Night had fallen in Yenekit. Tuot and his eared friend returned home. Dinosaur decided not to tell anyone about his failure to find Kyotyoryon, but something told him that wasn't quite right.
"There's a strange smell in here," Etinnei craned her head forward and pulled down her hood.
"What's that smell?" Tuot asked.
"There is something not very edible, in the kitchen."
Tuot locked the door with a code he somehow remembered and decided to check the apartment's most important room. But the dinosaur only had enough courage to take a few steps before turning to his friend, his mouth open.
"You turned your head the wrong way," Etinnei grabbed her friend by the neck.
"I just..." Tuot couldn't continue.
"You're hungry, I know. So you need to turn your head where the food is. I don't have it."
Etinnei tried to turn her friend's head toward the kitchen, but it only turned partially.
"Go there."
Tuot was about to reply, but a sudden rustling sound from the "main" room made him retreat slightly toward the front door.
The arctic fox girl was also scared. Icicles stuck out of the sleeves of her fur top, and her gaze was directed toward the kitchen.
"Tuot, there's something there," the animal girl said. "My ears definitely heard it."
"I heard it too," Tuot said quietly. "Let's hide in the bathroom."
Etinnei noticed a wooden door with a few drops of water painted on a sign. Soon, she and her feathered friend were sitting on the floor, looking at the pipes protruding from the walls and the faucets leaning over a large sink made of an unknown material.
"A bathroom is the kind of place you need to hide," Etinnei remarked. "There's water, so we can hold out for a long time. And if we were a little smaller, we could escape through these things. They're hollow inside."
Tuot looked at the pipes, then at his eared friend's head, imagining her trying to squeeze through.
"It's a good thing the pipes are thin, so Etinnei won't get stuck in there."
The faucet occasionally dripped, but the sounds, along with the walls of the shelter, couldn't drown out the rustling coming from the kitchen.
"I forgot the kitchen is behind this wall," Tuot said, looking at the wooden wall, partially covered in white tiles.
"Really?" Etinnei opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut, nearly biting her own tongue. "Can it come out of the wall?"
Tuot recalled the electric penguin that could pass through the thick walls of the cave cafe and even emerge from the ceiling. The dinosaur activated its aura in fear, but then realized it was too early and mentally deactivated it.
"Yeah," Tuot answered. "There are abilities that allow you to pass through walls. But they're very rare."
"Maybe it will come out from there?" Etinnei clearly didn't hear her friend's words.
The arctic fox girl's face no longer looked frightened. She stuck out the tip of her tongue and scratched her hand behind her ear on top of her head, as if oblivious to the danger.
"Do you want to see this?" the dinosaur asked.
"Of course," Etinnei looked at the wall. "Maybe this creature is cute and I can pet it. But if it's dangerous, then you summon the lizards and I'll cuddle them."
"This is so cute," Tuot looked at his friend's arctic fox ears. "Why isn't she in the game?"
While Etinnei stared at the wall, the enemy "appeared" from the other side. A sound like the roar of a wild animal, amplified by an echo, emanated from the faucet.
At first, Tuot thought he was imagining things, but when he heard something resembling human speech, he summoned his shield.
"Aaah..." the faucet said.
"Etinnei, it's coming out of the pipe," Tuot covered his mouth with his shield.
"It's just the faucet talking," the Arctic fox girl tilted her head toward the source of the sound.
"And what is it saying?"
"I don't know. I don't understand his language."
"I don't understand either. Maybe I should translate it? There's a program that translates ununderstandable languages. I've seen it somewhere."
Tuot opened a virtual screen and clicked on the icon depicting the brown furry ear of an unknown animal.
"Here you need to choose the language from which to translate," the dinosaur read. "There is a dog's language, fox's language, bear's language, deer's language, squirrel's language, and even a cow's language. But there is no faucet's language here."
"It must be a very rare language," Etinnei looked at the screen.
Tuot had a long list of different options in front of him, but none of them matched what he was dealing with.
"That's strange," the dinosaur said. "There are faucets in every house, but the faucet's language isn't in the program."
"Maybe faucets can't talk?" Etinnei looked at the pipe, from which indistinct sounds were still coming. "But you came across a talking faucet."
"Then that's very strange."
"Oh well. The faucet seems fine. Nothing but water comes out of it. I think we can ignore it."
"Yeah, but... I wonder what's going on in the kitchen. Maybe there's a doll there trying to drag the refrigerator away, but it can't."
"Dolls aren't very strong. They're not made of meat like us, but something else."
"When I hit them, they separated into body parts: arms, legs, head, and torso. They seemed to be loosely attached, but the body parts themselves were very strong."
Etinnei grabbed her own "edible" leg and pulled it up, but nothing happened.
"Mine won't separate," the Arctic fox girl said. "There's something inside that's blocking it."
Tuot tried to answer, but a loud roar from the faucet interrupted him. This time, the dinosaur could discern some sounds.
"It sounds like a metal bird screaming," Tuot noticed. "That's..."
"What?" Etinnei looked at her friend, her tongue hanging out slightly.
Tuot didn't answer. Instead, he walked over to the faucet and shouted something into it. Soon, a response came through the pipes, causing the dinosaur to jump back.
"What's that?" Etinnei asked.
Tuot didn't answer again. He spun around, miraculously avoiding falling, and summoned the door lock.
"Don't go!" Etinnei grabbed her friend by the tail. "If you open the door, someone will pounce on you and eat you, and I won't even know if you're alive or not. I'll search for you and never find you."
Tuot entered the password into the text field, and then finally answered:
"If I get eaten, I'll write to you."
The feathered tail fell from Etinnei's small hand. The door that served as the gate to the fortress of bathroom opened. Tuot stepped out into the hallway and headed for the kitchen.
"But…" Etinnei looked at the door, which closed in front of her. "How will you write if you're eaten?"
Tuot entered the kitchen. Tuot entered the kitchen and heard the sound of something heavy coming from the refrigerator. The gray stone faucet, jutting out from the opposite wall, shook and uttered something unintelligible.
"What?" Tuot approached the faucet, which hung over a white and yellow stone "bowl" connected to a thick pipe.
"I'm in the refrigerator!" a familiar voice came from the faucet.
"Ahh..."
Now Tuot was certain whose voice it was. The dinosaur activated its green aura, and then released a translucent harpoon from its tail…
The knocking sound from the refrigerator gave way to the sound of the door opening…
…something heavy fell to the floor.
"Birdie, you are good."
Tuot turned around cautiously and saw a horned girl with gray hair, partially covered in ice. Her face was no longer covered by a mask.
The dinosaur was so overjoyed that he deactivated his aura and immediately fell to the floor.
"The solid water captured my metal," Kyotyoryon shook her hand and freed it from the ice. "And it tried to capture me. If it weren't for you, birdie, I would have stayed there. That's why you're good."
"No," Tuot raised his head and saw the ice that had been encasing the metal spirit's leg fly past him and fall straight into the stone "bowl." "This thing only freezes liquid. It shouldn't freeze you. You're made of something else."
"Not something else, but my metal," a blade-like tongue accidentally fell from Kyotyoryon's mouth, cutting off the conversation.
"I hope Halankuo arrives soon, and Kyotyoryon won't have to test what I'm made of," Tuot said, turning away so as not to see the blade instead of his normal tongue.
Kyotyoryon tilted her head back, forced her tongue back into her mouth, and then looked at the metal bracelet on one of her wrists.
"Hey, birdie, can you help me?"
"What?" the dinosaur slowly turned to face the character.
"You will cut off my head, and then you will cut me into pieces."
Tuot remembered trying to push the spring back in, which was actually a spine, and nearly sitting in a stone "bowl," despite his long tail.
"I want to know what I'm made of," Kyotyoryon said, lifting her leg vertically and examining it like a thing.
"You said yourself that you're made of metal," Tuot said, walking over to the window to avoid accidentally sitting in the spot designated for dirty dishes.
"Yup, but... I feel like there's something else inside me. The creator spoke of this when I appeared, and I'd forgotten. Now I remember. I need to ask her."
Kyotyoryon brushed the last ice crystals from her metal-plated dress and then headed out into the corridor.
"She went looking for her creator," Tuot thought and his anxiety level skyrocketed. "Halankuo told me what to do if this happens, but I don't remember."
Tuot approached the large round window in the wooden wall. After the excruciating torture, his brain gave him an answer, but a completely different one.
The dinosaur ran into the bathroom, opened the door, and found his eared friend sitting cross-legged astride the metal faucet. The animal eyes were closed, and her lips were silently whispering. One hand held a strand of hair, the other pulled down her hood.
"Etinnei, it's just..." Tuot began his sentence, but couldn't finish.
The dinosaur's brain shifted into a different mode, one in which there were no sounds, no thoughts, no space outside the bathroom, only his favorite character. Tuot looked at the Arctic fox girl and understood nothing...
"Tuot, why are you eating a pipe?"
The dinosaur tasted metal in his mouth, after which the image before him began to blur...
…The image quality soon returned, but instead of the arctic fox girl, a gray metal pipe appeared in front of Tuot, onto which, for some reason, his mouth was impaled.
"This is inedible," the voice from behind continued.
The dinosaur freed himself from the faucet's embrace, turned around, and saw his eared friend kneeling on the floor with her legs spread wide apart.
"I had a strange dream," Etinnei yawned.
"What dream?" Tuot asked. "What was it?"
"There was snow there. I was following the cubs and came to the shore of a slightly frozen sea, where there was only snow, no trees. There was also a rock right in the water, above which a large skull with three horns was floating. It looked like the one you showed me."
"I should write to the mushroom spirit about this," Tuot though. "Maybe it will help Etinnei somehow."
"I wish I could get there," the Arctic fox girl stretched her arms out in different directions and closed her eyes. "It's so beautiful there. The ice and the gray sea..."
"But you don't know where it is."
"You can look at pictures on the network. There are lots of pictures. If you look at lots of pictures, you can find the right place."
"Uh... Do you know how many pictures there are?"
"Yup," Etinnei turned to the wall, lifted her legs, and braced them against it. "But we can only search for similar images."
"There are too many of them. You'll be looking for them for a long time."
Etinnei raised one of her legs vertically and then waved it through the air. A screen with numerous icons appeared on the wall.
"I didn't know you could summon a screen with your foot," Tuot thought, surprised. "But I can't do that. I'll fall."
Etinnei tapped the search bar icon with her toe, causing another one to appear over the main screen, with a text field at the top and empty rectangular slots below.
"Now I need to write something," Etinnei twitched her arctic fox ears. "I don't know what that creature's skull is called."
"Write 'three-horned dinosaur skull,'" Tuot advised. "I doubt the network knows what the "Mausoleum of Nature" server is."
Etinnei typed a few characters with her toe that happened to be under the search bar. The screen refreshed, but instead of a photo, it showed two-dimensional drawings of strange creatures that only vaguely resembled the "Mausoleum of Nature" server.
"It looks like the pictures Halankuo drew as a child," Tuot remarked. "Then she stopped doing that."
Etinnei scrolled down the results page with her foot, but found no suitable images.
"There's nothing there," the Arctic fox girl lowered her feet to the floor. "Maybe I should search with my hand?"
"Etinnei..." Tuot walked up to his friend and looked down at her.
"What?" The arctic fox girl tilted her ears, almost disappearing into her hair.
"Do you think the network knows what you're touching the screen with?"
"Yup, the screen is alive. When I write on it, it updates itself."
"How can I explain it to her?" Tuot began to think...
...but he couldn't finish. A heavy thud sounded behind the door, causing the dinosaur to jump back a step and feel its tail hit the wall.
"Creator, come out!"
Tuot jumped up and almost hit his head on the ceiling where there were small round light bulbs.
"Creator, I sense you're there," the voice behind the door continued. "If you open that wooden thing, I won't cut you."
After landing, Tuot immediately began examining the bathroom, wondering where he could hide with his friend.
"Maybe she really won't cut me if I open the door?" Tuot thought. "But I'm not Halankuo. That doesn't apply to me."
The dinosaur looked at his eared friend, who lay on the floor, her eyes almost closed, lost in thought. Etinnei didn't seem to be bothered at all by the voice outside the door.
"I need to think of something before Etinnei notices," Tuot thought looked at the "wooden thing." "Halankuo definitely told me something about this. But I don't remember... Halankuo said I wouldn't forget, but I forgot what to say. Maybe I should say the creator got into the game? Oh, no, it's not from this world... Aaah... What should I do?"
Luckily, the situation resolved itself, quite amusingly.
"Creator, I'm going to fly," a voice behind the door said. "I know how to open the transparent door, so don't worry."
The voice gave way to heavy footsteps, which gradually faded. Tuot looked at the door, then at the bulges of the arctic fox girl's fur top.
"Do you know what a transparent door is?" the dinosaur asked.
"What?" Etinnei shuddered and almost bit her tongue.
Tuot repeated the question.
"Ahh, that's what you mean," Etinnei sat down on her knees, wiggled her ears and hit her tail on the floor. "I thought everyone knew that. It's a door that lets you see through walls."
"What?" Tuot opened his mouth.
Silence fell. The dinosaur stared at one spot, while his friend sat on the floor, twitching her arctic fox ears.
"That's..." the thought occurred to the dinosaur.
Tuot unlocked the door, ran out into the hallway, and a few moments later was in the kitchen. Where the window had been, there was a black, round hole, and the floor was littered with shards of glass.
"So that's what it looks like, a transparent door."
Tuot finally began to understand a little of the language of artificial intelligence and was even happy about it, but then he realized something terrible.
"Kyotyoryon went looking for her creator, and now it's night, and at night it's dark. I won't find her."
The dinosaur began to tremble, causing it to fall. Luckily, his head never hit the wooden floor, but only tilted enough for Tuot to see the grain of the wood.
"This door is not for you."
Tuot didn't even have time to be truly frightened. He raised his head and saw those same edible legs before him, the sight of which was offset by an inedible tail of white and yellow fur.
… The dinosaur told his eared friend what had happened.
"Don't be afraid," Etinnei smiled. "Even if it's dark, I have little ears that can hear everything that happens in the city. It's just too bad no one can see them. They're cute."
"I see," Tuot looked at his friend's head, his mouth wide open.
The next moment, the dinosaur was lying on the floor, nearly suffocated by the fluffy embrace.