- Three colours, always
- Her hair is the colour her element gives off when it burns or glows. Her trim is the
colour her atom is drawn in a molecular model. Her coat is her family's colour, red through
violet across the table.
- Dressed for the work
- High necks, sleeves, gloves, skirts to the knee or longer. She can move, fight, heal and bond
in what she wears. The cut is the year and country she was found in.
- Her eyes and her face
- Her eyes shine and focus. Their colour is never given, and neither is her skin — every reader
should be able to find herself in the face.
- Wings, halos and capes
- Only the six halogens have wings and a halo, a thin ring of their own light. The other gases
wear capes.
- Who can see them
- A person sees an element to the degree she truly understands the matter in front of her. A baker
and a physicist can both see. Love, courage and luck cannot buy it. Anyone who is dying sees them
in full.
- How one is measured
- A halogen is read with a spectroscope, off her halo. Anyone else is read by a trained scientist
from one plucked strand of hair, held in a flame — with her consent, and never the whole head.
- Letters, number, name
- Berzelius gave her letters. Her number is the count of protons at her core, and nothing that
happens to her changes it. Her name is what a mouth makes of her letters, so there are many
spellings, and many characters, for every element.
- The bond is sharing
- Two atoms each give what they have and become something neither could be alone. Holding hands is
a bond. The number of cards she joins into a shield is how many bonds she makes.
- The girls and the boys
- Every element can be a girl or a boy, and each character is one or the other for good. What
differs is the history they lived in. For most of history boys were trained for war and weapons.
Girls could be weapons and go to war too, but more often they were part of a craft. That is the
historical record, not a statement about who is equal. The published table is the girls. The boys'
stories are held under review by L7 and appear here only as redacted files.
- The science is real
- No invented elements, reactions or properties. Dates, clothing and people are true to the year.
If you look something up, you will find it is so.
The girls on this table have hair the colour of their flames because they are the
elements. You are a person, and fire can hurt you. Dress up, sing, pretend to be any of them —
but never light anything to see what colour it burns. The fire stays on the page.