"Aunt Win! Ba! Look what Laraby gave me!" She pranced in with a Danger Service figure. A very beat-up figure of an orange Zheien.

Ba smiled. Then, Net insisted that he have it. From that day on, whenever Net and her friend Laraby went shopping at the Goodwill store, she brought another Danger Service figure.

We watched Danger Service vids a lot. Ba laughed at the awkward, low-budget portrayal of intrepid diplomats saving Earth weekly. The silly songs. The cardboard characters. Sets that sometimes fell apart as the actors tried to cover for it. Hysterically funny melodrama. I never could tell if it was supposed to be for real or designed as a comedy.

Ba protected his characters as if it wasn't all play. That worried me. He cried when a character got hurt on the show. Then he'd bring me the figure, even if it was a bad guy, and beg me to heal it.

"It's not real, Ba." Net kept trying to explain to him.

I just put my finger on the tiny heads and sang something from the show.

I'm a diplomat and I'll show you that we don't sit down for tea

We fight for the right with all our might and then the world will see

That diplomats act like me!"

Ba smiled. "My Ba is a diplomat, but he doesn't fight with Forbiddn. He tries to make excuses to avoid Earthan candies." He clutched the tiny Diplomat Martin figure to his chest—an orange-skinned Zheien, like him. Had 'em in every color in the rainbow. And brown, too.

"What's a diplomat do, anyway?" Net offered Ba a piece of chocolate. He always got bad headaches if we let him talk about Danger Service too much. Chocolate is a safe pain-reliever for them.

"Earth has diplomats. They have many meetings. They watch the happenings of the places they visit. Sometimes, they have the chance to discuss a treaty of importance. Rarely, they sign a treaty. DS diplomats are like that, and my ba—"

—My Brother, an unpublished story