Matilda shifted in her sleep a little on the way back to her house, and her unconscious motion bent the armrest sideways. She didn’t notice; it didn’t even wake her up. When we dropped her off, we left instructions to be sure to save seeds from the produce for her, and not to come near her while she was sleeping. Gary seemed to think we were joking at first, but after we showed him the inadvertent damage she’d done to the metal body of her wheelchair, he looked appropriately alarmed.

I was honestly a little leery of leaving Matilda, but we needed to get home and it didn’t seem like she’d be waking anytime soon. It wasn’t like our house would be any better of a place for her. Probably worse - even if she was by far the strongest person in this house, she’d be living with an infant too young to move on its own and two adults, who could presumably be trusted to have some amount of self-preservation. I wouldn’t call self-preservation a strong suit for… about half of the kids under my roof.

Priya and I did our best to help Gary and, uh, Tina understand the risks so they could communicate them to her... Tina being the young mom I'd escorted to their house a few days before. There was an embarrassing moment where it became clear that I’d forgotten her name. (To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t even tried to remember it.) I passed on information they’d need as efficiently as I could, trying to bulldoze my way through the awkwardness.

It didn’t keep my stomach from twisting. At least Pointy's presence ensured someone would remember her name next time.

I’d radioed our house earlier, to let them know that things had settled down safely and that they could turn off the walkie-talkie, but everyone was still waiting anxiously for us to return. Cassie made a beeline for me and I spread out my arms to gather her in a hug, but she ducked under them to grab Pointy from the purse at my side.

“I missed you SO much!” she said, snuggling the turtle.

Ouch, kid. Leave me hanging, why don’t you?

Honestly, my feelings weren’t really hurt. She was three: I was glad that she didn’t really understand the situation.

Gavin came to hug me, taking advantage of the outstretched arms Cassie had dodged. He pressed his forehead against my cheek, then drew back, looking at me critically.

“Mommy, you were out too long. Your skin is all hurt.” He pressed a hand against my face, and I suddenly felt an unnoticed tightness evaporate. Oops. Sunburn. I’d have to be careful to drink extra water.

Everyone wanted to hear all the details of our day. It took some time to communicate, but the kids were excited about the sweet potatoes.

“What I don’t understand is why Pointy didn’t know this was coming,” George said.

“I believe the human phrase is ‘making the data fit the hypothesis,’” said Pointy. “I made a serious error. I attempted to sort my footage into three-day segments, based on which monsters appeared in which segments. Some of my footage was easy to order, due to the contestant percentage counter, but much of it was not. This led me to making false assumptions. I had thought that half of the segments introduced two monsters - a land monster and an aqueous one, whilst the others had one or the other. Upon further review, I believe I mis-ordered many of my recordings. I now suspect that the previous race had two monsters during the first three segments of each 12-day period, and none at all in the fourth segment of each set.”

“Oh great,” I grumped. “So they’re going to throw some other fun surprise at us in twelve days? The monsters weren’t enough.”

Pointy nodded. “I expect that the trial I mentioned early on will take the place of a monster.”

Oh, duh. I guessed that was kind of good news - we’d been preparing for the trial anyway, so essentially we were just hearing that there’d be only three new monsters in the next twelve days instead of four.

Pointy continued. “Also… keep an eye out for other glowing, crystalline objects. I’ve realized I have a great deal of footage of people competing to grab them, and now that I have more details about how the Points Siphon works, I don’t think I can attribute all that footage to this. Some, I am fairly certain is part of the upcoming trial, but… all?” she shrugged. “I don’t want to make more false assumptions.”

So, only three new monsters, but potentially some extra bullshit on top of the trial. Great. “Thanks,” I told her, struggling to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I appreciated Pointy giving us info - I didn't want to treat bad news as her fault.

George had pulled out a notebook and was scratching away at it… “Do you know how many pounds of pumpkins there were? And how many calories per pound a pumpkin is?”

“I can estimate that the eight pumpkins together were roughly 100 pounds. I was not provided with nutritional data, so I only have what I’ve scanned off of food packaging. I have not seen any packaged pumpkins.”

“Yeah… that’s not really a thing. Pumpkins sort of package themselves,” George rubbed his forehead. “Alright, let’s guess that they’re around 100 calories per pound. The potatoes and the peas… they’re kind of starchy, so probably higher. Three hundred? Four hundred? Split the difference and call it 350. That means Matilda produced around…”

He moved his pencil toward the paper, but Pointy interrupted. “With those assumptions, she generated just under 30,000 calories of food. Enough for 12 to 15 average adults, presuming your caloric needs remain constant with what they were before the system.”

“Guess I can’t out-math a computer,” George chucked ruefully. “So… 12 to 15 people, and the Points Siphon pulled from how many?”

“From the number of points she earned, 1,504 people.”

Ugh. Some of those were kids - probably a lot of them - but even if we made everyone a farmer, it would take close to three months to produce enough food for everyone at this rate. We didn’t have that kind of time.

“If this was the food solution you expected, we might have to leave,” I said. “We could feed everyone with this eventually, but it will take a while. Too long.”

Pointy shook her head. “I agree. Unless the Maffiyir’s coordinators wish to see widespread starvation, this cannot be the intended solution. I did see something similar to the spire in my footage, but it is only one of the anomalous buildings I detected, and not the one I thought was the best candidate for a food solution. I still think you should all be attempting to raise your novelty value.”

I peeked at mine.

Meghan Moretti

Novelty: 78

“Hey!” I said happily. “Looks like our work today bumped me up a little.”

Pointy let out an irritated sigh. “No. It did not. Cassie went up a couple points today, perhaps due to my music samples, but your points did not increase at all. The increase you are seeing is from yesterday.”

Pointy said “yesterday” the same way I might have said “years ago.” I guess if she was querying everyone’s interface every couple minutes, she’d probably seen my increased points a few hundred times. I guess I should probably make a habit of looking at my interface more often, but… if I wasn’t close to a new ability, what was the point? Novelty and Money? Both were mysteries I couldn’t decipher, and it was frustrating to be reminded.

But Pointy was telling me Novelty was important, and while she’d missed some things, she’d also given us plenty of reasons to trust her judgment. I… should probably be paying more attention to it.

I sighed. “Sorry. So… from my, uh, interaction with the couple on Saffron?”

Pointy nodded.

I frowned. “I’m surprised I didn’t get any today. Carrying Matilda through the streets was probably a little odd, at least. And… giving a speech to all those people?”

Pointy looked pointedly at the children around us. “I would speculate that there is an aspect of… timing… to the Novelty granted. There were probably a number of exceptionally dramatic events taking place at the same time.”

Oh. I guess betrayals and murders were probably a little more broadcast-worthy than one woman carrying another down a mostly-clear road.

I closed my eyes, thinking. What could I do that would interest alien viewers? I wasn’t going to go kill anyone. Even those assholes on Saffron, though the temptation flitted through my mind. Cassie had gotten some points from Pointy’s music samples, but only a few. Plus, I doubted simply singing pop songs would have the same effect as fully-produced professional music clips. My daughter had probably gotten points because of how unique those sounds were amongst the contestants. Even a professional musician would have to be trapped in the right place, with band members and instruments handy, and they wouldn’t have access to keyboards, electric guitars, microphones, or auto-tune. All of our video and music recordings had been taken away, placed behind a massive wall we couldn’t breach or scale. Pointy represented a tiny, tiny window back into our lost culture.

But that wasn’t all she was a window to.

I thought about it for a moment. Maybe I was humanizing the aliens a little too much. Would this interest them the same way it would me? There was no way to tell, but we had to try something.

“I might have a way to bag us some Novelty, but I’m going to need Pointy’s help.”