‘Ha, finally found the light controls. Too bad they don’t make any sense.’


    He had spent a while trying to determine what the differences were between the water plant and the mess hall panels. He had managed to narrow down the similarities between them to be something about ‘room controls’. It had thrown him off at first, as the whole thing seemed to be room control, but it appeared he had simply translated it wrong. Or the translation was right and the future just had a weird taste in labels. Still hard to say.


    The category seemed to have a lot of things inside of it as well. A lot of options he wasn’t goring to explore at the moment. Even the sub-categories for the lights had a lot in it. Lacking any convenient slider or other recognizable element, he didn’t want to play with it and blow out a light bulb.


    He didn’t really have any replacements.


    He would need to check the panel in his room next, to see if he could ‘exit’ the category for controlling the room stuff and ‘go up a level’ into the other things the panel could clearly do. Well, maybe not his room. He didn’t want to brick a panel he actively needed for his room. Sleeping with the lights stuck on would be terrible. His sleeping was already messed up enough.


    Unfortunately, the rest of the panel in the mess hall had different options to the water treatment one. The translation here was a bit easier, far less complicated words to parse, but it didn’t give him nearly as many options or information as the industrial panel had. There seemed to be some information at least, as well as something he was guessing at being a P.A. system, but he was working off of pure context for both. While he got a lot more words translated here, it was still only one or two in a sentence. Much better than one or two in a paragraph, but still not great for messing about with commercial panels. The information didn’t help him much either. His best guess was environmental information. Temperature, humidity, that kind of thing. Considering he didn’t know the numbers or anything about the units, it was pretty much useless. He could guess at the temperature if he needed to, but temperature units didn’t translate well to power grids or chemical percentages. The things he actually needed to know.


    Not to mention the numbers would just be a rough guess, not nearly enough precision for important things.


    He stretched and yawned as he got up. It had been a long day and he needed a shower. And a good nap. He walked back into the kitchen where the girl was sucking on her finger. A quick glance at the griddle top showed she had been messing with it, so she probably scalded herself. He didn’t hear her make any noise and didn’t see anything that would indicate it was bad, so he counted it as a lesson on hot things and shood her out the door to the bathroom.


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    “I can’t be teaching you everything, but this should make you think twice at least. Let’s go take a shower.”


    He made sure everything was off before he left himself, it being pretty obvious the girl had tried to put everything back to the way it was.


    ‘I can’t teach her to cook or the rationing will go all out of whack. It’s a shame as it could free up a lot of my time.’


    <hr>


    He didn’t know if the girl knew what snuggling was, but he was almost certain that she didn’t realize how badly she wanted it. She seemed surprised every time she woke up. She also didn’t get close to him until she was mostly asleep. Whatever she had been through it was clear human contact had not been a thing for her.


    She didn’t seem afraid of it, clinging to him when she was scared or unsure and leaning into him if she wanted something. But she didn’t seem to be aware that she wanted it either. Almost as if she didn’t know what it was. The more time he spent with the girl, the more certain he was becoming that ‘feral’ wasn’t just a handy description. He still didn’t know why she avoided looking in his eyes, though that could just be shyness for all he knew, but everything else screamed complete isolation to him.


    He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t even realize he was a person.


    Er, well aside from believing he was a moose. Did she think moose were people?


    His sidekick’s wild imagination and strange quirks aside, he was sure he would need to do a lot of work to bring her around to acting like a person. Or a civilized person. He didn’t care much for stuffy manners or ‘societal expectations’, but she would at least need to be able to hold a conversation and understand you don’t walk in front of cars. Or whatever was used for transportation in the future. The basics so that she wouldn’t get pancaked or shot… blasted?... if they ever got out of here.


    Common sense could come after he figured it out for himself.


    Of course that all hinged on them getting out of here. Or even finding out where here was. He had headed to the labs after a pit stop and a food break, intent on finding more papers he could actually read. He needed to find more examples he could use to translate so that he could be safer on the deck level. Radiation leak or no, he would need to find the reason for the power fluctuations at some point. He wasn’t the heroic type, but if they were both gonna die anyways, it would be better for him to jump on that particular grenade. He didn’t think the girl could learn electrical engineering quickly enough to matter.


    She would last longer on what was left anyways. For whatever that was worth.


    With said girl being suspiciously fidgety on their trip, it was clear something was up. Could just feel guilty about the kitchen thing though for all the information she gave off. It is always hard to read someone that had a completely foreign thought process.


    He put it from his mind though, he had a genetics lab to ransack and a mysterious facility to keep from shutting down.


    ‘If someone was actually watching us, I hope they got their monies worth. All this constant reading is giving me a headache.’