“You did WHAT?!”

Pylo flinched, normally Quarti was extremely polite and well spoken. Always gentle and understanding of her, but just now the ire and frustration was like a flaming torrent. Pylo gestured vaguely around.

“How was I supposed to know that cleaning up after them was going to make it worse?! It looked like processing substrate leavings! If it was anything else this should have cleared them out! Not made it WORSE”

Omega had a look of consternation and conflict on her face and appeared to be grappling with the fact she actually was agreeing with Pylo on this front. Although she had not yet mustered the resolution to voice it yet. Which was annoying but Pylo was going to let her come around to it in her own time. It was sweet either way.

Aleph however voiced things herself.

“Wait, so Pylo tried to clean up the wraiths, as in she actually tried to fight them? Isn't that like-”

Quarti huffed in exasperation.

“You can fight wraiths just fine if you know what you're doing. But you have to be subtle and unpredictable about it. So not the worst thing you can do but also very much not recommended. Also You! What did you DO?!”

Omega blinked and shook her head a little.

“What about me? I did everything right, I didn't engage them, I sang the songs, I stayed on course and gave them nothing!”

"Yea. except your full and undivided ATTENTION. Also you showed them your entire hand on what your gonna do in the future! Yeah maybe if this was one or two starving wraithlets we woulda snuffed them out with a spot of ignoring! But big beautiful buxom ship mistress Pylo here decided she had to go and stuff the things so full they literally bursted with young, then stuffed those four generations deep just to be certain!"

Omega shook herself a bit then looked between Pylo and Quarti.

“How did doing a little bit of cleaning of some kind of gel feed wraiths that much?!”

Quarti pulled at her hair and stomped around a few times, then flailed her hands at Pylo and then Aleph and then Omega.

“Stop THAT! Listen very carefully to me all of you! I am very angry with you, I am upset, you need to be hurt and upset and focused on how much I’m upsetting you. And how stupid unfair and idiotic I think all of you are! You are all stupid and thanks to our idiot of a shaman here we cannot absolutely under any circumstances perform any of the usual rites or protections against wraiths because if we do it will just feed them MORE now because they know how to set up for it!”

Aleph frowned, Pylo tilted her head to the side. Terrans dealt with this kind of thing enough that they have normal traditions for them? That seemed a bit suspicious, But she could tell Quarti was definitely confident in her expertise in this. Enough Pylo would trust her.

Quarti turned to Pylo and nodded sharply, a little blatant to be fair but she responded with a subtle shift of her own.

[https://i.imgur.com/DJo6xzy.png]

“Yah yah, we prolly had a few spirit spore slipping onto your beautiful ship wife and got her all grubby with it! Get good and upset with us over that, FOCUS on US... Focus on how angry that makes ya?”

Pylo nodded and laced a bit of malice as per Quarti’s instruction into her translation. If this would help with the parasites lingering all over Tunie she would do it.

“So you are telling me none of this would have happened if you had been practicing proper sanitation? If you knew that this kind of thing could happen why didn't you even TELL me?”

Aleph raised her hand, she was a bit unsure of herself, apparently she misunderstood Quarti’s instructions.

“Uh, I’m pretty sure we covered it in the care and handling contract... But isn't this not the time to be fighting among ourselves? Don’t we need to focus on the wraiths?”

Quarti made a flicker of a gesture with a wrist and finger that none of the other terrans recognized but told Pylo to let her handle this delicate situation. In the same motion she rounded on Aleph. Face stormy and furious.

“You idiot girl! Don’t you recall anything about anything on wraiths? Didn't they teach ya this?! Don’t ya know how to pray to the departed!?”

Aleph huffs and there was water leaking from her eyes. But she was angry, her focus drifting properly to engage Quarti for a moment. But it started to waver right after.

“Of course I do! But why is everyone yelling at each other like this?! We need to focus on the-”

Quarti actually slapped Aleph across the face hard enough to crack in the thick soup of the habitat. It was harsh but it drew the young one’s attention back to where it should be.

“Cut that out! How. DO. YOU. PRAY. TO. THE. DEPARTED?”

Aleph’s eyes were running with streaks of water but she shook herself and glared angrily at Quarti, it made Pylo flinch. But she trusted the Terran knew what she was doing. And it was effective if extremely crude way to keep the youngest of them properly censoring herself.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Fine you crazy hag! You sing to them in resonance, you sing with each other about your memories of them or the stories you’ve been told about them! You put them in your thoughts and focus on them and about them and what they would do if... Oh OH!”

Quarti smacked Aleph again.

“None of that you idiot waif! Something else! Anything Else! Focus on me!”

Aleph rubbed at her face, there was a bit of iron rich ooze pooling at her lip. “I get it I get it, we can’t talk about them because-”

Quarti slapped her again.

“OW! Yeah or even think! STOP HITTING ME! I GET IT!”

“Then stop feeding the wraiths you stupid little sprat! Oiy! YOU TOO!”

Omega flinched but it shocked her thoughts from drifting to dangerous avenues. She and turned to Pylo with a bit of a weak apologetic expression.

“Uh... um sorry? This is for a reason I promise, we haven’t all just gone crazy. Honest”

Right if it was this Serious pylo needed to set up her own internal censors just in case. A precaution to help while she used Quarti’s own folk medicine memetics in the interim.

Pylo oozed with tones of contempt that made Omega shiver and look away then shake herself and blink hard.

“Well of course, you would have to be an idiot to not have seen how blatantly miss Quarti explained the plan of action. Truly only pitiful toothscum blind idiots rock whores like yourself would have possibly missed it”

Omega got a puzzled look of confusion near the end.

Huh okay some of those did not translate effectively to terrans, she would have to dig for a better analogy. Anyway she just needed to make sure that she properly followed Quarti’s instructions and a decent censor regarding the ████████.

Why was she having a blank referent thought? That was weird it was almost like she intentionally forgot or performed a censor. Why would she do that?

"Did I leave any messages for myself before I digested my memories of... something? by the way? It was intentional right? Not coerced or anything?"

However the question was ignored because apparently Aleph suddenly had to start shouting about ████████ that they had all been talking about circuitously but she needed to not remember because of it being part of what made ████████ dangerous?

Oh okay got it. She had performed a censor.

"Wait if we get angry at the ████████ isn't that the EXACT kind of- OW QUARTI! STOP IT!"

Oh that’s what she is not going to think about? Well that’s easy just a few cyclical anti-loops and done. There now she could operate around the censor! No need to make this more cumbersome than it needs to be.

“Don’t be angry at ████████ Focus on ME! This is very SIMPLE! Obbie save me from these idiot flat minded children and trumped up amateurs!”

Pylo huffed and did a tally of her recent memory, okay she apparently ran afoul of a kind of trap laid by some kind of ████████. Because of that there was now a large number of ████████. And because there were so many well fed and now organized ████████ they were having to do some pretty extreme social gymnastics to keep the terrans from accidentally feeding ████████ even more.

"By the way, if there's a reason I shouldn't send ▙◀ a message that there's ████████ afoot, now'd be the time to stop me. "

All the Terrans shuddered at what she said. Why did they? Oh COME ON! What kind of organism did not have proper null referent handling built into their substrates?!

Aleph looked at Quarti, then at Omega.

“What did Pylo just... I don’t even know... How?”

Quarti shivered and grinned and muttered something breathily about things being ‘UN-said’.

Omega however apparently was in the right frame of mind to parse a reply. That was nice.

"Just tell ▙◀ there's an infohazard and they should avoid finding out what kind. They can't do what you did to the gel right, so that just leaves us as potential vectors?"

Pylo gently let her thoughts slide around the specifics of the memory of what she had been doing that she could not think just now for safety reasons.

“No they should be fine, Although whatever things that you did with the ████████ over in the hold with your archived persons probably could be done by accident so I’ll try and send them a digest of sanitized disengagement protocols in a minimal-entropy language.”

Quarti trembled again.

Aleph just started rubbing her head.

Omega sighed and nodded.

“Uh that sounds good, also can you come up with a different way to say uh... what we are not supposed to talk about? It uh, that thing you are doing is like having a hole punched in my short term memory... I don’t know if that’s actually good for us.”

Pylo huffed and nodded, she supposed she could try and kludge an approximation together.

“Fine but I’ll have to cycle them or else the identifying stimuli will gain an association pattern match and defeat the point.”