Pylo vented heavily. Dropping down the temperature of her body from the slow but constant increase from metabolic activity.

Tunie required semi constant reassurance through the thicket of close in branches and rubble that lined the narrow cleft of reef wall they sailed through.

Subtle and slight curving of their path near constant as her friend weaved in shallow whorls. Every time they made their way through this place it was different. Every time there could be surprises.

Thus the need to crawl so slowly through the narrow crack between the two stellar volumes.

Pylo normally would be there with Tunie every moment of these harrowing trips. There was nothing really that could be done to help the ship in more than moral support. But Pylo could give that support. Reminding her friend to not panic that there was no longer any straight shot that she could push at maximum acceleration.

Remind her that although she felt like she was slow and vulnerable there was no monsters lurking here, not in any of the many trips had there been.

There was not enough traffic here to lure any of the big predators that preyed on trade ships. Just Tunie and her infrequent and erratic journeys. Nothing to inspire an ambush and no easy routes to arrive from or escape back into vast unpatrolled territories.

Normally Pylo would be there soothing her friend’s fears and lessening the burden. But this time they had passengers.

And passengers required attention.

Such as Squidgie here.

And whatever the little Clerk’s project was.

It was supposed to be a surprise for Aleph, a collection of art projects, sculptures, anatomical studies, various materials, colour samples of various kinds.

Pylo sighed heavily at the distraction from making sure that Tunie remained calm and did not panic and hurl munitions at echoes and figments.

“No, no that style works in flat abstracted illustrations because you are letting the Terran visual cortex fill in the blanks and create an idealized appeal internally. Translating that into actual objective reality in this manner overloads their pattern recognition and distracts from the cues.”

She gestures at one of the sculptures which she could already see was going to just make every single disgusted revulsion response in the two younger terrans fire unrelentingly.

“You are going to horrify the poor girl with this You will need to move away from actual direct analogue textures and materials. Simpler ones, Simpler textures. Now show me that joint assembly and how you were planning it to work?”

The poor clerk lacked the sensory bandwidth to actually make this take less time then it was going too. Not like ▙◀ or even Quarti (although Pylo really needed to see about getting the terran some kind of coolant system, the accumulated damage from heat exhaustion was going to add up).

So they did it the slow way.

The little clerk sent signals down the assembly for the puppet rig. It was Pylo supposed something like a toy? Maybe an armature rig of some kind to assist Aleph? Pylo was not sure, she honestly was only concerning herself with the prominent concern that the little Clerk had.

Which was if this was going to Appeal to her mistress Aleph. And a few dozen other aesthetic standards, but mostly that one.

And unfortunately there was only one answer Pylo could give.

“Ugh, I’m sorry you have the wrong movement pattern it’s not... Here let me show you”

Pylo flexed her cortices and flanks a bit until they were mostly approximating the Terran body in at least impression if not actual underlying structure.

“There you see? Yours is going to make her think you animated a corpse or that this thing was suffering from some kind of injury. Here try to do less instead of so many actuation points. Simplify and aim for the right sequence curves... Like how the flat images can imply much in the Human visual cortex with little? You do the same with a few moving points that sweep the right arcs see?”

The Clerk nodded and wrote furiously dense notes on the terran style paper scroll.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Pylo glanced at it but just saw a bunch of random sinuous lines that could mean anything and sighed.

“Alright, so to review what are the key points you need to address before you bring this back to my attention again?”

Squidgie squirmed and then spoke in an oddly accented light broadcast. It was much more like a terran voice being encoded and transmitted then what the other clerks sent and received. It also was not strictly necessary since Pylo could just read the output information designated sections of the brain but it seemed to help the little Clerk to organize her thoughts.

“Simplify the eyes, doing full musculature detail like my own or a Terran’s will just horrify. Don’t go for realistic flesh or skin textures, it gives bad corpse feeling impressions. But do have smooth deformations and muscle tissue processes. Adjust the pattern of the limb actuation to be simpler curves with fewer joints. Do not attempt to directly port techniques from flat depictions to sculptural ones, investigate a perceptual matrix transform for such instead?”

The last bit honestly did not mean very much to Pylo without wracking the Cleric’s brain for specific context but it seemed close enough to the advice she had tried to give.

Pylo nodded and vented heavily again before turning her attention back to the endless comforting of the near terror ridden ship.

“If that is all I need to calm down Tunie again. She thought she saw an echo that was ‘lurking with malefic intent’ again”

A gentle soothing dance for Tunie then, speaking her down in whorls and spins and light hearted laughs and reminders that there was nothing to fear. There were no predators so far, check and triple check the echos before panicking. Do not deploy and detonate the high yield munitions.

“↹⑈◮ █▄▅↹↹ ”

Pylo paused on that one and after carefully soothing the ship ceded that just in case Tunie could have a few of them loaded ready to be deployed. But not yet armed or starting any detonation countdown.

“↹◮!”

She huffed and verbally coddled Tunie a bit roughly.

“If anything is out there setting off any of the munitions will flash the whole passage with all manner of light and cast your shadow in high relief! Don’t hurl them around at every little spook or then you might give away our position worse! You KNOW this Tunie! You’ve explained it to me just a little while ago when I was reminding you that you HAD the munitions!”

Her friend was wonderful and Pylo did not deserve her but right now, in the dark, having to mostly coast through slightly curving canyons of reef material with no way to accelerate to any particular speed and no directly open path the poor dear got particularily panicky and stupid.

She ran a distil-most phalange along the curve of her friend’s hull. Not that she could feel much in the dead superstructure tissue that made up most of her interior.

But she spoke a soft comparable verbage to go along with it.

Ships were like her friend were meant to fly free in the open expanses.

Not crawl through narrow passages like this.

[https://i.imgur.com/Zsd4Bfa.png]

But it was for the very reason that there was no known polity of relevance in the following volume and the extreme inconvenience and uncertainty of this path that there was so little traffic this way to begin with.

Pylo forgot the specifics but her mother had once intimated that back before a stellar death had changed the balance of forces this way had been open. Not since her Grandmother’s time as Mother Courtesan almost certainly but definitely not so far back as her Great Grandmother.

There might even be distantly traveled ships who Pylo could meet that had come this way when it had been open and clear enough to pass at full cruising speed.

Who had known her family when it was led by her grandmother.

She shifted and moved with the slight nudges and thrusts of her vessel, friend and home. Moving through the passages to go and refill herself on coolant.

This was such a busy transit!

Pylo was definitely increasing her rates for passengers next time.