Omega thanked Squidgie for another set of notebooks.

“Of course Ma’am! If you run out I can also memorize them and clean the current sets as well.”

There had just been too much to go over and it continued to unfold all around her.

It had started as a procession through open sky.

Surrounded by thronging crowds of people above, below and to every side. So distant that they were like specks of multi-colored dust and glitter yet so numerous that they flowed like clouds of cheering motion.

With the landscape coiled around them in a spiraling hoop of cliffs, mountains, stones, landscape lashed and engraved in hauntingly familiar greens and browns of the foothills and valleys of home.

There was some disorientation of course, reminders of just how far from terra they really were. The expanses of white flowing structures, sprawlings cities, little forests and isolated towers, farms, fields and everything else was looped around them.

It was like someone had skinned terra and spun the lands of the plate all around her.

And then as the procession continued, moving ahead to the triplet of still yet distant towers, like three white skewers just barely ‘not’ meeting together she watched the skittering envelopes and shapes and streamers and so many others weave together. Brought upon the effort of the crowds, closing ever tighter together. Slowly knitting and weaving and fusing together into ever more complete multi-hued sheets.

It was enclosing them, sealing on all sides, filled with the lights too distant to distinguish what they were. Backlit by the bursting lights of celebrations.

She knew she was going to suffer for lack of sleep from all of this, but who could sleep in the midst of all this music? All these sights? Everywhere she looked another soul in her share strained to share her wonder.

Structural engineers, weavers, musicians, artists, pyrotechnicians, crystal weavers, dancers, metal workers.

The souls of the dead were almost as eager to share in her senses and mingle their knowledge with hers as she was to call them up.

But as they traveled the reach became more tenuous.

The crystals were going more and more distant.

It strained her until she had to give up on her newest method and instead choose a mere three to carry with her beyond the reach of Tunie and the store of souls in her berth.

That had been expected but she had tried to keep the flow of them going as long as possible.

But as the distance mounted and the connection grew difficult to keep clear and coherent she finally had to choose who would join her.

In the end she had settled for a Chronicler, a Naturalist and an Anthropologist. Settling them alongside her own soul and nestled in a store of a few storage crystals.

She had not been able to get consent from most of her favorites. But these three had been of an adventurous sort. And eager enough to risk themselves to fates worse than death.

Omega could not blame the others though.

It was one thing to ride a shaman while your soul was mostly secure behind lead, gold and insulation in a solid crystal matrix.

It was another to actually join her on an adventure riding in a knapsack with a significantly smaller crystal or if worse came to worse directly in her spine and pelvic symbiote stores.

Most terrans didn't even use the hollows stores beyond those in their face and spine!

But these three? They took it.

She felt the trembling whispers of awestruck wonder at Quarti, the endless teller of tales.

In some circles of the afterlife’s whirling pandemonium she was even called the Dream Empress.

Omega had honestly thought the souls that took to that particular degree of hero worship were a bit creepy. And she had tried to filter against anyone being that obsessive. But beggers can’t be choosers.

This soul was not even fully conscious really, not yet anyway. It would take a while for them to build up the store of prayer needed to be that involved.

But even in the half asleep semi-stasis of the crystals one of the souls reached out in trembling wonder at the blazing fire of Quarti’s Spirit. She could feel the little flickering chords of meaning that would in the following days build into a coherent soul.

Ugh she was going to have a devotee riding her and gawking and fawning over every word Quarti said. You’d think anyone who dealt with Quarti would know better.

But then again so it was with the afterlife, if there was something that could be taken to extremely disturbing extremes, well there was always a soul that was pushing well past any point of sanity that.

Omega shuddered and focused on something else.

As a shaman she was well acquainted with such strange and twisted parts of the choir. And plenty of souls she rode through herself carried baggage of all manner of deviant obsession and fetish.

That Quarti was not even stranger and more bizzarre was a blessing she suspected Aleph would never realize.

Not with them being off and alone separated from the heritage of Terra’s dead.

Well except for the strange little nuggets of those old forums that they brought with them among the dead.

And Quarti herself.

She mused as her fingers flickered through the notebooks like her words were fire burning through the pages.

This was an alien culture, it was as many individuals if Pylo and Elsie could be believed as all of Terra combined!

Nations worth of people pulling together an artifact bigger then every work of Humankind. Unified in a way that even the arrival of literal aliens had failed to bring her people together.

All of this effort for this moment.

A structure that she was almost certain was being purpose-built for Pylo’s arrival.

She could not conceive that they had some how kept it simply laying around for millenia. But then again maybe they had? Which was more likely? Which would baffle and amaze her more?

All around them this teeming throng of people was singing and performing for her, playing music for her. In instruments that reached in and out of the familiar, tones and sounds and roaring crashing waves of motion as phantasms of sensation.

She knew that Pylo was mediating the experience, mediating the roar, the waves of music rolling over and over her from all around.

Quarti was there too in the music, facilitating in her own soul’s voice layers and meanings and tones that would have been lacking if the Siren alone was merely tweaking and twisting and expressing to her nervous system directly.

It was a torrent of information and yet it also faded into murmuring background whenever she turned her attention away from some facet.

It should have been louder than loud! An overwhelming garbled mess of sheer torrential noise.

But it was mediated by her focus, by what was important by so many other things that she could not even guess at.

The Naturalist with her had once tried to be a musician, had failed out of joining the great choirs and orchestras. Had found a new love in the study of Terra’s many insects and plants and smaller creatures.

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In death they had woven memories of music and insect song and whispered them through the valleys and rode the communal songs and lullabies of Aoria for sustenance and prayer.

Finding music after death in the way creatures lived and integrated and symbiotically thrived through Terra’s tissues.

And now here so far from home the lessons in music lingered and now were at the forefront of Omega’s mind. They could recognize the sensation as one they were familiar with. And Omega too felt an echo of her own methods in shamanism.

They were not just being brute translated into this music.

They were being translated into a deeper context, not just the language but the attention as well.

It was dynamic, it was fluid, it had to be constantly operating on her own thoughts, attention and senses to properly convey for her everything that she would need to know.

Elsie had said that a Siren was worth thousands of humans in what she could do.

And in this moment she felt she could just about grasp it. Having every single voice of literally uncountable singers open to her comprehension if she just turned her attention to them effortlessly?

This was what a Siren was.

“That’s amazing.”

She caught herself murmuring it and Pylo’s voice rode along with the music soft and gentle as can be, almost fitting into voids within the song rather than fighting to be heard.

“Thank you I guess? It’s not really all that hard, I figured out how to listen to them after the third visit. And you have a pretty similar aesthetics. Glad you like it though Omega.”

The tone of voice seemed a little bit, annoyed which considering how much she was working to funnel all this along? Omega looked out the bubble to where Pylo was still verbally sparring with the Frog People Aliens.

She held herself differently here, Splayed out and wider, limbs rolling about. It was uncanny how much she changed. How she flowed out of the familiar Terran cues into an entirely different set, but still suggested them anyway.

[https://i.imgur.com/Qxb4qhi.png]

Omega could still hear Pylo’s jabs and verbal word play in the rhythm even as she had spoken to her.

“Oh! I’m sorry to distract you, that must be very complicated.”

That led to a soft unintrusive laugh. A subtle shift of shoulders and a motion of the head in time with it even as it was also in time with the performance. Keeping the two contexts straight was dizzying.

“Oh don’t worry Omega, You're not distracting anything like most of me, in fact this is rather nice.”

“It will help distract a few threads and keep them fresh and a bit more engaged. Honestly most of me is getting terribly bored with doing all of this. We figured it all out ‘FOREVER’ ago.”

The exasperated agitation came a lot more clear. Pylo was bored? Annoyed? Agitated? With handling a literal billion strong orchestra of song and musical instruments?!

“Any siren could hold a thousand unrelated conversations like the one I'm having with you right now simultaneously. She would not even notice if there was nothing particularly surprising or requiring much decision making. In fact I'm not even conscious of this one yet.”

Omega stopped writing and boggled a bit.

Aleph leaned to look over her shoulder from her discussion with Squidgie then leaned back over with the modified Clerk and filled the bubble with a more fervent whispered discussion.

In the stillness that followed she felt a clenching pain in her palms.

Her hands were cramping, she had been trying to keep the grip loose, the muscles relaxed, as soft and gentle an effort as she could. But a day of writing notes was too much.

“That looks like it’s going to hurt, what is with Terrans and pushing themselves to failure like this? Quarti is atrocious at setting proper bandwidth limits, Aleph literally won’t sleep until she can’t see straight. And look at you.”

Her symbiotes were exhausting themselves. Well beyond the heat of over-exerting too fast this was the dulling, painful ache and sting of actual borderline starvation.

Her head was going to be a foggy mess.

Her resonance and voice with the souls a tired slog as she tried to rebuild her reso-enhancing stores of bacteria.

How long had it been?

“Uh, I guess, we are just kinda... stubborn like that?”

She stilled her fingers again and yet even though there was relief stopping the motion seemed almost more exhausting and painful then continuing.

There was an ‘audible’ huff of exasperation from the siren, or some shard thereof. How did that work? Elsie said something about siren neurology. Something Paralleled.

Her thoughts felt like they raced but she was sluggish and frustrated.

She was not going to be any good to anyone if this kept up.

Her eyes hurt, her jaw was over clenched.

She forced joints to relax, unfurl, her muscles to still. Her breathing to be even.

Omega was drowning in wonders and they still had not even finished arriving!

“Hey, Pylo... could you tone all of this down a bit? Or something? I think I should sleep.”

They were still being welcomed and going through the motions of politeness!

She needed to rest, to stop despite all the tantalizing vistas and new secrets on display.

All the strange alien things.

She had to sleep or she would not be ready for the next disaster, the next surprise, the next moment when her focus would be required.

Omega breathed deep and steady, she let every motion still, she relaxed the communion with the souls and had them rest back in her satchel asleep and dead in crystal.

She turned attention inward from the sensations and the music faded to just an impression.

“Sure I’ll just shift the excitement and frisson down to something more in line with your sleep rhythms.”

Just the subtle swell and drop of an idea.

Rhythm alien but soothing. Like rain now, like the wind in the mountains howling, like the call of animals freshly risen by the waters, briefly flowing in brooks and ponds and puddles through the valleys.

She breathed and let nothing but the ebb and flow of her breath, the blood in her veins the feelings of her soul cycle through her attention.

She let her symbiotes settle at last.

She would be starving when she woke, having pushed them far too long for far too hard.

“Could you like, I dunno record it or something for me later, Want to go over these later...”

But now it was rest, it was peace, it was the rhythm of quiet things.

How the same music could be both the most soothing lullaby and the most raucous celebration she briefly wondered.

Pylo was so soft spoken, so soothing, so gentle.

“Alright Omega, sleep well, I’ll pass the translation to Squidgie for you to listen to later.”

And then Omega settled and she was at last asleep.