When all three Mahyeta conversed with each other at once, it often wasn't on purpose. One of them would be drifting through space and brush up against another’s presence by accident, prompting the latter to ask her to stay in her space, no pun intended. Or Croix would be glaring Alma down as the next solar eclipse drifted near, daring her to block her glorious rays again, and PJ would ask them to please keep their bickering down this time.
This time, the conversation’s spark was much less aggravating, although Alma still didn't like it. She had woken up from a hundred-year nap to find that the enSekharu were panicking over her absence. She’d spun up a lie about how she’d been busy with otherworldly affairs to placate them, and now she was pacing back and forth in her ethereal form that only other Mahyeta could see: a mass of glittering raw heka overlaid with shimmering waves of light, pulled into a somewhat humanoid form to facilitate her pacing. Magic that was so densely concentrated that a drop of it could crush a mortal like a boulder, even though their instincts provided them with only a vague sense of its existence. Yet the part of her that faced Croix reflected her sunlight all the same, because the moon was destined to be the sun’s facsimile. A fraction of the illumination and size, but just pretty enough to captivate mortals the world over. At least she wasn’t dangerous to look at.
Croix immediately noticed that Alma was stressed, and she didn't try to hide it. She was the best at people-watching out of all of them, and that extended to watching her fellow Mahyeta. Alma felt the light that bounced off of her grow just a bit brighter, as if Croix's currently non-existent eyes were peering at her.
She paused her pacing and said, “Stop staring.” Not said, but projected, a faint pulse of photons because she was very inert for a celestial body. The most she could do was manipulate the light that reached her.
Croix responded with a much stronger wave of heat and light that sounded like “Okay,” but really meant, “I'll stare less obviously.” Great.
Alma hoped the conversation would end right there, but then swirls of blue and green, dashed with brown and white and every other color Earth had to offer, manifested in front of her. It was PJ, looking at frazzled as ever. Her ethereal form was jagged at the edges and a little too transparent, to the point that Alma could nearly make out the green-blue planet spinning behind her.
PJ was gathering silvery, cloud-like swirls of heka around herself, the way a mortal might wrap a blanket around their shoulders. Her sigh was a gust of wind powerful enough to make Alma lose her balance. Why did she have to orbit so closely to two other people? So much space in the universe, and she didn't have any of it.
“Sorry,” PJ said. “The humans are on the verge of being infected with this nasty virus that's spread through fleas in addition to being airborne, but I don't think most of them know that, let alone have sufficient hygiene, and so many of them are going to die within the next few years or decades or centuries and there's going to be so much suffering…”
Alma tuned out for a little bit to gaze at Mars, her next-door neighbor. It felt like a redder, untroubled version of her. PJ never stopped to breathe because Mahyeta didn't need to breathe, so she could spew panicked rambling for as long as she wanted to.
“… And I can't lose focus for too long because a few of my tropical plants that only bloom once every few years will be blooming within the next few months, and I need to be there to make sure that goes smoothly.” PJ finally paused and wrapped her clouds a little tighter. “But all of that is a lot to deal with, so I'm taking a break.”
“A two-day break or a real break?” Alma asked, because PJ barely knew the difference.
“A two-day break is a real break,” PJ insisted.
“You'll change your mind once you try resting for longer.”
“You would say that,” Croix finally chimed in, voice as warm as her light on a spring afternoon to disguise the fact that she was laughing at Alma internally.
“It's not my fault that mortals operate on microscopic timescales compared to us!” Alma crossed the semi-transparent, purple tendrils of heka that served as her arms and continued, “I only meant to sleep for about a decade or so anyway. They don't whine about decade-long absences so much.” By “they” she meant the enSekharu, the only mortals who directly communicated with the Mahyeta. Alma liked the attention they gave her, but she was also grateful that they were the only mortals who spoke to her, because if the entire planet vied for her attention she would fracture into a million pieces.
PJ sucked her teeth, and it sounded like a crack of thunder. “I can't believe you still think like that.”
Oh, no. Not again. Alma didn't bother asking “Like what?” because she already knew the answer.
PJ knew what she was thinking all the same. “You went through all that effort to go behind my back, ignore my boundaries, create a new species, just to get humans’ attention, and now you don't want anything to do with them!”
“That was Croix's idea,” Alma couldn't help but yell. She wished her landmass was just a bit bigger, or that she had some plate tectonics of her own, so that her voice could be as loud as PJ’s. “She goaded me into joining her!”
Unspoken was the fact that Alma had been so easily swayed because she wanted attention too. All the Mahyeta knew it, and explaining the intricacies of her jealousy was too hard, anyway. “I'm not avoiding mortals completely, I'm creating boundaries of my own. I don't have the capacity to involve myself in every aspect of their lives, so I don't. I'd lose my mind otherwise,” she added, tone as pointed as she could make it.
“Every bit of my mind is right here!” PJ formed her clouds into a ring that encircled her entire being, because her mind was scattered across each bit of heka instead of being trapped inside a fragile brain. It was the same for the other Mahyeta, but Alma couldn't help but feel like it didn't help PJ’s case. “I wouldn't be able to manage my natural processes otherwise!”
“We keep saying you don't have to do that consciously—”
“You don't have to do that consciously,” PJ retorted. “I have life to worry about! The process of evolution! I'll repeat myself one more time, because you and Croix fail to understand this: Every single one of my organisms is more important and more delicate than they could ever know, and they all have a unique role. It's my duty to make sure they fulfill that role, and nobody else can do it.”
Croix’s presence stalked a bit closer. She was vaguely feline-shaped, and she often described herself as a cat but with her looming size, Alma felt that sabretooth tiger or lion was more accurate. “Remind me how you do that again? Make sure they fulfill their roles?”
This was where PJ always faltered. Before she could think of a response Croix teased, “I thought that since you didn't invent evolution, you're supposed to watch the mortals like Alma and I. You know, because mortals belong to science and we Mahyeta aren’t meant to interfere with their precious lives — even though by your logic, the viya and netheir belong to Alma and I. Unless I’m missing something? You’re the oldest, so you know more than me.”
PJ’s response was gritted, words scraping against other like tectonic plates. “Their. Evolution. Created. Me. I owe them all the attention I can give. It’s impossible to meddle in the enMahyeta’s lives without affecting the humans, so they’re off-limits to you too.” It didn’t escape Alma’s attention how PJ didn’t deny that she wasn’t supposed to interact with non-enSekharu mortals either.
Croix lazily licked her arm as if she weren’t in the middle of a heated conversation. “Right, right. So, the humans: you didn’t actually create them, which means they’re not really yours, right?”
Now it was Alma’s turn to falter. The Mahyeta had had a thousand versions of this argument, but Croix had never taken it this far before. Alma feared what would happen next, but she didn’t argue, because she couldn’t deny that she agreed with Croix’s words so far.
“They’re my—”
“If Alma and I can’t interact with mortals too much because they’re not ours,” Croix interjected, “then neither can you. Out of the billions of organisms across your landmass, you don’t own a single one. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, but it does mean you don’t have a good reason to worry about them so much. Do you think your watchful eye alone will keep all those humans from catching the plague?”
PJ curled up into a ball, and her clouds formed a fluffy ring around her. “No,” she admitted after a pause that probably lasted one Earth day. All the Mahyeta lost track of tiny increments of time like that, even if some were too high-and-mighty to admit it.
Croix laid down with her paws tucked under her belly, but her grin was all sharp-edged heka and searing rays. “And you can’t save them from the plague, because that’s cheating. The humans will die, the flowers will bloom, and evolution will continue. So you should take a break, a very long break, because they don’t need your presence and you don’t need all this stress.” A single orange-pupiled eye, burning with mischief, manifested in front of her and cast its gaze upon Alma, as if to say, I’m right, aren’t I?
PJ said nothing and trembled, and her cloud ring vanished. Alma cautiously stepped forward to see if she was alright. What did it mean when Mahyeta entered the fetal position? She got her answer just a moment later: PJ exploded with the force of a hundred volcanoes — a real volcano did erupt, Alma heard it — sending the other Mahyeta tumbling light-years away. Alma flew head-over-heels past Mars and right into the asteroid belt. Each misshapen rock pierced and scraped her form, filling her with a horrid, heka-rending pain that only Mahyeta could comprehend. She managed to latch onto a pair of asteroids and steady herself. Even from this far away, she could hear PJ’s endless screams, a chaotic blend of radio waves and gamma rays and everything in between. Croix was too big to have flown as far as Alma did, but she had made it all the way to Mars’s orbital path. If it had been a few months earlier or later, she would’ve crashed into the planet. Instead she held her paws over her ears and cast Alma another glance, this time something like I didn’t mean for this to happen. Yeah, right.
Eventually coherent words pushed through PJ’s screams. “Fine! I will take a ‘real’ break, since nobody here wants me! I’m going to Pluto and I don’t want either of you to follow me!” She twisted herself into a more aerodynamic shape, pointed at the tip with wings like sails, and zipped, spiralled, zig-zagged towards the distant planet. Shrieking all the while because she didn’t have to take a breather, even though she really, really should.
Alma formed moth-like wings of her own and fluttered back to her usual spot, next to her landmass, just as Croix trotted back to hers. She glared at the Mahyet and said, “This is all your fault.”
“She was already upset.” Croix manifested a miniature sun that was about the size of her paw and toyed with it.
“You made it worse!”
“I was trying to get her to take a break, the same as you. And it worked. Besides, we’d been thinking the same thing for millennia. Someone had to say it eventually.”
Alma would’ve rolled her eyes if she felt like manifesting them. “You had all of those thoughts for millennia and you couldn’t think of a better way to word them? She’s not resting now, she’s losing whatever’s left of her mind, and when she comes back she’s going to be even more neurotic.”
Croix batted the miniature sun away and let it roll on and on and into the real sun, where it was swallowed up by the star’s flames. “Okay, you got me. I guess I just wanted her to go away. She complains a lot. I honestly wasn’t expecting her to scream all the way to Pluto, though.”
“She really does, but… Ugh.” Alma transitioned to her humanoid form just so she could nervously chew her thumbnail. And roll her eyes properly, because Croix deserved that. “We need to make this up to her somehow. You have to apologize, and I could… I could get her some medicine. That eruption probably hurt her a lot.”
The downside of having plate tectonics was that every earthquake and eruption “makes your entire being feel like it’s been ripped in half, dragged against itself until it’s sloppily merged back together, and then ripped apart again,” as PJ so delicately described it. But medicinal offerings did make her feel better somehow, even if they didn’t ease the pain entirely. Alma owed the enSekharu another visit anyway. She could spin up some words of wisdom for their Khajaħu unMetnu — the holy text dedicated to her — and hint that PJ needed medicine to recover from…
Should she tell the truth? Telling the mortals about what really happened in space was always risky, but they might not buy the explanation that the all-powerful earth they walked upon had suddenly fallen ill. If she caused a drought or upset the ebb and flow of the tides, they likely would. But if PJ found out she did that, that would make her upset again. Either way, Alma wasn’t sure how the mortals would react if they knew that this predicament was Croix’s fault. If Croix lost followers, she’d be upset too.
Maybe Alma was overthinking things. She could just descend to Sekharu, speak the words that she was certain of, and base the rest of her message off of the mortals’ responses. It was no different than what she normally did. Perhaps she’d take another nap afterwards, to take her mind off of this predicament — on the other side of the solar system, so she didn’t have to hear PJ’s screaming.