Chapter 35

During the night, Hank repeatedly woke up and kept double-checking that everything was how it should be, which was to make sure no one snuck out and that the man did not betray his end of the deal. However, he knew that this was going to be a problem in the future if he wouldn't trust them since if he didn't, they wouldn't help Adair at all.

On his third time waking up, he heard a lot of rustling and squeaking of the wooden boards inside the house, and Hank quickly went up to investigate what was going on. Because since it was still the middle of the night, he wondered why people would be waking up.

As he hid around the side of the barn, looking at the opening of the door to see what was going on, he soon noticed two kids, one girl and one boy exiting the house and walking towards the barn. Hank started to get worried they were going to do something to Adair, but they only took a peek at her and then turned around and headed to a shed that was about 30 feet away from the barn. Hank then saw them enter the shed, stay in there a bit, and then carry several baskets of items Hank.

He could not tell what was inside the basket at such a distance, but it smelled like food. Do these people do stuff in the middle of the night? If so, do they sleep half of the day when there is light out as well? Or maybe this is a ruse, and they are distracting me so that someone can escape.

But nothing out of the ordinary happened, and soon enough, Hank started to smell meat being cooked, and it did seem like they were awake and preparing for their day to start. This was bad news for Hank, though, since he was betting on sleeping the rest of the night because while he could sleep during the day, there were so many more options for them to sneak out and go grab the town militia and bring them to kill or capture him.

He was starting to see a problem, though, and that was if he kept on being paranoid and investigated everything that made a noise, then even if they did go get help, he would be too tired to be able to do anything to protect himself. Still, for now, he was going to keep on doing what he was doing. At the very least, this would continue until he knew the people in the house better.

He continued to smell the food being made, and then he suddenly noticed that the man from the night before had come out and headed straight to Adair but when he noticed that Hank was not there it appeared to Hank that he started to freak out and he started running around searching for something.

Hank then noticed that suddenly, the man stopped and went into the same shed that the two kids when into before and brought out a bucket of fish and put it next to Adair, and then just walked back into the house. Hank felt very suspicious of that man's behavior, though. Why would he just start running around looking for me right after noticing that I was not there? It can be that he was just looking for me. But, there has to be another reason. Are my suspicions correct, and this man is trying to do something to me? What if he wants to get rid of me to sell Adair as a slave.

Because while slavery was frowned upon back in Otto Empire, it was still used in many different sectors. Hank was tempted to just go and run off with Adair and try his luck elsewhere to help Adair. Hank thought about it a bit more and realized that maybe if this guy was religious-like, he claimed, his behavior could be explained away by thinking he scared away a "holy beast" and that maybe Hank was a bit too paranoid.

Still, he was going to stay hidden and see what the family was going to do while they were awake and what they wanted to do with their time. Since back in the Otto Empire, people slept the whole night and only did work when there was light out, so he wanted to see if this was normal behavior or something unique and suspicious.

But as the night progressed, the family started off with feeding almost a dozen different animals ranging from a couple that Hank recognized like the Schwein, which was a small multicolored creature only about one foot to two feet tall but ate anything, and the Kuh, which were almost as tall as Hank but were either white, brown, or black and or had different patches of the other three colors. The main purpose Hank assumed that they were here though was that they provided milk.

There were animals that he did not recognize, though, and he wondered what the purpose of those animals was because there was no reason for a family to keep animals that did not have any purpose. As he watched, he noticed the man come in and check if the bucket of fish was still there, which was since Hank did not touch the food provided just in case.

He also noticed an older woman who he expected to be the mom of the two kids, and she checked up on Adair several times during the night. He was very worried that she was doing something bad to Adair, but as he closely looked at what the woman was doing, he noticed that she put a lot of care into her work, so he did not jump out and attack her.

Hank also noticed that they ate three times during the night, and then they all went to bed. It appeared that all they did the whole night was take care of the animals, which while Hank found suspicious at first, he now understood that not all animals were like him and could sleep for 24 hours straight. He also wondered if something was wrong with Adair because they had close to the same sleep schedule back in the forest. He then calmed himself down by reminding himself that back in the Otto Empire, they had the same sleep schedule that Hank and Adair had, so he calmed down a bit after remembering that.

After they all had their last meal, Hank had noticed that they double-checked on the animals again, and then they went back into the house and a short time later turned off all of the lights as if to show that they were falling asleep again. At this time, Hank was just starting to see the sunrise and realized that the family had probably fallen asleep. So he went back over to where Adair was and double-checked on her himself, and while she didn't seem any better than before, at least he knew that she was properly being taken care of.

He then looked at the bucket and found that it was still filled with fish. Hank was a little apprehensive about eating this food just in case it was a type of trap but remembering that he had gone at least three days without food before and this was just free food sitting in front of him, he decided to try it.

He inspected it before he ate one and found that it was almost identical to the fish he captured and ate in the river. This gave him a bit of hope that there was nothing wrong with these fish, so he decided to eat one. Again, it tasted exactly like the ones in the river, just a little less slimy.

As soon as he realized that he didn't feel any different, he started eating fish after fish until the whole bucket was gone. He then decided to do a lap around the small farm to make sure that nothing suspicious was going on, and then he went back to Adair and told himself that it was just going to be a light nap.

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Right after Adair entered her sleep, she noticed that everything around her was just darkness. The first thing she tried to call out to Hank, but either he couldn't hear her, or she wasn't making any sounds.

She started to freak out as she looked around because this darkness was eerily similar to the place she was trapped in right after she died in the Civilization Test. The more she looked around, the more similarities appeared. She then frantically called out for help repeatedly, but just as before, nothing was happening.

When Adair noticed this, she broke down crying, and this continued for a while until Adair started to calm herself down, and she began looking around again. Still, this time instead of there being nothing like before, a crystal feather was within arms reach.