Aleph considered the message, it was different from Tunie in many subtle ways. Assumptions she had come to have about the meaning of a course correction or a particular vector shorthand were absent. Strange new course mechanisms were brought up more commonly.

There was an entirely new subdivision of concepts in play that were very different and yet integral to understanding, extremely tiny and so meshed and intermeshed with itself that trying to track down exactly what it was left her boggled.

She finally flailed to herself, which got a raised brow from Omega as she chewed on veggie roll. But Aleph had more important things to worry about as she spun up a pidgin quick exclamation and sent it off to the relevant address. If she was going to try and translate what she sade in both brevity, tone and eloquence it would have read something like.

> Pylo! Wut say!? Use esy wrd plz k thx bai O:

It was honestly not one of her prouder exchanges in Tunie’s language, but whatever Pylo said had a lot of urgency too it. Like an emergency impact indicator projection flutter. So speed and brevity

The response time was almost immediate. And actually very legible and clear. It was in broad strokes, careful flows and far simplified from the original message. However the simplifications made the details less clear.

Down right nonsensical really. Or maybe that was just the subject matter? She was still not sure what it was about just that it was dangerous.

Apparently she was making a face.

[https://i.imgur.com/K3UgP5K.png]

“So, what did the ship say that made you flounce in frustration like that?”

She blinked at omega.

“You get a face when you are parsing stuff with the ship lately, it’s pretty obvious”

Aleph raised a brow and then let her face go slack and her eyes glassy in a very precise way. Then jolted back to ‘consciousness’ precisely as she had seen her friend do many times before.

Omega flinched and wiped her mouth from some of the sauce that was as close as any of them had managed to mayonaise since leaving Terra. If Aleph had any say in a colony academy setup after their arrival she was going to put culinary theory and technique on the curriculum.

“Right sorry I reached in the middle of the lesson there. But I’ve never seen you actually flounce like that. Something upsetting?”

Aleph sighed and took a bite of her roll, she kind of had almost forgotten what the originals tasted like at home.

Yeah... No.

She tried to believe that but knew it was not quite the same and she, Quarti and Omega all struggled to try and recreate their own favorite dishes.

"Apparently Pylo decided to talk to me in ship."

Omega raised a brow.

“Why did she do that? She can speak to us fine normally”

Aleph shrugged.

“I dunno, maybe something about the network I’m using? Anyway she wanted to warn us about something. But I can barely follow what she is actually saying, the first message was really really dense. Like uh, It was like being told a waterfall by saying every single droplet”

Omega blinked and fogged over a moment before her eyes cleared and yet still she seemed puzzled.

“Uh okay, so linguists... not as useful as I hoped... But what did she try to say?”

Aleph blew a huff of frustration with her ‘mentor’ but continued on anyway.

“Something-something drag clinging accumulate? Honestly you’d have a better grasp of this stuff if you loaded up a astrogator or a physicist. The language is really dense in the vector, trajectory and so on... But tunie usually ‘speaks’ it kind of broad strokes and obvious... Pylo... is different”

She waited for her friend and elder to fuzz out and grab whatever souls she could to share the burden.

“Okay got em slotted, could you paraphrase the specifics?”

“Well she’s on her way up tunie’s hallway and she was moving around through the shock absorbing gel layer that buffers impactor momentum in the feather roots with the outside collisions as they transfer to the hull. All that is super easy in ship, past and future courses are like practically introductions”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Omega nodded and took another bite of her roll, seemingly oblivious to the taste now that something engaging was being grappled with by her and her entourage of spirit aides.

“And while she was in the absorbing gel layer she found a thing that was uh... this is where it got impossible to follow for me the first time and then really over simplified the second time”

Again nods, so Aleph continued.

“So the complicated thing was a bunch of courses, that uh, spun into each other, and then spun into each other, and then spun into each other. And each one was a possibility of one that branched into another that branched into another that shaped itself like a thing and... It was really complicated, like more complicated than ANYTHING Tunie ever said to me. That was when I ‘flounced’ ”

Omega had a contemplative look and had stopped eating with the folded over end of her roll just dangling from her fingers.

Aleph took another bite and scowled a bit while she tried to ask for clarifications from Pylo. queries, misunderstandings, course ambiguity prediction. A few hazard guesses she had learned from her discussions with Tunie on common dangers to ships.

The rapidity of her attempt to communicate was probably making her sound like a garbled infant. But it was necessary to get anything across without careful thought.

She got back a response that helped but also did not quite follow either.

“I think she is worried something might be making Tunie sick? Then there were references to the uh, course origin configuration space that starts then branches, combines, crosses? close to... us? Twice? I dunno, it also could be a... Oh! I just realized what a third of the other stuff was... Oh!”

Her cheeks could not avoid flaring up now.

Omega’s brows furrowed.

“What did she say?”

Aleph waved it off.

“It’s not what she said, it’s perfectly natural normal way to identify things... Just I realized she’s been saying lineages and uh, I’d need you to look at it but it’s kinda like family trees? But there is a metaphor to journeys and navigation so not quite? And uh related to us, again twice...One of the relations is metaphorical and one is... reverse metaphorical? oh She’s saying a diagram that’s nice wa?”

Omega leaned in with a bit of an intense burn in her eyes, fierceness but also curiosity and a careful consideration. It was what Aleph had thought was the natural state of her friend when she was younger and had not seen anywhere near as much since their journey started.

“Uh... okay I think I get it, She’s saying that Tunie MIGHT be sick with something but it’s something that could also make US sick and then she pointed a course up and down our medial lines, circling our head and then down the spine so-”

Omega shot up to her feet already shouting.

“QUARTI! There’s a Haunting! Hit the pod we need to check the colonists!”

Aleph was stunned, Quarti MOVED from across the habitat like she was a stream of water cutting through sand.

She was inside the pod before aleph was able to fully track where she was going.

Omega was moving over to the airlock with the bubble walker not much slower.

“Wait what? What’s so bad about a haunting? Their just a little spooky and then you just sing a song and everyone is fine and safe”

Omega huffed.

“That’s if you’re alive and have a group of hundreds to make a choir. We have THREE living humans and the rest are dead and stored in crystal. I need to go check them in person for backup, You stay here and watch over Quarti in case something nasty goes after her while she’s distracted”

Aleph blinked, then slowly as her friend disappeared past the airlock started to dredge up the list of worst case scenarios she had been drilled on regarding the colonists.

“Oh...”

She politely thanked Pylo for the warning and gave her a best approximation of where Omega was going. She was not even sure how to convey what Quarti must be doing, so she just put an unknown distribution with weights of zero everywhere.