[8-A]She felt… empty.

  She knew it was the end when the monster lured her to the rain room and yet here she was. She didn’t know what kind of powerful magic the Moose monster had used, but all she could remember was the panic beginning to set in as the downpour started to sting her eyes and then waking here on the soft ground.

  Everything else was a haze of heat.

  She was too afraid of alerting something in the darkness if she moved, so she had id there quietly trying to guess what had happened between then and now.

  Did the Moose monster eat her soul, was that why she felt empty?

  The Pages mentioned it a few times as important but never told her why or how to find it. If she was still alive was it really that important? Maybe she could get a new one if it was. She guessed that feeling empty was supposed to be a bad thing and that was why it was important, but it didn’t bother her at the moment. Too many thoughts in her head to worry about feeling empty.

  She needed to find her trinket as well. She hoped the monster hadn’t eaten her trinket instead and was saving her for ter.

  Maybe the monster ate magic?

  It would expin everything. If the moose monster ate magic, like her trinket, then it would need some way to make more magic to eat. Maybe the magic it used on her was meant to grow within her so it could be eaten, rather than eating her body like she had assumed.

  Her heart started to beat a little faster, if she could get the moose monster to keep her close and protected and all she had to do was grow its magic food like she had been, it would be perfect!

  She may feel empty now, but if that empty feeling is where the magic was before it got eaten then it would simply fill up again before the monster ate it. Not very pleasant going from what she felt before to being completely empty, but a small price to pay for protection.

  And maybe even some magic of her own.

  The more she thought about it, the more ideal it felt to go along with the monster’s ‘pn’. It might be residual magic changing her thoughts and turn out to be a terrible idea, but she really had nothing else to try. The moose monster offered far too much protection to avoid it completely and the darkness had yet to change at all, preventing her from doing anything without magic of her own. The moose monster was still very dangerous, but she was learning quickly how to avoid that danger….

  Maybe avoid was wrong.

  Survive the danger?

  That felt better, seeing as how she had fallen into pretty much every trap the monster had set so far. She felt her face heat a little, thinking about all the times she felt she had the upper hand and lost miserably.

  At least she had survived, that was what was important. So long as she survived, she could learn and outsmart the monster eventually. At the moment though, all she could do was contempte her test defeat.

  She could tell the monster was close, very close. If she turned around she was sure it would be right there, able to reach out and grab her if it wanted. Trapped as she was beneath a bnket, she expected that any attempt to flee would fail quickly. She had been listening for any signs that she would have a chance, but the monster was surprisingly quiet for being so close. All she could hear was its breath.

  As slow as she could, she turned her head to try and see what was going on. This seemed to be the monster’s ir, as she saw the monster asleep for the first time. It was strange to see the monster’s ir open while it was inside, it always magicked the wall back after it had passed.

  Did it forget? What had changed?

  Her eyes widened when she realized what was different. She was here, empty, after being in the rain room. She was the change. Had the monster eaten too much magic from her and fallen asleep? She had eaten too much once, it caused her to grow very sluggish and feel terrible. If the monster had made a mistake and eaten too much at once, she would have a chance to run before it could catch her.

  She needed to be very careful though, it didn’t take much for it reach out with one hand and hold her in pce. She started to wiggle her body into a better position to leave the bnket and reach the opening in the room. All her efforts came to nothing though when she felt the monster’s hand brush her arm. There was panic at first, as she thought her pn was discovered. That panic faded quickly with a gnce at the monster, but it was repced with something far worse.

  Its hand had caused a tingle to race down her back. A tingle that pushed back the emptiness she now felt. While the panic had masked it at first, that tingle had shifted her goal. Running was no longer the only thing she could think about. Slowly, careful not to move it very much, she reached out and touched the monster’s hand.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She needed to do more than poke it with her fingers. She moved the bnket as off of herself as possible without a lot of movement, she wanted to be able to flee if the monster woke and the bnket was in the way. With that done she wiggled closer to the hand. The closer she got, the more heat she felt on her face, even though it wasn’t as near the hand as other parts of her. She would have pondered about it more, but as she pressed the hand against her chest it became the least of her thoughts.

  As soon as the touch became firm, the heat spread and the emptiness faded to almost nothing. The tingles returned, radiating out from the touch itself, rather than falling down her back. Her mind fshed back to the hazy heat that had found her here in the first pce and her body curled around the contact, reluctant to listen once again.

  It seemed that touching the monster caused its magic to return. Magic she was now desperate to welcome. She hadn’t realized it before, how very cold she had been. The emptiness had tricked her. It had felt like nothing, a minor inconvenience to ignore and go about her life. Now that the magic was flooding back and the emptiness fading, she realized how cold and truly empty she had been.

  Maybe it was a bigger price than she had realized.

  Now she was stuck. Had she fallen for another trap? If the emptiness stayed until the moose monster filled it with magic she would have to stay close and do whatever it wanted of her. Including feeding it the magic she now so desperately wanted to keep inside herself. Which would make her empty once more and require that she stay within arm’s reach of the moose monster to get refilled.

  She shuddered at the thoroughness of the trap. The magic never had to change anything, it just had to fill her up. She would do the rest on her own. Willingly do what the monster wanted just to push away the emptiness. All the times her body had rebelled wasn’t the magic, it was her recoiling away from the emptiness. Exactly what was happening right now, why she couldn’t let go even though she had realized all of this.

  All of the pns and thoughts she had up to now spiraled and lost control.

  How could she hope to fight against a magic that didn’t do anything?

  She couldn’t learn to counter something that was just there. Even if such a thing was possible, doing so would invite the emptiness back in as the magic was what was filling that space. All of her pns had involved besting the monster in some way. Learning to overcome it and gaining her freedom. But that was all pointless if what she needed to overcome was the emptiness, not the moose monster.

  It was painfully obvious now why the monster had let her do whatever she wanted. Why it never bothered to capture her and simply dispyed its superiority rather than use it in anyway. All the way back when it first used its magic on her it had already won. As soon as she had felt the magic seep in and fill the emptiness, everything she had done had revolved around that.

  Around getting more.

  Which she had gradually learned came only from the moose monster. Nothing else she had done, seen, tasted, none of it had filled the magic more. It came only from the moose monster.

  She felt movement as the moose monster stirred. Panic started to settle in again. She quickly wiggled off of the soft floor and moved towards the opening. She wasn’t sure if the monster had noticed its magic getting taken or if she had moved too much, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t seem to be awake yet but she didn’t want to stay and learn what it was like after eating too much.

  Unfortunately, the darkness didn’t seem to be as afraid of the monster as she thought. It had been trying to suck all the light from the room since she became aware again. It seemed to be doing well now that the monster wasn’t awake but that meant she had no way to leave without waking up the monster to recast its magic.

  She truly hoped it hadn’t eaten her trinket. If she could find it, she would have a way to stay away from the monster. She edged as close to the opening as she could get without entering the darkness.

  At least she tried, until her foot hit something damp and fuzzy and she nearly ran right back to the monster and soft floor. Her scare caused her to trip and fall into the darkness though. Something she was terrified of until the light burned her eyes.

  Using her hand to shield them she tried to figure out what had happened when she spotted her trinket, the very thing that her foot had touched.

  Of course!

  The moose monster ate magic, it had eaten the magic out of both her and her trinket but as soon as she had touched it with the magic she had taken from the monster it had started to work again.

  She quickly grabbed her trinket and raced quietly down the tunnel. She had so very much to think about and she didn’t want the warmth of the monster to cloud her mind while she thought.

  That and she didn’t want to see what the monster would do when it woke.

  [B]‘Of course I fell asleep, how could there be dramatic tension if I didn’t?’

  Rolling over with a groan, he checked the part of the bed he had set the girl on. There was only a hint of body heat left so either he had been out of it for a while or the girl had taken off the moment he conked out.

  ‘Probably a bit of both. This ck of light control is pying havoc on my sleep cycle.’

  Stretching a bit and shuffling off of the floor art he called a bed, he grabbed his notebook and plodded off to begin his ‘day’.

  ‘Gonna have to cut back on showers for a bit, nothing but quick wipe downs until we get the rationing back under control.’

  He wanted to kick his past self.

  As much fun as he had using the rationing numbers as a brainteaser to keep his mind active, actually living the rationing was terrible. While he could handle the food restriction so long as he kept retively low energy, that was the easy part. He had yet to find a water tank of any description and even if this pce had a recycler of some kind, water treatment took consumables. Ideally it was sor powered with UV or some other kind of energy-based filter and could st until he found it for maintenance. If that was the case, it was just a matter of keeping things running. Things rarely worked out that well though and if the filters or other consumables ran out before he could find both the active ones and their repcements there wasn’t much that could be done. The toilets were all tankless and the sinks didn’t have stoppers that he could find. The only thing he had found to hold water was small drinking gsses.

  They seemed like fancy kids cups so they had to be refilled three or four times to get enough water to satisfy after a meal, there just wasn't enough to hold a significant amount of water. It would have to do if he couldn’t find anything, cycling through the cups was better than simply guessing, but it was impractical and possibly dangerous.

  The same reasoning went into why he continued to take showers and had let the girl take such a long one. With no natural bits or any way to make things, getting sick was pretty much a death sentence.

  If it was a forest or other natural setting and he could forage for medicinal pnts it would be a different story, he could py more fast and loose with his estimate. Not so in this pce. When your choices when sick are ‘drink lots of fluids and rest’ or ‘just die, I guess’, it’s a no brainer to pick the former.

  Right up till you hit that pesky water rationing problem and might die either way.

  It just seems to take less water over all to wash and keep clean than it does to risk it. Hopefully he could convince the girl that showers weren’t so bad next time. Maybe the quicker wipe downs would scare her less.

  Either way, leaving water out in uncovered cups seemed counterproductive. It could work in a pinch as a warning system but the chance of getting sick went up. Hence the dilemma, they could either ‘suddenly run out of water’ or ‘suddenly get sick’.

  Terrible choices all around.

  Boiling could have been a good work around if he knew how the energy was getting supplied, but with the chance that the energy to boil the water was also what was used to clean it the first time, it was too much waste to attempt it.

  All of that to say, ‘if only I had more info I could make a better choice’.

  It kinda made up his mind for him at this point.

  Using the time he was cooking the thinkin-jacks to ponder his next moves was helpful, so long as he didn’t burn anything. It let him really contextualize the problem. He needed to find the water and power sources and they were most likely located in the one pce he really didn’t want to go.

  But needs must and he now had a lover of cats relying on him as well!

  Maybe.

  Hard to say what she relied on or needed. But it might be him and that would be disappointing if he possibly let her down. So, stuffing his face and leaving the obligatory cat treat for said girl, he picked up the hot pan and made his way to the one pce here he hadn’t really explored yet.

  ‘Maybe if the pans hot it will kill the zombies faster.’

  He wasn’t sure if the ck of zombies was a relief or a disappointment.

  Sure, not having to fight zombie horrors was a good thing, but now all his deying just felt like excuses and he just looked dumb. Upside was that there wasn’t anyone who saw him being scared of nothing, so maybe he got away with it?

  Bonus, he even found something that could hold water!

  Ignoring that fact that it was built into the wall and seemed very much like a growth vat for zombie horrors, if he could find a way to get it holding water it might be enough to survive on until they could find another source.

  Done admiring his find and squishing the paranoia that seemed very justified right now, he made his way back to the desks he had found. Desks that actually seemed used and not the sterile dispy pieces he had been finding in the other rooms.

  He would need to gather up all the paperwork here and see if he could find what they were working on up till now. It might even let him know where everyone went. When he had taken a quick gnce on the way in though it had seemed to be a different nguage to the wall bels. He couldn’t exactly sit and read anything here, the desks were too small, but if he got a good sampling he could take it back to his boss room and see about deciphering it as well.

  Grabbing as many loose pages that had pictures and poking through the books to see if any would help led him to a dusty old filing cabinet though.

  Well, not so dusty. There was very little dust anywhere to be fair. Whoever had been here had kept the pce clean.

  This cabinet was clearly seldom used however. Tucked in a corner and piled with ‘extras’. Clearing off the extras, which appeared to be more paperwork, and testing the drawers proved to be pointless. It was locked tight and didn’t seem to want to move very much. Some investigations didn’t show any welding or outside bolts, so it was either really heavy or attached on the inside somehow.

  The investigation did turn up something far more interesting though. Investigating had found a lone page lost between the cabinet and its surroundings. With a great deal of coaxing, a bit of ingenuity and some cursing thrown in for good measure, he had managed to get the page out without damaging it too much. It was a good thing he did too.

  The dialect was off enough he might as well have been reading middle English, but he was reading it.

  “Well that’s not ominous or anything.”