Aleph flopped into one of the fluffy cushioning ‘clouds’ of the habitat. It had not been a fun couple of shifts. Gardens by their nature generally did poorly if upended randomly and buried in the various hydroponic equipment that supported them.

It was honestly only because of the very same cushioning she was lounging in that more then half of the plants had not been more badly damaged. She suspected that of the mangled plants only a few of them were going to actually pull through to harvest and even of those that did the yields were probably impaired from the trauma.

They were going to have to ration things and likely dig into the tasteless emergency stores. Which was unfortunate because they were then going to have to rebuild those emergency stores as well, which meant that a portion of their crop produce was going to be going into that instead of tasty but more perishable goods.

It was going to double everyone’s cooking and gardening shifts for months and mean their actual meal choices were limited. But It was better than letting the emergency ration stores deplete so much that they would risk starvation if there had been a full year of total crop failures.

The worst part of it all was that up until just a few hours ago she was the only able bodied terran in the crew. Omega was more or less useless until she healed her spiritual injuries (and wasn't that a crazy thing she had never thought possible). Without the buoy of the skill share her former mentor was demoted to just a pair of amateur hands to direct that were only slightly better then Tunie’s Motiles.

The Motiles and Elsie were honestly the only reason she got the work done in any decent length of time. And Aleph was incredibly thankful there was a translation protocol for the big fleshy pink worm things. Although Pylo seemed upset with Elsie over that for some reason.

Not that she really had time to wonder about whatever weirdo alien political games were going on!

But it was over now, they had salvaged and reoriented everything and she had told Pylo and Tunie to be a bit more insistent and loud about course adjustments like that in the future.

Quarti had after waking up dragged Pylo into a corner promptly had a seizure for a few seconds screaming gibberish then came walking back sort of flushed and sweating but otherwise normal and cheerful.

Well normal for Quarti anyway.

But now it was over, she was laying down and there was at least a chance they could rest for a while. There was the previous harvests in storage that were mostly intact, besides some spillage they honestly should have secured against anyway but the constant acceleration had given them a bit more of a lax attitude then was proper on this mission.

Not to mention all of them were probably a bit heavier on the fat side then was strictly necessary for health and could stand to go on a stricter rationing diet.

She cast her gaze over to the ‘window’ that had with Pylo’s help been heaved back into position on the table (the thing was immensely heavy and probably one of the more dangerous objects to have shifted in the acceleration swap of Tunie’s braking.

Omega was staring at it somewhat glassy eyed, face tense, periodically flinching as she probably reached with her soul or something and pulled at an injury.

Aleph chewed her lip considering what she was going to do if it took Omega longer then a few days to heal enough to be functional again.

Quarti could probably pick up the slack because apparently she was, well okay maybe? But while the Prophet was pretty good at a lot of things she was not actually as technically savvy as either Aleph or Omega.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Well as Omega used to be with the help of a trio of souls in any given field.

Now she kind of suspected they were probably about even in the areas Quarti was worst at.

Sighing heavily she crawled back to her feet and trudged over to the table to watch what Omega was so transfixed on.

[https://i.imgur.com/FiUorPO.png]

“Hey, what’s in the magic ball now?”

Omega blinked and looked over at her then back at the marble.

“Uh, well we left a wake passing through this sun’s atmosphere that’s getting so big if this was terra it would be uh, yay big”

She held her hands out, a little wider then her head then winced a bit as she looked at aleph.

“This really sucks, I’m... I’m so used to just being able to know, just, anything... everything... I feel like I’m not all there anymore. Keep reaching and then it hurts... s’not fair”

Aleph huffed and looked into the window, not wanting to be mean, she could have said she told her mentor to stop reaching so much but. She more or less got off completely unscathed, Elsie thought it was because she barely had much of her consciousness actually as part of her soul yet. Before her first death it was a totally one sided process of filling the thing up with memories or something?

Elsie was not a terran and thus just guessing.

None of the second lifers or older ever explained it properly to Aleph before, not even Quarti or Omega.

What did it even mean to die and come back like that?

She always kind of assumed she’d just find out when it happened, that everyone did that. She had before meeting real aliens kind of assumed everything out in the reef would be like terrans.

But it had not turned out like that.

“It’s pretty. All those colors, like a rainbow.”

Omega sighed and nodded, paused as if about to say something, then sighed and flopped with her face against the table, breathing heavily.

Aleph thought she heard a sob but left it uncommented.

“Is that the reef wall? I think that’s the narrowest passage we’ve gone through so far. Um, the overlap of the two solar volumes must not be very big right? That’s what Elsie said earlier on the uh, astronavigation class we had a few months back... remember?”

Omega groaned and massaged her scalp through her hair. It was getting kind of thick with oils.

“Yeah... so, Tunie told me we are going to be going into something like a cave, or a tunnel, and there will be a lot of uh... I’m not sure big things like tall columns and a ceiling? It’s hard to get a read of how she describes things, everything is huge. These are gonna be bigger than all of terra. I think she finds it spooky and exciting though.”

Omega sighed and rolled her face so she could stare into the window.

“That sounds pretty crazy... Why are we going that way?”

Aleph shrugged holding her hands out in a gesture of bafflement.

“Aliens?”

Omega laughed then groaned in pain.

“Yeah, It’s always aliens isn't it?”

Aleph sighed chuckling a little, it was nice to hear her old mentor in there even with her seeming so hollowed out without that assurance that came with leveraging the knowledge of dead souls.

“Pretty much, just aliens all the way down”

They settled into a tired silence watching the Reef and all its boundless mysteries flow by.