-a new chapter 13 was inserted, this is not the new chapter (Jan 8, 2016)-

Amelie stood up and walked down the makeshift steps. Then she turned around to Adrien, her face lit up with glee. "Could you feel that? I was a part of it. The magic! I....I was able to connect with it. I could feel those bussing threads of energy you were using.

"I mean, I couldn't use them, but I felt them so strongly, I knew that the magic was there."

He stood up and grinned, "Maybe you just needed to relax?"

"Maybe..." she said, still unsure what had been the trick. She felt that he was not exactly correct with his assumption, but her suspicions about the answer might hurt him. She kept silent.

They tried for the next hour to extract magic out of her but were unsuccessful. But, each time Adrien used magic, she was able to feel it.

After they were both getting restless and bored Adrien stood up suddenly. "Break time!" he said.

Amelie immediately got up, relieved.

He walked over to the giant window and spread his hand out on the glass. The normal ten or so people were in the big room, practicing as well. "How do you feel about getting introduced to some of the Elves from Prost? I mentioned something to one of their Rentrés I'm friends with, so you're safe, but the guards who practice here been bothering me to make introductions since word got out about you."

"That's nice of them to have given me so much space, especially when I'm using their building," Amelie replied.

"It's only because they're scared of me. I threatened to harm anyone who approached you here or outside of the gym," he said simply. As if him physically threatening others was a casual occurrence in his day.

She wasn't sure how to respond to that so she simply chuckled lightly and gave him a half-smile. "Sure, I'd be happy to meet them."

It turned out that there was a door around the corner that lead right into the big gym. They walked through it and immediately ten heads stopped what they were doing and turned to the two newcomers.

Someone in the far right corner started jogging over to them. He had sandy hair like Adrien, and stood at almost the same height. In fact, almost everyone in the room had the same towering presence as Adrien, even the women. She hadn't noticed before because of the distance, but all of the Elves would tower over normal Humans. At 5'9" she had never before felt short. She wasn't sure if she liked it.

The sandy-haired man went up to Adrien and hugged him, then he pulled his body back, and leaned to his other side, just as Adrien did the same, then hugged again. Essentially it was as if they had hugged to the left, then to the right. Like how she had seen the french kiss to one side and then the other.

Standing next to Adrien, she could see that the Sandy-haired man was actually quite a bit larger than her friend. His arms were the width of her legs and she could see strong pectoral muscles peaking through his t-shirt.

"Greetings, Amelie. It's wonderful to finally meet the girl Adrien would sneak off to see at school! I'm Brooks." he said with a smirk. Then, he leaned in to start the strange hug she had seen he and Adrien do.

Amelie awkwardly hugged the friendly man to one side and then thankfully was pulled in for the other side. He seemed to know that she would not know how to preform the greeting.

"Now you've had your first proper Mooran greeting, Amelie! Welcome!" He slapped her on the back and she grinned at his openness.

"Hey! We're in Prost territory right now, she needs to learn our greeting first!" cut in a girl with incredibly long auburn hair. Amelie kept looking in the strangers' eyes to see if anyone had the unnatural vibrant colors, but everyone sported the same nondescript brown. She guessed they moved about the human word more than she had assumed if they all still wore their disguises.

"Amelie, this is Cassie, she's a Prostian," Adrien said, gesturing to the girl with the long hair. "And Brooks here is my partner from Moore. We also went to school together so he eventually figured out I was ditching the annual Aemion trips early."

"Let's all go grab dinner!" exclaimed Cassie, "We've been working all day, I think we could all use an early end to practice today." There was a round of affirmative responses and the group packed up to leave.

Once they were all outside, the others arriving via Diving, she and Adrien through the dilapidated back door, Amelie tried to catalogue all of the faces around her.

She assumed that they were all Prostian, aside from Brooks, but she could not tell as they all looked very different. They seemed human in every way except for their staggering height. She recalled from her Anthropology classes in college that species with less physical differences between the sexes were known to be less "sexually dimorphic."

They had varying shades of hair and skin color, but all looked like they could be natural on a human.

At dinner, she ended up seated between Cassie and a male Elf named Josiah. Adrien sat across from her. They had chosen a dark pub about five blocks away that had a warm yellow glow about it that made Amelie feel as though they were hidden of a cabin in the woods, rather than a few blocks away from Boston Harbor.

She nudged Adrien with her foot, "I thought you kept our meetings a secret all those years," she said, raising her eyebrows, "How did Brooks find out about it?"

He tilted his head to the side, innocently, "I kept it from him for the first four years, but the poor guy kept wanting to partner up on assignments and I finally let it slip that I never stayed the whole day to get him off my back."

Brooks coughed, "The poor guy? Dude I'm your best friend. I knew something was up and couldn't get you to talk about it. Any other assignment and you could have asked me first." He looked at Amelie and winked, "he knew I would try to flirt with you anyway, that's why he was really scared."

She snorted out a laugh. "Yes, flirting with boys as an eight year old was really something I excelled at. You missed out." She turned back to Adrien, who had his lips pressed together in a hard line. She nudged him again with his foot and he decompressed a little.

"Well anyway, it was a good thing I mentioned it to him because that was the year we went to DC for two days. I went to see you on the second day and he covered for me when they checked in on us as a surprise. Said I had found some Russian tourists to practice my Russian with or something ridiculous, but they bought it."

"Wait, you're telling me you've been here for three years and we never got the story of how you ditched your school's security for a human girl?" A dark-skinned male with black hair exclaimed. "I knew you knew her from the human world but how did you manage that as a kid?"

"Did your Rentré school in Prost do annual drop-offs? Ours did one every year on Aemion so I would just finish our assigned tasks early and go see Amelie. It was far more fun than reporting back to my instructors and waiting for the others." Adrien responded.

"No they didn't let us students out in the human world without being extremely supervised. Our first trip out to the human world was not until we were all twenty, and even then we didn't start solo trips until about twenty-five," the dark-skinned man responded.

"In Moore our Rentré education starts as soon as children are old enough to speak," Adrien said, turning to Amelie, "We're conscripted very young according to an aptitude test, but that means our schooling ends young. Brooks and I finished three years ago when we were about twenty-one, and then we spend the next ten or so years observing different Realm governments."

Cassie snorted, "I forgot you guys were such babies! Moore is such a strange place, letting their young out so early." Amelie turned to the girl next to her and tried to pinpoint her age. She had no wrinkle lines, nor gray hairs that Amelie could see. Honestly, she looked about the same age as she and Adrien.

"How old are you then, if you don't mind me asking?" She asked, and instantly regretted. No one says things like that to people they just met that day. She didn't know Elven culture well but she could imagine that asking an adult's age is a universal cultural taboo.

"I'm eighty-four," she answered simply, as if she had just said she was twenty-four.

Amelie felt her expression involuntarily turn to one of shock. She turned to Adrien who was smiling with his hands held up. She looked back at Cassie, "You're joking, right?"

"What? No I'm completely serious. I was born eighty-four years and three months ago...Adrien, did you not tell her how we age?"

He shook his head.

"Ashenta, boy. Why would you leave that out? Human lifespans are so short, that's one of the most terrifying things we learned in Rentré training in Prost. Did they leave that out in that abridged school you went to in Moore?" She scolded him.

"What..." Amelie started, unsure how to even ask what she wanted to say, "what are you all talking about? You....you live longer than humans? How long is long?"

"We live longer than humans, Amelie," Cassie responded gently. "You are one of us," she nudged Amelie with her shoulder.

Amelie put her hands on the sides of her head and leaned down over the table. She covered her eyes and groaned. There was too much. She had been handling everything really well, she thought, but nothing had really changed her lifestyle all that much. Her....lifespan? That would change everything about how she viewed life. Would she still look the same at eighty?

She wouldn't be able to have the same job. Not that she wanted her current position, but what if she found what she wanted to do and had to leave it after ten years?

And her family. What would they think, knowing she still looked the same?

Charlotte and Maggie and all her other friends would never understand. They wouldn't be able to remain friends. Not without her telling them what she was.

So many horrible scenarios rushed through her brain, she didn't even notice that Adrien was saying her name. She was jolted out of her spiral when she felt his hand press up against the back of hers and start stroking softly with his thumb.

She concentrated on the gentle, comforting touch and tried to take deep breaths.

"Okay...okay. This is okay," She said softly to herself. Amelie looked up and faced Adrien. He slid his hand down her arm to rest at her elbow. His thumb started making comforting circles on her elbow and he tilted his head in concern.

"You want to leave?" He asked. She then remembered that they were in a pub with the rest of the Prost Rentrés. All of whom were more than likely staring as she freaked out and noticing Adrien's touch on her.

She sat back in her chair, leaving Adrien's arm hovering in mid-air.

He looked dejected, but pulled his arm back.

He leaned back in his chair too and crossed his arms over his chest. "I didn't tell you because I was worried you would freak out. I wanted to tell you....just...not yet. I wanted to let your life stay the same for a little longer. Protect you..."

Amelie smiled softly at him. His protective instincts certainly needed to be trimmed down, but she couldn't help but feel it was sweet he wanted to keep her safe.

"Alright. Tell me. How long do Elves live?" She asked.

"About....four or five hundred years" Adrien replied. She sucked in a huge breath.

Five

Hundred

Years.

Five hundred years ago the United States did not even exist as a country.

"Are you really only twenty-four?" She asked Adrien.

He grinned and said, laughing, "Yeah, I really am!"

"I told you! In Moore they send practical kids out to work," interjected Cassie.

 "We Elves actually  at the same rate as human children," a beautiful black woman sitting next to Adrien said. "But conception is very difficult for us so we remain at reproductive capacity for centuries to better optimize the chance for offspring."

"That's why it is so rare for someone like you to exist. Someone who does not know their parents. Elf children are incredibly rare and treasured so it is astounding that your parents have not found you yet. They must have gone mad when you went missing," said Cassie.

"I don't know if I did go missing. I only know that I was adopted as an infant. How did you come to the conclusion that I went missing?" Amelie asked.

Cassie shrugged and looked around the table as if asking for others to validate her suspicions. "There were three or four cases we heard about after World War Two when some of the Realms were rebelling. The rebels would take Elven babies and try to start Elf colonies in the human world or something like that.

"Elf parents were crushed. Just imagine after two hundred years of trying to have a baby, you finally get a child and then he or she is taken away from you." Cassie shook her head and leaned back in her chair. The whole long table seemed to slip into a mournful silence.