Pylo had so many words for this experience. She had summoned forth entirely new linguistic paradigms of thought at the first taste! Now she was internally bifurcating into great branching poetries of living song welling up inside and through her at the nuances and flavors in play.

The original terran cakes had teased in numerous ways, the hints of the genomes were dead and burnt, proteins denatured, only hinted under the distractions that lavished one's senses by bright contractual living obligates borne by various flora native to the great sun chaser’s symbiote plate.

But Omega had wrought together a spin of nourishing delights, it was poetry, it was practically a lascivious and wild howling of a love song in decadent consumable form.

“So How’s it work?”

And Aleph wanted her to explain how to use the window?! She was savoring every nuance of this beautiful work of art that Omega had bequeathed upon her. Letting every delicate bond of its molecules gently come apart under the gentlest of enzymes so she could relish the unfolding tapestry.

That took a nice sweet savoring quantity of time that Pylo really wanted to breath and experience as a single sweeping thought.

But Aleph wanted her to engage with Terran brains, and Terran thoughts and Terran speeds instead of letting her cortices flow in a languid pace that paradoxically let her burst in the rush of every single aspect of her first bite of cake all at once as a single thought.

Now though the experience would have to be diluted, punctuated and interspersed with sudden shreds of dense rapid thought by comparison, forcing holes in the mesh of her experience of the cornucopia of lineages that promised at the edges of her senses.

No that would not do. Pylo halted the progression of her enzymes, shifted the still mostly intact bite of cake over to a curved crevice to be gently held in place. Stripping out the oxygen for more nitrogen for good measure in the little cleft in her folds.

Then finally she turned to Aleph and gave a breathy sigh of frustration.

“You ask it to show you things and it shows them to you... now if you would excuse me I would like to focus on completely enjoying this wonderful cake.”

She turned her focus away from the Terrans, from the rapid flickering moments, that slowly swelled into a torrenting sheet of events and information. Settling into the delicious and exquisite slow break down of her bite.

Somewhere in the relative tumult she caught the flickering flashes of confused comments. But her attention was not in stream with that pace now.

She had only attention for the cake as it came apart in a single burst of totality, unraveling simultaneously in what was an objectively gradual digestion, and yet with her whole attention dedicated to the cake it exploded in a single torrential instant.

And then it was over and Pylo was glowing in the after effects of utterly ecstatic rapture.

In the warm saturating delight she relaxed her attention.

Perception widened, sunk and settled into the flow of terran speech and thought and life.

Catching up on the tail end of the conversation that had blended into nonsense without her attention anchoring and ordering it.

“-een at least twenty minutes without her moving or responding! What did you put in that cake?!”

“Uh, lots of things, I figured she would like it and- Oh look she’s moving again, Pylo are you alright? We were getting worried, Elsie said it was fine and we should just check out the window, but then Quarti tried to eat your half of the cake again, so I put it back in the cooler because it was going to warm up and get kind of melty. And well then we noticed you had not moved AT ALL and yeah... uh was it alright?”

▙◀ helpfully provided a coherent log of events to go back over which Pylo momentarily consumed and integrated with compliments to their archival systems. She was honestly in such a good mood that the usual low key disgust was nearly absent.

“That was possibly one of the most beautiful things anyone has given me who was not my own family. I... Can I? ... I mean I request permission to hug you in gratitude Omega”

She added some nuances and little flavorings to the whole thing, oozed fluids from the approximately right places over her mouth in tasteful trails that glinted down her ‘cheeks’ the right husky slightly obstructed breathing passage ‘hitch’ to her ‘voice’.

Omega, Aleph and Quarti seemed taken aback. ▙◀ was keenly observant and there was some outright awful policy discussion going on among the demiurges.

But it did not matter.

Not right this moment.

Omega stiffened a bit at that then looked to both Quarti and Aleph before shivering a moment and opening her arms and nodding.

“Yeah, I mean your not even an animal right? So no way you could get me pre-Auoof!”

Pylo squeezed the terran close and very gently, just firm enough that some of the fluid in omega’s spine and shoulders formed and then popped bubbles in a manner that she could read was satisfying and startling but not painful. The sudden stiff apprehension of a fight or flight reflex eased and then settled into a reciprocal grip and then squeezing of over developed musculature, bones and tendons.

A body built to fight against acceleration every living moment. To pull thick soupy ‘air’ until it expired. Muscles deep in the chest cavity pumping in a rhythm that could never slow in its relentless drumming lest the entire fragile creature held in her limps expire.

Fragile and yet horribly, relentlessly fierce and indomitable.

And for all the art that Omega had rendered that utterly touching exchange? Pylo had to admit that perhaps Terrans could be genuinely, wonderfully beautiful after all.

She held the little tiny creature right up until the moment she was about to squirm and shift in discomfort. Then released Omega.

"Sorry for zoning out earlier there, But what you've given me something that... I mean... In that experience, that long single moment, I was closer to Tunie in the way... The way I experience life. Just so much closer I have ever been in... I can't remember how long... Thank you... Thank you so much..."

It was important to pause, to hitch, fumble and repeat noises with slightly different breathy emphasis, to momentarily wipe and snort up ooze at the right times. The whole experience was very nostalgic all its own.

Terran communication got so wistfully chemical and gestural some times. It was almost Siren like when it came to expressing powerful emotions. Not the primary, secondary, or tertiary layer, but the fluid and polymer production at the most distal layer was so very achingly close!

With the rich feral yowling density of the cake it was making her wistful for home. How long had it been since Pylo had actually tasted a proper packet of her native language that was not her own lineage?

Since she had meshed genomes from a sister, cousin or even a complete stranger to unlock the full breadth of a message and conversation and all the branches it could take?

Parts of her suddenly ached and howled in sharp contrast to the joy she felt and she had to hold fast to not translate the brief association into something the Terrans could experience lest she deafen them in howling.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Omega, Aleph and Quarti were staring at her, she had carefully forged and spun each their own specific flavoring of the jist of it all. The uniformity of their reaction spoke volumes to it.

“Right... I believe I will take the rest of The Cake to my chambers to enjoy alone... But first you still have not actually used The Window? Really? Come on and gather around then it is very simple!”

▙◀ added in tones the terran could follow.

“No, really! I assure you that we made sure it is ACTUALLY simple for you to use.”

And all the warm glowing fog was gone from that first proper taste of cake. Yes she was perfectly clear now and able to appreciate just how DISGUSTING ▙◀ and its aggregated constituents actually shaped up to be.

She huffed then relaxed the slight frown into a smile for Aleph and gestured her to The Window with a distal appendage.

“Now, simply speak to it, ask it to show you something.”

The terran had a curious but skeptical look at the Idle display of The Window.

“Well what is there to see? What can it show me?”

Pylo smirked as the Window released a gentle chime, soft on the senses of the Terrans then spoke.

The voice was precise in diction, soft and aged with nuances of gentle wonder and love. She had mulled on precisely what voice would suit the sensoria and ecologia apparatus of her Ship and Friend. It was not precisely speaking Tunie, anymore then a single one of Pylo’s own oviriticuli was Pylo, or even a dozen for that matter.

But it was a part of Tunie and she wanted to express the gentle wonderment with all of the reef that this particular part had within it.

In the end, she had settled on making it almost identical to one specific famous terran naturalist that had managed to embed it's image in the terran noosphere. Honestly the personality fit just the right niche.

A curator, a former hunter, a lover of all the wonder around them and delight in what passed for wilderness and nature on the gentle ecosphere on Terra’s sunplate.

“Welcome, I am the voice of the perceptual transform of Tunie’s Sensoria Ecologica to present this our journey through the beauty and majesty of the reef.”

Aleph’s lips were gently shaping the silent syllables of the voice’s original owner. Omega’s brows raised up slightly in surprise at the sphere then lowered as she turned her gaze on Pylo. One of them arched high in question.

Pylo gave her a helpless shrug with distals spiraling about in playful arcs to either side. The Window continued to speak after letting the impact of its voice settle on everyone.

“To begin, the question of what there is to survey can be answered simply. The local Reef is an expansive Stellar volume, bordering the more uniform cultivation and agriculture of Redweed.”

A single star blinked into visibility in the center of the orb, the surface of the volume interior covering most of the sphere within the wavelengths terrans could receive and a bit of bleedover to either extreme of light. There was a deliberate distortion around the edge to make judging distance to it easier for the terrans, and a reduction of brightness of the local star with a mimicry of terran camera technology artefacts to still give the same subjective impression without risk of damaging their eyes.

From some angles great clefts and voids in the shell of the reef could be seen, extending deeper into the ‘distance’, with glints of their own stars shining in sharp distant motes.

“From our vantage here we can survey almost the entire hollow”

All but a small cone shined briefly in resonance leakage blue, with its peak at the star’s epicenter.

Pylo watched the Terrans intently, Aleph was leaning over the table to peer into The Window. squinting at the miniaturized view of the hollow, leaning from one side to another to peer past the star into the crevices and gaps between this volume’s Reef shell and that of its neighbors.

“Redweed is the local Polity of greatest impact upon these pastures, although that influence is light and rarely felt as it is so far away, nonetheless the polity shapes the landscape.”

The Window spun and zoomed, the subjects within it growing until it surrounded the minor port where it clung to the edge of a reef wall, well in line of the twinkling streams of trade vessels of all speeds. The rapid Couriers in Tunie’s class being proper traders, but even more numerous were the incredibly dense lights of the slow traders, caravans gliding from all over the Reef.

The window lazily began to drift along, the effect was quite nice Pylo thought, from any given vantage a Terran eye would not be seeing a ‘small’ image of a miniature redweed now, but rather an accurate parallax and position as if the polity was at something close to its real distance to be taken up that arc of a terran eye’s field of view.

"We are passing through the hollow at an opportune moment. A herd of Lesser Mountain Rams are preparing for their courting dances."

The view flowed along the reef and then ascended, catching two of some beast in the framing of the terran’s view. Aleph gasped, Omega and Quarti leaned in to get a better view. With some interpolation, it switched to a more literal translation mode relaying the light in realtime.

“The males align themselves with great effort. Coordinating each each other for the optimal trajectory. They cannot afford to begin out of line with this.”

The two beasts circled slowly then stalled and shifted. Jetting exhaust to arrest their relative momentum with each other.

Subtle shifts and flickering gestures. Outgassing and more were even in this narrow anemic banding of light somewhat legible. Pylo could taste the simple animal thoughts, the tension and flaunting that none the less was sincerely cooperative.

[https://i.imgur.com/fruaK6k.png]

Neither of them wanted to die here. But they both wanted to win.

”And then the acceleration begins. They must hold this alignment as they barrel towards one another. Titanic bodies hurling to meet in a precision impact. The slightest mistake of either party could break both their spines instantly.”

They were no lesser void courier, they were nothing compared to Tunie in raw acceleration or efficiency. But still it was impressive to see them begin to push towards each their. Using violent jets of propellant to reach optimal speed. The light was dimmed considerably to keep the terrans from being blinded but Pylo could taste the subtle shifts that told her it was intensely brighter and hotter then The Window could or would allow.

And then they sailed at each other. Aleph looked over at Pylo, then to Omega and Quarti who were starting to lose interest and huffed.

“This is going to take a really long time isn't it?”

▙◀ spoke up calmly with subtleties of acid that put Pylo in mind of her nastier enzymes.

“We are watching this as it occurs. Honestly the timing was quite amazingly fortunate”

Pylo nodded to herself. This was all working as well as she hoped, ▙◀ could field technical questions if there were any more. She had other matters though!

“Well that is the basics of it, Now if you will excuse me I have an appointment with my cake.”

And with that she scooped up her cake, stuffed it into her gullet and then crawled towards the exit to digest the wonderful decadence in peace.