Starblight. LOG-002.

Starblight.

LOG-002.

The veritable swarm of daughters I’d spawned were…a lot more self-sufficient than I’d initially expected, if I was being entirely honest with myself.

I mean, they’d effectively come out of their bulbs as what looked like adults, at least from a human perspective. They were struck with what seemed to be an almost instinctual wanderlust as well, exploring every nook and cranny of their surroundings, scaling my tendrils (with a bit of help of course) and moving further out from their initial birthing grounds.

Communication was…difficult, at first. They were all a rather chatty bunch, and spoke with each other just fine, even assembling into groups and collaborating, though some remained loners. They’d spoken to me as well once they’d realised I could actually hear them, occasionally asking me to move this or that root.

My own attempt to respond to what I was tentatively calling my first born’s question (as to who I was) had been…well, a rather horrendous failure, to be honest.

“I am-”

The two words had quite literally echoed across the planet, erupting from countless mouths that couldn’t help but speak in unison. My children had all collectively clapped their hands to their tentacle-hair at the cacophony, whimpering in place until the roaring sound had eventually stopped.

I didn’t try to speak after that, instead doing my best to just guide my little ones around, while pondering alternative means of communication.

Still, it was…nice. To have so much company after however long I’d been alone. My daughters were an especially social bunch, and even the more solitary ones occasionally nestled themselves against this or that building sized tendril, chattering at nothing, or telling me about something they’d found that wasn’t just more of my expansive mass.

Whether they were actually speaking English, or if I had somehow nestled into a new, alien language without realising it, was unknown. But I could understand them all, and that was enough for me.

Things escalated once the first group of them (a few hundred daughters who had chosen to band together in exploring rather than going it alone) discovered one of the abandoned cities dotting the world’s surface.

It was like a switch had been flipped, excitement overtaking countless faces as the small army of tiny (well, to me) women scrambled to survey the dilapidated settlement.

They had a lot more success than I did, that was for sure. Mostly because they could actually get through doors and access infrastructure without wrecking everything with immensely oversized tendrils.

It felt a little unfair to have just a small fraction of my new family having all the fun though, so in a coordinated flexing of tentacles that would have been nearly impossible to even imagine if I had still been just a regular guy, I helped nudge everyone else in the correct direction.

Within hours, most of my daughters were riding building sized tendrils to their destinations, within days, the vast majority of my spawn were clustered in several locations, and within weeks, the cities I had depopulated were thriving once more, their new inhabitants settling in and learning things as they went.

Even if watching one of my little girls roar down the road in some kind of armoured transport she’d somehow managed to hotwire, several of her sisters hanging on top of it for dear life, still scared the living daylights out of me.

—

“Why won’t you come out with the rest of us? We managed to get one of the flying machines working, we can wander the sky now!”

Father was capable of speech.

“It’s better I remain here. There’s more than enough of us exploring, a few need to manage what we’ve claimed while poking around.”

Elunarieth knew it. Her sisters knew it. Her sisters within the other lost cities (contacted once they figured out how the local communications systems worked) also knew it.

“But that’s so boring! Come with me, we can explore that big tower the others haven’t gotten to yet!”

But Father could not speak without hurting them, because he was very, very loud. And as far as she could tell, their collective creator seemed to care for them, and thus remained silent as a result.

“No, I want to figure out how to talk to Father.”

Which is why she now found herself in some kind of laboratory (garbed in a synthetic white coat of some kind that she’d scavenged from a rusted container upon breaking in), taking her time to figure out what everything was and to gain access to it, all to see if she could be the one to find some way to allow Father to speak with them without splitting the sky itself with his thunderous roars.

“Mm…that…would be nice. But…but it’s not like he’s going anywhere, right? And besides, wouldn’t it be better to try and fix the even bigger flying machines before they break even more? Zynatrixvelyn says if we get them working, we could leave for the stars, and go explore other worlds!”

Elunarieth turned to stare at her moderately less intelligent (not her fault, she just wasn’t built for much more than exploration) sister, scowling and taking note of the light robes her counterpart had apparently picked up at some point.

“Zynatrixvelyn says a lot of things without actually knowing how to make those things happen. She’s good at telling all of us what to do, but not much else.”

Said sister (a scout who had taken on the name Vexiliraari), pouted, tentacles drooping slightly as if to emphasize her disappointment.

“But Elu, that’s what she’s for! Just like I’m for running around and looking at stuff! And you’re for being smart and fixing things!”

Elunarieth sighed, even if the impossibly thin air made it a little hard to do so.

“Precisely, Vex. And so why would one such as myself go to join you for something I’m not for?”

That seemed to bring her scout sister up short, the explorer (and on occasion scavenger, when she could convince her to bring a few things back) visibly thinking for a few seconds before raising a talon.

“...So you can help me open the big doors at the bottom of the tower!”

The burgeoning scientist blinked at that, tilting her head slightly.

“Big doors?”

Vexiliraari nodded quickly, tentacles bobbing with the motion as she did so.

“Mhm! One of the bigger groups I was with found some big doors at the bottom of the unexplored tower, but we couldn’t get them open! The rest of them are trying to find one of the big boom machines to break the doors down, but I said it’d be easier to just get someone smart to mess with the blinky glow things-”

“The computers.”

“Yeah, those-and just open them for us!”

Elunarieth hesitated, glancing at the data scrolling across the monitor she’d appropriated for herself, mostly just a series of access codes that she was decrypting to give her further access to the lab. It would still be a few hours until it was done, and…

…Well, for all that she seemed to be a born scientist, she was still infected with what she was now certain was a shared genetic disposition to wander across their entire species, just a slightly lessened one in comparison to her scout sisters.

“...Maybe seeing if there’s anything useful down there…wouldn’t hurt.”

Vexiliraari’s only response to her hesitant relenting was to cheerfully pump a fist into the air, before grabbing hold of her arm and forcibly dragging her towards the lab’s exit.