As Tha'ees Ku Era floated through the fleshy bowels of the leviathan, carefully shifting the rubbery walls just enough to let him pass, he was having regrets. Intellectually, he knew he had made the right choices. It was better to enjoy luxury than become like the eternal aristocrats and cling to power while never indulging in it. Though, perhaps, if he hadn't indulged quite so much in the perks of authority, he might have retained some greater comforts after stepping down.
The fleshy walls warped for a while in a way that a fool might think would crush Tha'ees who, after observing the changes adjusted his path. Something had disturbed the leviathan in some way and it was his job to fix it. Caring for the leviathan's comfort was a sacred duty that would allow him to climb back into a position of sloth and myriad pleasures fairly quickly. Even after eons of advancement, the Klaeth nor any other species have developed technology that can move something as big as a leviathan ship nearly as fast and efficiently as the great beasts themselves.
Sure, racers and the flan winglets were faster but noone wanted to be so cramped, the metropolis stations were larger but took huge expense to move at any pace and Gorm trawlers and bonevessels were brutally efficient but both slow and bereft of all luxury.
He stopped, snapped out of thought by his arrival at his destination, a large slowly pulsating blue channel running through the grey flesh. Something was moving erratically in there irritating things.
Tha'ees knew what was in that channel and braced himself. This would be disgusting but at least he wasn't the poor thing stuck on the other side. Moving back as far as they could, Tha'ees held their breath pointed a flange at the, channel causing a hole to open, oozing thick purple gwag and a solid clog of the stuff writhing in strange patterns. Fighting the urge to add to the mess with vommit he closed the incision and willed a healing tool to seal it more permanently.
Bemoaning how his seren granted telekinesis could not clean up the gwag nor move the strange thing he allowed a small assistant bot to start the clean up while he moved a shiny cloth to pick up and clean the object. It looked like someone was resonating the gwag and shuddered moving towards the tech wing as fast as was respectful. Either someone was so desperate as to practically kill themselves to force energy through the foul stuff or Tha'ees was about to learn something new. Either way, the faster he could get rid of the excrement the better. Tha'ees just hoped he wouldn't run into The'ra holding a piece of gwag, the confession would be hard and initiating a bond all but impossible after something like that.
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Mesh Tiil was an oddity aboard the Klaeth leviathan as they were Haxen. If you didn't count the leviathan itself they were one of only six dozen non-Klaeth sentients aboard. Dir Tiil didn't care in the slightest. Having at least one Haxen aboard every major vessel was basically necessary. Noone wanted to be cut off from the records and Haxen cared little for politics or anything other than knowledge in the abstract, so their presence rarely caused much tension.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Dir Tiil was as is common, meditating on the recent updates to the labelling in the records and defending their own changes by answering inquiring minds when two Klaeth rudely barged in they closed their discussions while checking their info. Ku Era would get a mandatory etiquette course in their feed and F Nes Tar would be looking at loosing her honorary Haxen title if she couldn't justify the insult. The glob of gwag that came in after them assured that the justification would be easy. A quick search showed this phenomenon was very sparsely labelled in the records but it was a message of sorts, one Dir Tiil would find an absolute delight to decipher.
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When The'ra Nes Tar saw Tha'ees with the strange gwag and approached her she wanted to run in shame at the thought she would finally experience a truly terrible confession, the likes of which she had herd through countless boring gatherings. The worst part was, she would have to refuse no matter how much she liked Tha'ees. As he got closer and started to explain she sighed in relief. He wasn't a complete fool. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her basic analysis tools before pulling Tha'ees into a lab. The analysis came back quickly and to her horror she saw the gwag was indeed resonating some sort of message, but it was one her research AI couldn't make any sense of. With a sigh she reluctantly stopped telekinetically prodding Tha'ees and indicated to the door. The Haxen claimed their records and connected hivemind contained encoded within all information in the universe, even if not all of it was properly organised or understood. Hopefully Dir Tiil would be interested or she was about to waste decades of work in a matter of minutes.
The'ra was absolutely astonished by what her friend Dir Tiil had shown her. The message was a first contact message and repeatedly cycled through details about a race of long limbed bipeds, mathematical theory, samples of strange language, obscure universal constants and directions to a worthless place on the corner of a poor, desolate and lifeless galaxy.
After her astonishment faded three things jumped out to her that answered why the message was sent through gwag of all things, first, despite all the fundamentals topics covered and the clear intelligence displayed there was not a single mention of seren. Second, whatever this species was they could apparently subsist entirely of the cheapest and most common materials in existence and third, they had developed basic communication technology and surprisingly efficient warp drives using nothing but gwag and some rocks. microscopic and simple life had been found many times without seren, and gwag warp drives were used as emergency backups for stranded ships.
To The'ra this was horrifying. The fairly fast reproduction cycle and the ability to subsist on basically anything without even a single speck of seren, along with that twisted enginuity could see these humans spreading everywhere almost like a pestilence and messing up systems that had worked as long as anyone could remember. It was also known that seren granted capabilities to everyone like the Klaeth telekinesis and Haxen connections. She wondered what it would do to these humans.
Regardless, she shudders in disgust, they were going to have to figure out how to reply.