Episode 37
Two portal changes and unending heckling from Syd later, the toxic swamp water had been mopped up and rinsed away to the best of their abilities. Sharp then made himself useful helping Cattleya find room for her belongings in the resource closet. Very important documents about the wormhole generator, as well as manuals, meeting notes, and a wide array of science books lined the metal shelves, but Sharp pushed them all aside to make room. He made AR notes while quickly gathering the books together and assigned a bot to research each book and prepare a summary for him to look over later.
He stood just outside the resource closet to the left of Cattleya’s bedding, which was a pile of jackets and blankets from Cattleya’s closet. She was reclining on said pile, and Sharp watched her tail swish to and fro in a momentary stupor as she preened herself. Normally, watching an anthropomorphic minotaur lady affectionately brush her tail clean would have inspired either awe or snark in him, depending on his mood, but he wasn’t staring at her as much as staring off into space in her general direction.
He was tired; he was discouraged, and he was no closer to getting home. If this had been a stuck elevator situation, he could laugh it off and keep himself busy with any number of projects queued up on one of his many virtua screens while waiting to get rescued. However, he hadn’t heard from his friends since the last time he didn’t answer their call. He was too exhausted at the moment to bother to check his call log to see how long ago that was.
I should probably ask a bot to tell me. I can’t believe how tired I am. Every reserve of energy has been drained out of me like one of those little elf things in that puppet movie my dad used to watch with me when I was a kid.
Earlier, after looking over his data logs, he had determined that the wormbox went kablooie—a technical term that he had happily documented in his incident report for Darity—at 9:33pm, Friday evening. He set a spacial timer over by the portal to keep track of how long he had been trapped in this nightmare. It was currently at 16:37.
We’re going on seventeen hours in here. It feels like longer.
Noticing Isabelle walking up to the observation window, Sharp snapped out of his funk and called over to Cattleya.
“We should eat.”
Cattleya looked up at him and drooped the left corner into a grimace.
“I can’t consume another maroon today, and I do believe that the tentacles are starting to spoil.”
“Spoiling?! We just got those six hours ago.”
“They’re liquifying.”
“Gross. What a short shelf life. Then again, we didn’t refrigerate them. We should get rid of them.” Sharp began to move toward their food piles over by the portal and pretended not to see Isabelle.
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“Oh, good. I’m glad you’re walking towards the wormbox, Mr. Hikoboshi. I’d hate to interrupt important departmental business like mopping floors and throwing away tentacles, but I have need of your IT services.”
Sharp stopped walking and gave the wormbox a baleful glance. “I don’t want to do it, Isabelle.”
Cattleya had put her brush away and caught up with Sharp to help him with the their former food, but slowed to a stop to his right. She looked from Sharp to Isabelle nervously.
“Is fixing this ‘wormbox’ too difficult?” she asked.
Syd and his friends began laughing, but Isabelle hushed them.
“Sharp, you can fix our network in your sleep. You’re the one who set it up, after all. Why have you been putting off fixing it?” Isabelle’s voice was both gentle and loud as her question came over the intercom.
“Well, as boring as it was, I honestly was worried about the toxicity of the swamp water. And the stink. So the mopping had to be done.”
“More important than fixing the network and figuring out how to get you out of there or sending Cattleya home?”
“You’re not in here. You couldn’t smell how rancid the air was.”
“Hey! Are you saying that Cattleya stinks? That’s rude, man! You’re a pig,” declared Syd who had come up to the window with his crew.
Isabelle’s eyes widened. Cattleya clutched her tail and stepped back.
“What? No! I was talking about the swamp water, you moron! Cattleya smells nice.”
Isabelle’s eyes widened some more. Cattleya dropped her tail.
“What do I smell like?” Cattleya took a careful step forward.
“Um, well, ano…” Sharp was caught off guard. The conversation had taken a sudden turn thanks to Syd’s help, and now Sharp felt as if he had to smooth things over. “You smell like soft musk mingled with vanilla and cinnamon. It’s nice.”
Julian plastered his face against the window.
“I see,” said Isabelle with a knowing smile. “Maybe you don’t want to leave.”
Sharp gave a good long look at Cattleya before answering. Her hair was coiffed up in a bun with a few shiny, colorful strands falling between her ears and her face. It bothered him that he wanted to touch her hair because he was so curious what it felt like. He wanted to know why it was iridescent like a hummingbird’s feathers—for scientific reasons, he assured himself. Her enormous teal and violet eyes looked back at him, full of hope at the mention of returning him home, or maybe she was surprised at his ‘soft musk’ comment. Either way, the affect on his heart was profound, which caused him to look away in a scowl. It wasn’t like him to get twitterpated. Not this quickly.
“I want to leave. I’d like to find out how to reconnect to Cattleya’s world. I especially want to dig deep into the data to see what happened and why. Right now I can’t do that without commandeering one of your workstations with my AI bots. It would be easier to log in from my AR deck and poke around without nosy eyes on me. But I don’t trust the network.”
“But you made the network,” Isabelle countered, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
“Yes, but one of you villagers used the network to fire up the wormbox and tried to kill me.”
With an accusation like that, not even Julian remained fixated on Cattleya’s scent. The entire observation room exploded in outrage, even the more quiet members. Isabelle and Kyle had their hands full quieting their rowdy coworkers down. Meanwhile, Sharp caught Cattleya staring intently at him, her face a visage of stunning, statuesque beauty.
She looked more regal in that moment than in any others since she had become trapped in the WMD lab with him. Yet she wasn’t gazing at him in the condescending way that he imagined royals would do, but with a calculating look, as if she was playing a game of chess against a challenging opponent, but Sharp was the king.
Oh, great. I’ve seen that look before.
The ground shook. The lab filled with sound. Sharp was never more grateful for a portal change than in that instant.