[A]“Moose.”

  She held up the page she had found.

  She didn’t know what it said or why Moose was looking for them, but she got a small treat every time she brought one. She never went far. At least not here near the garden. Moose must have found everything it was looking for in the area near her home, having left and not returned for some time now. They now made frequent trips to the area near the garden.

  She had looked around as best she could in the area near her room, she felt safe and had memorized it. So long as she never entered the magic room with Moose, she had yet to find any dangers lurking. She was quite sure that Moose had fought them all off.

  The area near the garden though?

  She shuddered just thinking about it.

  Moose had only opened the wall once while she had been present. Seeming content to leave it blocked away, Moose rarely even ventured that far. She didn’t know if it preferred the smaller rooms or if there was something it was trying to find. She suspected that Moose was looking for something specific. Even though she got a small treat for every page, most of them were only gnced at before they were set aside and forgotten.

  She had wanted to search in more pces. She had been dissuaded from doing so by Moose though. When she had tried to search in a wall space that was too low for Moose, she had been stopped. She hadn’t understood why, not until Moose took a piece of hard water from the space she had just opened.

  When Moose held it up about as high as its shoulders and let it go, she had been confused. When the hard water touched the ground and broke into a great many pieces, she had begun to understand. Moose didn’t want her searching like she had been. It seemed that Moose didn’t much care for the hard water, but the demonstration was clear enough. Whatever Moose was searching for was fragile. If the hard water could break so easily, she didn’t want to see what happened to something that wasn’t water.

  She had stopped opening things to search after that. If she couldn’t see it from where she was, she wasn’t going to bother it. That had limited her ability to find things of course. She had to go farther away from Moose than she liked in this area. Never far enough to not hear Moose. But sometimes she was behind a wall or corner and that made her heartbeat faster.

  Would she be able to outrun something that would challenge Moose?

  She hoped to never find out. For now, she just enjoyed the small treat Moose handed her and watched as the page was looked over and put aside like the others. She picked it back up and read what she could. There were a lot of words that she had never seen before. Words that seemed to have meaning, but she couldn’t understand what that meaning was. What even was an ‘incubation’ anyways? It seemed to be going well, whatever it was. At least according to the page.

  She had been spending as much time as possible trying to figure out the secret to the book that Moose carried and used to make more words. Truth be told, she much preferred when Moose sat in its nest and did whatever it was doing with the pages that had been brought there. When Moose was in the ir and settled in its nest, she could sit with her back to Moose and read the small book.

  It never ended well of course. The warmth from Moose always fogged her mind somewhat, even now after all the time she had spent in that position. To make things worse, sometimes Moose would rumble as she was trying to read. The feeling of the words Moose was speaking always turned into tingles as they hit her back, making it even more difficult to focus.

  She always wanted to scold her body for distracting her, but at this point she had to admit that her mind enjoyed it just as much. Not as much as the rain room though. She didn’t know what ‘good’ was, but if she repeated the word to Moose, it would rub her head. That never failed to send tingles all over. The warm rain and the tingles from a head rub often left her lost and confused when they stopped and the storm started. They were worth it every time though, that was something she couldn’t deny.

  Things may have been a bit different if she had not accidentally prevented herself from entering her home. Ever since then, she had followed Moose everywhere. Before, if Moose went somewhere she was scared to go, she would simply return and look through the Pages. Now, that wasn’t an option. She couldn’t return. If Moose went somewhere and she didn’t follow, she didn’t know if she would ever see it again. As she still relied on Moose for its magic, she just couldn't take the risk. All of that extra time spent with Moose meant she was exposed to more magic. It was why she could no longer say her mind didn’t like it.

  She barely even thought of her home anymore. Moose’s ir was more likely to come to mind if she even thought of the word.

  She followed Moose down another tunnel. Everything really had changed when she had magic used on her that first time. Thinking back, she had been so afraid of it taking her mind. Of losing the will to say no. Had that happened?

  Was she not able to say no, or did she simply not want to?

  She wanted that thought to be scary. To not know if she didn’t want to or wasn’t able to, should make her panic and do everything to find out. But it just… didn’t. What would she do, give up the warmth? Run away from Moose and never get a head rub again?

  Let the emptiness back in?

  If she couldn’t say no, did it matter, when she was pleased with what she had?

  Her pondering was interrupted by Moose rumbling. There seemed to be another wall like the one near the garden. Moose was doing something near the wall to the tunnel, rumbling things she didn’t catch. It did seem that Moose was having trouble with whatever was going on though.

  Was Moose trying to break into another monster's territory?

  Maybe she didn’t need to stand that close after all.

  [B]Trying to figure out the transtions really set into perspective why he had gotten into computers in the first pce. Human nguage sucked. Especially if you didn’t understand most of it. He had spent almost a week sifting through the papers in the b, desperately trying to find help with the transtions. Every day he spent there he could swear he heard a clock ticking down. He was pretty sure it was in his imagination, the girl seeming to not notice anything, but that either meant he was finally losing it or had gained superpowers.

  It probably didn’t matter which with the situation they were in.

  After the first set of bad news he had managed to transte, he had stopped reading as deeply. It didn’t matter where they were or what was going on here. He needed to know why they were alone and how the facility was powered. That was it. The rest of it could be gone over once he was assured they weren’t in immediate danger. He didn’t know how the facility had been built, but if they were under literally tons of water there was a good chance that a pump going out would be catastrophic.

  It would be especially bad if said pump kept them breathing.

  Unfortunately, the b had been a bust. He had brought a rge stack of papers back to his room for bedtime reading, something to keep the transtions going at least. He was sure the information was incredibly valuable in the right context, but this wasn’t that context. He was going to have to go back to the deck level and search. He was sure it would give him nightmares.

  While he had been hesitant to bring the girl the first few times he had ventured down, now that he knew the stakes he didn’t care much. If he screwed up and pressed the wrong button the whole pce could implode like a tin can. It didn’t much matter where she was in that case.

  She did seem to have lost all fear of him though. After she had crawled into his b the first time, he had thought she would get annoyed at all the man-handling he had to do to make sure she wasn’t in the way. After the third or fourth time, he had guessed she had decided to make it a permanent seat. While he decided that he would need to stick biology and personal space on the teaching list, for the moment he was in too much of a rush to care. If she enjoyed it and they might both turn into goo at any time, let the girl have her fun. So long as she wasn’t the reason they might both die, she had fallen pretty far down the priority list. She was fed and present, that was all he had time for.

  She did earn a higher spot when she had gone poking about a cabinet in one of the deck-level rooms. It had just been beakers, so not a big deal that time, but it highlighted the need to teach her to be careful. After her incident with the griddle, she seemed to be careful around him, but her curiosity still got the better of her. He didn’t know what the beakers were made of, so he did a drop test on a small one. It seemed to be gss. Not future gss either, just regur gss. He guessed it was optimized for temperature, not impacts. He should have expected it for a b, but he hadn’t wanted to dismiss future advancements out of hand.

  After he had cleaned the gss up a little bit, they didn’t really have a trash system, at least that he had found, he had turned to give a lesson to the girl. She seemed to have been spooked by the gss though and wasn’t poking things like she had been. He shrugged and returned to work, figuring it was enough. When she found a paper that could have important information, he had to bring his focus back to her though. He needed to see it, but he didn’t really want to wait until she got bored or just take it from her. He compromised and broke off a small piece of a choco-stick and motioned for a trade. She seemed to agree and took the piece and basically dropped the paper.

  It turned out not to matter of course, the page some kind of data sheet. It had too many numbers to be anything else. He put it aside and went back to his searching. When he heard a chirpy “Moose” behind him he was a bit startled. When he was offered another paper, he was thoroughly confused. It took his brain a bit and a failed attempt to take the paper to realize he was being propositioned for a bit of chocote. He handed over another small piece and received a page in return. Also useless, some kind of inventory. The girl had disappeared again before he finished figuring that out though.

  The third times the charm. Or enemy action. Depending on who you asked.

  He would need to bring more choco-sticks if she was going to be this useful. The only problem being that the rationing really didn’t like treats being snuck out in exchange for hostages. He would need to move up his pns to harvest some of the seafood in the water pnt if he needed to keep spending chocote on papers.

  A tiny handful of choco-sticks and a short story worth of pages ter and he was looking at another ‘industrial’ area. Or at least an area with a bigger door. It was small enough that he was confident that it didn’t have ‘deliveries’, it didn’t seem to need logistics and was only rge enough for several people to leave and enter at the same time, rather than the several vehicle sized doors the others had. The panel seemed to confirm this. It didn’t fsh the same warning that the other doors he had found did.

  He spent some time looking through the options for the panel, but this one seemed pretty bare-bones compared to the others. Pcing his hand on the door and pcing his ear to the door also didn’t reveal anything new.

  “What’s the worst that can happen, we all die? Who wants to live forever anyways.”

  Trying to hype himself up, he went to the option to open the door.

  It was pretty anticlimactic when he was denied.

  “Cool, that’s probably the universe telling me to stop.”

  It was a shame he had authority issues. Writing down the denial and poking around a bit more got him pretty much squat. The door simply refused to budge. It looked like he would actually need to read what the panel was telling him in detail.

  Seeing as how they were currently busy, that would just have to wait. He marked the door down on his map though. It was clear that it was important in some way.

  ‘I guess on the bright side we aren’t dead.’