Pylo was a woman of trade. Really, she was doing this for the sake of the sweet sweet deals and not voiding a trader’s honor binding contract again and calling a tribunal down on her and Tunie again.

And she was proud of what she could manage as a trader! The two of them were doing quite well for themselves! Yes there had been some lean trips but Tunie was kept healthy and the grist flowed well. Pylo was a good trader.

She was not much of a mechanic however. She was sure she had a sister, niece or cousin that was some kind of incredible perfect engineer savant. Probably several of each degree of relation.

But Pylo was not any of her family extended or otherwise. She was a Trader, and she was...

Well moderately passable at surviving if she was being honest. And proud of that yes! But a mechanic or engineer she was not.

▙◀ however was quite good at this sort of thing she had found. Pylo had to grudgingly admit it was making this whole affair easier.

Even if the awful thing’s personality made Pylo’s spores want to shrivel up and self sterilize. It made the whole experience worse that there were so many desirable qualities to the micropolity.

Keenly observant in a way that was out right magical? Delightful!

Highly versatile and well documented inheritance format? Oh yes!

Proven ability to survive across a number of polities and governments? Sweet susurrations if Pylo had not gotten a sickeningly deep fill of the underlying charters that governed the awful beautiful monster she would be inclined to brood very deeply indeed over ▙◀ 's most attractive features in a particularly prolific showering session.

But it all turned awfully sour and rank when Pylo remembered just what wonderful, clever and particularly attractive hunks of matter like this were perfectly happy doing to others.

Just the thought of it made layers of her ripple in anticipation to spew caustic hyper aggressive enzymic plagues.

“And you are sure this won’t be intrusive to any of Tunie’s optical systems? No backsending? Nothing? You promise on promise of forfeiture to me of majority shares of your volitions and body autonomy to me? To extend onto the completion of the clerk’s relocation and rehabitation if there should be a resultant failure of any sort or kind as I have listed?”

▙◀ and its embassy further ratified the terms and more, once again providing a complete and total schemata of the planned changes, what they should look like at each stage of implementation and again the stated purpose of every element.

It was a sensually rich exchange that honestly made Pylo somewhat disgusted with herself that she was performing it at all with the awful micropolity and its bickering swarm of demi-urges. But it was originally Tunie’s idea, and it was for her passengers well being.

“Again yes, and again of course, there is NO intent of any harm or injury to Tunie in these actions, furthermore and again to reiterate you are the one that will be performing the enacting and integration of a translation layer with the necessary sub systems and sensoria from Tunie to the necessary outputs for the Terrans. My part of this will have no capacity to interfere or interface with Tunie’s mind or anatomy in any way that you yourself are not acting as a bridge for and able to craft the necessary protections you also see fit in addition to my own design.”

The trouble with not being a mechanic and dealing with someone who was beautifully and deliciously capable of seeing patterns in the world you do not is that there was only so much you could trust that you yourself could see.

Pylo knew that even with every single level of their cognition seemingly open to her and her cortical stack chewing so heavily on every molecule of ▙◀ 's substrate that she was needing to spew hot thermal venting clouds that it was not certain Pylo was simply missing something.

▙◀ could simply hide a plan in a pattern that Pylo could not follow and conveniently never think it in a manner she could recognize until it was too late.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It had been done before.

But as far as she could see and know and taste this was safe. It was not possible as far as she could conceive that this could ever be used to hurt Tunie like had been done before.

But still it made parts of her tremble in nervousness.

Old fears etched into her body where flesh had long since replaced. Memories had faded and muddied and been mostly lost but she still held onto the root and core of it.

She would strike if it ever got that bad again. Before it got that bad again.

This time she would not let anyone hurt Tunie as badly as she had once failed to prevent.

Pylo craned her neck up to swallow deeply of the local reserve store. Flushing the fluids through her body up and down the cortical stacks. Draining away heat and waste compounds and flooding her with readily processable calories and grist.

Then she breathed the other half of the system into place.

Pylo was no mechanic, but she was a Siren. And this was ultimately a problem of speech, to turn one thought, one idea, one branch of life and preserve and yet change it utterly, to keep everything vital and salient and important while it become wholly compatible with another utterly foreign form.

To embed the shape of a particular form of this process into crude dumb matter. Hardly much better then half of tunie’s less bright motiles was a thing she could have done as a child.

Any siren could.

But she was here.

And now it was done. She had learned from her perusal of their heritage archives and ▙◀ 's own reminders and guidance that it was a Tradition of sorts for Terrans to bestow gifts onto one another at important times. The cakes were going to be part of a celebration of many such remembrance times.

Anniversaries.

Tunie had early in the trip pined about how the Terrans did not know where they were in space and could not properly introduce themselves and their courses because of it.

▙◀ had noted it again after a recent class on Reef history.

And so as she had with the scrapped together walker and its bubble of ‘air’ mix Pylo had improvised a solution.

With a great deal of help by ▙◀ making sure that the system would not get cleaned up by Tunie’s motiles.

She looked on the hub that would carry and translate the signal from Tunie’s passive observation and reef sweeps into something that the Terrans could explore and understand. It was crude in the extreme. There was a lot of compression loss and you could only ever look at a tiny piece of any given part of the totality of what Tunie actually saw.

But Terrans could not pay attention to very much anyway. She looked at the interface ▙◀ had recommended for being the end format of the translation.

It was smaller than the bubble for the walker and currently an opaque black in the ranges that Terrans could see currently.

“You really think this will be appropriate? That they will like it?”

[https://i.imgur.com/L0qydKZ.png]

▙◀ bobbed its head in a galling mockery of Pylo’s nervous tick of falling back into terranisms.

“Admittedly it would have been better if we could have managed a method that replaced the chromatic scattering coating in their habitat but I understand that we lacked the materials to do that properly and safely”

Pylo scoffed, this was a Trader ship, not some overly rich high urban estate. She didn't just have holdfulls on holdfulls of highest grade city magic!

▙◀ continued softly and with less hint of acerbic intent. Altruism and Mutualism were bidding high to keep the others from having too much share in the outgoing missives again.

“I believe Miss Aleph will be utterly awed by the gift of The Window Glass”

Pylo huffed and nodded, then together they moved to meet up with Omega for one more wraith hunt before the celebrations and cake began.

Apparently it would soon have been two ‘years’ since the Terrans left their homes.

Ah well it was an excuse for cake!