Ergo Retrograde (G/t)

Conscientious Comprehension

Links for related pic:

~DA: 

> > pic: https://www.deviantart.com/imperial-radiance/art/Conscientious-Comprehension-882036936

> > words: https://www.deviantart.com/imperial-radiance/art/Conscientious-Comprehension-in-words-882037850

~Tumblr: https://empressxmachina.tumblr.com/post/677361540117200896/conscientious-comprehension-by-imperial-radiance

Going off circadian clocks, it had been almost a week since Team Conscience had last been outside her doors, not that they had any good reason to leave. After being sucked in a wormhole and out onto an overgrown ground for some giant stranger to pluck them up, they had no clue if the open air was safe. All things looked fine – they were lucky enough that the day-night cycle seemed to match perfectly with what they were used to – but who was to say that all the gauges and filters weren't broken upon landing and transit? Nothing could clearly tell them where in the universe they were or if they were even in the same one, and the option to send out a signal for help was a no-go.

To make it worse because it could somehow still be worse, their final destination appeared to be, of all things, a table.

Having to ration the spoils that hadn't yet spoiled in the ship allowed the group to build a bond like nature retreaters around a campfire. Everyone had their own unique set of skills that, in some ways, kept the peace and benefitted everyone in the end, but even outside of necessity, they did anything to keep their minds off what past mistakes led them here was the way.

Their parking space appeared to be in a dining room in what was probably a family home, and it wasn't a spot frequented often... until now... by the one who put them there. After recovering from the blindness emerged from the opening briefcase that carried them, the once-suited colossus that carried it set them down, gave the tattered toy of a vehicle a once-over, and walked away. He – a presumed, now more casual 'he' – and no one else reapproached the Conscience and her travelers until sometime later when he surrounded them with a multitude of supplies.

Trying never to catch his sights, in case their relatively tiny troupe was more enticing than their makeshift, new home itself, they mainly stayed flat and unmoving to the ground or tucked away as far as possible in the sleeping pods, only to peek out to analyze what they couldn't hear or feel. Despina didn't know how to react when, after what could've only been a few seconds of observation long ago, the man-mountain had garnered a near-perfect sketch of the Conscience's top view on a tarp of a sheet of graphing paper. Looking past the impossibility of the outside's size, her studious senses tingled, seeing captions galore circling the dynamic but definitely drawn diagram. Still, even with her databank of languages being multiple handfuls' worth, the alien symbols gave her no springboard except an educated guess of numbers.

Before she could give her hypotheses to the rest of the class, however, they were all shaken off balance when, like when first found, gravity lost its hold, and the sounds of grating came from the heavens they began to rise into.

They were quick to believe those up-and-down, left-to-right noises meant their times as unwanted visitors were coming to an end. Yet, when the cacophony approached the cabin's sides with their broken windows illuminating the inside like a mosaic, a universally evident, heavy hum from above pulled their focus in to see that the terror wasn't yet immediate. Rather than sharps for puncturing and prying, they were met with a forest of bristles, clearing their vista further, some of them getting caught in the cracks and causing that weighted whining. He held the countless quills in one of his distal cages, as the Conscience appeared to be within the other, and ran them across her surface until he had his fill before replacing them with intensely fragrant liquid, spritzing the ship with enough moisture to quell a seasonal drought. The bristles returned for a moment before being switched out for a tent of twined fibers that removed the wetness and left a gorgeous gleam. Another hum escaped from their captor's cavern, one of definite approval, and the teensy team were soon brought back to solid ground, more gently than their elevation but still enough to assign everyone to a meditation session led by Sol later. Its need multiplied further when they noticed their previous view of glazed wood was put at a different angle and had now introduced an absence of color not unlike asphalt as their new floor.