Pylo settled for another rest, gulping sickeningly rich slurry as hard as she could stand. Venting heat in torrents as she digested and refueled her stores.

Acceleration was never pleasant but while her routine was being eased by the help from ▙◀, that was more than counteracted by the amount of extra work that had accumulated due to the ████████ infestation. And on top of that was the various needs and exchanges with the passengers.

The Clerics were thankfully mostly self maintaining. Including their own dissemination of inoculations against the ████████. ▙◀ was proving to be exactly as helpful and beneficial as promised, although there were several ‘personality conflicts’ Pylo was less than thrilled by.

The Terrans?

A mixed blessing at best, on the one hand they were really quite nice and very earnest in trying to help, Quarti and Aleph especially! They literally thrived under high acceleration too! Happily tipping all over the place. It had been annoying on Terra, but now even with Tunie at her maximum allowable burn they were happily trundling along!

But all of those advantages were countered by needing to be suspended in a soup of nitrogen, oxygen and their own waste byproducts! They ran practically frigid and cold for their relative cleverness, barely any metabolic waste heat at all, but they had such poor thermoregulation that if their suspension medium was not kept below their operating temperature they would quickly perish!

But not too far below their operating temperature! Only a small fiddly bit!

This and many Thun other maintenance concerns was exhaustively confounding the advantages of their acceleration adaptation and relative endurance.

Pylo would not admit to anyone but Tunie, But she was pretty sure if ▙◀ had not come aboard to help she would have been unable to keep the finicky little terrans properly alive.

Not that she would have let the contract be voided of course! But she was pretty sure no one would have been able to complain if she was forced to suspend their metabolisms for their own good. Tunie had several forms of digestive preservatives available (like she used on the cakes), one of them probably would work on terrans that kept them sufficiently intact.

To put it simply the Terrans might not be the most fragile passengers possible. But they were poorly packaged and ill documented enough Pylo thought they might as well be.

Yet, for all the frustration and in spite of how much she was growing to hate ▙◀ and her disgusting canner thoughts Pylo had to admit that the Terrans were getting better. It was slow going but Pylo agreed that the breadth of ignorance was not the Terran’s fault. And that given education it was well within their abilities to lessen the drain on Pylo’s time. To properly realize and take up the responsibilities required for their own well being.

Also it helped that Quarti, Aleph and Omega had promised to make cake and share it with Pylo!

It was in celebration of various milestones of their journey being passed. Although the reasoning behind it seemed arbitrary. Honestly Pylo was a bit confused by the measures used. Why exactly they would feel the need to put any significance on their home habitat loosely returning to the same position (but not even the exact position) as it had been at the time of their birth?

It was blatantly obvious that they DID but why was it held in such importance?

Or for that matter the significance of marking the ‘anniversary’ of their departure. Pylo knew that at least Aleph had enough grasp of Ship speak to know the truth of the matter. They were far distant and even compressed in their own local moments from the perspective of that distant slow moving behemoth they had called a home.

Pylo supposed she could imagine that this was their first journey at proper interstellar speeds. That was worthy of celebration, but that had already happened! Really it was all kinds of confusing.

Strange local custom like the millions of others that Pylo had mostly forgotten in her journeys with Tunie.

But that hardly mattered, because apparently cake was a traditional dish of celebration! Pylo would put up with a great deal of strange and arbitrary customs for the excuse to eat cake! Yes the caloric content was somewhat sparse compared to the sludge she was literally force gorging herself on right now.

But the flavors?! The nuance of crushed gametes! Complex carbon chains and compounds severed, sterilized and teased with sub-secondary processes! And for added nuance there was the decadent mother juice based coatings! Several species offspring nurturing efluvients mashed and baked and threshed! Modified and refined and focused! And then the subtly nuanced and delightful reproductive contracts of primitive beasts speckled atop the cakes as a further spiked lure!

Pylo had needed to add several new and strange species to her various garden creches to accommodate the variety of terran additions she had partaken!

Cake was truly a delicious invention of terrans! One she was definitely going to introduce to her family!

She suspected quite a number of her sisters would have ideas for ways to expand and improve on the context after they had sampled the originals Pylo kept in storage. Preserving the viability of several of the reproductive components was definitely a minimum. Probably also including a few more varieties of nurturing mother nectars from the courtesan menagerie population as well?

It was just as well that they were traveling towards one of her mother’s gift caches. She definitely was going to want to organize a rendezvous with them and it would be good to have something a bit more recent to go off of then the one she had picked up seven trips ago.

Oh she wished she could talk to Tunie about all of this. But the beautiful wonderful ship was far too busy with avoiding killing all of them with random debris.

Another reason to dislike the acceleration. Although she would never wish anything so cruel as to ground her friend and ship. Tunie was at her most beautiful and happy with her entire being sharpened and honed to the task.

Still it was inconvenient.

Pylo huffed more coolant vapor as she forced another layer of energy reserves into place.

She was just about stuffed to her every available inter-tissue crevice with capacitance. It would last for a time.

Now she had more patrols to make and passages and connections to purge of the aggravating ████████ infestation.

But soon there would be cake!