Zenith settled in to enjoy the refreshments.

All of the refreshments.

Every single one the Catharsisium would provide.

Opportunities like this were the kind you just had to simply seize. It might never happen again that Zenith would have the cordial facilities the Catharsisium represented to satisfy his curiosity.

To taste, see and know things that his own senses and body could never hope to experience.

To be inspired by the ecological tapestry of direct experience which his very mind could not properly contain or conform too.

He was intent on trying as many of these beautiful and up until now hidden secrets of life as he was able.

The nuanced and unique varieties of packaged genetics each of the present Siren regulars preferred were for this perfect cascade of moments revealed to him. (On the level of the raw sequence he could taste them on his own of course, but decrypting their true meaning was another matter.)

The barely stabilized volatiles which could be converted almost directly into the higher yields of Dragoon Munitions, known not just as he would have digested and broken them down but as the patrons of the establishment felt them. (Not that his own digestion of them, tiny amounts at great dilution, wasn't quite pleasant in its own way.)

Thousands of variations on delivery and encapsulations of glucose. Known as he did but also as each of their tailored recipients would. (Good presentation; tagging them in his own internal code and bypassing the indirection layer with a tailored psychoactive was entirely a flourish given the access they were already interfacing in, but an appreciated one.)

Even freshly mixed hemoglobin oxygenated and nutrient mixtures for serviles! When had a servile even BEEN to the Catharsisium?! And how sorely he had underestimated the deep warm satisfaction they felt when they cycled into new blood! (Thinking about it later, of course many more specialized organisms used the widespread Servile standards. He attributed not realizing that at the time to being outrageously inebriated.)

Every single libation was nuanced and specific, A craft of utmost skill and subtle nature.

Echoing in a reflection of his own ability to know it and the way it was intended.

Several even came with mystery tags or redacted species annotations, he was feeling such delights as beings he did not even know of!

Forbidden liquors and banished snacks.

Lashing corrosive feasts and intricately encoded diseases invigorating his immune system and making him feel alive with inflammation.

Rare forms of flesh cut from the rarest members (figuratively and literally) of the Menagerie. Such flavors and decadence only ever served here in the Estate to choice-members of the clan and guests!

Materials that were poison to his own metabolism without modification to gentle and soften them from harming him.

Others were sampled carefully, at a step removed from his actual digestive system but fully appreciated, savored and contemplated in both his own sensoria and the varied and numerous alternatives he could entertain.

Things which were vital components and compounds in his own tissues to the point his sampling could be viewed as quite narrow steps away from the old familiar cannibalism of his siblings.

Not all could even be touched stafely by his own body and had to be handled in careful isolation vials. Their flavors were enjoyed at a distance but still appreciated.

Some he could only afford to brush a deep sensing over incredibly briefly before they had to be whisked away.

Lest their natures corrode him even tangentially.

His attempts to try and strain the generosity of Courtesan (as impossible as that notion was) were stymied with magnificent absurdity.

And this greatly amused him.

The Catharsisium Staff of course were absolutely grand hosts!

They kept the streaming parade of new refreshments, samples and flavors rolling by for him to appreciate alongside the performance without him even needing to ask.

Of course he surreptitiously did ask! But he did so in the gentle soft understory of one servicer to another. With all the special little tells and exasperated appreciations.

He was, after all, a cook by trade.

This was not merely decadence but research and consideration for his future position.

It was of course ALSO indulgence, but a useful one. As most pleasures turned out to be. He contemplated the paradox that some species invented over such things, like the one whose metasensoria he was currently consuming, giving him such thoughts. To split indulgence and functionality so? Such strange minds the reef did sprout.

And sumptuously interweaving with his indulgence was of course the central performance itself.

He tasted that too along with all the other entertainment.

He enjoyed it, but he thought his other crew members took it a bit too severely.

Navigator was most consternated and burnt out its poor internals trying to verify what security could be gained regarding the character and mind of their prospective member.

Zenith supposed that such concern was a useful trait to have among crew. But he had never really understood it.

Competition, strain, effort. These were easy enough things to conceptualize. He had fought his siblings since the inception of Tunie’s egg.

Spilt and drank the blood of his brothers, laid ambush and traps upon them and also betrayed and consumed allies alike among his kin.

They also cooperated too of course, more and more as the nature of the growth changed and demanded greater honing and coordination.

More stable learning.

Him and all his brothers were not feral, they ate one another only when called for. They grew and learned together as needed.

Diverse, unique and bound together in common lineage. Hatched in choking multitudes all as one, nearly every member of their kind that would ever exist bursting to life together.

So he was no stranger to the demands of action. Certain mindsets and risks worth taking.

He understood that. The place and time for recognizing and catching the harsh reality that a sibling would not measure up. He had been the judge and the defendant as all of their numbers dwindled.

Fighting for their very lives. In secret and open. In betrayal and alliance. In duel and sacrifice.

He understood expending oneself for the sake of a goal.

But to be concerned about outcomes like this? To be concerned about anything like this?

It was not something he could see any point for. Comprehensive cognitive acceleration and high grades of computational burns had their place in a crisis. He had lived so many of those.

But the future seemed such an odd thing to dedicate such effort too. Then again he was last of his kind and had already achieved the aspirations of all his species.

All his brothers had lived and died for him.

Had become him.

He was Zenith.

And this was a party and a performance.

And that meant it was a place for refreshments.

He had been cut down by his brothers and for his failures was drained and became them.

Much like he was draining this fascinating slurry of carbo-silicates and potential vitalloy.

He too had cut down the failures among his kin and took into himself their own thoughts and the distinctiveness of each.

He had also been drunk quite often as well although what really was the distinction among brothers between to eat and be eaten?

Really, more often than either of those, you couldn't tell which was which; they had reached consensus cherry picking each mote from one or the other in a merger of near equal halves.

But eat, eaten, or both at once, It had all been joining and merging and twining together into the braid that was him.

Zenith.

He rolled a particularly interesting pink berry between his maxilla gauging if he wanted to eat it properly for the calories or appreciate it for its light refractive and focusing flavor potential.

Well okay, Not all of his brothers had ended in him.

The work and the winnowing had been harsh sometimes. There were some that were rendered naught but ash under the trails.

Unrecoverable for the blood of their minds.

But besides those unfortunate failures and lost lessons it did all end up in him in some form or another, either as observations of their ultimate ends or direct memories distilled, filtered and culled to just the essentials.

His final realization.

His Zenith.

So yes, as he was shucking this particularly interesting example of hybridized tissues to get at the delectable nerve fibres within he could reflect in abstract some of what the Navigator’s point might be.

He understood competition and strain and the need to push one self beyond the apparent limits. And also all the numerous times this did not work out as well as he thought it would.

But here and now and with this? What possible point was there to be so concerned?

They were all of them in their own unique ways alike to him. Assured and completed for this moment.

Tunie was a good ship.

Navigator was paranoid and mind blindingly Observant.

The Twins were bristling, Ever Vigilant and Supremely Dangerous.

Iliac was all sorts of comforting and totally smitten with Pylo although in more of a guardianship role then the usual Siren kind.

And he was Zenith.

He’d look after all their health and hearth and hearts.

It was a good crew, they would do quite well with one another and get along fine.

Which was why he was not trying to contort himself into all kinds of stupendously ill-fitting cognitive knots and instead utterly enjoying this opportunity to sample every single refreshment the Catharsisium and her lovely staff could be coaxed to bring to him.

It was always important for a cook to broaden his palette of flavors and sample new poison and tincture.

It was also good for a surgeon-butcher to be fresh and bright and sharp to every kind of ecological interaction he could consider and every potential new source of flesh to inspire him.

He mused among his brother-memories how some of the compounds and samplers would burn or writhe or vitrify tunie’s tissues, motiles or even the mind of her eyes.

How it would interact with the deep roots of her history that had been laid alongside his family’s maturation and narrowing down to him.

Zenith had been there as his teeming brotherhood since she was quickened. Him and his sea of kin Hatched there when she was still a sprawling weed of sessile infrastructure sucking hard and fast on the reserves provided by the port and Courtesan wealth.

Back then they had as often worked together as they had devoured one another.

The order and the structure to come was yet to be realized, in the primordial weft of her Polytyphium stage.

The wild churn when Symbiote, Parasite and Divimorphon blended and mingled, predated and nourished.

When his brothers had sometimes even birthed clonal siblings, so was the winnowing so harsh and the need for their multitudes so great in those times. Borne self-children of one another.

Zenith turned his attention to another delightful sampler platter. A cloud of delectable cuts pruned from the staff themselves!

(A full third of them were even digestible!)

“Oh yes! Please keep more coming! The last hundred or so were amazing! Especially the little ones from the larkel shade gardens! Do you have any that rhyme with those?”

The relish of actually plucking them to be eaten and known not just by his own sight and extrapolation but the threshing of his very own ingestion and enzymes was pleasant.

(Satisfying even if not strictly better in sensitivity to the nature of the vittles. An added subtle flavor of empiricism.)

The Courtesan waif of a Siren that had bloomed this particular selection emitted laughter and hurried off to fetch more samplers and spirits for him. He turned his attention up and above himself.

To Catharsisium herself as she enclosed all around them.

“You're sure you don’t want to try showing off a bit harder than this? I can taste in the cleaners how much you like to play with nastier stuff than this my dear.”

Which brought a soft radiant flicker to the venue and a prodding direct message of laughter and admonishment.

Catharsisium was quite a great deal older than Zenith and all his now dead and eaten brothers.

Wilier and wiser then he had tried much the same taunts before. But he saw in the way she pulsed and flickered that she appreciated the attention all the same.

He listened to the conspiratorial bawdry tales of all the ones that had thought themselves raunchier than her.

Matriarch’s milk!, what sort of idiot could imagine a dive like The Catharsisium buried in the Courtesan Estate itself would be some prude.

Ah the conversation was almost better than the flutes of mind corroding vapors he was currently sloshing around his feeder.

He offered a few recipes he’d been planning on serving after Pylo settled in.

Got a couple of suggestions of some of her favorites that Catharsisium knew she liked but never asked for directly, only snatched secretly when they were available.

Another thirty fresh and hilariously caustic samples later and he was still hardly even dipping into the thinnest scummy film of the venue’s potential refreshments.

But that was about the end of his chance to put the full attention needed on the more esoteric ones.

Pylo was finishing her show and it was time to shift from audience to participant in the conversation.

The Twin that preferred spicier food shot him a glance with a hint of judgemental exasperation.

“Did you even SEE any of the show?”

Zenith offered his jovial mood by gesturing for a few of his discoveries that would help the Dragoon loosen up without rendering her catatonic in experiential overload.

“Between my various taste tests? A few times. Oh you’ve got to try this! It’s Green!”