Chapter Text
The stack of transmission reports confounded Olorosh Rasolich, Third Bloom. There are many, many things in this universe that should be impossible, some of which she had even seen. “It shouldn’t be possible.” she vocalized for the benefit of her gathered entourage, the impossible transmission readout currently sitting innocently on her desk.
One to transport, independent Terran, have booze
That was what it was in English, anyway. It was a frustrating little bow on top of this whole ordeal. It was a translation, one that she and Dew had made themselves even. She’d worked with it each step of the way. She knew that that was what it said, but nonetheless it was still… impossible.
It was followed by a set of coordinates—once again an impossible set of coordinates. Olorosh slumped. Unlike many of her colleagues, she did not typically wear a humanoid form. Her body was a mass of unorganized vines. Sets of crystalline eyes, patches of unshapely flowers, and fragments of wood shifted and flowed as they writhed and flowed. Many might find her appearance unsettling, disturbing, a deliberate horror, and she had agreed, but her florets delighted in horror so much that she couldn’t help but take on such a form for them. She would often have to ask if she was “doing it right” or made sure the movements weren’t “too scary” for them, but nothing could quite draw as adorable noises as when she suddenly decided to claim one of her florets for snuggles into her vast unpredictable mass, so she indulged them this form.
Dew flipped around to lay her chin on the soft arm of the fabric couch she was laying across. “Want to go over it one more time?” a hopeful air in her voice. Olorosh did what passed as a nod with some of her headless faces. Her three florets did not hesitate to jump to action from their languished relaxation across the furniture in the wide open space of their hab unit’s main room. They easily settled into a circle on the slightly raised platform in the center of the room.
Erlen Rasolich, Tenth Floret, shortest at 5'1”, but dressed in a top and full skirt of loud oranges and reds to match the loud mane of her frizzy almost-black brown hair. Her excited big round brown eyes flitted back and forth from her colleagues and Mistress and the center of the platform to make sure everything was in order before she began. She flicked at a little control remote with a practiced hand and a holographic model of an odd ship materialized. It had a Terran style of hull, but the material was of Affini ships, like Affini scrap metal had been refashioned into a ship from an entirely different perspective. The arrangement left little room for anything other than its bulky engine. “From the top:” She began with a voice mixed with a conductor’s command to their orchestra and a musician’s excited opening address to their crowd. The three all stepped in practiced unison, keeping equidistant as they walked around the hologram. Olorosh delighted at their performance, a wholly unnecessary flare to what amounted to reading a research paper. “We have received reports of delightfully nostalgic old Terran FTL on our sensors across the past several months. The culprit was revealed to be this absolutely adorable ship, which was discovered when its Terran jump drive,” the diagram cut away to highlight the details of the big, old, clunky machinery. Including the engine and all its subsystems, it took up the entire rear and over half of the length of the ship, “jumped directly into a system which had sufficient presence to deploy the ships to intercept it.”
Klein Rasolich, Eleventh Floret, middlest height at 5’5”, took on the next part of the explanation. He had a polite voice, more reserved than his colleague. He dressed the most formally of the three, white buttoned shirt under a grey vest and grey shorts, though the neutral tones did well to make the red of his reddish brown hair as well as the sharp blue of his eyes stand out. “The ship was completely unmanned, and running on a very cutely-written custom nav routine that alternates the old, adorably noisy jump drive and the much more capable Affini warp engine.” An engine a fraction of the size built into the tapered nose of the little ship lit up on the hologram. “When the black box was politely asked for its contents, it was found to be useless for tracking the ship’s movements. We only have record of the ship in Affini space for a tenth the time the fuel stores would suggest, meaning this ship has likely been in operation for close to fifty months, jumping randomly in a pattern long since untraceable. What a brave little ship to work for so long!” A few holographic vines appeared around the ship and gave it a few pats. Olorosh rang out in delight in her song-like chime of a voice, then snatched up Klein. The presenter squeaked indignantly, but his part was done for the moment, and Olorosh needed one of her adorable petals to fuss and fawn over once she saw the hologram ship get its hologram reward. The careful horror, with her many eyes and frighteningly-crafted tentacled vines, found the horror her visage was supposed to invoke a bit spoiled with the delighted expressions and pleasant chimings coming from all the trawling wooden faces on her body once she had a creature to pet and cuddle happily in her grasp.
Dewar Rasolich, Ninth Floret, tallest at 5’9”, picked the presentation back up. Aside from her height, she had probably the most striking appearance. She had blonde hair that fell more than halfway down her back, though less than half of it was blonde anymore, instead dyed in streaks and waves of color spanning the entire rainbow. Her green eyes glittered in the middle of her long face, and her long, loose sleeved vibrant blue top were eye catching, but the most striking things about her were her long, full legs, exposed under her black shorts, and the tattoos that covered them: branches and brambles and thorns and flowers, but also waves and storms and animals of all variety. Neither the empty slot in their rotation nor the unprofessional squeals of her fellow floret seemed to bother her stoic adherence to her task. “The black box did contain an encrypted message, which was broadcast by the local group who salvaged the ship as an open challenge to any interested Compact ship. We have the only reasonable interpretation.” Dew couldn’t help but puff up her chest proudly, her expertise having been pivotal in their lead, and Olorosh couldn’t resist pulling her in for well-deserved snuggles and teasing whispers once her ego started flaring. “There’s nothing reasonable about this situation, Dewey.”
In fact, Olorosh whispered a downright devilish barrage of threats and promises to her captive toys, and Early was turning steadily redder at her colleagues squirming and moaning and pleading for her to join them. She continued on, “We tried several ways of reading the data, but it turned out an old Affini data transcription was the only one that produced anything noteworthy. The data began with an old word for "storm". With enough guesswork, we determined the actual key to be an old Terran pl –eep!” Olorosh was many things, but not always was she patient. She was an incomprehensible and irresistible corrupter of human minds, and she was going to exercise that right right now. She squeezed and squished her charges, stripping article after article of their unique fashion choices and throwing xenodrug upon xenodrug until she had more three machines of sublime pleasure than three competent Terran Accord scholars. Their cognitive functions were on hold at the moment, their steady patience and self control taking sabbatical, their voices as useless as their minds, all for as long as their Mistress wanted. The holograms flicked forwards and backwards as Early’s fingers pressed on her controller in meaningless patterns, cycling through ship diagrams and various screens of the black box text far too quickly to read.
“Oh no, I’ve broken them again!” Olorosh did not sound concerned, though there was hardly anyone to appreciate her melodrama, “I’ll have to put these back together again so they can finish up their riveting presentation. What do you think, my lovely, adorable florets, should I put your back together?” The florets all mumbled and groaned, but neither the sounds they tried to speak nor the ones they heard made any semblance of sense. Olorosh’s songy chimes of adoration rang out, their pleasant notes a bit more appreciated.
She lost track of time. She didn't know how long it had been when the door to their hab unit opened and a woman dressed in a pink blouse and a pencil skirt woven of red roses stepped in. She carried a data pad like a clipboard and her brown hair was done up in a bun. Her heels clicked along the floor as she came into the main room of the unit. She adjusted her thin framed glasses to take in the scene enough to blush. Olorosh spared a few loose eyes to watch her from across the wide space, waiting for her to be the first to address the situation. The woman cleared her throat. Her voice carried easily despite the distance. “I didn’t mean to interrupt, it has been some time since your last update and my Master thought to check if there was anything else you’d come up with.”
The Affini mass could hold her giggles in no long, “No interruption, Senna. It’s lovely to see you! The message is decoded as well it is going to be, I believe.” Dew let out a few murrs and was quickly pacified with a vine to gnaw on. “This one is very certain.”
“A rather annoying puzzle we’ve been given.” Annoying was the correct word for her. The wrong word for Olorosh, but the correct one for Senna.
“Puzzles all around us, petal. Why do you wear those glasses? Some would find that puzzling.”
Senna self consciously adjusted them again, her hint of blush stubbornly remaining as she chewed her lip and pushed at the mass of red skirt that somehow managed to fly all the way to the entrance to the big room. “My Master likes them, I find them familiar. You know this.”
“But it’s a puzzle for anyone else now isn’t it? Nobody in the Compact need suffer from poor eyesight, you couldn’t possibly need such things anymore.” She let one of the masks that carried her expressions rest in a sensible enough place for a face, moving crystalline eyes behind it and shaping a glasses frame out of other bits of wood. Then, just as quickly, it lost cohesion back into the smooth flow of vines she normally maintained. “You and I both know this, but someone meeting you for the first time would be puzzled.”
Senna clacked a heel. “I don’t do it to be puzzling! It’s just what my Master and I like! Not like this,” she gestured at the hologram, stuck for the moment on the ship being fawned over by disembodied vines, “Someone’s doing that on purpose.”
“And who do you think they are by chance?” Olorosh began creeping closer, her vines rolling on the ground in mock effort as she and her pets steadily closed the distance. Senna was not particularly impressed. “Who would make such a puzzle? Just for anyone to find it? Seems an odd way to get a rescue.” She fished out the hologram controller from Erlen’s grasp and flicked forwards to the start of the black box message before handing it off to Senna. “Look, it’s clearly human design, but it uses Affini language transcription.” Senna flicked through the slides, pages upon pages of Affini script filled out the holographic slides. She squinted and adjusted her glasses as she leaned in for a closer look, “I can’t read that, it’s some weird dialect.” Olorosh chimed in delight at that. “It’s a code, dear, it’s not supposed to make sense, though it is an archaic dialect. It’s like Latin to us. We wouldn’t have even been sure that’s what the character set to use to read the message was if not for other messages on the ship being written in that old language.”
“Ahh, I see” Senna nodded along, trying to share in Olorosh’s enthusiasm. “So whoever wrote this is one of your kind of people, maybe an Affini scientist?”
“It’s a human design black box,” Olorosh gave her a well appreciated pat on the head for her guess, “I don’t think an Affini would come up with a game quite like this, anyways. Much more your species’ wavelength.” Senna, for her part, decided to sink into the viney mass at the first sign of affection, taking her place in the middle of her strung-out fellow pets. They, for their part, rolled and fumbled towards her, grasping ineffectively to try and free her from her buttoned blouse. She suffered their neediness and flicked forwards on the remote, Dewar complained as she sped past the various failed ciphers and intermediate encryption steps, until she saw the first part of the message, translated back into English. “One to transport, independent Terran. Have… booze? Are you sure that’s what it says? Wait, there’s an old Affini word for booze?”
Olorosh’s giggle spread through vines, “Well, not quite as such. Dew could tell it to you better, but, well,” she lifted Dew up by the vine she was hugging and biting in all her naked splendor. Without her top the rest of her tattoos were visible: two long dragons coiled around her from wrist to wrist. “She’s rather busy at the moment. It’s a faithful enough translation anyways, casual referral to a recreational intoxicant.”
Senna flicked forwards onto pages of indecipherable blocks of numbers and a few scattered names. “And after that it looks like a bunch of math.”
“Navigation speech, Klein figured it out. Also archaic, actually. Whoever wrote this loves making us dig and think. Oh I’m so excited to meet them!” Olorosh took back the remote, and advanced the presentation until a wide shot of the Milky Way filled it, then shrunk to accommodate three oblong rings of various sizes. They all intersected the galactic plane, but did not intersect meaningfully, at first. The hologram slowly shifted through a timelapse, during which the rings twisted and turned until they crossed at one point, thousands of lightyears off the galactic plane. “He and Early worked it out. It describes the apparent path of certain celestial objects on the celestial sphere of three different planets, with some modifiers to draw them on a galactic scale. Klein and Early were so cute working on this! Oh you should have seen them, when Early figured out they needed to scan for the path across time! Right, my pretty little flowers? Remember how ecstatic you were?”
Klein and Early did not coherently respond, as they were still busying themselves trying and failing to strip Senna, who for her part seemed only half attending the technical details anyways.
“Anyways, we don’t know exactly what’s there. It’s rather out of the way. I don’t think we would have explored anywhere near such an inhospitable place for life if not for this. It’s quite honestly an impossible place to find a Terran.”
“Doesn’t Master always scold you about using that word?” She protested, her attention returning for a brief moment after a long moan drawn from her vine-mate’s exploring hands.
“Hush, you. It’s the best word your language has for the incredulity of this situation.” She gave her a pat and righted her on the floor, rescuing her from the indecency her pets were trying to inflict on her. Despite their rather lacking motor control, Olorosh's florets did manage to tear some flowers off her skirt and undo some of her blouse, exposing her black bra. As she got herself back to some image of professionalism and buttoned herself back up, Olorosh slipped a thumb drive in her pad. “Give that to your Master; it’s the whole explanation, if he’s interested in reading it, but he can just review the flight plan to our wayward Terran if he finds it too much of a chore.”
Senna regained her composure, ready to resume the task she came for. “Very good,” she flicked through a few pages, scanning the document, mostly dismissive of the level of detail she had neither the expertise nor the care to parse. Mostly dismissive. “What’s with some of these phrases? ‘adorably noisy’?”
“Oh, I don’t allow my florets to write reports on your species' adorable technology without proper reverence.” She did not seem at all ashamed at the requirement.
“‘Politely asked?’” She zoomed in on the phrase and held her pad screen up to Olorosh.
“They aren’t allowed to use the word ‘interrogated’. Oh! You should read Klein’s PhD some time. It took him six revisions from his published version before it was acceptable.”
Senna shivered at the thought. “Even after them I think I’ll pass. I do just fine with Class A’s if I’m trying to make my head spin. Is there anything else you wish to tell my Master?”
Olorosh thought for a moment, humming pleasantly before her disjointed bits of wooden masks converged back together into an over-wide grin. “Tell him: I have dibs on this one.”