Remove ads

Onward to Providence: Alien Trucker with Goldfish Stowaways [Original Fiction]

Reader mode
Remove ads
Duat 0.4
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat

    0.4

    Von Squidgie Worth The First Esquire was ecstatic!

    "We went deeper, downward and closer. Away and inward, split apart and tightly spiraled. All those words and none of them. Ah friends! Again I am at a loss of words that can convey all that it is to be alive and experiencing as the spirit bereft of body."

    Miss Aleph and Miss Omega were wonderful people who employed them gladly! They kept Squidgie Worth so busy with learning and learning and learning so many things! They fed them a wonderful air to breath!

    "Obbie and I with our caravan of souls trekked the winding threaded sinewy wilderness of spirit and death. Skirting the edges of predators who the very brushing of which could make an end of human souls. "

    Also there was water and food makers. Aleph even paid Von Squidgie Worth the First Esquire in food and water and air and taught them how to maintain the machines that provided these treasures themself!

    "We supped sparsely on the essences and ways of lesser spirit beasts, always with care and only enough to sustain us. For as I have said I had come to know that to consume spirit is to be partly consumed by spirit and forever be changed."



    Also delightful physical contact and so much activity and things to learn and do! Von Squidgie Worth The First Esquire was even given their name! An actual name instead of just a position identifier!

    "So it was that we traveled into the thick hearts of terra, For Obbie and I knew that there were wonders and secrets that might yet save us. The shaping of the living and solid matter by the means of the dead was prominent. But it was a thing beyond the ken of I, Obbie or all the 'shallow' spirits we knew of."

    So many of their fellow spawnmates didn't even have a work identifier! And here Von Squidgie Worth was with a full name, and a work apprenticeships! And it was even given leave to enjoy Miss Aleph's story time with Miss Quarti!

    Of course Von Squidgie Worth The First Esquire was always prepared to leap to the assistance of Miss Aleph or Miss Omega if they should need something fetched during the story time! They were capable of exiting the bubble and slipping through vacuum for a time without any ill effects. They had to hold their breath of course but that just put a nice strain on their lungs and stretched their limits.

    "It was a court of veins, extending out and inward, bent and twisted in all directions, it was a heaving great thing which upon and through we crawled. Not Terra herself, but an inhabitant curled tightly upon her flanks and flesh. We and Obbie journeyed, near bereft and starving. Daughters and sons were lost in that long stretch, to tricks of traders like obbie, to eating too deeply of the spirit flesh and becoming inhuman and unconnected to us. To simply vanishing, sometimes taking memories of their very existence from those around them."

    It was so good to have so many things to work for! So many things to learn, so many things to try! Von Squidgie Worth the First Esquire could already see that there would be room for them to adopt many spawn mates and siblings into a proper cooperative venture later.

    Employ them as gofers and maintenance technicians and farmers! Train them up on all the wonderful skills that Miss Aleph had trained them. Perhaps Von Squidgie would even give them names like Miss Aleph had! That seemed only fair as it was how they were paid and trained in the work.

    "Time for the dead is strange and different, While living among my family I did strive to find a count for it that I could recognize, but our journey was drifting deep and far from the familiar sign and spore of trees. And it was not yet that I had learned to count the ages as stones felt them."

    The story was fun, although Von Squidgie was not very clear on exactly what it was about, It seemed kind of like the one who was Forth Dottir who was now Miss Quarti had suffered an unemployment.

    Which was horrifying, Von Squidgie quailed a bit at the thought and snuggled closer into Miss Aleph's embrace for comfort.

    "Our lives are tied much tighter to the flesh and prayer we sup and live on. We breath our lives in pulses that never quite settle in the same rhythm. We see and feel and think at the beats of where we dwell and feed. So I cannot say to you that we knew the lengths of our journey into the tighter woven coil of the elder nest."

    But then Miss Quarti seemed to found a new cooperation and re-employed both herself and many spawn! She became very rich and productive and it was quite good.

    "But I and Obbie did guide us on, with what family survived us. Of what had been hundreds was by then dozens. Souls who had starved, blinded and been lost thinning our numbers. Others choosing to join in the songs and lives of other spirits and subsuming into them. Seeking senses to survive and trading everything of themselves for it. But we climbed the spindly ways to that great deep."

    But after that there was ANOTHER terrible unemployment! One that fell upon all of her coworkers and partners! A terrible wave of collapse that left all lost and forgotten. But even so the brave and wonderful Miss Quarti persevered and strove to find new training and secret partners to refund herself with new work and a new job!

    "And there upon the center of a coiling nest of rarified lives, where we felt utterly apart and separate from all familiar, and yet closer and tighter to the pulse of Terra then we ever had before. Split thin and wide and close and sharp. It was there that Obbie and I who was Fourth Dottir beheld a great and old beast of the deathly shroud."

    Von Squidgie was so inspired by the tireless work ethic of Miss Quarti who was Forthdottir! They hoped to grow to be even half as hard working as she was!

    "And at last did we find one who could teach us what we had sought"

    There have been hints about the nature of cats and terrans all through out this story. Although to be fair most of them are of the brick joke variety. There will be more. This story is an interweaving tapestry of off comments and foreshadowing. I hope you have been enjoying it. So many things that I worry/feel are blatantly obvious appear to still be a mystery to you my readers. But I hope the moments of enlightenment are as satisfying and delightful to come to as they were to write and plan.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat 0.5
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat

    0.5

    How to tell what cannot be described?

    How to bring into words that vision and all mortal senses falter to contain?

    How to shape in crude metaphor even an approximation of the shape of an experience which the very brain quails to render?

    Quarti held her hand out to run along the shimmering surface of the bubble. Which would not let unprotected terran flesh to pass into cruel vacuum though it allowed Pylo and the strange new passengers as readily as the skin of water.

    She looked back to her audience of two humans and two foreign and unsouled beings.

    Then she wore a face as she would have worn at that time deep in her memory. The face of a child who has stumbled out of the warm comfort of home for the first time and into a cold dark night.

    Night...

    Another thing that no other living human seemed to remember. Despite how much she tried to convey it.

    "Hold and imagine the feeling, of reaching out to touch the feathers of this ship we find ourselves within. Imagine that your fingers could stretch for the yards and then kilometers they would need to begin to realize the greater shape of our conveyance"

    She gave a heavy sigh, a gasp of wonder, the slight flit in resonance of much the same to reach out and run light touches along the sympathetic connections of her human audience. For the aliens Quarti reached to the translator and spoke richer and deeper sub-meanings. Prevocal analogues of body language and tone.

    It was different to tell tales to the inhuman. To speak to the unsouled. There were fewer cheats, and little common ground.

    But Quarti would endeavor to continue in this strange and new medium with listeners unlike any she had ever told tale to before.

    "Think also of looking upon a great cliff, straight ahead it is close and you perceive little of it, now sweep your gaze to left and right, above and below. Realizing the hugeness of it stretching past your sight in every direction. Taste that vast apprehension inside at the scale of it. The rushing knowing of it's scale? The unease in your belly as the mountain begins to turn and move. As the foundations you thought were solid anchors for you become like the hair upon the brow of this behemoth as it TURNS"

    She draws them close, she lowered her voice a little at a time, calling attention to her. Now she can whisper and they will feel the closeness and pay heed to her tone. She struggled with the apparatus and protocols she understood from the translation box. It was foreign and strange, but over the ages language had always become foreign and strange to her.



    "It was like Obbie a little bit, in the faintest textures. A comforting slice of familiarity for me. But so much vaster, roiling and folded over and twisted in ever larger and LARGER shapes of it. The spirit sight I had bought for a price unknowable faltered in apprehending it. And it moved!"

    She used the space she had dug with her softer tones to cut with volume and emphasis. Striking on the mood of dream like awe with sharp notes of fear.

    "And lo did the behemoth before us speak."

    Quarti had been struggling to convey the speech that had taken place, burned into her soul with harsh memory. It had not be words, Like with Obbie it had hardly been speech. But a deep arrangement of knowing that crashed over them. Gravitas and terror of a flooding river threatening to wash her and their fragile caravan away.

    How to tell the exchange of moments correctly? How could she make it both legible and true when literally no words would suffice? Well sounding stuffy and old timey would have to suffice because she was out of time to come up with something better.

    "Ho, children of surface flesh and spritely mote of my kind. You traverse where you ill are suited to places far twisted from your proper shapes. To what do you strive so perilously here in my demesne?"

    It had not been like this really at all of course, the sweeping waves of expression had as they pulled back drawn the answers from her soul by force. Dragged and stripped her soul of the meaning of their visit. But this was not a story about the deeply wounding violation of that had taken her life times to recover from. She would save that tale until Aleph was older.

    "We travel here in search of secrets, all the flesh of ours and our people are lost and gone. We are dwindling souls only and seek knowledge and skill to survive."

    She lowered herself as if kneeling, peering up to her audience as the supplicant soul. Pure theater and yet also true to the meaning of the story. A fiction and a lie that would land closer to the reality then the facts.

    "And if perchance it is possible we seek means to wrought our will in the physical world and kindle our flesh anew. To ensure our peoples are born again and our lineage is restored"

    Yes that was a heroic note, a good contrast to the god like beast thing the size of mountain ranges. It would suit the cadence better Instead of the wailing horror and psychosomatic whimpering panic attack that had rendered her insensate and forced Obbie to take the reigns for the exchange for a while.

    She had held off on making Obbie too vital a character or an influence in the story. Even though the spirit truly had been one of the pillars of her second life. It was easier to allow the audience to forgive the creature that was never doing anything but its nature if they did not have to dwell on all the horrors and cold calculous it had enacted. The sting of the betrayal was not as harsh if there were fewer of those seemingly tender moments when Obbie was like a third parent to her growing up.

    It was not fair to ask an audience to face and then forgive what it had taken Quarti decades to reconcile in the span of a few moments.

    "So did the great spirit beast, of the kin of Obbie, a merchant all the same kind and yet vast and huge and old beyond all reckoning. A great tree to the spring flower of Obbie speak unto us of what secrets and knowledge and spirit flesh it had available and what the price would be"

    She had mused on this moment when she started the story, but given the condensed nature of her narrative she had chosen this path. It had been a much longer and more harrowing back and forth, every skill and even the hints of the skill had bled them of more and more of Obbie's fat stores of prayer and meaning.

    But that particular battle of wits was less important to what she needed to come to next. To the revelations that she was bringing her charges too. And with it the absolutely vital lessons they needed to survive the trials of the Reef far away from the gentle garden of Terra's shelter.

    "In the end the price was harrowing and left us thinner and less then we were, bereft and near starving. But we that survived that far were obtained something incredible. Even Obbie was wracked with the wonder of this"

    She shivered both in memory of the moment and for theatrical effect. Revling with her eyes closed and her hair back.

    "I have described before that Obbie procured for me the eyes of a spirit so that I might look. But the great trade beast nestled in the depths of Terra gave us that and more, for it showed us how to see"

    Quarti took a heavy breath and held it, giving the moment time to settle before she continued into her flowery, enthralling and beautiful fiction. A lie to tell reality when the facts would fail.

    Quarti's First Perspective Chapter. It has been a long time coming, but some ground work was needed to get across to you the pivotal moment of her life. The thing which had shaped her to be what she was. And also just how much she is as little similar to Aleph and Omega as Pylo is.

    She has not been anything quite like a normal human of the reef for a very long time.
    And it seemed important to show first how she had begun to change. And then later here how she finished changing.

    Hope Ya'll are enjoying it. Also there is a meaning to the name for every 'episode' and this one is no different, although I've reached a little bit outside of english this time around and I expect I will again.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat 0.6
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat

    0.6

    Pylo could not follow the point of this whole story.

    "To see and to hear are metaphor. Even here in the living flesh they are illusions and words but pale shades of truth that tell only the slimmest similarity. To say that before I saw is as close as to say that I tasted and touched, that I perceived and heard and became and was not."

    And it did not help that of all the terrans the eldest was in some ways both the easiest and hardest to read. She was wonderfully precise and eloquent in her diction. Compared to Aleph and Omega who were mumbling muttery and imprecise, she also heard Pylo with really almost no misunderstanding at all. Often managing to...

    She could barely stand to even acknowledge it but Quarti was able to TRANSLATE Pylo to the others.

    "From Obbie I had been given a thing we call sight, a single sense, grown out of a dulled half sense of the human spirit. A fumbling worm squirming blind is what us departed, And I was given a slightest of fine tuning ability. "

    Pylo could watch Quarti's senses firing as she said these things, watched the language form in orderly chains. And yet at the same time she practically was throwing these things up from effectively nothing. There was a howling chasm of meaningless gibberish noise in resonance and then suddenly the pre-impulses of words.

    "A single sense grown from a half realized one. That is what I and obbie and many of the spirit forms we had known used."

    Pylo could follow in Aleph how the pre-words of impulse grew and spiraled, they CAME from specific places within the brain, then spun momentarily into chaotic resonance noise. And looped back into presence again.

    "All of speech and sight and touch mashed into a single sense. That is what we had grown to know. From this great spirit we survivors of humanity had bought two more."

    Omega was different she sort of echoed herself into a coherent pre-word impulse and drive. Fresh ovum planted inside the terran's cortex that grew into impulse and then thought and word. Like she was doing right now. They were all very different and strange, She had never noticed before...

    "But what was the PRICE you paid? You had to promise the flesh of your soul after the final death for the senses Obbie gave you right? Or something else even more important you don't even remember. What did this THING ask for?"

    Pylo had just done what she usually did, read up the locals knowledge base on anatomy and psychology. Spent some time identifying any roots of communication that she might recognize from an earlier venture or her lessons at home.

    Then applied it for the brief encounter needed to get the trade done or the uplift finished and left with her cargo. To be quite honest she was practically speaking on the verge of forgetting most of the Terran lingual-physiology by the time they left.

    It wasn't like verbal single channel languages like Terrans used were very stable. The destination would have mutated to barely recognizable permutations of dialect if Pylo was even slightly delayed.

    But now she had them as passengers and she was starting to suspect something was amiss.

    "Obbie had supped and grown thick and fat on all the prayer and thought I had funneled them over the many many many years of my family's renewal. My friend and partner was thick with the spiritual nourishment enough to tempt even the interest of this colossal beast"

    Pylo huffed, she was letting the very thing she was trying to get away from sneak back into her cortices. She was here to relax and stop chewing at the translation problem of the terrans!

    "It's been my custom in this tale to call the spirit sense we had acquired so far sight, but it is as said as much touch and taste as anything like light. For there is nothing akin to light in the world of spirit and soul and the departed lands. I say this because of the new senses I shall liken it to hearing."

    Silly nomenclature, air pressure wave sense associated too strongly with language centers and spatial orientation. Accidents of their-

    Pylo was going to stop thinking about this.

    "I call it such because it is indirect, a way to feel shifts in the wefts of those more directly contacting the soul-body. To infer something without putting oneself in direct contact with it. And in doing so know if without revealing oneself to a subject of this sense. By crudest measure I had used the ear of a spirit in vaguest facsimile when I had suffered the first death at the end of days."

    Pylo tilted her head, trying to connect the reference, when had the Terran eldar been describing a sense like that? She could not resolve the association reliably. It was frustrating, but she would let it go, the meaning would either be important and become clear in the tale teller, or it would be unimportant and sail past Pylo like the idiosyncrasies of most conversations with none-siren.

    "It was by the dull and near deafened use of that sense as a fledgling of the dead lands that I recognized the death and consumption of other souls and the weft of horror in the other-land of association and sympathies. And by that did I thwart Obbie's attempts to lead me to a final death all those years prior."

    Quarti took a heavy breath, then mustered associations and emotions for the next step. The storyteller poured context and wonder into mingling awe as she mustered her words.

    "The 'sound' after being near deaf and muffled was like a symphony, echoing out and into us from all directions and more. What had at first seemed the solid threads or even the very space of reality as we spirits and departed souls were suddenly granular, chiming and singing with unique voices in numbers that remain even now uncountable for me. A mesh of tones and notes wrought out in every direction, growing thin and ephemeral in one twisting turn, thick and searingly warm in another. It was like we had dropped into a vast sky of song that encompassed vastnesses we had never known before."



    Pylo was lost again, but it was a pleasant ride and not a bad moment to be lost in. It reminded her of the few times she had gone out onto Tunie's hull when they were moving close to a star. When she was young and reckless and before she had lost most of her face to a dust mote impact in transit.


    "It was then that I truly could apprehend the vastness of the creature we were 'beside' and begin to sense its place in the realm of spirit and dead. It was at once more vast and smaller than I expected. It stretched out in four and five and six directions of association, wide and fat where the song was hottest, wispy and slender and bifurcating to hair thinnest in the twists that were colder and emptier. All in all despite subsuming volumes on volumes of space to my new ears it sounded incredibly flat and squashed to a thin sliver of being compared to the full scope and range of space in which sound could traverse the dead lands."

    That tickled a lesson, a thought. Something remembered remembered Aunt Morrigan describing but the memory was weak and Pylo did not have any caches of pollen to remind her of precisely what. But it latched and itched at her trying to connect this moment in the story to something. But the feeling left her with nothing but loose threads of memory and no substance. Frustration she focused on ignoring to try and take in the next step of the befuddling story.

    "Yet that was not even the start of our revelations, for there is still the third sense which we traded the great trade beast for. Which I have no clever association or metaphor for. It stands apart from all mortal fleshly senses"

    Pylo inclined her head to another side, the shape of this one was suddenly brisk and familiar to her, a bright and obvious commonality emerging that she could just barely understand as something she did not even think of.

    Quarti's words flowing over as she continued.

    "So I will simply call it Enlightenment or Insight."

    Woot, managed to finish this chapter while flying! We are coming at you from Denver Airport! Also I adore rampant speculation and discussion. Just saying!
     
  • Threadmarks
    • It's getting a bit too abstract to actually understand what's going on. Maybe have the other two Terrans or Pylo ask some questions to clarify it?
     
    It's abstract, but that's the point I think. It reads like a highschool textbook or decent popsci.

    To better explain most science concepts you would either need a lot more detail, or some mathematics. Preferably the second.
     
    Duat 0.7
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat

    0.7

    Aleph tried to follow what was going on, She really did.

    There were the broad strokes that she was able to keep track of. But this whole thing was turning out much as it always did when she tried to get a straight answer on what the after life and dying was like. Everyone who had experienced it did that nodding understanding, or they just started talking in metaphors and prefacing everything with "It is like this and yet nothing at all like this".

    It was the same routine, she appreciated the history lesson though. What she could discern from it all. It connected with some of the myths and stories she had listened to during her research of the outsiders and extraterrestrial beings. Stories that Aleph suspected she was possibly listening to one of the original authors there of.

    It was a bit of a heady feeling honestly to consider. To really think on it. This manic and filthy mouthed, most of the time near gibbering mad woman was also one of the eldest terran souls!

    Actually considering what she was describing about staying 'dead' for so long and all the things she had witnessed it made sense she might be a bit off. Aleph kind of suspected if she tried to describe Redweed or Pylo to anyone back home she would come off as a bit off kilter as well.

    "All I have said we saw and heard were like smoke, figments, disconnected delusions and memory dreams ephemeral. But with Insight finally we could grasp what was and what was not. Until that point we were dead and removed from the world of the living, it makes the afterlife seem separate and wholly apart. It's vagaries of space and dimension and association a place that extends out into far distance and only vaguely akin to any form of life in flesh"

    Aleph nodded along, more bombastic random hyperbole and abstract poetry. She had grown up on second and third lifers speaking senselessly about this for as long as she could remember. She only half listened at this point because there would be another salient event. Something concrete to tell her what had once been.

    "But with Enlightenment the connections become obvious, the implied patterns clear. And with this new sense of things to rally and organize the others we could finally make sense in a physical world of the flesh way of our reality."

    Omega jolted a little bit at that and leaned forward.

    "You could orient to physical space?! Can you STILL do that?"

    Aleph jolted a little in surprise at the outburst and tried to track what was surprising. Something something something... reality making sense so-

    "Wait you mean you are going to stop using triple layered metaphors to explain this now?! You can even do THAT?!"

    Quarti made a bit of a face at all of them and stuck out her tongue.

    "Of course, gribbling jabber-wock-nibblers! Why think I be such tah yordli all this wordsome wisdom intah ya ears like a grabbahgabbawong? Sit tightstitch-headed now snubsluts so I can learn ya propah laik!"

    The tonal shift, quality of dialect, clarity of word choice and grating accent all crashed across Aleph's ears so hard she felt like she was smacked upside the head.

    "Now as I was say-such wot before stupid sasslers... The World was clear for the first time from that side of death. Before we were adrift and unmoored somewhere in a wilderness, lost amidst the turns and uncertain of how we had gotten where we were. But after We could see, we had barely traveled the length of our home valley in depth into Terra's skin"

    Aleph rubbed at her brow. Somehow knowing Quarti COULD be eloquent if she wanted made this all so much worse.

    "Insight made the chaos and strangeness and associations of spirit and the death lands anchor and moor to the living world. And also by a slight tilt it let us view things from other more sparse and heady abstractions of association with equal clarity. And in this way I can finally say to what we had been dealing and in what manner we were dealing."

    Aleph held her tongue from simply shouting 'get on with it you kook!'. She was pretty sure Quarti was holding off on the final reveal and explanation with any sense on purpose at this point though. However in contrast to that Quarti spread out her hands and then let loose a sympathetic resonance glow. Drawing lines of blue light along the air to illustrate as she spoke.

    "The spirit to which we felt was was so vast and old and unknowable, and yet was flat and squat and thin headed? The warmth of one turn and the cold of another? Terra and solid and the meat and bones of physical living things was the warmth. And deeper still, in the stone skin that was seemingly dead and cold to living flesh there was a life a roiling and on those lives and the lives of Terra herself and the grasses and trees and the beasts minute and vast were we the dead and all the spirit riding."

    Quarti drew more lines, sweeping arcs and rivulets, gestures and whorls. And then she drew them in together into tight little knots until Aleph began to recognize it as something like a diagram of a cell. A living cell. And then with a crushing gesture the cell shrunk to a mote of light and then a tapestry of veins and tissue sparkled into being. Sweat pooling along the storyteller's skin as she twisted and contorted her resonance light with the air.

    "To live is to tell a tale, to breath is to shuffle the tally and move the count. From the minutest and seemingly invisible eldest of life, which I at last then saw sits in the crystal chains of dead stones singing away. To the flesh and blood of Terra herself we did finally know the churn. To live is to tell a tale, and spirit and soul live amongst the words of those tales. Breathing the beat of songs and taking a few stuttering syllables as their own to tell their own tale."

    That, almost made sense to Aleph, it touched on something she could construe as sense. It lined up with the arcane and ever distorted literature on the topic of death and souls. But at the same time it did not quite touch on things precisely enough for her. Leaving Aleph frustrated and lost on the edge of the answer finally making sense.

    It made Pylo finally speaking after remaining more or less entirely silent through the whole story rattle her a bit more than usual, the words like a shocking touch close to her ear and more.

    " Why tease your fresh young waifs with this tale of tremulous seeds? "

    Quarti laughed and then met each of their gazes, although with Pylo it was more meeting a grin to a frown.

    "Spirit and deeper, stranger, wonderous and vast creatures dwell in all matter, they are thick as weeds where life churns hot and sweet and full. They are vast and slow and cold with distance from the close frenetics of solidity. Layering over and over and over each other, living on the life of each and with each layer twisting out and out into strange unspaces. Stealing a few words or even pauses of the tales of those that make their foundations to weave ever more rarified and whispered lives"

    She gestured one last time, flicking a dollop of sweat from her brow as the light flared one last time to sketch what at first Aleph did not recognize as anything but abstraction, until she recognized the positioning of a few astronomical objects as foci for wide sweeping bands and patterns of light.



    Then she could not help herself in the realization.

    "That's Terra! But what is all the rest? Those aren't magnetic lines, it's MUCH too big"

    Over the course of the display Aleph realized that Quarti had been expanding out a sketched view, wringing the air into blue phosphorescence until there was a map of Terra's own star and home system. The thought of sustaining so complex a manual working of the symbiotes made her back and headache in sympathy. And if the sweat was any sign it was exhausting the narrator to maintain the resonance required.

    Quarti laughed and spoke softly.

    "Those are the lines of the spirit of Terra, and the lesser and greater beasts of the dead lands and the great empty cold things beyond and within them. It is a whispery threading of the matter which they stood upon, living and unliving. It is comfort and safe and has nurtured me and your mothers and even fathers for all my memory and most like well before any of us"

    Aleph ran the story forward and back in her head before she felt it starting to click together.

    "It's like a crystal program. The afterlife... It's"

    Quarti shushed her and tried to continue. But this was too much Aleph had to expound, expand, exasperatedly burst with the idea she had realized.

    "It's computation! Tales using parts to tell others?! Quarti! OMEGA?! Why did none of you tell us! Why does no one EXPLAIN IT PROPERLY! It's a um... It's an Infosphere! The afterlife and the souls are a resonance INFOSPHERE?! Like they had at Redweed? It's just lik-mf!"

    Quarti was RIGHT there with her hand covering Aleph's mouth with a bright light and a too pointy grin.

    "Right you are dear, right you are it's much like it, and yet that thing you wos seeing and poking and prodding, and all the little crystal likes you tweak and twine are civil things, made things. Grown out of matter and for matter and the use of living flesh types. They are not wild wilderness spirit things, They are not shaped and made and formed from the OTHER end!"

    She shoved off of Aleph back to her spot across the way. And she was gesturing again, a new shape emerged, but where the Terra system and its star were sparse spidery webs and loops with a only a few focuses. This was more like a raging inferno made of incandescent scrawls and brambles. Great big whorls and twists.

    An inferno and a pyre of blue light that was so bright it made Aleph's eyes hurt and spine ache in sympathy of just how many calories Quarti must be burning to simply illustrate a story.

    "And now we come full circle to the reason for all of this tale and the secret and spartan bits shush all of my insistence in the place of Redweed. This you behold is the spirit and outer-beasts of Redweed. Of which they were vast and terrible to know. And as with all of spirit like life they would know you if you knew of them. For none of you young uns are anything but worm-sighted in spirit, or anything but deaf in spirit, and you are unenlightened and uninsighted! You wos skimming surface of a pond all through Redweed whilst great deep beasts passed yon by buried in the matter and even your own thoughts and meats whilst we dwelt there. Beasts so big upon themselves they make all of Terra an unreckonable gnat! And all it would take is you to knows of dem to badly have yons soul prod the big oafs in the nose and BRING THEM DOWN UPON YA!"

    The resonance light sputtered out at the last words. And heaved a heavy sigh and went limp in the air breathing heavily. Droplets of sweat hovering in a misty cloud around her. A slick shine of exhaustion to her skin.

    Aleph could only blink before looking back to Omega.

    "Wait... so wait... What did all that mean?"

    Been waiting to get to these series of truth bombs. How is everyone's score on predicting things?
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat With Tunie
  • Threadmarks
    • Duat

    With Tunie



    Crew was having better morale. But still not as good as usual. This was vexing! However the trajectory of Morale for Crew was improving. Which was more relaxing! In addition the new passengers and the old were having very good morale interactions! And now it was confusing silly one thing after another story time with crew and passengers again.

    They liked to nestle in close to Tunie's interior drive chamber and the churning whirling heart of her interior feather gyre. She could relate to wanting to be close to it! Her drive chamber made her all warm and fuzzy and tingly inside and let her push extra hard in her linear acceleration!

    Speaking of she was finally underway!

    It had been so nice to drink and drink and drink the grist until her feathers were so solid and whirring with potencies that she was sure she could have weathered a decent paced ramming! Tunie was so full she had started itching to just go-go-go! But alas the port was super duper crowded!

    So she was only lightly push-puff-pushing! Flutter flutter fluttering only her outer-feathers to drift and shift around traffic! So much traffic here at the port. It was all because they were at a bend point in most of the courses through this part of the reef. It made it so a lot of ships were already slowing down almost to stop when they were close to the port anway. So of course it was worth it to make a stop and trade for some fuel or trade mass to haul elsewhere.

    Which was convenient of the port to have done for Tunie and the Ships. But it also meant it was so crowded and full of TRAFFIC.

    So Tunie was still puff puff shuffling with her feathers flutter fluttering. Hardly pushing at all, feeling all the more twitchy and wanting to leap and lunge and shove herself to the limits of speed for how buzzy her feathers had grown from such a deep feeding.

    But Tunie was stuck nudging and fluttering in traffic so slow-Slow-SLOW. At least everyship else was mostly peeling off in their own courses instead of converging all down to one point, so there was a lot less need to stationkeep and check courses and correct for idiots or slow stupid clumsy not-ships.

    So she had attention to spare on her Crew and Passengers sharing some more of their 'story' time. This was a really stretched out one this time. Strung along super slow and stretchy.

    It made it take so long to define the course of one of the passengers. Also she was not sure but Tunie figured from the crude details given that the stupid fat fish was doing a waggle dance to start with.

    That made sense to Tunie, Waggle-dances are a common body signal. For a ship waggles were signal to draw attention. In the case of stupid fat flashy fish who did not even have proper feathers to push themselves along it also had the added bonus of throwing short light all over the reef out from the circle of the fish's feeding grounds.

    That it called in some cleaners for the passenger's people was also very sensible to Tunie. It was the most obvious and universal kind of signal, draw attention to yourself from afar very brightly and obviously and it will draw all kinds to you. If you have some kind of icky sticky things that are hard to get off SOMETHING is going to like to eat those eventually and will tell all their friends.

    Tunie of course was a Civilized Ship and she had her wonderful bestest Crew to give her brushies. But for big dumb fat stupid fish beasts and wild Ships without the benefit of crew waggle dances it made sense very useful ways to get cleaned and preened.

    After that sensible bit things followed for a bit longer making sense in the course. The big stupid fatty fish got properly cleaned and stopped waggling. Then the passengers spent a lot of time working to quicken new families and rebuild themselves to proper and useful for feeding port status. Or at least useful for uplifting to useful for feeding.

    But apparently the stupid fat fish ran into something and then the passengers people got sick and died. After that it all started going wrong and disturbing. Parts of the earlier course started lining up in ways that were awful and dangerous. Smelly and foul accidents were aligning in ways that made her quiver in worry. Ugly and nasty coincidences that were too lucky.

    Hints of something hidden moving.

    Shadows of the horrible void predators which Ships whispered soft of and danced slowly about in hidden corners of the reef. Things which were best avoided for ships that ignored these warnings were lost and never heard from again.

    Shadows in the distance, mysteries in the close. Hidden secret terrible things which were not to be touched by Ships.

    It made her nervous and worried and yearning for it all to turn out to be just another of the passenger's bad jokes. The really awful ones that were so unfunny but good intentioned. But the punchline did not materialize. The course was left dangling with those awful awful coincidences that teased and itched and terrified.

    It put Tunie in a jittery mood all around, which made it hard to concentrate on traffic, the story or anything at all.

    Which is why she almost missed the signal in a long light and resonance channel.

    At first Tunie was even more suspicious that maybe this was some final conspiring of the terrible hidden things of the passenger's long distant course. But the harder she looked and considered the less it seemed so. It was just an honest cry for help, Corroborated by many other ships heading in opposite vectors.

    No suspicious tight beams aimed solely at Tunie.

    No strange shadows or occlusions in the distance.

    Just a simple cry for aide.

    She needed to inform her Crew of this.

    There we go, closing up another of the life and times a multi-millenial. How did this time work out for everyone? Better or worse then doing it directly in the chapter? More or less the same? Oh also because I must always, have a bit of a cliff hanger and ominous hints of other things going on.

    Also Duat refers to the Egyptian land of the dead. Just in case you were wondering
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Tunie is the bestest and fluffiest ship and deserves all the brushies. Also interesting to see that there may be more going on in the background of Humanity's history than a mere series of unfortunate events.
     
    Refuge 0.0
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.0

    Ashley worked the fields til harvest was done. Moving up and down the stalks plucking the fruits of iron and tungsten for her cousin's forge work in the town. The fruits were abundant and readily available all along each stalk, the plants eagerly offering them up that if left alone they would crowd out the avenues between them.

    It was easy work with a basket and a sweeping brush of her fingers to pull the fruits free. Far more delicate work was drawing from the taps. Every plant gathered up a great store of water in their flesh for their many needs, kept warm by distant sunlight and kept liquid with tightly sealed veins and bladders. To draw on these stores of water and the sugars within one had to tap the stalks, fit an inflatable bottle to the outlet, and let the plant gently fill the new volume to capacity. There was a cycle and a rhythm to changing over the bottles on the taps. And it was that rhythm which set the times for harvest and the cycle of working the field here.

    The taps were made in the forges of town, delicate exchangers with precise valves and pressure locks. The gossets and latches needed to seal tight or water would seep, freeze and then evaporate out around the edges. They needed to be clean or the stalks could suffer and infection or blight. They needed to be sharp and very strong or they would shatter under the strain of the plant's flesh. They needed to be tempered against corrosion for the mix of nitrous and enzymes could be caustic within the flesh of the stalks.

    The connectors for the bottles were also made in town's forges. Carefully lathed and treated to fit to the taps without welding locked into them. A welded tap was a ruined one and required delicate extraction and tending to the wound on the stalk before that site could be set for harvest again. Long periods of regrowth where the harvest of waters and sugars could run low for field workers like Ashley.

    She sang to her sisters in medium long light and listened to their progress, each of them had their place in the fields. Everyone was making good progress and it looked like she would be first to finish her harvest.

    The net around the raw metal fruits and bottles of syrupy sap water was edging towards full enough it would be too much of a strain to take to town safely. She sang out that she was finishing up in her field, noting the stalks she missed for her neighbors if they wanted to take up any extra load or make up a deficit from a blighted or less fruitful stalk.

    Then it was the work of ropes and knots to close up the net tight. Then once everything was bound solid and secure together she started it along to coast down a field avenue. Chirping softly ahead so that others could stay out of her way or another bundle and its handler could divert or warn her to brake and stall her bundle's momentum.

    At the end of the fields where she harvested she braked her bundle so she could swap out her lungs and air reservoir. It was quick flex of her air intakes and loosening of her own living connectors. Dropping the waste saturated symbiote into the chamber and picking up a newly revitalized one fresh with glucose, oxygen and water.

    Ashley was economical from long practice in slipping herself into the symbiote's embrace, no panic like when she was younger and scared of not getting her breath back. A sickening moment of exposure as bits of residual liquid sizzled on her exposed membranes. A quick sticky cling and then once more she had air and sugar and water to live by. The swapping station for field workers was fed into the farm's local grid, fed by their own taps. The sugary syrup of the sap lines run through splitters and filters and digesters to revitalize the air symbiotes.



    No need for imports of the very same bottles she was harvesting here. Not like the power canopy.

    After ensuring she would have enough symbiote breath for the journey Ashley shoved off with her bundle to town. The avenues of the fields met with one of the thoroughfares here, a nice clean straight shot with overwatch from periodic watchtowers, scouts and snipers. Keen eyed friends and family with ancient imported weapons and strange city magic ready to protect any of the caravans of bundled up metal fruits and sap-syrup bottles that came along this way.

    Ashley liked to rest during this part of the trip, with just a few quiet chirps down the town-ward road. Coasting with minimal nudges and tugs to keep her on course. When she was young she had practically had to crawl along constantly adjusting her burden's trajectory and the trip had been exhausting, requiring she have a spare symbiote to swap out along the way. But now she could usually manage the trip without hardly having to breath at all.

    The symbiote was mostly so she could have breath in town without having to trade at whatever Smithiner was charging. Sometimes it was almost reasonable if she was ahead of the rush of laborers but it was hard to beat the price of free that was offered complementary to any sap workers.

    The syrup and metal field was a decent place to harvest. And a good place to get tool metals of course as the plants were always trying to get rid of more metal. Not like the danger and risk of the great power canopy which surrounded most of the town and the local use crops. The great black leaves darkening out the sun so much that one could freeze to death if they brushed too much that was shaded by them, or be roasted alive by moving too close to the red hot fins that kept the plants themselves from bursting under the heat of the sun. She had lost a lot of cousins and friends and a few uncles and aunts during their due work time in the solar fields.

    But the power canopy paid for wonders and the Tith, the debt owed by all. The price promised by their ancestors and founders of the town. Debt to the great mythical city. A place none of them had ever seen. Sometimes the beam riders and traders spoke of news relayed along slow and trickling between the towns and consolidation stations all the way from the fabled and distant fantasy of Crimson Leaf, the red glowing tree where everyone was so rich that they did not need to work a field to breath.

    The place that the light of every power canopy and solar field converged from all around the sun.

    The market from which traders found magic and the great weapons in the watchtowers.

    A trickle of miracles and the honor of ancestors required that they work the power canopy no matter the risk to life and limb.

    So the most skilled of field workers took lots and worked the power canopy as was their due. Risked the dangers of hungry predators and pests seeking to sap the lifeblood of the town. Ashley had done two tours of the caustic danger and gotten out with only a few burns and some skin frost frozen.

    She had been lucky.

    Ashley prefered working the syrup and metal fields, it was pastoral and safe, close to town and it gave her all the breath she could want if she was careful with the bundles. And hardly anything more dangerous than a few children wanted to eat the kind of plants that made sap and metal.

    But she would put in lots like everyone else so that the children and her younger sisters and brothers did not have too.

    The power canopy was no place for the unaware or inexperienced.

    Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Hope this story has been something enjoyable for you lot as much as it has been to write. This 'episode' will be a bit different from the usual and I plan to have a few of these scattered around. The reef is just so vast that some times the story needs to look at the world from a perspective not in the lens of any of our protagonists.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • I had an interesting idea for a kind of trader some time ago: A kind of sapient fungus grows throughout areas of some kind of land/rock analog like part of the reef (what is the reef made of anyhow?), the long dead corpse of some leviathan as a decomposer or even the dead surface layer of a worldbeast sorta like the terrans do. In any case they learned of some great cataclysm approaching and most of them decided to simpily up and leave by dissolving the edges of their territory and leaving, ground and all. Some would be traders and probably act as mass traiders, they wouldn't have the specialisation to "skirt the edge of speed" and no particular defensive ability. I imagine they'd specialise in shipping huge quantities of something that'll be usefull to whoever's wherever they're going whenever they get there but not in and of itself to possible raiders. So for exsample a few megatonnes of impure iron to an iron poor location but wouldn't be worth it to most raiders who wouldn't want a truly exsessive amount of iron and little else. Perhaps they'd spend a few years growing through the new lump and retracting from the old one while negotiating, alternativly they could act as a mobile base for a swarm of smaller symbiotic shipfish that act as protectors and make shorter side deliveries if it happens to pass by something interesting.
     
    Refuge 0.1
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.1

    Town was a bustle of activity as always, those working one of the fields were always arriving or going. Couriers and caravans loading up with fat breather symbiotes ready to replace those in the power canopy hospices. New bottles of sap coming in bundles with the metal waste of the plants just like Ashley.

    The traders and travelers, big wide orbs with a girth as wide as Ashley's arms splayed apart spoke that Town was much like other towns, all along the reef in these parts. And they all named themselves Town or very much close to it.

    This did not bother Ashley over much, she did not expect to ever travel further than the periphery of their own belt of solar fields. And every other town was a journey requiring many reserves of symbiotes or a store of air and water and digesters all its own.

    Even the outer reaches of the town's Power canopy was a difficult journey only made possible by hospices and reserve caches carefully tended and maintained by your friends and family working endlessly.

    The travelers and traders were as far as Ashley could see of only two kinds of people. The big wide orbs who could survive long waits between restful breaths and resupply and those strange folk like herself that lived mostly tethered to their tuggies.

    Ashley could not see the appeal of having only a few dozen symbiotes to share amongst yourself and family. All stuck to some frame or metal net that stored heavy bottles full of what the symbiotes needed to restore themselves to freshness. Some even tugged along the unwieldy mass of digesters and splitters so they could trade for raw sap.

    But managing such a bulk was exhausting and required they tether beasts of burden to start and stop their coasting.

    Still there was usually one or two drifting clumps of a tuggy at Town ready to trade news and whatever strange wonders had drifted along the reef from Crimson Leaf. And many more of the big spherical traders too of course.

    There were also the strange wriggling ones who had to suck up breath so often they could not work the fields. They writhed and wiggled and helped with accounts, organization and whatever tasks were needed in Town.

    Smithiner was one of them actually, he had gotten fatter as the two of them grew up. Her from a short armed little larva into the strong and long armed field maiden twice veteran of the power canopy. He from a mostly flat cushion with wiggling appendages, to a more bulbous and overstuffed looking pillow with stubbier appendages that seemed to make his living somehow by trading in sap bottles and metal in exchange for swapping fresh for old symbiotes during the peak rush of returning field workers.

    Which is why she was braking herself and her bundle right at his little spot at the corner where he rented a big silo for deliveries.

    "Ho Smithiner! Swindled a baby for its mother's breath lately?"

    "Ho Ashley! Nae not I, but have ye plucked a lung off your sister again thinking it was a fruit?"

    They both laughed, silly jokes and mistakes in their youth exchanged they got down to business.

    "So I pulled a hand-of-hand-of-hands in sap full ripe sap and twice that in iron fruits. Tungsten was slim this harvest though. My usual return in scrip for time in the town?"

    "Aye Ashley Aye! Pity on the tungsten, I'd have paid double for it, all the fielders been coming short on it. Star's breath been less heavy then? Less for the weeds to filter?"

    She shrugged a bit and rolled to look past the scramble jutting branches and stalks of Town. like a field all its own it faced the sun with short and stunted shrubs on its roofs to help supplement its needs.

    "May be, may be. If so I expect sap to be rich and plenty then, if sun is giving finer star breath. Sap tends rich"

    "Oh so? Oh so? Nay seen that either, but can take time to notice. More taps then? More bottles?"

    "No, fine-breaths too short to warrant the strain, but we may need to shorten harvest times on the sap fields. I'll ask around if Glory has seen bottles go plump before their time"

    "Just so, tell me if ya hear, I give ya finger-of-hand in scrip discount for the knowing either way"

    "Course, course Smithiner! Best friends we are I would, thanks kindly"

    With that Smithiner, wrote up a stamp of her accounts with him for her stay in town and a few hands of token ribbons to trade quick and easy. Then it was off to her cousin to trade some metal scrips and then see if she could track down her sister's aunt Glory for word on the other sap fields and their bottles.



    Town was a bustle and Ashley was practiced in it, her Town-Trade was mostly a courier with a bit of news and rumor mongering for Smithiner and his fellow stock keepers. She dabbled in smithing and machining but had never taken as much of a liking to it as her cousin did. She was not much a builder honestly.

    Glory by contrast adored construction, and maintenance and whatever great fool works some one with too much scrip or an over rich haul in the fields thought was a splendid idea. Which meant that the easiest way to find her was to drift to wherever the most construction was underway.

    Glory was a good field worker too, and had supposedly lived through a full twenty or more tours in the power canopy. Not without taking on some scars though, her arm had been splinted back in place from a bad break and had never healed fully. Stiff and inflexible in a way that should have made her awkward.

    But experience and skill had overcome whatever deficiency that Ashley was pretty sure would have left her utterly crippled.

    She seemed as fluid and capable as any other of the construction workers, shouting in short light and long instructions and demands of the many different workers assembling the new frame.

    "Ho! Glory! What fool thing you working on now?"

    "Ho! Ashley! Just a new silo, a few were getting porous and mites and fluffers had gotten into the sap store of one! So we need a new one with proper seals"

    "Oh Fluffers? Hope no rounds were about, they take poorly to them"

    "Nay only sisters and brothers and uncles about there, we burned them out with proper hard lights and melted the spores then had a proper scrubbing of all involved to be sure. Pity about the mites though, mighty cute be a mite as they say"
    "As they say! Oh ho! I be meaning to ask you on if you've seen or heard o bottles in the sap fields filling up over fast? Tungsten been sparse, I thinks maybe we are in a fine-breath from o sun, mayhap a time to shorten the harvest cycles? Til the tungsten gets heavier again or the bottles slack"

    Glory shouted a loud and bright curse on long light at one of the workers, shocking them into action so that a strut did not end up drifting into a dangerous trajectory with another of their fellows. After the disaster was preempted she turned back to Ashley for a softer long light discussion.

    "I have seen the metals on the less heavy side of things. That may have been a wise course afore, but I will be suggesting nay, the silos ain't much secure with the loss of half a hand worth. And fine-breaths are short, easy to overshoot. No point in risking strain on harvests later on for a bit more sap now. I recommend telling sisters and friends in the fields much the same, I know I will."

    Ashley hummed and chirped affirmative, it was nice to have someone so wise like Glory around. She would be missed when the solar canopy finally claimed its due.

    "I see, I see, that does make a lot of sense then Glory, Thanks and be well!"

    "Be well! And tell that fat clog Smithiner he owes me on insurance for a silo! I just fini-"

    And then a terrible howling roar sprung up in the long light all around them, momentarily drowning out or distorting normal speech. It as attenuated and distant but also from all sides as well. Horrible vast voices that could only be the sound of monsters and predators.

    Glory whirled to look out from the reef bed and towards the open void beyond Town's canopy.

    She spoke in tight and sharp light that burned a little to receive but was the only thing that could be heard over the cacophonous roar.

    "Dragons"

    Another update with Ashley and her friend Smithiner. You have already seen ashley's people before, although they were not particularly named and few of them had much of a major role. Hope everyone had a good Thursday. I'll be flying out late/early this tonight/tomorrow morning. Hope everyone is staying safe.

    @Evonix you managed to describe a slightly larger version of the 'tuggies' I wrote in this chapter just a few hours ago! Hilarious serendipity. Although their less fungal adapted there is a great majority of traffic in the reef going around the slow way of things. How do you think enough material and energy gets in one place for Redweed to exist? Lots and lots of slow caravans.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter posting delayed by hard drive failure. It's written but the illustration was halfway done when everything went kaput. I have a flat of the in progress I can use but all the source files are gone until I can see about getting the drive to a recovery specialist.

    I backup all my writing on google so no loss there.

    New parts for comp expected to arrive tuesday.

    Driver installs and setup will prolly be ongoing for a week but I think i'll be able to get back to it by Wednesday with a skeleton of a system.

    Sorry for the inconvenience.
     
    Nighzmarquls said:
    Well, she was mostly lost anyway. She knew it was a story about a lot of things happening. And even what those things were in the moment at each step. But as for why any of it was happening?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I sympathize with her.

    I also love this story.

    You paint these characters so well, their needs are alien to me, but everything else, I empathize with.

    I especially like Ashley, that kind of long-suffering, kind, yet hardy and skilled character has always hit a soft spot for me, and they're no different.
     
    Refuge 0.2
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.2

    The roar and scream in long light echoed and reverberated all across Town. It pierced down from the void. In the distance along the path that Ashley had just taken a little while ago from the fields the watch towers were rallying. The searing painful flashes of shortest light were already flickering through the gaps between buildings and silos. The batteries which were almost twice as tall as Town was wide hummed as some of the tithe beam was redirected and unleashed to try and lance at the source of the monstrous signal.

    Ashley could feel her skin and the outer layers of her eye lenses prickling and blackening with the burns from shorter light leakage from the terrible weapons rallying all around her against the threat. Glory was shouting at her in a tight beam that burned so it could over power the deafening light of the dragons.

    "Seek a shelter or rally to a militia barracks! Ashley! CLEAR and BRIGHT respond!"

    She mustered as much of a voice as she could in her boggled state, burning far more of her breath from her symbiote then she probably should have for this but she needed to be heard"

    "ALRIGHT I will seek a shelter! "

    This was nothing like the solar canopy she had prepared and trained for all her life and survived. This was something she had never seen, that she had never heard of Glory seeing and yet she seemed calm and in command and directing. Dragons were a story, a thing told to scare children so they did sneak too much glucose.

    Ashley wanted to help... But the roars of the Dragon had rattled her so bad she would have stumbled into a heating element like a newborn. Whatever was needed to be done to deal with Dragons was well beyond her right now.

    Everything in town was a slightly contained panic. It was like the crushing rush of a harvest a hundred times more. But there were those like Glory amongst the fear and panic. Directing and rallying their fellows to the deeply carved shelters or to the upper reaches where caches of weapons and city magic were prepared.



    A buffeting light muffling cloud billowed from some of the flanks of buildings, trailing behind painfully bright lights as they hurled shining metal tubes out into the upper void above the canopies. The heaviness of the clouds clung to everything and blocked the shorter light, protecting skins and eyes from the flashes but also scattering the tight beams of speech. Swaddling the flows of people of all kinds as they moved to their chosen place.

    More diffuse flashes screamed past into the distance from whence the roars had come. Again and again in great cascading pulses. The light of the sun and the Town was dimmed and then darkened to a creepy gloom. Like the near pure black shadows of the Solar fields. The only thing missing was the dangerous terrible reds of heating elements.

    Ashley trembled and felt her draw on her symbiotes breath increase alarmingly. The particulates and billowing clouds were like the largest leak of sap she had ever seen. The expanding clouds were freezing cold. She could barely see anything but what was directly in front of her. She felt like she was being smothered in tiny biting shards of ice that also smothered all light and voice.

    Her symbiote was not going to last in these conditions, not in the panic of her hearts and the shuddering convulsions she kept feeling in the cold.

    This was not like the solar fields, where the cold was sharp and burning, here it was slow and yet utterly smothering.

    She could feel ice starting for form on her skin and the harness, her arms felt brittle and poorly able to bend. She stopped moving.

    Her symbiote was starving, it was burning with need to be replaced, but she was smothered and cold!

    She needed air that it could not give her.

    And then with a terrible jerk she felt it yanked away from her. Pulled free, she tried to panic and squirm but could not move. She was too starved, bits of her skin were torn off where it had frozen a seal with her struggling lungs.

    She had no breath now!

    She was an infant child, it was her first time being pulled from the nurturing breath of her mother again. She panicked and yet was unable to move!

    Suddenly warmth, great close warm contact and then the connection of a fresh passage to her air and glucose intakes. But the air tastes wrong, and the glucose in the blood made her dizzy. That was not a symbiote!

    But it was warm!

    So warm!

    And finally she could move, she could speak, she could turn her frosted over eye to look at what was wrapped all around her and carrying her in this smothering horrible fog of frozen crystals.

    "Smith-ner? W-what- where were?"

    "Ho Ashley! Don't dawdle here friend! We must get to shelter where we can have you hooked up safe and breathing! Don't fret I keep you warm and living friend! Stay awake, talk to me! I'll weather this exhaust for both of us!"

    The warm embrace was the rolls of nebulous flesh of her friend smithiner, blocking off the terrible heat sapping ice! Completely curled around her. The intakes were...

    "Smithiner! What did you do! You are NOT a symbiote!"

    It made her want to squirm and writhe away, it was indecent and horrifying in the extreme. But at the same time it was the blood in her veins and the breath in her mind! It made her feel dizzy and out of sorts as well. The balance was not right, but it was close to it. It was keeping her alive.

    The big lump of her friend simply curled tighter as her nudged and tumbled them with little grabber sticks and tools with the rest of his limbs. Tossing them along in the confused crowd, calling out chirps of progress like a proper field worker and bundle. Only Ashley was the bundle now!

    "Ho! All my stock of breathers is moved to the shelters ahead, didn't have any more to help you. Gave my spares to three others before. But could not leave my friend Ashley frozen in the way. Not my best customer and friend! I breathe and eat ten times what yon Ashley does! I can spare the blood and air! You're barely a strain promise!"

    Smithiner had taken several of his own feed lines and jammed her viscera into them. It was a tight and desperate fit, it was going to chaff and probably even burn and itch later. She was going to be all off balance and loopy on the balance of nutrients from his blood. And she could practically feel the over flush sense of how much air he kept pumping through her body as it cycled in and out of him.

    But at the same time she was alive.

    She looked out into the now eerily silent muffling of white. Occasionally cries, conversations or shadows of buildings from town would hove out of view or flash sem incoherent in the deeper shade.

    It was still so cold that she could barely keep her hands from going numb and her arms felt creaky unless she wrapped them tightly into the folds of Smithiner. She felt like a grub or a mite latched to her friend. Shivering in the cold, living off his breath and blood instead of free with a symbiote.

    It might have been the imbalance of the blood or glucose, or it might have been the rush of too much oxygen. But she did not properly realize they had stopped dangling from a grip on one side of a building for quite a while. The way the clouds of obscuring vapor kept shifting and moving all around had confused her sense of direction.

    The lack of markers to coordinate and fix herself too also disoriented.

    "Ho smithiner why have we stopped?"

    She felt like her words were sloppy the way she had to try and shout them through his bulk.

    He hushed her softly, quietly so dim that she must have been the only one to be able to feel his voice.

    "Hush ho little Ashley! I 'hear-feel-sense' something in the vapor"

    She was confused, how could he hear anyone? Barely any kind of light could pierce this smothering gloomy smog. Still she lowered the intensity of her long light whisper so that only he would be able to discern it.

    "What? How?"

    "The cloud pressure shakes... bits of it against me, I feel it in my skin. Waves of it, like light but different. I can hear in it. I can hear a lot"

    Ashley was not going to complain about magical extra-sensory abilities never before explained by her friend with very shaky sounding groundings of practical use except in the explicit conditions they found themselves in.

    But she was mostly not going to complain because she was high on his weird oxy mix and she suspected it would devolve into rambling about sap tap jokes.

    And now she was itchy.

    We are back! Hope everyone likes the picture, it feels a bit rushed for me but I wanted to get it out before the end of the week. Computer is fresh and new and blazing fast with new harddrive and ram now!

    New gig is also a lot of fun so that should help my writing pace (I write better/faster when I'm busy, go figure).

    Speculation, discussion and questions are always welcome.

    Also I like to think that a decent understanding of physics is not required to enjoy my story, but I'm pretty sure it helps. An important trait for this chapter is the normally insulating properties of a vacuum.
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Nighzmarquls said:
    magical extra-sensory abilities never before explained by her friend with very shaky sounding groundings of practical use except in the explicit conditions they found themselves in
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Ha. "Vibrations in atmosphere? What an oddly specific superpower."
    One detail I love from this is how little explicit explanation you give. It's one of the things that sucked me into the first Pylo chapters so fast. No matter how non-human the perspective, everything is presented as perfectly mundane. The little moments when the earth-human filter and analogs break down are so delightful. All these little reveals as we get to puzzle together what's "actually" going on.
    And then the inversions hit, like the quote above! Fantastic punchline.

    It's less relevant to this episode (which I'm loving so far), but the gradual breakdown of the earth-human filter is even better in the human-perspective bits. Clearly these humans are far from homo sapiens as we know them, but I'm always surprised how many built-in expectations you manage to subvert. I think I've got an understanding of what's going on, and then a new throwaway line makes everything shift just-so. I do a surprising amount of re-reading on this thread, and not just to refresh on older plot-points.
     
    Refuge 0.3
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.3

    Smithiner had lived in the Town for his entire life. He and a small shoal of his brothers and sisters came to Town as egg spore on a travellers caravan. Dropped off to make their way in the world by some unknown pack of parents.

    They hatched new and ready and eager to find their place in a world full of potential. They followed around and sought to find a place with all the bustling people and things around them. The people of the Town, field workers all were pleased by most of them. Called them cute and kept them around. Stumbled through finding out the proper care and feeding of the infants that Smithiner would a great time later learn are called clerks.

    Over time they would dwindle though that first generation, there were many a hard lesson to learn. Like the importance of staying in town.
    It was the only place a Clerk could survive. The fields were too sparse and wide and their bodies too clumsy and expensive to feed to work out there. When he was young he had tried a few times, as every larval child might, to seek a frontier of service to claim and make his own.

    Thinking himself invincible or at least expendable he had tried to work a field. He'd nearly starved to death and asphyxiated both.

    To start he could not relax his body the right way so he did not burn so hot during drifting between town and field. So he had to bulk up on stocks and make several poorly thought out attempts trying to learn how to not constantly use precious oxygen.

    Then when he finally got to the field and tried to work with his too short arms, his gluttonous hunger for oxygen and water and his feeble musculature balance?

    It was the work of ten field hands to keep him alive and bring him back to town from that ill thought out adventure. But it had left an impression on him. He could not do the most important work needed for his community. He was not suited to it no matter how hard he pushed himself.

    So he had stayed back in town and worked to try and help his community somehow. He and the decimated population of his sibling clerks. He'd tried to do construction but again his arms were short and had poor leverage, his body was too soft and his hungers were too great. He needed so much more simple oxygen and food than anyone else. He suffered dizziness and hunger pains trying to keep up with what even the frailest and most sickly child of the field workers all around him could manage.

    He again fell into a charity case of others as the debt mounted. He eventually ended up as the assistant of a smithery. And for a time it was wonderful, his new work mates fashioned tools to let his arms be longer, he took to it with all the zeal and gumption he could muster. But again the curse of his body asserted itself. He was not skilled and his body expensive. His friends and colleagues seemed to ignore it but he could feel the balance so badly shifted.

    He cost more than twelve times one of the field workers to do the same work as them.

    Even though their kindness and charity continued he simply could not stand the way he was always backsliding. The balance was awful, they were throwing away so much of their precious time and work for the fields. Work that could have been going to the great tithe of the Town. Wasting it on him, simple little useless Smithiner.

    He could not stand that, he had to pull his own way like so many of the people and friends all around him. Like so many of the workers that went to tend the great Solar Canopy and did not return as anything but frozen corpses or ash.

    He had to justify the waste of his own existence.

    He started out by finding ways to save his colleagues time. It began at the smithy, he would stock up and organize the metal in one easy place for everyone, worked metal, raw fruit from the fields, freshly stocked symbiotes for those that needed them. He'd just organize them and hold them in readiness for others.

    Then one shift moving through a pair made an agreement about trading an extra symbiote one had for some spare fruit they had on hand. They made the promise and Smithiner saw it. So naturally he promised to remember the deal and make the necessary exchanges.

    That worked incredibly well, the field workers bartered of course, they knew how to trade and haggle with one another and did so with traders and travelers. But their memories were a bit flighty. Their grasp of sums a bit dodgy, and their education mostly concerned with how to follow the instructions of scriptures and codices that had been passed down from the Town's founding.

    So Smithiner took up the role of remembering their deals and helping to make their lives easier. When he did that he found that the sense of balance was better. Yes he eat up the air and food of a dozen field workers. But as he counted it up he realized he was starting to save half of that in time and effort and worry and waste.

    And it went from there, Smithiner would discuss with clever tinkers that were well practiced in metal and have them make tools to help him along. He would check with scripture archivists to find useful treasures and secrets. He even sought out and began haggling with the traders that came through.

    And as he took these things and put them into action he found more and more ways to save his fellow workers all that much more of their precious time. He made the scrip in vouchers of his seal of accounting and ribbons of exchange.

    He began renting great silos and store houses for the bulks of goods he moved paying in promises that eased the strain of the owners. He worked with the architects and archivists to interpret the scripture for the town's layout to help reposition and utilize its secret wisdom.

    Smithiner worked the worth of his own pay in food and air and from his example his surviving brothers and sisters found their place in Town as well. He sired children, taught them the ways he and his shoal mates had learned in how to live and serve best in town. And swelled and grew prideful and happy. He bought tinctures and poultices from traders to shore up where his swollen body failed or rebelled from his desire to serve. Yet another way in which the field workers were so much better suited then he.

    Ashley had been young when he was, and yet she had never faltered like he did. Her injuries had never accumulated the same way and she never seemed frailer or less capable then the first time he had seen her fully adult. She forgot him some times when she was on a long shift far away and he had to introduce himself all over again. But beyond the memory the field workers seemed to last until something horrible befell them. And so long after those difficult times as a young one he was pleased he could help so many that the balance of the great worth weighed him like the lives of thousands of field workers in the time he saved them.

    But now with the mist enveloping all his friends and for lack of any stronger words family. Now when he sees them freezing and dying in panic and terror along the avenues that should have been full of life and peace. Smithiner did not feel he was anything but a lump of wasteful meat again.

    His worth, the contribution he could make to the work of the Town was nothing if there was no one for him to help. And although he had seen many generations of the poor field workers never return from the hard labor tending the solar fields or the occasional silo accident or explosive battery failure he felt a stinging fear at the loss of them here and now.

    Friends never became easier to lose.

    If anything Smithiner was convinced by his relatively long life that loss just got worse the more it happened.

    So he was bundling up three of his fellow citizens of Town. the precious life blood of his world. It was only fitting that he protect and nurture and pay them back for all that they had given him when he was wasteful and useless.

    He had taken Ashley whose symbiote had starved to death and run her into his own blood and breath to sustain her.

    And here now that he could feel the vibration of the air in a way he had never so clearly comprehended until now. The strange funny sense like light emitting among solid objects now given voice and clarity at last.

    He would do everything to keep them safe.

    Even though he did not know what he could possibly do against the presence of something so vast and terrible in this frozen mist.



    So I just realized completely by accident that this is being posted in December, and most of this episode is going to be full of frozen water vapor clouds.

    So I guess this is the Christmas special episode.

    Enjoy!
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge 0.4
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.4

    Glory was working the guns, she had lived through animal attacks before. She had weathered raids and pirates descending from the trade routes. She knew that sometimes your fellow people could be the greatest danger of all.

    And she had heard first hand accounts from refugees of dragons. Yet she was not prepared. The first attacks had been the roars, fear and panic and contemptuous disregard for giving away their position.

    Arrogant beasts!

    To arms had gone the tight beams of her fellow vets and the pups and volunteers! Flurry and activity, throwing themselves into the bunkers and gun baskets in the upper floors. She watched on the green lit screens the targeting arrays for her own battery of missiles. They had built these weapons for these days. To deter the less kind people, to turn away the pests and beasts of the reef.

    Now vapor exhaust from thousands of the Anti-Astro missiles spread across the void converging on where the monsters screamed in long light over the fields, open and exposed, dancing and teasing the fringe watch and their smaller armaments.

    The flares of light from rail guns spearing white hot lines as they burned through the exhaust. Rapid covering fire to try and corral the enemy. The dragons were so distant as to be only specks on her read out and target acquisition screen. But there were only a few dozen of the dragons. She felt a warm pride in her artificial symbiote line rigging her to the buildings reserve oxygen and glucose stores. How could they possibly fail to miss when they enveloped the targets with atomic munitions?

    The flashes and waves of static rattling and distorted her screen long seconds after the actual detonations had occurred. Speaking to the incredible distance and excellent early warning of their scouts. Bolstering her with the foolishness of simple beasts to have announced themselves so blatantly with such a small pack.

    The interference from the AA-Missile exhaust and the disarray of the light shock filled her screen with static and echoes. The gnomes were on it though! Clever little sprats fixing any burnt or damaged circuits from the blast exhaust. Even without eyes on effect Glory was confident, she knew they had enough time and even if some had survived they had a dozen more volleys of equal measure in the launch tubes and more besides in reserve!

    Then space giggled. It was there in her head, right behind her eye, light bubbling in a delighted and youthful tone.

    "FoOlisH onE wHo caLLs HeRseLf gLorY. ONly YOU aRe a beASt hEre!"

    She flipped to all hands broadcast.

    "Info Security Comped! Repeat! Compromised channels!"

    Was that still quite right? The voice was in her mind, not the coms. But it was the closest protocol to fitting.

    Calls went out from the other turrets and missile towers. Some confirmed and repeated they too had compromised messages, presumably like her. Others simply copied as was protocol and doctrine. It was a simple code but it informed her that she was not alone.

    "oH bUt YoU wIlL bE!"

    It rattled her but she focused her eye on the display as it had finally stopped warbling and fizzing with static and echoes from long light reflect- NO! That was wrong how did they?! "All missiles, close quarters yield! HOSTILES IN TOWN PERIMETER!" What happened to the border watch towers where had they gone!? She spotted the black and red pulse of dead hard line connections! All gone?! every single border and watch tower over the fields had been taken out while the main towers were blinded by light shock!

    The light in her head was laughing like a child, like an infant playing with a ball for the first time. Delighted and shrill and discordant.

    The dozen or so contacts were right on top of them now! Swooping through at an absurd speed between the towers and silos. Missiles let fly and crossed one another, their detonation yields cut to almost nothing to avoid destroying the very buildings they defended! Sparks and flashes of light shock in close proximity now! Near constant blasts of static on her screen. Buildings flashing in black silhouette as the searing heat of the missile detonations overloaded the contrast equalizers!

    That one had been a direct hit. Any thing of flesh, even a million times the size would have been a cloud of powdery ash. Yet this thing had not a scratch, it hadn't bothered even trying to dodge. And then, she remembered, that ridiculous and absurd legend a trader had told her so long ago.

    "SWITCH TO ANTI ARMOR RAIL GUNS ON TARGETS! TRACK FOR EFFECT! DRILL AND SHELL BUSTING MUNITIONS!"

    The things were sweeping around them flying faster then their missiles could manage, arcing and spinning on to swoop around corners! Missiles trying to track them either swerved up into the empty void over the city or disastrously smashed into defensive positions and exploded. Rupturing the interiors and killing the crews and gunners. Leaving just the gutted shell of the structure drifting apart without its skeleton.

    And then it was upon her.

    Her station was buried inside a tower, halfway down and shielded by lead and armour. But the thing was spearing right at her, not the cameras of her viewfinders, not the long light echo dishes. Right to where she was locked into her bunker!

    It was sleek and solid, a sheet of rippling black spines looking like soft flesh and not the impossible armor she knew it to be and then sudden changing shape between a dozen whirling single edged blades, threshing through her tower and then noise, icy cold, rubble, terrible light screaming in her head and then a burst of dust and heat as it passed. All of her screens were dead, she could see with her own eyes the devastation and desolation of the defenders of the city through the gaping chasm it had left behind it.

    She turned her eye around to survey the entire extent of the damage to her tower. She was totally unhurt. It had cleaved through the building and cut it in half with enough force that the upper levels were rupturing and flying apart into the void above. It had all taken less than a heartbeat ago she had been a warrior in the center of her fortifications connected to the defense and rallying the greatest instruments of destruction known to the Town.

    Now she was a lost and fragile field worker exposed in open void chained to the life support of a mortally wounded building.

    And then the thing which had exposed her swooped lazily, slowly back around, shedding the exhaust of their useless missiles as it had the hard armour of her 'bunker'.

    Coming into full view right before her.

    The thing resembled illustrations she had seen of void craft more than an animal, but there was nothing machine-like about it the appearance of even what was clearly rocket exhaust nozzles, guns of some kind, and laser targeting arrays. Twelve horrid mouths opened simultaneously in it's underside, and from them snaked twenty four ropelike tongues covered in barbed hooks.



    "ThAt WaS fUn, TiMe FoR sNaCk!"

    She was cut off, her coms were smashed and scattered parts, the clouds of exhaust blocked her own internal transmission system.

    She flexed her arm to reach the detonation switch for her station.

    But the tendrils were too fas-

    Trying out a bit of something different in writing style to try and up the feeling of action and tension. How's it work?
    Also grats you have met the VERY FIRST proper predator of the reef.
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Poor Glory. You fought valiantly.
    But it seems a mere city was no match for Cthulhu's manta-ray cousin.
     
    Refuge 0.5
  • Threadmarks
    • Refuge

    0.5

    Town was being torn apart. Smithiner could feel it and hear it, They moved away from the places where waves blasted from. The icy mist roiled. Flashes of light blind the eye as they sear out in the clouds. And then in a rush the ice blew away. Shredding around smithiner and the huddling half frozen forms of field workers in white ribbons.

    The avenue of Town were blasted clear in the wake of a rocket detonation. Or at least Smithiner thought that was the case at first. The defense weapons were bombs and rockets, He thought for sure that was what this must have been. But there looming in the black of the void far out from town's towers was a clump of twisting and sweeping shapes.

    As he looked he realized it was a pack, a few dozen at most and amongst and around them he could see wreckage and ruin from tall towers and buildings. Big heaping brickworks and armoured plating from the defensive towers.

    They were concentrated densely together, looping around the city in searingly fast arcs. He did not know or understand why. But then there was a flickering light through the clouds of mist and sputtering heat glow splashing over one of the dark delta shapes.

    A missile screaming with a plume of venting smoke sweeping in from elsewhere. And then realizing what was coming Smithiner turned away from the missle just in time. His skin prickled and he felt the short light and long light scream howling pain down upon him under the flash of detonation. He felt like some of his insides had been deafened by the volume of it.

    By the time he looked back but the sweeping back had changed posture, they swooped out in ones and twos and then unleashed lancing attacks of their own. Bands of painful bright light bursting in electric arcs where it ruptured the vapors along their path. And then buildings crumbling and bursting with fresh horror.

    Smithiner was only saved from being blinded by munitions or some other terrible new weaponry by the intervening buildings blocking the terrible glare.

    These things, had just launched weapons equal or greater to the mustering of the entirety of town. The work of hundreds of millions of field workers and hundreds of thousands of clerks such as himself. His children and peers. And as he looked out into the ruined wreckage of buildings he did not even know how many gnome families would be tossed out from their safe crevices and walls in this wreckage.

    He dragged, pulled, jerked, yanked. He tumbled away from the horrors to try and seek the shelters. With the freezing mists rising he saw little clumps of people swinging into motion around him all over the avenues.

    But all the more distressing were all the frozen clumps of starved field workers and stumbling blinded or worse clerks. There were the deflated bags of traders that had ruptured from some impact, uneven heating or something else, their viscera and internal ecocosms vented out into emptiness leaving their corpses adrift.

    He shoved and cajoled his friends forward, but he could barely feel his own voice, the damage from unshielded detonations in so many lengths of light felt like it had burned and scorched some of his insides. He he might be mute, or deaf or both!

    He saw similar pain and confusion in some of the still mobile field workers. He saw another stumble and waver their symbiote dieing in seizuring failure without a chance to restore itself in their panic.

    Another cut to his side, the sting of jamming the viscera of a friend into his own so that they could survive, not thrive, not without suffering but at least last long enough to reach the shelter.

    He felt like he was budding with new children for all the cysts of his friends jammed into his circulatory system. He felt short of breath.

    Weak and shallow.

    But there would be a shelter though.

    He just had to reach one, down deep, dug into the old bones of past reef growth. Buried away from the star sun and the dangers of the void and invaders.

    Something wrong, he could not hear words, he felt out of sorts. Mist was clearing up, diffuse. He turned his eye all around, buildings close and far were shuddering and quaking around him, impacted by dark deltas rocketing through them or perhaps searing bright spears of weaponry.

    The flanks of the structure next to them lurched and heaved from an impact further up its spine before shreds of it snapped all around in violent metal and stone viscera.



    The flailing panicked wriggling forms of a family of gnomes burst into the violence of the void as their world ruptured blew past, many splattering in freezing droplets when they impacted the opposite building.

    There! Shelter, the sign for emergency, field workers and survivors dazed and panicked following by rote the old dictates, go deep, hide in the shelters, seal safe and whole. Wait for rescue.

    He stumbled and ended up drifting too high, lost grip of something flailed and was shoved by a passing panicked stranger back into the crowd. They latched onto one another, becoming a woven mat of pained shocked individuals glasping to each other as they funneled into safety. Some buzzed in their fingers with touch song, sign words, hum speech.

    "-seen my sister? Anyone seen my sister she was right with me!--"

    "-The silos, they cut open the silos, all the harvest, harvest-"

    "-caravan! They snatched up my caravan! Eat all the tuggers! My beasts! My mothe-"

    "-Saw one, saw last one, can't see now, it burned but they didin't-"

    "-sprayed acid, it swam like mist but eat them, eat her, she was eaten by the goo like-"

    Smithiner wanted to ignore the tide of torment and fear and horror but he had to do his part, pass on the messages to those that he joined hands with in the chain. Crude with his stubby inarticulate and weak fingers, but he could manage a pidgin of the dialects and languages passing in currents through their fingers. And he could not be a dead end in the chain, it was a duty in these times to pass on the messages as they came. To spread word and reunite lost loved ones and bring news of elsewhere.

    He found himself starting to add slowly his own witnessed horros, the things he had seen, the findings.

    This was not the shelter he had been planning to reach, the town was in upheaval, but he had some sway and recognition here. He could pull some attention. And everyone was fellow friend and family now anyway.

    Home was beset and besieged! They would share whatever they could. He felt woozy, out of sorts, he lost the thread of the communication. He couldn't focus. He fumbly bumbled? Bumble mumbled?

    He was so tired. Just worn down, he was desperate for a fresh breath, his insides burned for it, caustic painful exhaustion he had not known since his youth.

    Since he tried to work the fields.

    He needed, Need to? Something... Needed to get his friends to symbiotes! he could taste bitter starvation in his blood. He tried to yell for attention but realized his voice was too burned by the fires of the bombs. He was too sparse and reedy. In this tumult he would be lost, He squeezed a pattering inarticulate fumble of panic and tried to get attention. He was not sure if the woven chain of other hands carried his message.

    Everything was going grey and dark around the edges. He was so tired, he needed to get his friends help. He needed.

    Something.

    He burned and yet felt at peace.

    It was so quiet and soft and warm being so close to everyone.

    They were in the shelter?

    Yes he thought he felt a fumbly message and his eyes might be seeing the right thing. They were in the shelter, he had gotten his friends to safety.

    That was good he had made it now he just.

    Had to do something?

    Something-

    Don't mind me, couldn't sleep so I wrote. going to bed now. Enjoy the story.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • TBH for much of this I was expecting this to be Tunie and the Hideous Miscommunication
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top