyes. The decision --- go or stay --- isn't helped by the eyes and attention entangling you and drawing you in. But really, were you ever not going to find out whatever these vesperbanes were telling everyone else? Sure, they were mean and don't seem very good at their job, but they do the job, which alone elevates their words over the usual mentors. And if you didn't find out now, you don't trust anyone else to remember it well enough to relay it accurately. "--bats and mantids, and in theory shoggoths but that's more of a scary story. I... we don't know why none of the other kinds can, it might be biology or the vespers just don't want to." The vesperbane with green chitin is the one speaking, her voice losing focus and trailing off as you arrive, a distraction. Wesk had saved you a seat --- or at least, had enough free space around her. The almost-sixth instar nymph is about half again as big as anyone else, and with her beside you, you're obscured from about half the other nymphs. The two of you aren't quite on smiling terms, but she does give you a nod. The arrangement the two of you went was something like, whenever you did athletic team exercises, the two of you try to end up on the same team --- Wesk being enough of an asset to make up for how little you could offer in any activity --- in return, you have far more patience answering her questions than anyone else. Inserting yourself into the rapt crowd doesn't decrease the number of glances your way. They still come, and pair themselves with light, quiet stridulations like gossip. You imagine it couldn't be a secret that your mom had rounded up half the town in the search for you last night. You ignore them. You look to the front. Green had leaned over to consult with one of the mentors --- to make sure you belong? You mirror her, and lean to consult with Wesk, asking what's going on. "The banes came here from the city to fight termites! And the mentors got them to spend the morning here, and tell us what it's like to be a vesperbane and answer all our questions." "What was the last question?" You piece together context from the bit you heard. "Why other species can't become vesperbanes?" "Yeah. How'd you know?" The vesperbanes were speaking again. Red, this time. "Hey, settle it. If you're going to talk instead of listen, we can get back to our mission instead." There's quiet, and where there isn't quiet, there's other nymphs jabbing each other to quit it. "Are there any other questions?" Green asks. You look, and Shimare isn't standing with them --- she's in the shade beneath an awning, reading and occasionally shuffling the pages she is reading. The nymphs with questions (surprisingly not all of them --- had that many questions already been answered?) show it by making a display of the eyespots on the inside of their raptorials. You consider trying to ask a pointed question about renegades, or maybe that's a bad idea. You do want to get their help, after all. "You, with the red chitin." "I um... well, my aunt tries to make me stop coming here whenever I go see her. But I don't know... why do some mantids hate vesperbanes? Aren't they heroes?" Green glances at Red, antennae flexing. It's Red who speaks first. "You know, there's a story our teacher told us when we asked something like that. Should we tell them?" She smiles. "I think we should." Green frowns, hesitant, but it seems to be all the prompting she needs. She starts, "The short way to put it, it's a story about mantids a long time ago. A long time --- before the bats. A lady owned a farm that fed a village, but then there's a drought, and then a plague that cripples her farms' roaches, and then a horde of reaver ants sweep through and raid their grain silos and livestock... it's a real bad year. And it starts to look like she's not going to be able feed the village." Red asks the obvious question. "So what does she do?" "Searching for a solution, she dares to venture out into the woods, which are..." --- Green pauses, eyes drifting towards the horizon. "Actually, this far south, you probably know what the woods are like. This long ago, before the ambrosia isolation pact, the woods were even more unkempt --- trees melting into each other, blight galls growing like weeds. So this lady ventures into the woods, and shadows dance at the edge of her vision, weevils keeping just out of sight, their breaths and beatings wings like a chorus of laughs. She's lost in those woods, hopelessly hounded and herded by those shadows, till one weevil has the mercy to appear before her." One nymph interrupts here. "What do weevils look like?" "Night had fallen at this point, so she doesn't get a good look at it," is Green's way of dodging the question. "Weevils can only speak by making you eat the fruit of a fungus that makes you babbling mad, making you dream while awake, giving all light a smell and every sound a color. By comparison to that, it makes the buzzing of weevil wings makes sense. So this one weevil makes the lady eat the mushrooms, and it speaks to her. The lady babbles forth her problems to the weevil, and it proposes that it can solve their problems. "'What are you willing to give?' the weevil asks. And the lady replies 'Anything. My husband, my kids, the village --- they have to eat. I'll do anything so that they can eat.' The weevil laughs, and it tells her the secret to solving her problem, and disappears. With this knowledge, the lady runs back to town, her eyes dilated black from the mushrooms, and the other weevils laugh and leave her alone enough to finally escape the forest. She reaches her house before she reaches the village, and in her excitement, exclaims the solution to her husband. He then turns into a tree." Green pauses there, eyes roaming as if savoring the gasps and confused murmurs. "A little sapling, but it grows fast, the way they say weevil magic does to plants. She's as surprised and taken aback by this as you are, and decides this is another waking dream of weevil's mushrooms. So she goes to sleep. And in the morning, she rouses to find the tree her husband became is still there, now far bigger than their house. It's grown flowers and fruit now. The lady herself can do nothing but stare, but when one of her children picks a fruit, they find it tough and greasy and delicious. And there's enough fruit on all the boughs to feed the entire town." Red's palps draw into a big grin as he looks over the bewildered nymphs. "That's it. That's the story our teacher told us." "How does that answer the question at all!" "If we explained that, it wouldn't be authentic to the experience of our teacher telling it. He has this way of telling you things and watching you react like it's a test, and you fail if you don't act like it somehow makes sense." "But," Green starts, "because we're better than our teacher, in this regard, we'll try to explain. By now, you've surely learned what it means to be a hero, right? A hero is one who sacrifices. The good for the better, the one for the many, a hero pays the price, whatever struggle and strain needed to keep her protectorate safe. The story illustrates this with the husband, I think. I believe the husband is the same as a vesperbane --- he was transformed into something else so the village could survive. There are people who think vesperbanes are less mantid, because of their union with the vespers. But despite this, because vesperbanes fight monsters, heal the sick, and build our cities, the Pantheca endures." "Look at this way," Red cuts in. "Your parents might not like it when their little nymphs go off to Wentalel to get transformed into powerful vesperbanes. But I say it's what makes you a hero. And besides, if you live here, enjoying the benefits of there being vesperbanes, without doing your part to help there be more vesperbanes, isn't that the definition of being a defect?" "But to return to the question we're supposed to be answering," Green says, "we think it's that simple. Vesperbanes make sacrifices mantids are uncomfortable with. Especially among the religious, becoming a vesperbane is viewed as a corrupting transformation. They say a soul united with the vespers can never be reborn in the welkin, and call that deprival of eternal life murder, and conclude that vesperbanes kill by simply existing." "It's all very complicated, but it's all nonsense. Especially if you've ever met a vindicator. Assholes, all of them." Green makes a sort of coughing sound in their trachea. "Oh yeah, nymphs," she says, an antenna falling. "It's a word you'll learn when you're older." "Are there other questions?" You keep glancing to Shimare, and decide you'll ask her for help after this is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Red is answering a question ("Why don't vesperbanes rule the world?") with an analogy to mantis-fungus-aphid (which sounds a lot like a weird foreign version of mantis-fungus-ant), when an interruption comes as the beating of chitinous wings. Above, a dark form darts down to land on the foreleg of the Green mantis. It's a bee, black thoracic fuzz pressed down to a more aerodynamic form. It puffs out after landing, making the bug appear rounder. The bee bounces and points at paper tied to a leg. A messenger bee. Green gently unties the paper and unfolds it, meanwhile rubbing the bee's head with a dactyl. "Good girl." Th