Pylo was as often happened glad she was a siren. But not in a chauvinist way! She found Tunie and the Ships lovely a big favorite of hers obviously. She could also appreciate the appeal and features in terrans, clerks, sleek micro-polity such as ▙◀ and the many other numerous eligible species of the reef.

In fact when she was just a little sprout she had quite the unhealthy infatuation with the legislative branch of a neighboring polity’s military junta. Kind of cringey in hindsight yes but she was young and prone to being swayed by simple surface features like great tracts of territory and the romance of sweeping powers of economic forfeiture for ones constituents.

Come to think of it hadn't Helena actually hooked up with that bad girl of a governing body? She could not remember. It had been a long time since she’d checked one of her mother’s caches for an update.

So by no means was Pylo some weirdo purist. But she was really glad she was born a siren. It saved her from being worried about having any number of the many little problems and frailties that Tunie and the Terrans had.

Like right now? She was going over the crystalline aberrations. Which she was pretty sure was just waste processing refuse rather then active substrate. The distinction was a very VERY fine one and sometimes there was not one that you could expect to taste in raw chemistry. But she was pretty sure this was of one character and not another. Her cortices running up and down her tails were itching that way.

Normally it wouldn't matter, she'd just need to track down a purifying song that was well aligned to Tunie’s own resonance sensitivities and sing it real loud, but the terrans on board were definitely highly resonance dependent due to their spirit symbiotes/material parasitism. And she was not at all the right kind of specialist that she could WRITE a new song that could accommodate them.

So she had to make do with humming a more generic cleaning rhythm very gently and in a much more close in associations to herself. Reasserting and cleansing Tunie’s gel of erroneous happenstance process crystals with a quick shaking and in the process scrambling any dependant extra material organisms, spirit or otherwise.

It was all so very tedious. And further reaffirmed her relief in being born a pure-strain siren to her matriarch. Her resonance voice mixed up the matter deep in her body constantly, pushing, flipping and churning the associations as a natural metabolic course. Turning this voice outward to apprehend the matter and speak to those not so gifted was first nature to her.

It was as such that Sirens did not have to be actively concerned about unwanted resonance parasites such as spirits or similar. Their voices drowned out anything insidious and minor. And for any of the larger and more rarified forms of resonance?

Well everyone had to worry about those.

That said she got creepy shiver crawls all up her insides at the thought of fluffers and the various forbidden fruits like any proper girl. The idea of getting some kind of infectious phage into her lineage made her oviriticuli clench. There were downsides for every kind of person and difficulties that they each faced for their niche.

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She liked her place in things though, even if she was just a hair's breadth into the category of macrofauna to be able to play host to some things smaller species were utterly overlooked by.

Such thoughts drifted by as she worked, this was after all a very long and repetitive process that left her agitated and annoyed. And it was getting to the point that she was willing to brave the indignity and ache of acceleration without Tunie’s supportive shock gel just for a change of pace.

Yes she thought this was quite enough for now, she should check on some other duties for a time until she was fed up with being slammed into tunie’s bulkheads randomly.

She slipped and squeezed from the gel, feeling her body pressed and scraped, feelers and brush hairs scratching over and through her crevices the fizz and buzz of enzymes and then waiting close by a pack of tunie’s motiles that further writhed, squirmed and suckled over her until she was completely dry. Reclaiming every scrap of the precision manufactured gel before she was heaved into a spinlock and then deposited into the onrushing surface of Tunie’s bulkhead.

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It didn't hurt anything but her dignity, but it was still annoying to be shoved like that. And now she was forced to drag and pull herself along feeling so awkward and graceless. This was truly the worst thing about traveling with her friend.

And it was made all the worse because the terrans just swayed all over the place easy as can be under the constant shoving! She’d been riding acceleration longer then any of them had been alive! Yet she felt like some kind of hull clinging slug in comparison!

Okay maybe she was only technically older then Quarti. But she was honestly not sure which of them had more experience under acceleration. The way the symbiote functioned was still confusing to her honestly.

Oh.

Right.

Resonance parasites of an unknown kind were riddling Tunie’s shock gel, possibly nesting somewhere else in her more info dense substrates.

The Terrans had/were resonance facilitated symbiotes/parasites with poorly documented fragilities and anatomies in those very same substrates. Tunie had a case of resonance parasites that might very well be fundamentally and horribly dangerous to the Terrans.

The Terrans that she had a contract on her honor as a Trader to see to their destination.

She should tell them about that as soon as possible.

Grumbling and cursing she tried to reach the crew com hub that Aleph was usually hooked into. Ah good it was there but the dumb squawker box was so distasteful she had never bothered to try and get something for herself on it. That was frustrating, Terrans were still finicky creatures to translate for.

Bah Aleph was passable in conversation with Tunie by now and Pylo lived and breathed it, she would fall back on Ship and spin up a quick digest of the situation then explain in person for any clarifications.

This was too important to risk a stupid terran incomprehension on.

It was much more compact and info dense too!

There that should give them a more immediate warning in case something was moving in on them right as she spoke.

At least while she was busy getting herself across Tunie’s corridors.