[4-A]She feared there was something wrong with her eyes.

  Once she had fled from the monster and made sure it wasn’t going to follow her back to her home, she had made her way back and looked through the Pages. While most of the Pages had no pictures in them, they were magic and the words helped to create a picture in her mind. But no matter how hard she looked through the Pages with pictures she couldn't find the monster’s match.

  There were far too many Pages to search them all, but she also failed to remember any that had words that made her picture the monster either. She had gotten a clear view of the monster, why was it so hard to find a match? The closest she could find was a picture of a being known as moose, though the picture did not match the monster very well at all.

  Both were rge creatures with lots of hair, but the monster bothering her didn’t have the rge horns that the picture depicted. It also differed in the way it stood and the picture didn’t show the hands and feet, so there were many parts that didn’t fit or she was unsure about.

  Still, it was her best guess as to the monster’s identity. It had nearly cornered her in the rain room, which she now understood was where it liked to stay. The Pages mentioned it liked water and was big enough to not be stopped, which seemed to fit with what she had observed. She would need to watch it some more to see if she could get a better idea of whether it fit what she saw in the Pages.

  Fortunately, the Pages mentioned the moose ate grass and other pnts in the water. She had no idea what a grass or other pnt was, but if it ate things in the rain room then she would not be eaten if she avoided getting trapped again or just stayed outside of it. That just left the danger of getting in its way, though that would be fine so long as she was out of sight of the monster.

  While she had only seen one monster so far, the noises indicated there were many more. Perhaps if she could stay near enough to the first monster it would scare off the others and she could simply learn how to not get in its way. A monster that ate in one pce and could be avoided easily was much better than dealing with an attempt to learn about all the monsters.

  She would learn all she could. Maybe, if she learned enough, she could even make her home safe again.

  Something definitely was wrong.

  She had spent as long as she could watching the monster to the best of her abilities. She had even found little nooks and small spaces to sleep when she grew tired. Even then she had yet to see the monster rest. It had disappeared several times so it could have rested then, but she had seen it doing something, went to rest herself, only to return and it be doing the same thing.

  It seemed the monster truly was a moose, too big to be stopped, even by tiredness. It also visited the rain room several times during her observations, so clearly the Pages had been right about where it ate.

  Still, her excitement at learning the monster’s true identity was washed away when she had found the food pces empty. She had known that the food pce she had always visited before was running low, but she thought she would be ok when she had found the second food pce with a full sack of powder. Now both food pces cked the powder and she was too afraid of encountering other monsters to venture out to find more.

  It seemed she had guessed right about the other monsters, the moose monster seemed to scare all of them away, as the noises stayed far away when it was nearby. It seemed the other monsters were only scared of it when it was active though. When it disappeared, the noises returned and she guessed that the other monsters were growing desperate for food.

  Eating all the powder so quickly meant that she was not safe anymore anywhere that the moose monster wasn’t active. She did manage to scavenge strange floppy disks in the food pce. They were probably scraps left from the other monsters, as they only appeared when the moose monster disappeared, but they were enough to get by for now. They tasted good enough she could also save her treats.

  She didn’t know what the scraps were or how long they would st, so saving all her treats for the time they disappeared for good seemed the best idea. Unfortunately, that meant going to all her stashes and moving them to hiding spots in the moose monster’s area. She wanted to move them all into her home, but if her home was invaded while she was away she would lose everything.

  Best to keep a few stashes close by but protected in the area. She only moved them when the moose monster disappeared though. Anytime she could find it, she watched it as closely as she could without being caught. It might not eat her outside the rain room, but if it cornered her somewhere she couldn’t get away she doubted it would even notice her as it crashed though whatever else was in the way.

  All of her observations had led to some useful discoveries though. Aside from the magic to push away the dark, it also seemed to be able to move parts of the wall with little waves of its hand. It also seemed interested in the words on the walls. The colors seemed to mean something she had never been able to figure out but the words were pointless. Still, the monster seemed hypnotized by them, staring at them for rge periods of time.

  Interesting as that was, the important bit she had learned from it was that the monster sat down on the floor and stopped moving. Stopped for long periods of time no less. She had worked up the courage to get close to the monster a couple of the times it stopped. Still much farther away than when it had almost caught her in the rain room, but close enough to make out its eyes as it stared at the words. Every time she had managed the feat she could hear quite rumblings coming from the monster, the sound so deep it rattled her breath. Every time she had to slink away, quiet as she could, unable to outst the monster and needing sleep.

  Maybe that was how it rested? Could she have mistaken the open eyes as it being awake? Maybe, just maybe it would be safe enough to get close when it was sitting, staring at the walls. She wondered what she would be able to learn then, when she might be able to get close enough to touch it. Something to consider next time she caught it in its strange task.

  Until then, she had another stash to move and needed to get some sleep. All the learning and pondering tiring her mind and body, somehow. She turned a corner and paused. There on the floor in another tunnel was one of her treats. Her mind screamed that something was wrong, but she was tired enough she couldn’t figure out what. She also couldn’t leave the treat here, it would just be eaten by a monster.

  Carefully she padded closer, trying to figure out what was going on. She needed to check the corner before she walked fully out into the tunnel her treat was in, but listening as hard as she could she still heard nothing arming. Creeping close to the corner she tried to look as far around it as possible but saw nothing close enough to her treat to be a problem. Her treat was close enough, she didn’t need to fully enter the tunnel, so she reached out to pick up the treat and blinked in surprise.

  Her body reacted before her mind could figure out how the treat had run away and raced to catch it, only for her to stop as abruptly as she had started. There sat the moose monster, her treat in its hand. Again, her body reacted before her mind as she saw it crush the treat, her hand going out and her foot moving forward.

  What was happening to her, why was her body moving without her?

  She was about to turn and run, wanting to flee before it could stand, but a strange movement with its hand and there was her treat once more, the inedible outside gone.

  Magic.

  She had read of it in the Pages, it was how she knew her trinket had some. She had thought she understood. She knew the moose monster had magic as well since it pushed back the dark and could open walls, but this was well beyond what she had thought she understood.

  Too far beyond.

  To crush her treat to nothing and suddenly be holding it whole with its other hand was a great magic straight from the Pages, something she had never managed to grasp. While her mind grappled with this new information, her body once more moved without her input. She sprang forward to try and grab the treat. The monster was sitting down and they weren’t in the rain room, if she was to stand any chance, now was it, the treats were too important to just leave without trying.

  She failed though, watching in despair as the monster swallowed the treat whole. Unfortunately for her, her body had tried too hard to snatch the treat and crashed headfirst into the monster’s bulk. Slightly disoriented and unable to get her legs under her, she turned so her back was touching the monster, brought her legs into a better position and attempted to spring forward once more, it was time to escape.

  It seemed that her luck had run out however. As all of that was happening, she felt a strange warmth passing through her. Looking down in horror, she watched as the monster’s hand pulled another treat from her belly. It…

  It was trying to steal one of the treats she had already eaten!

  The strange feeling pushed her limbs forward once more before her mind had time to fully process what she had just lost. She grabbed the monster’s hand and took the treat for herself, stuffing it into her mouth as quickly as possible before the monster could swallow it whole as well.

  She wouldn’t…

  she would……

  Her mind went bnk and the warm feeling from before returned. Only it returned so much stronger and brought with it pleasant tingles that fell all the way down her back.

  She wanted to panic, to kick and scream and run away.

  Her body refused her. It wanted nothing more than to wallow in the warm tingles.

  Her mind eventually conquered her body though and she managed to spring from the monster’s grasp. She nded on her knees and had to scramble to get back to her feet and run away, though as she rounded the corner and looked back to where the monster was, the look on its face caused more warmth to spread through her body and brought back the recent memories of the tingles.

  Before her body tried to rebel again, she started running as quickly as she could. It was not her fastest or quickest escape, but she had gotten away…

  Right?

  As her body ran towards safety, her mind tried to repy what had happened.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster had gotten exactly what it wanted.

  Whatever it had wanted.

  It was clear she had had magic used on her. If the warmth wasn’t enough to convince her, the rest of the encounter did. She had managed to take back control of her body at the end, so she had gotten stronger, but it was a near thing. She didn’t want to imagine what would have happened had she simply allowed it to continue or failed to break free. With some more practice she may even be able to resist every magic the monster had, though it would be a dangerous thing to try.

  Maybe, just maybe, she could even tame the monster.

  If she could control the monster, she would be safe from everything else and wouldn’t even need to worry about being crushed. Maybe she could even learn how to use its magic herself.

  Warmth spread through her at her next thought, as she considered if training the monster to follow commands would let her feel the tingles anytime she wanted.

  [4-B]Heart attacks might not be great for his health but at least it had knocked out the more ‘supernatural’ theories he had.

  That and the automatic flush gong off in the bathroom.

  Unless these high-tech auto-toilets detected ghosts as well.

  In which case, well…

  “They were high css apparitions and deserved a high five for being civilized, uh, beings.”

  … Waiting a few seconds and not seeing any ‘other-natural’ signs or compints, he felt it was fairly safe to put those theories to the back and try something a little more future centric and a lot less fantasy.

  He had of course thought of the possibility that he was being avoided, but he couldn’t come up with any reason why people advanced enough to build whatever this pce was would need to do so.

  Considering his new close encounter, it seemed he needed to reevaluate that line of thought.

  There was always the possibility of generational degradation of knowledge, but he really really didn’t want to consider that scenario. It would mean he had been in that cryo-pod for a hell of a lot longer than he could even guess. Seeing as how the tech wasn’t so far advanced he didn’t understand it, smart money was on that not being the case.

  It still wasn’t something he wanted to contempte though.

  That meant the only other possibility at the current point was a knowledge gap cause by a disaster, hence his zombie scouting, as disease or attacks were at the top of the list of possible causes. That or he was some kind of human zoo exhibit and his newest discovery was there to keep things interesting.

  He could handle being an exhibit, it meant he would get more food when the stuff that was here ran out, though beyond that there wasn’t much reason to pursue that line of reasoning, as he would never figure it out if he wasn’t supposed to. Outwitting a game master in something this complex wasn’t exactly a productive use of time. The disaster scenario was not nearly as survivable, so it was better to focus his efforts there for now.

  Not much he could do in either case until he got more information though. Just keep making a map and making sure he was paying more attention for small ‘visitors’ in the future. That and continue trying to decipher the literal writing on the wall.

  He was making progress there, but events conspired against academic pursuits at the moment. With most of the doors being closed, his progress on the map was also going well and he would be done the initial sweep soon. At that point he would have to start opening things that may be better off closed and he wasn’t looking forward to that.

  Maybe starting with the bedrooms, they only rarely hid the horrific science experiments.

  It seemed that automatic things had their perks in a stalking scenario.

  What he had initially put down to lights flickering seemed to be his new visitor spying on him from afar. Hard to miss now that he knew what to look for.

  She was damn good at hiding though, he would give her that. Since he knew about her presence now it was stupidly simple to pte up some not fpjacks and hide the powder somewhere high up. He just had to sit in one of the adjacent rooms that had a view of the mess hall with the light dimmed way down.

  The auto lights seemed to ignore anyone in a room and he could actually control the light in the smaller individual rooms. He hadn’t figured out how to do so in the rger communal rooms yet, but he knew where the panel was. It was just a much more complicated thing than the smaller rooms. He wasn’t about to start randomly hitting buttons in areas that could end with gas explosions or electric overloads.

  Still, even with that it was a simple enough trap to set and sure enough his little jump scare eventually came padding into the mess hall, quiet as a cat and twice as skittish of every little noise. She seemed to be holding a cat as well, or at least a stuffed version of one. It was adorable to watch her push the stuffed toy into the mess hall to get the lights to come on, though he shuddered to think of what kind of life led to her being that scared of an empty room.

  Ah… he supposed she didn’t know it was empty anymore.

  That little bathroom encounter may very well have ruined two sets of underpants, if either of them had clothes of any kind. It at least let him see that the little adrenaline shot was female, though he was quite far away to be able to get any kind of real detail.

  Helped him figure out next steps though, as he watched her search for the powder, not find it and reluctantly head for the not fp jacks. If she was eating the powder as well, it was a good indication it was the only thing to eat around here. Probably best than to not let her have any more, as cooking it let them stretch their rations farther than eating it raw, since it was more filling that way.

  He would have to redo his math as well, though he needed to find out how much she needed to eat before he could tell by how much. Making them all the same size and progressively leaving more until she stopped eating them all would be the best way to do it, though it was likely only two or three as he was only eating roughly double that.

  Cutting the rationing in half would just see him delirious then dead as he was already eating as little as possible, so finding out exactly what she needed would let them stretch this out as long as possible. She seemed to have at least a little forethought as she didn’t seem to have much meat on her own bones, which meant she hadn’t just filled up on the powder before now. Assuming she was here before he woke up to begin with, which may be a mistake, but he wasn’t going to change that assumption for the moment.

  Unfortunately for him, the next step to that was getting the girl to trust him. It made it very difficult to pn survival when half the survivors were stalking about the pce like it was a deadly jungle.

  It also made him paranoid. What did she know that he didn’t? The initial sweep hadn’t turned up anything that was immediately attention grabbing, but the girl was more than capable of opening doors, as she was tall enough to reach the panels. If she was stalking around all quiet like, there was a good reason.

  If that reason was him that was fine. Seeing as how he hadn’t run into her before the bathroom incident meant she either knew of him before that and was avoiding him or she was already hiding from something else. He wouldn’t be able to find out which until he got her to sit and talk, so they really needed to have a discussion.

  So that’s what he set about doing.

  A bit of revenge stalking ter, as she never stopped trying to stalk him, he managed to ferret out that she had stashes of something hidden around the various open rooms. They looked suspiciously like something he had stumbled across in the higher cabinets in the kitchen, though he had dismissed them at the time. They appeared to be edible though, so he returned to check things out.

  They turned out to be some kind of sorta-chocote bar thing. Not his favorite but calories were calories. They were good enough to lure the girl as well.

  Better than not fp jacks at the very least.

  A few days of trap jacks and watching where she went afterwards, he was fairly sure he could get ahead of her on her little expeditions. He had to channel all his efforts into being silent to do it, as she bolted at the slightest noise.

  Quietly bolted too, the girl needed a damn bell.

  Still, with a string from a picked apart bead sheet tied to an empty choco-stick wrapper, he set the ‘prize’ in a spot she would see if she came in his direction, while he sat back far enough to not be in view immediately. If she didn’t come this way, he could try again elsewhere but getting it over with was a ‘faster the better’ kind of deal.

  He picked correctly though, and she poked her hand out round the corner, so he started pulling in the string. She rushed around the corner to catch the errant snack stick and froze when she saw him sitting there. He managed to get a good view this time, but she seemed about to flee again so his brain fumbled for something and nded on kid’s party tricks.

  Too bad he wasn’t very good at them. Still, crumbled wrapper in one hand and the snack stick he was going to give her anyways in the other, he put on the best show he could to get her to stick around. A ‘disappeared’ snack stick dropping down his back where his other hand was getting rid of the wrapper got her to stick around as expected.

  He did not expect a headbutt to the chest, but she was so light it probably hurt her more than him. Still, it dropped her in his p and got her close enough he could ‘appear’ the elusive snack stick from the hand near her stomach.

  Partly to keep her attention away from where she was and focused on the show. Mostly so he could make sure she didn’t appear to have any obvious medical issues to worry about, the food being his biggest worry in this pce so far.

  Though, once again she did the unexpected and grabbed his hand. Probably to snatch the treat, but he had been sure she was afraid of him and wouldn’t want to touch him at all. He filed that info away for ter and took the chance while she was occupied with the snack to start massaging her scalp, checking if there was anything wrong there as well.

  Best to use the unexpected situation to gain as much info as possible.

  It seemed to spark an internal debate within his skittish audience though, so he continued with both hands to get her used to his presence.

  That seemed to make whatever decision she was debating harder, but she eventually sprang out of his p and nded unceremoniously on the floor. Her scrambling to stand let him get a good look at her back, which also seemed fine, and off she went with only a quick gnce back at him.

  The smirk he had at the pn’s unexpected bonuses probably didn’t help his chances of convincing her it was in her best interest, but it had gone so well he couldn’t help but be happy at the outcome.

  She seemed healthy enough, so either the food had everything she, and by extension both of them, needed to survive long term, or she hadn’t been here much longer than him.

  The ck of talking was concerning, but regardless, he needed to keep enticing her close so he could keep an eye on things, not least of which was how the rationing was affecting them both.

  At least his new life wasn’t going to be boring for a while, she had managed all that and never once lost control of her stuffed cat.