Cassiopeia gripped the brush in her teeth, which was unbecoming. She made each stroke violently, as if trying to slash the canvas open, but each time the bristles would part against the unyielding canvas, leaving it uninjured. Benn could see the faultiness of each strike. If given such a ridiculous task, she could break the canvas open with three strikes and half the bristle power Cassiopeia had been alloted. Benn could give Cassiopeia the benefit of the doubt and say she wanted to leave the canvas intact, but there was nothing in those extraneous slices of paint that was worth preserving whatsoever.

Cassiopeia breathed deeply, as if she'd been doing something strenuous, and placed the brush beneath the canvas, where a sturdy cup held her supplies. She looked back to the others. "Your thoughts?"

"It's very-- It's-- um, iiiiit's..." Pechi began. She tilted her head, looking at the frantic miscellany of whites and pinks and dappled prisms on the board, all smeared into a dissonant, frantic mess. "What were you going for, exactly?"

Tabai began, "Art is conscious expression. If this helps her alleviate pressing concern, then it's valid, regardless of our opinions. It's not our corner to censure if she hasn't asked--"

"She just did," Dusty muttered. "Anyways, the problem here is that there are no mechanics here to be found. Even fully abstract art obeys some kind of guiding artistic principle, which is why it's art in the first place, what differentiates it from the natural world. There is some sort of unnatural, not to take the negative connotation of that word, intent which makes it a conscious manifestation of the desires, beliefs, or thoughts of whoever created it, and those principles, those mechanics are what structure it into a format that can be used to judge and interpret it. It's like language. When telling a story, you can break rules, but if you babble incoherently, you aren't communicating anymore. What's the point, then?"

"I'm guessing I'm babbling," Cassiopeia mumbled, tapping the floor with one hoof.

"Just a touch," Dusty said.

"You don't need to indulge her," Alexa said. "This whole conversation is, given current concerns, verging on the absurd. Art is a luxury, so it serves no purpose to us whatsoever, and we're universes away from the next person qualified to judge its quality."

"I already mentioned that the 'point' has nothing at all to do with that, she's trying to get feelings across, and you all are not listening to me," Tabai said.

"I agree, generally, that art without any kind of symbolism or technical skill is defaultly amateur, but maybe we can be a little less confrontational about this?" asked Pechi. "Maybe?"

"She's just venting on a canvas," Benn sniped from her corner.

"Exactly," Tabai said.

"I'm not agreeing with you. It's still stupid," Benn snapped. "Our captain is murdered and everyone comes here to not talk about it and make art."

A heavy sorrow settled over the group like a weight: bearing it didn't make one cry, it hardened one, strengthened their resolve.

Cassiopeia's ears fell. "I slotted in some time to grieve before we talked about it." When this elicited no reaction, she admitted, "I should really be as tactful with my art as I am with planning, or any other activity that requires a serious amount of deliberation. This is just screaming in color." She shook her head. "We only have so much grieving time left, anyways. I don't want to be rude, but it doesn't seem like you all have been taking advantage of it... are none of you upset?!"

At last, Dusty merely admitted, "We're good at hiding it."

Benn leered. "We still don't know how she died. There's no time to be sad when you should be wary. Put your guard down to grieve and they'll have you next."

"Thanks," mumbled Pechi. "I still believe our first matter of business is locating the murder weapon. We found the body stabbed ten times with a long pole, blood pooling out... clever of them to conceal their pawprints by not physically engaging her, but it also points to the murderer being a Canis... would any of you like to speak up? No? Of course there is the issue of someone attempting to frame a Canis, which would lead us back in the other direction. There's a lot of historical precedent for Canii using telekinesis for murder, as to cover tracks, which we'd all be reasonably aware of..." Pechi descended back into almost incoherent mumbling. Benn found herself wondering if anyone had even asked for her opinion on the matter. She had noticed the glance in her direction at the word 'Canis', as if she would stoop to murder with a pole when there were infinite, far more useful methods of murder that would arouse less suspicion. Not to mention the real scope of the issue at paw.

"That ignores that the body was petrified, blood and all," Tabai said at last.

Cassie flinched violently.

"Seraph intervention," Pechi suggested, mercifully brief. So she was capable of using less than ten words in one sentence. "It could have-- well, it could-- I don't even know how it would have penetrated the ship from a distance like this, there's no evidence, and there's no way for it to have magically affected G'ana unless she allowed it to, consensually..."

"So what you're saying is that you've gotten us out of one dead end and into another," said Alexa.

"Well--"

Benn grimaced. "Are we done?"

"Do you have somewhere to go, Benn? That seems a little... suspicious," Alexa's eyes widened, light shining in them like lightning in the heat of a hellish storm, and then narrowed to slits of perfect darkness. Benn felt her heart thrum once in her chest, eager not to betray its fear, and she suppressed whatever murmurings of dissent the traitor in her ribcage might have in mind for her.

"I could stand around in the room keeping up appearances if you want to waste time," Benn said, nostrils flared like a dragon's preemptive to exhaling a swathe of fire. "Or you can pretend that trying to keep to Cassie's stupid schedule makes me an impediment to order. I'm very emotional. I want to fight it out. You all would be free to come, but I don't want you there."

"Let her go," Tabai suggested. "I, myself, would like to leave, if we're done cajoling Cassie's creations."

"Please stop talking like that when you're not charmspeaking," Alexa snapped at Tabai, "It's obnox--"

Her voice was cut off by the slam of the elevator. Benn looked up, even though there was nothing there but the metallic ceiling, and let herself be carried into the sky. She would have begun calculating the gravity based on the counterweight and the length of time to travel up the shaft, but she didn't know the counterweight or the shaft length. Information on their ship regarding menial details only Dusty would ever need to know had, unsurprisingly, never been disclosed. It didn't help that those materials would have the gravity information and settings in the first place, rendering her entire set of calculations moot. She had complained, or at least attempted to, but they didn't really like their muscles with mouths.

Especially not of her ilk.

Benn's ears itched furiously as she returned to the training room. The door slide cleanly away, denying her the satisfaction of throwing it open, and Benn entered, her shadow looming large. She rushed up, turned on her front paws in a motion so seamless that their corner of space seemed to withhold its breath, and kicked the punching bag upwards. It jingled, unfazed by the effort, and as it began sliding down, she calculated its velocity off the angle at which it peaked and prepared for the descent. The next kick was all deliberation, sending it across the ceiling, and she felt the recoil, the equal and opposite reaction, impact her leg. The enemy returned with a vengeance, and she was there to lift it again, until it became a rhythm, a series of calculations to be repeated ad infinitum. She could feel the whirl of graphs peaking in her mind, a euphoria overtaking her with every crunch of false flesh.

It hit the ceiling again. Lie to the fabric on purpose. Kick off-balance. When it swings back the wrong way, take it in a new angle. Create variety. It was hard to force herself not to play correctly, but the minimal variations were otherwise unsatisfying.

If necessary, she could calculate the impact needed to break bone, where to direct it, and how best to approach a swathe of enemies, all within a few clicking moments in the timer that was already whirling on in her mind. A breath was 2.357 seconds, averaged, at this level of exertion, and if she got out her lucky pebble and dropped it, she could account for changes in gravity, too. They had set the rotating outer level of the ship, giant centrifuge that it was, to mimic Omnian gravity, but there was a roughly 1.37 percent margin of error... significant, unusually significant for Omnia, but this was a foreigners' ship they were using. Omnians didn't usually take trips like this. Omnians were too smart to agree for missions in space. Omnians didn't send Viviants, the highest rank of Omnian guard, into space, but their younger sisters, the Vidants, they could be exposed to something more than the mammary gland of magic they called a home, they did not have as much magic to lose when they were out here, isolated. A half-Lapnin's magically enhanced intelligence might dull, but she would keep something, certainly, she would hold onto every calculation she could salvage back from being a dumb bunny.

The punching bag swung back and Benn fell on her ear. She skidded across the too-slick floor (it really would have killed them to install a floor with legitimate friction, rather than this almost-acceptable rubber garbage that barely kept her equipment stable) and found herself up against the door. She rose to her paws, but not before running her needle-sharp claws through her ear as a warning. The familiar relief of pain surged through her, but as she looked up at the door, whose sensor she was approximately... oh, let's say half a pawpad from (stupid, stupid name for standardized measurement. Whose paws?)... she realized that the others were going to see this and assume even more bad things.

Benn took as much skin from the inside of her mouth as she could and ground it under her teeth. She lay on the floor for a moment, desiccating in the silence, and then, deep within the useful part of her ears, she heard the voices ring.

"And you're sure they won't realize?" asked a voice, familiarly deep and dark, like the purr of a thundercloud after it had loosed its lightning.

"Definite, or I wouldn't be talking to you," replied another. See, figurative crap aside, that was just Dusty. Benn could hear the way he kind of wheezed. It betrayed an intellectual's weakness.

"Fix it quickly," Alexa responded. "I'm sick of--"

The next part was hard to catch. They must have been walking down the halls together. Benn busted out of the door, which grazed her fur as it struggled to get out of her way, and found that the pair was already halfway up the hall. Neither turned, shocked by their own incompetence in speaking of such a vital, incriminating plan in front of her door. She might as well have never existed at all. Benn felt fire under her jaws, stirring up in her like a great storm, and she stomped back inside. The door closed behind her. She began hitting the bag with the opposite foot, and eventually moved to cheating, telekinetically hefting the bag again and again. It was easier to do with the feet. That was muscle memory. The resistance up here was so much stronger than back in Omnia.

Though her wits hadn't failed her yet... she could almost approximate how much capacity she'd lost up here, had she wanted, and she guaranteed the percentage was smaller than what her telekinesis had lost. Hybrid faults? No no. It was definitely a Canis thing. The stars didn't want them up here, moving, rearranging, bending the world to their whims. Dusty and Alexa, Tabai too (but who cared) would be weaker. Good information in a fight. Excellent information in a mutiny.
Theirs.

Their mutiny.

... obviously.

Dinner came unceremoniously, with the wail of alarms in every residential room on the ship. Benn only heard it down the hall, but she came out and saw the others waiting for the hallway and faintly remembered a part of a debriefing she had been postulating through. It wasn't as if she routinely received difficult instructions. Benn. We need you to fight this thing. Kill that thing. Shut up, sit down, and listen to whatever the captain tells you. Would G'ana tell her to avenge her murder? That seemed plausible.

Soft sciences, like psychology, pissed Benn off.

She brought the pebble with her, squared neatly between her shoulders and held there telekinetically, to dinner. She took the last elevator trip for express purposes of being alone, because Cassie's enthusiasm, Dusty and Alexa's condescension, Pechi's... everything about Pechi, and Tabai's soft pity, were all unbearable. It was better to count the clicks in each jolt in the shaft. Uniform. So she only needed to multiply some unknown constant by thirty-six to attain the length, plus the landing pads, those counted too.

The others were already at the table when she entered. There wasn't much of a conversation, but there wasn't much in the way of food, either. Entire rooms on the top floor were nothing but preserved, frozen food, and yet here they were, rationed. Benn flicked what looked like it might have been a potato in a past life with her paw. "Who did this?" she asked. "Couldn't we have preserved anything better?"

"Magical means take too long and may not manage in our conditions. We're obliged to take things literally," Tabai expressed.

Benn leered at her.

Across the table, Cassie was staring down at her vegetarian meal. The greens were blackened, forming a wilting salad. The others at least had a bit of meat, even though it was near impossible to make out as meat from this angle, pinkish and sickly, like...

Benn's russet fur spiked, feeling lightened several shades under the glare of machines.

"Do we have leads?" asked Dusty.

Cassie shook her head. "I've spent most of the day, well, I'm trying to formulate a plan, but I did assume we'd be a little closer to our destination by now. Do you two have coordinates? Is that Alexa's job, or is it Dusty's?"

Alexa and Dusty looked at each other. "We'll be there soon, but it's been hard to make approximations," Dusty said, at last. "Does anyone else have anything useful to contribute?"

"We're making light conversation?" Pechi bolted up so quickly she almost knocked the table over. "It's a bad night back home. Heavy storms rolling over the countryside in Opphemria. The whole world takes a deep breath in and waits for an answer it won't attain. For those of you born in the starving moons, this is a time for contemplation, but for those of us born beneath the growing signs, it's a sign of calamity to come. Do you guys know your harvesters? What are your birthdays?"

"No," Tabai said in a hushed whisper, but it was less of an I-don't-know kind of no and more of an I-have-no-intentions-to-tell-you-why-do-you-need-this-information.

"Thanks, that was the opposite of useful. You're getting all this from where, exactly?" asked Dusty.

"The way my plants bend, obviously!" Pechi said with a heavy roll of her eyes.

"That's-- that's just wonderful! Thank you for telling us, Pechi," Cassie said, trying to cut the bemused silence.

"We're not doing base superstition aboard a ship of trained professionals," Dusty said.

"I wouldn't expect anything less from a Canis-majority ship," Tabai said. It was hard to tell if she was being venomous towards Dusty and Alexa or everyone else aboard, but regardless, the intent was poor, and it sat poorly with Benn.

"We're not Canis majority," Dusty said.

Tabai's ears slid back. "What... is that supposed to mean, exactly?"

Alexa's eyes slid in Benn's direction. "You heard him."

The silence grew stiff as a corpse. The table trembled beneath Benn's weight as she put her front paws onto it. Maybe her own front legs were trembling. "Give us an approximate on when we're going to get to the first planet in this system," Benn snapped.

Dusty's eyes widened. "Excuse me?"

"Can you give me an answer?" Benn asked. "Down to five decimal points. That is the precision you'd be working at, wouldn't you?"

"That's a little sudden," Dusty said.

Benn's mouth twitched open, those front two incisors that let everyone in the room know exactly what else ran in her veins. "You murdered G'ana, worked some dark magics on her corpse, and now you're hardly even attempting to keep it covered up. I heard you all talking outside the training room earlier. Did G'ana realize neither of you are competent at your jobs? Was she a threat to you? I assure you there are many, many other Sentients on that ship who are more than willing to fill that position."

Dusty blinked. Neither he nor Alexa looked the least bit disturbed. The other three Sentients looked confused at best, but there was none of the red rage Benn had expected, even counted on. She felt her breath seize up in her chest as she looked at the assembled group, hoping in her hearts of hearts to throw the table over in the next minute. She hoped the food would fly up in their faces and mar all of them. Her ear hurt where she'd cut it.

"Dusty and I were discussing navigation. The seraph has spacial rending ability, as Pechi could confirm. It's being a massive impediment, but we're still heading in the right direction. It's going to be a little harder to navigate than expected, but it's nothing that two professionals can't handle," Alexa said.

"If you'd been sticking to the schedule," advised Cassie, softly, "You would have known that. We already discussed it together. As a group."

Benn's nostrils twitched again. She hit the table with both paws, not calculating for precision, and Alexa's paws hit the table at the same time, as did Tabai's. Between the pair of them, the table remained entirely sedentary, though Cassie's water spilled and rolled across the table. The party stood, facing each other, for a few heartbeats. They were much taller than her, which Benn was used to, but she didn't like it. Her internal counter began rolling again, quickly. If she swung the pebble right now, she could get it in Alexa's eye, but the rest was up to chaos theory.

"Come back! Don't you-- don't you at least want to eat the rest of your dinner?" asked Cassie, anguished, as Benn stood up from the table. The Lapnin-Canis was in the elevator before she got another earful of false sympathy or charmspeak, and she was in her room, her actual room, before she heard another breath. She lifted the stone with telekinesis and calculated its fall again and again. Uniform.

Hits the wall. 0.3954 to the ground. You can calculate the height it hit the wall at off of that and the known gravity constant, but there are other forces to account for... how infinitesimal would air resistance be up here? How infinitesimal was she? This ship?

The door swung open.

"Get out," snarled Benn, her voice hollow with malice. The door shut again. It was definitely Tabai, who was going to become a problem at some point. She could deal with her later.

Benn ran numbers through her head, bolting up primes like she did to calm herself down when she was younger, forming a backbone to reality that would remain constant even in the depths of space. No slander could delude her of the primes, nor did the primes care what she was. Any being, in any dimension or set of dimensions, would understand the primes. They were constant across base-number systems, regardless of gravity, whatever you have it.

Her ear still stinging, Benn remembered first seeing the body. G'ana's mouth hung open, eyes wide and pupils just visible even though the color had dulled to that eerie silver that seemed to coat her body and blood, and there were no answers, no protocol, nothing to do next.

There was no precedent for this.

(A/N: MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMF. These chapters are so fucking long and I'm really not sure I have everything down yet-- if you notice anything askew, please tell me. I'm sure I'll have all these kids down by the end of the month ha ha. Also I just wrote this so we're currently communicating real-time-- don't expect that to last long! Discussion, as always, encouraged in the comments.)