Pylo indulged in her meal.

The next course was everything Pylo had hoped it would be and more. a Veritable zoo of freshly plucked fruits, whole and treated for maximum ripeness. Choke full of seeds, embryos, and eggs. All still viable. Looking for surrogation or transport to distant places.

Offering up the stores of flesh their parents had imbued them with or nestled them within.

There was also a wonderful froth of parasites. Eager to try and entice Pylo by nuzzling for purchase in her flesh.

But Pylo politely and sternly told all of those to encyst themselves and pass along. There were very poor odds any of these endemic fauna could find proper hosts outside of the people or the forest around them. Not without significant ability to do useful work for someone else to pay for the accommodations.

And on the whole most of these delicacies were far too simple to provide that. Too quaint and feral.

Still Pylo appreciated sampling the genes of so many forms, contemplating the vast spiraling interrelations of each.

Savoring every nuance.

She would remember a few choice phrases of transcription and regulatory function presented for later.

Quarti was the next to summon her course by supping upon the finishing waters. The Eldest Masters content to nibble and warble among themselves. Delaying the preparations as was their due. The feast would be going for quite some time.

It worked on several layers. It was not going to be slow enough for Tradition to manage more than a perfunctory greeting. But That was just the way with her. Pylo had only ever stayed long enough for a deep conversation once and the result had made Tunie rather tetchy and cranky with being in one place for so long.

So there would not be a repeat of that.

Now Pylo only ever left conversational payloads for her friend.

It was mostly the same thing after she re-integrated the paths taken into her episodic memory and resynthesized it into a linear narrative with the rest of her memories after all.

Still the meal!

To be honest the caloric content was abysmal. But you did not eat such feasts for pure calories. You did it for the theater, for the message, for the social integration and bonding in the case of Terrans and The People.

Aleph was still eating plates with bits and pieces of the rest of the sample platter. The terrans were actually settling on sharing just the one heart between them.

Pylo sighed while shucking the rind from a particularly juicy fruit. Rolling the jelly to partition the seeds and then letting her enzymes etch them away before spitting the primed and ready for planting seeds into a vase provided for the purpose.

They needed to be warned about what the feast was going to entail.

"Aleph. You do realize this is just the first course right?” You'll probably want to leave room for more."

That apparently caught the youngest terran by surprise looking over everything, then noticing the cloud of fruits Aleph had been sampling.

“There’s going to be MORE?! How many?”

The Clerk helpfully chirped up while squeezing one of the water finishers into her feeding port.

“Oh between Forty-Three and Fifty-Seven depending on your preferences Ma’am. Although there should be time to take reprieves for rest and to expel waste for you.”

That bothered Aleph enough to get her to stop eating entirely.

“Forty Courses?! Are they all going to be this size? That’s... Uh I think I’d explode if I even tried to eat like THAT.”

Aleph waved her hands at one of the Masters who offered a smile and a gape of greeting between stuffing three of the hearts into her mouth.

Pylo parted her own lips in a comparable gesture of assent to the master who returned to eating while Pylo slid some more of those wonderful fruits into her mouth for a truly delightful enzymic parceling.

The youngest terran stared down at the portion of plate she had been eating, turning it over in her hands before squinting down at the table’s branching arm around her.

There was a small speck of living accumulate in the white fibres of the table’s carving.

Hmmm it was an interesting growth, a brief consideration showed the lineages within were very venerable, familiar from one of Pylo’s earlier visits actually! It really contributed to the whole story of the table, made it cohesive.

Oh but attention was better served in a particularly novel little kink of mutation and transcription error in one particular seed of the last fruit she swallowed.

Hah! That was a nice one... hilarious really she would-

▙◀ was in motion almost before Pylo could even recognize the signals were moving through the stone born accursed canner heap’s actuators.

It was just like before when the thing had detonated a limb right in the middle of a conversation. Happening and finished before Pylo could properly react or even recognize what was happening.

Aleph was frozen, wincing a little at the pressure of the grip on her wrist, pressed just so her hand could not physically close in where a single nail was about to scrape at the rough flakey growth.

Her other hand had let go of the plate so it drifted away.

Slowly the micropolity was shifting, moving itself in interposing between Aleph and the table’s branch. Aiming to be cradled around the venerable speck brooding over it with limbs splayed out all around.

Aleph had tears welling a bit in her eyes from the injury.

The Terran was injured...

▙◀ had injured one of Pylo’s Passengers.

Injured.

Her.

Passenger.

The grip was still pressed into the flesh where Pylo could practically taste the smattering of burst blood vessels and crushed tissue. There was a single drop of blood where one of the more angular parts of the actuator had sheared against her skin.

Aleph was speaking but Pylo’s entire focus was on the interior of the micropolity.

“Elsie! Ow! What gives?!”

The traitorous micropolity was forming an answer, rallying excuses and platitudes.

The Demiurges were in disarray, Altruism was conflicted; they had ties to this act! Survival was coiling ready to attempt an ejection and escape into the wilderness. But was stalled with the near certainty that to try and flee here would be death for the entire accursed franchise.

Furthermore even this most paranoid of the Demiurges had threads of action and contractual obligation in this act.

The nerve signals for aleph's statement had of course not even the very first ones reached her lips or voice box yet. But the mental motion that in Pylos opinion was the actual moment of speech was there.

The Embassy was already priming, rallying the ratifications and orders that had dared to enact this. Pylo had been so sure, she was so certain she had properly leashed the micropolity.

But just like she feared they found some technicality. Some weaseling squirming idiosyncrasies and definitional perspective extrapolations to excuse treachery!

Pylo’s Ovireticuli flared, the passages that had been just moments ago parceling out select and clean enzymes began to prepare.

To speak the death of this interloper.

And then her account in the embassy ballooned and swelled with power and influence.

Precisely as agreed in the contract.

The clout of the exchange, the irrevocable access, everything she had stipulated and required of the Demiurges as collateral.

What would if she chose to enact it would effectively gut, parcel and annihilate their entire apparatus of choice and goal setting.

Enough shares to dissolve the franchise and lay even the scriptures that could spawn another barren and fallow.

Sterilize the entire micropolity’s line.

Potentially even the necessary access to subvert and overthrow any sibling sufficiently similar to ▙◀ in lineage or heritage.

To cut off a confrontation before it could even begin. With potentially an entire species!

All of it sitting as a payload unencrypted or hidden in the account opened for her in the embassy.

Which was of course entirely a formality and empty gesture, since she could have just grabbed those by force anyway.

Well maybe. If she had known where they were. She had not actually recognized that those codes and rights even EXISTED before now, obfuscated somehow across the entire mass of the polity.

But there it was, if ▙◀ was a terran this would be like...

Like laying herself splayed open and quartered, ready to be slaughtered. Half opened up even for Pylo’s convenience.

At her mercy entirely.

But with a single desperate plea appended on it.

Wow! This Terranism issue was worse than she thought.

Still the message.

“Please, We did it for good and love. Hear us out. The reasons are ones a siren should understand better than anyone. Please, For Love.”

Pylo roiled inside.

The words hurt and stung and made the cavities that once were memories burn.

It was not the same words, not even close, but the spirit of them was so close to those...

Those things which could not be recalled. Encrypted behind chemical computing delays and cortical votings. The keys discarded and overridden.

Burnt out.

Forgotten.

Pylo slipped her perception back into terran time, she had no immediate action needed now.

The traitor could not relinquish that account of access fast enough now. It would be an effort far too slow for it to try and change things up or sneak the clout away.

She could afford to hear this as Aleph did. To wait if it satisfied both her judgement and her Passenger’s.

But if it was not a very good explanation?

There would not be anything left to be remembered of ▙◀.