[A]She had stood no chance.

  When she had realized that the moose monster was headed towards the rain room she had understood. It had been gone for a long time, it most likely had to get wet again. Her theory seemed to be true when the monster started its rain magic. As she somewhat enjoyed the magic and didn’t see any reason not to, she had copied what the monster had taught her the st time. When the monster rumbled and held out its hand, she had reached out to grab it.

  What she got instead was a handful of slow water.

  It had sparked her curiosity the st time as well, but as she was trying to hide, not very well she realized now, she hadn’t spent the time to examine it. Poking and maniputing it in as many ways as she could think of, she had only one conclusion to reach.

  It was exactly what she had thought the first time, slow water.

  She still had no answer for why it was a different color, even if she could still see through it, but she had seen the moose monster mixing the powder into water as well. She had also seen it trap water, making it hard enough to hold more water. It was clear that the moose monster was deeply connected to water. If it had mixed something or used its magic to make water slow, that seemed perfectly natural. The fact it made her slippery wasn’t all that strange either. As she had been rubbing herself before she got the slow water, she knew that she became more slippery as the water fell on her.

  Everything made sense.

  As she rubbed the slow water all over herself like the st time, she noticed that the moose monster wasn’t moving. It seemed as still as the walls. She watched for a little while, trying to puzzle out this new behavior, she could find nothing that made sense. Especially since the st time it had seemed to be in a hurry.

  A desire to test her new magic and pure curiosity made her move her hands to the moose monster. She couldn’t reach all the way around the monster the way it had reached around her st time, so she put both hands on one side and said her magic word.

  “Moose.”

  It seemed to work. Either her hands rubbing its side or the magic had pulled its attention back to her and it started moving again. Something she regretted almost immediately.

  Well, her mind regretted. Her body was perfectly happy with the new turn of events.

  It seemed that by calling attention to herself she had made the moose monster actually pay attention to her. After which it seemed to decide that she didn’t have enough magic. The monster got some more slow water and started rubbing her head. The combination of the warm water and head rubbing instantly sent tingles all over her body. Again.

  She really should have learned not to make herself so vulnerable during her experiments. By calling the attention of the monster she now had lost control of her body as it sought out more head rubs. She didn’t know how long that sted, but she did know when it changed. At some point, the monster had stopped rubbing her head and was using only one hand to squeeze her shoulder. It wasn’t as good as the head rubs, but it still sent tingles down her back.

  That was a good thing, as the storm magic made her tense up. She would have run had it been the first time, but she recognized it since she had done this before. She didn’t stay tensed long though, as the head rubs returned and her body did its best to make sure things stayed that way. She only vaguely noticed that they were returning to the monster’s ir.

  Once the monster sat down on its nest, her body decided to get as close as possible, her mind supplying memories of the warmth she had experienced a few times now. The closer she got to the moose monster the more warmth she could feel and the better the head rubs and tingles got. Right up until she realized she had lost.

  Once she was at the point where her mind had started to turn foggy, the monster moved her onto the bed with her back facing up. It then did something with its hand that made the head rubs fade into nothing. She could feel the monster’s hand doing something on her back and then she lost all strength, the tingles too much to endure.

  Strangely, while her body was very happy and utterly powerless, her mind seemed to be clear. It was slow, but fully clear. It was the only reason she was able to understand she had fallen deeply into a trap.

  As she watched the monster pick up the book she had intended to keep from it until the trade, she wanted to protest. To snatch the book and demand it trade. Insultingly, the monster hadn’t even moved fast. It seemed the water had made it ponderous and rexed. She had plenty of time to stop it, plenty of time to move or do anything.

  She couldn’t even work up the energy or desire to speak, let alone move.

  This was the answer to her question she guessed. What could be better than before? This. This was better than before. Was it worth the trade? She had no idea, it was too much work to think that much right now.

  Even more insultingly, the monster didn’t seem interested in the book. The first book she had shown had earned at least enough attention to look through it. This one got nothing more than a short peek before it was set down again.

  The monster pulled the book it normally carried with it out of the bnket creation. When the monster opened it, she could see why her book was discarded. Every page seemed to be filled with enough words to make her book seem as empty as the word walls. The monster didn’t even try to hide it from her vision, though she couldn’t muster enough anything to do something about that.

  If she could steal some of the words in that book then everything would have been worth it. She could only imagine what she could learn, it might even have as much information as the Pages. She would need to come up with a new pn, a way to see as much of the book as possible.

  Soon. She needed a pn soon. Later. After…. yea, after.

  [B]“So, hear me out. It wasn’t a trespassing notice exactly.”

  As he had not only an eager learner but a captive audience, he had decided to think out loud for the time being. His transtions had required the use of both hands from time to time, something the girl had protested. It had only taken a few moments after he stopped the first time for the girl to follow his escaping hand.

  She was currently situated in, what looked like to him at least, a very uncomfortable position draped over his knee. She may very well have had other intentions that first time, but as she had tried to follow his hand into his notebook he had simply returned to his back massage. As she went limp pretty fast, he had simply continued that course of action. If he needed both hands, he switched to rubbing her back with his arm and elbow instead. She was either quite pleased with the situation or had fallen asleep. Both worked for him, but he would continue to think out loud just in case she could absorb the lesson.

  He really didn’t like what he was finding in the transtions anyway, so this way at least he was accomplishing something. The rge text block the panels had shown were some kind of access control. He couldn’t transte the entire thing, but what he had managed basically said, it was a restricted area, his access had been logged and he had to override security. Which was the yes/no at the bottom.

  All fantastic access control things in a working facility.

  Well, aside from a rando like him being able to override it.

  Those words meant something very different to him now that he had been here a while. The first was that wherever they were had restricted access. That meant either under-qualified people would be a danger to themselves or others, or there was something not everyone in the facility was allowed to see. Given that he was currently in what he was assuming was a secret area, it didn’t make much sense to have information control on certain areas on the main level. What he assumed was the main level at least. It would make more sense to simply put those areas up here.

  The second thing it said was that those areas needed special considerations, and likely training, to operate and maintain safely. Probably involving safety gear and the like as well. Areas he had wandered into with nothing but a makeshift backpack. He was lucky the first one he had found was a water area. Had he wandered into a radioactive stockpile or a high-voltage area and poked around like he had, he would be toast. The need to find the purpose of those rooms before he entered had made itself all the more apparent.

  The third thing he was forced to face was the fact he could get in at all. It had to mean one of two things. Either someone had given him full access or access control had been suspended. He wasn’t sure which scared him more. If access control had been suspended, that meant something had happened to all the qualified people that made this pce function. There was either an automated system that noticed the ck of maintenance or someone had started an emergency protocol before whatever happened… well, happened. He was somewhat ok with an automated system. He couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t been shut off before everyone left, but if there was an oopsie that resulted in the emergency systems staying functional he could live with it. It noticed no maintenance being done, opened his cryo-pod and made him the ‘fix-it’ guy.

  No idea how his leg warmer fit into all of that, but it was workable.

  If it was an actual emergency protocol and hadn’t been simply forgotten but had gone off properly, things weren’t so peachy. An emergency that emptied a pce this extensive had to be catastrophic. It would probably be invisible as well. A gas leak, radiation bloom, epidemic. The list went on but none of it was good. Given that the girl was most likely awake before him, given the stashes of choco-sticks, he didn’t think it would be a quick fatality.

  It was possible that whatever it was had caused an evacuation and an automated clean-up, in which case they would have visitors soon enough or he was back to his first theory only it hadn’t been forgotten, simply overzealous.

  Regardless, if a hazard had occurred that cleared the facility, he needed access to the computers as soon as possible to find out what that hazard was. He couldn’t be wandering around trying to find a power pnt if there was a radiation leak.

  The st option…. That one gave him shivers.

  He could think of a couple legitimate reasons to give the man in a cryo-pod full override access to everything in a secret facility. They all revolved around tests and st resorts. If you had a body in cryo sleep and something happened, like they were completely forgotten, that person had to be able to go anywhere they needed in an abandoned or mothballed facility. The optimist reason being that they needed to be able to find a way out. The pessimist reason was that a locked door could prevent them from being able to survive that journey.

  The part that scared him was that kind of override access was likely to be the one, and possibly only, clue to a mastermind or game-master running a human zoo. That or some other entertainment setup. As he had no indication before this that override access had been activated for everyone or that there was a need for it at all, it meant it hadn’t been part of a narrative he was in the middle of or he had missed crucial information that had been id out to push him in that direction. Him finding out with this transtion and no hints beforehand meant he wasn’t really supposed to know.

  “Who would have believed that I would find myself in a situation where the radiation leak was the less scary option?”

  Unfortunately, his smaller companion didn’t seem to have an answer to that question.

  ‘Good thing it was rhetorical.’