Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

The Lone Hunter

He was hunting.

He liked how that sounded.

Hunting, like he was some sort of predator, like he was human. Funny thing is he knew how people saw him, enjoyed how they reacted to his bone white skin and black coal eyes, the way they flinched when he grinned at them, the way their mouths opened in awe when he floated past. Yes, he did enjoy the way humans reacted to him, despite it being mostly a lie.

Conn was well aware that even the weakest human could pose a threat to him, all they would have to do is take off his gravity belt and he would be a gravity pancake. Starborn weren't predators despite how they looked. He lived off of sunlight and minerals, which he could grind up in the circular configuration of his teeth.

He floated through the sky with an expanse of night stars above him.

A jelly floated past, stopping to greet him before pulling away. The creature's mind was strange, closer to his own than other species, not like Jeffery or Waffles. Conn thought back to Jeffery and waffles, the dog's mind was hazy in some ways sharp in others, her sense of smell was pungent, and the way she understood humans was a haze of love and intense concentration as she tried to understand what was going on. She understood emotions the best, and reacted to changes in perspiration, temperature heartbeat and smell. Jeffery on the other hand was..... well if he had been any smarter he would have been sentient, almost right on the cusp of it.

Conn imagined that he was smarter than any earth animal, even Elephants or chimps. He understood speech in a way that other animals just couldn't. He could follow simple conversations about location and position, and identified new objects with great speed and accuracy, though he did struggle with abstract concepts.

Conn thought Jeffery understood love and hate or at least love and fear, but anything beyond that was too far outside his reach .

The Jelly was an odd mix. It could read minds in the way that he could, so it had an innate understanding of how people felt and what they were thinking, though it didn't fully understand. The one thing it was best at identifying was intentions, so it had the ability to be very friendly. That's why they liked humans so much, because humans liked them, and it was why they paused to let conn pat them before sending them on their way.

Conn floated past the spiral tower, Adam and the crew's new residence, it was like a permanent upscale apartment building with Adam's residence at the top.

Adam and Sunny.

Conn tried not to let his mind range too far here.

There was once upon a time where he would have enjoyed invading Adam's head and pestering him, but these days it felt.... Like an invasion of privacy in a way that it hadn't been before. He knew how odd that sounded coming from him, after all one of his favorite pastimes was invading people's privacy, but somehow this was different.

Unlike Starborn, humand and Drev minds were minds of extremes. The emotions were vivid and piercing and could easily worm their way into his own head, and sometimes he found it difficult to separate himself from the second hand emotions of others, so when, Sunny and Adam were together he was..... flooded with emotions that he knew weren't his pulling him inward.

He saw people in their worst light and their most flattering light.

He saw Adam through the eyes of Sunny, and he saw Adam through the eyes of the prisoners being held in the brig on the ships.

It was hard to keep himself separated from these emotions, sometimes difficult to figure out where they ended and he began.

It was only a pity that he couldn't deny that the jealousy belonged to him and him aloe.