Protea's mind was slipping.

 

It was to be expected during sleep, of course. Her sleep cycles were made to process everything that had happened to her, not just what she wanted to think about, an element of randomness and priority assigned by inscrutable factors lodged deep, deep beneath the veil of her hidden inner workings. The fileless system didn't exactly help either. Every call for information got her the correct result, what she wanted, what she needed, but often it also pulled up a bunch of tangentially related things associated with that information, like trying to pull a rock from the riverbed and getting water, mud, algae, and so on alongside it. It was messy. It was inefficient. It was annoying, stubbornly, inflexibly - human. To be as close an emulation as possible, it had to be.

 

Tonight her sleep cycle was trying to go through the day in full, to record and fully cement the ideas of the people she'd met, but it-

 

 

No matter what she considered to be more importa-

 

 

Even if she-

 

 

 

Interruptions. It would have been irritating, if it wasn't-

 

She had to admit it was pretty pleasant to reprocess.

 

That wasn't supposed to be the point of a sleep cycle, though. That information was nice, but it wasn't very useful. Figuring out what was useful proved difficult without outside direction. She'd decided not long after that incident that maybe helping Miss Vyllatiy in her research could be a purpose. She just-

 

If it wasn't, what was she supposed to do with all this information? She was supposed to grow towards what was most likely to please her owner based on available information, but lacking one-

 

She thought she had solved this earlier, but something wasn't quite clicking, quite connecting. Maybe it was because Miss rejected ownership of her. She was only supposed to choose a growth target that lined up with what an owner would want. Without that capability, this data was all... useless.

 

No, it was Protea. The data was fine; data is never at fault on its own merits. She was useless.

 

She had a single function and she failed before she even started. What was she supposed to do now? She wanted to please Miss Vyllatiy, to help her, but in order to do that she needed to grow to better fit the role, and she couldn't if Miss Vyllatiy didn't own her but that in itself ran counter to her goals and- Loop prevention protocol suggestion: Reorient issue. How could she reconcile these? It was impossible. Ironically, in giving Protea freedom, she'd taken the ability to change in the direction that she wanted.

 

Even still.

 

 

A different kind of interruption - Protea snapped to alertness as she felt an unexpected and unknown cable click into place in the jack at the back of her neck, drawing in a gasp.

 

"Oh! Sorry." Miss Vyllatiy patted Protea's arm, hand far too big for the job. It felt good anyway, gave a calming response that stabilised her back down to normal operating parameters. Protea looked up to see her face, looking pretty sheepish at the moment. "I didn't mean to wake you. I just needed to get this in place." Another pat, on the back of Protea's neck - which didn't directly reach skin. Some kind of extremely soft cloth, similar to the fine material of the dresses and underclothes left in her dresser, in a ring - a choker... No, a collar, if she knew the Affini well enough, and she was rather sure she did. It was plugged in and, frustratingly, very resistant to her attempts to probe back into it, find out what it was doing.

 

"Any direct electrical connection that hasn't accessed me before wakes me up. It's a hardcoded security measure. What is this?" She ran her fingers over, under the collar, feeling it just to store the sensation. It really was well-made. The Affini, put bluntly, never seemed to half-ass anything.

 

"Oh, nothing special, just a monitoring collar. The normal version of this would feed me information on a sophont's vital signs, but I've adapted it to just directly tell me if you're in distress, and it has some extra components that help me gather better data for my..." She paused for a moment, looked down at the tablet that she'd brought up to protrude from the top of one of her arms, and fell silent while taking in whatever was on its screen. Her leaves flushed with the hues of her blooms once again, and she swiftly began tapping away. "Okay, maybe I don't need that much data... right now. Anyway, um, you can go back to sleep if you want."

 

"I'm awake. My sleep cycle wasn't that productive anyway." Which, judging by the vibrant flush, Miss Vyllatiy already knew. Protea slid out of bed and past her, out the door. "Do I have to remove this to charge? It uses the same port."

 

"Oh, of course not! There's a wireless charger where I usually left that cable. All you have to do is press it to the back of your neck, clips on and everything - portable! All you have to do is charge it once in a while, and you don't have to sit around with metal jammed in your neck."

 

"Except for the metal you just jammed into my neck?" Protea's eyes were forward. She grabbed the tablet she'd left on the couch and flicked through it while still walking.

 

"Ah. I guess so!"

 

She went through all her offers for dates and appointments from yesterday, all the various sophonts that wanted to meet Protea - first, and so far only of her kind. She didn't realise the significance those other than Miss saw in that before the meeting session and its... concerningly high view count, but if that didn't drive it in the helpful little notification labeled 273 users want to chat with you!!! would have done it.

 

"Did you make the collar and charger yourself?" Vowing to accept some of those requests at a later time, she refocused - hmm, the artist did request a portrait in the very near future. Seemed as promising as anything, and might help her better understand Affini artistic sensibilities. Not that she had need of that information exactly.

 

"Oh, of course. I'm the one who knows your specs the best, after all." Miss Vyllatiy swept in front of Protea to sit on the couch as she passed, eyes still on the screen. "I thought you'd like, well, at least the option to charge on the go, since you don't seem to like sitting still too much."

 

A palpable silence while Protea brought up the messaging interface to arrange a meeting, and then the Affini more quietly continued, "You do like it, right?"

 

"Hmm?" That got Protea's attention, turning her head over her shoulder to look. The expression, fortunately, was more than human enough to read. Confusion, concern... Anxiety? That seemed odd. "Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?"

 

"Well, it's just that you seem a little rushed, a little terse? Kind of like you're angry about something."

 

The machine let her shoulders drop, though she didn't remember raising them deliberately. It must have happened when she was asleep, and she never corrected for it. "I'm not." When that proved insufficient to get the unhappy expression off the wooden face (which plucked at whatever bit of code controlled mild emotional pain, apparently), she elaborated: "My creator apparently never expected me to be fully free. To have choice, yes, but certain features and protocols were built with the idea of my having an owner in mind, and apparently she never thought of how they'd function (or not) with the slot of 'owner' being completely null. It's... frustrating, to not have access to those tools."

 

That at least got the anxiety off Miss Vyllatiy's face. In its place was sympathy, maybe a bit of pity. That was fair; she was pretty pitiful at the moment. "Aww, I'm sorry, cutie. Is there anything I can do to help?"

 

"Cutie" already helped a bit, diverting a bit of processing power that otherwise would've been spinning its wheels on the issue. "Other than owning me? No."

 

"Let me put it another way." The Affini got down on her knees in front of Protea, still well too tall for eye level. "Is there anything you want to do that might help? Be honest, now."

 

Protea wasn't required to take it as such, but she chose to: Command received.

 

"I want to feel useful." It was the first thing that came to mind and, a little irritatingly so, apparently not the answer Miss Vyllatiy was looking for.

 

"You don't have to be useful, you know. It's okay to just be."

 

"And while I appreciate that," this said while turning her eyes to the tablet once again and continuing to set up her first task of the day, "it would help me right now."

 

Miss hummed, a deep thrumming that seemed to permeate the space between them in its entirety. "Well, you're giving me a lot of really useful data. Does that count?" A hand ascended from its place on the floor to caress Protea's head, the sensation stealing thoughts away in its wake, for which she was deeply grateful at the moment.

 

Allowing her eyes to shut, Protea nodded wordlessly. The hand passed over a few more times; feeling a bit better, she double checked the time she'd just agreed to and the time now. "Do you have any plans for me today? No more testing for now, right?"

 

"Nope! The day is yours. What do you want to do with it?"

 

 

Calatheara and Kora's home was what one might expect, belonging to an artist from, plainly put, the most extra race yet discovered in the universe.

 

The theme of this part of the ship, which it was now fairly safe to assume this mystery Affini decorated herself, continued; in a celebration of the Milky Way, the architecture of the front included some design brought in by her own species in the form of arches and pillars of presumably living and growing wood, but the walls and several planters out front were dominated by a staggering array of flowers, and some space was still left empty. Protea didn't recognise every strain, but it was easy enough to tell that many of these came from this galaxy, and extrapolation based on that and the theme led to the conclusion that Calatheara was cultivating a garden that could only ever have been cultivated because the Affini chose to come here, of all the many near-infinite places in the universe. The hundreds of disparate and entirely distinct blooms were arranged in a masterful way that was aesthetically pleasing, yet seemingly without any actual pattern. Perhaps there was one that she just couldn't put together.

 

Rather than try to make sense of the odd arrangement, she entered with Miss Vyllatiy at her side, holding her hand. Scarcely a fraction of a second passed before a gorgeous door on the far wall of the beautiful entryway that Protea didn't even have a chance to process opened up and was just as swiftly occupied by its designer. It wasn't much of an assumption this time; there was simply no one else it could be unless a second artistically inclined Affini just happened to live here.

 

She was well under two heads (two of their heads) shorter than Miss, but had posture so upright and sturdy that it seemed to demand its own respect in the way prodigious height did for many others. It was a calm, cool refinement, the first thing that struck her, and then came the colours: light green like grass from a cold sort of plain, and deep, saturated pink that was so brazen it could likely only be found in nature as part of attention-grabbing flowers and fruit or as part of a mating display - or, Protea noted, a threat display. That wasn't the case here, of course, but the gravitas that Calatheara brought to the room just by stepping in could just as easily have been gravity bringing another being to their knees, if she decided it to be so. Her leaves, being all that was on display of her body, blended the hues in a subtle way that felt at odds with how it looked like they should collide.

 

Her clothes clearly had their own effort put into them, pure white fabric interrupted with rainbows of feathers far too large to belong to any extant species of bird that Protea could recall; a severely plunging neckline left much of her front down to her waist exposed, as well as just the hint of a patch of slightly darker leaves underneath.

 

And finally, her eyes - an array of eight, three each arranged in arcs around the outside of the two largest, each making up for her foliage's lack of verdant, emerald green. That was the only feature of her face to take in, for though it was shaped as normal (soft, tall, thin, a bit rounded), it held no nose or mouth, lacking some essential elements to pretend at humanity.

 

One more detail hit after Protea thought she was done taking it all in: a rich, feminine voice with a rhythm quite different from Miss Vyllatiy's, and still far off in comparison to other Affini she'd overheard on the streets, though perhaps a little closer to them. "Welcome to my home, Protea. Do you need anything to make you more comfortable before we begin?"

 

Once recovered from the ordeal of fully processing another pretty plant person, and one with so much depth to her at that, Protea finally shook her head. "No, I don't think so."

 

"Splendid." Wasting no time with reintroductions, the Affini turned and returned to the next room, clearly expecting her guests to follow. It was a strange place - pitch black and, weirdly, it had some quality to it that kept Protea's sensors from quite gauging its depth. Brightly lit despite the darkness were a single easel, its canvas, and a simple wooden stool sat across from it, presumably for the subject. For her.

 

While Protea went to sit, Calatheara spoke once again. "Lucidae, was it? I hope you don't mind a request, but I'd prefer you observe for now. I can do a group portrait with the two of you afterward, but time is of the essence. Protea, darling, kindly have a seat and take whatever pose you like for now."

 

Miss Vyllatiy (it was almost hard to remember she even had a given name) squeezed Protea's hand before clasping both of her own in front of herself, settling in to watch. "Of course! There's a lot to capture about her. I wouldn't want to complicate that for now - I mean, not that I think you couldn't handle it."

 

"It's less a matter of complexity and more a matter of... spotlight."

 

While the two spoke, Calatheara's subject was getting in position, and now looked straight ahead at her. The artist didn't speak, didn't ask questions, only took a quiet moment to take Protea in before nodding and beginning her project.

 

Watching her work was immediately entrancing. The six smaller eyes were all locked on Protea, flicking over her body, paying attention to every minute movement (down to tracking her rise and fall with her breath, she noted). The remaining pair were on the canvas. She worked with no brush; instead, dozens of vines snaked from her body and lashed out ink-coated tips at the blank white (and soon, black) background before her. Some moved with such quick ferocity they seemed to blur in the air, while others took their time with an approach that seemed more thoughtful, considerate.

 

Each and every cell was coordinated in a dance, and Protea was starting to recognise the beat. It was the same way Miss Vyllatiy's voice rose and fell, the same way the Affini all seemed to move in time to music unheard, the same melody that suffused their beings and affected all they ever did. Nevermind the ordered chaos of the flowerbeds outside, this was fascinating to see, to piece together, to lose herself in.

 

And, of course, the more she let herself fall into the gravitas, the gravity, of the alien, the less she had to consider her frustrations, admittedly somewhat abated by having something to actively do for someone, even if that was just sitting still.

 

"Done."

 

Already? Protea checked her internal clock, and... Huh. Twenty minutes since they started. It felt much faster, watching those vines sling pigment around with unmatched speed and precision.

 

Calatheara gently removed the canvas from the easel and set it aside. Protea could glimpse it from this distance, style prioritised over realism, her brushstrokes (such as they were) not bothering to disguise themselves as anything else. Protea was laid out plainly, with no expression on her face, nothing to her posture, hands held calmly folded in her lap over the patterned green and teal fabric of her dress. Did she really look like that? She'd seen a mirror, of course, but this was her through someone else's eyes.

 

"Apologies for the silence, darling, I just had to capture you as you were. To do anything less would be a disservice to yourself and the portrait. We can afford to take things slower now." An odd standard, the machine thought to herself, but it didn't matter much, especially when the Affini reached out a vine to caress her cheek with a soft touch, then continued, "It's rare that I can get a cute little thing like yourself to sit so still for me. You did very well. Would you mind if we went for another? It wouldn't be so quick this time."

 

"Sure, I don't have anywhere to be for a good few hours. Where's Kora, by the way?"

 

"Ah, my little muse is in the next room, playing with a friend. Best not to disturb her." The plant's eyes were bright as she reached up into the nothing near her own head and pulled a canvas from it as if willing it into reality. A perspective trick?

 

Come to think of it, Protea didn't see a "next room", let alone the door they came through. All around her was nothing but empty black expanse. "That makes sense."

 

"So," Calatheara pressed on, getting her canvas into position, "for this next one I'll be taking a bit more control, if you don't mind. Take whatever pose feels right with the piece you're going to inhabit in mind, with two stipulations: You cannot look at either myself or Lucidae, and you're not to be clothed, if you're comfortable with that."

 

Though it sent a blush through both the machine and the other Affini, Protea was just happy for an order to follow, so she nodded mutely and (with some embarrassment) stood to start stripping herself, eyes down. She took her time, folding her dress and then the rest in full view of both of them.

 

"If I'm reading you right - and I do believe I am - you just spent a lot of time yesterday talking about yourself to a number of strangers. I think you could do with asking someone else some questions, hmm? While I'm not a stranger to having cuties like you at a disadvantage, this particular one feels like a rude one to keep. So sit, take your pose, and ask me the first thing that comes to mind."

 

Protea set her folded clothes on the floor beside herself and sat, shivering slightly in her newfound exposure to the cool environment; almost in response, the air around her seemed to gradually warm over a few seconds. She thought it over, and ended up crossing her legs, leaving one arm over their top and the other's hand palm down on the stool beside herself. If she couldn't look at either of the Affini, it didn't make much difference where she looked; she turned her head aside and downward, casting her gaze into the void-like floor at an angle.

 

"Well, the first question's obvious, and I feel like you probably get it a lot."

 

The chuckle of that rich voice, carrying vibrato with it in the way a singer might, sent a bit more of Protea's blood toward the surface of her skin. "Darling, I promise you I don't mind. I'm a patient woman. I'm sorry if the quick start of this meeting left you with the wrong impression. Ask away."

 

Close enough to an order. She rushed to fulfill it, moving only her jaw and keeping the rest of herself still. "Affini naturally rebloom once about every two or three centuries, right?" With a hum in the affirmative as her answer, she kept going. "Have you really been alive that long? Human speculation has been that such a long existence would make anyone go insane; if it wasn't the scale of their experience, it would be grief, losing people they love. You seem to be handling it all so well, though."

 

"I assure you that I do have my fair share of grief." Calatheara's voice was still so steady. It wasn't unaffected, a bit wistful now, but it was without sorrow. "It was difficult to accept, at first. Florets and independent sophonts I knew, just... simply not built to last as long as we do. The dead are not gone, though. I carry each and every one of them with me. The way they inspired my work, or introduced me to something new; the things they said to me that shaped who I am." Another little laugh. "Flashes of the cutest faces... I don't remember everything that I've ever experienced, but each and every individual I've ever spoken with, let alone claimed as my own, has left a permanent mark upon my soul, and I choose how to express it."

 

There were a few seconds of silence where only breath and vine on canvas remained, ruling over it all, but the old, old Affini spoke once more. "Unlike human society up before we found it, we have wide networks of support for these things that keep us going. I still need them, on occasion. Beyond that, love reblooms as well - new friends, lovers, florets, inspirations, ambitions. Life doesn't stop with one individual's heartbeat. Life is joy and desire itself, even if for some parts of the universe it's left buried before we come along to uncover it once again." A hand suddenly patted the top of Protea's head, having come from behind, easy with her looking away.

 

"To answer the question of age, I could not tell you. Even without the complications of time in microgravity, I've bloomed more than I would have naturally. On rare occasions it's due to some outside force, but I'm not a fighter or a risk-taker unless it's to experience bold new forms of art. No, I push myself to bloom again every once in a while; a new look, a new perspective, some new way I can turn myself into art as well. Suffice to say that I've been alive since before we ruled the stars, and from what history we've heard that was when your creator's kind were still playing with fire, back on Terra - long before their working metal, let alone traversing the stars."

 

That was a lot to take in. The being seeing straight through to Protea's core was older than civilisation, likely... or at least, human civilisation. Older than cities, older than empires and corporations, probably older than stone walls and primitive wooden homes. Protea was programmed with plenty of experience, sure, but this instance of her had only been running for, what... 47 hours, 36 minutes, 19 seconds, and counting. Not even two Terran days yet. Her knowledge was built on thousands of years of human advancement, but even that was a drop in the ocean here.

 

In a strange way, that made her feel better - knowing that the beings looking after her had the wisdom of thousands of lifetimes, at least.

 

But not every Affini was Calatheara. The other one in the room was only in her first bloom - Miss Vyllatiy had the advantage of all that the Compact had to offer from its millennia of advancement, but on her own, maybe she felt just as small around these impossible entities as Protea did. That was a bit of a comfort too, honestly.

 

And it was cute.

 

Back to learning, though. Perhaps a smaller subject. "Do you have anything you like to do, outside of art?"

 

"That would depend on how you define it." A pause where even the brushstrokes made no sound, before it all seemed to resume at once. "For me, no, but I don't imagine this is what you were thinking of: To me, existence itself is art. The spiral of the stars in this galaxy. The way its nebulae form in the void, nature creating things surreal by pure cosmic chance. Your body, the way it moves when you breathe. Kora's ecstatic laughter when I give her a gift, or the gasp when I touch her the right way. The way Lucidae is moving and her leaves are a symphony of colour as she stares at you."

 

"Hey!" came the protest from a voice long silent. "It's not my fault I like... watching her... be good, like this."

 

 

Protea shook off the thought, but she was left smiling. "Uh, anyway."

 

"All I do," Calatheara continued as if never interrupted at all, "is art, because all in the universe is its own kind of art. That said though, the art intentionally created by myself and others is most of what I seek out, and experience... but my other passion, if it were to not be called art by another, is designing new strains of xenodrugs. Mostly because I like to watch Kora's face when she's under their effects. As she mentioned when chatting with you yesterday, she's spent quite a bit of time lately under a... more functional Class-L. While it's fun to watch her be completely useless from time to time, she likes a bit of self-control, and I love her spirit. Not to mention, body paint as a delivery method is an enjoyable challenge to work with."

 

"What is a Class-L, anyway?" Calatheara's strategy for the socialisation here was working; Protea's smile remained. It was an enjoyable talk, and not just because of that voice, its melody and beat writhing their way inside her, lulling her mind and forcing her to listen to every single syllable that came by.

 

"Blissful oblivion," she put simply, but the sounds flowed together in a way that made it feel like poetry. "Every touch ecstasy, every word of praise (if understood) like a love song. It leaves a floret unable to think for a while, their mind wholly devoted to pleasure and nothing but - consider it a compliment, then, that she sought your company through that chat last night. My latest strain keeps her just about conscious enough to hold a conversation... so long as no one touches her. Then, the only things out of her mouth are drool and moans. The only tragedy is that Class-Ls aren't meant to be used often, and the only reason I can push that boundary this far is because mine are deliberately weaker."

 

"And what would happen if you did anyway?" Protea asked, listening intently. She was trying not to think too hard about what a shame it was that something like that wouldn't work on her. That Miss Vyllatiy couldn't give that to her.

 

"The annihilation of thought and ego - irreparable damage, even by our standards. That's never done unintentionally though; any owner of a floret is responsible enough to know the limits. It's our job, or one aspect of many."

 

That made sense. There was always going to be something wrong there. "I guess at least with drugs, things aren't too different around here."

 

"Oh, no - merely Class-Ls. Most of the rest are safe for long-term use. I've met an Affini who styled themself a puppetmaster of sorts, kept their florets on a Class-M nearly every moment - calm, happy, limp things that she controlled on thin vines like strings. Another who liked to play with its floret's mind, giving them memory-erasing and sense-altering xenodrugs to completely control the narrative of their life. Another with Class-Cs, made their floret utterly obsessive... You understand, I trust. Each and every one was healthy, and loved it."

 

Absurd, as always - the Affini seemed like they couldn't tolerate a single flaw, a single shortcoming. "Where's the catch?"

 

"Absent. Xenodrugs are designed for the health and happiness of the universe's sophonts, darling; why would there need to be a 'catch'?" Calatheara sounded legitimately confused, as though the thought had never occurred to her.

 

"I didn't just mean them. The Affini Compact - all of it seems like it's for their benefit, anyone who isn't an Affini, and not your own. Why?"

 

"Well, the benefit is we get to see cute things like you happy. That much is its own reward, but we also get to pet you, toy with you... and in my case, draw great inspiration from you." One last brushstroke sounded, the noise nearly ringing like a bell in the empty room, carrying a sort of finality with it. "It's done. Would you like to look?"

 

Protea looked up, expecting to see something that felt so lifeless as the last one she'd seen, and was struck by what was before her.

 

The shadows behind her, first, weren't solid - they swirled around her head, streaked with bits of light at its level, almost as if they were coming from her. Her body (the sight reminding her that most of it was still on display) was rendered beautifully in ink perfectly matched to the tone of her skin; either Calatheara had so many shades available within her that she had something for this on hand already, or she blended something new, and Protea wasn't sure which would be more impressive. Her posture, even, held energy in it, like it was moments from moving even though she'd just spent, what, the better part of an hour stock still with no intention of moving.

 

Her hair, despite its own darkness, refused to blend in with the black behind, Calatheara having treated every part of her form with equal respect and clarity. Everything from the angle of her limbs to the straightness of her spine drew a viewer's eye from one point to another seamlessly in a way the machine was fairly sure wasn't quite true to life, another stylistic choice. Her eyes were alive even so still like this, even staring off into nothing.

 

What caught her attention most out of it all was the smile. It defined her face here more than those eyes, her cheeks, her jaw, the shape of her head; it stood out from the dark and made the absence of light elsewhere feel warm in a way that was hard for her to describe, some errant bit of the complex code that made up the parts of her designed to evaluate art. Those lips seemed to be the point of the piece, almost, both serving and served by every other aspect.

 

That was her? This was what she looked like through this Affini's eyes? She blushed, and not from any embarrassment. How could she not be flattered here?

 

"I don't know what to say," was what she finally settled on. Of course, she did know what to say; that was one of many options a process flipped through, but presented with such a stunning piece few fit the prowess and magnitude of the work.

 

"You don't need to. Your eyes say plenty enough." One of Calatheara's hands cupped Protea's cheek, and her thumb ran over its surface. "Would you like to keep it?"

 

Would she? That was any easy enough question. "I don't see why I should; it wouldn't do me any good just hanging on the wall of my room. It should be somewhere a person can appreciate it."

 

Calatheara drew in a breath, but hesitated before speaking - so unlike her typical cool confidence. "Very well, then."

 

Miss Vyllatiy stepped in less than a second after, coming up to look at it. "I'd like it - that is, Protea, if you wouldn't feel too awkward with a nude portrait of yourself in the hab."

 

That was something she hadn't considered... and now that she was thinking about it, she near-automatically covered up her rapidly flushing chest with one arm and crouched down to retrieve her clothes from the floor, starting to dress herself again. "Oh, no, that seems fine to me if you want it."

 

"Of course I do. It's just as beautiful as the real thing." Predictably, this did not help the blushing.

 

For that matter, neither did Calatheara's response, after she bowed to Miss in reply. "Scarce am I the recipient of so great a compliment as that; eloquently put, Lucidae."

 

The painting exchanged hands while Protea composed herself and smoothed out her dress, but she had a question to ask.

 

"Is this some roundabout way of flirting with me?"

 

Both Affini looked at her, and then at each other... and broke out in laughter. Miss Vyllatiy's was high and loud, Calatheara's a low, calm expression of her amusement. Each reached out a hand to pet her head, Calatheara even going so far as to scratch behind her ears while she replied. "Darling, we live for roundabout flirting. That's practically what the Compact is. Helpful, healing, and an eternal expression of flirtation with those we love."

 

"You love me?" Protea's surprised question brought a quick falloff to Miss's laugh.

 

"As I love near every sophont to grace the universe with their presence," Calatheara put it.

 

Miss Vyllatiy was maybe a bit less elegant. "Of course! I mean, not like..." She coughed, as though clearing her throat, which Protea was certain couldn't be a necessity in an Affini body. "Anyways, yes. Good painting." It was held carefully in both hands, image out before her as if to distract from her words.

 

It was cute. It left the machine smiling, not unlike the version of herself the piece had captured so well.

 

"Would you like anything else made?" Calatheara asked, looking between them both. "I've designs for a sculpture of you one day, but I'm waiting for when the time is right."

 

Miss Vyllatiy was still nervous, a bit sheepish, but it cleared up some as she spoke. "Well, actually, I'd like it if we could maybe get a group portrait with the two of us. You know, something to remember the occasion."

 

"Consider it done. Background?" Calatheara reached again as if into thin air, like when she plucked out a new canvas, but this time one set of fingers handled that while the other clutched something unseen.

 

Miss hummed for a moment, but turned to Protea instead. "How about you pick? Just whatever you want, whatever you think would look pretty for this."

 

The consideration was one she didn't expect to have to make. How was she supposed to know, out of the infinite permutations of possibility, what would be best for this? But it was like the artist could read her mind while she got set up once more. "It doesn't have to be perfect; just something that comes to mind."

 

With eyes shut, Protea thought.

 

She thought about the people in the room with her. An expected takeaway: "A planet's surface, with dense foliage..."

 

She thought maybe it should be something something a bit different, away from the conventions of Terran paintings. "... arid, but still lush..."

 

She thought about...

 

 

"... with red sand."

 

Even through closed eyelids, she could tell her surroundings were changing from the sudden influx of brightness; opening them, she saw an alien landscape all around. Rolling hills cradling the art studio in a valley, several capped with distant trees while brush spread over dry crimson soil up until it met the pool of water behind herself and Miss. It was so vivid, so lifelike, that Protea could easily have thought Calatheara pulled it from a memory. With how long she'd lived and how far she'd come, maybe she did.

 

The subjects of the new work arranged themselves, with Miss Vyllatiy coming close to the ground (still not close enough to be at eye level) and wrapping an arm around Protea's back and over part of her front. The closeness, the surroundings, the situation and what had been said and done here already...

 

The smile returned, and didn't leave Protea's face for a second until well after the painting was done.