Omega floated, wrapped in a gooey blanket, focusing on the orb of the window with her eyes and the sound of Elsie’s words with her ears.

Lightly flexing her voice in and out of resonance with the flora and fauna of the gooey biofilms lathered all over her. Settled into her hair and over her brow and thickest where it pooled along her spine.

Never pushing too hard, never pulling too sharp. Gentle and easy.

“This culture is a masterwork of engineering. You took disparate forms of yeast, bacteria, pluripotent human spores, starches, sugars, water and several more to construct a self reinforcing psudo-reso material that complements and amplifies the signal semblance of your own resonance facilitating much greater range against the natural background noise!”

She itched to know what so many of those words meant, she remembered having known, she felt the absence of that knowledge worse than her memories of losing a hand. But she focused on just the words, on the rythm and the subtle wonder and beauty flowing by in the window.

“The ecosystem that self assembled is brilliantly robust and seems to be dealing with or even incorporating hundreds of species in the environment dynamically with no physical barrier!”

Quarti was cocooned in her own bubble of seething biofilm, the mass glowing sharply in blue light, showing signs of far more intensive resonance activity then Omega could afford. She recalled that she preferred the sterile sanitation of the meditation pods but every time she tried to muster an argument Quarti would hit her with something.

Or even worse, she would leverage a flood of arguments Omega could simply not refute without straining herself for a skill share. So they did it the ‘old way’ that was already mostly being phased out when Omega was on her second life!

The gross, filthy, lewd muck. She knew she used to have so many good arguments against having to wallow in this stuff. She used to know why it was not just simply gross awfulness that was laced with Quarti’s snot, spittle, blood and things she wanted to not think of.

But all she could muster was it was icky.

And Quarti was honestly kinder when she just threw things at Omega instead of destroying her infantile arguments.

"Many of these species never evolved to survive outside terran symbion chambers, but here the ecology balances the microbiome exactly as is needed for them to thrive millimeters from the open air. Quarti, you're a genius. "

The praise finally seemed to get the prophet and alien proclaimed genius to open one eye, forehead still faintly glowing with the blue subdermal glow of resonance. Her eyes shining from within in a way that suggested to Omega she probably could not see a thing.

“Ey? Nah, iso just being the right flavor of recipe, push an shove an a million times over practice. Most of this not genuine my own knowing. Was childrens who learned it in the first hundred years. But thousand after that every few dozen generations fool childs muck up and lose the mother crops local. Set back the priests, shamans, soothsayers by a hundred years. Have had to learn the roots of making the batches to fill in for idiots”

Omega let the words flow, she didn't catch them, did not let any curiosity distract her. She focused on the branches and the silvery threads and the flocks of things she knew not what that flew by as they rose through what for all its grandeur and scale was much like a wood on Terra.

"I doubt it. Finding a configuration like this should have taken millions of years of trial and error. And a deep conceptual understanding to integrate all these more recent species without spoiling the whole balance."

If you did not pay attention to the sense of scale and if nothing was getting particularly close and you ignored how there was a deep, endless chasm of forever darkness below it was like a particularly deep and old forest somewhere in the mid-land valleys.

“Not really much ya over-thinking-idiot. Could even teach Aleph how to do it within a hundred years. You just need the right flavor, taste of a bit of spiky, a dash of twisty, spin and churn and let it warm and grow until you smell it right, seep a bito milk so it sours just right. Then churn and twist until you feel the spring, Wossa hardest dealing without the gravity from terra. Feels all not quite right. Oh and if the air is thin you have to use extra wheat germ to make sure it grombles. ”

Ignore the strange tumbling heaps of what was obviously dead and cluttering wood and crowding thickets of undergrowth that kept the vision from reaching far as she would like.

Yes, don’t focus on the strange and curious spurring alien lights and creatures. Focus on the familiar and mundane of it. Yes that was a sweeping flight of strange delta winged creatures.

But they also fluttered amidst the colorful more or less flowers like any number of pollinators she had seen visiting groves in the gardens of the academy.

Some of them almost even moved as if they were flapping wings!

"That might be for the finished recipe, but you might not realize how much talent is implicit in being able to intuit those things. You must have gotten the underlying knowledge from somewhere."

Quarti closed her eyes and the blue of resonance activity that Omega vaguely thought seemed out of place as a sign of strain/inexpert work with the elder terran flashed brighter.

“Not ken any secret knowledge fool box boggart. Is done this way, was done this way, if not having had the right bits, nay know what to even do. Knew this wheat, knew this milk dear pylo make and how it was like and not like the first mummy cow milk and what it missed from human cream by taste. Knew what grows in my spit, what the wonts and hawts of me own line in this fleshy youngling be. Learned these, knew how ta mix em up right. Know the taste of the right and the stink of the wrong. Don’t know anything else. Boggle me bond britches on how any of this flub actually work”

Omega focused on breathing, watching without thinking, listening without wondering. Letting the voice of her spirit flex in gentle, slow, smooth tones. Letting the echo of the goop floating around and on her and how it was alike and unalike the symbiotes that nestled inside her.

How they in turn were similar to the loom of nervous tissue up and down her body that anchored and shared and fed and joined with her soul.

"Well, the ecological machine you've built here, with it's million moving parts, is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen."

Huh? Elsie talking of beauty, that was new. She thought back over the conversation and felt a growing burning itch to know, to reach. But she took a deep heavy breath and turned inward, and then outward and stared at the glitter and splendor of sunbeams shining through the wood that was not a wood.

The undergrowth of a forest bigger than worlds.

“Wot not any prettier than a sourdough or a cheese wheel ya fool box for brains.”

That got Elsie to question honestly.

“Really? Could you show me this cheese?”

Which got Quarti laughing and nodding over to where she had setup a ‘cheese cave’ for some of the dairy Pylo provided earlier in the year.