Chapter 8

After the bear closed the lid on the clay container, he went back to turning the massive tree into logs. Since the clay box appeared to contain something special Adair put it back into the bag.

Since Adair had nothing better to do, and Mr. Bear was busy with work, she decided to crawl over to the lake to potentially find an answer to the question that had been on her mind for a long time. 'Why do the blue trees want the lake water so much?'

The first thing she intended to test was if it tasted the same as the water back in the Galactic Empire. So far she had only ever drunk the milk from the bottles and her furry companion had been satisfied with the fruits he had consumed as well as the rain during the storm.

As she dipped her hands into the water and brought them up to her mouth, she stopped abruptly when a sudden thought entered her mind. Whenever pioneers of the Galactic Empire found water on a new planet they wanted to inhabit, they would test the water first to determine if it was drinkable or if it contained materials that were harmful to their bodies.

This thought brought back the memories of the time one of her teachers had taken her class on a field trip to the History of Space Museum in the capital city. She was unable to recall everything about the museum, but one thing had stood out to her. A display with a newspaper headline that read "4 Explorers on Proxima B have died due to drinking contaminated water!"

Under normal circumstance Adair would have likely forgotten such a tidbit of information, but one of her classmates had made fun of those explorers, pointing out how dumb they had been to drink water from an unknown source without even testing it. After all, even on their home planet there were instances of bad water, so what had made the explorers think that water on another planet would be any different?

At the time, the classmate had looked directly at her as if implying that he believed Adair would have been another such explorer. Ironically, she had nearly proven him correct just now. Adair let the water drop back into the lake and crawled back to the bag to check if it had some sort of device or tool that would allow her to test the water. While her hopes were not high, she at least needed to try to cure her curiosity.

Adair touched the bag while thinking about the machine the Galactic Empire used for this task, but nothing came out. 'If I remember correctly before they had machines the people of old used to boil water at 212 degrees F (100° C) for like thirty minutes to end up with clean water. Only... how am I going to boil the water? Should I start a fire? But is it really a good idea to do that next to so many trees? Wait, are they even burnable in the first place?'

Alas, with humans turning into bears, thinking blue trees, and technology more advanced than the civilization she used to live on, she had given up on expecting anything to be what she would consider 'normal'. She realized that there was no guarantee that boiling this water would have any effect on it whatsoever. For all Adair knew, the water in the lake could cause her to never age or just be a poison for anyone but specific beings like the blue trees.

Nevertheless, she held the bag and wished for items to start a fire. What she got was not what she had expected. The bag offered her a circle on a small sheet of paper that was about one square foot. Inside the circle in the direct middle, there was a flame symbol. Adair recognised this item as one of the diagrams that had lit up as a defensive mechanism when she had been in the room with the crib in the grey building. Adair quickly put back this dangerous item before something horrible happened.

Suddenly Adair became aware that this was the first time she had come so close to the lake water without Mr. Bear stopping her. This would be the perfect opportunity to finally get a good look at her body. Adair had already tried summoning a mirror from the bag earlier, but as it turned out nothing similar existed in this world.

She made sure not to disturb the surface of the water to get the best picture possible. Her reflection turned out to be an extremely dirty chubby cheek blonde haired baby with pink eyes. She was not too surprised, since she had not really expected anything different, but she was elated to confirm that she did not have any birth defects anywhere.

While the pink eyes undoubtedly stood out, the Reincarnation Machine had already warned her about it back when she had made a deal with it. Her hair color had also not been a surprise. She had known about it before the storm had appeared, since it had grown so long that it began to cover her eyes. At that time she had been confused about why her hair was not the color of a rainbow like her mother's. Her best conclusion in that regard had been that either her hair color was the same as her father's or that her mom must have dyed her hair and that her natural hair color had been blonde.

Just to make double sure that nothing was different about herself, she spent the next few hours looking over herself to determine if there were any differences. The only thing that she found that made her different from a typical Galactic citizen were two hard spots on her back, right below her shoulder blades. Adair assumed that at some point in the future that would be where her wings would sprout from. She was actually looking forward to having wings as beautiful as her mother.

Adair then crawled back over to where the bear was to determine how far it had gotten with his little project. Unsurprisingly, it had not gotten very far cutting up the logs. Her body informed her that she was getting hungry so she took out a milk bottle and asked the bear to open it.The bear absentmindedly opened the bottle before immediately going back to working the wood with its claws.

One month passed in which the bear was busy with his task and Adair passed the time either watching him or exploring the vicinity. During this period baby Adair had finally become able to walk a few steps without falling. This was a significant accomplishment for her because it saved her poor body from the unpleasant feeling of crawling over the forest floor.

Unfortunately she did not get to enjoy her freedom for very long. One day she had still been looking at herself in the water, admiring her cuteness, when all of a sudden, she had been grabbed by the bear's mouth and brought away from the water. After she had repeated her offense, the bear took more drastic action.

Whenever her large friend got tired of taking care of Adair, it would fill up a bottle of the water and give it to the blue tree in exchange for it watching over Adair. This annoyed her greatly because the tree pulled her back whenever she moved outside a certain radius, which was not very fun compared to exploring.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bear had not only finished cutting the tree up into logs, but had subsequently further refined them into planks. Only one part of the original tree remained. No matter what he had tried the bear had been unable to cut down the trunk. However, it had served him well as a working station.

Now that the bear was done with the work it spent some time trying to tell Adair something. After much confusion he had managed to make her understand that he wanted her to put the trunk into the bag. Adair did as she was told and was completely baffled by this revelation.

She had strongly believed that only specific or special items that had been pre-registered could enter the bag, but apparently this was not the case. Armed with the knowledge that other items could indeed be put into the bag, she immediately started experimenting with this function.

The first thing she tried putting inside was a whole tree, but nothing happened. Her next target became her furry companion, but that also did not seem to work. In fact, he appeared to have seen through what she was trying to accomplish and 'punished' her by licking all over her face.

'Does it not work, because they are too large to fit inside of the bag? Or is the problem that only inanimate objects can be put inside?' Adair wondered. To test her new theory she tried to put some dirt from the ground into the bag. Surprisingly it only worked once she limited it to a small fist full. She quickly removed the dirt from the bag since she had no idea if each item had its own separate compartment or if everything was jumbled together.

Adair did notice that only about half of the dirt that she had put in came back out. This worried her because she had no idea what happened to the other part of the dirt. Did it get absorbed by the bag? Could it have contaminated another item? To check this out she wished for the dirt to come back out again but nothing came.

She then tried to summon out all of the items in the bag but that did not work either. She then determined that it was a mystery where the dirt went and she hoped that it would not affect anything in the future.