"Just seven by the time we reached this star system. Five by the end of the first year."

...Aly starts looking through her glossary to find more words, then decides it's not urgent enough to divert her attention from maneuvering.

They reach the 'ship' in the cavern's center. There's a ladder bolted to the side of it, leading up to one of its doors.

Edith goes first. Sanjana will bring up the rear. The door, conveniently enough, is currently wide open and the passage beyond it is reasonably easy to navigate under weightless conditions.

Aly follows along.

The vehicles' interior is strange looking compared even to the other bizarre architecture and technology of this world.

Its hallways are narrow, barely wide enough across for a single person to shimmy through in places, due in large part to the numerous odd ends crammed floor to ceiling throughout.

Beneath the clutter, extravagant baroque flourishes poke out: it seems almost as though this vessel were once beautiful and spacious, but had more and more new things bolted into it until it became an untidy mess.

"Home sweet home."

They are here for her "scooter", right?

They reach a somewhat less cramped space dominated by two large blocks of machinery (Aly’s implants label the two as ‘macrofabricator’ and ‘biofabricator’).

The macrofabricator hums. Sanjana approaches a screen beside it and starts tapping in commands.

Aly peers over her shoulder.

"Look here." Edith points at a transparent pane on the back of the macrofabricator. "You can see the assembly chamber at work."

The interior of the machine is brightly lit. The chamber's once pristine walls are encrusted with old rust and stranger things, but the mechanical arms within still glide smoothly.

Over the next couple of minutes, these arms retrieve pieces of metal from a reservoir higher up in the macrofabricator's volume and then fit those pieces together into something very much resembling Aly's old scooter.

"Thank you."

"Of course! You arrived here under such rough circumstances, I'd like to do as much as I can to make up for that."

"Thank you," Aly repeats. And since they are stationary at the moment waiting for the scooter to be done, she looks through her glossary. "How did more people be here?"

"We started with this machine here." Sanjana raps a few knuckles against the room's other large block of densely packed technology, the one labeled 'biofabricator' via holographic optical interface. "After we'd established a better foothold, and had the resources to feed more than just a couple hundred mouths, we fabbed up larger machines to handle the reproductive needs of a growing population."

"Huh." So they just make babies like they make scooters in the machine next door. Weird.

And speaking of scooters...

Ding!

The scooter-making-machine has finished its work. A fully functional scooter floats within its assembly chamber.

Aly isn't sure if it's safe to reach in there. She looks to the others.

"Careful. Some of the pieces might be hot to the touch, at first."

Okay. She waits.

Sanjana powers down the machine, opens the assembly chamber, and then carefully feels down the newly-minted scooter's exterior with the back of her knuckles.

She hums a note to herself, steps back and says: "It's safe to handle."

Aly collects it. She can't really ride it in the floaty areas, but she can fold it, if it's like her own.

She does this by taking hold of the handle and closing the hinge without applying any pressure to the other side.

It folds just fine!

It's a near-perfect mechanical replica to the scooter she had before, though the coloration and texture suggest a slightly different material constitution.

Edith carefully studies the scooter's movement. The way it closes as though guided by an unseen hand.

(They'd had footage of her doing this once before, spinning the wheel without touching it back at Outpost 5, but most had assumed that was just a camera glitch or an unusual property of the specific 'scooter' the stranger had brought with her. Few had believed the girl could truly apply motive force at a distance, but here it is before Edith's own eyes. Just as she'd hoped it'd be)

Nonchalantly, she asks: "Could you explain how you just did that?"

"Um. I can in my language. I need time to think of a sentence for this language. - you can't do that?"