Pylo was busy, but apparently ▙◀ could simply not deal reliably with whatever Quarti’s concerns were.

[https://i.imgur.com/WHBvw8f.png]

It was amusing to her on one front, that despite how much the micropolity and its demiurges would boast (oh they claimed it was just objective honesty but there was plenty of evidence to the contrary) there were obvious limits to its vaunted abilities.

One of which was in Quarti, the Terran was incredibly old by her specie’s reckoning. And she would flex the deep stores of memory by habitually and quite often maliciously using self referential linguistic errata so knotted and complex that ▙◀ utterly failed to parse it.

The micropolity’s current charter and broad assets was significantly younger than the terran, and the records necessary to perform the full linguistic analysis without rederiving from basic entropic principles simply were not extant.

As such Quarti could if she was feeling like it refuse to be understood by anyone except a Siren.

So while she had mostly been working with Tunie to keep the ship calm and focused as they move through the closed in passage she was now having to once again split her focus.

At least according to Tunie’s motile system network there was apparently not any maintenance issues coming up.

Although that was suspicious. Normally there would be a slowly accumulating list of tasks that needed Pylo to confirm and tweak things.

It must just be luck.

“Quarti, Tunie needs a lot of support and comfort right now. I need to focus on that, what is upsetting you so much that you had to make yourself incomprehensible to ▙◀ ?”

The Terran had grabbed one of the awful ‘emergency suits’ to slip away from the habitat and find her instead of taking the conveyance. Why she did not know but it did not matter, it was just one more tiring and distressing factor to the whole exchange.

“ ▙◀ has little to no expertise in anything but dry written accounts in what concerns me. Of the complex interplay of spirit and soul and the ecosystems within they are blind. If they had been even sparsely competent in that sector then they would have known to warn you and Tunie away from such a close rendezvous with a star’s cosmic brilliance and attendant swarms.”

Pylo huffed coolant in a fine frosty mist before pumping the conversation densely and thickly through Quarti’s nervous system.

The conversation was an instant, each branch spun into the nervous system and only the responding echo of changed meaning and memory needed. Pylo unfurled the densely packed reciprocity and waited for her terran partner to gasp and sweat out the overheating and recovered from an uneven timesink.

“Granted, so it is something to do with the resonance biome that is changed? Something you cannot trust ▙◀ or your fellow terrans with?”

The terran had shifted in that line of questioning and opened into other threads

“Omega is broken and must be cared for and tended to not heal crooked. She took what was sparse and superficial injuries and bent and contorted her soul over herself trying to force what should have only taken time. In her panic she injured herself far worse than the star spawn ever did. And Aleph is not yet mortal, she has yet to fully be born in soul, she could not understand.”

The later paths were mirrors and shapes that formed in absence of Pylo’s own inquiries and yet emerged and formed readily for it. Burning along the coiled networks of Quarti’s brain tissues and letting her resonance interface form the responses and open the replies.

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“So what is the nature of the disaster now Quarti? What must you speak to me and only me now?”

There was a shuddering and a dislocation in this bit of the mutually woven tapestry that the two of them were making of the terran’s physical flesh.

“I spoke to the little daughters about the nature of terrors old and ancient in the city of Crimson Vines. I burned with the spark of the terror of stars out here in the dark and explained and coddle and tend the wounded panic of one of them now. But now in this place we drift like motes of dust you bring us here? Where there is a shadow and a presence over all that lives and breaths in spirit!”

Pylo let the tapestry settle and cool as Quarti’s flesh spelled out all the experience, all the wonder, all the horror of what she felt and saw around Tunie and through her.

“They are here, great vast guardians, each on a scale to the warm soft presence of the mother Terra herself. Some even vaster, huger, they carry the spirits and not spirits of this place to them on tethers and leashes and contracts. They pull them together and they answer dutifully. Threads of them reach into every shred, every parcel, every living thing. What is this, What is this place to which you have brought us? That there are spirits here the scale of worlds that are beholden to some... some vast distant THING!”

There was not in the loom that Pylo had given Quarti the answer to that. So Pylo had to wait for her to cool down enough to take another reweaving and begin a new arching tapestry of conversation.

"Those are the workings of one of the gods of this wilderness. This region of the forest is its dominion, where it aligns and maintains the wild chaos to serve and sustain it. "

Quarti seemed stunned and baffled. Her soul did not weave any response, did not prompt any further explanation. It was kind of rude and wasteful but at the same time Pylo supposed it might be a surprise?

That eventuality unrolled its own meaning

“It is a wild god, so it has no need for conventions such as names. Nothing I could tell you to call it. Those are things of civilization, and people and wild things do not use or need these. But be not afraid this one is a mostly passive and calm god. We are of no concern to it.“

The Terrans had words that meant ‘god’ or as close a fit as likely. Many words actually and many different ways to align and contain the pantheons they imagined.

But apparently when Pylo had spoken the scope to her it had stalled.

She added a soft lilt in the manner she would normally speak to Omega or Aleph. Just tweaking Quarti’s audio-linguistic centers.

Hopefully that jolted the terran back into action?

“Do not be worried, Tunie and you and all aboard are far, far, far too tiny to concern a god. We have made this trip many times and we have never done anything that could draw its attention, let alone its ire. Now if that was all you were concerned about please go back to your own duties I need to keep Tunie calm enough she does not leap at the first chance at an open sky.”

Quarti was quiet and disturbed but not in a panic or too dangerously troubled.

She quietly moved her way hand and foot over the chamber to rejoin with ▙◀ and get a ride back to the habitat.

Pylo huffed coolant again and turned her full attention back to making sure Tunie was collected enough to not over-thrust without warning as soon as they finished aligning with the exit into the forest’s stellar hollow.

Seriously the Terran was put into such a panic because she felt the presence of a divinity?

Backwards tooth scum people.