Grinding Through The Infancy Stage

The rest of the evening James spent zoned out. He had no interest in looking up more about mice or elements or anything else. Surfing the internet was all he could do, but even that was fruitless somehow.

In the morning he woke up drooling all over the computer desk and with a bad back ache. 

'Argh! What did I do yesterday?'

Rubbing his back he stood up and stretched. Quickly he got over the random stretch realizing that he had seriously twerked his back out.

 It was still early so he pulled out his yoga mat and did a yoga sequence that he had learned from one of his instructors at school.

Late to school, he didn't care, and neither did anyone else. The teachers only cared about the kids with bad home lives and/or poor grades. Wilbur was stowed away in his shirt pocket and it was all James could do to feed it every hour sometimes more. The news that he had contracted a mouse had got around. As he was contracted to Wilbur for longer and longer he was starting to make more sense of his inheritance.

"Yes, just what I would expect from James."

"It makes sense, someone has to be the cautionary tale."

"Oh! Is his mouse going to breed a whole colony? Yikes! I am glad I am not his Mom…"

It seemed like an inheritance was not something that James could just receive. He had to learn how to use it. Just being able to hear more didn't mean that he could make sense of what he was hearing. However, now that he knew it was a matter of skill he began actively trying to make sense of what he had been given.

After school he went straight home and cared for Wilbur. The pup did absolutely nothing for the first two weeks except sleep and drink milk. Except that instead of just leaving the pup to sleep on the desk he took him around everywhere in the pocket of his shirt above his heart. James knew it didn't mean anything really, but he couldn't stand the idea of his pet being lonely. So in the end the pup went everywhere with James.

James' shipment of mouse pup related purchases came on the third day he was in his new apartment. After that it was no longer the drip feed method. Instead Wilbur had his own tiny bottle with a nipple just the right size for a baby house mouse. After that Wilbur was even easier to take care of. Online it said never to bath a mouse, but James used a damp soft rag to wipe Wilbur's face and front paws. The milk that he had splashed on the little guy had gone rancid and a distinctly unripe smell had begun to make the air in the apartment rank.

After one week James had just finished feeding Wilbur when a space pocket started to shake in the living room. Wilbur was completely oblivious, but James being a little too energetic from being cooped up for so long decided to introduce Wilbur to space pockets.

For James this was a normal thing. So normal that he had seen thousands of them. Normally space pockets are completely stable and completely closed off. There is no way to enter them and if you could why would you want to go into a space pocket that was only a few cubic centimeters wide.

What was happening was that two space pockets were interacting. The boring result of which was that they were going to either combine or annihilate each other.

These little spatial pockets were just nuisances. Nobody could do anything about them. Instead they were tolerated because their larger more stable cousins highly prized. Dungeons, basically anything over a cubic meter in size were incredibly beneficial!

"Hey, do you want to experience your first space pocket?"

James said to Wilbur.

Of course Wilbur couldn't show any signs of interest in his sleep and even if he was awake all he could do was nose around a little bit.

Bringing Wilbur's blanket to the two space pockets that were dancing around each other James started to tell Wilbur what was happening. Wilbur's ears were just starting to appear above his skull, it was anyone's guess if they were actually functionally hearing anything at this point. However, James verbally explained anyway.

"Right now, two tiny points of light are glowing in our living room. It is a very dim glow, you probably won't see it unless you were right in front of it. They are so close together, probably only about one centimeter apart. As they become closer and closer the two lights merge until it looks like one light."

James checked to see if his antics were having any sort of result. They weren't.

"Anyway in a second the two lights are going to zip into each other. I don't know the science behind it or what is really going on in the alternate dimensions, but this is what I see. ... Yep. They just collided. It's over. It was just a slightly brighter flash."

James was somehow really depressed after the little presentation he had put on. He knew his Wilbur was just a pup, but James wanted some sort of reaction.

"Do you want to get a little closer? Sometimes your can put your finger in the space pocket right after they interact and haven't settled down yet. Only the bigger ones have proper cracks or doors or whatever that you can go in."

Carefully James brought Wilbur right up to the point at which the light show had ended.

"See, this is a space pocket."

Being too eager James had become distracted. He had stopped because the little blanket with the mouse pup inside it had disappeared.

"Ah!! Wilbur!! Perhaps this particular space pocket is a little bigger than I thought!"

Having had similar experiences putting things in space pockets in the past he knew that the space pocket would explode and disperse within a few minutes. Still he tried to fit his hand in to pull Wilbur back out.

Impossible to do, but he tried anyway. After just one minute the space pocket exploded and out popped the blanket safe with the mouse inside. A tiny space pocket is always temperamental. Any little outside influence and it would become unstable. Thankfully, the little guy wasn't teleported to another dimension or anything.