[A]She pressed further into Moose, letting the rain pull the tingles down from her head and throughout the rest of her body. No matter how many times she had stood here under the rain, it never felt as good as when Moose was forcefully involved. Mostly by her.

  ‘Ah, according to Moose it was a shower, wasn’t it?’

  As always with head rubs, it was hard to really think. Her next thought had to do with licking the water trailing down Moose beside her head. She was too comfortable to move enough for that at the moment, but if Moose kept making her drink the green stuff, she might change her mind.

  It seemed Moose had truly wanted to eat green stuff. So much so that he used too much magic and the green stuff turned back into water. Only now it was green water. Green water that had strange feeling bits that sank to the bottom. The taste at least had become neutral. She didn’t hate it like the green stuff before it turned back into water, but it wasn’t like the disks or a treat either.

  She had really grown too dependent on Moose and his magic. Even now she didn’t want to go back to how she got water before. With Moose’s hard water it was incredibly easy to get as much water as she wanted. Trying the old way was difficult and time consuming. She may not even get enough water if she did things that way!

  Fortunately, Moose had gone back to making the disks. She didn’t know how long the powder would st, but if the green water made it st longer, then she was happy enough to spread things out. The green stuff alone would be too much. She had stopped eating her treats altogether unless she absolutely needed to. It was better to save them for st.

  At least they tasted good on their own.

  Once the storm had dried her, she reluctantly padded behind Moose. Having lost both the warmth from the rain and from Moose, she didn’t like walking back to the ir after their time in the rain room. She wished the rge room Moose used as a ir had been closer at least.

  As Moose got into his nest, she crawled in as well and got on top of him. She didn’t know why, but the sound of Moose under her ear made sleep so easy. She decided to leave thinking for the next day and let the warmth pull her eyes shut.

  She listened the best she could as Moose spoke to her with his rumbly words. As best she could tell, she needed to hold onto Moose or herself and be careful. The rest just left her confused. And slightly worried.

  It seemed there was another wall in the wall they stood before?

  One of the many big walls they had encountered on their travels had the dubious honor of Moose giving it the bel ‘Danger’. It seemed that wall was here in this other wall. How or why that happened she couldn’t figure out, but she did get the impression she wasn’t supposed to touch either wall. Mentally shrugging off the bizarre magic situation she grabbed Moose’s hand with hers. She still held her carrying bnket, which Moose had beled her sack, but that didn’t stop her from using both hands. With magic this hard to understand she didn’t want to take any chances.

  When Moose finally opened the door, he stood still for what seemed to be a long time. Perhaps he was fighting some magic? The other wall was also not present that she could see, maybe that had something to do with his hesitation?

  She didn’t know. All she could see was a great many small lights. A big light had come once Moose had opened the door, but only near the opening. The rest of the room was a mess of blinking small lights.

  Small lights that seemed to be in the shape of words.

  It was very interesting, but she didn’t see anything dangerous. She would never take a chance with the warning Moose had just given her, but she didn’t think she would be targeted at this point. Whatever battle was happening between Moose and the other wall called ‘Danger’, she wasn’t involved and she believed everyone nearby that was involved preferred it that way.

  They would have dragged her into the battle otherwise, right?

  She really did not know how to feel in this situation.

  When Moose had carried a nest into the food pce and told her to not leave, she had thought she misunderstood something. Moose closing the walls to the food pce behind him put that thought to rest and gave way to utter confusion.

  Why did Moose want her walled into the food pce?

  She couldn’t figure that out, so she decided to give her time to practicing the spell for the disks. She had learned a lot of valuable information st time and she felt confident she could accomplish something today. Unfortunately, she had not managed to find all the tools Moose used every time he cast any spell in the food pce. Not before Moose had returned anyways.

  Her confusion only grew more as Moose had her follow him.

  At this point her ck of understanding and the confusion surrounding everything made her start to panic. She had clearly missed something important. It was most likely information, but if she had missed some kind of action she wanted to know where she could run to and hide. As Moose slowly moved into the new room she trailed behind. Still clutching Moose’s hands of course. He was still the safest pce to be right now.

  ‘I never want to face something that makes Moose this cautious.’

  [B]The edibles storage area, while a tremendous find, turned out to be a disturbing set of discoveries concerning their long-term situation.

  There were no fresh consumables.

  He had started his recording of the storage room with the hope that something, anything, would give him a clue to location or time period or anything else he could use to determine the situation. There was nothing like that. Almost everything in the storage was non-perishable. His hopes of finding a nice apple were cruelly dashed.

  ‘I could kill for a nice fruit sad about now.’

  There did seem to be rge ‘lockers’ of things he would think should be frozen, but a quick test with the seaweed seemed to indicate that those ‘lockers’ were some kind of cryo chamber. There were a number of them and they were built in such a way that people couldn’t get in, so they obviously weren’t as advanced as the cryo-pod he had been in. Or at least not as suitable for sapient beings. He didn’t know what half the things in the storage room were, let alone what needed to be cryo frozen, so he didn’t mess with anything but the powder they had already been eating. There seemed to be several boxes with bags of powder in them, so either the system needed to remove that powder every so often to keep functioning or there were enough people to need that kind of supply on a regur basis.

  Or emergency basis, considering the boxes had the word written on the side.

  He would have to slowly test everything here in the storage area after he had reduced the rationing he and the girl were under to be less strict. Once they had both stabilized, he would be able to tell if something was affecting them better. For now, it was best to just use the powder he knew. He did find a few boxes of the choco-sticks as well, though he kept them high up on the shelving and didn’t open anything with the words the box had on it. It was best the girl not realize she could eat nothing but chocote. Diet problems aside, he didn’t want to worry about her system colpsing from only eating a single thing.

  He still didn’t know if the seaweed was edible, or supposed to be edible at least, seeing as how they could eat it. He didn’t bother getting any more and the one he did have had mostly disintegrated at this point. He managed to use some of it for tests, like with the cryo-freezers, but considering the taste he saw that as more than acceptable. His initial thought to dry it out in the oven saw most of it gone, burnt to ash.

  Turned out it was very difficult to dry things when you didn’t know what temperature your oven was at. It took a lot of trial and error, fiddling with the numbers until he figured out which direction they seemed to go in. He had thought he was a better judge of temperature than that, but for some reason the oven always felt simir to him. There might very well be some advanced tech that kept the heat in really well, but all he could feel when the oven was open was hot air. Air that was all a simir temperature hot as well. Other than sticking his hand into the oven, which he avoided doing without a bnket to protect his hand, he just couldn't make out a difference from what came out.

  The sacrifice of the seaweed wasn’t without benefits though. By figuring out where the seaweed burnt or just dried out, he was confident he had managed to work out the numbers. He was guessing of course, hypothesizing that the seaweed would not burn under two-hundred-degrees. Well, in Fahrenheit at least. He figured Celsius would be more accurate, but he had no idea where the different cooking reactions took pce in Celsius. He knew where water boiled, froze and that was it. Same reason he wasn’t using the Kelvin scale.

  As far as he knew, organic matter started to reduce to carbon around the three-hundred-degree mark. He didn’t know the exact number, but since he was figuring that water wouldn’t boil under two hundred, he could make the guessing narrower by testing exactly where things turned into burnt charcoal. Considering most of it was guess work, he figured that it didn’t really matter how accurate the temperature was. He couldn’t even tell what the pressure was so everything could be off by fifty degrees or more.

  All that guess work aside, he basically just turned the oven all the way down and guessed that the symbols were zero. Once the seaweed started to burn, he marked the symbol the farthest left as a three and when nothing happened after a night in the oven he marked the farthest left as a one. He did make sure there were the same number of symbols, so he should be between one hundred and three hundred. He doubted that was what they actually were, the system and numbers were clearly meant for more accuracy than that, but it helped him with transting things to have a direct comparison to what he knew.

  He did manage to get some dried seaweed out of it as well he guessed, but that wasn’t nearly as exciting.

  The dried seaweed didn’t taste any better and they didn’t really come back after they were dried. If they got wet, they just turned into mush. Considering it mostly a lost cause at that point, he made a stock out of the rest of the dried seaweed. It disintegrated in that much water, but that worked fine for him. It would st them a few meals and he could test things, like mixing some into the powder, but he didn’t expect there to be much improvement where the seaweed was concerned.

  He did go back to the power room with his new grasp of numbers. He didn’t know why he bothered, considering they were just as meaningless now that he could guess a couple of them. The only real way to progress there was transting the words and gathering the numbers to add to the data he had collected. He wouldn’t know if there was a problem if he didn’t have a nice rge base line. He wasn’t worried much as he was distracted anyways.

  There were other nuts to crack. Like the one in the shape of a door.

  It took him three full days of poking, transting and re-poking things for him to understand what was going on. The door seemed to be very important, which he expected with the word ‘central’ popping up on the panel. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t allowed in because he needed to ‘authorize’, uh, well…. something. That was where he was stuck. He expected biometrics to be around before now, so not a huge surprise. He didn’t know if things before were being overridden because of his access or if it was built into the panels when he touched them.

  Just to be extra sure, he took his now very clingy kitty and sat her in the mess hall. With the doors closed he figured she would be able to survive pretty much anything that didn’t destroy the entire pce. A short prayer to appease Murphy and a blind guess ter, he held his hand on the panel while he hit the open button and clicked a few yeses. It was hard not to stare as the door hissed open.

  ‘Well now, I guess I need to figure out which of those words is ‘command’. That, and make it very clear to the girl that she shouldn’t touch anything.’