Tunie did not really understand stories. Not the way the Crew and Passengers told them. Tunie understood how to report status. Tunie understood journeys and courses. But to break up things one after another like this?

The first story had sounded a lot like maybe it was a bout a city? But maybe it was an ecological warning diversion? Tunie could barely parse how slim and shallow it all was.

And the next story was almost like a joke, which Tunie thought was funny! But the delivery was clumsy and over complicated by the stupid giant sunfish pushing so much during all of it.

And then the nearly last one was almost sensible, it was about storing and eating fuel. But then it seemed like it was suggesting things hat Tunie KNEW was not sensible but sounded true anyway. It kind of was awful and terrible actually, a place that would have crushed Tunie and broke her spine!

It was all very confusing.

Even the nice story from her Crew about how they had first met and played was strange to Tunie.

Why not look at the ‘end’ and the ‘beginning’ and the ‘middle’ all at once?

Why so much cutting up pieces and laying them out like silly little strings when things really happened in great torrents of happening.

Where were all the trajectories? How were you supposed to know what was going on without trajectories?!

Tunie was a simple Ship.

Ships liked simple things.

Like clear paths with few potential collisions to avoid.

Holds heavy with highly lucrative trade mass (precisely what did not matter so much to Tunie as long as the cargo traded well wherever she went and was safe to accelerate).

And at the end of a trip a massive store of grist for her to drink off and feed her feathers and drive with till she could feel them grow utterly solid and more with the delicious mass of potentia.

Tunie was a simple ship and she had simple wants.

Like healthy and high morale crew and passengers and rich ports to visit and trade with.

Maybe when she was older a nice pretty city to arrange a nest for an egg or two?

So really she did not have the need for these strange and weird stories. She didn't really need to understand them more then they seemed to be helpful with making her crew’s morale good and helping satisfy the contract of the passengers.

Tunie looked out over her course and ruffled out her feathers.

Catching the aether for her slow down braking arc.

Her drive and feathers idling down from the main job of converting her heaviness into speediness. Mass handed off from the fierce potency of stillness to the equally fierce potency of speed.

And now that she had finished it was just the work of all of her feathers in concert to grasp the Aether and brake.

Shedding into the endless sea of the aether the rushing momenta.

And as she did shedding her of a significant fraction of her transit mass. Lightening her skeleton and body more and more hollow.

It always made her feel giddy when she slowed down.

Becoming more movable, more capable of the forces of outside herself to push upon her instead of she being the one who pushed.

On her first proper flight, when she left her nest for the first time that draining of her potency had terrified her. She had been feeling heavy enough to burst from suckling her creche’s stores of grist and delighted to feel the heaviness of her drive and feathers sink free into the mass of her bones and eyes.

The slowdown of her own count of moments against that reckoning of others.

But then during her first major braking all that weight drained out of her.

She had felt so hollow and weightless after that she had feared she would shatter. It was terrifying and she had been afraid to leave again for how much it drained her.

But her crew then had been gentle and calming.

Had carefully reassured that she was fine and she would fill her stores again.

Her feathers and drive would thrum with potentia and then once more she would trade that potentia of indomitable stillness for the mass of speed.

Her first crew had been wise, she had been so delighted to have the fun little thing which had come out to meet her that time as part of it.

And she was so pleased with how high the morale of that crew element had been to join her.

Tunie always loved her crew. She wished for little else but their happiness once she took them on as her own.

She always wished them well, she listened to their counsel and trusted them to know what was best for her.

Even when they had started to hurt her so terribly. When they had started cutting at her eyes.

And parts of her had began to go numb. They were her crew and she loved them, she trusted the cutting and the pain and the numbing was for the best.

She had been sad when they fought over it. Crew morale was so BAD in that time.

The one element who had first met Tunie was very bad Morale over the cutting. None of the other crew elements could improve the morale on this topic.

There was disagreement.

Tunie trusted all of her crew for they were hers. She loved them. She didn't want them to fight.

Tunie knew they only wished the best for her, even when they began killing each other. Even when some of them had cut and burned one of her eyes until her sight and memories shuddered and died there.

She trusted they would look after her.

But She keened inside like when she was still a young calf and huddled in her nest city’s creche from terrible frights outside. She cried when the first of her crew died in the arguments.

Morale just got worse and worse for all of them after that. And over and over they kept dying and Tunie could only cry helplessly as their lives were snuffed out within her.

Her lovely precious crew died until only one remained.

But then the fighting was over, Morale improved sharply and Tunie still loved her crew.

She was so relieved the dying had stopped.

They were the Best Crew now.

Tunie was sure of it.

Since there was only one left of them that was the only thing that made sense.

Obviously only the best crew would have survived whatever it was that happened.