(A/N: You can skip the starting part and read after the *** )

Aaron watched Ariana go with a great sense of apprehension.

Despite his supposed blood relations with the woman, he couldn’t bring himself to trust such a foxy person as her.

But turning around and glancing at the camera, Aaron scoffed lightly.

He wasn’t a fool to believe that woman’s words that this was the only camera in the room.

He could bet a billion bucks that there were several more hidden ones around.

Luckily, his bestial eyes weren’t just for show.

Aaron walked around casually, pretending to yawn as he walked into the bathroom.

The moment he was inside, his eyes flashed briefly, allowing him to detect, or sense the ’intent’ in the walls.

**************************

Aaron watched Ariana leave.

He stood there for a moment, tracking the door she had walked out of, and thought about trust. Specifically about how much of it he extended to family members who had blackmailed him, extracted his blood without consent, and installed at least one visible camera in his room while presumably installing several invisible ones elsewhere.

The answer was: not very much.

He turned and looked at the camera.

The camera looked back, as it had before, with the blank confidence of surveillance equipment that has never once questioned its own ethics.

Aaron scoffed quietly.

He was not, by any measure, a fool. Ariana had told him about one camera. With the pleasant, open-faced sincerity of someone who genuinely expected him to believe that a research facility this size, run by people this paranoid, had installed exactly one camera in a guest room and then told the guest about it voluntarily.

Right.

He would bet a billion on there being significantly more.

Luckily, his eyes were not just decorative.

The specific ability was less an eye thing and more an instinct thing — a deep, bestial sense that operated below the level of conscious thought and detected something simpler and more fundamental than cameras. It detected intent. The feeling of being watched, distilled into something precise and navigable. The kind of thing that made assassins useless, stealth pointless, and hidden recording equipment about as covert as a person standing in a room waving a flag.

It worked on machines too. On robots. On any system designed to observe and record without permission.

He went to the bathroom first, because bathrooms are where people go when they want to pretend they’re not doing something specific.

The moment the door closed behind him, his eyes flashed.

The intent in the walls came back immediately, directional and clear. He found them one by one, pulling them out with calm efficiency — hidden cameras tucked into places that suggested the installation had been carried out by someone following instructions they had minimal enthusiasm for. Not deeply hidden. Not cleverly concealed. Hidden in the way that someone hides something when they’ve been told to hide it but disagree with the assignment and are making the bare minimum effort.

He also found the microphones.

As he worked through the sweep, he found himself mentally drafting Ariana’s future response when he eventually brought this up. He could picture it precisely: the wide eyes, the hand over the mouth, the performance of outraged surprise.

"Wow, the spy from last time not only stole our data but also installed cameras?! That mfker!!!"

Yes. That would be exactly it. Delivered with complete commitment, zero acknowledgment of reality, and the serene confidence of someone who has never once been successfully cornered in an argument.

He didn’t let it bother him too much. The beautiful part was that since the hidden cameras were not officially supposed to be in the room — given that only one camera had been officially acknowledged — there was no legitimate complaint Ariana could raise about their removal. You cannot report the theft of something you claim doesn’t exist.

He collected everything — cameras and microphones alike — and packed them efficiently into a corner of his suitcase, lens-down, because even disconnected equipment deserved to be reminded of its failures. He’d dispose of them properly later.

For now, the bathroom was clean.

Once he was confident that no recording device within the bathroom retained any functional interest in his activities, Aaron reached into his jacket pocket.

Alyssa was asleep.

This was not entirely surprising. The tiny mushroom-capped figure had been through a reasonably eventful day — relocated without warning, transported via magic circle, deposited into a surveillance-heavy research facility — and her body had apparently decided that the inside of a jacket pocket was a perfectly acceptable place to process all of that.

There was a biological explanation for this. Back in her homeland, nights were patrolled by nightcrawlers — creatures that operated on a simple and comprehensive philosophy of killing everything they encountered. For small, non-threatening organisms like the mushfolks, venturing out after dark was not an option. It was a death sentence with extra steps. So they had forced themselves to operate during daylight hours, against their natural inclinations, out of pure necessity.

Here on Solaris, however, there were no nightcrawlers. No nocturnal threats. No reason to maintain the schedule. And without the threat holding the structure in place, Alyssa’s biology was slowly, contentedly reverting to its factory settings.

Which were: sleep when the sun is up, wake when it isn’t.

Aaron flicked her on the mushroom cap.

Her eyes snapped open with the speed of someone who had been raised in an environment where slow reactions were fatal. For approximately two full seconds, her face arranged itself into an expression of such pure, concentrated hatred that Aaron genuinely paused. She glared at him with the energy of someone who had both the motivation and the intent to commit violence, lacking only the physical capacity.

Then the sleep haze cleared.

She recognized him. Her entire expression reorganized itself from murderous to delighted in the time it takes to blink, and she threw her tiny arms around his thumb in a hug that, given the size difference, was mostly symbolic but entirely genuine.

"Sir Aaron!" she squealed.

Communication had become considerably easier since Bella had permanently lent Alyssa a translation orb. The orbs were small pieces of enchanted something-or-other that handled the language gap efficiently, which meant Alyssa could now be understood by anyone and could understand anyone in return. This was both convenient and, depending on what Alyssa chose to say, occasionally a mixed blessing.

"Hello, Alyssa." Aaron rubbed her head gently with one finger in greeting. It was the most reasonable scale of gesture available to him.

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around with bright, curious eyes. "I remember your sister was taking us somewhere."

"Yeah, we’re in the Oscar’s Research Centre or something," Aaron said, keeping his voice low. "Currently inside the bathroom of our living quarters. I removed all the hidden cameras and microphones in the bathroom, so you can move around in here — but you cannot go outside, okay?"

Alyssa blinked several times, processing this information with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who operates on mushroom-person time.

Then she hummed, nodded, and turned around to explore.

Aaron watched her investigate the bathroom with the attentive curiosity of a very small scientist examining a new environment. She moved past the toilet — deemed uninteresting — past the shower stall — noted but not yet relevant — and then stopped at the bucket sitting outside the shower.

The bucket was empty.

Alyssa examined it. Then she located the tap. Then, through the combination of observation and instinct that had apparently served mushfolks well across generations, she figured out how to turn it on.

Water began to flow.

Aaron watched this sequence of events with the mild confusion of someone who has no strong objection to what’s happening but cannot yet see the destination.

The bucket filled. Slowly. Past the quarter mark. Past the halfway point. Past halfway, heading toward three quarters.

Alyssa watched it with the patient focus of someone executing a plan.

Then the bucket was sufficiently full, and Alyssa, without ceremony or announcement, jumped in.

She submerged completely. A small cascade of bubbles rose to the surface, marking the location of one tiny, extremely contented mushroom person who had just found her natural element.

Aaron stared at the bucket.

He had expected, in the general range of things Alyssa might do, a fairly wide variety of outcomes. This one had not appeared on the list. But thinking about it — she was a plant-based organism. The enthusiasm for water made complete biological sense. She simply hadn’t had the opportunity to explore it properly before, and now she had a bucket and privacy and apparently no further agenda for the afternoon.

Fair enough, honestly.

From outside the bathroom, a sound filtered through. A beeping, rhythmic and insistent. Unmistakably a telephone.

Aaron looked at the bucket.

"Will you stay in the water nicely?" he said, keeping his voice low. "I’m locking the bathroom door. If anyone even tries to enter the bathroom — hide."

From inside the bucket, Alyssa released a cluster of bubbles and nodded her head in a gesture that operated well enough as confirmation, especially given that she was mostly submerged and formal communication was somewhat limited.

Aaron accepted this. He locked the bathroom door behind him, walked across the room, and picked up the telephone with the enthusiasm of a man who already knows that whatever is on the other end is going to complicate his afternoon.

"Hey, my favourite little brother!"

Ariana’s voice came through with warmth, charm, and the kind of brightness that, coming from her, functioned as a mild warning system.

"What is it?" Aaron replied. Flat. Efficient. Communicating in tone alone that pleasantries were unnecessary and perhaps unwelcome.

"Well, let’s start with our experiments, shall we?" A brief, cheerful pause. "Look excited, brother!"

Aaron looked at the phone.

He considered, briefly, the full arc of events that had delivered him to this specific moment — standing in a metal room, in a facility he had been blackmailed into attending, with a tiny plant person soaking in his bathroom bucket, holding a telephone on which his scientist sister was enthusiastically inviting him to be experimented on.

He decided not to feel anything about it for now. Feelings could wait.

Experiments, apparently, could not.