Chapter 7: Groundside Work, A Review.
Eckreet arrived at the A-7 drawing room at 6:64 Venluash, to meet Uffers for debriefing. Uffer’s was rereading the experiment parameters from before hand in preparation for questioning. The senior members of the away team would trickle in in the next 45 krots or so, but for now, it was just the two of them.
“Best cycle, Chronicler Eckreet”, he said in the formal tone which was preferred for debriefing. “What’s your basic assessment of the ground mission’s success”
Before answering Eckreet deposited her written records in the array of specialised storage apparatuses in the corner of the room. Most official milieu scientific or political reports were recorded in at least two different mediums, written in visible and tactile forms, but Eckreet was a hyper-polyglot and always wrote as many different forms of report as she could. She said that recording it in pheromonal form, Anchin colour code, Sapio-Malignant pulse code and, if she could get a camera into whatever event she was recording, audio-visual logs, helped convey a more holistic view of the experience.
Then she turned to Uffers “Balanced life, Uffthit, The first stage of the experiment was largely successful, the isotopic tracers were successfully administered to between 80 and100 different individual organisms, depending on the parameters used for ‘individual’, we also dispersed high concentrations of the tracer in high traffic game trails and feeding zones.” She raised two of her larger limbs to the middle of her cylindrical torso, arising from her 6 legged lower body, and undulated them in a wave motion to indicate a desire to move the conversation to more personal matters, “but there were several difficulties I want to discuss in a more informal manner before the others arrive, I want the opinion of someone a little fresher of faced than my team members”
Uffer’s raised a hand in a lateral sweeping motion “That can wait until after the full debriefing, for now we don’t have the time”
Eckrite nodded and flashed her eye’s green in affirmation but continued “We do if we speak through direct neurological interface, I think you will understand better if I show you directly what happened”
Uffer’s pondered this for a moment. Direct neurological interfacing, was very quick, and was common practice in many buffer communities, but not his to it, The community which reared his current form into being, which had housed several generations of his lineage, restricted the practice of direct neurological interface to closely related individuals. This was related to their traditions of memory preservation. Buffer’s in his society, were part of a mountain dwelling, dwelling ecosystem in the southern hemisphere of Tindruit. They were a deeply sedentary and litigious society and had a complex system of laws which deemed precedent and accuracy of utmost importance. As a result when a member of that community spawned, something most of them did via burrowing into the mountain and metamorphosing into a gestational sack which in turn spawned out dozens of new creatures which were then dug out of the rock 5 months later each with a portion of their parent buffer’s memories locked into both their genetic code and neurological structure. This was utilised in their legal system as a form of organic record keeping, many members of a familial line could be used to reconstruct fairly accurate testimonies about previous cases and judicial decisions. As such long term residents of the community were encouraged to only exchange direct neurological information with those they were closely related to so that the accuracy of the case history stored both in their minds and in their DNA would be less likely to be corrupted by mixing with the experiences of another lineage. That said, he wasn’t at home any more, and he had already broken with this custom when he had taken Brily’s mental imprint in his first metamorphosis so this was not, perhaps, a worthwhile stigma to have. Eckreet didn’t have such reservations in any case.
Eckreet extended one of her weaving arms, the shorter, cilia covered limbs buffers possessed to manipulate living tissue on a molecular level.
He nodded his permission, extending his own weaving arms in response. She wound the microscopic cilia in her tendril tips around his and sent a series of neurological pulses through his nerve endings, delivering a series of impressions, sensations and conclusions into his head, recounting the events she wanted to discuss. Uffer’s closed his eyes as they played out across his consciousness.
The experiment had been designed to test a new set of isotopic markers applied to the plants in each quarantine zone which would accumulate in the life forms which fed on them. These markers allowed the station to track any creatures from one quarantine zone if they escaped. For ease of management, the planet was divided into several hundred administrative zones. These zones had different sizes and different designations, based on the climate, and the impact the failed colonisation attempt had had on them. There were dry zones, wetland zones, prairie zones, cold zones, and then there were the contaminated zones, these were divided into two sub-categories, stable zones and quarantine zones. Contaminated zones were designated stable if the organisms residing therein did not regularly suffer deadly side-effects due to their mutations, and, though changed to an extreme extent by the introduced genes, were forming a stable ecosystem. Quarantine zones were contaminated zones which possessed large numbers of organisms still in the process of mutating, exchanging genes and dying of harmful mutation. In the worst cases, such as when mutative genes had spliced themselves into the gametes of spore spreading organisms these had manifested in a sort of transmissible cancer, with the inhaling or ingesting of any living cells by another organism risking the growth of completely unknown tissues, organs, or even entire organisms in some cases, growing where they shouldn’t inside the creatures’ bodies. Even those organisms within the zones not killed by such terrible blights, carried the risk of spreading these or any other mutant afflictions to the rest of the world. The stable zones had tags on the moving creatures which shocked them unconscious if they tried to leave them and the borders were protected by various natural deterrents such as noise machines and foul smelling gases. This kept the relatively low risk of contamination spreading even lower. The Quarantine Zones, the largest of which was 400 thousand square kilometres[1] in area, were surrounded by kilometre high walls. Their defences were much more lethal, and quite painful, so as to ensure nothing could escape. The organisms inside all Contaminated Zones also had electronic trackers, which, through a very elaborate process, worked with the isotopic markers to identify the degree to which the foreign gene mutations had infiltrated into the ecosystem. However, the mutations in the quarantine zones organisms often resulted in the electronic trackers being disgorged or rendered inoperable, not to mention the rapid reproduction and frequent mortality rate of these creatures made them hard to keep track of even with the current isotopic markers. However, doing so was vital for preventing another mutative cascade event such as the one which had burned away half of one of the northern continents. To serve this end the new generation of markers were supposed to last longer than the previous ones and stick around in the offspring of marked creatures for many more generations. They were supposed to be administered to organisms in all contaminated areas, but this test was administered in two Quarantine Zones, Contaminated Zone C and A, on the assumption that if it could work on the creatures in quarantine, any others would be a doddle.
The impressions and conclusions Eckreet had sent him indicated a certain level of success in the experiment. There had been several attacks by mutated animals but only a few crew members were harmed and none of them had died irretrievably.
The information had entered his nervous system as a flow of thought memories from Eckreet’s perspective, the first attack had clearly left an impression on the junior researcher, The emotional memory was intense but frayed, coming apart at the edges
The experiment in Zone C had been conducted by teams 6 and 8, who had encountered their first creature, four local days into the experiment. They had landed at space to ground landing zone next to the primary observation facility for Contaminated Zone C. After a delicate descent under the learned appendages of their veteran pilot Maroon-Teal-Thrice-Alternating[2], the team had opened up the observation facility, greeting its two custodians, the Observer, and the Gatekeeper[3], specially adapted buffers semi-permanently attached to the observation and security systems of the quarantine zones, in short order and asking them to double check their own data determining which areas of the quarantine zone would have the specimens they wanted, that is, specimens liable to change rapidly, which had low or no traits of the previous generations of markers, then they spent two days checking vital systems along the containment walls, repairing what was broken, and taking inventory for all the equipment they had not brought with them on the landing craft for reasons of space and weight. In previous years, the maintenance would be done by automated systems overseen by a third caretaker, The Custodian, however, after the first 150 years, 90 years after the containment zones were properly established with the great construction of the various facilities and the containment systems that now spanned the planet, these duties had been relegated secondary functions of the Observer, and several breaches in the containment zones threw the efficacy of automated systems into question, it was added to the duties of all ground teams to check the conditions of facilities they used, and make any repairs they could for the sake of redundancy. They took one of the lighter-than-air transports to scout the region designated for the first step of the experiment from the air. Contaminated Zone C was the second largest quarantine zone on the planet, 3000 kilometres at its widest and 3500 at the longest. Their destination was 1215 kilometres from their start point at the containment wall. They took much of the third day travelling, moving at relatively slow speeds. For her part, Eckreet kept documentation of the state of the landscape they passed over during the 7 ont journey, noting the fields of technicoloured waving tendrils that made up much of this region of Orica before those gave way to craggy, vertical lands, covered in webs of iridescent steaming mucus which were inhabited by photo- and chemosynthetic, sulphur eating organisms which fed on the geothermal activity of the mountains. These were of particular interest to the early researchers of the Orican restoration taskforce, as though the mucus had previously been a tar-like black colour, the organisms had remained relatively untouched by the disaster which had swept this place from the failed colonisation attempt, The shift in colour had apparently been due to a shift in atmospheric composition due to certain chemical processes introduced to the ecosystem by the Milieu settlers. Apparently the mucus had formed a filtered shell which protected the algae from ingesting the alien gene code. This mucus had been the primary focus of half of the stations operation for decades after its discovery, having many properties which informed the previous generations, or iterations in some cases, of researchers as to how they could interact with alien ecosystems without having to vacuum seal themselves in bulky work suits, a practice which they had observed for at least the first 50 years of their construction. Finding a way to imitate the isolating properties of the mucus, its ability to exchange gases but little else with its environment, took a lot longer, as they worried about trying to simply incorporate the alien genes into themselves as they often would on the home world. Regardless they eventually managed to create a new genotype out of the genetic stock of Tindruit which enabled an organism to secrete a substance onto its skin which would capture any exfoliating cells from their bodies and then ossify, trapping the organic refuse inside. Every so often this protective layer could be neatly removed from the body, almost in one piece, to avoid stray bits being lost off like shedding skin. This genotype was added to all buffers on any of the blighted worlds. Uffer’s observed Eckrite’s horror upon realising that the secretions increased when exposed to the atmosphere of Orica, due to the need to contain more drenching her sandal wood brown skin in a layer of blue-tinted gunk.
Uffer’s broke in to the recollection at this point saying “wait till you combine that gunk with fur, it gets so much worse”
Eckrite bristled with indignation at this and reemphasized in the communicated memory, the effect of the slime on the fur she had grown across her back for the journey to the cold climate of the quarantine zone. The hairs had been bound up into hardened clumps which made her lower body look like a rotten log covered in knots. When she’d woken up with two of her six legs stuck together whilst in their tightly folded resting position, she had given up and shaved it all off before incinerating the shavings in the airship’s hazardous waste disposal system.
Uffer’s communicated his contrition back through their neurological interface.
When she had taken the shaved fur to the incinerator, Maroon-Teal had happened to see her doing so and told her that it was probably a bad reaction to the oils she produced on the fur and the containment mucus itself, and to get checked up by a life weaver when they got back.
“in the mean time,” they had said “we have plenty of cold weather fabrics in the store room, and the tailoring room is room 396 on deck 3.”
Taking his advice Eckrite had resorted to the use synthetic thermal wrap the ship had on hand for cold environments, from which she fashioned a coat using the sewing, cutting, weaving, knitting and stapling tools in the ship’s tailoring room. It was not a pretty finished product, but it was warm and it did the job.
Eventually the research team arrived at the first location they were most likely to find the specimens they needed. It took another two days surveying to find one that seemed sufficiently isolated to approach without excessive risk. The biohazard spores which made the region so dangerous were far less common here, and that made longer living macro-organisms more common, but that also meant there was a greater chance of being blindsided by a here-to-fore unknown mutated creature which might pose a danger even to them. They passed the glittering mountains and into the lowlands of the aeroponic coral hills. This area was cold and damp, filled with short, glassy anthozooid organisms which dotted the hills with their crystalline skeletons. These Anthozoids were called Kitraxies by the Buffer’s in spoken language, and they were brightly coloured and mostly producer organisms in most circumstances, fed upon more than they fed on other creatures however, the ecological fallout in this zone had bleached the colour from their translucent bodies and left the rolling hills looking as if they were covered in ghost shrubs. After two centuries unable to photosynthesize, they had devoured most of the smaller organisms around them and died off everywhere in the quarantine zone, Everywhere, that is, but here. In this region, at the foot of the mountains, where geothermal activity was high. It was supposed the organisms had adapted to some way of harnessing the geothermal power of Orica’s crust mountains to sustain themselves. As such this was a decent compromise between the dusty wastes and dead fields of the planes below, the sparkling but difficult to traverse landscapes of the mountains and the rampantly mutagenic spore fields closer to the containment walls from which they had come.
Then it was time to comb these ghost hills for their first specimens. They descended low and the crew gathered on the observation deck. A technological marvel if ever there was one, not only was the air ship equipped with motion detection devices and very good life sign detectors, but most of the observation deck was made from a material developed in the early days of space exploration to cope with rapid changes in brightness, changing opacity in response to changing charges, the walls and floors could all become windows at the sliding of a dial. Not that this prevented the need for opening windows, as crewmember Lingthan demonstrated by poking their extremely sensitive nose out of one of the mid-level portholes and taking a big long sniff, then scuttling over to the opposite side of the deck, and repeating the process.
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“That way,” he said, pointing a long, bristly fore-limb 20 degrees to the left of the ships current trajectory “look for movement that way, I could smell thrangomer musk on the breeze, and ungorm blood, both stronger in that direction”
A chemical analysis of the air confirmed both of their findings, the chemicals released by a thrangomer to mark its territory, as well as the chemicals released when ungorm blood mixed with the planet’s atmosphere were detected in that direction, a scan for movement indicated that there was at least one organism a little over half a kilometre in the same direction.
They gathered their instruments and survival gear, and headed for the safest place to put down, which ended up being a relatively flat hill two hundred metres from the last place they detected movement. Now it was time to track down the organism for testing.
They spread out to the edges of the hill to look for it. Thankfully, Kedaric spotted it before they had to bring in their mobile sensor equipment.
The creature appeared relatively sound of body at first, so they decided it was a good enough candidate for their first test. It was, in appearance a variation of one of the mid-sized colonial organisms that inhabited the safe zones of the planet referred to by the buffer’s as an ungorm. Usual examples of them were actually between 5 and 17 organisms working together, Visually they resembled a mammal crossed with a bird. A warm blooded animal covered in oily feathers, whilst the number of legs appeared to vary. This was because the legs and body, though they were spawned together, were actually separate organisms, as indeed were the venomous spikes that poked out from within the masses of feathers. These secondary organisms parasitically leeched blood from the torso organism, which also had the mouth and the gastro-intestinal system. In their natural, untainted state, these colonial organisms were fairly docile and predominantly grazed upon the vast fields of animal polyps which occupied the vast plains of the continent, skewering with the claws of the limb organisms and chewing with the grinding crushing teeth of the torso organism.
The organism they were approaching now was slumped on the ground which its mouth gnawing at the shells of a group of smaller, clinging polyps, which attached to the glassy sides of the Kitraxies. It quickly became apparent however, that it was radically altered from its safe zone brethren.
Eckrite, had been told to expect this, even been shown examples but it had not prepared her. The other crew members had not shared any of their own experiences with Eckreet as she was now doing with Uffers, out of the principle that such things needed to be witnessed for the first time for ones self, without the filter of someone else’s thoughts and feelings. Such a life changing experience should not, they said, be had for you by someone else. Especially, when you needed to go into the same work.
Sure enough what she now witnessed would ensure that she would not be the same being there-after. The ungorm’s genome had clearly been infested with the genes of near every living thing it had encountered. It was a twisted mass of spines and feathers and limbs sticking out of translucent pale skin. It’s torso organism was peppered with spots of white. The polyps it fed upon had string-like digestive organs which they could shoot out of their bodies, to attack other creatures, this creature had apparently developed those same organs and now they pierced through its skin in sporadic spots, waving around spewing their digestive enzymes everywhere, which in turn cleared the feathers from around them leaving bare patches through which the pale ochre of its epidermis was seen.
At first they wanted to sedate it from a distance, not wanting to risk scaring or angering it with a close approach. Unfortunately, at this moment, the clouds broke right in front of them. A shaft of heavenly fire stabbed down on group of scientists and by miserable coincidence, the sunlight glinted off Eckrite’s shiny metallic coat and alighted on the tangled mass on the ungorms back.
Despite the normal ungorm eyesight being nearly non-existent, this one stirred from the glare of reflected sun beam, and arose up on its far too many legs, they realised another strange mutation. Arms. Several of which clearly did not belong in the usual ungorm set up. There were thrangomer claws sprouting eyes from the backs of their hands (it was these, it seemed, that had spied Eckrite’s glittering lower body and caused the creature to notice its alien visitors), and the three toed hooves of the ewerant, sticking out at odd angles.
Any Milieu lifeform with this mess of traits would have long since reoriented its anatomy to function better, would have developed or acquired a resistance to its own digestive enzymes, would have adjusted its limb length and orientation to walk properly, would have concentrated its stringy externalisable stomach towards its mouth. Looking back through the memory of Eckrite, Uffer’s could not help but feel sorry for the beast.
In the memory, the ungorm got up and regarded them with its many eyes. The ungorm did not naturally have more than two eyes, near its mouth, with only enough to do more than vague shapes, but this creature had many extras with which to see the team of alien scientists, most were poking from its limbs, bloodshot and watering. At the time Eckrite had wondered if the cold look she perceived in those eyes was a sign that the creature knew who and what they were, and resented them for its fate.
Uffer’s thought this was a melodramatic thought but tried to be sympathetic.
The ungorm issued a low snort, and began to move away from them.
Herost, the Chief pacification specialist for the group readied what could be described as his weapon, a tool which could have been compared to a paint gun if any buffer had ever heard of paint guns.[4] It was designed to use pneumatic force to throw projectiles over long distances, specifically it fired projectiles designed to shatter on impact and were filled with a special anaesthetic vapour which could penetrate most skin membranes and immobilise most methods of movement. However, it was most effective on thinking creatures when it could get into the lungs or directly into the brain, where it could quickly induce unconsciousness in most central nervous systems.
“brayin somewhere in t’ main body cavity I think.” He said in his thick rural accent. The mutated Ungorm didn’t have a clearly distinct head, just a mouth and nose protruding from its spiny feathered torso. “but t’ extra, limbs will make t’e ideal contact saahte ‘arder to ‘it”
He pointed with his short, scaley brown arm a little way behind them, “back oop in cayerse t’anaesthetic doesn’t take rahgh’t’away”
On the matter of anatomy, Herost was himself of a serpentine body plan at present, having come from a rural, mountainous region in the south of Tindruit, filled with natural and artificial tunnels, caves and holes, where short limbs with elongated torsos were more useful. As a matter of cultural habit, he had kept the body plan when moving to the station 30 years previously, and he had augmented this starting point with forward facing eyes, and decades of training his short, stout limbs to the peak of physical prowess in steadiness and aim.
He descended the slope slightly, trained that aim upon the centre of the beast’s mass, in amongst the tangle of limbs, and pressed the button which unlocked the valve on the compressed gas tank at the back of the weapon, ejecting the tranquiliser orb out of the barrel and sending it straight into the centre of the Ungorms body.
The projectile shattered and sprayed the tranquiliser over its back, but the creature did not seem immediately effected. Instead the mutant creature flicked its eyes to Herost and roared its displeasure at him. It pawed the ground with its feet and sent a spray of mud in his direction, probably in an act of intimidation.
If it was meant to blind him, it was in vain, he was still a long way from the ungorm, and his sealed transparent eyelids prevented from touching his eyes. The warning did not go unheeded however. Not wanting to endanger the rest of the team, should the creature charge, Herost slung his weapon across his back and dashed on all fours to circle the Ungorm ‘til the others were out of its charging line, dodging between the pale grey, low-lying Ketraxy variants and stopping in a hollow just big enough for him to comfortably curl up in before retracing his aim on the creature and firing again.
Seemingly understanding it was at risk from long range attack the beast swiped the air with the gnarled, clawed arms sprouting from its back. Most of the limbs were way off mark, but one managed to catch the projectile as it soared through the air, shattering it but spraying most of the sedative away from the main body.
The sedative was having some effect though, even as it roared its displeasure at this unwarranted attack and seemingly resolved itself to retaliation several of its arms went limp, immobilised by the potent cocktail of chemical sedatives splattered across them.
Herost’s fan-like head crest unfurled itself in satisfaction, confident now that the sedative was not at fault and lining up his next shot.
Before he could however, the ungorm decided that a show of force was necessary to defeat this new threat, It’s remaining functional clawed hand, grabbed on of the spiked organisms from its own back, and threw it back up the hill at astonishing speed.
Herost ducked down into his hollow as it whizzed over his head, it bounced off one of the pale translucent Ketraxies, cracking its exterior and causing the creature inside to let out a sharp scream and a spray of foul smelling liquid before coming to a halt in the dirt a full metre away.
The Mutant Ungorm roared a challenged up at Herost, but as it did, Herost took his opportunity to fire a third projectile straight down its throat.
This caused the creature to wretch, to splutter and finally to collapse to the ground with all its mismatched limbs on top of it.
It had seemed odd to Uffer’s when he had first arrived to find out Herost was consistently the best marksman in the group, even after being physically broken or even clinically killed on several occasions, as well as integrating into the choral minds, metamorphosing and being reassembled into new versions of himself multiple times, but what he had come to understand that Herost had fashioned himself over many years into something of a biological archetype of a marksman. His mastery of most forms of projectile was so ingrained in the very structure of him that no amount of reassemblies and partial deaths or metamorphoses could remove it from him entirely. The other reason was that Herost, took active effort to avoid the normal amount of physical alteration, disintegration, and integration that was quite commonplace in the life of an active Buffer.
Herost looked over at his compatriots with a fully unfolded crest and half screwed eyes that said he was satisfied with the outcome, and just a little bit pleased with himself. “’T’haihn’t nuthing t’worrear abowat”
The other’s nodded, whilst Ekrite took a moment longer to process his accent (despite her extraordinary language skills, she had some difficulty adjusting her understanding of North Ascect spoken language in the accent he spoke it in.), then nodded, and started taking notes on her electronic note pad, describing this specimen, and its behaviour for later analysis. She almost went to examine the projectile organism where it landed but was stopped by an interjection by Dittockney, the assigned leader for this mission who said “Ekrite, don’t get too close to that until we have a suitable containment unit, we don’t know what it might do.”
So Eckrite took a mental note of the location of the projectile and joined the rest of the team clambering down the hill to the fallen creature. Kedaric cast an electrified net over the ungorm’s unconscious form, and Lingthan and Dittockney got their deep body scan equipment set up.
Eckrite, for her part, had helped Herost, prepare the syringe to administer the new isotopic tracker.
Mission protocols for interacting with tainted or mutated flora and fauna during experiments demanded that effort was made to understand, and document the anatomy of the organism being tested on, in this instance, the extra arms which appeared to come from a different organism entirely.
“Ah,” said Dittockney, “I think I see what happened” she pointed to a monochrome image on the screen of the instruments she and Lingthan were examining “The ultra-sound looks like this ungorm torso have the entire upper body of a Thrangomer growing inside it, it even has two brains”
Herost nodded but added “awfly func’sh’nul f’r a criture wi’ two brayerns, it nearly ‘it me with its thraw”
“On that note” said Lingthan “there’s something strange about these spinoids”
Behind them there was a small ‘Whoomf’ from back up the hill where the spine had landed, a small cloud of green-yellow particles bloomed over the surrounding Kitraxies, in an explosion of organic matter.
Eckrite let out a sigh of relief that she had not touched it.
“Some sort of gas pockets and particulates inside them” Lingthan finished.
They had quickly administered the tracking isotope after that.
Herost watched closely too ensure that the ungorm did not stir from its sedation whilst Eckrite administered the solution which contained the isotope into each of the limbs and the torso, to ensure that it was spread to all of the semi-independent circulatory systems.
They also noticed that the very same digestive filaments which had penetrated the ungorm’s skin had seemingly cross-bred with its nerve cells, and were connecting the brains of thrangomer and ungorm, forming them into a single network, explaining, to some degree, its precision throwing with limbs it shouldn’t have.
Things were going well until they finished the diagnostic and administered the trackers and were on their way back to the airship.
As they proceeded up the hill of translucent shelled stationary animals, Herost and Eckrite went to investigate the site of the explosion and Maroon-Teal Thrice alternating, ever the thorough investigator, gently detached one of the spinoids from the ungorm’s side. It was an unfortunate coincidence that these happened at more or less the same time.
For as Herost and Eckrite arrives at the place just behind where Herost had perched in his brief contest with the ungorm, where the thrown spinoid had landed, they found that the entire area was covered in a thin, yellow dust, and the Ketraxy shell which had been cracked by the impact of the projectile was now fractured, rent asunder by the expanding and misshapen mass of the now horrifically mangled creature inside.
Herost covered his mouth and nostrils, and protectively moved his elongated midsection in front of Eckrite. “Back UP!, it’s t’ Spores!”
Eckrite, understood immediately what he meant and backed up.
A few moments later, perhaps stirred by the extraction the creature shook and spasmed in its sleep. This knocked Maroon-Teal down and the spinoid fell on to the ground.
Eckrite heard the sound and turned. And she saw what would happen
“Get AWAY FROM IT! HURRY!” She frantically yelled.
Maroon-Teal was unsure what she knew, but was a quick enough thinker to know she must have a reason, and hurried away from the dropped organism.
Unfortunately, he had not made it quite out of the blast radius when a second WHOOMF and another cloud exploded from the spinoid.
“well,” said Uffers, “I think I see why you’re so upset.
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[1] Author’s note: The different civilisations of this setting do have their own measurements of distance but given the physically diverse nature of Buffers and the feeling I was pushing my luck with the two different time measurements, I decided to just go with the metric system for simplicity’s sake. Decimalisation is simple and easy. Don’t come for me imperial measurement fans.
[2] As previously discussed, colour based languages are a big part of Tindriuilite language, some regional cultures of Buffer, mainly those who, by habit or by environmental limitations, do not have the throats or jaws for spoken language, speak solely in these visual languages. As such, many Buffer’s have names which are a pattern of shifting colours. For the purposes of spoken languages, these names are described with the colours involved and the pattern in which they alternate. Maroon-Teal-Thrice-Alternating is from an aquatic community of lake dwelling buffers where the waters are very clear, but for whatever reason, the hypersonic communications used by many terrestrial aquatic mammals were, for whatever reason, didn’t take off in their very isolated ecosystem, despite being nearly ubiquitous across the oceans of the planet (the drawback of the rapid spread of mutations and thus, new phenotypes, across the planet is that some traits become so wide spread for a given function, in this case communication, that they essentially suppress all alternative traits for this function, as such there are movements and organisations on Tindruit which have dedicated themselves to preserving minority languages and popularising less common phenotypes, to ensure the ecosystems of the planet remain diverse enough to survive any drastic changes they might encounter.)
[3] Some Buffers with so dedicated a function get a little pretentious about it and give themselves grandiose titles, usually involving definitive articles, others are content with the extra-terrestrial equivalent of “Jeremy”
[4] An interesting thing about Tindruit is that paints are seldom used and took a long time to invent because things evolve so fast there and those evolved traits spread so fast, that a paint making method that is invented one year will have an entire (short lived) ecosystem based on eating the paint made through that method the next year. As such when making art, Buffer artists don’t care so much for what colour the stuff they make it with is, but rather, what colour the thing they can get to grow on it will be, when interacting with that substance. Of course pest resistance paints do exist, for artists that really want to use it, but that paint is often so toxic that they would not likely put themselves in any position to be splattered with it.