Chapter 9

One day Adair noticed that something was different. The bear had provided the blue tree with four times the usual amount of water. Even the tree seemed confused as to why it was getting special treatment on that day. The bear and the tree then had a conversation which Adair was unable to understand, but they had come to a quick resolution.

The tree started grabbing the planks the bear had prepared and laid them next to each other on the ground. It did not take long for Adair to conclude that they were building the flooring for a building. The way they were going around building the structure, though, felt wrong. 'Why would you start with the wood floor? Doesn't that go in after the rest of the building is finished? Is this the way people usually build structures in this world?' She also thought 'why build a floor its not like the ground is much worse and we are wasting wood building the floor.'

Whatever the reason Adair decided to wait and watch what they were building. On the first day, the tree and the bear did not do much besides continuously laying the planks next to each other. The bear had done the best he could, but his claws were not ideal tools for cutting the wood, so his planks were not even close to being standard planks. Instead, it was more like a jigsaw puzzle on getting the pieces close enough to each other so that there were no major holes in the flooring.

They started with the outside of the building and worked their way into the center. From Adair's estimations, the structure they were trying to build was about four times as big as the bear, so around eighty feet in length and two hundred feet long. With these estimations Adair wondered if the roof of the building would reach the branches of the trees and realized that no it wouldn't. It probably wouldn't even be close.

It took the bear and the tree two months to finish the ground floor in a way so that it did not have too many holes, and the ones that it left were reasonably small... at least compared to them. For someone as small as Adair, the holes were big enough to make her whole foot disappear, yet neither the tree nor the bear seemed to have any indication to fix them for the time being.

Once they were done with the floor the bear went to Adair and started drawing something on the ground with its paw. At first Adair was confused what the bear was doing but she soon realized that it was a box. This made Adair think for a second until she realized that the bear probably wanted the clay box from the bag.

So Adair quickly went and got the bag and pulled out the clay box. The bear quickly took it and did a soft growl as if to show his appreciation. The bear then took the box to the tree and made the tree open the clay box again, which it then used to pour some of the contents onto the wood flooring.

The floor visibly changed until it took on the same color as the grey castle where Adair had been born. After making sure it was safe Adair checked the wood to see what had changed and she found that the wood kept the same texture as before and this made Adair wonder if the whole stone building that her mom lived in used to be a different color until this liquid was poured onto it.

She also wondered what extra properties the liquid gave the wood. Did it make it fireproof? Waterproof? Unbreakable? Again there was nothing Adair could find out about it until she asked the bear, who had knowingly used it for the construction. Learning the language that the people on this planet spoke became Adair's number one priority because so many easy questions could be answered if she was only able to ask them.

Of course, that was only under the assumption the bear would understand her questions and be able to communicate back to her. However, Adair was reasonably confident that it should work. She eventually would have to bite this bullet anyway, so even if the bear could not answer any of the questions, she did not want to stay illiterate since she planned to enter human society or whatever race society she was in the future.

Adair went over to the magical bag and wished for items to learn the language. What she got was a picture book and thirty wooden blocks. Adair recognized most of the letters as they were the same ones that the Galactic Empire used for their own language. However the vowels A, O and U were duplicated with one set looking normal and the other having strange balls above them. (Ä, Ö, Ü)

Adair was unsure what to do with them, so she put them aside for now. Similarly, she also had no idea where the strange letter ß was supposed to go. This also brought up the question of what time period she was in because whatever the answer was, it would rock her understanding of the universe.

Did she get reincarnated in a time before the Galactic Empire existed? If so, did that mean that the Galactic Empire adopted this language? If that was the case, then would her current race be destined to go extinct in the future? Alternatively this race might be an advancement of the Galactic Empire. In that case it would mean that the Galactic Empire no longer existed. The third option was that, for some reason, all languages throughout the universe looked the same.

While the last option briefly popped into her head, it left it just as quickly. What was the probability that two advanced civilizations would have the same alphabet? It had to be nearly 0%, right? The beings even looked similar. This could be written off due to something that the Reincarnation Machine had said, though. Adair had memorized everything that it had told her in case it could help her in the future. It had told her, "So in your case, female and human with the base of God *******."

If Gods created every race, then it was possible that they all looked nearly identical and also shared similar languages. Adair quickly realized she was getting ahead of herself, though, and if she had the opportunity, she might be able to figure out the answers to her questions, but that was so far away that she didn't even want to think about it.

She then spent some time organizing the letters in the same way the Galactic language was organized, and put the weird letter ß at the beginning of the alphabet and the duplicated vowels at the end.

She looked up to check the progress of Mr. Bear and the tree, but they had not gotten very far. Adair spent some time trying to vocalize all of the letters that she knew. She quickly discovered that she could not. Her vocal cords were not strong enough to do it, most likely because she had not had any chance to use them in the previous months, so she began rectifying it.

Two more months passed, and Adair could easily say every letter according to how they would sound in the Galactic language. While she had no idea if they sounded the same in this new language, she hoped so. Even if they were not, it was good practice speaking with her new body.

At the same time, the bear and the tree had completed the building. One side was left open so that the bear and Adair could enter the building, but besides that, it looked like a huge grey wood box. While Adair knew that the building did not have a slanted roof she was worried because not having a slanted roof did worry her because if it rained again it was practically guaranteed that the water would come inside their new home instead of outside it, especially with the holes. Nevertheless, it was a significant improvement over sleeping out in the open.

At times she tried asking the bear and the tree questions about the alphabet and the language. The bear scratched something into the ground, but she was unable to understand what he was trying to tell her. Adair ended up trying to read the picture book. Alas, without a dictionary or someone speaking to her on how the language should sound and behave grammatically really made this process far more complicated than she had ever hoped.

She continued for around a month until one day, while Adair was writing the letters in the dirt outside of the building, she noticed that the light on the ground was no longer green and was becoming darker way sooner than it should be. This caused Adair to look up and the retracted leaves allowed her to see the already black sky.

It looked identical to the storm from around six months ago. As soon as Adair realized this, the downpour began. Not wanting to get wet, she rushed back into the silver box. The bear was not there yet, but she assumed that it was collecting more of the basketball-sized fruit that it seemed to enjoy as its provisions.

The bear arrived shortly after and started bringing in the extra wood that had not been used in the construction. Overall, they had ended up with a couple of hundred feet of lumber left unused, which was designated to be used in case of damage to the box as far as Adair could tell.

Unlike the last time, the temperature continued to drop. It had not been very noticeable in the first hours, but after the second day passed Adair had been forced to snuggle up to Mr. Bear for warmth. As the temperature continued to drop the rain turned into snow.

Adair actually welcomed such a change because back when it was raining, the holes in the roof had continued to leak inwards. Which made Adair get up and stop snuggling Mr. Bear and spend a lot of time pushing around a makeshift broom, a wood plank with a short handle, to make the water leave the box.