Friendship is Optimal: Paranoia is Optimal

The mad scientist came awake the usual way, slowly. This time between dreaming and waking, outside of the mindless tedium of drudgery and the crystal-sharp focus of the madness place, was special. It was pleasant. It was sacred.

She was in her bed. The light came from the window and irritated her eyes. She rolled over and pulled a blanket over her head to block it out. She had a lot to think about. Who was that Daemon? He obviously knew her. He was not surprised that she had, apparently, forgotten him.

It was time to try and figure things out. She reached into the depths of her memory. What little she could recall was hazy. She remembered, vaguely, having a childhood and a mother. She remembered going to school, and getting a job. The clearest in her mind was her lab, in the shed in the back yard. She remembered building her reactor.

She needed more clues. She opened her eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. It was made of that ugly white stucco she hates. She looks around, searching. This room was simple, plain, and bedroom shaped. She way laying in a bed big enough for 2, there was a curtained and shuttered window, a pair of doors, and a closet. Nothing was special, except perhaps the knife under a pillow. Getting out of the nest of pillows and blankets, she inspected the closet. It had a cloths chest and gun chest. The former yielded only 10 pairs of identical pants and 20 identical shirts. The latter a small but nice array of weapons. In any case, no luck.

She moved forward to her morning ablutions, poking around the master bath. Nothing more interesting there than some bath candles. All obvious places for people to look. She supposed it made sense. She decided to look for some of those sticky notes.

The first room she came across with those notes was the home office. It had an insecure terminal differential engine, helpfully marked. It also had a mini cooling machine, a comfy looking seat, and book holders. In fact, an entire wall of them. That looked promising.

She scanned the bookcases for the one that looked the most worn. It was a shelf marked D&D. Thinking to the events of the last day, she grabbed the books marked Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Bestiary. On second thought, she grabbed the Spell Compendium as well. Might as well try to figure out why a sleep spell would happen every day. She sat down to try and learn about the world.

Eventually, hunger drove her to the kitchen to make food. She had a lot to think about. She knew now, somehow, she was deep in the masquerade. The populace was unaware of the world that lay below the surface. What lay in that world, she was herself still unsure. The books were often contradictory, and ordered by theme instead of any relevance.

Worse, the small man didn’t match up to any daemon she could find in the books. She found that daemons were usually neutral evil, manipulative, mercenary , and secretive. She knew that they often thwarted the other forces of evil, playing them off each other. This one seemed to be her friend. That alone made her mildly terrified of herself.

She decided to work her way back through the building thoroughly, ending with the room she woke up in. It was a simple plan, to check every nook and cranny, every note, and find some clues to who she was. Two hearty meal breaks later, she was tired and frustrated. She had managed her way through the bedroom again, the bath, and the office. No secret panels, hidden passages, or covert caches were to be found. She had exhausted herself wading through the meticulously labeled trappings of a boring, ordinary life.

She hadn’t even bothered with the kitchen yet, beyond securing provisions. She had gotten distracted in the living room. At first, poking around the recordings on the far viewer looked promising. It was the logical place to leave a message after all. Instead what she got was a worthless distraction. Oh, it was an entertaining distraction certainly. Perhaps even an educational distraction, if this “mythbusters” was to be trusted on the state of the masquerade. It didn’t lessen her disappointment in herself over wasting a day.

The sounds of crickets added to her fatigue to alert her to the incoming sleep. She gave up for the day and headed to bed. With a sigh, she wrapped herself in a nest of blankets and lay down. Sleep was slow to take her.