The 25 Bees from the diner boarded the ship and where almost immediately lost from view of anyone who was trying to keep track of them, mingling back into the collective swarm that was the Bees. The Mind, for lack of a better word, went to have a nap, and so ceased to manifest anywhere, dissolving into the collective consciousness of the Bees and let them get on with business. For the most part, that business was the prior mentioned party in the cargo hold which most of the bees called home.

The cargo hold was once a place used to store ice cream, then evil equipment, then a royal treasury, and finally as the storehouse for the supplies for it’s ever changing Space Friends crew until the day when they collected the Bees and locked them in there. Since that day the bees had gradually made it home, so the largest room on the ship now contained what was known either as the Hive or crate town, a vast collection of various shipping crates of various sizes, from waist high too twice as high as the average humanoid, converted into homes for the Bees and set up to look like a small village. This township was complete with roads, streetlights, a school/nursery of sorts, a hospital, various business like buildings homed to specialist bees, a military barracks, a sports arena and finally at the center a large town hall/church looking building. This building held the all important ISF Badge, handbook and notebook as well as anything the else the Bees thought should be held in reverence, mainly anything shiny collected during the Wills time as captain, some of the more decorative prizes received from good deeds done and a polished stone from their homeworld, carved in it’s image. 

Currently there was something of a street festival going on, bees buzzing around, eating, drinking, chatting and playing sports in the arena. The roads had been cleared of their normal traffic of RC cars and toy robot horses/dogs and the bees danced, played squeaky instruments like the mouse pipes and played football in the spaces between their homes. However the bees had long been released from the confines of the hold and could be found anywhere on the ship, some more improvised homes could be found in nooks and crannies for the Bees that liked to be nearer the parts of the ship the were associated with. Also, when it came down to it, the Bees had difficulty sitting still most of the time, so small groups where always aimlessly wandering the halls, [s]making the ship look busy and alive but otherwise not serving any real purpose other than background dressing for the protagonists[/s].

There were, naturally, some things that needed to be done to ensure that the trip would be made successfully, which mainly consisted of checking over all of the maintenance bodges the bees had made to the various ship systems in lieu of an actual mechanic. Bees lugging atmospheric pressure checkers and other equipment much too large for them made sure that all of the patches to the various hull breaches were holding up, that there was no radiation emissions from the reactor or leaky pipes and library applying duct tape if there were any issues. Others performed the almost ritualistic combinations of button presses, lever pulls and thumps with a wrench of various parts of the FTL drive that were required to get it to work properly in preparation for their exit from the system. They fed the weird brainy frog thing that either acted as the receiver for the Universal Position System, as a defense against space demons or was some lost crew members pet. Various batteries were replaced in the odd appliance in the kitchen, pistons and cogs were oiled, the AI was read a bedtime story despite the fact that it never slept, that one room that always had the bed sheet ghosts playing board games in it while the ship was in transit welded shut again, all the seats were put back into the upright position with their tray table up, a solved Sudoku puzzle was ritually sacrificed to the Pet-Rarthian’s god of logic and so on. Most of this stuff was done out of either tradition or superstition, it was unclear how many tasks were actually necessary but the bees would rather not stop one to find out if it was essential and then have part of the ship explode next jump or worse have strange things knock at the airlock trying to tell them about about their lord and savior shU’loar rapmMaz’tor the many nosed’s upcoming album: A Dertulian swivel ostrich in a jellybean factory.  

[hr]
[@Archmage MC]
Some of the bees had found out about Toonys bowl making trick from the dinner and were eager to find out more, a small group found here exploring the ship and excitedly buzzed alongside her as she traveled.

[color=F7DC6F]The bees asked Toony what kind of things she could make, was she limited to simple bowl objects or could she make more complex machines, perhaps miniaturized versions of stuff like sensor equipment, electric toothbrushes or controls for fork lift trucks?[/color]

There were scant few sentient races their size, the bees small brains did not allow for individual neural complexity sufficient enough to allow logical thought but their hive-mind link allowing them to crowd source their intelligence, something unavailable to the more common Solo races of the galaxy. As a result there was not much of a market for machinery their size and the bees were not the best engineers, managing to jury rig simpler smaller devices to work for them, but the possibility of custom made equipment exited them greatly.

[hr]
[@DepressedSoviet] [@Hylozoist]

Up on the bridge the Mind realized it should probably check that they were actually under way. Somewhere behind where behind Elarin was the captain's chair, with its multiple sub chairs seating what looked like a committee of Bees, sitting about trying to look as serious and Captainy as possible while sitting in a myriad of tiny booster seats. A few of their antenna lit up purple and they buzzed over to Elarin so the Mind could check on the flight computer and their pilot.

[color=8E2EF9][b]”Ah, I see you are still with us, how are you holding up my friend? you look like you could do with some sleep.”[/b][/color]   

One of the bees looked over the lizard’s shoulder at the screen. 

[color=8E2EF9][b]”Ice cream? So now we have two hungry robots on board? I will have to see if that Fiddlesticks fellow can have a look at the AI at some point, we never had any luck fixing it but maybe that scatter brain is hiding some genius and he can work out how to patch the darned thing and make it a bit less eccentric”[/b][/color] 

[color=F7DC6F]The Bees on the bridge offered to get the AI some ice cream but are not sure what it would do with it.[/color]