Von Squidgie marveled over the craftwork of the People.

Each table was a mastery of shaping the material. Based on the spectra it was almost certainly the core superstructure of some kind of carbon based megafauna.

The reflexive autonomous actions arrested motion. Gripped and twisted, leg compressed by joint and posture tweaks. Absorbing the energy with minimal engaging of the spring forces and a bleeding of the overall momentum load into a-

Well to be precise it was nothing like the Terran crafts known as table.

But the purpose was memetically the same, a re-emergent root of a concept rather than an inherited lineage.

Even though it was neither flat, nor legged, nor any of the other terran affordance features indicative of tableness. This structure was most certainly a grand and proper feasting table.

It had several of the mechanisms to communicate this if you looked at it as a member of The People.

And most importantly it provided the place for eating-with-peers quality that she was pretty sure the Terrans would pick up on.

Although she had to admit the concept was a bit foreign for her.

Von Squidgie was only an infant and not even properly aware before Tunie was underway.

Adjusting grip to improve Inertial predictive models, reorient to face Miss Aleph. Emoting that way she liked, the smile right? Yes the smile-

And she had little to no records of anything much like a table as far as her own people and family from when they had lived in Petalweft Salts.

The proper social place of a Cleric was to either bolt down whatever sustenance was available while doing some other job and then to ‘ascend’ (in the Aorian word’s meaning) to such a station that you didn't even digest your own food as soon as possible.

Bereft of that she would have struggled to recognize how this could be anything like a Terran Table.

However, Ship Mistress Pylo had fortunately never encountered one of the Stalwarts before. And as such she had collected several quite legible records that Squidgie could compare cultural significance too related to them.

And they at least had something like feasting tables.

Stalwarts actually created quite intricate fluid pumping apparatus so that guests and family could all rest in the rich flow of thick sulfides and heavy metal complexes that would have simultaneously crushed, seared and poisoned Squidgie were she to even attempt to attend such a meal let alone partake.

Again this was nothing like a Terran table, but there were further concepts in various crew maintenance digests Squidgie had managed to translate to further expound on the concept.

And thus did she come to the conclusion that a Stalwart Feasting Gyre and this fleeting of sweeping curves that was yet unnamed by their hosts all more or less served the same cultural role as a Terran Table.

So Squidgie was confident that this was indeed a Table.

Another success with the social emoting! Shifting the feedback loop through memorization for-

If one that was cylindrical, curved, and branching into simultaneously places for comfortable anchoring as well as points for skewering, hooking or further attaching food items and edibles.

All of it carved and shaped from well selected bone or wood of some highly portion of a living thing’s anatomy.

Squidgie was, despite gazing in deep consideration at the spectra and experimentally running her fingers over it for acoustic analysis entirely unsure which kingdom precisely.

There were certainly fibrous elements to the matrix that put Squidgie in line to think it was probably a variant of a Mycelium?

But then there was far more calcium crystallization occurring for that to be certain.

The pattern of high linearity in the grain was very much in line with one of the many kinds of woods that they had already passed on the way here.

But the iron content was far too low for what Squidgie understood was standard in most plants as recorded by the Ministries of Agriculture at Redweed.

It would probably be the work of a moment to answer the curiosity by passing a question to the Custodian ▙◀. But puzzling over it with one’s own knowledge to try and tease the problem apart was honestly more satisfying.

Hmmm there had been a sealant applied to the surface to fill in the pores and prevent rot when soaked in an atmosphere like it currently was.

A good one too!

In the memorization Aleph turned and smiled, the Emoting was subtly tweaked, what would Squidgie do if she frowned. Well she would-

Oxygen proofing like this was not common outside of industrial manufacture or corrosive bearing agricultural or life support plumbing according to the records from her ancestor’s accounting ledgers. At least, that was true for the places she had read about (with the exception of terra).

Then again given such an exception oxygen proofing being common was not strictly speaking impossible, but it seemed unlikely.

Surely Redweed or Pylo’s shipcare manuals would have had more documentation if high oxygen atmospheres were especially common in the Reef.

Then again Tunie had already visited two ports now with a propensity for having such a supposedly rare condition.

Was it perhaps a Specialty of the Trade ship and her crew so far?

Squidgie would have to make an effort to try and find out without coming afoul of one of Ship Mistress Pyo’s many sensitivities to the topic.

▙◀ was here now, performing their own analysis of the lacquer for the table. Squidgie fired up the long light transmission protocol and fired off the analysis she had come to so far.

It would be lacklustre and not particularly deep but it might be worth some praise and clout with the other being.

Squidgie noticed that Aleph was smacking her lips in the air before speaking. This was something important, something that Squidgie could contribute too, the memorization of the facial emotive cycle was pushed to full operation instead of memory strengthening.

“I was not really expecting it to smell like a festival at home... but it really does, the meat and char and even some of the sauces... Like a festival after a heavy storm had rolled through.”

“Indeed Ma’am! Truely the feast smells delicious! I am looking forward to the full preparations!”

Custodian ▙◀ bobs their own emotive screen and runs through the exchanges of the many internal priorities that drove the statements they presented.

“Indeed! A wonderful Bouquet! The Skill of this polity is one to be treasured, I expect there are a great many highly lucrative speciality crafts and goods being exchanged here for Pylo.”

Squidgie tried to keep themselve engaged in the conversation entirely. That was how terrans did things after all.

Pushing as much of herself as she could to be direct attention instead of settling back into her old ways. Only using a portion of herself at any given time while the rest were aggressively memorizing and approximating potentials.

She needed to be attentive to catch everything the Terrans did.

She would let the events of the day spool back more coherently later.

It was only Polite but it made for a much more intense heat exchange with her various circulatory systems.

Von Squidgie would not let Miss Aleph down though!

Miss Omega’s words were thus raw and properly immediate in Squidgy’s attention instead of being spooled into a different remembrance.

Tangled properly into the stream of all the current events.

“Wait... Elzie can smell?! How?!”

Despite having spent here entire life with these three Terrans they still managed to surprise Squidgie sometimes.

That was actually a bit distressing. She was supposed to help be a bridge between them and the rest of the slowly congealing crew!

She apologized profusely that she could not take up the cost of answering the terrans properly in this. She was just not ready, not prepared to respond in a reasonable back and forth for the pace of this conversation.

If she had been ready she could have smoothly played her-

Oh nevermind the reflexive posture was already moving appropriately!

So Convenient!

With the gross physical actions taken care of and only the emotive load and the verbal aspects there was plenty of attention to go around and generate.

Sadly it meant that Squidgie was not quite able to forestall spinning up a few archive retrieval but at least they did not need to be fully processed as Squidgie was able to take up the rest of the slack.

Squidgie accepted a significantly minimized tallying of her obtained dept to the Custodian.

Personally promising herself she would dig even heavier into the Terran Literature to try and catch more of these bizarre associations of theirs.

“Ah! Almost every organism in the Reef has need for some kind of Chemosensory apparatus Miss Omega!”

Oh there was a status and humility opportunity there!

“I have had to actually add several layers to my own original ability to even match a terran’s extremely broad capacity of chemo-sensoria! But Yes Custodian ▙◀ has a few more orders of magnitude breadth and depth compared to even Quarti’s chemosense.”

Her finger was doing something odd, what was? Oh it was for another thoughtful realization cue! Right which obvious fact needed to be-

“Of course none of us or our hosts have any comparison to the full chemosensory abilities of Ship Mistress Pylo. Even if we discount the range at which she can apprehend chemical structure the quality and resolution available to a Siren is to such a magnitude it would almost certainly seize anyone else in Timesink!”

Aleph chimed in.

“Everyone keeps mentioning that, Elsie hasn’t actually gotten into explaining exactly what that is? It’s some kind of computational limit?”

Oh.

Oh dear.

Her body was already moving into the shocked posture and her emotive screen was easily able to catch up without entering into the Terran perceptual range.

By the time she had finished flowing the screen into an appropriate expression Squidgie was ready to actually say what her expression had apparently needed to mark as she realized it herself.

It was a huge relief there was so much fluid atmosphere to cycle for coolant purposes.

This conversation was turning out to be one of the really intensive ones.

Also the kinetic systems in play that Elsie had gifted her the source for were truly as the Terrans said ‘top notch’!

“Oh well that will be quite an explanation, perhaps after the food arrives?”

That would probably give Squidgie enough time to actually plan out how that conversation was going to go, run a deep memorization on a digest from Custodian ▙◀ and possibly even request some conceptual transform work from Ship Mistress Pylo.

Squidgie was thankful it was a ritualistic feeding event.

That would give her enough time to up her coolant for higher temperature running.

It was so much work to keep up with the Terrans and their insatiable Curiosity and its symmetrical twin of Ignorance!

Von Squidgie though was confident that she would be able to satisfy that hunger.