Welcome to Gaia! ::

When Encke had just come out for a bit to clear his head--nothing felt correct anymore, everything felt upside down, everything felt like an impossible tragedy--and to admire the meteor shower, he had expected to see other people out. What he hadn't been expecting, though, was a fellow senshi--basic, by signature--out with a telescope and loudly declaring her admiration of the shower.

It reminded him of Raksha, really, and it brought the ghost of a smile to his lips.

How was she doing?

The youthful excitement about it was probably similar to her, too -- and admittedly, it was something he liked to see. If she was already interested in space events, perhaps it wouldn't be hard to transition her into visiting her planet, which was the first step to lessening the ability of the Negaverse to... take away too much.

"It is, isn't it?" Encke pulled up next to her, adopting an open position with his arms at his sides and a smile that was a bit brighter than he had generally been feeling. "Haven't got tired of watching this yet."

That was a promising response! Exactly the type of person he was looking for!

... He felt like a used car salesman but for a place in space that had been abandoned for years--

Wait, something seemed different about her eyes, though he didn't just want to stare at her to try and figure that out. Maybe he was just seeing things, but then again, "I do!" They easily rolled from thinking about her eyes to continuing the conversation. "Star watching with something that motivated me pretty early on in my time powered. I'm Encke. Nice to meet you, Urania!"

Easily, they offered her their hand.

"You have a telescope I see -- come out here often?"

Long time ago was something he zoned in on, and their conversation had quickly gone from one of him trying to encourage her to go visit her place in space to him trying to figure out when she had gotten there. She was fairly clearly an alien now; so her eyes did look different, then, and maybe it wouldn't be rude to squint just to see if he was seeing that right.

Then again, it was just as easy to take a quick glance when she shook his hand with a little too much enthusiasm. Were those stars? Stars in her eyes? "I've always been fascinated by the stars myself, but it increased considerably when I realized I could go to them."

It was one thing to see the literal stars in her eyes up above them. It was a different one altogether to realize he could stand on an actual comet and see a different sky moving above him, and see visions of a people clearly inhuman. "Might be able to get a Mauvian to help you make it a bit less manual, at least. It would be tech, not magic, but," he snickered, "probably easier."

Especially if she was a recent arrival.

"How long have you been here?"

Encke had to agree with that -- going to them was a bit more fun than looking at them, though these days as he looked up at them, he also imagined the societies that might have been there, the spaces that these societies had developed, how different their skies looked compared to his own...

That being said, he could appreciate the reason why they were all there being that Earth was a lovely place. From what he had seen, the universe seemed dead except for Earth, and he figured that perhaps why they were there was because there was little else. The Velencians were so far an exception. His world had come back to life in a way he had never dreamed (though he wished the people would come back, too, in his furthest dreams).

But the optimistic view of it made him smile a bit stronger than he often had in a while.

"I bet Viatrix would love to help you," he chuckled. "She's my guardian and she honestly loves technology things. She's currently working on a chat app and also is finishing up a world GPS. She's made a whole lab in my basement, honestly. Don't understand half the s**t going on down there..."

She told the time by the Zodiac?

Fascinating.

"Your world uses a Zodiac year? Does the year start in Aries?"

"Bet she'd love to meet you too."

The alien senshi were something between a fascination and a personal project of hers, especially after she had found Dagon and helped her back to the house and through her levels. If Viatrix could do the same for other of the alien senshi, she would feel like she was doing something good there, especially since the alien senshi had all lost so much. She had never run into one that had much of their world still standing.

The story of how her world kept time was fascinating. Urania the planet must not have been terribly far away, and that seemed to track with some of his own space research. That was an asteroid, right? One that could be theoretically spotted with lesser technology than what they used for a lot of things these days to discover all sorts of things in space.

And high festivals?

"What did your world find worth celebrating?" Encke knew the rough timeline of the Enckean Festivals at this point, but experiencing first and yet secondhand was one thing. If she was from Urania, she'd have more direct knowledge, and if she was up to talking cultural things, he'd love to hear them.

That was especially interesting to him in a lot of ways.

For one, he could see the commonalities in his own memories. So far as he could tell, the Enckeans had twelve overarching houses--unless there was one he hadn't thus far remembered--and it was how they determined who their current leader was. In a lot of ways, though, the house was symbolic. It determined where they "belonged" and the leadership cycle, but their society otherwise intermingled.

Uranian society sounded much more tribal than that.

"Enckeans had something similar. We had the Houses -- so far as I can tell, there were twelve at the time of the last Encke. We used it to go through a cycle of the leadership so there would be no fighting over inheritance." Before him, obviously, seeing as there would really be no point in such a system now--

Depressing, but not worth focusing on. His world was thriving.

"So while they were meeting, did you all celebrate?"

That told him a bit more about her world too. They're part of the forest either implied that her home world was entirely a forest, at least when it was thriving, or that the tribes of her people primarily lived in the forest.

These things were all fascinating to him. Even with so much lost, it gave him pieces to hang onto and build off of for a vision of what the cosmos must have once been like, and perhaps would give them all a place to start if the universe was ever a little bit more populated.

He hoped it would be.

"Twelve must have been an important number at some point in history." A history that neither of them would remember anyway-- "That sounds really nice, though! Sounds like a planet-wide potluck essentially, where all of you bring your own things for all of you to share." Might be the kind of thing Caedus would appreciate with how easily he had taken to human cuisine...

Encke paused. "Do you know about potlucks? I feel like that would be the kind of thing you would appreciate."