Squidgie was delighted and every single fiber of her being was a faintly screaming in anguish and panic on a cellular level.

She was finally useful, not just in this single moment but in how she was helping already to smooth out and improve the quality of life of her eventually crew member Ship Mistress Pylo.

And even in this very moment Miss Aleph was asking for clarification on the nature of the Polity that still was weighing like the densest of economic market digests in her hind brains.

“So, how big exactly was Redweed? I feel like we never got a clear concept of that despite how many times Elsie went over it. And even when we went back over it with the Window last year I still don’t feel like I get it. Now when we went over how big this port we're going to is... redweed was bigger right?”

Squidgie was so thrilled to finally be useful!

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

“Oh yes! By many orders of magnitude Miss Aleph. This port is only a thousand times more numerous than Petalweft salt’s population on approximation. But they are scattered over so much space that it is rather straining the terminology to even call it a contiguous polity.”

Aleph scrunched her brow and tilted her head.

“What do you mean by that? Also, I don't really have any idea how much of redweed Petalweft Salts is so that doesn't really tell me anything.”

Squidgie waggled one of her sets of hands.

“Oh I’m sorry, I thought you would have remembered. Petalweft Salts was prior to the exodus of my parents and the Clerks affected by your misadventure representative of a little less then a millionth of the population of Redweed”

"So this place is around one thousandth as big as redweed?"

"No, Redweed Proper has very sharp borders but the population density is very smooth in descent as you leave the main superstructure, most of redweed's actual inhabitation and economic activity does not count as discrete "population" as such, and industry means the energy and materials flowing through it is another few orders of magnitude larger than that."

Aleph raises a brow.

“I know you can run the numbers faster than me, so how much bigger is Redweed compared to this place?”

Squidgie nodded and played a bright smile for Aleph.

“There is a fairly even population density going out quite a ways further then the extant that miss Pylo considered rather arbitrarily the ‘polity proper’. So the actual densest and lightest population numbers are likewise arbitrary.”

Aleph glared at her a bit but it was not yet a bad kind of glare, just a slightly impatient one.

“I could adjust to be closer to the measures that Redweed uses. But by any of those standards, not a single cubic meter of this port would actually fit the criteria of being a polity. But at the same time within that volume the actual areas of habitation are very sharply defined with dense centers within and absolutely no population without. The simplest would be to compare total metabolic rate in calories.”

Her employer and mistress waved a hand to tell her to get on with it.

“But that would be confounded by how many client species that are considered below significance for personhood are involved and after all adjustments were finished would leave us back at the conundrum of Standard Persons calculations”

She offered and apologetic smile and dipped her head to Aleph.

"Elsie going on like this is exactly why I still have no idea how big this place or Redweed are."

She flinched a little bit at that and fluttered the image of her eye.

“I apologize Ma’am. This is not an easy question to answer accurately. There are many different factors that make any given population center incredibly incomparable between each other. I do not wish to be misleading.”

Aleph sighed and pulled herself back into the cushioning of the wall.

“I just need to put this into any context Squidgie. I need to be able to line it up with Terra and understand where we are going, where we have been. What any of this even means. How big is this place?!”

Squidgie took her mistress’ words deep into the little churning mass of cellular tissue that was still vaguely her digestive system. Although one flayed open and out in a way that made her immune system fizzle semi constantly.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“On terra... your cities are like a... I believe you say a spider web?”

"... You know what spiders are?"

"Yes there are numerous spiders in this forest. Closely related to the ones you have on terra even."

Aleph blinked a few moments in consideration but Squidgie quickly felt guilty and had to clarify.

“Almost no one but a specialist biologist would recognize they are so similar however. And I must confess I only know to call them spiders because I read the terran zoology textbooks. But please wait and listen I am attempting an analogy Ma’am.”

She sighed and nodded for Squidgie to continue.

“Now then, on Terra your cities are much like a spider web laid out across the sun plate of your symbiote yes? You can see the similarity of these two things? Think of one of your normal sized spider webs about this wide?”

Squidgie held her hands apart to demonstrate like she had learned terrans would, it was a little bit more apart then Aleph’s head.

“Redweed Proper is like if you wove all of that thread into a tight ball that'd maybe be this small in diameter "

She demonstrated holding two fingers in a near pinch.

"... then kept adding to that thread until it was this big around”

She held her hands about once and half again as wide as Aleph’s shoulders and waited for her to understand.

“There is a lot more space much more densely used and in more directions in Red Weed. You see?”

Aleph considered then nodded and smiled.

“Now this place we are going is like you took a spider web like your cities on terra? And strung them out across a bunch like an actual spider in the wild would instead of laying it flat. And in this case it is using between fifty and a hundred times more silk then terra did and the space it is spread out over is almost clear across this room”

Mistress Aleph looked back and forth across the room before nodding and smiling.

"So Redweed is... at least millions of times bigger than all the civilizations of terra... and elsie said there were civilizations a TRILLION times larger than that?"

Squidgie nodded then considered.

“Well not civilizations really, those are entities that are not even contiguous across Redweed. But basically yes, centralized political bodies.”

Aleph raised a brow.

“Isin’t civilization and Polity the same thing?”

Squidgie made a cute smile and quirked her ‘brow’ that only really existed for the sole purpose of making that expression in that moment.

“Is Terra only midland countries, or whatever the capital of the biggest one is? Or the Rimwall port? Polity is a much bigger and greater thing than a civilization.”

Aleph nodded and smiled a bit brighter, which honestly made the constant painful itching in every miniscule shred of her flesh worth it all over again.

“But back to your question. That was a trillion times larger than the Redweed polity controlled territories, we've just been talking about the core polity itself. The villages and fields and chaparral that supports Redweed is many orders of magnitude greater than that. But still quite small in the scheme of things I have read exist..”

Aleph was intently watching now, her attention actually engaged. It warmed Squidgie up inside and made her emote a slight flush to her cheeks which got a laugh.

“To continue the metaphor in many cases they do that by having either sparser spider webs then even terra and spreading them out over more space then all of tunie billions of times over.”

The look of incredulity returned, then slowly dawned into actual comprehension.

“Sometimes they wrap up very dense and tight balls of silk, but usually that is because such a web is large enough that in a spider web knots of that size would form naturally. And some of those knots have densities that really break the metaphor due to the limits of physically being able to compress silk. But it gives you some context yes Miss Aleph?”

There was a pleased nod and another bright and wonderful smile of appreciation and understanding. Another golden moment worth all the suffering of this body!

And with that ▙◀ arrived with Quarti and Omega.

“Well it’s time to talk about the specifics of my augmentations now! We can discuss this more later Ma’am”