[u][b]GCN Concordia, Sagittarius A*[/b][/u]

"The Manifold does not care about the perceptions of inferior species like your own!" The artificial voicebox Seven Desert Streams was shouting now, and had a faintly wet slur to it - one could almost hear the spittle flying, even though the surgically installed organ had no way of producing any. "I will have your mate and offspring abducted from their cheap hovel and have them violated in public vivariums on my homeworld!" Seven Desert Streams shrieked. "I will have their disgusting face-flap acoustics recorded and broadcasted all over Terra, and then I will sell them to the lowest bidder and pay the fine for selling deficient goods! I'm having your profile posted in every inter-species negotiable affection business stating that you'll sell yourself for the equivalent of a quint and passing out your home address! That is all you are good for to me! You are a large-gamete producing Terran bark-mammal that has come here exclusively so that I may emphasize the place of humans in the galaxy - as a five-bit dative case legacy business acquisition undergoing government censure for the purposes of expunging failure from the public record!"

There was a brief pause as Seven Desert Streams reviewed their injected dictionary of human-specific insults. Most of it appeared to be oriented around reproductive behavior, which was exasperating if only because it limited the purview of insults they could fling at Alexander. Once the Council session started and the human actually started speaking more extensively, Seven Desert Streams could set to work turning their own words against them - but it would be a while before the remaining delegates arrived. The lexicon would define the limits of emotional duress that could be targeted by the Complex member, which was infuriating. How, in the endless darkness of Countless Ineffable Wonders, did deputized envoys so effortlessly handle it? 

Most of all though, Seven Desert Streams was consumed by a renewed, needling hatred for the menial humans and the paroxysm of their inferior existence, like some kind of dihydrogen monoxide scar on an otherwise perfectly aesthetic ammolite sculpture. Even their physiology was disappointing, apparently only possessing four independent filtration organs with only one redundancy and...

Seven Desert Stream's four lower eyes contracted and then descended into their recesses slightly, and their naked jaw-bones clacked together. Yes, that was it. As soon as the blemish of a human opened its disgusting mouth, the Complex member could begin ridiculing its contemptible body. There would be no negotiation, no concessions or mediation for this council session. That would come afterwards, in the private shipboard diplomatic suites aboard each of the delegates' vessels - and not a moment sooner. For now, it was critical that the masses of the galaxy received the correct message.

The Manifold hated each and every single one of them, and they were only useful for external market-force influx taxation and as chattel.

To say anything else in public would be a sign of weakness. No matter how imbecilic they pretended to be, no matter how inferior they truly were, they all, each of them, possessed a solitary nacre-ridge of mammalian cunning that they used to detect smaller, weaker mammals and eat them. If the Manifold showed any sign of weakness, it would damage their standing, their projection of power and influence in the Galactic scene. The pathetic, feeble facade of compassionate empathy and reason the aliens projected was as transparent as it was hollow, and Seven Desert Streams refused to be the first amongst the Stoor to fall for it.

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[u][b]Two Solid Shadows[/b][/u]

Unfortunately for Grzegorzy, his target did not possess a surgically installed human voicebox - few Stoor within Manifold space had any need of such an augmentation. Fortunately, the Stoor still appeared to recognize what he had said, and there was an interpreter on hand.

The slave was human woman no older than nineteen and, other than a combination mask and backpack for protection from the planet's gravity and air, was entirely naked - their skin was coated with a layer of some partially hardened slime of some sort or another that was protecting them from the brunt of the atmosphere's causticity and radiation, though this was merely a token precaution - such coatings dissolved quickly, and were only intended for brief sojourns. Merely having stopped the slave and the Stoor that owned them as they moved between dwellings likely meant she would receive several permanent chemical burns and scars, and significant radiation poisoning. To the Stoor that probably meant nothing since most human slaves on Two Solid Shadows had a life expectancy of perhaps three days and could be effortlessly replaced, but to her it would probably mean a slow, lingering death involving necrosis and organ failure. Eventually she would fall, unable to continue working, at which point her body would be used as fertilizer for Genestem - if the Stoor didn't eat it whole for dinner.

Predictably not minding such a trifling inconvenience, the Stoor aide - Three Perfect Spheres - stopped and began making several completely incomprehensible oscillating motions with its upper neuropodia. Whatever the massive alien worm was signing, the slave apparently understood it.

"Three Perfect Spheres indicates that serving under Seven Pitted Wheels for the greater advantage of the Manifold is filled with many burdens and hardships which you, as a mere human, would not be able to appreciate or even comprehend, mentally or emotionally." Her voice was clipped and very carefully neutral, but her eyes underneath the filtration mask were pleading.

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[u][b]Cormyrean Territory[/b][/u]

Ifliington's exploratory fleet was not the only force that would be encountering alien lifeforms that day.

Unbeknownst to the five differing nations of the Confederation, approximately two weeks past a single unmanned Manifold scout had detected signs of one of the Nalloth colonies from an adjacent star-system. The rudimentary, animal intelligence the scout possessed had not been expecting to find anything - for when it had surveyed the same locale a mere 300 years prior, it had found no signs of life.

The scout had vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived, long before any of the Nalloth could register anything but ambiguous readings of its presence.

Now, it returned, and it had brought 300 friends to assist in the task of fully scouting out the boundaries of the assuredly vast interstellar empire that had been discovered. Needless to say, when the scouts arrived and managed to collectively map the entirety of the Confederation's territory in less than an hour, it was perplexing. Unfamiliar. 

Unsure of how to proceed, with no exterior signals or traces to follow or home-in on, the Scouts lingered errantly in groups of five at the boundaries of each system, scanning, observing, collecting data on the new intelligent species. The scouts kept their distance from the strange new creatures and their vessels, avoiding contact and steadfastly ignoring any communications. They possessed the means to transmit messages, but lacked the intelligence to assemble any kind of meaningful transmission. They restricted their communiques strictly to tightbeams between themselves, relaying observations.

Although they were dumb, the scouts were not without a degree of analytic power. Their minds were made to record and store patterns and trends, to track them across time, to establish correlations and evaluate statistical eventualities. As they silently watched the Nalloth, more and more data became available, bringing the scouting force closer and closer to their eventual goal - their eventual identification and seizure of an alien vessel. One that could not fight back or run or resist, one containing myriad minds that the masters could dissolve and then distill once it had been brought back to the homeworld.

Then, the Masters would come.

The scouts were dumb, but they were not without a degree of analytic power. Upon having discovered the limited breadth of this new, alien species, they had already possessed enough information on the behavior of the Masters to immediately predict that, when they arrived, they would move to seize control of it entirely. Not by force - the Masters acted in ways subtle and deceitful. But the Masters would come, and they would make the aliens into their chattel.

Of this, each of the individual scouts agreed, there was a virtual certainty.