[B]He poked at the tablet a few more times. He would have loved to get it working for himself, but it was clear it really wasn’t meant for him.

  ‘I feel like I’m going to break the thing. It’s basically an oddly shaped smart phone made out of thin pstic.’

  It probably worked great for everyone else. Hell, it might even work ok for him if it wasn’t made out of whatever it was made out of. As it was, it just felt too fragile in his hand.

  ‘I wonder what kind of screen it is. If I can strap a few together and set them on a backing, it would be a pretty good little screen. It would just be a matter of figuring out the programing at that point.’

  It would be nice to have something that could alert him when he wasn’t on the bridge. He might be able to spend a lot more time out and about if he didn’t need to sit there and watch the computer do its thing.

  He sighed.

  “Kitty. We need more of these. We also need information. Books, you know? Otherwise just tell them to get needed supplies.”

  The girl gave him a look as she cocked her head. He really hoped everything was getting conveyed to Pup and her friends. He trusted Kitty to do her best, but he didn’t think she really understood trade and economic systems. It wasn’t really something he could expin, being an abstract concept she really didn’t interact with much.

  When she started chirping at Pup, the poor alien seemed very confused for a bit but eventually nodded and walked away. The male watched from the doorway and followed Pup as she left. He was probably in charge for their ship and wanted to make sure things were working out.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going into the station myself this time. I would just need to have Kitty stay here and not let strangers on.’

  He didn’t think it would happen. They weren’t even docked at the moment and he wasn’t about to let people he didn’t know fly his ship. They must have a shuttle bay or something for the aliens to be going back and forth. He had managed to see the cargo bay on the screen when they docked, but if they had a shuttle bay, he was completely ignorant. It was probably on the internal map, but he hadn’t had a real chance to examine each and every room the map showed. He was taking that slow.

  Not that that was the only hurdle. Even if he trusted someone else to fly and didn’t need Kitty to understand how to guard a ship, he was beginning to suspect he had a problem.

  Well, multiple problems.

  He gnced at the hand that had held the tablet again. It was clear from the tools and other things that the aliens used that he was significantly rger than the norm. There was no way that general tools like that tablet were made to a specific size just for the two races on-board and that lizard race Pup’s ship had on it. That was three examples of a retively uniform size and the tools reflected that.

  Kitty was an outlier of course. He still didn’t know if that was because she was a normal human or if she was some kind of cross breeding experiment, but she clearly bucked the trend he was starting to see. Unfortunately, without a measuring system he objectively understood, he couldn’t get any retive measurements. He knew roughly his own bodily proportions, but if he had grown they weren’t very useful. Rather than assume the rest of the gaxy was filled with races at three foot nothing or ships filled with children sailed the stars, it was far more likely to assume he was bigger.

  He had no idea what the averages were for aliens of course. His best guess for now, purely to make the math easy, was that five foot was about the average across the board, which would make him over nine feet tall and make Kitty somewhere in the seven or eight foot range. Far too rge for most common built structures.

  At least by old earth standards.

  That may be different on a pnet, but in space he didn’t see spacefaring races building extravagant ceilings and massive open spaces just because. Ironically, space was at a premium in space. He doubted he would fit all that well outside the industrial or manufacturing sections of a space station. His ship was pretty much a perfect example, even if the hallways were slightly rger than he expected the norm to be.

  He had no real desire to walk into an industrial section, look around, then get back on the ship because everything else was too small for him. It was all metal anyways.

  ‘I might think differently if we nded on a pnet.’

  It might expin why he felt everything was so light and flimsy. Physics was physics, but if he was expecting something to be a certain thickness compared to his height, he could be wildly misinterpreting those measurements.

  The other problem was what he had been given the tablet for. It seemed mail was a thing, even way out here in space! It was just too bad it was spam mail, but still, a neat discovery. According to Pup, the mail had been addressed to him, though he suspected it was probably addressed to ‘the captain’ rather than him personally. She had wanted his opinion and to find out if he wanted to buy anything. Once he transted it as best he could, the mail itself amounted to little more than ‘stay there and win a prize!’. It was s~S~o obviously spam that it was embarrassing. He could appreciate Pup not wanting to make decisions for him, but he would need to teach her to avoid scammers like that.

  ‘I’m not sure if it is comforting or unsettling that spam-mail is still an issue.’

  He brushed that off as the meaningless crap it was. It was the shopping list he had much more trouble with. Figuring out what they needed had been his objective since the st station. The problem was, he hadn’t had enough time to figure it out. He was perfectly fine just getting money, but bulk purchases still had to come at a discount right? If Pup and her friends were going to do a big trade with that cargo, he might as well take advantage.

  If only he knew what was in demand.

  ‘I got plenty of cargo space. It would be brain-dead to leave it empty. It could be making us money.’

  One they got back into the exploring part of his ship’s cssification, he might actually need that space for supplies and samples and what not. For now, since he was helping Pup, it was just wasted potential.

  He honestly didn’t really know how his finances were doing. Completely ignoring the compounding interest he might possibly be acquiring back home, the numbers Pup had shown him were pretty big.

  The problem was that this ship was pretty big too.

  He needed to find a mechanic or learn to perform the maintenance himself, and he doubted he could manage that second one before something bad happened. He also needed a quartermaster to help with these problems in the future. That didn’t really impact the shopping list now of course, but it highlighted how little he knew of what was required. Pup and her friends ~had~ might have their own thing going on and supplies were plentiful for now, but he needed to learn fast.

  ~But h~He would need to see about hiring that extra help at some point soon as well.

  Something Pup was probably going to have to be a part of, now that he thought of it.

  Kitty didn’t seem that keen on job interviews.

  [A]Even now she was only touching the surface of how brilliant Moose’s words were.

  She had learned her lesson. Don’t get mad at the small things for no reason. If she didn’t understand something, that was her fault.

  ‘I still don’t understand most things they do. Maybe I need to stare at a wall more?’

  She had been watching the small things as much as possible. They were an endless source of new things that didn’t make sense to her. They used a lot of small thing words as well. So much was new, that she even learned how to use some of the old small thing words in better ways. A discovery that had her wondering just how much the Pages had.

  And how much she had missed.

  Padding down the magic tunnel after the small things, she kept herself and her thoughts quiet.

  ‘I know the small things can see, but most of the time they act as if I’m not there.’

  Had she found a magic spell that even Moose didn’t have?

  It was an intriguing line of thought, but she dismissed it fairly quickly. Moose had a lot of magic that he had not shown her yet. The talking lights alone had been a massive discovery. What more was Moose not showing?

  A lot, obviously.

  Moose didn’t need to use his magic, so why show it? He didn’t need to move very much, so why move? It all felt very zy and made perfect sense. Moose could do anything he wanted, but why spend the effort? Especially when the small things seemed so eager.

  She could feel the change in herself. Her own magic was growing. A feeling of motion, a need to not be still had found itself at home in her chest. It demanded she expend all of that magic. Something she did quite happily now, running alongside Moose up and down the tunnels. The activity so much more understandable once the feeling had gripped her.

  Had shown her why.

  She had been surprised when Pup joined the running, the small thing far too slow to hope to keep up with her, let alone Moose. But she dismissed that in the end as well. Pup did a lot of strange things. She was beginning to suspect that Pup was trying to stay close to Moose.

  ‘Had the transformation begun in her? It doesn’t feel like it has been as long as for me, but Pup didn’t run away like I did at the start.’

  The more she followed Moose and watched. The more she did as Moose said and felt the world around her, more and more things started to come into focus. The wall did not help her learn words~magic~, it helped to slow her mind, bring things into focus. The pages were not traded for words, they were traded for the ~little book~magic they might contain. Something she still wasn’t moose enough to understand. The rain room wasn’t for water magic, it was for removing the outside.

  ‘It is no wonder that Moose keeps the ~small~tiny creatures in the garden. The small creatures are so dirty.’

  The bed sheet Moose had wrapped around her had annoyed her at first. It felt scratchy and uncomfortable pressed so close to her body. She hated it. She had pnned to remove it after she was out of Moose’s sight.

  At least that had been the pn, until she stepped out of the magic tunnel into the small thing area.

  Her feet had never felt so sticky and slippery at the same time. It was clear in hindsight that the small things had gathered where they were to avoid all the disgusting stuff. It had taken all her practice to stay quiet while she made her way around the worst of it, off to the side.

  She wouldn’t risk a monster attack, regardless of the dirt.

  The slow water in the rain room had never been so welcome before. The whole process far more enjoyable as she felt the disgusting bits of outside wash away. She had left the bed sheet in the magic tunnel, same as she left Pup’s ruined bit of cloth. She wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

  She had skipped the bed sheet this time. Now that she knew why Moose had insisted the first time, she had learned. Moose hadn’t asked her to come with the small things this time so she didn’t have any advice from him, but she couldn’t continue her transformation if she waited for Moose every time something happened. All she needed to do was avoid anything that looked bad. The outside was a terrible pce and she wanted nothing to do with it, but the small things acted the strangest when they were out there.

  Not something she could miss at this point.

  ‘At least the small thing cloths make sense now. Pup wore it because she was outside.’

  …

  ‘Wait, does that mean the pce where the small things are is outside as well, since they always wear those cloths? Doesn’t that mean the talking lights were outside?’

  Something to talk at Moose about ter. She wished Moose would offer more insight when she shared her musings with him, but just putting words to them helped her more in the end than keeping it in her head.

  ‘Is that what the little book is for?! Maybe I should try to find a little book.’

  She watched a small thing sneak around behind Pup’s group as the possible revetion bloomed in her mind. She already knew words were powerful, knew that giving words meant something. It was why Pup was Pup and not girl. If Pup had been girl, the new small thing would not be able to use that word.

  ‘I wish Moose would give the new small things words. It is hard to think about them without… them.’

  The uncommon use of the words in her thoughts causing them to stumble. It just highlighted why the right words were so important.

  Why she had been wrong before.

  She watched the small things talk, not bothering to get close enough to hear this time. It was always some silly small thing game anyways. It was only their actions that interested her now.

  ‘Hmm, the small thing that looks like Pup seems to be nervous. Did the small thing games not work out for them?’

  When they had come to the talking lights and taken them from Pup, she had been intrigued enough to pay attention. Even Moose had spared them some of his time. A short command to use words after Pup seemed to want to battle was his only real contribution though.

  That and holding Pup.

  She on the other hand had been happy to pay attention. That time alone hadn’t meant much, but putting it together with all the rest of the times she had been watching told her who was in charge among the small things.

  She cocked her head.

  ‘Is that some strange magic attempt?’

  She had seen the small things get up real close and wrap around each other like that at the st small thing area but had never seen anything come of it. They had always been away from other small things though.

  ‘Probably why Pup and that other small thing are unhappy. The blue one should know better.’

  As she got close enough to hear, she had to come to a different conclusion though.

  “…nd now you’re going to hand it over.”

  She sniffed.

  Picking up the new small thing by its cloth, she watched it unwrap from the blue one.

  “Moose’s. Not yours.”

  ‘I was doing so well. Why are all these small things so dirty! Maybe Moose can help me rub this time. I can try wrapping Moose, see if it is magic.’