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Doing your best to ignore a sinking suspicion that you are in over your head here, you turn all of your attention to the name of the drone. For now, you will ignore the non-standard pictographs, and focus on what you understand. The second part of the second phrase is as clear as the first phrase – ‘softly’. If your hunch is right, and the second pictographic phrase depicts the drones name, then you just need to untangle whatever is going on with the first portion, and then you are good to go. Something close to ‘footfall’, but outside of the typical rules for synonyms.
Normally, that would be way too broad to work out with just pictographs, but you have to assume that the answer lies with the non-standard stuff drawn around the second phrase. The dash, the five over the eight, and the leaf. Of those three, the leaf seems the most straightforward: the name of the drone has something to do with plants, else, why include it? Yes, perhaps it shares its name – or part of its name – with a plant. Now, ‘plants’ is much broader than ‘near-synonym of footfall’, but as you are space-born and space-bred, so your knowledge of plants is limited – and for your sake, you are going to assume that the programmer’s was as well.
Still, when you start thinking about it, you are surprised at just how many plants that you can name off of the top of your head. Looking to narrow things down further, you consider the other two non-standard pictographs attached to the second phrase – the dash and the five over eight. You consider the dash first. As it is rendered just like a written hyphen, and it is placed deliberately above a conjoining bracket, between two parts of the phrase, then it seems as if it should be taken at face value, as a hyphen. That said, a dash could also be a subtraction sign as easily as a hyphen … however, there <span class="mu-i">is</span> a pictograph for ‘take away’. There is <span class="mu-i">not</span> one for ‘hyphenate’. While you are confident about that reading, it doesn’t do anything to solve what the first part of the second phrase is supposed to be. With it all seeming to hinge on you gleaning the meaning of last non-standard, you stare long and hard at the five over the eight … but nothing comes to you. Unlike the rest of the phrase, the numerals seem completely separate from –
Hold on here! These aren’t pictographs for ‘five’ and ‘eight’, these are the numerals of ‘5’ and ‘8’. Now, a lot of people who can read and write Mainline Pictographic are either fully semi-literate, or at the very least, they know their numbers and how to write some basic words, so odds are good that someone who was able to read the pictographs would also able to understand the numerals – but it feels like a very deliberate decision to have just these two numbers written, and everything else depicted.
