Omega settled into position around Elsie and Squidgie. The assemblage of boxes forming a kind of natural backing and framing feature for the former Clerk.

She supposed technically from what had been said so far this was not considered enough to actually make her divergent from the rest of her species. Everything important was the same but it was hard to not think that something fundamental had changed about what used to be a squishy pillow with arms and a single eye.

There was a soft pleasant humming tone from Squidgie’s screen and a soft kind of smile and bright eye blinked a few times before she made a momentary eye contact with each of them and the smile widened.

“Alright! Welcome friends! Thank you for the time so that I and The Custodian Elsie can explain my new appearance and some of the systems involved. This presentation is also to be an example for you of how many of the lessons of Custodian Elsie are actually applicable to one’s life and in what ways they actually give a foundation for greater things.”

Omega smiled a bit, She’d already spoke with Squidgie a bit on things but even in this more ‘formal’ setting she noted how the tone of voice and presentation was much smoother than Elsie ever managed. Formal yes but a lot more intimate and less like a proclamation then the pile of boxes ever managed.

“So to start with what did I even do here?”

She planted a foot into the squishy cushioning of the room and then pirrouted about, flexing the other leg in and out, up and down, arms arcing, twisting through each other and then flaring out into wide fanning sails or wings around her head before smoothly folding over her face like a cacoon.

She stopped straight and planted her other foot straight next to the first, her arms sweeping out as she did a bow and mimed curtsy face looking a little flushed in that strangely abstracted artistic way and glittering with a ‘shine’.

“Well this is a sculpted armature and casing, woven and manufactured here aboard Tunie using available materials on the ship. Although the critical structures of the design are capable of significant downgrades in materials manufacturing, computational materials and more with Elsie’s assistance.”

She beamed and bobbed a bit in place as if she was being pressed down by gravity instead of somehow clinging to the surface of the ‘floor’ flexing everything up and down her body.

“Overall seventeen-million and three local economic calorie-equivalent resources were used in-”

Omega raised a brow and was about to speak before the screen on the clerk filled with a sudden wide eyed realization and she blushed furiously.

“I apologize, I just realized I was using my internal metric measurements, um ah... It’s something like... ehm”

Elsie spoke up with a gentle flat tone.

“To accurately assess and translate proper economic and industrial capacities and costs related to the construction is a significant problem exceeding the time and abilities of Von Squidgie the First Esquire and this meeting. We covered the proper procedures on this in the class relating to macroeconomic conventions of inter-polity trade works and relative evaluations of energy versus manufacturing components and innovative potentia as it pertains to baking”

Aleph, Omega and Quarti blinked at each other for a moment then frowned. Quarti scratching her head and raising a brow at Omega who shrugged,she sort of remembered that Elsie might have been rambling about something related to that when they first were discussing making cake?

It was one of the ones that the three terrans had mutually agreed made no sense whatsoever most of the time and promptly forgot about.

Squidie watched them a moment and sighed before chirping softly.

“Right, well moving on to medical application and integration!”

She extended an arm and flexed each of the nine fingers split among three hands.

“Nearly my entire original epidermis and ocular materials were removed, their equivalent neural interfaces rerouted to more standardized ports for the armature. Said ports as well as the rest of my internal visceral tissues have been spooled open and through with supportive mesh that while insulating from vacuum and terminal pressure will freely exchange a degree of gas and fluids with my external environment this-”

Aleph spoke up with a bit of a pained edge to her voice.

“You took- You removed your eye and skin and... what do you mean spooled your visceral tissues?! Squidgie! That sounds really dangerous.”

Squidgie smiled a little sheepishly and looked down at her shuffling feet as she fiddled with her fingers behind her back. Omega thought it looked a little bit like something she’d seen a very young Aleph do when she was trying to get away with something she knew upset the adults.

“It means that a maximum amount of my internal organs and tissue systems have been peeled apart to maximize their contact surface area Then a fibrous medium similar to the one used for the bubble walker was poured into the interstitial spaces. This along with the ports will ensure pathogenic and environmental exposure to all parts of my body so that-”|

“ENSURE WHAT?! ELSIE Y-you! YOU HELPED HER DO THIS?!”

Aleph sounded genuinely horrified and a bit panicked now. Omega flinched in sympathy, that was the tone of voice she recognized, it was one she had held in her own throat when speaking to the aliens about Aleph’s own health.

Elsie’s dry but gentle tone was utterly calm against Squidgies preppy excitement and Aleph’s horror.

“Yes, I actually insisted upon it over other methods to ensure that the Clerk’s future health is not compromised.”

Aleph’s mouth gaped and the statement stalled out whatever she was preparing to say.

“Y-you... wait... b-butchering her... making sure she’s cut apart was... was for her health?!”

Omega winced again, yeah this was like watching a time traveling mirror of her own past experiences.

Elsie continued.

"Although having to use either option would have far exceeded the projects budget, remember that the Brush and Pylo were both available, should the worst happen."

Squidgie’s voice was softer, apologetic but also with a hint of firm determination and just a hint of throaty stress. It gave the hint that the clerk was a bit hurt by the reaction from Aleph. And the way that the face on the screen looked strained and a little teary helped sell it.

“In addition, I know precisely how brutal and terrifying and painful this sounds and even more so how much it does hurt to be this way Ma’am. I feel it in my every cell, every second.”

Omega turned to watch Aleph’s own expression flinch through a few forms of contrition at that voice then a dawning empathetic hurt and horror as she continued.

“But this was the only way Ma’am, I’m still a Clerk inside. I neither wished to change that about myself nor thought you’d want to lose me like that. To stay me and do this there was only this way. Elsie helped me understand and improve this. I would have horribly screwed it up otherwise.”

Omega watched her once student across the little huddle. Squidgie was nice but honestly she was just a friendly alien. Her pain sounded kind of awful but what does it even mean. Omega was not sure she really knew. But she could see that there was a lot more to it for Aleph.

“If we did anything less I would be choosing some part of myself to consign to the wasting of adulthood. To prevent that we have made me raw and in so doing preventing any of me from encysting naturally.”

Aleph nodded but she had a strained thinness to her lips.

Her voice suddenly cleared, almost entirely, but for a slight rawness in the undertone. It was the voice of someone who was pushing past pain or recovered but still with the strain of having cried.

"It hurts a bit but it's nothing I can't handle. And everything was and is safe; I'd never put you through losing me like that Ma’am. That is part of the point of this exercise."

Then she suddenly twirled and pointed right at Quarti!

"But this is supposed to be a happy lesson, showing off cool toys! Qiarti pick anything about me and ask anything! I’ll be really surprised if I can’t field even one of YOUR questions."

She leaned a little closer and held a ‘hand’ of hands over her ‘mouth’ to ‘whisper’ loud enough so that everyone present could hear.

“But please keep it a little bit less risque I don’t wanna embarrass my prude of a mom right now.”

With a blatant wink, (or blink since she was mono-eyed, but it was kinda... asymmetrical?) that Omega was pretty sure made a little faint bell chime sound Squidgie leaned back grinning at Quarti.

Aleph seemed to still not be fully recovered from the revelation of near constant exposed nerve torture. Quarti gave Omega a solemn look before splitting her face into her own bright grin.

“Alright gilly-gal! How ya gonna eat like that anyway?”

Squidgie laughed lightly, barely even a hint of the rawness now in her tone.

“Ah that’s actually only gotten a tiny bit more complicated. I can still take the usual intravenous feeds like before but now I also need to make sure the armature gets a decent dose of grist from Tunie. Not often though and really on the balance I’m actually going to run a lot more efficient than I was calorie wise! Not *cheaper*, but more efficient.”

To demonstrate she took a syringe of something yellow and cloudy from Elsie and then completely nonchalantly stabbed it into the back of her neck and pushed the plunger in.

“Honestly the best part is that the digestive pocket I made out of my circulatory system is a lot better at handling rapid fluid injections so I don’t need to go as slow with feeding!”

Quarti offered a laugh that Omega could not tell if it was genuine or not. It probably was half fake if she had a guess of what was going on.

Aleph still seemed to be working through her own emotions so Omega chimed in with her own question.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“You are... Um really agile like that now. How do you manage that?”

Squidgie laughed and then bent over with a little hip sashay and PRIED HER FINGERS INTO A SEAM OF LEG’S SKIN AND PULLED IT APART.

Omega kept her expression frozen and glanced at Aleph who, oddly enough seemed less bothered by that then the earlier revelation. A glance back at the leg revealed something almost but not quite like a human skeleton.

There were a lot few pieces, but honestly it looked a lot more natural than artificial. There were slabs of blue grey ‘muscle’ but when she leaned closer she noticed they had a repetitiousness to how the fibers laid down, they interlocked and were texturd in a way a lot more like a woven thing then she would have expected.

In fact

“Is that one of Aleph’s Knitting patterns?!”

That got Aleph to look closer and even got a bit of a confused smile before she fingered the near exact same weave in her own green sweater.

Squidgie nodded, flexing the leg around so they could watch the ‘muscles’ compress and relax, tightening and releasing the weave. They looked shiny and slick. Quarti naturally reached out and poked one before pinching her own fingers together a few times in curiosity before looking over at Omega with a raised brow.

“Slinky with no mess. Neat”

Aleph raised a brow up at Squidgie. She finally managed to speak although her voice had a lot more hints of her earlier panicked shouts.

"S-so that's what the knitting lessons were about? When Elsie had us share crafts? I thought you were just uh, curious or wanted to fix my sweaters for me or something. Uh, I was not even imagining you’d do something like this."

The clerk laughed and ran a finger up and down one of the woven muscle groupings, letting a finger dance in wandering lines through the knitted looking texture.

"I actually used the basket weave Quarti taught us for the armature’s structural support matrix and where the actual functionality of the pattern matters more in the connective tissue of the musculature. She had very good optimization patterns towards being shapeable and generalizable."

Quarti laughed and poked at Elsie’s exposed thigh muscles. Omega idly flowed through medical students, doctors and a few butchers before musing.

“That’s not terran musculature, or anything really like any animal I can place. But it looks natural and functional to the same degree.”

Squidgie nodded and gently pushed her ‘skin’ closed, massaging it up and down before she stood back up and flexed the leg around, peering closely at it, possibly for defects?

“Me and Elsie had to trade back and forth on the anatomical designs, but no we did not copy anything from actual animalia, just basic optimization methodology. This is just a carbon based elastomer, plenty strong for daily use but It won’t even self repair. Very cheap and easy to replace though.”

Aleph eyed the leg, now whole again and seeming more or less perfectly fine after having been flayed open.

"So you made a super robot body... using basket weaving. Right."

Squidgie bobbed her head and smiled so wide it nearly escaped her screen.

“Yes Ma’am! I’m so glad you are impressed, and it’s such an excellent example of how flexible our lessons can be in actual application is it not?”

Omega decided to fill in the space for Aleph to get a moment and process things more.

"So, how are you so... acrobatic? Didn't Elsie go over a bunch about how we have special brain parts that let us do that clerks don't?"

There was practically a vibration to how she moved just then. Delighted, excited, like she was going to explode. Omega hoped it was just emotive excitement and not a literal volatility.

"Yup! cleric neurons are far too slow for this kind of reaction speed. That was one of the hardest parts of building the armature! At the lowest level, it's a number of analog electronic feedback circuits that wire into the muscles directly, and those are controlled by a motion planner basically the same as one of the ones Elsie uses, which I just send high-level commands through my own motor cortices to. It's... really fun to use. So much easier to do everything!”

She bobbed a little bit on her ‘feet’ grinning with a bit of a pink tongue poking past her ‘lips’ then extended her arms out towards them and flexed each finger individually.

“However I kept most of the ones attached to my fingers the same, just with a faster connection over that distance. For emergencies I have an override grip reflex that can travel from the motion planner but I thought you’d appreciate I kept that part personally. Plus it lets me keep a bunch of the more subtle skills I've developed, that have some personal attachment even if they'd probably be fairly easy to relearn."

Quarti leaned forward a bit and tilted her head.

“How you make all dis ? Seems very cash money spendy.”

Squidgie blinked a moment and looked puzzled, then glanced at Elsie and back at Aleph before seeming to comprehend.

“Oh! The actual manufacture! Well I actually planned out several methods for that depending on the available infrastructure. Originally I did sculptures and basic mold casting for practice and as a fall back in case I ever got stranded without a compatible industry available.”

She briefly flickered through images upon her screen of carving and shaping various materials. Omega briefly recognized at least four crafts that she had once held the skill of. Among them was something that looked suspiciously like blacksmithing!

“But given the likely capabilities of ports that Tunie will be visiting and the capacities of most Polity I settled for a method of polymer weaving for most of the major structures. It’s simple enough nearly all of them should have equivalent methods ”

Squidgie reached behind her and turned to expose her back to them, quite literally as she peeled it apart revealing something that looked suspiciously like a spine and ribcage, although the joints were more ball in socket based then what terran anatomy resembled.

There were also large fleshy pink masses that Omega would have compared to a Liver or spleen if this was a normal human torso, that didn't look quite like they matched either the tones of the ‘muscles’ or the smoked glassy looking mass behind the ribs.

“It also makes it much less fiddly to lay in all the different materials and such like the signal lines for the epidermal tactile and proprioceptive sensors.”

Squidgie ran her fingers along the inner lining of the skin where fibrous lines converged to circular contact points as she talked, other fingers showing how those contacts lined up with matching sets on the surfaces of her ribs.

“And to be honest, it helped that I could use one of the Prototyping Looms Miss Pylo had laying around, I think she used it to build the legs for your walker.”

Aleph was softly spoken, sounding a bit more like herself before Squidgie’s little revelation at the start.

"You didn't have bones before. What are those and what are they made of? It looks like Ivory almost."

Squidgie hummed as she sealed up her back and twised back around to face Aleph. Squating down even though everyone else was floating around her.

"That’s a coating we based on your tooth enamel. The cores are actually shaped scrap pieces of Tunie’s Skeleton. These parts of the frame are planned to be replaced the least often and require the most skill so Elsie and I aimed for a lot more durability and high end manufacturing techniques. "

Quarti laughed and poked her in the little nub that resembled an amputated arm. Omega was pretty sure Squidgie only had them so she could shrug.

"And the... skin stuff? It’s soo smooth, but it squishy squishes even though it looks hard. It's really pretty, like pearls and oliph tusk and mummy cow mashies!"

Squidgie laughed and leaned towards quarti extending an arm right under her nose so she could see.

“It's a thing pylo made, if you look closely, it's actually striped and the stripes are hard and soft. ”

There was so many more questions and answers after that, Omega filled two more notebooks with the results but the most important part was watching Aleph slowly relax back into naturally smiling instead of the forced tension that she had been putting in at the start.

"I actually use acoustics for the tactiles, simpler to manufacture if I don’t have bio-printers. I actually first derived the general principle independently and designed a crude idea, but the implemented version used is a common standard Elsie had on file."

The excited girl just wanted to gush on and on about all the things she could do. It was honestly almost exactly like a terran child wanting to show off their latest achievements.

“Oh that? It’s a stunted segment I cut out of one of Tunie’s circulatory motiles. It gives me a output-input channel into the rest of her immunocirculatory ecosystem, and a few other functions. ”

Honestly it was all overwhelming but at the same time she could see Aleph growing into a beaming pride and delight at all the things her little ward could do.

Omega hummed, yeah ward would be a good word for squidgie

“Yeah I have a generic data ports in the palms but I can plug in adaptors for most of the common formats Pylo has laying around and a few Elsie thought would be useful. And I’m sure wherever we end up I could machine adaptors for any new ones we find!”

Aleph was laughing and soon Omega and Quarti were more or less silent just watching the two of them banter and expound and delight in the many different functions and abilities Squidgie had laced through her new body or planned for expansion.

[https://i.imgur.com/TupKL8n.png]

Eventually though Elsie chimed and brought the conversation to an end, in much the same way that Squidgie had at the start.

“I believe that this review and sharing has been quite informative, Now it is time to go over what safety practices and concerns you should have about our next port.”