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empressxmachina · 3 years

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“The Line” | See more from this storyline/universe - Ergo Retrograde - in its gallery here! and the related tags below.

(Stock for photo and greater context under the cut.)

***

“Well, ain’t this just fantastic!? I thought this kind of trash would’ve stopped with Candela choking everyone out, but here you are again, suffocating me like at every damn summit.”

“You’re coming at me!? You’re the scared puppy here! It’s not my fault you won’t listen to reason… or simple criticism!”

“A pot calling the kettle black, huh? Get over yourself, princess.”

To be so opposing in everything, they combated like they had been married for years. For ones so small, they were so very loud.

One couldn’t be more out of their element than being light-years away from home. That and being confined to the Conscience and with its lodgers, the ship itself only having a house’s worth of surrounding walking space, had knocked DeShawn off his rocker. In size, the house in question did fight Euphoria, the station from which the tiny team’s once-unsuspecting trip departed. However, it was nevertheless an unbounded labyrinth of mostly sunless walls. He may not have been the sole, small soul with the opinion, either, but he was the only one to vocalize or, for all he knew from his low angle, show it, exploding from cabin fever up to the heavens one morning after the first meal, unapologetically unafraid to nip at the enormous, ecru hands that just fed them.

Beige body parts controlled by a being so unfathomably large and figuratively otherworldly if the latter wasn’t already the literal case.

Nonchalantly wiping a just-used mug clean in his hand, Kolvyr’s celestial head gazed down at the less-than-cup-sized collective on the dining room table in silence, scanning over the samplings of surprise from the tinies with titles, fear from the civvies, pointed antagonism from a particular captain-companion combo, and the daring, diminutive glare up to him from DeShawn. The little lieutenant and the large lord of the house locked eyes for what felt like days – the tension building enough to make Kiyoko herself need a doctor. Like everything in the end, however, it didn’t last, but it wasn’t easy to say who, if anyone, faltered first.

Every infinitesimal astronaut caught their heart in their throats when Kolvyr glanced to his side for a moment and then suddenly walked away from his audience, footsteps reverberating past corners, down halls, and upstairs with the clink of a now-clean mug set atop a counter in the midst of them.

In the giant’s absence, a tsunami of quietness rushed over the group – dense stress too thick for a laser. Armand, the subdued beacon of wisdom, was the one to break through after a pregnant pause, divulging everyone’s variant yet aligned thoughts with a cheeky “I’m sure there was a better way to go about that.” Its simple veracity did squeak chuckles out of some, but the fatherly tone came at a price: being just like that of the mountain DeShawn just lashed out at. Another glare from the unjaded gentleman was gifted to the giggling gaggle, clamping their lips closed in an instant, except for a gasp from Gale, who was first to notice Kolvyr’s return to the table in a proper day outfit rather than the cotton separates in which he awakened.

Having smartly kept to himself the observation of how the dried streaks and stains in Kolvyr’s cup were uncomfortably close to DeShawn in more ways than one, the horror on Gale’s face was palpable when the casual Colossus raised a Laputan island of a palm up to the table top’s edge. Again, more looks of panic popped across the populace before anyone acknowledged the awkwardness, and again it was Kolvyr to make the first move.

“Did you change your mind?” he queried with softness, light in volume but heavy in heart. His eyes pointed toward DeShawn, showing nothing but patient beckoning, yet the question’s inflections, along with the vista his satellite pupils spanned, framed it for the entire group.

The offer was grand, and against how it looked, its journey was sure to be safe. But the ride was not everyone’s to take, at least not yet, even with little Lemon shaking and wagging in hopes to run to her wit’s content, pushing her handler to hold her back. With cute choruses of ‘No’ or ‘Maybe later’ floating up to Kolvyr, each returned with an understanding grin and nod, the hover-boarding-by-hand initiated and finished as a ride for one.

The fearless, puny passenger took his seat atop one of the palm’s lines, and away he and his breathing magic carpet went, swiftly gliding across the open area of the dining room with rhythmic, slightly muffled drums beating from below and behind. The border wall of blinds blocking the destination was reached in seconds, but the passage had hesitancy. At the unexpected pause and its paired pulse progression, DeShawn looked up at his wielder and found him looking behind them both. The angle of mostly under-chin and nostrils left much to be desired, but it only lasted for a moment. The fabric slats were separated, the glass barrier they hid broke its seal, and a grass jungle soon entered the fray.

***

Life finally allowed a breakaway from an involuntary shipwreck to simply be a tourist. Increased endurance made the distance ran and still running no worse than anything dealt with on a tour of duty. Observing overgrown flora in unobstructed suns’ light, overstimulated by liberation, overseen by a distant, lazy leviathan midway through a magazine on a lawn chair, DeShawn revitalized his system and reveled in his lack of regrets.

He did… until they came to him as if the Conscience crashed again in the form of his most adversarial ally approaching out of nowhere.

“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

DeShawn’s state of calm was immediately broken at the sound and then the sight of a shrilling silhouette in a floral headscarf. Charging through stalks of weeds at him like a bullet train, an emotionally exhausted Rana let him have it,

“For you to be so strung on getting back to your wife and son, do you actually have a death wish, Oldham!?”

“You may be a superior to some, Commander Naaji, but not me,” the junior of the pair cattily reminded her, looking past the subconscious wonder of how she got outside by recalling their unaffiliated factions. He had paused his run while doing so to wipe his blinded eyes of sweat, and he figured the factual statement was an end-all-be-all, resuming his outing in peaceful solitude. But, to his dismay, fate had another idea, and Rana followed, matching DeShawn’s pace with ease.

“I have my rank for a reason,” Rana proudly detailed through metered huffs. “I also… don’t have much to lose, but I’m not letting an innocent child lose his father if I can help it!”

“Such a drama queen; some things never change.” As much as he wanted and tried to sidewind her off his tail with jukes and dekes, DeShawn wasn’t going to leave an argument without winning, let alone give her a chance of doing so with eye contact. “Am I that much of a short-sighted bastard to you that you think I don’t know what I’m doing!?”

If each sharp verbal diss and jab they pulled toward one another was a scrupulous landscaper’s tweezer pluck, Kolvyr would’ve been kicked out of the neighborhood for developing such a barren yard. Left-and-right, up-and-down, the minute militants were moles or at least mites scrounging through the grass blades and each other’s psyches, perhaps only willing to make the verdant strips into slides or surfboards in a happier reincarnation of themselves. But, despite their smallness, their sounds carried.

Rustling, pitter-patters, and the occasional gasps, whether from DeShawn at the onset or enhanced by Rana’s delayed yet expected entrance, Kolvyr caught every exertion… and eventually every exclamation and expletive.

And then he didn’t.

There was only the fluttering aerial fauna and the flora in the breeze until a sudden ringing of his communicator at his hip joined the party, and the bang of the sliding door crashing open came right after. At a glance, neither had a directly visible source, but he could assume both their causes without having to look at his plot and check.

There’d be no point and no time to lose as they wouldn’t be there at all.

***

“Well, ain’t this just fantastic!?”

The onslaught of sass just wouldn’t stop, and it didn’t look like it was going to anytime soon. For every step and outburst Deshawn respectively took away from and through against Rana, she was right on his tail, volleying them like a gold medalist. Replacing his exhausted bits of patience, all he could see was red, and his throat and face shared the same hue.

“I thought this kind of trash would’ve stopped with Candela choking everyone out,” he asserted, “but here you are again, suffocating me like at every damn summit.”

“You’re coming at me!?” Rana fired back, having to readjust her headscarf and tighten her bag’s straps with every other sudden turn or so. “You’re the scared puppy here! It’s not my fault you won’t listen to reason… or simple criticism!”

DeShawn never claimed to be perfect, or so he said, but he quickly pointed out others’ flaws.

“A pot calling the kettle black, huh? Get over yourself, princess.”

To be so opposing in everything, they combated like they had been married for years. For ones so small, they were so very loud. So loud with so much tunnel vision, the only thing one of them saw or heard was the other. If one didn’t know any better, they’d think the pair were destined to fall in love, but there was nothing except a blend of acute hatred and chronic disappointment that only a parent could have to spew from their lips.

“Do you see!?” Rana pleaded through a nearly breaking voice. “This kind of nonsense is why you’re never getting promoted!” At long last, it was this emphasis on his subservience that finally stopped DeShawn in his tracks and made them face each other once again.

Rana jumped at his sudden pivot, not believing that those words, of all she had said, would’ve moved him to dominant submission. Seeing the heaviness behind his eyes, though, she braced herself for a tussle. Reflecting on her defense, DeShawn did the same. The two fighters were readied for battle as their friction had kept them mere seconds from killing each other at all times.

But then roared a referee, silencing them and calling the whole spar off as, “Shit like this… will get… you both… killed!”

The verdant stalks on one side crunched and split, and a predator emerged from them, ready and waiting to pounce. The pairs of puny pupils widened at a familiar face, but it was only when the overhead light suddenly went out that hardened what it meant to see it.

The three souls’ focuses moved to the obstruction and found no cloud.

The slits in the yard’s fences were more than enough space to fit a shrunken soldier and then another, both too distracted by drama to see where they were going and that they had gone anywhere, to begin with. The area right outside of those protective planks may have been solely comfortably dull, vacant residential space to not overshadow Rana and DeShawn’s shouts at each other, but privacy was lost with the cross-country race’s worth of distance. The pair became a plentiful of persons as the duo crashed the celebration of one of the most communal days Ia-Dunn had to offer, and a hard-working custodian was simply doing their job, cleaning up the litter compiling from a sanctioned bike race.

Plucking a bottle top bigger than them with an extended grabber on one side and accidentally crushing a drink can rivaling the Conscience, it was only a matter of time before the giant janitor turned their head to dispose of or detain the diminutive, overly detailed dolls some child likely dropped in excitement… if they weren’t made into stains on their overarching treads without notice first.

The bitty beeline from general suburbia into the park was drawn just at the wrong time to inadvertently intercept the massive means of maintenance in action, though who was to say that an animal proper wouldn’t have gotten them if all the enormous audience and athletes competing weren’t around? Nonetheless, the pocket-sized lieutenant and commander were lined up to be overcome by something there or exhaustive attempts of finding their way back to one gargantuan house of many of which they had never seen the exterior.

They were, but they were instead only swept off the ground like rowdy children back through the barrier of woods they penetrated, having to have the unobstructed view of that colossal cleaner’s subsequent, unwarranted asphyxiation and then flop to catalepsy onto the grass brand itself into their brains as common conurbation greeted them on the other side.

Before either loudmouth could comment on their renewed safety or, heaven forbid, chomp at each other again, their savior abruptly dropped them at the roots of mountainous, manicured bushes edging concrete and confront them on the bigger picture. “How dare you… make me… disable an innocent!?”

When the pain and blinding stars settled from the impact enough to revitalize voices and, of everything, realized guilt, a duet of endless apologies provided Candela a corrupted serenade. Yet, all their compassioned chords rising up from below her shadow sight-read as odiferous odes on the music staff that was her mind, and she didn’t hesitate in switching the key, time, and tempo to recenter composure for everyone’s sake but mostly her own.

“You’d have a better chance of regrowing my right arm from that fucking fruit salad we had this morning than getting an apology through to me!” she hissed through her teeth and pulsating veins on her face, the latter a blend of present anger and recovery from her impromptu, extrapolated spell of paralysis. “You can try one on him, though.” The captain nudged toward a familiar titan down the sidewalk inconspicuously peeking through the trees at the race’s timeout as volunteer medics went to care for the newly collapsed next to a checkpoint, then quickly regained the two twats' attentions by adding, “if he doesn’t make an embrocation out of you first for this fucking headache we have!”

A glow in the fuchsia-locked femme's eyes came as fast as it went, and the trio of tiny souls - one in annoyed patience and two in disgraced depression - braced as slow and softened, patterned tremors approached their leafy shelter, ending there with a sigh from the sky and a simple, eclipsing kneel down to tie his yachts for shoes. Time was of the essence as not all in the vicinity were cretins, and Candela wasted none getting her fellow passengers in her arms again and them all, with another swoop, tucked into one of Kolvyr's cavernous pockets where a patient pointer with paws was waiting as he finished his knot, stood, and started his way back home.

***

They were adults – living dolls, sure, but alive and mature – adults with lives they left behind… and were taken from… somewhat literally by a briefcase that one day. They could’ve taken care of themselves enough to survive an overgrown lawn if they survived a crash landing. So it had only seemed fair to give them some freedom they no longer had.

It had.

Welcome to the Tour de Ia-Duun... or Something Like That ~Autodesk Sketchbook ~DeShawn ~Rana ~[race] Phil Roeder from Des Moines, IA, USA, Worm's Eye View (36993234410), modified, CC BY 2.0 ~treads ~foreground grass ~[grabber] Eddau, Grabber reacher IMG 0499, modified, CC0 1.0 ~can ~[bottle cap] Mikael Häggström, Sports cap (bottle) - open, modified, CC0 1.0 Photo circa January 2021; excerpt circa September 2021. Yes, seriously.

I told y'all I'm still writing. Things just happen in a weird order, okay? I'm always proofreading.

#g/t #my art #my writing #ergo retrograde #the line #sw #sm #giant male #those two fucking hate each other and have for a long time

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