[6-A]Maybe the people in the box talked the way they did because it was easier.

  After she had fled from the moose monster’s attempt to magic her in the tunnels, she had thrown herself into learning its rumblings. It was very difficult to match it. She was beginning to see why she had no magic and why the people of the box never did any either.

  The rumblings of the monster were too deep to copy.

  She thought she had the right …. Shape? …. for the monster’s words but she couldn’t match the sound.

  It didn’t help that she couldn’t ask the monster for its secrets. Even the pages would not help her here as all the Pages were silent. It seemed the monster was scheming something though. Ever since she had nearly failed to run, the monster would sit in the food pce. The disks would be on a surface far enough away that she could reach them without the monster being able to reach her, but it was clearly a trap.

  One she avoided at first, but after realizing that her treats would not be enough without the disks, she had to risk it.

  It was even more obviously a trap when the monster started rumbling when she entered the food pce. She nearly ran right then, but she waited as it only made her ears tingle. Clearly not a powerful spell like before, it would be the perfect pce to start learning directly.

  She crouched and watched the monster as it continued to rumble and not move from where it was. Unfortunately, her belly compined not long after and she had to make a difficult decision. Did she attempt to get the disks or did she just leave and go back to the treats she had hidden away.

  Ultimately, she decided that her time was running out, the potent magic from before still causing her issues. If this was some kind of trap, she would just have to be faster than the monster. It seemed to be interested in words, so if she found herself in trouble she could offer some in an attempt to get away.

  Moving carefully towards the disks, she grabbed them and ate them quickly.

  That was when the monster sprung its trap, and it was a dangerous one. So dangerous in fact she wasn’t sure how she would deal with it.

  The monster had used its magic to trap water, and it slid the trapped water slightly out of its reach with an accompanying rumble. She had always before drank the water from where it flowed and never been able to carry it with her. While the disks were much better than the powder, they still left her mouth dry and she craved water afterwards.

  With the monster sitting between her and the waterspout, she had no way to get that water. She could make her way to the rain room, but that was a long journey and may be even more dangerous, as she would be directly in the monster’s feeding area while it was aware of her. If it followed her, she would have no way to avoid it and would be in need of water the whole time.

  She had no idea what accepting the magicked water would do to her though. She looked around the food pce, seeing if there was a way around the monster, but it had put itself in the perfect spot to stop her from getting behind it without getting closer than the trapped water was.

  The monster was proving itself more and more cunning.

  If she wasn’t careful she feared that she would find herself tamed by the monsters magic long before she could tame the monster. She hardened her resolve and carefully stepped forward to snatch the trapped water. Slowly bringing it to her lips she drank a small bit and waited. The monster rumbled at her and she began to feel the warmth spreading again. She quickly made sure not to look at the monster, only watching for movement as she drank what she could of the trapped water.

  Once she had as much as she could take, she carefully pced the rest of the trapped water down and fled the food pce. As she got far enough away from the monster to feel safe, she felt a slow but painful realization take root in her mind.

  The moose monster was far too cunning to tame before she fell to its magic. Something it seemed to realize before her, as the trap had clearly shown.

  Not a trap at all, but a show that it wasn’t worried about what she did.

  If the moose monster was truly unstoppable, how could she even hope to win?

  She understood now.

  She couldn’t win.

  The only thing left to her was choosing how to lose. She was not cunning enough to out trick the moose monster in the short term and she didn’t know enough about it to tame it before its magic finished doing whatever it was doing.

  Still, if she was going to lose then she was going to choose how. The only way she saw to lose and not completely fall to the moose monster was choosing which things she lost in while she slowly tamed it in other things. It wouldn’t be ideal and she would have to give up on some of her pns, but it was better than the alternative.

  Whatever that happened to be.

  She didn’t need to win everything in the end. So long as the moose monster was scaring away all the other monsters, she could just stay near it rather than being in complete control. She would miss her home, but she didn’t see any other way forward. So long as it didn’t eat her and kept the other monsters away she would be ok and could slowly learn its rumblings. Maybe one day she would learn how to break free of the magic bothering her.

  Until then she would let the monster’s magic do what it would to her and only fight it when she tried to teach the monster how to do what she wanted. If the monster relied on its magic, it might not notice when she tried to teach it how to listen to her without any magic at all. A quiet approach as she fell to the magic was the only way forward. Learning as much as she could and small tricks that wouldn’t be noticed every now and then may let her get what she needed even while the monster thought it was winning.

  Having come to that conclusion and trying to pn a way forward she realized a fw in her long-term pn. How did she fall to the magic and still maintain enough control over her body to learn and do what she needed to?

  It was one thing to pn for it, but when the magic had her in its grasp her body simply refused to listen. Could she still use her senses if her body rebelled and did as the monster pleased?

  A dark thought came to mind.

  Perhaps she should just wait in the rain room and let the magic take her. At least then she would know what was going to happen to her at the end.

  She shook her head.

  The magic had taken root far deeper than she had guessed. For that to be her first pn did not bode well for the future. She struggled desperately for a moment, determined to find a better thought to base her pn off of, but all she could think of was not becoming food.

  Maybe that was the answer, her mind rebelling against the magic?

  The moose monster was safest when it was sitting and going to it outside of the food pce should mean it wasn’t thinking about food. The more she thought, the more this seemed like the best idea. If the monster was focused on the wall, she could get close and let the magic take her with the least danger. It would be focused on learning words and not eating, so she would not be seen as food. It would also be sitting so it wouldn’t squish her on accident. She may even be able to grasp its rumblings while her body was immersed in the magic.

  The only part left that she hadn’t figured out was how to escape when the monster was done its task.

  [6-B]If he could kick himself he would have.

  Of course trade required communication. You had to communicate interest and value if you wanted to trade. That means using trade as a means to communicate required that you have a way to communicate in the first pce.

  Something he currently cked and was using trade to establish.

  Curse him and his half circur thinking. That’s what he gets for being too zy to come up with the second half of the pn. Too bad it took a full day of being avoided and a very nervous cat enthusiast to point out the fws in his brilliant pn. Big waste of time all around.

  On the bright side he managed to get the girl to approach him while he was talking. It had just been soft rambling to get her used to the sound, but she had come and eaten and then got a drink.

  It was a good thing he had been sat there a while. He forgot to leave a drink out for her near the food, so he had to slid the one he had gotten for himself over so she didn’t have to get in arms reach. He didn’t expect her to get even that close, but she surprised him again.

  He was beginning to suspect that the analogy was less ‘abused animal’ and closer to ‘feral child’.

  It would be much better on his end, as teaching her how to talk in the first pce would be easier than having to deal with a past that had been locked away due to trauma. Wouldn’t be much quicker to the finish line, but the situation would improve a lot faster in the beginning. Seeing as how the beginning was the important part in survival, he was fine with the tradeoff.

  All that time sitting in the mess hall waiting for a visit did give him time to get a very crude transtion going though. Turns out you could get up and running pretty fast if the signs you were trying to transte where literally pointing at the thing they were a sign of. Some quick and dirty letter swaps got him some understandable, if untrustworthy, single word transtions for the wall signs.

  Great for orienting himself and getting an idea of where he was, not so great if he encountered full text of any kind.

  He would probably have to start over from scratch if he found some, letter swaps probably not the greatest way to understand a nguage. Other than the bathroom being called the ‘comfort room’ though, everything seemed to line up with his own sensibilities.

  Or they would have if he was fancy, he wasn’t about to go around calling them ‘dining quarters’ or ‘living arrangements’.

  There seemed to be another line though, one he hadn’t managed to find a bel for. He could just be paranoid, but there was a space the exact distance needed to have another line between two of the colors. It was near the bottom, so he could be off his rocker, but the space bothered him something fierce.

  Other than it driving his OCD mad, he hadn’t managed to find the purpose of that space though. It wasn’t present everywhere and the pces where it was present didn’t have any hints. He would have simply dismissed it as shoddy craftsmanship even then, but for two bits that made it stand out.

  First, his brain was rotting due to ck of stimution. Unless he managed to find more words, or even better, a way out, he had nothing to really occupy his mind. Mindlessly ransacking empty bunks all day everyday was soul crushing and the random finds in the ‘occupied’ bunks didn’t have enough clues for him to put his archaeologist hat on.

  Not that he had one.

  The not-line gave him a mystery that he might be able to solve by simply exploring. He had avoided opening anything that didn’t look like living space up to this point, but that would need to come to an end soon if he wanted any chance to keep them both alive.

  He couldn’t wait for the food to run out before he started opening potentially dangerous areas. If fighting for their lives was going to be a literal thing, they would need the calories. It might just be stalling, but as he had yet to find a food storage area, he could hope that the not-line was a miracle fix to all his problems.

  The second reason?

  Well, the not-line was only in the area where his cryo pod was. The cryo pod that had looked like it was in the middle of an empty room without doors.

  Maybe it was the brain rot talking, but something didn’t sniff right about that, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t the kitty-cat in desperate need of a bath.

  It seemed the not-line would have to wait.

  It turned out that the stuffed cat and its owner did not appreciate forgetting the drinks with their meal. Considering that he didn’t think it was a great way to go about gaining trust, he had stopped pnning to trade the girl for her meals. So when she stopped showing up in the mess hall with him present he wasn’t all that worried about it.

  He probably should have been though.

  She had decided to, uh, gre? her displeasure at the thoughtlessness the next time he was staring at the not-line, willing it to reveal its secrets.

  She had come close. Much closer than any time in the past. Any time that wasn’t a trick at least. She was in arms reach for himself and she could probably reach him if she leaned a bit from her crouch.

  Suffice to say she was in nasal range and she decided he needed a good staring. He ignored her at first, hoping for a repeat of her previous visit in the tunnel, but as she kept silent he had to reconsider.

  If she squeaked at him, he might be able to learn some words, but she seemed disinclined to talk his ear off. If he kept ignoring her, he wouldn’t be able to get her talking, but if he did the wrong thing she might run away again.

  Why was getting used to his presence and useful interaction such a difficult line to walk?

  Ultimately it was his nose that decided. She needed to be ‘civilized’ at least to the point where she took care of her hygiene. He didn’t care if she showered every day, but at this point he was worried it might turn into a bio-hazard.

  Nothing worse than dying to an infected paper cut because you didn’t wash your hands.

  He turned his eyes to look at her without moving much at all and ‘rumbled’ a bit in his chest, again getting her used to the noise. It did seem to catch her attention though, as she tried to ‘rumble’ back.

  Well, it was sorta communication, right?

  It seemed that she wasn’t averse to noise so much as she was averse to sharp noises. He kept his voice deep and low and kept repeating ‘kitty’ over and over again. If she could at least recognize a word, he could get her attention. If said word was the name of her stuffed toy, it might make her more interested in learning more.

  He kept it up long enough for the girl to be able to vocalize a sound with a close sembnce of kitty. It would take a while to get her vocal cords used to speech it seemed. She was clearly not used to the act. Once he stopped, she kept going a couple more times before she fell silent as well. He figured he may as well push his luck and hid a choco-stick in his hand before slowly reaching out to her.

  She eyed his hand pretty closely, seeming to debate whether she should run or not. His pn was to touch her knee, it being the closest body part to him, and give the choco-stick as a reward. If he could get her used to his hands, he could lead her to the showers and at least get her to wash her hands. Sadly, it wasn’t to be as she seemed to lose her nerve before he touched her. It was close enough that his hand brushed her thigh as she turned and sprang away, running off down the hall.

  Hmm, this was tricky. He was sure he could simply overpower her and manhandle her into the showers if needed, but he wanted her to enjoy the showers so she would go herself and he didn’t need to do that every time she got a bit ripe. Scaring the crap out of her and traumatizing her towards water kind of went against that purpose.

  While he could file that way as a st resort, finding a better pn to try first seemed like the best option.

  Maybe if he got his hands on that cat toy.

  “I wonder if its waterproof.”