[A]It was becoming more and more clear just how much she had to learn about the conflict between light and dark.

  It was also now clear that the moose monster had not fixed her trinket. When she attempted to call the darkness to herself in the rooms like the monster had, it never came. However, when she left her trinket in the hall to avoid its protection, the darkness did find it. A confusing turn of events to say the least.

  A few more tests and she found that the darkness would never enter a room she was in, almost as if it was afraid of her. It had no problem finding her trinket when it chose to, which only made things harder to understand.

  Had she been wrong all along and the darkness was a timid thing?

  The darkness had always frightened her. Always hiding the noises and stealing her vision. She could understand the moose monster not being afraid of that, but if she couldn’t see, how could she run away.

  But now?

  Now she had to think about things from a different perspective.

  The Others had always been watching her. Moving about on the other side of the foggy wall, they had always been interested in what she did. But the foggy wall was not always foggy. When it was bright and she wasn’t close to it, it showed her herself. Showed her a copy of her home. It was only when she got close to the wall and the light was blocked that she could see the fogginess and the Others.

  Her test now showed that she didn’t need the trinket to call the light to herself. While the darkness was happy to swallow her trinket once she left it behind, it would never allow her to touch it. She knew that the darkness hid things. She had never once considered that it might be hiding them from her.

  Had she been cursed with light?

  It seemed that the light was far more aggressive than the darkness. It was also clear the light did not like it when the moose monster banished it with its magic, painfully attacking as soon as it was able. If the light had been attempting to blind her from seeing things, what else had she missed because of it?

  With the moose monster prolonging the conflict between the two, it was clear that there was a benefit to having both. She had no doubt the monster could simply choose one to win and the other would have no way to prevent that. Since that was not the case, it meant it was better to be in conflict, though she didn’t know why yet. The moose monster was too cunning for any other conclusion.

  She would never be able to figure out why either if she couldn’t chase away the light.

  These revetions swirled in her mind as she padded back to her home. She had been eager to find the mysteries in the darkness, how the tiny lights survived if at all. Now that she had realized that it was the light that attacked, it answered some of those questions but raised many more. How to escape the light without the moose monsters magic being one of the first.

  Now that she knew her trinket had not worked from the start, she also needed to undo the monster’s work. While she was curious about the monster’s intentions in altering her trinket, how it did and with what were far more important at the moment.

  Settling onto the floor of her home after closing the wall behind her, she set about examining her trinket much more closely than she had before. It seemed the monster had wrapped the strands around the arms and a moment of working those strands saw them slip off. Left with her trinket as she remembered it in one hand and the addition in the other, she set her trinket down.

  When she tugged on the strands a bit more to see how they were attached to the small bnket, they came off with the end in a small circle. It didn’t take her long after that to discover that the small bnket had an opening just like the creation of the moose monster. Growing excited at the discovery, she set about trying to make a copy of the creation.

  ‘It might be smaller but so am I.’

  She was not happy.

  The creation that the moose monster had made seemed so easy when it had been making it. All she had to show for her long stretches of work was a bnket with an opening it had when she got it and some strands she didn’t make. It was frustrating to know her creativity was less than a moose monster.

  She padded through the tunnels once more. It was a strange feeling to be alone without her trinket, but as she had thought, the light refused to leave her behind. A thought that gave her far less comfort now than it would have even a few sleeps ago. She clearly needed to learn more about banishing the light from the moose monster. Among other things.

  The small bnket proved very useful even without the strands attached though. It was even carrying those strands inside itself right now, along with a few of the books from the Pages. She had been hesitant before, the moose monster being a dangerous thing she had tried her best to avoid. As she had watched it and learned of things she had been unaware of however, she realized that she didn’t know what dangerous even was. While the moose monster was indeed dangerous, what else was also dangerous that she had thought safe? The powder? The noises?

  The light?

  She still trusted that the knowledge in the Pages was useful. She didn’t trust that she could understand or find that knowledge on her own anymore though. Perhaps if she kept watching the moose monster, the knowledge in the Pages would become clearer and she would learn on her own. But how long would that take? How many dangerous things would she not know to avoid before then?

  No, it was best to try and speed things up. She had taken only two of the books from the pages, the one that had the depiction of the moose and one that seemed to combine pictures and words. She would show the moose monster the book that spoke about it, show that she knew what it was. Then she would see what knowledge the moose monster could gain from the other book. It had eluded her what that book had been made for, the knowledge in the words made useless by the pictures, but it would be interesting to see what the moose monster could gain.

  It would tell her if she had been looking at the Pages wrong. Tell her what else she may be able to learn.

  When she found the moose monster’s ir open, she began to get excited to see what else she would learn.

  If only it wasn’t empty.

  Again.

  [B]In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have been so excited.

  Finally finding a water processing area had made him lose sight of the bigger picture for a moment. The actually rge area seemed to be some kind of aqua-culture loop. A rge opaque tank he didn’t know the purpose of, several other rge tanks that seemed to be made of a transparent material and a lousy amount of pipes.

  A couple of the transparent tanks seemed to have aquatic life of some description. Fish and shellfish most likely, but he didn’t immediately recognize any of them. All but one of the others seemed to be pnt-based tanks with what looked like seaweed but was probably something else. The st transparent tank was doing some kind of mixing.

  It all seemed clear water to him, though following what pipes he could the system seemed to recircute the water. He would need to know what was in the st tank eventually, but this find pretty much ruled out running out of water. So long as it was just the two of them, they could live on this much water for years without running out and that didn’t take what the system was doing into account.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if the habitat tanks were a bio filter of some kind. He would still have to poke around to see if there were any filters or separation tanks that needed maintenance, but from the look of things the system didn’t need to be touched. It would expin why the future soap was so strange, it was meant to py well with the overall system. The only worrying part was that he didn’t see any sanitizing systems. All of the pipes that seemed to leave the room were rge enough they could have one, but it was strange it wasn’t beled if that was the case.

  He did have to sigh once a thought struck him though.

  ‘I am going to have to count every living thing in those tanks, aren’t I?’

  Not a task he looked forward to. Never anything for free. Unlimited water budget paired with the torture of learning all the things about the system. Possibly a power crisis as well, as the system was way too big for just two people. He hoped that wherever the power was coming from he would be able to understand the readouts, it probably wasn’t a great idea to shut this system down even if he could figure out how. He didn’t think the critters would do so well if things stopped and he didn’t know where to get more. Best to just do what he could to keep everything alive.

  It took him several hours to copy down all the bels he found in the water treatment room. That along side a rough estimate of the numbers in the tanks should give him a fair amount of work to go through once he found a power area.

  He had come down here to fix a problem with the power. Not having to worry about water any longer was a good thing, but it didn’t touch the immediate problem. Either that water system had been working in low power mode and he had screwed up by hitting yes at the panel, or it had been working the whole time. He had been out of cryo long enough for sensitive water creatures to be having issues had that system been off completely. Barring future tech of course. Still, he doubted it had been the thing to change the power situation, as it didn’t appear to be a system that had an ‘off’.

  Stopping at the panel on his way out, he tried to close the big door. To his not surprise, the panel popped up with something simir to the other rge areas he had come across. A lot of words and what were probably options to select and not a bit of it that he understood. Sighing as he continued on his way, leaving the room open, he could only shake his head.

  “I hope that wasn’t a clean room. Or at the very least the whole pce is filtered.”

  In normal operations it was probably a terrible idea to leave open systems like that exposed. Seeing as how he had yet to find any terrestrial life on this level, it was likely not worth the risk to press buttons and hope for the best. He would need to transte the panels before he selected anything on them.

  Another project that kept being pushed down his to-do list.

  Making his way back to more unknown parts of the level, he began working on his map again. If he found more areas like the water one, he would need to think long and hard about opening them. If they were dormant and he started them up again he wasn’t sure things would turn out all that well.

  Tiredly trudging back towards his room was probably not the best course of action. He needed a shower before he went to sleep and he doubted he would want to make the trek after he got back. He had already done far too much walking for his liking.

  He had managed to find two other areas like the water treatment one. Large closed industrial doors, though much smaller than the water area, and a suit of rooms that seemed to hint at a purpose. He assumed the bs near the water area were testing and treatment bs now that he knew where they were located, retive to everything else. These new rooms had no context to help him, as he had not opened the other doors. When the panel popped up asking questions he didn’t have answers to, he had simply copied down what it said and left it behind.

  Once he had gotten some rest and done what transting he could, he would either return to them or continue looking for more, depending on what the panel said. He had needed to return to his level though because he ran out of supplies.

  He really couldn’t justify taking the shelf-stable choco-sticks down with him en-mass, so he only took a couple. It was better to use up the powder first as it was an open bag. Not to mention it gave him a chance to rest and puzzle out the transtions. That meant he couldn’t manage more than two days on the other level though, limiting how much he could find at a time.

  What he found when he made it back to his room might have been more surprising than anything on the other level though. He had expected the girl to be off pying with her new toy. Finding her crouched in his room, staring at him with strings in her hand was quite the shock. She almost looked guilty, though he had no idea why.

  He didn’t put much thought into it though.

  The items spilling out of the pillowcase she seemed to use as a bag were drawing all his attention.