She was not entirely sure of the performance.

It was a lot of many things but the dancing was very small and hard to follow.

Tunie could see all of it of course, but the light was super squished by little tiny eyes. Short, flat that is crampy and squished. Like peeking really hard into a building of her Motherport through a window lacquered in flaky tasteless grist that was hardly wider than a tine of her feathers as far down inside as she could pull the light in from as she did laps around the hollow.

Even with the help of one of the actual little ships that were propositioning her to be crew, Tunie found it hard to follow something so small.

So much less volume to see, so much less texture, color, vibrancy and humming, buzzing frequencies. It was strange to think that this was still more than they were seeing!

She recognized the small crew. When she had been puttering around a bit to flex her feathers she had met most of them. It was before her new-for-crew parts had properly woken up.

This one had been all tied and woven into and out of her Motherport, with springly swoops, it was clumsy and slow and silly, full of tumbles and joy but also glittering and full of vibrancy and hues, full of liquid love and joy and scrumptious glitters.

With threads of tightly woven family that linked it to every other part of the Motherport. Joyful closely tied overlapping twisted inversely multi brachiating joins to the vibrant life all through her Creche and before it.

She had known and appreciated it and even spoken to it then.

At first Tunie had not really understood the difference between the speck and the rest of the port. Then after a while conversing with its tiny voice as softly and small as she could speak and listen she had concluded it was not actually the Motherport.

So naturally with what context she could surmise she had decided it was a ship, but a very feeble and tiny one, like if somehow a single feather was clogged over in blotting and then soaked til the tines no longer could weft the aether but still pushed itself along with little puffs of ballast.

And now that her crew bits were growing in and sorting themselves out she could see it in a new light, dazzling in the far-wide and short ranges, the sort that tickled and burnt her wriggly motiles. Alongside all of these potential crew. Appreciate them more than just as extensions of her Motherport or strange clumsy ships.

Although it was still rough and made her feel like she was trying to look at something through deeply occluding clouds of many sized particulates in silicate, gold, aluminum, silver and iron. So dense, shiny and varied in size that it distorted and refracted the majority of the lights in her eyes, casting a disorientingly splitting of the sight lines in every direction until the courses were so chaotic she could not even continue seeing their futures.

She had found the way that the little one was ecologically linked to everything around her of course. As she had recognized before.

But now this was more than that.

Connections shined and reflected with potencies and potentials almost like the trajectories that still were curtailed and snarled so short inside Tunie’s memory and yet were echoing and mirroring off every other crew-like thing.

It was a proper and potential friend different from how she had understood such things before.

A friend that was strange, wiggly and odd. Like fuzzy and fluffy sharp crystals with clear distinct blurriness? Inverted fractal enfolding past-tensified muddle-contrasted? Coiled up tightly self reflecting mirrored transparent distorted? Narrow-wide color-monochrome?

Properties that were difficult to grapple the light into meaning with. Things like an identity that was somehow only the size of two or three of her own eyes. It was incredible and disturbing how so much could really truly fit in so little.

How something that could move so little could be so much.

She thought it was really sweet and adorable.

All of them were growing ever more cuddly and enticing as she finished settling her newest components.

Small and practically blind but in a way that was deeply endearing. Even the actually tiny ships that could dance and share their eyes were becoming so quaint and delightful in new ways.

It almost made accepting them as a crew seem more warm and fuzzy. Like star breath washing her feathers. Shining bright and harsh and searing in each eye til the more delicate receptors were dulled and darkened for their own safety.

It still made her quiver, made her flex and reach out to leap, made her afraid to consider the precipice of accepting them as her crew.

But many of them were friends, or potential friends already.

The performer in the middle of the-Motherport’s-parts-that-had-always-been-there-for-her-when -she-needed-it was spry and earnest and maybe a little clumsy in how she danced, like a inner wriggly inner motile that had been fitted with a coat of feathers to spin and laugh! But delightful for it all the same.

That was the one she had mistaken for a clumsy tiny ship mote before!

The freshest and newest and strangest of her maybe to be crew was at the same time old. She had met them many times, each one different, each one subtly more or less in different ways.

When she chewed on the details inside with her new parts she found them becoming much less shaped like these new person things then they were before.

Tunie found that comforting in a way, it was much more familiar with the ecological basis. But different, sharp, with eyes that were not eyes and yet sang with her own in ways that none of the other potential crew could.

Not even the little ships with the tasty looking coats.

Those were the least changed, having been proper ships before (if tiny inconsequential ones).

They were peppery and spicy and they came with so much sting and sharp that it gave her a quivering appreciation all through her feathers.

Her gaze traced the potencies that had left subtle grooves among their feathers, the matting that never was fully pulled apart and instead allowed to simply burr and gnat together. The actnic sharp cues of harsh buzzing danger. The way they spun light in and out to all around them the subtle little ecological sprites that waited upon their call. The lines and cues of deep lineage of stings and burns that could be unleashed in a moment's notice.

Tunie had seen the small ships play fiercely and brightly with light that could even singe her own feathers if she got too close. And she could see the same tracers live, dead and sleeping in each of the pair of little ships.

Despite their smallness they carried a fierce spice of threat.

They were sadly unable to leap like she could, Their feathers soft and stunted and barely able to do more than buffer and cool them, with a little wiggly twisties of nudging that barely covered her own girth.

If something was only nimble when very slow, did it still count as nimble?

Another potential crew emerged out of the vagaries of her latest parts to shine, She recognized those flows, those patterns. Not often but sometimes there were treats and snacks and little nuances when she was suckling from the feeds of her Motherport.

This potential crew was only recently rendered and resolvable into the sharp and clear shape that was individuality. A shape that was of a course with one another and matter and make of a thing but actually distinct instead of merely motiles and forms within a whole.

Seperate from the greater context of the all encompassing Motherport. They were much like the singing one that had been mistaken for a ship. Tiny and small and yet positioned like the root of a feather, an anchor that pivots far more than itself. That when working in congress could as she did leap and throw vastness to speeds impossible alone.

This crew potentiate was like that, one of the roots of the Motherport’s strange and alien raiment of effectors. That moved without moving, that changed without flight.

And of course there was her oldest friend, who had grown with her, as part of her, and then been separate from her.

Who had once been many and now was one.

Who yet could still speak to her in the secret way that was not dance, nor eye. Who knew her inner wriggling symbiotes each and all and in turn known by them.

The comfort of that old and dear friend that had always been with her was the biggest reason Tunie calmed her fear.

The part of the Motherport who was always there to listen spoke to her, showed her, told her and shared with her visions and shadows.

It was not as deep as any two of her eyes could have seen with the microscope. It felt like she was squeezing light out of a crack in the reef wall, twisted around six corners of reflective crystal shining aluminum and then smeared between obfuscating and obscuring nitrogen, chlorine and sulfur dust.

But it was almost like being right there deep inside the closed off parts of the Motherport.

“It’s very sweet of you Tunie to humor her desires like that.”

Tunie spoke as if she tumbled in laughter, she phantom shimmied in agitation and embarrassment, she sighed and lamented and teased the tiny ship in gossip for having such small eyes with hardly any of herself to be said within them.

Tunie spoke of the small little ship and the confusion to have so much living meat and flesh inside compared to the sparse and threaded body of Tunie where nearly everything was eyes or feathers.

She spoke of the family lines she had seen growing and surmised in her ecological sense. Of the hilarious and absurd joke of how the tiny ships used something as strange and bizarre as their teeth and stings to think compared to the far more sensible place to rest one’s being in the roots of the feathers and the wells of the eyes.

Considering the breadth of their absurdities and the delicate little niches that demanded them.

She considered the tickling tingles of vision that was shared with Tunie via the sparse miniscule eyes and how little of her own sight was making it back to the other’s vision.

It was adorable, and laughable and delightful and Tunie would not trade a moment of anything to deny herself the sight of the little vessel in spite of it.

After all of that the nestled together part of the Mother port which spoke softly spoke again, although Tunie found it kind of silly how little it seemed to have caught in her own message.

But then that just was what it meant to be a Ship.

“Oh she knows she’s only giving you a hint but the earnestness of it is to be commended is it not? You shouldn't laugh at the girl so much.”

So much missed.

Would that part of herself change after they became Crew? Tunie was uncertain, she quivered in concern, she fretted on all the contagions that might be introduced, all the strange ways this could change her. In all the ways that she felt alone now that she could understand that the Motherport was not like her.

That not even the other ships were like her. Having a crew would change her, and she had never met another ship without a crew. Who had never gone through the bonding that would make her different from she was.

There were no feral ships in the Motherport, although she heard tell of them and saw sight of them in the eyes of others.

But they were not the same as a young Ship even as she witnessed them. The ferals were different from her too.

She could feel the isolation and the lack but also still that deep frisson returning. There was never going to be a way she would ever be the same as she was after this commitment.

The part of the Motherport which yet held her potential crew inside itself spoke again, still not seeing all she was seeing, not feeling all she felt. But enough to comfort her anyway. Her crew would change her.

Despite how much she tried to accept the fearfulness of that it was undeniable.

“Oh they are all quite pleasant I think, Very devoted I think they will make you a very fine crew. Don’t worry your feathers over it.”

Tunie did not want to refuse a crew, she had realized that as her parts settled that she desperately did want them. But the tension as it all was coming together inside herself was growing ever sharper, harsher, like the chewers that stripped old bone struts away when she needed to brace and grow new ones.

The other ships had an eerie tone sometimes to Tunie. They were spooky and strange about their crew. Before she had the parts to recognize the distinction they had always sounded just like speaking of an intractable part of themselves.

But now she could see the separation. It was disquieting.

Crew were going to be a part of her in some new and yet unrealized way. No ship conveyed it clearly to her. No person-like shape in the Motherport seemed able to either.

Her anxiety could not be quenched by any other.

But they all cared for her and tried anyway.

“Don’t worry your eyes over it either girl. They all love you plainly as I can see.”

Tunie fluffed herself hard, grabbing hold of the aether and locking herself in place. She could feel the longing to fill the void that was opening up inside her.

The place that her crew would fit, she could feel the importance from everyone she knew, from her Motherport and its many diffuse and disparate beings insistent that she find a crew she accepted, that she trusted.

But in the same gentle soft murmurings they all of them promised that these were good candidates too.

But it was still up to her, they promised it was, it was vital that it was.

Even the tiny ship who shared her eyes with Tunie insisted that this was important. That she does it only by her own decision. That it was her action and no one else’s

She would make the choice and no other.

Tunie watched this last candidate to complete the set. Like all of them she knew the course of this one. Like all of her crew there was a shared course with her.

None of them had traveled beyond the Motherport. Some had shorter courses then others. Less time spent transiting around and around the hollow.

But all of them were born of this place as much as she was.

They were children of her Motherport too.

How could she not trust them?

But still in spite of every reassurance from without and within, Tunie trembled with the squirming thought that perhaps she should leap and ignore the gnawing hollowness inside.

Flee away from it all to set out on her own.

Yet the thought of that loneliness burned with an even more terrible future fear than the trepidation of change.

Tunie watched with agitation and longing. Fear and anticipation.

Her potential crew were now coming to meet her.