[For the first time in a minute, Alvin looks at her. It's the briefest of sidelong glances, there and gone, yet there it is--a glimpse of uncertainty. He wasn't expecting Presa to ask for clarification; or, perhaps, he expected a different, harsher tone.

Still too much of a coward to meet her eyes for long, he starts transferring eggs to toast, toast to plates, enough for two.]

Yeah. You know the tsunami that ended the Battle of Fezebel, twenty years back? That same storm blew in all the Elympions who eventually became Exodus.

[Including little mama's boy Alfred Vint Svent, newly fatherless in a terrifying, lush, hostile world.]