>>5889741You grin and type “Earthrise”, and in moments the picture you’re looking for shows up. A great field of white and gray under a black sky. And hanging in the sky suspended by nothing, a blue planet with white clouds swirling.
“That… that is how the earth looks from the moon,” you say, voice filled with pride, and Helga’s voice hitches in her throat. Without magic, without the power to bend the world to its will with just the wave of a wand, muggles had managed to do what no wizard had ever accomplished before. You type some more, switching through pictures. “Here is a photograph taken by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, of Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.”
“Why are they using that white thing?” Apollo asks, curious.
“There’s no air on the moon, so they put on those clothes that keep them with a supply of fresh air. They got there with a rocket,” more typing. “Which is this huge machine with huge amounts of fuel, they burn it, the fire pushes them forwards, and that’s how they leave earth. That tiny thing beside the rocket is a person, by the way.”
“<span class="mu-i">Impossible</span>,” Helga says, and there is a tremor of true fear in her voice. “The muggles could never… They were struggling just to stay alive!”
“And it took a thousand years of death and suffering for us to get there. Sometimes… Sometimes I wonder if magic made things too easy. I wonder why wizards stagnated, why we weren’t the ones to go there first.” You say. It is truly no wonder you and Taylor had become friends. Much like Atlantis was the physical embodiment of magical might, that flag on the moon was the embodiment of muggle might. Except it wasn’t just muggle. It was <span class="mu-i">human</span>. Just a slightly different kind of human than you. One who couldn’t take the easy way out, one who was forced to sit down and do the math. “That was Taylor’s dream, to build a house with that view. And, between mine, his and Linda’s, his was the most realistic.”
You type a few more words, and “The Blue Marble” shows up in all its glory.
“That’s how Earth looks from space. And not a single wizard has ever seen the way muggles have.”
[Cont.]
