[A]She didn’t need to wonder anymore. She knew now. Knew that the magic had made her different. Had changed her.

  She was thinking in the rumbly words that Moose spoke.

  She hadn’t noticed when it started. It was only one or two words. Only when she didn’t have anything better to think. It was more now. Almost all the words she thought were the rumbly ones. She only went back to the other words when she didn’t know which rumbly ones to use.

  She couldn’t talk with them yet. The rumbly nature making them difficult for her to say aloud. She also didn’t know how they went together. She knew the words, but the words were always alone. They were all bels of some kind. Always the same magic. Find an object and use your finger to direct the word and its magic. It seemed so simple. Everything had a word. Every word had a pce.

  She knew there were more words, of course. Moose always spoke in the rumbly words. There were clearly words that had not been given to her. Complexities she didn’t grasp. She always knew when he was speaking of a thing they had seen. Knew what was spoken about. But trying to understand what Moose wanted her to do with that thing wasn’t something they had managed to figure out yet. It always came down to gestures in the end. If Moose didn’t simply do it himself.

  There seemed to be some problem with the powder as well. Moose had stopped making the disks as often. When she had watched him eat part of the green stuff in the garden she hadn’t thought that much about it. She had thought it was expected.

  Natural.

  She had expected to return and to eat a disk, the same as any other time. When they returned and she was given some of the green thing after Moose had used magic on it, she had been very confused. She wasn’t a moose, why would she eat green things?

  But the magic had changed her. She couldn’t argue that.

  Had Moose been changing her into a moose?

  Could…. could that happen?

  The thought both thrilled and terrified her. It was terrifying to be changed. Made into something else. Something you didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. How could she still be herself if she was something different. But… that power. To be given the power that Moose wielded. To have that not as a follower of Moose, but at her own command. As a piece of herself. That sent a thrill through her that she couldn’t ignore or expin away. It left only one question really. Did she have to give up everything…

  …Or could she choose how much she would give away?

  To never have to worry about other monsters again, that was worth a lot. She was more than willing to give up the parts of herself that were scared. That wanted to run at every surprising sound. That were lost or confused about what was happening.

  She didn’t want the parts of herself that made things feel bad.

  Moose could have them all. Anytime he wanted.

  She had no way to control things like that though. Even if Moose could speak the other words like her, she wouldn’t know how to communicate her desire. Didn’t know if Moose would even bother to listen. She was already being given magic and food. Already had the emptiness filled and warded away. Demanding more would just be…wrong. If even she didn’t want those parts of herself, how much value could they have?

  That was all assuming that Moose had control over what was happening. She thought he did, had believed he was directing things. But it could be like water, you could stop it going one way but that didn’t mean it would go where you wanted. Moose could just be giving it the right direction.

  She hoped so at least. Moose had seemed very busy tely and hadn’t paid much attention to her.

  If Moose had been directing things and suddenly stopped, she hoped it wouldn’t go out of control. If Moose had a pn and she was being changed for a purpose, she could enjoy the benefits. Even if they came with downsides. If she was just changing at random and she could end up any which way, she would just prefer to remain herself. It was a bit te to worry about things like that though, things had already started. They would end up however they ended up.

  She had thought the green things were the next step of course. That she had enough magic, she now needed to begin eating green things. Whether the change wasn’t as far along as Moose thought, or she had misunderstood why moose ate green things, she found that she didn’t much like the taste of the green thing. She didn’t care much for the texture either. She didn’t know how something could be both chewy and full of strings, but she guessed magic had something to do with it.

  Maybe they were a way to get her to hurry up. After a couple of meals with the green things she was ready to give up just about anything to make the change happen faster. Maybe if she was a full moose they wouldn’t be so bad. She didn’t think she had much hope there, as even Moose seemed to be looking for ways to make them less…. everything.

  It was only after she had compined and refused to eat the green things, tried to make her own disks, that she had learned the problem. Had learned just how little powder was left. She truly regretted closing her room at that point, the stash of treats could have washed the taste from her mouth.

  At least she now knew why she had never seen Moose eat green things before.

  She padded into the new room that Moose had taken over. She didn’t know which monsters were creating the rge walls. She assumed they all could, since Moose had been the first one she had seen do so. Following Moose, she had seen a handful of them so far. Moose had tested each of them. It seemed the rge wall was enough to slow even Moose down. She guessed that made it a very good wall. They still fell to Moose if he chose to try though. That was probably why no monster attempted to recim them.

  Crawling into Moose’s p, she wiggled into the warmth. She hadn’t been able to find any more pages in the area. Moose had spent a lot of time here, seemingly fascinated by the strange things in the room. She had wandered as far as she dared in that time and scavenged the area clean of things Moose would trade a treat for. Her scavenging this time had turned up nothing and had left a chill on her skin, so she did the only thing left to do.

  ‘I hope I don’t leak before we get back to the rain room.’

  [B]He had finally found the power room!

  Too bad he didn’t dare open the stupid thing. The panel had fshed so many warnings at him when he went poking about, he had basically just given up. The panel itself had what he was coming to think of as numbers. There appeared to be ten different symbols at least. They didn’t do him any good as the beling for the panel wasn’t something he could read, but if he could find the information without opening the door, he was happy to keep it closed.

  What he did instead was note down all the numbers he could find, stay near the door for roughly an hour watching said numbers the whole time, then return twice a day to record any changes. While it was very possible that all the numbers had nothing to do with power or were negative or some other situation where looking at them didn’t help, he would at least be informed should they become arming.

  Arming to him at least. They could already be heart-stopping for someone who knew what they meant.

  The number that was currently heart-stopping for him were the ration numbers. Between checking the water pnt and the power panel every day, he didn’t have a lot of time left over for searching. Add in all the walking and that he was sacrificing the calories in his share of the choco-sticks to give the girl trade fodder and he wasn’t doing well. His energy was bottoming out and he could tell he was on the verge of starvation. He did his best not to go that far, aware that he wouldn’t use the remaining food as efficiently if he did, but it was a close thing. They needed to get more calories somehow.

  While his first thought was a fish thing, he didn’t know the purpose of any of the ones in the tank. If he guessed and picked one that was supposed to clear out poisons, food would be the least of their issues. Truthfully, with the numbers he had managed to gather on the various tanks, he didn’t know that there were enough fish things left for eating. Not that would solve the problem anyways. One or two small critters a week would wipe out the tank pretty fast and wouldn’t be enough to notice a change in the rations.

  The seaweed was really the only option. He would need to watch the growth rate, but as long as it wasn’t sucking up poisons, it was rge enough to make a difference. He would just have to use the tank that was farthest from the in-flow and hope for the best. So long as the system was designed to filter things out progressively, the st visible tank growing the seaweed should be mostly clean.

  It did leave him with several problems of course. Considering the tanks were rge enough to swim in and tall enough they may as well be in an aquarium, just getting to the pnts was going to be a…. task. It had been the original reason he hadn’t thought of using the life in the water pnt as food. If they were meant to come out of the tank on a regur basis there would be a way to get to them. Considering he couldn’t spot it, that meant it was locked away somewhere or they were meant to be undisturbed. It was always possible there were automated processes or holding tanks of some kind that he would be aware of if he could read, but he couldn’t.

  He sure as shit was going to learn before he tried to get another pnt though.

  The tops of the tanks were high enough even he didn’t think a fall would leave him unscathed. It was refreshing to have things be proper sized again, he just wished it wasn’t the thing he had to scale just to eat. He did get it though. Climbing and getting the tank open were the hardest parts as well. It seemed the pnts weren’t anchored all that deep in the tank bottom. A bit of metal and a long string with a loop on the end managed to be enough of a fishing rod to snag the pnt well enough to hold through fighting it out of the tank. The pnt was long enough it was between two and three times his own height, whatever that was nowadays, and probably weighed more than the girl did. He took a small bite of course, best to start the testing as soon as he could. He would need to do a lot of work to get it patable though. The only thing he could compare it to was the strings from fresh celery mixed into chewy mush.

  It was a shame they didn’t have any oil. Deep frying may be the only thing that could save it.

  His only ideas were to make a stock or see if cooking it changed anything. Considering it was already mushy, he might try drying some as well. Scratch that, he would need to dry some. There was far too much to eat all at once and he didn’t have a cold box of any description.

  He would keep the root end in a pot of water for now while he experimented though.

  Aside from one fit from the girl about the seaweed, which he wholeheartedly agreed with, things were not terrible. When the seaweed had begun to disintegrate as each part of it died, he had panicked a little. It was clearly not food and was meant to leave the system if it wasn’t alive anymore. Given that it only caused a grumbly belly, he was sure it wasn’t acute poison, but he didn’t want to risk things.

  When he finally managed to transte some pages from the bs near the water pnt, he was terribly disappointed in his priorities. There seemed to be some kind of filling area nearby, but it wasn’t until the girl excitedly brought him a bag that he had managed to work anything out. Though she seemed more interested in the treat than the implications.

  There seemed to be a food b of some description near the water pnt that had an area to fill the bags the powder came in. He still didn’t know how it worked, but there was clearly a renewing supply of the powder. It would expin what happened to the pnts and why they disintegrated.

  A good system if he could make it work.

  He didn’t really start to kick himself until he transted the rest of those papers from that b area when one of them mentioned a long-term edibles storage. It even gave him an area to look in. Such easy success was not making his decision-making look good, that was for sure. It still took him a couple of days to find it of course. One of the rge industrial doors he had left behind before. Now that he had an idea of the area and a hint about what it was, he wasn’t as afraid to open it.

  He would be pretty busy now, there were a lot of numbers to record.

  ‘Once food is out of the way, I am definitely going to check that door that didn’t let me in. Anything with central in the panel has to be important.’