“So what have we learned?” Madeline prompted me.

“The food from those relief packages is delicious.” I said, lazily. We were both reclining after our meal, I was spread out on Madeline’s couch, and she had crawled into her recliner. She was laid all the way back in that thing, and I was downright envious of how comfortable she looked.

For my part, the couch was alright. Better than the one in my place, at any rate. Not that that was a high bar, that particular piece of furniture was absolutely abysmal.

“Other than that.”

“Uhh. . .” I prompted my sleepy brain to wake up a bit. Fry was laying on my stomach, and Mick-Chicken was currently wandering around the living room examining the furniture and such.

“The plates disappear after a while, and the food is delicious.”

“You already mentioned that second part.”

“I can’t help it, I've been craving that katsu for months.”

“That! That right there.” She said, un-reclining the recliner to look at me. “I’d been craving those same paninis too.”

“I can see why, that bite of sandwich you gave me was tasty.”

“Wasn’t it? But that’s not my point.”

“Oh?”

“My point is that we’d both been craving those foods, and that those same foods were what we’d gotten from the items in our inventories.”

“That is a little odd, now that you mention it.”

“At the same time, neither of the Icons for food we have would even remotely suggest that what we’re getting is a hot, fresh meal.”

“Your right, my cans and your MREs both imply long lasting, less delicious fare.”

“And crucially, I think my point about both of our items fitting into the same categories has been proven. We both get similar results from both the healing items and the grub.”

“Maybe, but what about our third category, the bubbles and houses?”

“Hmmm. . .” Madeline looked up contemplatively.

“I think I want to reevaluate the bubbles,” she said, “I would be more tempted to call them barriers.”

“So the third category is shelter or protection you think?”

“That’s what I’d bet,” she agreed, “but the only way to know for sure is to test it.”

“Should we both try it then?”

“Nah, on the off chance that your houses are actually houses, I don’t want you ruining my apartment with one. I’ll use one of my barrier-slash-bubble things and we’ll see if it makes a noticeable difference.”

“Sounds good to me. When do you wanna test it?”

“Now,” she said, double tapping on her display.

We both waited in silence for a breathless couple of seconds. Nothing seemed to have happened. I sat up fully, carefully holding fry to my chest so as not to cause him to tumble to the floor as I righted myself.

“I don’t notice anything different.” I said.

“I do.”

“What?”

“It’s gotten quieter.”

I listened carefully. I couldn’t hear anything, though I guess that didn’t prove her wrong. But it had already been pretty damn quiet before, honestly, so I wasn’t picking up a difference.

Madeline seemed to notice my confusion.

“There’s no police siren.”

“Ah!” She was right. There had been a police siren going off while we were eating. I hadn’t even given it any thought because we were in the inner city, and police sirens were practically just background noise.

“That could just be because the police siren stopped, for whatever reason.”

“True, but the noise from the floors above us stopped at the same time as well.”

I thought back. I hadn’t heard any noise from the upper floors.

“I didn’t hear anything coming from above us at all.”

“Really?” She said, seeming genuinely confused. “There was a fair amount of stomping, I thought.”

“No, It’s been eerily quiet in the building.”

Madeline furrowed a brow. “Then are you imagining things, or am I?”

I thought for a moment. “Could be neither, actually. Show me your phone.”

“It’s in my purse.”

“No, your other phone.”

“What other phone?”

“No, I mean-” I searched for the right word, “Your display!”

She unfurled her right fist, and waved the materializing rectangle at me.

“I can’t exactly hand it to you, you know. It comes attached. And frankly, I don’t wanna get up.”

“Fine.” I scooched over to the end of the couch closest to Madeline. I placed Fry back on my shoulder so that I wouldn’t have to worry about dropping him as I leaned over the armrest to take a look at Miss Madeline’s display.

“Show me your radar chart.” She swiped a thumb to navigate away from the inventory screen.

“Here.”

I looked at her stats. She was pretty well balanced, compared to me. It was even across the board, with a slight lean towards the body stat.

I showed her my radar chart in return. “See, I think the body stat might make your senses a bit sharper, like in the animes.”

“Oooh, am I gonna be able to sense killing intent?”

I laughed. “Maybe. Wouldn’t be any more ridiculous than any of the other stuff that’s going on.”

“True.” She agreed.

Madeline un-reclined her chair even further, sitting up straight.

“We can’t prove anything regarding my senses though,” she said, “and we still don’t know what the barrier does.”

“Yeah, we’re going to need to do some more testing.”

“Like?”

“Well, we can check your possible sharpened senses with an app on my phone. When it comes to hearing at least, I have a frequency generator app. I figure if you can hear outside the normal range of human hearing, that would be good evidence.”

“Do we know what the normal range of human hearing even is?”

“We can google it.”

“No we can’t.”

“Shit, you're right,” I said. “Still don’t have cell service. Still, we should be able to get somewhere by comparing our hearing ranges. If you can hear significantly higher or lower frequencies than I can, that would be something.”

“Ok, let’s try it.”

We did so, and tried a variety of different volume levels as well. The speakers on my old phone couldn’t go that high or low, but it was enough. Miss Madeline could in fact hear a broader range of frequencies and at lower volumes than I could. By a significant margin too.

The process gave Miss Madeline an Idea. She got back in her wheelchair and rolled to her room and back. What She returned with looked like a pair of nutcrackers.

“What are those?”

“Grip strength trainers. I’m wondering if my body stat has increased my strength too.”

She fit an orange coloured trainer in her hand and squeezed. She nodded to herself and tried the other trainer next. This one was red. She squeezed it a couple of times, and I observed the muscles of her forearm flex as she did so.

“My grip strength looks like it’s improved by at least 20 pounds.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“It is, sort of.” Her facial expression spoke of mixed emotions on the subject.

“I mean it's a big jump, but we're not talking superhuman levels of strength here. This Orange one here is 100 pounds. This red one is 120 pounds. Given that there are trainers that go up past 200, it's not that impressive.”

“Can I try the orange one?”

Madeline handed it over.

I could barely squeeze it.

I was unsurprised by this.

“Here’s the red one if you want it.”

I couldn’t get the red one to budge, even when I was cheating with both hands.

“From my perspective, it’s still a lot.”

“Yeah, but the whole reason I have that red trainer is because I would have had to switch to it anyway in a month or two. I’d probably be there already if I hadn’t waited so long to start training my crush strength.”

She’d lost me. I did not know of the mystic arts of exercise. Crush strength sounded cool though.

She picked up on my confusion, and offered further explanation.

“You know how I can’t feel much in my pinky or ring finger on my left, and got other stuff happening with my right arm?”

I nodded. She’d explained how her tetraplegia worked to me before. It wasn’t that she couldn’t move anything below her damaged cervical vertebrae, but instead that there were sort of patches of paralysis all over her body, and she had some level of restriction in all her limbs. She couldn’t feel her lower legs at all, for instance, but according to her she ‘still had some wiggle’ in her hips. She couldn’t raise her right arm a certain point past her head, and she couldn’t feel a couple of her fingers. There was some other stuff, but she hadn’t exactly given me a full tour. I’d just picked things up as we talked and I spent time together.

“Well,” she continued, “Whenever I was having trouble controlling the weights I was lifting, I just assumed it was part of my disability. But one of my gym buddies mentioned that it's not uncommon for people to have the same sorts of problems I was having with my form if they weren’t training their grip strength. So I started doing that and it really helped, but I’m still a bit behind on that front.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“You're still doing way better than me.”

“That’s because you don’t exercise and you eat sugar like it's going out of style.”

“Oof.” She was right, but that didn’t mean I was giving up twinkies and going running.

“Anyway, I seem to have gotten a boost in strength, but I’m not superman. I could go and test my max bench and all that other stuff, but now doesn’t really seem like the time.”

“Probably.” I said. “We have other priorities.”

“Like filling up the sink with tap water?”

“I totally forgot about that!”

I finally got up off the couch and walked the few steps it took to get to the kitchenette. The sinks were clean now, aside from the fork and knife I’d used earlier. I gave them a quick scrub and deposited them in the drying rack with the other dishes. I then got to filling one bay of the sink.

“What else do you think we should be doing?” I asked.

“Well, we’re probably gonna want to stock up a bit on food. I’m just about clean out, as I mentioned.”

“Can’t we just eat those ration thingies we got from the display?”

“Won’t we run out after a while?”

“You haven’t looked at the shop?”

“What shop?”

“Uhh, it should have been pointed out to you after the finalization thingy.”

“I was a bit busy dealing with my broken limbs and ribs at the time.”

“That bad?”

“Several things were bent in places that shouldn’t bend, and I couldn’t breath for a while. Actually using the medkit item also hurt like hell.”

“Was it kind of an Icy-hot sort of feeling?”

“Yeah, actually. It was suffocating too.”

“Then our healing items both really do work the same. Mine felt the same when I used it.”

“I wonder why the icons look different then?”

“No Idea.” I said, for seemingly the twentieth time that day.

“Anyway.” I continued, “Let me show you the shop.”

“No, wait, is it this pink button on top of the big gauge thingy?”

“Yep.” Apparently she’d found it on her own.

It was a little hard to miss, I suppose.

“Hey, we can get more barriers and rations and stuff here.”

“Which means we’ll be eating well for a while!” I said, a little excited by on-demand katsu.

“If it weren’t for the fact that everything costs ATP, and by percentage too.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on going out of my way to use my ATP for anything else.”

“Hmmm. . .” Madeline stared into space for a bit, seemingly in deep thought.

While she was doing that, I swiveled the faucet over to the second bay of the sink, and started filling that one too. Our rations would provide food, but neither of ours had come with any sort of beverage. That meant we needed to get water on our own.

“So,” spoke Miss Madeline, having come out of her reverie. “Each Item in the shop is priced for 25% of our ATP. That means that if we eat three meals a day, we still have enough ATP to buy one Additional Item, or maybe use an ability or two.”

“Yeah.”

“So wouldn’t the Ideal strat here be to buy your meals, and then set up a barrier? That way you could just hole up from any monsters or zombies or skeletons.”

“Maybe that’s why everything is so quiet. . .”

“Right!” Madeline said, seeming to have realized the same thing as me. “It’s not that everybody’s gone, it's that people are using the barriers, which block sound!”

“Assuming they do in fact block sound.”

“Well, at this point I only got one way to test it, and neither of us are gonna like it.” She said.

“What?” I asked.

“If one of us makes some sort of persistent noise and the other walks away from the apartment. . .”

“. . . Then if the noise ever stops or gets suddenly quieter, we’ll know if and where the barrier is.” I finished for her.

“Yep yep yep. I don’t really wanna leave anymore than you do,” she said, “but staying here the whole time and not testing it doesn’t seem like a great Idea, either.”

“How so?”

“Well you said that the door to the stairwell was propped open, right?”

“Yeah,” I groaned. “And at least one asshole made it in.”

“And while it was very impressive that you managed to dispatch it, the possibility that there are multiple things in the building that might want to kill us can’t really be ignored.”

“And if the barrier doesn’t work at all, then we might be in danger of those things finding us.” I said, sighing. “Plus, those things could hurt someone else.”

“Which means that just hunkering on down would be a little irresponsible,” she agreed.

“Ok, but If I’m leaving this apartment then I should make sure I’m ready as can be.”

“Who said you were going?” She said, “I’m the one with the keys to the apartment. If the barrier keeps me from hearing you knock, then how would I know to let you in?”

“Couldn’t you just keep an eye on the peephole?” I said, pointing to the front door.

“No, it’s mounted at the wrong height.”

She was right. The peephole was mounted at just under head height for me, and that was a good distance above any comfortable height for Madeline in her chair.

“Wait, they thought to give you a custom sink, but not a door with an adjusted peephole?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. I’ve thought about getting one of those smart home security devices to use as an intercom, but it's spendy and I don’t trust tech companies.”

“Probably for the best. Though I can’t say it wouldn’t come in handy now.”

Miss Madeline nodded. “Anyway, I figure I’ll go out, and you can keep an eye on the peephole.”

“I can’t say I’m jazzed about that plan. As we’ve discussed, there are probably nasties about. And you haven’t really gotten a handle on your abilities yet.”

“Don’t really need abilities when you’ve got a gun.”

She had a point.

“Okay, compromise then, I hold the door open. That way I can see you the whole time.”

“Oh,” she snickered, “having separation anxiety are we?”

“Yes, actually. And I think that’s perfectly warranted given the situation.”

“Fair. You can hold the door then. What are we using as noise then?”

“I figured I’d just talk at you the whole time. The moment you hear me shut up, you’ve crossed the barrier line. Assuming it exists.”

“I sure hope it does,” she said, “because the alternatives suck.”

“How so?”

“Well, if it isn’t the barriers making things quiet, then something else is.”

“Oh boy.” I didn’t even want to think about what that might be.

“Yep.”

“Let’s hop to it then.” Madeline prompted.

I grabbed Mick-Chicken, who had ceased his wandering and tottered back over to me once he noticed that we were getting ready to go. Fry was still on my left shoulder. Mick-chicken took his place on my right.

I checked the peephole before we opened the door, and it appeared to be clear. We couldn’t hear anything around us, but given the possible barrier situation that didn’t mean much.

“So should I start rambling now?”

“Might as well.”

I started in on the differences of all my favorite model kit brands, happy to have the opportunity to jabber about my favorite consumerist pastime, even if I was mostly just doing it to annoy her.

Whilst I verbally compared and contrasted the various grades of models and their price points, madeline opened the door and exited. I held the door, chattering the whole while.

Madeline drew her firearm from a purse. It was a semiautomatic pistol of some kind, though I couldn’t tell you what, as I wasn’t much of a gun person.

She made it about 30 feet before she raised an arm. I saw her mouth move, but I didn’t hear anything. That was it then, the boundary.

Madeline started booking it back towards me and I got out of the way as she quickly rolled her way back into the apartment. She deftly grabbed the door handle as she did so, and used her inertia to pull the door shut, letting go as it slammed close. She put a hand on one of her wheels to half brake, and spun to face me.

“Why the rush?” I asked, a little concerned.

“You couldn’t hear it, probably, but shit sounded like it was going to hell.”

“How so?”

“There were screams. And loud crashing noises. And I could hear someone or something on the stairs.”

“Oh no.”

“It's not looking like it was just one guy who made it in.” Madeline said.

“Oh god.”

“So the next question then is whether or not we try and do something about it, or we just hide.”

I felt the muscles in my face tighten, and my eyes burned. I didn't relish the Idea of going out and fighting off who knows what given that I barely survived my first couple of encounters and I was almost out of heals, but leaving someone else to die seemed even worse.

And all that aside, it wouldn’t just be me going out and endangering myself. Madeline said ‘we’ for a reason. If I went, she would follow. After all, I'd do the same thing if she was trying to leave by herself. We were of one mind when it came to these things.

“Well, I hate the Idea of someone else getting hurt more than me getting hurt, so I vote we go.” I said.

“Likewise, but I think we should prep a bit before we charge in.”

“But-”

“But nothing. I get that it’s urgent, but you're in panic mode, and we should have a plan.”

Stress showed itself on Madeline’s features. She clearly didn’t like the Idea of wasting any time either, but she was still advising patience. I took a deep breath. I remembered a trick someone had taught me for calming yourself.

Five senses.

What are five things I can see? Miss Madeline, her chair, the purse she has wedged between her thigh and the armrest, the light hanging from the ceiling above her, and the TV behind her.

What are four things I can feel? The sweat on my palms. The burning on my cheeks. Fry standing on my left shoulder. Mick-chicken on my right.

What are three things I can hear? My own heart beating in my ears. My breath. Miss Madeline tapping on her armrest.

What are two things I can smell? My deodorant, fighting off the stench of my Body odor. The slightly off stench of the garbage that still needed to be taken out.

What’s one thing I can taste? A remaining piece of chicken meat wedged in between my teeth.

I was still tense, but the overriding panic was no longer at the front of my brain. I hadn't even realized how wound up I was, but I could think now.

“Okay, I’m good.” I said.

“That’s great, because I’m not.”

I could see that. Madeline had just gotten more tense while I had calmed down.

“Have I told you my favorite trick for that?”

“No.”

I prompted her through the same thing I’d just done. She wasn’t exactly happy about doing it, rightly feeling like there wasn’t time for it, but I turned her words about panicking and needing to prep first right back on her. That pissed her off of course, but she did listen. By the end of the exercise she had calmed down a bit.

“Ok. We need to be as armed as possible.” I said, opening my display to examine my ATP. I still had only one point of it.

“Yeah, I’ll go grab my other gun.”

I looked up from my display. “You have another gun?”

“Yeah, one sec.”

Madeline headed to her room and following her, I saw her open up her closet. There was a pile of dirty laundry at the bottom of it, but she ignored it and reached just to the side of the closet door and pulled out a green tackle box.

She placed it on her lap, and turned her chair to face me. She opened the tackle box, and pulled out the top storage bin, placing it on the bed to her right. Madeline then pulled out a small red box with the silhouette of a deer on it. Next was a brass cylinder with a spout on one end and a knurled cap on the other. She unscrewed the end cap and checked the contents of the cylinder. She was apparently satisfied with what she saw.

Finally she pulled out an extremely large revolver. The thing looked to be nearly a foot long. The metal was ominously black, with a slight rainbow shimmer to it, like crow feathers. The grip was a dark red wood, and was dull and unpolished.

“This isn’t the most practical of firearms, but it’ll do.” She said.

“It looks deadly.”

“And it is, it just takes a month to load.” She started doing so as we talked. “It’s a cap and ball revolver, a colt 1860 to be exact. What that means is that it takes black powder and round lead balls as ammo, instead of shells.”

“You basically have to assemble all the parts of a normal bullet in the cylinder. First is the powder.” Madeline carefully pulled the hammer of the revolver back, and rotated the cylinder of the gun a couple times. She then grabbed the brass tube she had pulled out earlier, and shook it, placing her finger over the spout and turning it upside down.

“This powder flask has a spout on it that can hold 60 grains of powder, which is the maximum amount I can load into the gun without risking it exploding.” She tipped the spout into one chamber of the cylinder, and repeated the process with the other five chambers as well.

“Then,” she said, grabbing a ziploc baggie, “are the wads. These are wool pads soaked in peppermint oil.”

I could smell the peppermint from across the room. She pinched one between her fingers and placed it into a chamber, rotated the cylinder, and repeated that five more times.

“After that is the lead.” She opened the red box she had taken out earlier. Inside was a plastic bag with a hole torn in it, and it contained little lead balls. Madeline placed a ball into a chamber. It didn’t go in all the way, with a bit over half of it resting atop the cylinder.

“You have to shove them in with the charging lever.” She pointed to a rod of metal just below the barrel of the gun. She then rotated the cylinder, and grabbed the lever before cranking it down with a bit of effort. She rotated the cylinder again, and I saw a ring of metal fall to the floor.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I said, pointing to the ground where the metal had fallen.

“Yeah, it’s how you know there’s a good seal. That's the lead that’s coming off of the bullets.” She loaded the rest of the chambers.

“Is it done?”

“No, next are the caps.” Miss Madeline grabbed a metal object from the bin on the bed. It looked kind of like a sports whistle that had been squashed flat. She placed the mouthpiece of the not-whistle to the rear and side of the cylinder. I saw her twitch a thumb, and then she rotated the cylinder and did whatever she was doing another five times.

I saw there was now shiny brass on the back of the blackish cylinder. She poked and pressed each piece of brass, and eventually nodded.

“Now it’s done. Here.” She slowly lowered the hammer of the revolver and held the gun out to me.

“Madeline, I’ve never held a gun in my life, much less fired one.”

“Which is why you get the old colt, and not my beretta.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference.”

“And you don’t need to. All you need to know is that you never point it at anything you don’t want dead, and you have to pull the hammer back every time you want to shoot. That means after each shot, you have to pull the hammer back yourself. It won’t do it for you. If you pull the trigger when the hammer is down, nothing will happen.”

“Also, the rear sight is on the hammer itself.” She pointed to a notch on the hammer. “Try and put the front peg in between the v-shape here. I’ve zeroed the sights in with a file so if you miss it’s your fault. Now take it, we’ve wasted enough time.”

I took the gun from her gingerly. I held it up in order to try and figure out the sights.

“You won’t be able to see the rear sights until you pull the hammer back, and don’t do that until you want to shoot something.”

I was fundamentally uncomfortable with the menacing hunk of iron in my grasp, but I wasn’t looking forward to beating things to death with another standing lamp either. I’d just have to get over myself.

“Ok. I’m ready. Let's go.”