Pylo loved her ship, but sometimes Tunie could be rather frustrating to deal with. Like right now, they were supposed to be making decent head way in getting their passengers to either nice prosperous and lucrative labor markets. Or in the case of the Terrans to their designated destination with as little wear and tear as was feasible.

But apparently Tunie wanted to play with the local wildlife and grab a snack.

Pylo had seen this before, the exact reasoning varied but the outcome was always the same.

Sometimes it was for a bounty reported in a port and Tunie would get all obsessive over being a fierce predator out to hunt like her ancient primordial ancestors. They would divert a course to snatch up the bounties, maneuvers that were hardly worth the rewards posted. And she would catch and then incidentally slurp up the mist and jelly of her ‘quarry’.

One time it was because she needed to divert because a cloud was ‘scary’ and it just so happened to drive them at a decent clip through some swarm of gnats or something and then again she was slurping up the debris and happy as can be.

And yes sometimes the reasons were heroism. Getting to ‘rescue’ some habitat, or lost slow ship traders, or just laying down ‘vengeance’ and ‘wrath’ upon some ‘evil despoilers’. Tunie had her little indulgences that Pylo was more than happy to indulge, even if it felt a little ungrateful some times. It’s not like Pylo didn't make sure she got all her vitalloys!

Pylo huffed coolant exhaust and dug into her own little distraction. She was cramming through her cortical stacks the local language, dialects and ideoforms of the dozen reef scrubber settlements that needed to launch their little flares at the right time.

She did admit It was nice to just tackle a nice and simple little challenge like this. And it was a good stretch, these communities all shared a single foundational culture and processing substrate more or less. So it was just a question of lexical variation then entirely different cognition. Although the specific iterations of which language were scattered in a delicate spice of far ranging cross pollination.

Why just next to each other Pylo could taste the roots of a single tongue but it had been split and permuted greatly in far and distant generations and only recently found itself close company with a distant cousin!

However in paradoxical contrast another neighbor had a mother lex which had no basis of any relation to either and was deeply ancient beyond them. Even though by the weft and twine of its grammar Pylo was all but certain it must have had its community founded after the other two.

There were hints over here of families, alliances, and settlements distant. All kinds of deep and nuanced history. A murder or crime in this community so overwhelming it warped an entire set of syllables for generations to come and changed their syntactical use.

An insult there that had once been the greatest of endearments teasing delicately at programs of cultural genocide and the subversions and rebellions that followed.

Another with the stark metallic sharpness of a constructed language, people and community made wholesale to order and planted with ready traditions and words in their heads. Hints of trademark and idiosyncratic signatures by the designers and folk-craft artists that had engaged in the project. Now all but buried under generations and generations of organic growth and drift!

All of them had their similarities and familiar deep roots of course, the minds which spoke them were a well tread and common kind of folk found in one way or another everywhere that there was the right kind of niche for them. And that stability was reinforced by periodic recolonization by some base stock whenever a community was wiped out.

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Ah it made her tingle up and down to taste and learn so many shallow and sweet languages at once and then after a moment of brief exhilaration Pylo had the missives of her message ready for Tunie’s much further reaching voice. Steeped heavily in protocol, tradition, nuance and authority.

To craft it she had called on records from Redweed and the hints and treaties that were murmured and spoken of in each of the communities general message traffic around them. The closest and directly contacted were the most important for they had to then convey the secondary and tertiary messages to be sent along the surface of the reef clandestinely ahead of Tunie.

And to do so without over-interpretation and modification lest the plan which Tunie and Pylo had constructed should fall to pieces.

As such the more subtle methods had to be abandoned. No they needed obedience, swiftness and moral assurance for all parties to be aligned perfectly. As such calling on the obsessive zeal and dogma instilled by the founding of each of these communities was called for.

Each message individualized for their background and dialect and cultural heritage and yet complete and uniform in how it would be received and understood.

It was a good stretch of her cortices to do for a few moments while the Terrans were failing to understand a joke Aleph was trying to explain from earlier.

She willed the missives to Tunie and she conveyed them dutifully to the relevant parties.

[https://i.imgur.com/h9FlN97.png]

“People of the Reef who toil for the Tithe of Redweed hear me!

I am Pylo Courtesan of the Trader Ship Tunie.

Your fellow reef workers are beset by great peril and horror.

Monsters even now feast upon them and their weapons proven useless.

These very same horrors shall soon fall upon you next. But in her mercy Tunie has willed to bless you.

By the Tithe of your ancestors obey our commandments and we shall end this horror and save not just thy neighbors but all who might one day fall to them.

For your deep oaths of loyalty to the might of the Crimson Tree of Fire, For Redweed and the tithe owed by your lives and your ancestors heed these commands.

Rally your great weapons of war, send them loose with dulled and unarmed fire.

Send them forth upon this vector and you will be complicit in the saving of an entire city and world of your fellows.

Fail and whatever blood is taken by these monsters henceforth will be upon your conscience!

OBEY by your tithe and debt to Redweed!”

Pylo huffed again as the Terrans finally moved on from what they were struggling with about a pretty basic velocity pun even Pylo snickered at some times.

Aleph frowning a bit in concern.

“Are you alright Pylo? You were kinda huffing and coughing a lot for a few seconds.”

Pylo nodded and made a dismissal whip with one of her phalanges, not wanting to risk some kind of awful misunderstanding by tweaking the terran verbally. She still did not get what was so confounding about the weirdo terrans and their muddled cerebral system.

Made no sense.