There was nothing but blackness, the distant, cold stars winked softly from the inky expanse of nothing. Against the light reductive layer of his eyes, that distant illumination barely made an impression on his consciousness. Even the slight infrared-sensing rods of his eyes had trouble picking up such a detached source of illumination. The filaments at his back streamed out behind him in slow undulating waves billowing behind him in an attempt to catch light. However, with illumination so distant, his only source of mobility was reduced to all but uselessness. It was a strange feeling, to be immobile in the vacuum to patter along like the helpless humans forced to drag himself by way of the ship to actually get anywhere.

Without the powerful glow of his origin's blue light, he was nothing more than a piece of space debris caught on the rudder of human pity and compassion. It was mildly frustrating, but it was a fair price to pay for the solitude of thought.... the beautiful silence. Once upon a time others had invaded his thoughts knowing his every intention able to guess his every action. They knew him as well as he knew himself, and they had no right to do so. They had persecuted him for his wish, his desire for secret things. They had tried to destroy him for how different he was, but then came the humans, seeming to fly from nowhere on fates own wings to whisk him away from the noise and into the silence.

Gliding slowly with only the grace born of a creature from the blackness, he glided to a slow stop peering in through the observation deck, a silent observer on the outside. He could hear them, just barely over the sound of his own thoughts. Human thoughts were quiet, delicate and difficult to distinguish like trying to hear a conversation through a closed door, but if he was quiet enough, if he was still enough, he could hear them. He could hear their inner dialogues, but those weren't half as loud as the feelings. Human's spoke quietly, but their feelings were broadcasted on powerful waves from their brains as if they wished for the whole world to know. It was a wonder than not all sentient species could hear them, they screamed their feelings so.

He wasn't so used to understanding the human feelings, and so had not noticed them at first, but here, now they seemed so obvious once you payed attention. In the stillness of perpetual freefall, the convict turned slowly onto his back hands cradled behind his head as he closed his eyes and listened. The multitude of human voices flooded through him throbbing in his chest. The feeling was exhilarating like riding some kind of high. He could only manage such an exercise for so long before becoming overwhelmed, but the humans lived like this every day.

He could feel them now one by one popping into his consciousness like the winking of stars in a night sky. If he could have taken a breath, he would have as they washed over him. The first feeling he felt was distant and warm, the ability to know someone without having to be inside their head, the desire to have someone understand you, and knowing that they desired the same thing. It was quite beautiful really, the idea of giving someone consent to view your inner most thoughts to understand your inner most feelings. Conn could only imagine what such a desire meant. Coming from a society that understood your every thought since birth it struck him deeply that such a secretive species with private thoughts would want to share with someone else. It must mean something very important if that was the case. Not only did they have to open up the inside of their heads, but they had to find some way to communicate it using their horribly inadequate language without the ability to broadcast the emotion that went alone with it.

The next sensations was.... Was something he couldn't describe but for his access to the human memory banks. He recoiled at its chill. He didn't understand what cold was, he had never felt it, but the feeling itself was piercing, rending like being picked apart by a thousand needles, but not into his skin, into his very head like torturing his psyche into submission. The cold froze him, made him feel like he couldn't move, couldn't think he was so sluggish, so cold, so isolated. He recoiled from that spot and opened his eyes glancing in through the window. All of the humans he saw there appeared to be happy, they bared their strange white teeth at each other, they laughed, silently to his ears, and they continued about their way. He couldn't imagine someone, someone there, moving with the terrible immobility of that agonizing cold inside them. He drifted away cringing from the feeling, from its total disconnection from the scene before him.

He glided sideways and downwards expertly maneuvering himself over the ship's hull as they rocketed through space, though without any real landmarks, they could have been standing still for all Conn cared. He tucked himself quickly into the nearest crevice and paused surrounded by a cloud of his own tendrils. The crew quarters was close by now, he could already feel their thoughts beating against his, though he couldn't make them out just yet as more than a fluttering of butterfly wings.

He braced his hands against the outside of the hull and closed his eyes.

And was bowled over by a sudden wave of warmth, not heat but still fire, a burning fire, but not painful. It rolled through his insides like molten metal again, not burning, but igniting setting his very synapses to light. It was like someone had taken a star and forced it into his stomach. His insides pulsed with the power, with the warmth, like a fusion reactor. It was like he was expanding outside himself, like his body could no longer contain what the fire had made him. Bolts of lightning ran through his nervous system and though he was weightless in the vastness of space, he could have dissolved into a gracious cloud, no form, nothing but the fire and the lightning, and the warmth. And the heat only grew rising to a crescendo till it was screaming inside him. No, a choir of screaming angels, like the humans might say, alight with their fury and their glory bright and blinding, and powerful. And then just like that, the feeling was gone, he was drifting back into blackness sucked into himself. The lightning retreated from his limbs and the fire abated until there was nothing but ashes left. He shifted a little and shook himself.

He couldn't imagine how humans could do anything else when they were capable of feeling like that. It was an experience his body could not comprehend on any level other than physical comparison. He could not imagine being able to feel that way despite being inside their heads, after all he was merely an observer by proxy, and even then their voices were muffled and distant. He wondered what it must be like to feel like a human, at full force all the time. Somehow they never stopped, rocketing from the highs to the lows in a matter of minutes like it was no problem.

No wonder the humans were so exhausted. No wonder they ventured into the blackness every night. Their nightly agreement with death was a strange one. Escape from your own thoughts for a while, experience the blackness and then return to do it over again. What must it be like, to be so ruled by your emotions, choked by them, that you needed to die every night just to recover. It would be like drowning in an ever stormy ocean with the only reprieve being to sink through the waves and into the depths where there is nothing around but the endless gloom of night just to hang there until your strength returns and you claw your way back to the surface.

He glanced out at the passing stars cradled against the ship as it cut its way through the blackness. So safe and isolated. No one jostled at his head, no one picked at his memories. He was merely an observer, a lonely god on the outside looking in. No one could see him if he didn't want them to, and no one could hear him. It was so perfect, so relaxing.

He closed his eyes again and allowed his mind to drift into the ship. He waited there for a moment as the human's thoughts and feelings rolled by him in a myriad of colors and textures. They were all so different, he could have gazed at them for hours in their strange beauty and wonder, but as he watched, he reached out and caught one, plunging himself inwards immersing himself in the experience as if he was bringing a lens up to his eye. The sensation was an eruption of bubbles in his stomach and in his chest, the feeling wasn't terrible, it was pleasant, no pleasant wasn't the right word. The fizzing rushed around inside him accompanied by shocks of electricity jolting him repeatedly as the bubbles rose their way up his throat and into his mouth. He couldn't keep himself shut, he had to open up or the pressure would build. He was a can of soda and the feeling was forcing its way through him. He wanted to curl up, needed to hug himself and hold his body together worried that he might just fracture apart like the bubbles could leak through his skin and out into space. Like an earthquake, he might just shake himself apart until he rattled right into oblivion.

But then the bubbles contracted, coalescing into lines of pain pulling his body taught against their strings, against their iron cords. His back, his sides, his chest, all wound about with steel cords. They tightened and pulled him closer. The electric shocks kept happening, the bubbles were still there, but the iron cords held him fast. They slowly began to relax after a while only to tighten their constriction at random moments until he was left exhausted head resting against the ship. He shook himself, he didn't understand the pleasant bubbles and the painful stricture, it just didn't make sense in context with each other. The human didn't seem displeased by the sensation, in fact, despite the exhaustion, they were left filled with a surprising sense of warmth.

He let go of that thought and floated away tracing his fingers along the ship's hull as it cut below him. At that moment he caught something, passing into the radius of another thought bubble. This one was loud, the thoughts were loud the voice was loud, there was no wall there like with the other humans. The door had been opened, the wall torn down, the surface of the water had been broken between them. He knew this consciousness, and he reached out to test it feeling a sense of glee in the idea of annoying someone. Being able to tell them one thing and mean another. He could hear the other humans just fine, but they couldn't hear him. This one could hear him, but only when he wanted to make contact with him, he was a broadcaster, but not an open receiver. Conn prepared himself for contact, but paused.

That was odd, there was no dialogue. All humans have a dialogue and it seemed to be running at all times. They spoke inside their heads just like they spoke on the outside of their heads, and it was easy to tell what they were thinking, but now, this one..... There was nothing. He reached out with his other senses looking for an emotion or a sensation, and he found one. He found one quite immediately since it bowled him over like a speeding train.

He was grabbed around the chest squeezed till he thought his innards were going to spill from his mouth and then tossed into the void. It wasn't like the void he knew, comforting and bright, it was..... it was nothingness floating in a vast emptiness of blackness staring towards distant pinpricks of light with the realization he would never reach them never be a part of their light but only be an observer. He was caught where he was with no way to move and no way to fight. He floated there suspended being crushed, paralyzed with only the desire to move towards the light. It was choking, agonizing like being ripped apart.

What was this, what could be so terrible as this. The feeling clawed its way through his insides. He was an observer, on the outside never watching as through thick glass as others moved about freely only to be left on the outside.

The parallels were not lost on him. As if the human feared his existence above all else. The horrible feeling inside was compared to his life every day. He could not understand it, he did not understand it, what could it have been?

He opened his eyes clawing himself away from that horrible feeling opening his eyes only to be caught in the gaze of another. The human stood in front of the observation window, his large unprotected eyes glowering out at Conn as he struggled to regain his composure.

"Spying again, are we Convict." The king human insisted on speaking with his mouth though his thoughts were still quite clear. There were the words he intended to speak and the real meaning behind it.

Mind your own damn business convict, my thoughts are my own.... And you weren't supposed to see that.

Human thoughts were so obvious, they could hide nothing from him, "What was that your highness." Conn asked smugly knowing he would get his answer one way or another.

"What did I just say? Get the hell out of my head you creep."

What is it, this idiot of all creatures should know.... Or perhaps he doesn't he can read minds.....he's never experienced isolation....

Loneliness