It was alright. Gretel would be alright. "I'm sorry you had to go through that. I've heard horror stories and stuff. It wasn't good of them to use students to get out of paying for services," Green_One consoled her, bringing a hand up to tap her a few times on the shoulder. "If you ever need to talk to somebody about it, I'm here, and so is Blue. He's better than me at this," Green_One went on to explain, before his hand dropped down and he went quiet. None of them spoke afterwards, the sounds of pencils scratching and paper rustling filled the void between them. Gretel cursed herself. She should have lied. If she had lied and had said literally any other institution, other than the truth, then the situation would have worked out far better, but no. She had to go ahead and think that she could open to the man in front

“There’s not a God out there,” Emmet cut in, before grabbing Lila’s shoulder and pointing her towards the bank ATM machines.“Yeah, no. You’re coming with me. Do they still have cards in your future?” Lila asked him.“No. It’s all done with biometric data. Saves more money that way, not having to pay for card production,” Emmet answered her, watching her as she rummaged through her pockets for her wallet.“Really. What do they do about people whose fingers are damaged or have had their fingertips changed? I read somewhere that rock climbers can wear out their fingerprints, but I’m not sure if that’s true,” Lila questioned, before giving out a little celebratory noise when she finally found what she was looking for.She really was a child. A terribly responsible child.“Biometric data can be extracted from other parts of the body as well. Fingerprints, eye scan

The words on the forms were strange, and it had taken Jasper less than half a line of initial reading to understand why.They had all been written in his mother tongue.They had been written up in the official, government recognised language of Gryaz which looked so much more like the Greek letters in Lila’s history books, than the anglicised ones on the road signs outside.He had read them all by instinct, understanding them and going on as usual.Picking up the form that he had just signed, he recognised the language there as English. Jasper sighed and put it down once more, rubbing at his temples and hobbling to the sink to drink some water.He was so tired.He was so tired of the voices and words that were whispered to him in his mind and were left hanging in his brain for his mouth to say, the effects of the translator that had been fitted into him with the tracking chip still lingering in his psyche.Wondering when the eff

The worry and panic soon gave away to something much less turbulent with Gretel, as she tried her hardest to focus and understand the chicken scratch that somehow managed to pass as handwriting in the eyes of the Sýnnefan officials that had handed the work off to her. It was atrocious and tedious work to complete, especially when Gretel thought that she had managed to understand one particularly badly written word, before she read ahead and saw that no, she hadn't actually been able to decipher the random and eclectic scribbles in front of her. The frustration of it all was a simple, familiar and distracting one - a task that she had already spent hours doing previously when looking over her own old notes and served as a good enough distraction from the world around her. The simple, swooping mechanical movements of her hands gave off a quiet sort of delicacy that she hadn't particularly experienced in a while, the

Gretel had to stop and stare when she saw what awaited for her in the food hall.The same grey mush that she had been forced to consume for breakfast laid there on the tables as if there was nothing else that the facility could offer her, or more likely, was willing to offer her, considering that she was just a prisoner from Gryaz doing free labour for them, because they were incapable and unwilling to do the work themselves.Green_One yanked her along and brought her properly into the room with the rest of them to not hold up the line, as soon as his arm had straightened up, him walking in front of her and leading her to her meal.She let go of his hand and walked over to her own table, attempting to sit down while making the least amount of noise possible, cringing internally at the screeching sounds and the painful squeaking of the structure.Ducking her head down to eat her food, Gretel hesitated to even try and pick up her spoon, the metal shiny and