Aleph finally spoke.

Even while Pylo was still a bit dazed trying to decipher everything that had been sang and implied.

“So... where does that happen? Where did that story come from?”

Quarti laughed.

“Oh I made it all up my lovely little sillies! It Was really quite a lot of work, spoke to many a friends to tease it all out”

Omega shook her head and tilted it to the side.

“Tease it out?”

Quarti nodded.

“Yeah, I had to come up with how the stars still worked... and explain where people came from. Explain all the little stories... the lives. The struggle. Some of my friends were very specific on that...”

Omega was stilled to silence.

Aleph however was flaring with bafflement.

“Wait, your story was supposed to be about humans?! How could humans have ever evolved somewhere like that?! What were they descended from? How could they even LIVE without the ecology of Terra!”

Quarti laughed and started trying to explain, words pouring over Aleph and Omega to try and explain, but only being half received.

Apparently garbled somehow by her age or dialect.

Maybe that was why she was always so nice to Pylo, she knew how it was to be misunderstood?

Pylo however was a bit distracted mulling on what she had said. She’d come up with the story whole cloth? Even though it felt so true? It was amazing, she had wrought life so real that it was like she had lived it to tell?

Omega was talking about something as Pylo came back to herself.

“-so I was thinking I could tell a story about-”

Pylo spoke softly as she could, gently brushing the relevant bits of each terran’s curdled up neurons.

“Could I tell one?”

Her three passengers turned towards her with surprise, although aleph’s eyes were widening and a smile splitting her face in a way that might be painful. Pylo was pretty sure that flatlander mouths were not supposed to.

“Did she just say what I think she said?”

Quarti smiled warmly and nodded a bit.

“Dear Beautiful Pylo wishes to tell a tale?”

Omega seemed wary but offered a tentative smile and nod of her own.

“Yes... could I tell a story? That is how it works correct?”

Everyone waited as Pylo tried to organize memories, warm and soft and distant in time.

“When I was a young girl I was not very proper...”

She tried to pick just the right associations but it was hard to reach back into herself and also out into the trio’s heads at the same time.

“I enjoyed the usual games with my sisters and cousins. I played with jokes and did little flirtlings with visitors... Like any girl my age would... but I prefered to be outside”

She thought back to the memories, she was acceptable for the family back then. Nothing stood out about her then. She was just a normal little child with none of the disappointment and worry that would later come to cling to her.

But even then she had wandered out to look at the stars and the reef a little more than any other of her sisters.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“One time I was out watching the ports, at the ships coming and going, when I noticed a very small one swooping around close to the city”

[https://i.imgur.com/9n9ojFl.png]

She laughed a bit.

“I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I was quite young so I simply shoved off of the family home and sailed out to meet this strange little Ship”

She thought back to her elder sisters ,those from clutches much earlier then her own. How terrified she had made Artemis the creche watcher.

“The Ship of course was also very-very young, though also very-very much older than stupid little sprout me. But for Ships she was still just a child all the same. Not old enough to leave the city of her birth.”

Pylo felt warm and happy and tried to find the way to show that to her audience of passengers. Tried to capture some of that hint of the memory as she stayed to just the parts that Omega proscribed as ‘safe’.

“It gave the poor dear a bit of a shock to start, but then the two of us played... I tried to speak with her even though she was already much bigger then I was and it was very hard to speak big enough for her to hear me”

Pylo wanted to laugh, so she moved as if she did. In the way that the Flatlanders would understand.

“That was a lot of fun, and as I started working through it. As we tried to narrow down and spread out our voices and our songs with each other. Little me and that little ship really had a great time”

She peered at the Flatlanders again, trying to get a gauge, they seemed to be getting something out of it. Although Aleph looked like her blood might start bursting from her cheeks they had gone so plump and open with it.

“My nurse-sister was so mad with me when she finally found the two of us, but I was too delighted to care. I’d gone and made a friend with someone that none of my sisters ever had. And also I just, I really liked that little Ship much more than any of my flirtlets that I had found with my sisters”

She huffed and looked around at all of the swaying fronds of the baffling. Here near the heart of her best friend.

“And-”

Something starting whining and pinging in the little orb. Aleph cursed, Omega sighed and Quarti sighed and shook her head.

“Ah, I guess that’s all the time we get, but long story short, That little ship and I both grew up, and I’d say she’s doing really well don’t you think? Ain’t that right Big Girl?”

“◸!”

The Flatlanders grumbled and laughed and waved thanks to Pylo as Aleph grabbed one of the control sticks and started guiding the big orb back along the way to their silly little canner room.

Oh drat!

Pylo was supposed to finish making them better accommodations and totally forgot!

Well it’s not like she ever told the Passengers she was trying to do that, but with all the touring and surgery and what not she had forgotten to work on it at all!

She better get started on that again.

“Hey tunie, do you remember where I was when I dropped that load of left over packaging?!”