Pylo needed to have a talk with the passengers about abducting hitchhikers from Tunie’s plumage.
The poor thing was in many ways simpler than Tunie’s own motiles but obviously very distressed. And it had already missed the window that the rest of its fellows used to leap free of Tunie’s feathers and into the empty relative safeness of more familiar foliage.
Letting it out now would have been a culling sentence to it’s whole line and all those possible factories it kept nestled inside.
She guessed she shouldn't feel bad for the things; they did stowaway without offering anything in return, and added weight tunie needed to further brake.
But they also would have hopped off before they even were much of a factor in maneuvering if Squidgie and ▙◀ had not snatched it from Tunie’s exterior and brought it indoors.
It didn't really have all that much of a sense of economics. Or thought for that matter. Just a few prebuilt signals that tied to embedded service agreements for the expected hosts or allies to try and supplicate anything dangerous the little factory founder encountered.
By some reckoning even the anemically-to-nearly-non-cognitive fruit that the Terrans had was more aware and capable of exchange.
But here it was on Tunie and they were well into the grove of ultra aggressive psychotic trees that simultaneously terrified, abused and protected the vaguely polity shaped port her mother had arranged for her in the Wilderness.
A more actively and aggressively inappropriate place for founding new factories would be difficult to find.
Well she would see if the locals wanted to buy it off her, and if not she would probably throw it into the random curios and trinkets hold for later.
Was its own fault for trying to cheat a ride on Tunie.
But still she should talk with ▙◀ about this. They should have known better and Squidgie needed to be reminded.
Also probably bring the terrans into it in order to ensure that they don’t get some wrong headed lessons from it.
The people were with them already.
Riding their steeds along side Tunie’s own course. Spiraling and looping with one another. Voices amplified and translated into a soupy bath of different frequencies of light.
Calls and songs both for her benefit and also out into the vastness of the grove.
Pylo was from past experience certain that the trees here had long ago learned Tunie had absolutely no interest in occluding their light, eating their flesh or otherwise reinforcing or encouraging their many enemies or parasites.
But still the songs went an exultation and promise of peace, passage and supplicating submission to the trees for the sake and safety of their treasured wanderer.
Comforting arias surrounded Tunie as the riders and their beasts sang and spoke and called out. They welcomed her and told her stories and passages of their remembrances of her.
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Every time they did this the artistic wordcraft was different, Pylo suspected that many were practiced and reiterated and preserved as well as the people could manage but in the intervening time the song changed. The broadest of symbolism and tones remained but moralities, ethical substance, allegorical associations?
Tunie had on one trip been welcomed as a fierce and ever hungry goddess beast, to be satiated lest she bring ruin and damnation on all. In that song Pylo who was also her mother and mothers mother had tamed the fierce allegory for oppressively powerful wildness that Tunie represented and in doing mirrored and represented the ideal of the People’s own endless struggle with the Forest and its overwhelming powers. But that was an odd one, during turbulent times.
On another trip the song spoke of Tunie as an eternal child, chained and broken by dark and unseemly powers coming to them for succor and comfort. In that song Pylo had barely even been a factor, a vague and mostly unremembered peripheral to the deeply tragic story of hope, perseverance, innocence and crippling injury that Tunie’s own epic tale encompassed. She quite liked that one.
Then there was the one where Pylo was a barely restrained caricature of a hated faction within the clan leadership. Malevolent but also a source of trials that one honed themselves to better their character. In that song the premise of Tunie was one that stripped all identity and agency from her. An extension of Pylo’s own distorted and completely laughable societal role as hated arbiter and dispenser of punishment and woes. She mostly just had a good laugh out of how her polite and casual attitude utterly baffled the younger populace on that visit.
On and on the meaning of who or what she was in the song was different and varied every time, the greater population inventing and reinventing the rituals and their meanings over generations. Finding and seeking new interpretations and meanings.
New relevences and foundations for their experience again and again.
But some parts they managed to keep almost identical, the short snippets that held actual specific function, or the ones headed by a particular elder. The bulk goods she would take in exchange and the list of wares and wonders she would have available were stable and strong for example.
As was the fact that for whatever morality they assigned to her she and Tunie were sacred things to be preserved, respected and engaged civilly.
But the surprise of how time and culture could spin a new version every time was a delight.
Honestly Pylo found it very pleasant, and she suspected that The Traditions of the People was flirting with her a bit.
It certainly had the capability to preserve much larger pieces of information with perfect fidelity. It was it's main function after all, and what let the People survive the innumerable threats of this place.
But still here it practiced a lax whimsy in its role and let permutations flutter and flit and delight her and Tunie.
It seemed that on this visit she and Tunie were seen akin to sisters, powerful personalities who traveled the forest and the people’s distorted conception of the greater reef as a comically larger and more terrifying forest around their own.
The fictionalized events attributed to them were morality plays but there was a balance of flaw, virtue and character to the both of them. As often as Pylo had a comeuppance for the current culture’s idea of rash stupidity Tunie was caught up in improprieties.
As often as it was her own heroic adherence to law, order and the great traditional pillars of elder veneration Tunie had deeply insightful moments of secret wisdoms from within that only an individual who had lived and seen could know.
The characters and distortions were as always delightfully humorous and totally inaccurate but she happily shared them with Tunie. Who was equally amused by the prattling infantile flickering ways that The People’s steeds peppered her with.
However that brought on a moment that drew her up short in the obviousness of it.
“ ⎌↹⑇◆?”
Pylo could not remember the last time Tunie had suggested she actually tell anyone anything that did not involve and uplift activity.
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“What... share it with the Terrans? And the others?”
She flinched a little bit internally at the idea of sharing this special thing she had with Tunie and herself for so long.
“◹⑈⌒ ◃⑇⎌↹▇▜▄◬⑆.”
But when her friend put it that way how could she refuse? She supposed it was her own fault for leaving the crew communication channel somewhere that Aleph could get at it and make friends with her ship.
Actually when she thought about it like that Pylo decided she was glad that Aleph could talk to Tunie so much! She was here to make Tunie safe and happy! If Aleph being a passenger who could tell her jokes did that then she would support it!
She actually laughed to herself a bit how life was imitating fiction on that one! It was almost like the people’s silly little aesop they were singing about the two of them.
Only entirely wrong cultural values, characterization or dynamic.
“Alright, I’ll go explain it to them.”
Tunie was obviously the sulky rules adhering curmudgeon of the pair and Pylo was the happy carefree loose flyer hurling with abandon to rules or regulations!
As she entered the Terran’s habitat Aleph was apparently already in the midst of an infantile pidgin of Tunie’s geometric flight signaling protocols and staring intently at the window watching the surrounding riders and squinting at the corridor they made into the canopy.
The other two terrans were watching as well with interest while randomly coming up with their own made up names for different apertures at the ends of tree branches in some kind of game.
Squidgie, ever observant turned towards Pylo as she entered and made a curtsying flourish that had hints that the clerk had tried to replicate and integrate into a terran mannerism a story of a story of a rumor of a gesture used by those of her Masqued Sisters.
Pylo politely weaved her head in a gesture done from the correct traditions there of then deployed a high density packet into the clerk’s language buffer so that she could actually interpret it.
The resulting seize stilled the Clerk for a few moments giving Omega and Quarti time to notice her arrival. Aleph however was still thinking through how to get the right geometric twirl to convey her next question.
Pylo spoke up gently and in a friendly tone similar to how she was pretty sure her sisters would have educated her.
“You should flip the direction of that spiral and pull it in and aft-ward. Doing the syntaxt that way around and fore-ward makes you ‘sound’ like you need to clean your feathers. It’s passably understandable but sort of grating and silly.”
The terran blinked a moment then looked down at her notes and furiously scribbled before groaning and palming one of her eyes.
“Thanks... I’ve been stuck on that one for hours! I knew it was awkward and not right but I could not figure out how I needed to fluffer-twister-waine to widdershins without a gimble-lock! Eugh so obvious if I did a transform that way it would make the tines look sticky!”
Omega gave Quarti a suspicious glare but the prophet held up her hands grinning.
“Nay, my friend becalm your wrath! It is not my prose whom the youngest of us three does dip her ladle so! Nay but by quickness on the tip of a tickling feather gracing the void does she pull the dance of our celestial host into words wrought in such tumbling contrivances”
Pylo nodded and grinned pleasantly at Quarti.
Which apparently just made Omega scowl at each of them in turn and huff heavily.
“You made that last bit sound like utter gutter filling oafel and lurid filthy innuendo on purpose.”
Quarti waggled her brows to further cement just how intensely she was playing the joke on Omega and then chirped a few dozen syllables.
“Verily!”
Which just exasperated Omega even more and got Aleph to flush heavily. Pylo was still not really sure about that physiological response. She was pretty sure the Terrans somehow had hijacked blushing from something much more sensible.
Omega however turned to pylo and huffed heavily.
“Pylo, explain what Quarti actually meant instead of the fever dreamed smut she made it sound like she said... please”
Quarti pouted and then gave Pylo a mock expression of utter wounded betrayel as Pylo happily did so.
“My dearest and oldest siren friend! You wound me with this denial of my succor in taunting the young waif with confoundments!”
Pylo shrugged, this was fun but she actually came here to do something with the terrans.
Oh and it appeared that Squidgie had finished digesting that etiquette digest, perhaps she needed to adjust her bandwidth allocation for the Clerk. That should not have taken that long.
“Well, I came to share with you the music The People are singing for our arrival. Well it’s mostly for mine and Tunie’s arrival. But she thought you would like it too, they are very funny really.”
Aleph brightened up a bit.
“Oh is that what they are doing? Tunie would barely explain any of it before she starts gushing about how um... adorable all the little pink things flying around her are.”
Omega squinted at the Window then gave Aleph a flat look.
“I’m pretty sure that those ‘little’ things are bigger across then the village center back home.”
She turned to peer at Tunie herself in the window.
“But then again Tunie is the size of a mountain. So I guess it fits. Anyway they are singing? About you two?”
Pylo ‘took in a breath’ she didn't really but the sound that she played over the terran’s auditory nerves was in place of the pause in a terran performer. She privately asked Quarti to forward the long-light choir as analogue to terran resonance song while she'd focus on the acoustic equivalent.
And then she sang the song.
In human form she supposed they were more like different songs, momentary stanzas and performances, solos and duos and great rousing trios and more.
Playful performances and silly affectations and exaggerations. Distinct and weird little nuances filtered and refracted from The People’s culture to the Terrans.
Telling the fictional, allegorical tales of Tunie and Pylo and their adventures in the oversized forest that was not really a forest but as close as The People could understand of the Reef and tell in the medium of their long light music.
The actual melody was quite refreshingly simple translation compared to the cultural context and puns!
Keeping most of the specific relative tone-sequences. Only requiring padding them out to more familiar human rhythms and shifting them down by a transform into terran octaves. The resulting impression on the terrans was it being exotic but in an enjoyable way.
After a while Squidgie silently signalled that she needed to wrap it up before the terrans got distracted by necessary bodily functions but the break came with a promise to continue the ‘stories’ and music.
And so it was that Pylo found herself relaying this iteration of the welcoming song in installments over the rest of the journey in to the port.
By the time they arrived they still had not caught up to the place The People’s own songs were reaching and she had required making edits and condensations to keep the pacing right for the crescendo.