Red Weed was refreshingly civilized and cosmopolitan after the barbarity plus monoculture of Terra.

The Transit and Trade authority promised reasonably priced vitalloys for Tunie’s supplements and even categorized them properly for general Ship consumptions. They however seemed to only have two of Tunie’s favorite flavors but Pylo had hope that some of the unfamiliar ones might be pleasing to her partner in trade.

“Looks like it will be a good run... they are really interested in some of the poetry trove from a few ports back. They also like the manual library and it sounds like they are willing to do an investigative sampling of the terran raw grists for any useful pharmaceutical applications. At minimum they are willing to exchange the raw Grist value as higher grade refinement plus genetic diversity bounties. I expect with maybe one or two trinkets we will get another two trips of food in your belly plus a medical check up!”

“▿⑆ ↫ ▟▄◶↻▗ █◴⌒▄ ?”

Plyo laughed and rang her distils over her fresh new hide at the keening tone from her best friend.

“Yes and there will be brushies once we settle into docks. I promised after all”

“!!!↫!!!”

There was a little buzzing shift in acceleration to let Pylo know just how delighted Tunie was. Not enough to disturb the passengers or cargo unduly but both crew and ship knew what it meant.

“So um, I suppose I should go and let the Passengers know we are going to be stopping soon?”

There was a non-committal hum from the bulkheads which probably meant that Tunie was having to focus very carefully to avoid creating a major incident in traffic.

Well that was Pylo’s cue to stop bothering her so she could deal with the absurd complexity of a major port habitat’s in and out flow of vessels at varying directions and intensities of acceleration.

Truly Pylo had no idea how canner ships managed it, the last time she had tried to work out all the math that Tunie processed in a single eye she had felt her cortical stack getting ready to try and hybridize a course vector algorithm.

There were things one was just not suited for and it was best for everyone to know when you reached one of those limits.

Pylo huffed then suckled on a tube to replenish her oxygen stores to rebuild fresh connective tissue.

She stretched her limbs, flexed her musculature and length and stretched her face into a few approximate expressions that should work well on the locals.

There was not really much else to do until they were closer and Pylo could start haggling with the customs office.

Might as well make a visit to the flatlanders and let them know to get ready for the stop.

Plan in place Pylo shoved out of her room and into the greater structure of her friend.

She glided easily along the hallways. Having to stay close to the surfaces in order to have ready graspables when Tunie made unexpected shifts of acceleration. Presumably to avoid collisions or taxi towards a docking approach in the labyrinth of crowded space.

Tunie’s motiles were more clingy and less active during these awkward shifting times of velocities. It seemed like it strained her a bit, Pylo thought.

But even if it made her friend uncomfortable it was still true Tunie and her kin were some of the most maneuverable Trade vessels in the reef.

At least barring something that was blatant city magic from one of the empires and their capitals or the truly urban population centers of the reef.

Encysted civilizations layered deeply around each other. So full of specialized secrets and wondrous crafts that Pylo could not even begin to guess at what made good trade and what was rubbish.

As developed compared to Red Weed as Red Weed was to Terra.

Really there were places that Pylo honestly preferred to not haggle directly herself. When it was better to favor ports of call where one of her sisters, aunts or nieces lived so that she could have a advocate familiar with the prices and value of the local magic and miracles.

Ah here were her triplet of passengers.

Omega, who had been coming around to be a lot more polite and friendly lately. It seemed like maybe the pivot had been when they had helped save Aleph from permanent injury. A nice enough woman as far as Pylo was concerned, but perhaps a little bit overly conservative and paranoid.

Quarti who was usually the most civil, clear spoken and eldest of the group but had some strange obsessions that really could twist her mood around and turn the sweet comforting tongue to horrible lashing sting.

And last of all little young Aleph. Who was young in some difficult to define way. Pylo was not actually sure she properly understood how her passengers measured age and maturity.

First there was the confusing way Flatlanders measured time that really befuddled Pylo; What point was there in keeping track of segmentations of how their giant fish had been circling a star? So what if it had been a stable meter for the measly instance of time they called recorded history the big oaf of a beast was just going to change its circuit eventually and then all of your time measurements will be wrong!

Then besides that there was the weird circuitous larval stage. Apparently facilitated by some kind of distributed symbiote network?

Pylo wasn't sure she understood it. But that was symbiotic aggregate forms for you and she had in her travels come to the conclusion other species and their arbitrary distinctions of ‘me’ vs ‘not me’ were a headache best avoided.

Some species only identified themselves by the gooey substrate that facilitated cognition, even if all the info density and processing occurred in the rest of their body the lubricant was the actual self.

Others considered their entire society and habitat an extension of self even though there was no real medium of informational transfer.

Whatever the case the important bit was Aleph was young, more like a child then her two elders and also apparently had been waging a major project to actually carry on a conversation with Tunie for the last Deshɛ of the trip.

And was apparently discussing her latest exchanges with the ship.

“I’m telling you it is actually really funny, but you have to recognize that everything is about velocity, acceleration, mass. Then you need to remember that the humor is in how it mirrors one phenomena but unambiguously is clearly another... but without looking too coincidental either, because that makes it creepy and she really is a bit of a-”

Quarti was of course the first notice Pylo’s entry into the living space even though she knew for a fact she hardly disturbed the soup of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon-dioxide in any way that the flatlanders should be capable of noticing.

“Oh great and beautiful Pylo! so nice to see you! Please liberate us from the lecture of our resident polymath in her profusion of enthusiasm for completely and utterly explaining the nature of Ship based humor and in the telling so utterly murder any and all hope of delight and spontaneity to be found in it!”

Pylo tried laughing audibly, the sound not quite putting any of the passengers at ease, drat she probably got the vibration frequency wrong. Oh well she would try a different frequency arrangement next visit.

Oh well, time to socialize and inform them of the happenings. She still had not found a good solution to keeping the trio informed of where they were despite Tunie’s requests. It just was not feasible to move them anywhere near the outer surface of the hull. They were too fragile to the occasional stray ablation shrapnel or the narrow scatter of short-light.

Hum.

“So I have heard! I’m impressed honestly, throwing a Velocity Pun that actually gets Tunie to laugh is not easy, I think I only managed it once. She is kind of clumsy with catching none-ship humor so you have to get it just right or she just goes flat at you”

Aleph stared at pylo with brows furrowed in thought and concentration, apparently the accent was causing some difficulty with that one as her cheeks were going very hot with rushing fluids.

“So... I think you just congratulated me... for pleasing? no on tickling your.... ship? Oh the Joke!”

Suddenly Aleph was beaming and her lips were cracked in a toothy delighted smile, eyes glittering in the light filtering through the cushioning Pylo added to Flatlander proof all the dangerous edges, accelerations and light frequencies common to interstellar travel.

“You congratulated me on telling a joke about speed and mass to your ship! YES finally someone gets it! Everyone here seems completely daft about it... even you Omega! Seriously this is amazing! Communication with some kind of distributed intelligence network and the very ship that is carrying us at mind boggling speeds. And uses an entirely non-linear language system!”

Omega offered a weaker but still friendly smile from where she was rescrewing a case together.

“It’s not that we don’t think it’s cool Aleph, but you literally spent shift after shift after shift talking about it and explaining it and showing us graphs and math formulas for it. I mean if I was properly slotted up to full arithmetics it’s cool and all but I needed to shift to the mechanic share girl... I don’t have the head for it in those cases”

Aleph pouted a bit and gave a huff.

“Well it’s not my fault, you have to be really precise to actually get anything across in her language. There isn't a discrete linear time interval! So I have to format it into a trajectory function to even get the point across. And then I have to make sure I’m upshifting the scale factor correctly when it goes through the transponder! This stuff is hard. And then I had to make it funny!”

Pylo tilted her head to the side. That, seemed like a lot of extra work. Definitely showed signs the poor flatlander sprout was reaching well outside her aptitude.

“Wait... you were working that hard to talk to Tunie? Why didn't you just use the Crew lex-formatter in the transmission-node? Or ask me, I speak Ship better then most”

Aleph blinked a few times.

“... Uh I think you meant to speak and not- right whatever... Jokes don’t translate well through the machine, so I was checking what the actual parse algorithm was doing... Which is really very accessible and super intuitive by the way!”

The little flatlander was slightly bobbing with her fingers and toes anchoring her to a fluffily cushioned wall.

”So and then I realized how much best fitting placeholder it was doing with a linear verbal language versus a non-linear geometric and spatial language. So uh I had the idea that I could probably just send the geometric function formula on it’s own?”

Pylo nodded a bit. Omega and Quarti having moved on to go find something else to do now that Aleph had been sufficiently distracted/found a new target to bombard with her latest obsession.

“-So I started testing some pretty basic functions... And it was just fun? And your ship is really nice and helped me with uh... It’s not but almost is like pronunciation? Wait you speak this language native? You don’t use a translator at all?”

Pylo made a face of disgust.

“Ugh why would I? Stupid squawker boxes never work right, And it’s not like it’s hard... I figured it out when I was still an infant. Honestly Tunie is a lot easier to understand then you Flatlanders”

Aleph just gave Pylo a confused look while she parsed through it, frowning a bit, then scowling up at the trader.

“I hope you speak it better then you do to us... No offense... otherwise I’d be really worried about how you are sure we are going where we should.”

Pylo scoffed and shook her head.

“Me and tunie have known each other for longer then most of you have been alive”

The Flatlander blinked and looked thoughtful, mulling over the statement.

“Wait... even Quarti? That’s a really long time”

Pylo hummed a bit and looked up at the lighting, obscured behind pale insulation.

“Not quite? Depends on how you count. Local times on that big fish terra? Absolutely, tons more than that... But with the squish from traveling? Uh not really no... Oh yeah I had something I needed to tell you three!”

Omega and Quarti looked up from some kind of crystal they had been poking at.

“What does the lovely pylo have to share?”

“We are going to be stopping at our first port of the journey soon, it’s a smaller port called Red Weed... But I thought you might find it interesting... and also you will need to be prepared for some heavier acceleration to match position”

Aleph looked over at Quarti cheeks flushing hot.

“Uh could one of you help explain that one I kind of lost track around when she said something about well- yeah”

Pylo sighed again, this time she thinks she actually got the tempo right because Omega and Quarti actually laughed and Aleph seemed a bit more relaxed.