Aleph could not begin to parse what Quarti had just said. It had sounded beautiful yes, there was a rhythm and music to it. But she had almost no idea of the facts of the situation.

Omega’s expression of awe and wonder and slight shifts and shuffles and shocked noises sort of helped fill in the context. But for all the meaning Aleph could actually extract from the words of quarti’s story she might as well have been speaking another language.

And even then Aleph was getting pretty passable at speaking with Tunie, there were a few concepts she had to use approximations and pidgin just because her brain could not hope to do the math needed to be accurate but the big ship was accommodating for the ‘accent’.

Actually it kind of made her feel a bit more for Pylo and appreciate how something as ridiculous as having ‘lewd’ as an accent could happen. Perhaps some of the issues with the siren earlier was from the fact that their courier literally did not have the right shape of mind to do some kind of easy calculation that every part of terran thinking did readily?

Or maybe it was the other way around and there were things that Pylo was trying to say that could not be understood?

Either way the story seemed to be wrapping up with Quarti coming back down, inward or whatever from rarified hyper abstract lofty none-sense space of ‘deep spirit’. Something she was GUESSING meant that somehow Quarti had shifted her soul into maybe something like a new layer of emulation inside of an emulation inside of an emulation?

That was her best guess but it all started sounding like when Pylo scrambled her brains that first time they met near the end there.

“So it was after all yon travel wide and weeping across the breadth of wicked wildness that we did returned, quartered and so divided and sliced by our travels, sparse corpses fed upon ourselves and lost, oh friend obbie did I miss ye, but all lost and alone was all but I refined and made anew to see the wonder of the arrival”

Aleph blinked a bit, apparently in the poetic maelstrom that had commenced and almost put her to sleep in incomprehension everyone’s souls died some more? How had she missed that? Was it when she started doing temporally reflective fractal pantomere poems?

“And so it was that I came round and beheld the arrival of fresh terran spore. Within the bellies of far starbeasts drifted down to our home upon gaia and her valleys. Turgid with infants and strange foreign souls unknown and bizarre to mein”

Aleph blinked a few times, having utterly forgotten the point that started this entire epic saga into rarified lexical absurdity. She felt rusty and befuddled trying to engage with the tale now that suddenly it was all making a lot more sense and apparently getting to the point.

"What strange land fertilized them we will never know, who took scalpel those lumbering cattle to implant clockworks to mesh with their flesh and their own seed? And yes, that is not a metaphor; there were scars and sutures and the cogs and springs were of what seems to my senses fired clay. The souls within the upon landing nestled into quickened children and knew not word or thought for me to entreat them. They were near blank and empty of lives, fresh waifs of spirit. "

Aleph blinked several more times.

“You mean WE are the aliens?”

"Hah. No, those were your ancestors. Frightful lot of them for me was! Carried ta term in big parasitic womb boils all of them! Came out all blue and pink and orange!"

And like that suddenly the spell of the story was broken, Elsie was bobbing its screen and adjusting its absurd little bowtie in a manner like when the weird professor stereotypes in plays was about to try and reclaim the classroom from the protagonist making a passionate finale speech.

“Yes... that was a very useful illustration, thank you quarti, it shows off several matters relating to your species, It also EVENTUALLY helped illustrate one of the primary characteristics of your class Horribulmorbus, which are more popularly recognized by their parasitic and disease causing species.”

Omega choked a little bit.

“Wait you mean were descended from some kind of... of parasitic worms? Fungus? viruses?!”

"Oh no nothing like that”

Omega relaxed a bit but was immediately blindsided

“Your species are descended from a cancer."

Aleph was not sure how to take that one.

[https://i.imgur.com/KmoIgI6.png]

“And now an excellent segway into our next topic. Aleph! What is resonance as you understand it?”

She could hear Quarti muttering ‘ya mean awful clumsy faffer idiot fool segway’

“Uh, ahem right, Resonance is an energy field comparable to light which is generated by living things and propagates out from them to signal and communicate. It passes through all known forms of matter with no impact in speed or direction except living things and specific remains of them.”

She racked her brain to try and bring up the drills she got from Omega and the extra studies she took up over Terra’s chorus of networks.

“It is the foundation substrate of the spirit and soul and also the basis of most of our... That is I mean terran information technology. Resonance can be refracted and temporarily stored with certain crystals that are harvested and processed from Terra’s deeper dermal layers. Attempts are still ongoing to fabricate them from raw materials but modifications of the properties of harvested crystals have shown great strides in technological innovation in the last thirty years and we are expecting to extend the density of refraction chambers for resonance well into-”

“Ah thank you Aleph. That is a workable metaphor for a narrow subset of resonance application, but it misses some fundamental principles and as a result misses many of the foundations of the entire universe, as well as several phenomena you do have documentation of but don't seem to have connected to the same underlying cause yet.”

Quarti tilted her head to the side a bit, voice a bubbly puzzled amusement.

“Oiy wot saying now? Next ya gonna tell me that their aint nae mana in prayer and stories are nothing at all but motes in the wind ya tinker tok box”

Elsie turned their screen to address Quarti, although aleph was a bit distracted that one of their cameras was still fixed directly on her nose.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Hardly, although the property you are calling mana is merely potential energy suspended in a particular metabolic state, and prayer is an accessibility mechanism your species generates with a rather highly specialized cryptographic encryption that only your own symbiotes can extract and interact with reliably. I would have thought that was obvious given the dealings and failures of your fellow pan substrate resonance facilitated being known as Obbie.”

Quarti crouched back but did not seem inclined to voice any other objections.

Aleph decided to speak up, not bothering to raise her hand or anything since Elsie was staring right at her anyway, whatever the screen ‘face’ was indicating.

“So I’m hearing a lot of you saying we are right, but we are not completely right. So what is the whole story on it then? You already know it, you already know what we know and what we don’t know. So why not just tell us?”

An equation with almost no symbols Aleph recognized besides some equalities started taking up the upper quarter of Elsie’s screen. It also appeared on the projector behind them.

"This is Physics as commonly used in the reef.”

A limb gestured at the projector screen and several of the characters in one section of the equation grew bolder and brighter, the miniature on their screen expanded to only show the highlighted equation.

“This term here is what is referred to as Resonance."

Omega’s eyes fluttered a bit in the way that Aleph knew meant she was probably swapping souls out but she could not really fault her for it. If all of Terran knowledge was missing some fundamental aspect of how something worked it hardly was cheating to get another set of eyes on it from the same knowledge base.

When her eyes cleared they were focused and she suddenly had a lot more assurance in her shoulders.

"That looks mostly like the Fundamental Song Propagation Equation, but that doesn't explain spirits, qualia, or any of the other wierdwards stuff. And we already know the Song Equation is incomplete, and doesn't explain half the stuff we see songs doing, and your addition don't touch that part."

Elsie looked at aleph, then quarti and took a shifting sliding roll of a step that looked almost like a puzzle folding and unfolding before it settled to the side of the screen. Aleph guessed it was something that was supposed to map to a theatrical flourish.

The equations shuffled around and the terms expanded into further equations with more symbols that Aleph kind of recognized.

“Your primary assumption and the reason you don’t see how these additions resolve the paradox and missing apparatus is you have confused emergent properties for fundamental ones. And this is in turn because you have mistaken one of the conditions and mechanisms of Resonance.”

"Are you talking about the Nucleus standing wave song? That was debunked decades ago, it's been proven that the standing wave is a garden of eden configuration. "

And Aleph was lost, she could not follow a fully prepped Omega having a conversation on esoteric fundamental physics with an alien that apparently had a more COMPLETE version of fundamental physics.

"Well, you are correct that the class of systems as a whole is, although the loop IS closed when you account for time dilation to downscale the standing wave. This is commonly accepted as a proof of the origin of the reef in a spontaneity event. Although that conjecture is not unanimous in even the most homogenous polity’s scholarly centers"

Okay she understood most of those words, she was not sure how they connected to the formulas that Elsie kept unfolding on the projector board but she could kinda follow along.

"I don't have to tell you the probability of ten to the power of fifty kilograms of iron coming into existence from a quantum fluctuation."

Aleph was not sure if this was better of worse then listening to quarti beautifully monologue on and on and on about stuff she could not contextualize or not.

"Of course not, the stars did that."

She honestly would accept that, she could not follow the math either of them were discussing.

"Are you telling me. You believe. That the stars generate matter from nothing? That they are literally magic?"

It was strange but Aleph found herself looking across the ‘classroom’ to Quarti. And for the first time in her knowing the insane prophet she saw a matching expression of bewildered confusion and then mirroring the tension in her own face a smile of camaraderie.

“Investigation into the nature of stars is a recurring topic of all polity of any significant size or technical acumen within the reef. As are the ruins and desolations that have occured to every single one of them to date that have been too intrusive. We have not yet determined HOW they do it, and experiments to discern have been catastrophic to undertake but it is definite fact that they do it”

That, sounded important and terrifying.

"Wait, are you saying entire civilizations the size of Redweed were destroyed, repeatedly?"

"Oh no, the lower bound on the size of a civilization is typically at least a trillion times that community in equivalent standard persons before it is considered significantly relevant. "

Okay this was one too many world shattering revelations for a single class.

Aleph turned to Quarti and they nodded in unison and stood up as one force of 'fed up with this'.

“That’s it, we are done now, I’m starving, class is over”

Omega seemed completely taken aback.

“Wait what? But this is crazy and vital and important and...”

Omega’s stomach gurgled loud enough for everyone to hear.

Aleph shook her head and raised a brow at Quarti.

“Little once lived is right wise now big blue! Up and at em now ta feeding! And Elsie Boxbrains? Lighten up on the mathly wisherwash Aye en Firstly here totes lost and braint oozling ovah here ya?”

That seemed to take Elsie aback as well because they nodded their screen.

“I understand, I will prepare a better presentation and methodology for you three next time. There is still so much to cover for the fundamentals.”

Aleph huffed and stretched, then curiously checked the comlink that had started buzzing in her attention the way that it did when Tunie had something to say to her.

Wait what?!

Pylo?!