Aleph beat the bag full of harvest with a bar of metal that had been meant to replace a strut for the berth. She smacked the cloth bag like it was the reason her mother fell off a cliff.

She’d met her mom reborn after that, but it had not been the same. They had not really gotten along and parted ways.

Aleph beat into the bag in the way that Omega had shared a demo for over resonance. Her hair stuck to her brow, this was the tenth bag they had been working over.

It was sweaty, dusty, exhausting work. But she was not alone in it. Although Quarti was being a total show off and ignoring the demo entirely. Apparently she had done this sort of thing so many times in her lives that she found Omega’s method boring.

This should have been done by a machine, but building the machine for it would have taken longer apparently then just doing this by hand.

So she and Quarti were preparing the harvest more or less the same way people had done it for millenia.

It had all seemed like a reasonable number of steps. She had agreed with everyone when they were discussing and planning it.

Even the kinetic demos Omega had shared and gone over with her from some expert farmer’s skill share seemed reasonable.

But all the theory and discussion and balancing and energy budget did not make the here and now any less awful and dusty!

It had started with such a simple discussion. Mainly how long they had all been on the Ship. The things that they missed. Then that had turned into talk about celebrating birthdays and when the next ones were coming.

Aleph beat the sack of wheat.

Quarti had mentioned something about cake and Pylo had lamented that she was never going to manage to eat her favorite one ever again because the terrans had only given her one of each.

She tossed the bag onto the pile of ‘threshed’ harvest that she and Quarti would get too after they were done.

That had started an animated discussion between her and Quarti and then Omega had gotten dragged into it and after a bit of back and forth had agreed that she could probably do it but that it would take a long time to grow proper chocolate.

She grabbed another fresh bag that they had stuffed with the broken off tops of grain and began beating it anew.

Then that conversation had turned to Pylo asking what precisely made the chocolate take so long and then Quarti and Elsie had gotten involved in it.

And now months later Aleph and Quarti were processing the harvest of ‘wheat’. It was the strain that Terra had prepared for the colony, apparently extra short and high yield for biomass.

But even so it was not expected that they would have the room on the berth for it.

They were not expected to grow this stuff at all during the trip.

Honestly Aleph was kind of in agreement with the planners that had left Wheat off the list of viable crops for berth growing.

Her fingers stung from threshing the stuff with a metal rod.

Omega had never had to drill her on this. Aleph mused if she had that maybe she would have given up. But then comparing it to the spiders this was not so bad. And damn it that kinetic demo had felt like it would be so EASY.

When it was a memory of someone else’s muscles working the stuff down.

So she had agreed to work with Quarti on it.

And that was how Aleph got herself into the position of breaking the ‘berries’ free by ‘threshing’.

Then she would be needing to separate the actual ‘grain’ from the ‘chaff’ which Omega had demoed for her and had not looked too difficult but as the scope of the work was slowly dawning on her she suspected was grossly in excess of being worth the effort.

Why couldn't they make cake out of the easier crops from back in Aoria? What was so special about this stuff?

Sure bread and cake and flour were nice imports from down the flatter more central lands.

But even when it was just the flour Aleph had thought it was barely worth the effort to haul it up from the train stations up to the village.

And now all of THIS work?! How did something that took this much effort end up as a staple food crop?!

There! that bag was probably well and truly thrashed. Now to start up work on another one. She took a few breaths and wiped her brow before moving to grab another bag. She glanced over at her partner in this ‘task’.

Quarti was quite happily swinging/beating her bag of wheat around as equal parts dance partner and unfortunate target of vented aggression. It made her own method seem crude and backwards.

“Surely this is not the best way to be doing this right? Is this really how they did it for thousands of years?”

Quarti laughed at her as kicked the tied off bag into the air, spun to smack it about fifteen times with her fists, then grabbed it and spun around again to bounce it off the springy ‘cloud’ of the floor and get started all over again. Elbows, fists, knees, feet.

“Eh! Pretty much till last two centuries!”

Aleph fumbled with her swing and the metal bar slipped free. Of course out of nowhere at this exact moment Quarti would pick to be completely and utterly coherent and legible.

“Quarti you WITCH! Why do you always do that?!”

The elder laughed and having thoroughly pounded her bag bare handed better then Aleph was managing with a metal baton Quarti moved on to another one.

“Yos young newb is ovar doing! Burning outa straina foo! Not be all the grain! Rest ya butt I’ve got dis! Little scrombdudette”

Aleph huffed and just let herself fall back into the clouds, the crazed alien tech whisking away her sweat and grime like a washcloth and a cool spring breeze and fresh water all in one.

She laughed.

“Look at us! We’re harvesting grain like ancient primitives while hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light in a biomechanical space ship! I just... I can’t even!”

Quarti laughed and spun with her fifth bag before whirling around and slamming it over her knee with a whoop.

“Oh! Noice ref, very learnd, oldah then dirt! Much praise! Now sit there and breath afore ya burst something in ya overworked brain meats!”

Aleph huffed and looked at the pile of ‘cloth’ bags and the racks on racks of growing rigs they had to setup from the berth’s spares and backups in order to grow the necessary quantities of the terrible yellow grass.

When she had visited the academy she had found the fields of grain magical in how they went on for seemig forever. Looking at the comparatively tiny plot the four of them had harvested she had a newfound appreciation for the amount of toil those fields represented.

But they were almost done.

With this step.

“I feel like we should have put in the time to build the machinery for this. Doing this by hand was a mistake, I don’t care how much welding it would take.”

Quarti laughed and apparently decided that this next bag would be threshed by dancing/stomping on it faster then Aleph had ever seen someone move before. She made a breathy noise like some kind of yapping cliff jumper as she did.

“I mean Really?! This is insane! How did the midlands not starve to death with needing this much work?!”

Of course suddenly Quarti was right there, stony faced and grim. Eyes distant and staring through her at more deaths than Aleph cared to count.

“Oh we did a lot of that. Be more grateful, you’ve never even seen what famine means.”

Aleph’s face was already flushed but she put in an effort to add more red with the shame of it. The spry young girl looming over her looked aged and worn even with a bag full of threshed wheat sitting on her shoulder.

“rIGHT uP WITH YA!! Threshing done! Now we Winnow!”

She didn't have much choice, the hand on her shoulder practically threw her to her feet. And then Quarti was bounding over to where they had setup the spare air-circulator fans and some metal bowls.

“Quarti, could you just pick to be an idiot or a wise old witch and stick with one or the other? At least for a shift? Please?!”

However the ancient monster in disguise of someone younger than Aleph herself just laughed.

“Ain’t as much different between fool and sage as ya think little duck”

She wobbled over to join her friend at the bowls and fans and flopped down next to her.

"What's a duck? no wait that's not important! I still don't see why we couldn't make some of those 'motiles' do this. Or one of LC's legs that they are not wearing."

Quarti ruffled her hair and then started pouring the threshed wheat into the bowl for ‘winnowing’.

“Cuz they’ve got better things to do love”

Aleph huffed and spun a message over the choir to Omega. Not that she hadn't absentmindedly been broadcasting the entire conversation, but she made a point to ping her.

“Hey Omega! What’s going o-”

“Not now Aleph! Busy!”

She groaned as Quarti proceeded to somehow make ephemeral sculptures out of the light ‘chaff’ blown up in the winnowing. Flashing a sharp toothed grin at her.

“See? Toldja so”