“Do you feel anything inside you at all Rusty?” Cal asked. Rusty shook his head no.

“Think about a time a time ya might have accidentally done something a bit unexpected, weird fire, water strangely hot or cold, heard an animal talk before you were, weird shit like that,” Twonger said. Cal almost regretted letting the alien help with this, but they didn’t have a lot of people built for anything like this. Jen, Andy, Ethel, Melissa, Albert, and Bill were all still missing, and while they were working deprogramming the ogres, that hadn’t gone anywhere just yet. So Twonger was one of the choices.

“I find it also helps if you try to think of the time that everything felt better for a moment like you’d always have a friend,” Serilina added while she pet her cat. Cal still wasn’t sure what to make of him. The dogs, Andrew and Twonger, had all said to just let it be, which, considering the combination, he went along with it.

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“Wait, right after the crash and my parents died, something whispered to me in the moonlight. It told me to hide in the pond from the monsters. How did I forget that?” Rusty said.

“Good job, Rusty. What happened then?” Cal asked.

“I lived in the woods for awhile; oh, it was you, wasn’t it? That’s how it took them so long to find me,” Rusty said as the light around him seemed to bend away.

“So the kid’s got some shadow magic, that should be interesting,” Twonger said.