Omega felt a hot itching sting in her soul. She had not properly noticed it but with nothing to look at or feel but slimy, silky, pink, alien skin pressed and wrapped all around her it was sort of hard to deal with anything else.

Her stomach suddenly dropped out inside her and her inner ear panicked.

“Aleph! You okay?”

Her once protege and now honestly highly capable crew mate mumbled and finally managed a strained groan of frustration.

“I’m fine... But that was an acceleration shift. We must be turning around to start a burn the other way and... Uh... Oh sodding gimble-wabe! I Missed Tunie giving us a warning hours ago because Quarti beaned you with a tea cup!”

Omega huffed and squirmed to try and give herself some distraction but the itching pain got suddenly sharp and searing in the spirit-wise voutward direction. It itched so bad she missed the next bit Aleph said until the pain was just a dull sting.

“Eh? Huh? Could you repeat that? Something is really messing with my soul-senses. Its distracting”

Aleph huffed heavily.

“I said that she’s not flipping around! Tunie is uh... just gonna brake herself without changing her facing! We need to get loose and start shuffling everything or its gonna make a huge mess of the ‘ponics!”

Omega groaned and tried to reach for the astrogation expert system-

“Omega?! Hey! Wake up! You there!”

What? What just happened? She was hurting all over and there were stings and pains in places definitely not in her body.

“Uh... I was trying to get a share swap and I... Ow... OW what the blazes and abyssal fuck-nuggets?! What?!”

That HURT.

That hurt in ways she didn't even realize one could hurt. It was like a broken arm but somehow on the inner lining of her stomach. It made her feel floppy and stinging all over.

And it hurt enough when she had tried to-

She was laying on her back in the fluffy clouds. Her ears were ringing and her soul share was empty. She slowly turned her head. She was numbly stinging from every kind of pain imaginable and feeling perfectly alright in every single muscle, bone and square millimeter of skin.

She was extremely aware of every single bit of herself to the point it was actually uncomfortable and itchy.

She coughed and tried speaking without turning or moving too much.

“Aleph... What just happened?”

Her crewmate was rummaging and cursing somewhere she could not see.

“Not now! Just... don’t try to do anything with resonance at all or something. Elsie and Tunie’s uh... Motile Slug-tube-things are helping me fine... mostly... Just lay there until you can get up and don’t strain yourself”

There was a lot of noise. Omega felt dizzy and out of sorts and simultaneously hurting and not hurting.

Her head felt fantastic and also like it was awful all inside.

Everything around her looked subtly wrong some how.

“Uh... I think I’m okay like... physicaly maybe I should-”

Aleph shouted from whatever she was doing that Omega could not see from this angle.

“No! No just stay put and don’t uh... don’t try to do anything spirit or soul or whatever. Elsie thinks you might have sprained something. Thinks quarti got it even worse then you and that’s why she went all mad crazy”

Omega just lay there. It was really frustrating. She simultaneously felt fine and sore at the same time. She could barely even begin to describe HOW she was sore.

It was not her back, it was not her skin, it was none of her muscles, honestly her head and a few cramps in her neck were the worst of how she felt.

And at the same time her... her things she had never realized existed in her soul ACHED.

She didn't even know souls COULD ache.

There were stories that said they did but she’d never really believed that was literal. She was pretty sure spiritual injuries were pretty much all or nothing. Or more insidious and creeping kind of disease corruption things.

Hellish abominations in the deep world skin even the stories about being EATEN as a soul suggested that it didn't hurt really. You just were made into something else immediately and that was the horror of it.

She tried lifting an arm and that felt mostly alright.

She tried flexing her toes and sitting up.

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That was fine too.

She turned to look and saw Aleph, a ‘herd’ of the pink tube monsters and Elsie rummaging over what honestly looked like an upended garden/trash heap.

What was that? She did not really fully recognize it. Something to do with the agricultural stacks or the maintenance system? She started to reach for a share and almost completely whited out in pain over it.

She didn't realize she was screaming.

Her throat hurt now too though.

Aleph was there with a cold washcloth on her head. She felt dizzy and feverish.

“I Told you ya big garbler buffoon of a wastrel! That you need to not reach for anything! No soul stuff, no skill shares, no nothing! Don’t even try to sing. You got like... pummeled with a bunch of somethings and had like a billion tiny-tiny-tiny pieces of your spirit organ things knocked out of place. Or something like that, Elsie is not actually very GOOD at resonance stuff. They just have a basic physics guide and some supposition of our kind of biology”

Omega grinned weakly and gave her a thumbs up.

“Right... sorry... aye-aye captain! Ueh”

That made sense right? Whatever okay don’t reach for anything. Right she was having a burnout headache like she overused her resonance symbiotes. How long had it been since she did that by accident?

Uh wait, like a year?

Yeah the thing with Pylo.

Ugh.

Aleph was not there anymore. She had to just let her head cool off and wait for things to make sense and not try to reach for any of the instinctive shamanistic reflexes she had honed for decades.

Easy!

Ugh! This sucked!

It was awful!

She was so confused and out of the loop and bored!

She sat up and walked, it was awful her body worked FINE, she was a little dizzy and off balance but otherwise everything worked great.

But she couldn't actually use any of her spiritual acumen or generate a choir or anything.

Even thinking about doing that sent nasty flare ups of pain through her. She apparently so innately did things even considering it apparently did ‘something’.

The big black marble of the ‘window’ was sitting there in the clouds. For some reason the table and chairs were embedded around it upside down in other hillocks of fluffy white.

Wait. She could think this one through.

Aleph had said something about the ship braking. Acceleration for gravity had stopped.

Oh.

“Hey... Wait... Why Is Everything upside down?!”

Aleph groaned in frustration.

“Omega. Look you are a great friend but without your skill shares you are useless so just sit there and I dunno look out the window! Me and Elsie have to get all these crops right side up or we are going to have to either eat the emergency rations or whatever stuff Pylo can produce that’s edible.”

Omega blanched a little, eating from Pylo’s dairy produce was... no no NO! Definitely not interested in doing more than strictly necessary. Getting the milk and eggs was cheek burningly embarrassing as it is.

She leaned over the black orb of the window and poked it a bit.

“Hey! Could you show us what we just went through to cause all this-”

The view was incredible. It was spectacular radience and corruscating color.

It momentarily shocked her into inner stillness and silence.

[https://i.imgur.com/43IdHTE.png]

The voice of the narrator/naturalist/whatever it was the interface was called softly explained.

“Around every star is an extensive and progressively thickening envelope of highly charged matter and symbiotic organisms. Study of these forms of cantia is problematic and difficult for many reasons. Including but not limited to their extremely hazardous niche within lethal proximity to stellar objects and the vanishingly minute time frames under which an entire life cycle can be executed.”

Omega sighed heavily and tightly held onto herself to avoid pulling on any skill shares or assistance in understanding what the sea of words flowing over her must mean.

She just listened to the nice soft voice and tried to focus on the pretty pictures as they slowly swept over the vast ‘wake’ of Tunie’s passage through the star’s extremely rarefied outermost ‘atmosphere’.

Trying to commit it to memory so that she could figure out whatever it was whenever she could fix whatever was wrong with her soul.