Chapter 5:

The Void scared me again. We had to get rid of...a few...things, as fast as possible.

We were discussing it with the squad when Clemmie proposed we give the bo- things to The Void. This troubled me. Melandru asked for clarification and Clemmie only said that we needed to see if The Void was okay with that.

Clemmie worried me. It was the first time he was this vague in his answer. Usually, he would beat around the bush until we asked him the right question. But it was just a quick definitive answer.

So, we went to see The Void. Clemmie explained our problem to it like it was a member of our squad. Needless to say, I was absolutely disturbed by his conversation with The Void.

He gave a lot of clarifications and details like The Void was actively asking him questions we couldn't hear. I looked at Melandru, he didn't seem as worried as me. Usually, when Melandru is calm, it calms me down too. But that only made me more suspicious of The Void.

Clemmie then asked if it wanted to help us. A small pink mouth appeared under its eyes, it replied with a shy sound resembling a "ma". It looked almost cute.

Clemmie got all excited. He was jumping a little and squealed "It said ma!". He then looked at us with excitement. When he saw that we didn't even smile, he went back to his usual serious side and told us The Void was okay with our plan.

So we gave the things to The Void. I never saw them again.

Afterwards, I asked Melandru a few questions about The Void. He said that passive entities, while rare, are not unheard of. He confessed he was more worried about the fact we were losing time to hide what we needed to hide than about The Void.

It concerned me more. I pushed him to keep telling me what he thought of this. At some point, he just told me that if The Void was truly aggressive and playing the long game then it would be a problem for later.

Melandru does take on one problem at a time and we had a lot on our hands but I didn't think he would bluntly tell me that he didn't care at the moment, especially since we were talking about Clemmie's safety.

I realised I was the only one who cared about that in the immediate future.