Kiley stared after Knives, then waited a few minutes to see if he would return. She sighed when she realized that he had really left, then returned to eating. Finishing up her plate, she decided that she really didn't want anymore at the moment. She gathered up her dirty plate and utensils and cautiously entered the room that food came out of, hoping that there would be something vaguely resembling a recognizable kitchen.
Her hopes were dashed as she looked around the room. Nothing that looked like a refrigerator, nothing that looked like an oven or stove, nothing that looked like a garbage disposal or a sink, nothing that looked like a microwave, even. The room looked very sleek and high tech, but she didn't want to go poking around and accidentally incinerate herself, or somehow make seventeen dozen brownies. Not that brownies were bad… but even she could only eat so much chocolate.
Cautiously, she set her plate down on a flat, counter-like surface, and was pleased when nothing happened. She backed out of the room and grabbed a handful of fruit as she passed by the table on her way out. Popping berries in her mouth, she wandered through the halls, looking for a computer terminal of some sort, hoping that Knives hadn't thought to shut her off from the system entirely.
It took her almost half an hour, but she finally found a door that would open and contained a monitor inside. Seating herself at the desk, she started to browse through the system, looking to see what was accessible and what was not. After fifteen minutes, she saw that the man had played an unholy amount of solitaire games, and that he thankfully did not deny her access to a word processing program.
She held her hands over the keyboard, fingers poised to strike, mind waiting for conscience to give her next actions the green light. While the actions she was about to take were not going to commit her to a course of action, they were another step that got her closer to leaving. And maybe never coming back.
The thought coalesced in her stomach, a hard cold lump that froze her. To leave forever would not be her intent, but she had no reason to assume that her presence would be desired here again. Maybe after getting information out of her, Knives would have no further use for her. Maybe leaving, she would hurt their feelings so much that they wouldn't want her back, just on principal. Maybe this was the only value she had.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. There were a lot of options available at this point, and none of them particularly happy. Maybe she would stay here, and she and Knives would lead the life of a storybook romance.
She chuckled, a less than happy sound that the walls seemed to eat, leaving the silence of the room more oppressive then it had been before. Maybe not.
Her fingers settled on the keys, then began to strike, pounding out letters in a rhythmic pattern. She cast her mind back over books read; pages, leaflets, papers, all kinds of information that she had devoured in her desire to learn as many tricks as she could. Word for word, letter by swiftly typed letter, she poured them into the file. She did her best to not think, but only regurgitate what she had memorized. Three hours and twenty thousand words later, she quit for the day, saving the file and password encrypting it, not so much because she believed that Knives would not be able to break the password did he so choose, but because she hoped that her obvious desire for privacy would be a deterrent to his curiosity long enough for her to finish.
Stretching, she worked out a few kinks in her spine. Her stomach informed her that it would not mind eating again, so she wandered back to where she had left the food. Peeking her head in the door, she saw that nothing had changed in her absence, save some congealing of the fat on the bacon. She browsed through the food selections once more, finishing off the toast, fruit, and waffles before wondering back out of the room.
She made her way back to her room and palmed open her door. Walking unseeing past the clutter on the floor, she ended up on the bed, pillow over her eyes. Having finally amassed enough calories, her body was demanding a sleep period in which to process them. Her mind, however, was reluctant to let go.
Had she done the right thing? Was leaving even the right thing? She wanted to stay as much as she wanted to go, was balanced on the cusp of a decision. She could be happy here. Happy. Her. The concept was almost more than she could comprehend.
Or she could go back into the world and try to figure out if she had a purpose. She had needed a purpose to keep her personal demons at bay, but didn't she get to leave those behind, now? No one here cared about her existence at all, save Knives and Ace. There were a few other lives she had touched, but none of them would really care if they never saw her again.
She tossed and plumped her pillow before settling down again. Yes; she could leave the only people in the world who cared about her, and then… go do what, exactly? What would she learn out there that she couldn't learn here? There was an enormous catalogue of texts in the electronic library; she could read up on this world for years, become well versed in its intricacies.
But… that information would all be secondhand, colored by the interpretation of the one who wrote it. There is no substitute for first hand information. Ask any soldier whose recon they trusted most, and it was always their own. She would learn best about this world by being in it, not by taking on the role of some ivory tower academic, knowing so much that she knew nothing at all.
