This lingered in Vegis’s mind as time went by and it neared the end of their stay at the northern lab. Boreal has started to talk more and gained basic proficiency at talking, going from small short sentences to being able to have a basic conversation without having to stop for minutes to try and gesture for a word they didn’t remember. Mitra occasionally did dips into the LSN
A small outbreak of food poisoning happened due to a malfunctioning machine that didn’t properly sterilize the kitchen. This didn’t affect Vegis and Mitra so they just made fun of Jee, Oak, and Cheez who got sick from this with Mac being spared from this since she wasn't hungry that day. Vegis hadn’t seen Jonsa or Coltman in a while but would occasionally see Jess hanging out with some of the other people that he didn’t recognize. He hasn’t talked to her in a while, but that was mostly due to having to keep an eye on his roommates almost all the time. If he ever goes to hang out with the others, he sends a clone or asks Drake when he has free time to watch over them.
After Vegis return from hanging out with some friends, Drake asked him a question in passing while he was watching Boreal contort the plants into geometric shapes. “Do you remember how the changes felt?”. This startled Vegis since it was both out of nowhere and a topic he never really focused on. He had to mull over this question for almost a minute before Vegis gave his answer. “I don’t think I was ever fully conscious when it happened. When this first happened after I got knocked through a barrier, I was barely holding onto consciousness and not much changed. When the major changes started to happen, it was while I was sleeping and having a dream. I felt things, but it was kinda like it was being inflicted onto my soul instead of my body. The contracts were the only things I can fully remember but all I remember is pain during those moments.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Vegis continued to try and scrap together a full picture of what he felt during these moments but all he could let out were vague guesses from half remembered memories about the occurrences. In the end, Drake had to go away since he got a call for something important. Vegis continued to sit there and think about the incidents. It took an hour before Mitra interrupted him so she could ask him his opinion on a content creator she was starting to get into. Vegis did a quick look at them and told her that he never watched the creator.
It was now only a week until they were to leave for break and not much happened. Vegis was cleaning his stuff and was having the clones help him. V4 acted as scaffolding for the others as they started to pick up items on high places to clean them. They had to do it by hand since advanced cleaning tech was not allowed in the rooms since they would both breach privacy and can endanger the inhabitants of the room if it was accidentally activated when they were sleeping. Mitra and Boreal were currently spending some time in the office to study while he was cleaning. Every now and then, they would peek out from the office to see if Vegis was done clean or if they were done with studying.
It took a total of 30 minutes for Vegis to be done with just dusting all the nooks and crannies and 2 more hours for him to clean everything else. Boreal left some plants fused with the the chair, Mitra left ash on some of the walls and furnitures, animals would just randomly pop out of Vegis’s right arm while he sleeps, among other things, were among the long list of what Vegis had to fix, clean, or capture. When he was finally done with the deep cleaning of their living space, he had captured 23 small rodents, 41 plants that slithered like snakes, and 2 living flames. Vegis couldn’t count all the hard to remove stains, items, and what he could only describe as malignant mana.
Vegis called Drake so he could get a person to deal with these things. It took ten minutes for a person to arrive and pick up all the things. Sometimes, Vegis would feel random jolts of pain and wonder if he was connected to these rodents. He can’t see any connection between them but it could just be that it is too fine of a connection for him to see it.
