[A]Moose wasn’t watching her any longer so she slipped back to the pce where it had made the disks.

  All through the time they had spent in the watery pce, Moose had kept its eye on her. She wasn’t sure why, Moose had never paid her that much attention. Maybe it was making sure she didn’t break anything in the garden?

  That attention became even more clear when Moose had used the big magic near the end.

  She was surprised at first. When Moose touched her head, she had been thinking about her home and hadn’t expected it. Once Moose started to rub her head and the tingles began again, she understood that something was happening. She had thought Moose was just giving her more magic. That she didn’t have enough or wasn’t growing it fast enough.

  All of that was forgotten when the noises started.

  Even her mind hadn’t known what to do. With noises so close, she normally would want to run away. To escape whatever was coming. But these. These noises were far worse than anything she had heard before. Her body refused to move and her mind was filled with nothing but the noise. It pushed out all her thoughts and made it hard to do anything but hear more. It was only Moose and the head rubs that let her do anything at all. All she managed to do even then was to cling to Moose and hope it was strong enough.

  It wasn’t until the heat from clinging to Moose started to loosen her body that she realized there was nothing coming for them. That Moose wasn’t giving her more magic. Everything had been Moose from the start. It had used some great magic to make a wall between them and the garden.

  It wasn’t like what happened at the ir. The small magic there was quiet and the wall closed up fast. It was only a small piece and didn’t seem difficult to do. Moose only needed a moment before the magic was done and the opening closed. Here? Here it was very different. The magic took a long time to finish and Moose seemed to need the magic in her for some reason.

  No, the reason was obvious.

  The wall that formed before her was enormous. Far rger than even Moose. It filled the entire tunnel with its bulk. She doubted even a monster as rge as Moose would be able to break it. The tunnel as well was much rger than almost anything she had seen before. It was clear that this was where Moose spent its time. And where other monsters that could compete with Moose also lived. She could see no other reason to use all that magic on such a big wall otherwise.

  How terrifying must the monsters here be, to compete with Moose?

  She didn’t want to find out. If this was what it took for the garden to be safe, then she would rather not stay here. Not have to deal with the reasons it needed safety in the first pce. She made sure to cling to Moose for the rest of their walk. She didn’t recognize any of these tunnels and didn’t want to risk being separated. She didn’t think she could survive here on her own, especially with her light curse. She would be easy prey.

  She should have been far more wary when Moose used magic on the room that brought them here. It had been strange, but she was more curious than anything. How had Moose made the same opening in the wall lead to different pces? That would be an amazing power to have. To use it to make the opening in her home lead to Moose’s ir. She would never have to walk the tunnels again. Simply appearing where she needed to go.

  But maybe there was a reason. Maybe if Moose did it, other monsters could do it too. If Moose used the magic, other monsters could find it and appear where Moose had been. It would be a good reason. Even Moose couldn’t be everywhere at once. At least she didn’t think so. Even if another monster couldn’t defeat Moose, they could just wait and do whatever they wanted when Moose wasn’t there.

  She would need to memorize exactly where the opening that brought them here was. If other monsters could find it because of the magic, she needed to stay away from it. To run if she heard any noises coming from that direction. After what she had seen, her life might depend on it.

  Even after they had returned to the tunnels she remembered, she had stuck to Moose’s side. She had no idea how the magic worked and didn’t want any mishaps. It wasn’t until Moose started to make more disks that she stepped away.

  It was hard to watch what was happening when she was that close and she wanted that spell.

  It was clear it was complex magic. Not as big as what had been done in the tunnel, but more difficult to do. At least from what she could see. Whenever Moose made a wall, there wasn’t much hand movement or concentration. It seemed that making a wall was simple but took a lot of magic. This seemed to be the opposite, not much magic but a lot of hand movement. Still, it would take more time to memorize it exactly. She didn’t dare try more magic in front of Moose. Even if she was protected for now, if Moose found out she could do lots of magic at some point, it might not give her enough. Or it might not give her any. She didn’t want Moose to know what she could or couldn’t do until she was ready.

  Experimenting on her own was different though.

  Once the disks were finished, Moose set them on one of the surfaces in the food pce and went to the wall. Where it then proceeded to make words pop out. Again. Maybe that spell should be something to study as well. To simply make words appear anywhere would be a great help in learning them.

  As Moose had stopped paying close attention to her after it had set the disks down, she used the distraction caused by the wall words to return to where Moose had made the disks. If she could learn to make the disks on her own she wouldn’t need to worry where Moose had gone.

  ‘Moose used its hands like this, right?’

  [B]‘Ha, finally found the light controls. Too bad they don’t make any sense.’

  He had spent a while trying to determine what the differences were between the water pnt and the mess hall panels. He had managed to narrow down the simirities between them to be something about ‘room controls’. It had thrown him off at first, as the whole thing seemed to be room control, but it appeared he had simply transted it wrong. Or the transtion was right and the future just had a weird taste in bels. Still hard to say.

  The category seemed to have a lot of things inside of it as well. A lot of options he wasn’t goring to explore at the moment. Even the sub-categories for the lights had a lot in it. Lacking any convenient slider or other recognizable element, he didn’t want to py with it and blow out a light bulb.

  He didn’t really have any repcements.

  He would need to check the panel in his room next, to see if he could ‘exit’ the category for controlling the room stuff and ‘go up a level’ into the other things the panel could clearly do. Well, maybe not his room. He didn’t want to brick a panel he actively needed for his room. Sleeping with the lights stuck on would be terrible. His sleeping was already messed up enough.

  Unfortunately, the rest of the panel in the mess hall had different options to the water treatment one. The transtion here was a bit easier, far less complicated words to parse, but it didn’t give him nearly as many options or information as the industrial panel had. There seemed to be some information at least, as well as something he was guessing at being a P.A. system, but he was working off of pure context for both. While he got a lot more words transted here, it was still only one or two in a sentence. Much better than one or two in a paragraph, but still not great for messing about with commercial panels. The information didn’t help him much either. His best guess was environmental information. Temperature, humidity, that kind of thing. Considering he didn’t know the numbers or anything about the units, it was pretty much useless. He could guess at the temperature if he needed to, but temperature units didn’t transte well to power grids or chemical percentages. The things he actually needed to know.

  Not to mention the numbers would just be a rough guess, not nearly enough precision for important things.

  He stretched and yawned as he got up. It had been a long day and he needed a shower. And a good nap. He walked back into the kitchen where the girl was sucking on her finger. A quick gnce at the gridle top showed she had been messing with it, so she probably scalded herself. He didn’t hear her make any noise and didn’t see anything that would indicate it was bad, so he counted it as a lesson on hot things and shood her out the door to the bathroom.

  “I can’t be teaching you everything, but this should make you think twice at least. Let’s go take a shower.”

  He made sure everything was off before he left himself, it being pretty obvious the girl had tried to put everything back to the way it was.

  ‘I can’t teach her to cook or the rationing will go all out of whack. It’s a shame as it could free up a lot of my time.’

  He didn’t know if the girl knew what snuggling was, but he was almost certain that she didn’t realize how badly she wanted it. She seemed surprised every time she woke up. She also didn’t get close to him until she was mostly asleep. Whatever she had been through it was clear human contact had not been a thing for her.

  She didn’t seem afraid of it, clinging to him when she was scared or unsure and leaning into him if she wanted something. But she didn’t seem to be aware that she wanted it either. Almost as if she didn’t know what it was. The more time he spent with the girl, the more certain he was becoming that ‘feral’ wasn’t just a handy description. He still didn’t know why she avoided looking in his eyes, though that could just be shyness for all he knew, but everything else screamed complete isotion to him.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t even realize he was a person.

  Er, well aside from believing he was a moose. Did she think moose were people?

  His sidekick’s wild imagination and strange quirks aside, he was sure he would need to do a lot of work to bring her around to acting like a person. Or a civilized person. He didn’t care much for stuffy manners or ‘societal expectations’, but she would at least need to be able to hold a conversation and understand you don’t walk in front of cars. Or whatever was used for transportation in the future. The basics so that she wouldn’t get pancaked or shot… bsted?... if they ever got out of here.

  Common sense could come after he figured it out for himself.

  Of course that all hinged on them getting out of here. Or even finding out where here was. He had headed to the bs after a pit stop and a food break, intent on finding more papers he could actually read. He needed to find more examples he could use to transte so that he could be safer on the deck level. Radiation leak or no, he would need to find the reason for the power fluctuations at some point. He wasn’t the heroic type, but if they were both gonna die anyways, it would be better for him to jump on that particur grenade. He didn’t think the girl could learn electrical engineering quickly enough to matter.

  She would st longer on what was left anyways. For whatever that was worth.

  With said girl being suspiciously fidgety on their trip, it was clear something was up. Could just feel guilty about the kitchen thing though for all the information she gave off. It is always hard to read someone that had a completely foreign thought process.

  He put it from his mind though, he had a genetics b to ransack and a mysterious facility to keep from shutting down.

  ‘If someone was actually watching us, I hope they got their monies worth. All this constant reading is giving me a headache.’