Chapter 15

When Adair read this, she was shocked by how advanced society was. Going by the state of the grey castle she had believed that the technology level would be at the point where the people of this planet would be using bows and arrows, heavy metal swords and such, but apparently that was not the case. It turned out that they already knew about genes and mutations!

Since the bear did not know anything about the race of her mom and given the hard spots on her back being on the exact same spots where her mom had wings Adair felt confident to refute the theory about her mother being a mutant. While she had not studied genetic mutations in depth, she was aware that they did not normally pass down genetically.

Adair also smirked that despite the 'alien theory' people had not considered a more obvious possibility. And that was that there might be a hidden society of winged people that stayed away from the 'normal' folk. Adair personally believed that to be most likely the truth because it would explain the giant black pyramid underground.

Or if they did, they were not the exact same as the previous generations. To be honest, Adair had no idea if this was the case, it is just what she remembered from watching some video off of the Galactic Web when she couldn't sleep. For all she knew the handsome person telling her this information might be a pile of lies, but she had no way to fact check now this is what she is going with.

Adair then asked Hank about the "spells" that her mom wrote. SHe had a little bit of hope that Hank had some answers since had experienced with the teleportation sheet of paper that was used to make them get here, and if he was her mother's confidante then perhaps he knew more about other spells. Sadly, but nor unsurprisingly, the bear shook his head. The only reason he knew about the sheet of paper and its usage was because the Queen had briefed him about it right before they had used it. That was also why he claimed earlier that no one would follow them because as far as he was aware, only the Queen could make those circles, and she told him that theirs had been the only one on the planet.

Hank did tell her though which became the only silver lining for Adair was that the Queen had given Hank some books so that Adair might learn how to use that power she supposedly would have in the future. And yet this confirmation really confused Adair. Just a while ago, she had tried to get items out of the bag that could teach her how to use magic, but nothing had come out. 'So maybe the bag has security locks that can only be opened by specific people?' 'or maybe she has to request something specific?'

Alas, if that was indeed the case, then Adair would be in trouble because, as far as she was aware, Hank could no longer use the bag. She could only hope that there might be ways to grant permission to others to open special compartments in the bag. Hopefully this would be the case, and then Adair planned to go back to the bag and see if it would allow her to access more technological items that she could possibly use. She secretly hoped for a cranial implant, but her growing enthusiasm quickly faded when she wondered how she was supposed to implement it into her head. Still if there was one, she was determined to get it. There might always be a way to use it in the future.

To confirm her thoughts on certain items being inaccessible to her, she asked the bear if some items in the bag could be locked away while others were available for use. Hank confirmed her theory, yet also told her that currently the only things locked away were the books and items that the Queen had passed to him to teach her how to use the magic. This disappointed her greatly. Why couldn't there be any electronic devices for her to play with!

Since the bear was still talkative, she decided to finish asking the bear questions before getting the books from the bag. So her next question was regarding George. She had spoken a bit with the dark blue tree while it had been teaching her, but their conversations had been rather short and she had not been able to determine much. Not to mention, Adair had needed to pay the tree for it to answer her questions while the bear was completely free, at least for right now.

Hank informed her that George was one of the very first explorers of Emperor Otto I and that he had gotten here by accident. He himself didnt know how he got here but as soon as he did. He had been transformed just like Hank had but instead of becoming a bear like Hank did he became a dark blue tree.

Hank then told Adair that he had learned the forest apparently went on for forever. And that the forest seemed to expand with every storm that passed. According to George he had found some remains of what he assumed had been a city, one that had expanded as far as the eye could see based on what he found. But sometime before he got here a disaster struck, the whole landscape changed.

The only city left on this continent that the tree found was an outpost that was exploring the area because the Empire found that the ground around it had some unique properties to it.

At the time George had admitted to Hank that there could be more people than just the ones in that outpost on the continent, but he personally doubted it. Hank then wrote that when he first learned of this, he had been shocked because he had not had any knowledge of there ever being an empire on this side of the planet. In fact before the Queen told him there was a second continent, he had never heard of such a thing existing.

When Adair learned this she wondered if it meant that all of the trees of the forest used to be people? And if that was the case, what about the dirt and water? Was that also why she didn't see any animals around? These were all questions that Adair would love to have answered, but by the sounds of it, neither the bear nor the tree would have those for her.

This was further proven by the fact that Hank was unable to answer much more about the forest than what he had just shared. Even to questions such as 'why did the trees' leaves retract when it's storming?', Hank did not have an answer and told her to ask George. In turn, this made Adair curious how he had been able to communicate with the tree. This made the bear ponder before writing that it was just something natural. It was the same as if he was still a human who was speaking to another human. Whenever he wanted to say something to the tree, his body just made the sounds necessary to communicate with the tree.

While they were on the topic about the bear Adair asked some more questions that came back to her about her furry friend. Why did the water magically stay in the bottle when the bear had rolled it on its side when the tree had been opening her bottles? The bear responded that it somehow knew that by licking the inside of the bottle the water somehow would remain stuck inside. There was a time period, though, so the stickiness only lasted so long. This made no sense to Adair. How could a liquid stick to a nonliquid, but she wrote it off since the bear appeared to be telling the truth and she had actually seen that blatant defiance to the laws of physics.

Adair's next question was how did the large fruit that the bear ate taste like. She assumed they tasted amazing, but since the bear refused to allow her to eat any of them, she had no idea.

The bear responded that it had a creamy consistency that just melted in its mouth. The bear also wrote that depending on which tree he took the fruit from it could have different tastes. He told her that the ones closer to the water tasted fruity, but the ones farther away tasted woody.

The last questions Adair had was how long was one Jahr (year), how many months were there, how long was a day, and how many different seasons were there? Hank responded with one year was 24 months, and each day was 48 hours. And lastly, there were four seasons.

This interested Adair quite a bit because each day was exactly twice as long as a day back in the Galactic Empire and then if the months were also twice as long then each year was four times as long as a year back in the Galactic Empire. She also was extremely happy to learn she was right on point with how long a day was.

But with these last questions Adair had finally exhausted her list of questions. At least for the time being, She felt like she might have forgotten one or two, but she was sure it would come back in the future. Hopefully Hank would be willing to answer questions at that point.

The only thing left to do was to ask the bear to give her access to the books inside the bag that would allow her to learn how to use the spells her mom was able to use. The bear responded that it was too tired after this whole discussion and said that it would help her after he woke up.

With no other alternative, Adair let the bear rest, while she chose to experiment if she could bypass the locking mechanism inside the bag on her own in the meantime. She tried over and over again, thinking of imaginary ways to bypass the lock. Adair tried everything from imaginary lock picking to blowing up a lock with a bomb.

Nothing appeared to work, though, so after a few hours, she decided to just leave the bag and let the bear handle, allowing her access tomorrow. She hoped that it would work. She didn't want to have a huge letdown happen by the bear not being able to give her access to the bag since he was no longer a humanoid. As she thought about this, she fell asleep.