The Cast (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
random_xtras) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
random_nanorimo_stuff2012-11-27 09:29 pm
random_xtras) wrote in random_nanorimo_stuff2012-11-27 09:29 pm
Entry tags:
Other Trails Chapter 10
"Hey, the sky's all red." Shade paused with her hands deep in an ant hill to stare at the violent blasts of scarlet and magenta that were throwing the far distant mountains into relief.
"Yeah. That happens when the sun goes down." Jenny didn't look up from where she was wiping dirt and furious insects from a large, leafy bulb.
"Always?" Shade looked down at her own cluster of leaves, and then finished digging up the fragrant hill onion and sniffed at it with tentative interest before shaking it violently to clear ants away.
"Yeah! Leek spin!" Jenny laughed and waved her own onion around, singing a snatch of a happy nonsense song as she did.
"Is that a custom of your people?" Shade watched the smaller girl with surprise and wonder, then studied the bulb in her hand.
"No." Jenny laughed. "It's a convertor thing. I got it from the Warlady's little pink mechadroid."
"But aren't most convertors too big to wave these?" Shade waved hers by way of emphasis.
"Huh. Okay, maybe it's a Pink thing." Jenny purrled and grinned, then put her onion into the red bucket that they'd brought along to hold their foraging finds.
Shade found herself unable to resist grinning back at the vivacious unicorn girl. Then she looked around and got up from kneeling so that she could move to the next ant hill and its clumps of strap-like leaves.
"Hey, there are still three more here." Jenny looked at Shade quizzically, gesturing to the plants in front of her.
"Yeah, but you never take all the plants in one spot, or there won't be any for next time," said Shade. "You have to give them time to make more plants, too."
"Oh." Jenny frowned at the three onions in the hill she was kneeling by thoughtfully, then gracefully rose to her feet without using her hands. "Yeah, that makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Of course it does." Shade flicked an ant off her belly, then adjusted her elastic top and looked back at Jenny. "Your skirt's different than the ones the people cat women wear."
"Yeah." Jenny bent over to smell a lovely orange lily that poked its freckled face out of the soft spring grass. "I move differently than them, and my metabolism's not as fast, so I need different coverage. But I need to be able to move freely too, and you can't do that in a solid skirt, so I use the strip-skirts. You don't wear the shirt Mom made for you anymore?"
"It's too pretty to mess up." Shade shrugged her lower shoulders, then bent her knees to couch by the next big heap of ant tilled dirt. "And this top isn't as warm. It's more comfortable down here in the sun."
"You mean out here in the sun?" Jenny knelt gracefully and poked at some interesting looking large brown mushrooms.
"No. Down. We're not in space," explained Shade, then grumbled and shook ants off her mane. "Don't even try anything sneaky, you bugs. I'm watching you."
Jenny perked her ears and laughed, her pixie face bright with amusement and happiness. Then she stopped and studied an ant that was scrambling around on one of her three fingered hands. "What do you think of people eating things that aren't plants?"
"Some people need to," said Shade, momentarily distracted by comparing her fine, sleek fur to Jenny's very short, dense, and plush covering. "It makes me want to run, but as long as it's not other people they're eating I can live with it."
"Alright. We know the ants aren't people." Jenny got a little glass jar from the bucket and shook the ant into it, then set to gathering more, her big orange eyes creased with concentration. "One of the guys back at the med base likes bugs and spicy things, and these bugs smell spicy."
"A person who eats bugs?" Shade was distracted from her comparisons between her own features and Jenny's.
"Yup." Jenny paused and frowned as she kept getting more dirt than ants for her hunting efforts. "Boy, you can really tell my people have never had to catch their dinners except maybe when friends were playing keep away with them."
"Do you know this plant?" Shade pointed to a large orange, fluffy flower.
Jenny glanced that way. "Dandelion. They taste pretty good."
"So it's alright to harvest them." Shade broke the flower stalk and watched the white sap come out, then tried poking it at the ant hill in front of her. "It works! They come to bite it, and..." She lifted the stem and tapped the ants into the jar. "Close it quick, they're walking out!"
Jenny hurried to do so, her big eyes wide, then got herself her own dandelion stalk and started catching ants. Between them the two girls soon had the little jar full.
"What does the guy who eats bugs look like?" asked Shade as she turned her attention to sniffing at the brown mushrooms and then picking them and putting them into the bucket.
"Kind of stringy." Jenny chuckled. "It's not really a guy, and it'll tell you so. It's our second doctor, a hydraoid who calls itself Lou. It's a stem with a lot of long, thin tentacles on top."
"I thought it was rude to call someone 'it'?" Shade got up and moved a little distance away to investigate another scent, picking dandelion leaves and digging up a couple more hill onions as she went.
"Lou's people don't have any gender. If they want babies they just apply for a license and then grow one like this onion's doing." Jenny pointed to one of the bulbs that had a small offshoot attached to it.
Shade paused in poking something rubbery that was buried just below the surface of the ground to stare at Jenny. "So they don't need to wear clothes."
The unicorn girl paused with her mouth open, her mind derailed by the unexpected turn that Shade had just put into the conversation.
Then she laughed and shook her head. "No, but Lou says they like to look pretty, so they decorate a lot with jewelry and flowing stuff. Lou's job means it wears a medical uniform."
"Huh." Shade smiled slightly with wonder at the thought of someone who was so utterly different from everything she knew. "What's it like?"
"It talks worse than two teenage girls on a gossip marathon." Jenny purrled and grinned. "But most of what it's got to say is interesting, even though I think I only understand a little more than a quarter of it. I'm a border space pilot, so I don't have a lot of use for science and medical journals."
"Ahhh. I know what that's like." Shade remembered the one time aboard the Nothing Yet that she'd actually gotten to sit in the mess with the ship's engineer and spent a pleasant hour being utterly lost as Heather talked.
"Yeah?" Jenny looked up from sampling a dandelion leaf to grin at her
"Everything that the engineer on the freighter Mist and I shipped out on said was interesting. But I had no idea what any of it was."
That made Jenny laugh. "Oh. Engineers. Don't worry. I think the only people that understand them are other engineers."
"Well, she was talking about the ship's engine," said Shade as she paused in her search on the computer pad that they'd brought along to watch with wonder as a massive moon peeked over the opposite edge of the world to the one that the sun had just slipped behind. "...And something called 'Crosswires'."
"'Crosswires'?" Jenny perked. "She watches that?"
Shade nodded uncertainly, eyes still on the moon. "That's what she said. She had this thing that slipped in front of her eye that I think had something to do with it."
"Oh wow. A tele-monocle. Those are usually toys for Taloran toffs. I wonder where she got it? What are you digging up?" Jenny came over and peered at Shade's find in the light of the moon.
"Well, she's Taloran. But I don't know if she's a toff. She lives on the ship, and not in a fancy space station. And the ship belongs to Captain Jones and his sister." Shade tore her attention from the colossal rock in the sky to look back at the ground in front of her. "It looks and smells like one of those truffle things."
"What?" Jenny grabbed the computer pad and read the entry, then squealed. "It is. You rusting found a giant truffle!" Then she peered forward into the darkness. "The ground tree must be dormant. I don't see any leaves on the ground. Do you?"
Shade shook her head as she resumed digging. "No. There aren't any big leaves paving the ground. Just grass and ant hills and dandelions."
"Too bad. I hear the tea that happens when water pools in them tastes really good." Jenny poked at the ground and then grabbed a small rubber digging poke from the bucket and started to help unearthing the big fungal sphere.
"Good to you, maybe," said Shade good-naturedly. "The field guide says it's sweet."
"You don't like sweet things?"
"Not really sweet things. I like nuts and flower nectar. Oh, and the honey from the bees from where Mist and I were born." Shade shrugged as she continued digging. "It seems strange to think that there's a whole tree down in the ground underneath here."
"Why? I've heard of trees growing crazier places than this." Jenny gently poked the ground again with her fingers, and then went back to work with the poke. "Have you ever heard of Tondoorim?"
"No." Shade glanced sideways at the rolling depth of the syllables in the untranslated word. "What is it?"
"They're trees on one of the young worlds. Huge things. Massive. They make the jungle over on the other continent here look like some toff's bonsai forest. One upper leaf could carpet half the mess hall at base."
"Upper leaf?" Shade stripped away sod from over the truffle and set it aside carefully, then paused to throw a rock at a skulking canid that had been trying to sneak up on her and Jenny, snorting softly as it yelped and fled.
"Yeah. They grow in pretty deep water, and roots need to breath." Jenny watched the dog-thing run off, then tried to emulate what Shade was doing only to find that though she was fit and strong that she didn't have the same upper body strength as the larger girl. "Rust. Anyway, do you know what lily pads are?"
"Yes. Round purple leaves with a little rim that float in the quiet eddies and get sat on by frogs."
"Really? I want to see pictures of your world some day. But Tondoorim have got leaves that come up from their roots that look sort of like really huge, really thin lily pads. They're called air leaves."
"How huge?" asked Shade, trying to envision them as she dug around the truffle.
"Even bigger around than the upper leaves, and they're so thin that you can see through them into the water below. Since the sunlight doesn't reflect off them like it does from the water they're like windows to what's going on down there, and you can see the fish and things." Jenny paused in her industrious though unskilled digging to push aside the small hill of dirt she'd made.
"Ohhh. How often have you been to that world?"
"Heh. Never." The unicorn girl wrinkled her muzzle humorously. "I never leave the Warlady's space unless she or some of the other Army's with me, and that world hasn't got anything to offer Army. I just watched a feed about it once."
"Hmm. I wonder if we should go after we leave here." Shade moved to one side and continued digging, her hands tireless as they pulled aside turf and then started moving dirt. "Do you know if there are any jobs they might want a shuttle for?"
"Nah, they're archaists and raise or make all they need. But I hear that if you buy some of their beer from them and then go to the mining colony out by Stargone you can make an insane profit," said Jenny. "And while you're at it you could ask Dr. Syrya to prepare some bones for you to sell. The grumposaurs out there probably don't get a lot of real JD cooking, and everyone says grumposaurs are crazy about it."
"But you don't know it for a fact?" Shade grunted softly as she thrust her hands deeper into the dirt and then popped the truffle out of the hole.
"Eeep!" Jenny whistled soft alarm, then laughed. "Huh? No. The Warlady and grumposaurs don't get along, but they're so common that nearly everyone knows what they like to eat. Besides, the things that that mining colony likes to buy is proven intel."
Shade retrieved the truffle and set it down by the bucket, then dusted her hands and picked up the computer pad to call up a file. "Hmm." She frowned with confusion and called up another. "Where is Stargone? It's not on my maps."
"Maps of the galaxy, right?" Jenny laughed softly as she pushed dirt back into the truffle hole. "Stargone's officially out in the space between galaxies."
Shade stared at her with surprise. "Isn't that dangerous? What about the Infection?"
"They won't get near that sector. The asteroid belt's the home of a star dragon family, and they put out some sort of vibes that the gugbugs can't stand. It's why the Infection's so frantic to get through over on the Warlady's side of things, after her space it's too far for them to go to get into the galaxy." Jenny got up and used a trowel to add the hill of a very startled colony of ants to the truffle hole.
"Ohhh." Shade turned her attention back to the pad, then frowned and poked it accusingly. "This says star dragons are a myth."
"Try 'Meredronian'," advised Jenny. "That's what they call themselves."
"Alright..." Shade tapped at the screen, and then scanned over what she'd found, her eyes widening as her ears twitched with surprise and wonder. "They don't need to breath? And the baby will take over a hundred standard years just to hatch from the egg?" She looked up.
"What? Really?" Jenny dropped the trowel and came over to look at the pad herself and open that lit feed. "Whoa, that wasn't up the last time I looked. The not breathing part was, but not this. Wow..."
"How can they not breath?" wondered Shade. "Even plants and things that live in the water breath."
"Some kind of chemical reaction inside them," said Jenny absently, squinting and turning down the glow of the pad as planet rise restored daylight to the landscape. "It's got something to do with how even though they're animal type carbon-based organics they can live off sunlight just by having it shine on their skins, and they eat the same kind of minerals that convertors like. It makes sense though. They don't live where there's air or anything to eat."
"They hardly ever have babies." Shade snorted softly as she read that, also absently squinting as she read. "So this is an amazing event for them too. Wait, it says they seldom have non-drone babies. What does that mean?"
"The drones are little bipeds only ten foot tall," said Jenny, pointing to a spot lower on the page. "They're tailless, and only live a couple hundred years. Meredronian mothers have them to help care for the main baby, to help interact with smaller races during the rare times that they encounter them, or just for company. So they're kind of like Owned people."
"Here's a picture." Shade poked it for magnification.
"Awww! He looks something like a JD! Cuuute!" Jenny grinned at the image of the beautiful shiny copper coloured person with gentle golden eyes.
"You're smaller than them." Shade recalled what the unicorn girl had said earlier and chuckled. "What do you mean, 'little bipeds'?"
"Thrrpt!" said Jenny cheerfully. "I'm used to bipeds like the Warlady and the rest of the Army, alright? Compared to them these guys are tiny!"
Shade laughed, then pressed the button on the band that circled her upper arm. "What is it, Starfighter?"
//Sebastian's just wondering how Jenny's doing,// came the prompt reply of the blue, white, and silver convertor.
"You mean you're worrying about me being out of your sight, Mom." Shade laughed more.
//Hey! I told you, I'm not a mom! I'm a dude!//
"Maybe you're a dude like Norton!" called Jenny, her big eyes dancing as she purrled.
//No! I am NOT a dude like Norton! And you know it, fuzzball!//
Jenny laughed so hard that she could barely razz in reply, then managed to check the mirth long enough to call back, "But you carry your babies in your belly pouch!"
//Arrrgghh!//
Shade stood and stamped as she laughed, hearing Sebastian laughing in the background behind Starfighter's sounds of frustration and knowing that the convertor man was probably making his avatar sign so that Mist was able to follow the conversation too.
//Go ahead and laugh, Shade! Where would you two be without me?//
"Alpha Centari?" She giggled. "Are you guys finding anything good to eat?"
//Eh. Sebastian seems to think so. Mist finally just stopped putting things in the bucket and started feeding it all to him.//
"How much is he eating?" Shade's expression changed to surprise.
"Hey, big guys like him need a lot of energy!" called Jenny, then squealed soft surprise as Shade absently hiked her up onto her back so that the unicorn girl could be closer to the radio.
//Big guy? This runt?//
"He's a giant among unicorns." Jenny grinned, her eyes bright. "And a hunky one."
//Ugh, you have a one track mind.//
"Yup!" she agreed happily. "Fuzzy purple muscles. EEEEEEE!"
Shade laughed as Jenny hugged herself. "Don't worry, Starfighter, Mist and I think you're pretty too."
//Bleahhhhhh.// The funny noise from the radio made the two girls laugh even harder.
//Jenny?// called Sebastian. //Jenny happy?//
"Awww." She stopped laughing. "Yeah, Sebastian. I'm happy."
//Jenny happy. I'm happy,// came the simply succinct answer. //We have guava for Jenny.//
The unicorn girl's mouth fell open, and then her big eyes filled with pale purplish tears as she put a hand to her mouth.
"Jenny? Is something wrong?" Shade lifted her arm and looked under it at her friend.
"He's making connections on his own, without prompting," whispered Jenny.
//Jenny?// There was the sound of a finger tapping a radio as Starfighter came back on the line. //Are you still there? The connection's still live...//
"She's just too happy about what Sebastian said to be able to talk right now," said Shade, reaching back to patpat the unicorn girl.
Starfighter laughed. //Now he's sticking his chest out again. Mist wants to know how many of these fruits you want, Shade. They're about as big as a knuckle.//
"Oh six should be enough," said Shade. "Have you found hill onions?"
//No, the turf's too tough over here for that kind of ants. We've got ground tree tea, though.//
"Jenny wanted that! Our ground tree's sleeping, but it had a truffle up near the surface where we could get it."
//Heh. Mist says she'd like six onions. She's picking ground tree leaves now and saying something about making a salad.//
//Salad!// agreed Sebastian, sounding pleased to have caught the familiar word.
"He loves salad," said Jenny. "His favourite kind involves smallow fluff."
"You guys and your fixation on sweet things." Shade shook her head.
"Why do you think we're so cute?" Jenny laughed.
//You know, for fuzzballs,// added Starfighter.
"Oh shut up." The purple girl laughed harder. "What a jerk."
//Fuzzball!//
"Jerk!"
//Fuzzball!//
"Jerk!"
//Jerk!//
//Hey, Seb, leave the trash talk to me.//
"What is it with you and teaching people rude things?" Shade snorted, then laughed more herself. "Eeesh." Then she looked into the bucket and quickly counted bulbs. "Alright, we've got enough hill onions and dandelions to feed me, Mist, and any shifters who want some. Not to mention this truffle. So we're coming back."
//Alright, we'll be back as soon as we have the bucket full of leaves.//
"You almost sound like you're helping," teased Jenny.
//What? I am!//
"He is." Shade nodded.
"Oh." Jenny sat back a bit, but then leaned toward the radio again. "Bye, Sebastian! I'll see you soon!"
//I'll see you soon, Jenny!// came the bright and happy response.
//Hey, quit waving that handful of grass around. Don't play with your food.//
Shade laughed so hard that Jenny wound up hanging around her waist. "I'll talk to you later, Mom."
//STOP calling me that!// The connection clicked.
"Let me down." Jenny meeped and wriggled, her tasseled tail curling slightly with the force of her effort to climb back up.
Shade gently grabbed her by one arm and set her on the ground. "Sorry."
"It's alright." Jenny dusted herself off, then reached back and straightened her skirt so that it covered her tail again. "I would've been laughing too. What is that guy, anyway? Your bodyguard?"
"Ffft! No." Shade grabbed the bucket, then paused to snag one last onion from the ant hill that Jenny had put most of into the truffle hole. "He's just learning how to cope with Archivist protective programming. He says my sister and I own him, but I don't know about that."
"What don't you know about it?" Jenny lifted the truffle and tucked it under one arm, then paused to tip her head back and look up at the taller girl. "You Own somebody or you don't."
"You can't own other people." Shade frowned and turned back toward the base, her strides slow so that Jenny could keep up.
"Sure you can, if they say you can," retorted Jenny, her ears going back slightly with annoyance. "The Warlady Owns me and Mom, and we're glad. Nobody else can mess with us and we've always got a place, food, and something to eat."
"That's almost what Starfighter said yesterday evening when we first brought Joel back." Shade frowned. "But we're a crew. We all get a cut of our profits. Starfighter just wants his in fuel."
"Sounds like he really wants to Belong. Just let him," advised Jenny. "It looks like it's been good for him so far."
"What do you mean?" Shade paused to look down at the unicorn girl, one hand absently gathering a handful of her mane as she did.
"Well, I don't really know the guy," admitted Jenny with a shrug. "But I know his reputation around the station. He's a slacker. A loser who never does anything but drift around and occasionally mooch some mineral mush to supplement whatever he absorbs from the suns or digs out of a comet or asteroid. Now you guys have him working, using an avatar, and interacting with other people."
"Why didn't he just do that on his own?" Shade followed her, still frowning deeply.
"Who knows? Some people just need somebody to tell them what to do."
"Do you?" Shade stamped a hoof and sent the startled wild dog scrambling away again.
"Heh. Nooooo. I tend to give the orders unless there's someone bossier around, like the Warlady, Mom, or you." Jenny picked a ripe dandelion and leek spun it before watching the seeds spin away.
"Me?"
"Yeah. You'll be leading more than a deep space shuttle crew some day." The dandelion stem got thoughtfully munched on. "Probably some little Nation of your own."
"Why would I want to do that?" Shade stood the ant jar back up in the bucket, then frowned down at her.
"I don't know. But you already kind of are." Jenny snerked, then pushed her soft, curly hair out of her eyes and grumbled about getting it cut.
Shade didn't reply as they passed through the gate of the medical base. Her mind was too busy chewing on the new ideas that her smaller friend had just thrown at her.
"Yeah. That happens when the sun goes down." Jenny didn't look up from where she was wiping dirt and furious insects from a large, leafy bulb.
"Always?" Shade looked down at her own cluster of leaves, and then finished digging up the fragrant hill onion and sniffed at it with tentative interest before shaking it violently to clear ants away.
"Yeah! Leek spin!" Jenny laughed and waved her own onion around, singing a snatch of a happy nonsense song as she did.
"Is that a custom of your people?" Shade watched the smaller girl with surprise and wonder, then studied the bulb in her hand.
"No." Jenny laughed. "It's a convertor thing. I got it from the Warlady's little pink mechadroid."
"But aren't most convertors too big to wave these?" Shade waved hers by way of emphasis.
"Huh. Okay, maybe it's a Pink thing." Jenny purrled and grinned, then put her onion into the red bucket that they'd brought along to hold their foraging finds.
Shade found herself unable to resist grinning back at the vivacious unicorn girl. Then she looked around and got up from kneeling so that she could move to the next ant hill and its clumps of strap-like leaves.
"Hey, there are still three more here." Jenny looked at Shade quizzically, gesturing to the plants in front of her.
"Yeah, but you never take all the plants in one spot, or there won't be any for next time," said Shade. "You have to give them time to make more plants, too."
"Oh." Jenny frowned at the three onions in the hill she was kneeling by thoughtfully, then gracefully rose to her feet without using her hands. "Yeah, that makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Of course it does." Shade flicked an ant off her belly, then adjusted her elastic top and looked back at Jenny. "Your skirt's different than the ones the people cat women wear."
"Yeah." Jenny bent over to smell a lovely orange lily that poked its freckled face out of the soft spring grass. "I move differently than them, and my metabolism's not as fast, so I need different coverage. But I need to be able to move freely too, and you can't do that in a solid skirt, so I use the strip-skirts. You don't wear the shirt Mom made for you anymore?"
"It's too pretty to mess up." Shade shrugged her lower shoulders, then bent her knees to couch by the next big heap of ant tilled dirt. "And this top isn't as warm. It's more comfortable down here in the sun."
"You mean out here in the sun?" Jenny knelt gracefully and poked at some interesting looking large brown mushrooms.
"No. Down. We're not in space," explained Shade, then grumbled and shook ants off her mane. "Don't even try anything sneaky, you bugs. I'm watching you."
Jenny perked her ears and laughed, her pixie face bright with amusement and happiness. Then she stopped and studied an ant that was scrambling around on one of her three fingered hands. "What do you think of people eating things that aren't plants?"
"Some people need to," said Shade, momentarily distracted by comparing her fine, sleek fur to Jenny's very short, dense, and plush covering. "It makes me want to run, but as long as it's not other people they're eating I can live with it."
"Alright. We know the ants aren't people." Jenny got a little glass jar from the bucket and shook the ant into it, then set to gathering more, her big orange eyes creased with concentration. "One of the guys back at the med base likes bugs and spicy things, and these bugs smell spicy."
"A person who eats bugs?" Shade was distracted from her comparisons between her own features and Jenny's.
"Yup." Jenny paused and frowned as she kept getting more dirt than ants for her hunting efforts. "Boy, you can really tell my people have never had to catch their dinners except maybe when friends were playing keep away with them."
"Do you know this plant?" Shade pointed to a large orange, fluffy flower.
Jenny glanced that way. "Dandelion. They taste pretty good."
"So it's alright to harvest them." Shade broke the flower stalk and watched the white sap come out, then tried poking it at the ant hill in front of her. "It works! They come to bite it, and..." She lifted the stem and tapped the ants into the jar. "Close it quick, they're walking out!"
Jenny hurried to do so, her big eyes wide, then got herself her own dandelion stalk and started catching ants. Between them the two girls soon had the little jar full.
"What does the guy who eats bugs look like?" asked Shade as she turned her attention to sniffing at the brown mushrooms and then picking them and putting them into the bucket.
"Kind of stringy." Jenny chuckled. "It's not really a guy, and it'll tell you so. It's our second doctor, a hydraoid who calls itself Lou. It's a stem with a lot of long, thin tentacles on top."
"I thought it was rude to call someone 'it'?" Shade got up and moved a little distance away to investigate another scent, picking dandelion leaves and digging up a couple more hill onions as she went.
"Lou's people don't have any gender. If they want babies they just apply for a license and then grow one like this onion's doing." Jenny pointed to one of the bulbs that had a small offshoot attached to it.
Shade paused in poking something rubbery that was buried just below the surface of the ground to stare at Jenny. "So they don't need to wear clothes."
The unicorn girl paused with her mouth open, her mind derailed by the unexpected turn that Shade had just put into the conversation.
Then she laughed and shook her head. "No, but Lou says they like to look pretty, so they decorate a lot with jewelry and flowing stuff. Lou's job means it wears a medical uniform."
"Huh." Shade smiled slightly with wonder at the thought of someone who was so utterly different from everything she knew. "What's it like?"
"It talks worse than two teenage girls on a gossip marathon." Jenny purrled and grinned. "But most of what it's got to say is interesting, even though I think I only understand a little more than a quarter of it. I'm a border space pilot, so I don't have a lot of use for science and medical journals."
"Ahhh. I know what that's like." Shade remembered the one time aboard the Nothing Yet that she'd actually gotten to sit in the mess with the ship's engineer and spent a pleasant hour being utterly lost as Heather talked.
"Yeah?" Jenny looked up from sampling a dandelion leaf to grin at her
"Everything that the engineer on the freighter Mist and I shipped out on said was interesting. But I had no idea what any of it was."
That made Jenny laugh. "Oh. Engineers. Don't worry. I think the only people that understand them are other engineers."
"Well, she was talking about the ship's engine," said Shade as she paused in her search on the computer pad that they'd brought along to watch with wonder as a massive moon peeked over the opposite edge of the world to the one that the sun had just slipped behind. "...And something called 'Crosswires'."
"'Crosswires'?" Jenny perked. "She watches that?"
Shade nodded uncertainly, eyes still on the moon. "That's what she said. She had this thing that slipped in front of her eye that I think had something to do with it."
"Oh wow. A tele-monocle. Those are usually toys for Taloran toffs. I wonder where she got it? What are you digging up?" Jenny came over and peered at Shade's find in the light of the moon.
"Well, she's Taloran. But I don't know if she's a toff. She lives on the ship, and not in a fancy space station. And the ship belongs to Captain Jones and his sister." Shade tore her attention from the colossal rock in the sky to look back at the ground in front of her. "It looks and smells like one of those truffle things."
"What?" Jenny grabbed the computer pad and read the entry, then squealed. "It is. You rusting found a giant truffle!" Then she peered forward into the darkness. "The ground tree must be dormant. I don't see any leaves on the ground. Do you?"
Shade shook her head as she resumed digging. "No. There aren't any big leaves paving the ground. Just grass and ant hills and dandelions."
"Too bad. I hear the tea that happens when water pools in them tastes really good." Jenny poked at the ground and then grabbed a small rubber digging poke from the bucket and started to help unearthing the big fungal sphere.
"Good to you, maybe," said Shade good-naturedly. "The field guide says it's sweet."
"You don't like sweet things?"
"Not really sweet things. I like nuts and flower nectar. Oh, and the honey from the bees from where Mist and I were born." Shade shrugged as she continued digging. "It seems strange to think that there's a whole tree down in the ground underneath here."
"Why? I've heard of trees growing crazier places than this." Jenny gently poked the ground again with her fingers, and then went back to work with the poke. "Have you ever heard of Tondoorim?"
"No." Shade glanced sideways at the rolling depth of the syllables in the untranslated word. "What is it?"
"They're trees on one of the young worlds. Huge things. Massive. They make the jungle over on the other continent here look like some toff's bonsai forest. One upper leaf could carpet half the mess hall at base."
"Upper leaf?" Shade stripped away sod from over the truffle and set it aside carefully, then paused to throw a rock at a skulking canid that had been trying to sneak up on her and Jenny, snorting softly as it yelped and fled.
"Yeah. They grow in pretty deep water, and roots need to breath." Jenny watched the dog-thing run off, then tried to emulate what Shade was doing only to find that though she was fit and strong that she didn't have the same upper body strength as the larger girl. "Rust. Anyway, do you know what lily pads are?"
"Yes. Round purple leaves with a little rim that float in the quiet eddies and get sat on by frogs."
"Really? I want to see pictures of your world some day. But Tondoorim have got leaves that come up from their roots that look sort of like really huge, really thin lily pads. They're called air leaves."
"How huge?" asked Shade, trying to envision them as she dug around the truffle.
"Even bigger around than the upper leaves, and they're so thin that you can see through them into the water below. Since the sunlight doesn't reflect off them like it does from the water they're like windows to what's going on down there, and you can see the fish and things." Jenny paused in her industrious though unskilled digging to push aside the small hill of dirt she'd made.
"Ohhh. How often have you been to that world?"
"Heh. Never." The unicorn girl wrinkled her muzzle humorously. "I never leave the Warlady's space unless she or some of the other Army's with me, and that world hasn't got anything to offer Army. I just watched a feed about it once."
"Hmm. I wonder if we should go after we leave here." Shade moved to one side and continued digging, her hands tireless as they pulled aside turf and then started moving dirt. "Do you know if there are any jobs they might want a shuttle for?"
"Nah, they're archaists and raise or make all they need. But I hear that if you buy some of their beer from them and then go to the mining colony out by Stargone you can make an insane profit," said Jenny. "And while you're at it you could ask Dr. Syrya to prepare some bones for you to sell. The grumposaurs out there probably don't get a lot of real JD cooking, and everyone says grumposaurs are crazy about it."
"But you don't know it for a fact?" Shade grunted softly as she thrust her hands deeper into the dirt and then popped the truffle out of the hole.
"Eeep!" Jenny whistled soft alarm, then laughed. "Huh? No. The Warlady and grumposaurs don't get along, but they're so common that nearly everyone knows what they like to eat. Besides, the things that that mining colony likes to buy is proven intel."
Shade retrieved the truffle and set it down by the bucket, then dusted her hands and picked up the computer pad to call up a file. "Hmm." She frowned with confusion and called up another. "Where is Stargone? It's not on my maps."
"Maps of the galaxy, right?" Jenny laughed softly as she pushed dirt back into the truffle hole. "Stargone's officially out in the space between galaxies."
Shade stared at her with surprise. "Isn't that dangerous? What about the Infection?"
"They won't get near that sector. The asteroid belt's the home of a star dragon family, and they put out some sort of vibes that the gugbugs can't stand. It's why the Infection's so frantic to get through over on the Warlady's side of things, after her space it's too far for them to go to get into the galaxy." Jenny got up and used a trowel to add the hill of a very startled colony of ants to the truffle hole.
"Ohhh." Shade turned her attention back to the pad, then frowned and poked it accusingly. "This says star dragons are a myth."
"Try 'Meredronian'," advised Jenny. "That's what they call themselves."
"Alright..." Shade tapped at the screen, and then scanned over what she'd found, her eyes widening as her ears twitched with surprise and wonder. "They don't need to breath? And the baby will take over a hundred standard years just to hatch from the egg?" She looked up.
"What? Really?" Jenny dropped the trowel and came over to look at the pad herself and open that lit feed. "Whoa, that wasn't up the last time I looked. The not breathing part was, but not this. Wow..."
"How can they not breath?" wondered Shade. "Even plants and things that live in the water breath."
"Some kind of chemical reaction inside them," said Jenny absently, squinting and turning down the glow of the pad as planet rise restored daylight to the landscape. "It's got something to do with how even though they're animal type carbon-based organics they can live off sunlight just by having it shine on their skins, and they eat the same kind of minerals that convertors like. It makes sense though. They don't live where there's air or anything to eat."
"They hardly ever have babies." Shade snorted softly as she read that, also absently squinting as she read. "So this is an amazing event for them too. Wait, it says they seldom have non-drone babies. What does that mean?"
"The drones are little bipeds only ten foot tall," said Jenny, pointing to a spot lower on the page. "They're tailless, and only live a couple hundred years. Meredronian mothers have them to help care for the main baby, to help interact with smaller races during the rare times that they encounter them, or just for company. So they're kind of like Owned people."
"Here's a picture." Shade poked it for magnification.
"Awww! He looks something like a JD! Cuuute!" Jenny grinned at the image of the beautiful shiny copper coloured person with gentle golden eyes.
"You're smaller than them." Shade recalled what the unicorn girl had said earlier and chuckled. "What do you mean, 'little bipeds'?"
"Thrrpt!" said Jenny cheerfully. "I'm used to bipeds like the Warlady and the rest of the Army, alright? Compared to them these guys are tiny!"
Shade laughed, then pressed the button on the band that circled her upper arm. "What is it, Starfighter?"
//Sebastian's just wondering how Jenny's doing,// came the prompt reply of the blue, white, and silver convertor.
"You mean you're worrying about me being out of your sight, Mom." Shade laughed more.
//Hey! I told you, I'm not a mom! I'm a dude!//
"Maybe you're a dude like Norton!" called Jenny, her big eyes dancing as she purrled.
//No! I am NOT a dude like Norton! And you know it, fuzzball!//
Jenny laughed so hard that she could barely razz in reply, then managed to check the mirth long enough to call back, "But you carry your babies in your belly pouch!"
//Arrrgghh!//
Shade stood and stamped as she laughed, hearing Sebastian laughing in the background behind Starfighter's sounds of frustration and knowing that the convertor man was probably making his avatar sign so that Mist was able to follow the conversation too.
//Go ahead and laugh, Shade! Where would you two be without me?//
"Alpha Centari?" She giggled. "Are you guys finding anything good to eat?"
//Eh. Sebastian seems to think so. Mist finally just stopped putting things in the bucket and started feeding it all to him.//
"How much is he eating?" Shade's expression changed to surprise.
"Hey, big guys like him need a lot of energy!" called Jenny, then squealed soft surprise as Shade absently hiked her up onto her back so that the unicorn girl could be closer to the radio.
//Big guy? This runt?//
"He's a giant among unicorns." Jenny grinned, her eyes bright. "And a hunky one."
//Ugh, you have a one track mind.//
"Yup!" she agreed happily. "Fuzzy purple muscles. EEEEEEE!"
Shade laughed as Jenny hugged herself. "Don't worry, Starfighter, Mist and I think you're pretty too."
//Bleahhhhhh.// The funny noise from the radio made the two girls laugh even harder.
//Jenny?// called Sebastian. //Jenny happy?//
"Awww." She stopped laughing. "Yeah, Sebastian. I'm happy."
//Jenny happy. I'm happy,// came the simply succinct answer. //We have guava for Jenny.//
The unicorn girl's mouth fell open, and then her big eyes filled with pale purplish tears as she put a hand to her mouth.
"Jenny? Is something wrong?" Shade lifted her arm and looked under it at her friend.
"He's making connections on his own, without prompting," whispered Jenny.
//Jenny?// There was the sound of a finger tapping a radio as Starfighter came back on the line. //Are you still there? The connection's still live...//
"She's just too happy about what Sebastian said to be able to talk right now," said Shade, reaching back to patpat the unicorn girl.
Starfighter laughed. //Now he's sticking his chest out again. Mist wants to know how many of these fruits you want, Shade. They're about as big as a knuckle.//
"Oh six should be enough," said Shade. "Have you found hill onions?"
//No, the turf's too tough over here for that kind of ants. We've got ground tree tea, though.//
"Jenny wanted that! Our ground tree's sleeping, but it had a truffle up near the surface where we could get it."
//Heh. Mist says she'd like six onions. She's picking ground tree leaves now and saying something about making a salad.//
//Salad!// agreed Sebastian, sounding pleased to have caught the familiar word.
"He loves salad," said Jenny. "His favourite kind involves smallow fluff."
"You guys and your fixation on sweet things." Shade shook her head.
"Why do you think we're so cute?" Jenny laughed.
//You know, for fuzzballs,// added Starfighter.
"Oh shut up." The purple girl laughed harder. "What a jerk."
//Fuzzball!//
"Jerk!"
//Fuzzball!//
"Jerk!"
//Jerk!//
//Hey, Seb, leave the trash talk to me.//
"What is it with you and teaching people rude things?" Shade snorted, then laughed more herself. "Eeesh." Then she looked into the bucket and quickly counted bulbs. "Alright, we've got enough hill onions and dandelions to feed me, Mist, and any shifters who want some. Not to mention this truffle. So we're coming back."
//Alright, we'll be back as soon as we have the bucket full of leaves.//
"You almost sound like you're helping," teased Jenny.
//What? I am!//
"He is." Shade nodded.
"Oh." Jenny sat back a bit, but then leaned toward the radio again. "Bye, Sebastian! I'll see you soon!"
//I'll see you soon, Jenny!// came the bright and happy response.
//Hey, quit waving that handful of grass around. Don't play with your food.//
Shade laughed so hard that Jenny wound up hanging around her waist. "I'll talk to you later, Mom."
//STOP calling me that!// The connection clicked.
"Let me down." Jenny meeped and wriggled, her tasseled tail curling slightly with the force of her effort to climb back up.
Shade gently grabbed her by one arm and set her on the ground. "Sorry."
"It's alright." Jenny dusted herself off, then reached back and straightened her skirt so that it covered her tail again. "I would've been laughing too. What is that guy, anyway? Your bodyguard?"
"Ffft! No." Shade grabbed the bucket, then paused to snag one last onion from the ant hill that Jenny had put most of into the truffle hole. "He's just learning how to cope with Archivist protective programming. He says my sister and I own him, but I don't know about that."
"What don't you know about it?" Jenny lifted the truffle and tucked it under one arm, then paused to tip her head back and look up at the taller girl. "You Own somebody or you don't."
"You can't own other people." Shade frowned and turned back toward the base, her strides slow so that Jenny could keep up.
"Sure you can, if they say you can," retorted Jenny, her ears going back slightly with annoyance. "The Warlady Owns me and Mom, and we're glad. Nobody else can mess with us and we've always got a place, food, and something to eat."
"That's almost what Starfighter said yesterday evening when we first brought Joel back." Shade frowned. "But we're a crew. We all get a cut of our profits. Starfighter just wants his in fuel."
"Sounds like he really wants to Belong. Just let him," advised Jenny. "It looks like it's been good for him so far."
"What do you mean?" Shade paused to look down at the unicorn girl, one hand absently gathering a handful of her mane as she did.
"Well, I don't really know the guy," admitted Jenny with a shrug. "But I know his reputation around the station. He's a slacker. A loser who never does anything but drift around and occasionally mooch some mineral mush to supplement whatever he absorbs from the suns or digs out of a comet or asteroid. Now you guys have him working, using an avatar, and interacting with other people."
"Why didn't he just do that on his own?" Shade followed her, still frowning deeply.
"Who knows? Some people just need somebody to tell them what to do."
"Do you?" Shade stamped a hoof and sent the startled wild dog scrambling away again.
"Heh. Nooooo. I tend to give the orders unless there's someone bossier around, like the Warlady, Mom, or you." Jenny picked a ripe dandelion and leek spun it before watching the seeds spin away.
"Me?"
"Yeah. You'll be leading more than a deep space shuttle crew some day." The dandelion stem got thoughtfully munched on. "Probably some little Nation of your own."
"Why would I want to do that?" Shade stood the ant jar back up in the bucket, then frowned down at her.
"I don't know. But you already kind of are." Jenny snerked, then pushed her soft, curly hair out of her eyes and grumbled about getting it cut.
Shade didn't reply as they passed through the gate of the medical base. Her mind was too busy chewing on the new ideas that her smaller friend had just thrown at her.