The bars were made of sturdy stuff. They were rigid and metal, and they didn't bend no matter how hard she tried. But she wondered if the person who had built the cage had ever actually met a human, especially a wiry one such as herself, because the bars were far enough apart that she was certain she could squeeze herself out. It couldn't be that easy, could it?

She could feel that the longer she stayed put, allowed herself to remain stagnant, the more tired she felt. Her energy was being sapped fast.

Nikola looked both ways to make sure there were no guards about before starting to slide one of her arms through a gap between the bars. They felt chilly against her skin. The more she pushed on, extruded herself through the spaces like pasta, the more of herself she was able to fit through. Her shoulder popped past them first, and then her ribs and chest, and then her hips and stomach, until her entire body had passed and she was just standing barefoot in the hallway.

Wow. It actually had been that easy.

She was unarmed, so fighting her way out of the dungeon was still going to be a challenge when all of the guards she had seen had been sporting swords and armour, but anything was better than staying in this place.

At the sound of footsteps approaching, she slid herself back into her enclosure quickly; she was probably better off waiting until it was nighttime before truly attempting to escape, as most of the guards would be snoring by then.

She plopped her butt on the blanket just before the person making the footsteps checked in on the prisoners, but they barely poked their head in before disappearing back down the hallway.

"Did you see that?"

Upon being addressed, the red-haired girl in turned her head, her gaze half-lidded as she looked her way.

"You are thinner than I; if I can get through those bars, you should be able to as well."

There was no reaction on her face; it stayed vacant, as if she hadn't just told her of a way to escape. Her eyes began to slide shut and Nikola snapped in before they closed completely.

"Escape is within your grasp. You could all get out of here - all you have to do is slip between the gaps in the bars. Are you not listening to me?"

"I... am tired... I have not walked in many moons... I am wasting away, and I can barely keep my eyes open..."

Nikola's eyes waded over her body, over the ribcage that was so pronounced that she could see its shape even through the blanket she was under. She was malnourished, underfed, barely hanging on. That was part of why it was so frustrating that she didn't seem to have the will to escape, but if she had been in this place for as long as she had, would she be able to stand either? How long had she been here?

"How many moons have you been here for?"

"I... stopped counting at 23..."

23 moons. Gods, if she had been down here for so long, would she even still be sane? She would go mad in this place, with no access to a cleaver or a bread stove or her books, not to mention the fact that the slab in the basement of her home would never be drenched again. The First Voice, the male one, had made it very clear that if she stopped drenching the slab, he would never have the energy to follow through with his end of the bargain.

"Then come with me. I'm getting out of here come nightfall."

Nikola waited for a response, but no sounds came from the other side of the bars. She craned her neck to look at the red-haired girl and she was staring straight up at the ceiling.

"I will protect you from the guards, if that's what you're worried about."

Silence.

"If you are too tired, I will carry you."

Again, the horizontal girl didn't so much as blink in her direction. She could understand perhaps being nervous about the prospect of getting caught during an escape attempt, but to not so much as respond to someone offering to help?

"You are going to die here if you stay. Do you hear me?"

The red-haired girl's mouth opened and she started to speak, but this time her words were short and tinny. "You have made over 3 queries I have had no set responses for. Chances are, you are trying to get me to do something I am not programmed to do, such as leaving my set path when I do not have a side quest that allows me to do so. Please come back after the next update, which may give me more dialogue options, or try speaking to me about something that is more relevant in my main quest. Thank you for your patience, and I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused."

Programmed? Quest? Nikola's fingertips felt tingly as the words washed over her. She had heard about this 'quest' thing before, but she had been so sure that the nonsense the raving boy in her basement had been spouting had been born of desperation.

But it didn't make sense for him to have put this girl up to lying to her. They were sitting in two different cities.

She was pretty sure she had killed all of his friends, and given that the prisoner laying before her had been down here for at least 23 moons, the timeline just didn't add up. But then... was there a grain of truth to what he had said about all of this being a game? Was her homeland just an elaborate toy?

The spot between her temples started to thrum, a soft, steady pain blooming from between her pale blue eyes. If Lukeknight64 had been telling her the truth, then...

No. No. She hadn't lived for 19 and a half years in some kind of fake simulation, made only to entertain an audience. Her father's dedication to his craft was real. The blanket she had been obsessed with ever since she was a little girl was real. Her time spent learning to sift through grains and her recent mastery in baking bread were real.

They had to be.

Nausea licked at the base of her throat. If somebody had created her as a mere character to flesh out an imaginary world, then why was she now able to move around freely? Actually, come to think of it, why had she ever not been able to move freely? What had been keeping her there, doing the same things at the same times, speaking the same responses or not saying anything at all?

A feeling of vague nostalgia filled her when she thought about whether she had ever said the words she had heard come from the red-haired girl's mouth just now. Had she ever been the deliverer of the same speech? The combination of words felt so familiar, like a song she didn't know she knew the lyrics to until she started singing along...

"I want to talk to Luke," she said hastily, without thinking. It was a statement of pure instinct; he was the only one who held answers.

Of course, the world didn't respond. The fiery-haired girl pasted to the floor didn't acknowledge her either.

She thought back to how Luke's friends had all called upon their floating blue rectangles in her home. They had claimed that doing so would allow them to 'report a bug', so she wondered if they might be some sort of device used to contact people. If she summoned one, would she be able to talk to Luke? She had already demonstrated the ability to use them once before. Actually, more than once... the clues were beginning to stack up in front of her, and there were starting to be too many to ignore.

Nikola concentrated, combing over her memories; had Luke's friends done anything special to call upon their rectangles? Now that she was thinking of it, they had each made a peculiar hand gesture that hadn't looked like much to her then. How had it gone? It was slightly squiggly, with a curve or two like a worm that was hooked at the end.

She repeated the motion, and to her surprise, a blue rectangle appeared out of nowhere, rising from nothingness into somethingness.

Oh no. Oh, no no no, she didn't want this to be real. She didn't want to be somebody's imaginary friend, with no agency of her own.

She decided to just keep moving instead of dwelling on the ominous, rising emotions. She scanned over the surface of the ephemeral rectangle and saw that there were small shapes lining the bottom. One of them looked rather like an envelope, so she reached out and touched it and the screen changed before her eyes. Letters popped up near the bottom, and a whitish, see-through square was seated above all the letters. And above those, a 'Username:' field, where she would presumably enter the name of who she was trying to contact.

Lukeknight64. It hadn't sounded like a proper name to her when he had said it, but he had dubbed it a 'username', so she slowly, laboriously entered it in. And the box responded to her, adding the letters in as she tapped them. Amazing...

She tapped the 'Message' box when she was done, and continued writing.

Lukeknight64, is this reaching you?

She waited for a tense moment, staring for half a minute, and then a whole minute.

Then, upon further inspection, she saw that there was a button that said 'send'. Ahh, perhaps she had to press that? She tapped the 'send' button and the text moved up from her typing box to the conversation box, so at least something had happened. The message was on its merry way now, traveling to Luke, who was... in her base--

Oh, shit.

OH NO.

Nikola had been so caught up in being displaced in a peculiar city that she hadn't even remembered that Luke was locked in her basement. How long had she been here? How long could he and his 'hunger bar' live without food? Had she just sent a message to a dead man?