Omega collided with Pylo with a heavy exhale of air as her chest curled over the side of the creature’s face.

Aleph was aghast.

“Quarti! That was so rude!”

Quarti however was just laughing as she tumbled back into the distance before sinking into one of the fluffy clouds to the point of almost disappearing from view.

Her voice echoing out in a muffled cry of delight.

“Total Worth!”

Pylo meanwhile was not moving at all, practically frozen with Omega splayed over her face. Biting at a lower lip as omega scrambled to shove off and away from her.

“QUARTI I respect you as my elder but PLEASE do not THROW me at the- Hey!”

Aleph tilted her head, having gotten used to moving without the pull of gravity seeing Omega just ‘stop’ like that threw off her intuition.

Only after staring for a moment and seeing Omega herself look down to her ankle did the full picture click.

Pylo had ‘grabbed’ her friend around the leg with one of her ‘arms’. The spindly almost vine like appendage loosely grasping as a thoughtful look quirked the creature’s lips.

“Should the fleshes press softly in exchange? Spore and spittle surging between? Is this to prelude in provocative endearment? Is such acts burgeoning onward? Nay I forbid myself to lust after your supple luxurious flanks. It shall not be my tongue’s preference to lap you Omega, last of daughters”

Omega’s face was flushed as she worked to untangle her leg, Finally being free when Pylo’s limb let her go. But the momentum had already been arrested. Omega was drifting untethered and without a means to pull or push herself beside Pylo.

“Uh no, No thanks! No need for a kiss Pylo. Quarti was just teasing us because I’ve been so... I’m sorry I’ve been less than friendly with you. But uh I’m good, not attracted to you or anything. No Kisses”

Her friend was just floating there at the mercy of a looming creature of black amidst the seeming wonder of an eternal sky.

“I am of prime breeding! My flesh sublime and eggs and spore fresh! Do not think to deny I luxuriate in your every seeping glance. I know your wants and twisty little wriggling desires. I am beautiful and you yearn within for it. But It is I who holds no wish to seed you.”

Pylo huffed heavily, the sound made Aleph jolt and a terrified shiver run up and down her spine. It was a vibration that passed over her skin and prickled it with goosebumps. It made her ears sting, it made her bones and muscles rattle.

That was the sound of either industrial machinery or a VERY large animal. It had a metallic twang to it and looking on the creature before her she could see that a cloud of steam seemed to have erupted all around it before the airflow of the space started to siphon it off into the misty cloud cover all around.

Omega was slowly tilting away towards one of the fluffy white walls with cheeks practically incandescent and scowling. Struck as still and dumb as Aleph.

It had been almost possible to forget how massive their host was. Mildly disturbing suggestions and wounded pride in her words besides. Their host was bigger than the hut Aleph’s parents lived in!

It was easy to let the vacuum of the ship’s corridors silence the being’s mannerisms and body.

But here in air with them where she could smell and hear Pylo’s body made the entire thing even more looming and present.

Aleph found herself settling into the spongy, soft fluffy walls of the room before she realized she had been drifting.

The roiling springy mist rolling up from all sides around her. Soon swallowing up her head and then brushing her cheeks with a cool refreshing texture that made her give out a soft sigh of surprise.

This.

This was what Aleph as a child had imagined a cloud would actually feel like.

Cool but also firm and springy.

Where it touched her cheek she almost didn't notice.

It was like she was pressing her face into a strong cool wind rather than solid objects.

What hints of the fibres she thought she could feel were silky and softer than any down.

After luxuriating in the surprise she tried shoving herself off, scrabbling to pull free. And Surprisingly it bounced her back into the air easy as can be.

“Look Upon me Silkiesome wobblahs and rejoice I’m an Angel!”

Quarti was laughing, sailing across the room from one end to the other spinning and twining through the air in hip slinking dances. Then sinking smoothly into another ‘cloud’ Aleph could almost guess that the stuff must be spreading the impact load and bleeding momentum incredibly.

She turned her attention back to Pylo.

“Uh... as I said this is wonderful. But did you mean for us to stay here? We kind of have to take care of the farming stacks and all our stuff is in the-”

Plyo’s speaking ‘voice’ was almost as ‘violent’ as the sudden hoarse reedy snarling choke that filled the air.

“YES! Stay and rest and sleep safely swaddled little nubile nymphs! Your conveyance in the hold is death and spur and flesh torn open for festering rape! Fluids stripped and sucked and pulled from your mouths and gouged out of you! Please begging for your daughters and fruits do not stay in the terrible metal heap!”

Omega popped her head out of a cloud with a look of concern and seriousness.

“Wait? What is that bit about the Berths? Is there something wrong with them?!”

Pylo threw her limbs out the motion cracking them like whips hitting soap suds.

“Leaking, oozing, dribbling precious oxygen from it like a drooling mink! All the times, leaking and leaking and leaking! Precious stupid supple inner curves twined blind and gagged to the taste? Mouths pried apart and vomiting hemorrhaging birthing blood and and choking idiots! Yes deathly chill and eternal denial! Why think always stealing away into lovely courting across the ship everywhere? Can of metal scrap emptying trash!”

Aleph straightened herself. Which in hindsight did not really do anything as she was slowly sailing across the room.

“If you knew that you should have TOLD us! Where is the leak? How bad is it? Oh no what if it’s a flaw in the design? What if all the other colonists asphyxiated? Pylo how long would it take the Berth to empty with the current lea-”

Pylo said something, but Aleph’s brain scrabbled for the concept. Oh right...

Aleph forgot how their host counted time.

She could feel her brain trying to fold into itself under the weight of the impression of so huge and so small a thing.

But she mustered to hold onto consciousness this time. To try and plow through the massive ‘number’.

Then something seemed to snap into place.

A lesson on notation.

Right scholar’s notation of numerals.

She...

She could feel something loose and frayed snap taught and anchor in her head and finally it flowed around her head and made sense.

“Fif-tah... thord?”

Aleph’s mouth seemed to lag behind and she had to give herself a shake as muscles stopped tingling and sniffle a little at snot oozing from her nose. She was getting a ache down her right side that tingled a bit.

“Fifty-third? Fifty-fourth? To the fifty-third? Uh... what? Wait... HOW long? What even comes in that number?!”

Omega was frowning from her position slowly drifting across the room nearish pylo.

“You were worried about a leak that would take CENTURIES to empty the Berth? That was panicking you enough you wanted to move us over...”

She looked around at what but for the closest inspection might as well be a chamber full of blue sky and pleasingly cool clouds with warm luxurious sunshine.

“I mean... thank you for the concern Pylo... I guess but the journey isn't going to take that long right? I mean that would have taken quite a few rebirths for me and the contract put a time frame on how long we had... And isn't there something screwy with time too? Like when you go really fast I had that slotted in a while ago but um-”

“Relativity! Yes! The Relativity of velocity in relation to the speed of light! It shouldn't take anywhere near centuries to get between the colony and terra at the distance we are going! Well not a century for us anyway... It gets weird.”

Omega nodded.

Pylo was... twiddling her fingers and looking kind of pensive. She was biting her lower lip a little bit.

Aleph blinked.

That was a very specific and incongruous posture for a strange star beast from beyond that she was almost certain was intentional and very clearly meant to convey what she thought it conveyed but that suggested-

“Pylo... How long is this trip going to take? This is really important because even if we could stay alive uninterrupted for that long the hydroponics would run out of trace minerals long before that leak. Not to mention air circulation fans that keep us from suffocating in our sleep would fail from metal fatigue in about ten percent of the time it'd take that leak to be harmful. And about twenty other similar and more obscure things in the in-between timespans.”

Pylo said a number. Well more like two numbers.

Omega blinked a few times before her face got angrier and angrier “Seventy years?! I thought this ship was fast!”

Aleph however spoke up quickly.

“Well it will only look like... uh... About twenty-five years to us... Wait! That can’t be right! We are only going ten light-years!”

Pylo did that lip biting twiddle fingers thing harder.

Then she uttered what was possibly the most horrifying thing the creature had ever said. It was delivered with something so dry and almost painful it gave Aleph flashbacks to when it had tried to ‘correct’ it’s accent.

“Contract did not specify direct shipping.”