Apparently Terrans found everything interesting.

Like packing mucus.

“So wait is that the same thing as what we are inside of?”

Aleph tried to push at the interior of the membrane and ended up being shoved back into the opposite wall of the orb, which stretched and rippled a little to absorb her momentum but did not let her escape the life sustaining pressure and air mix.

Pylo was proud of herself! she’d remembered/muddled through and jury rigged the calibration correctly.

“Uh no, not at all, if I’d packed you lot in mucus you wouldn't have been able to get out again, and I’d have had to kick it into hardening while you were inside anyway. No that membrane is a lot more efficient”

“Oooh How does it work?!”

Stone-fuckers and rapists... Pylo had no idea how it actually worked.

“It’s uh... I shape it into the correct geometry that I want, fill it with the required air and then tune and lock in the necessary parameters for what should be allowed to pass the barrier and what should stay inside. It’s very complicated”

Hopefully the stupid Terran brains would get distracted on something about how she shaped those ideas in their ganglions or whatever and not notice Pylo had no explanation for any of the principles.

She’s a Courier, how is she supposed to keep track of how everything works that she is shipping?

If Pylo wanted to keep track of all of those things she would have stayed home and been a omni-diplomat or a bridge-wife or even just whored it up and gone into politics like some of her sisters. Done any number of those things but hopped on a star ship and took to the trade streams.

Oh dear Omega the frumple grumple mumble monster was talking again.

“- that is humming all the time, what is that?”

Pylo had to act fast to follow how all the signals that were propagating up and down in cascading branches and spiraling networks inside Omega’s skull to backtrack just what in the reef she was referring too.

Following aborted impulses of motion, twists and threads of signal that ripple and twine toward various organs through the chord down her neck. Echoing fragments of eye motions and recursively reinvented internal images fluttering half formed through the dorsal side of the knot of connective signaling tissue.

Ah right that makes sense!

Pylo spoke, as curtly and sharply as possible. It seemed to help when dealing with Omega. Although she could still see shudders and sparking cascades of sensation that suggested it was probably more for show of politeness then that Omega was not upset over Pylo’s voice.

“Oh that? It keeps me in contact with Tunie, helps with reporting my location and up and downshifts our voices for each other”

Pylo opened her mouth and hacked up the hunk of metal and goo filled ampoules from where it had been resting.

Dangling it out for everyone to see with her tongue before slipping the thing back into one of her crevices just past her back row of molars.

Omega was the first to recover from the sight

"Oh so it *is* an anchor ring. We do have those, but that is a very well tuned one. I assumed it had to be something bigger and the location was confusing me not being on your finger. The frequency shift implies a lot more processing power as well. "

Aleph leaned over to quarti. There were indeed metal toruses on one of their digits that humed quietly now that she listened for it.

“Are we not going to talk about how her mouth opens so wide she can peel back the top of her head? No?”

Quarti laughed.

“You just mentioned it dear, and I keep telling you, she listens to your words before they are spoken, the volume is little more than inflection... try to keep up”

Aleph stilled then looked between omega and then Quarti.

“You can read our minds?”

Pylo shrugged and swooped one of her distal phalanges in a spiraling path next to her head.

“I follow how you connect things you see, things you do, things you feel, and where you organize those things and then that’s obviously the word you use for a thing. Then when I want to talk I just put the right words back into your heads where those things go and you understand me. It’s not like it’s hard”

Pylo huffed and rested some of her aft limbs against the gently vibrating frame of tunie’s hull. Soothing herself with the contentment of her friend and ship. They supposedly wanted to see tunie and learn all about her and Pylo, but apparently just getting out of the cargo hold without tripping on ‘wonders’ to ask about was a heavy task.

“That’s easy?”

It was Quarti who spoke, although mostly looking at Omega and Aleph.

Omega shook her head a bit then shrugged and waggled one hand.

“It’s not impossible, I could do it in theory but only to other terrans and I'd need a full on astral projection ritual and I already HAVE a human brain to understand what I’d be seeing, I don’t really know how she could have done it with humans so quickly... Unless you’ve met humans before?”

Pylo laughed and shook her head.

“No, this is the first time I’ve seen anything like you three. But really it’s not that hard. Everything wants to feed, fight, fly and fuck. Once you’ve seen one processing network and recognize its inputs and outputs you just have to follow the lines...”

That apparently disturbed omega a bit much, in fact all three of them had their faces pooling up with a lot more blood then was normal.

Really?

What was that reaction?

Ah well, more material for her private laughter fit after all of this was over. Really? a ‘projection ritual’ whatever that was sounded silly. And who needed to have a wholey identical (or close enough) brain to understand some one? Pfshaw. She wouldn't have needed that even when she was an infant.

There was a shrill beeping from one of their rings and aleph groaned in frustration.

“Really? We were just getting started and now we have to go back?”

Omega nodded, and seemed to be furiously trying to get control of the blood flow to her cheeks.

“The habitat needs maintenance and the farming stack, and me and quarti need to check on the colonist stores”

“Ugh... Well thank you pylo but we need to get going... uh how do we get this thing to go back?”

Pylo shared a sentiment with Aleph. But waggled a distal at one of the four control sticks in the orb with them.

“Just shove one of the control sticks in a direction you want and squeeze, it should walk in that direction. If you want it to jump you pull it out”

Aleph crawled around the interior of the membrane into the little cradle then grabbed hold and directed the orb and its walking legs back to their habitat.

Pylo just sighed and turned to continue her rounds and mull on just how to get the idiot Terrans to stop living in that decrepit disaster waiting to happen.