Rodentia Adventures

CHAPTER 3: THE JOURNEY BEGINS! FOR REAL THIS TIME!

It continued to look, turning the pages back, nearly to the beginning, stopping at a pair of them. To one side was a face of sorts, at least something possessing the basic properties of a face, even if the rest of the body was somehow missing, but next to it, on the opposing page, was something else. A simple sketch, one which should have been far less interesting than the creatures, characters and vistas, but it took up all of the mouses attention, normally a very finite resource but growing by the second. It didn't quite match the elongated arm, but their new powers of deduction taught it that they were similar devices. Not visually identical, but similar enough in principle. Not only could it now recognize the drawing as something real, it understood the purpose. The long narrow portion of the sketch which represented a potential physical item, and how it might be used.  

The mouse sat upright and looked about the ground, quickly finding what it was searching for: a small stick, not an easy thing to find when one considers it needed to be small by mouse standards. It reached down towards it, grasped it within its furless fingers and held up in front of its face before giving it a swing. It stared with wide eyes at the ordinary hunk of wood, looking down from it to its own hand, as though seeing it for the first time, and in a way, the creature was. Sure, the appendages had always existed, not just for walking on but for occasionally holding and grabbing objects, namely foods, but all at once it understood the 'true' purpose of a hand. What it was truly meant for. They wondered how it could have possibly taken so long to realize it. 

They looked back to the stick and the page, alternating between them, effortlessly able to transform the piece of debris in their hands within their mind. It could have a heavy rounded edge to bludgeon through obstacles. A blade to cut away bite-sized portions of food. A weapon to defend ones self. a flattened end to dig through soil. A tool that could be used to make... that could be used to make... 

It turned away from the stick, from the book, looking towards everything else, taking in the wide world around it. Streets and buildings and walls and doors and vehicles, once simply pieces of the environment, only worthy of heeding so far as whether or not they represented a potential threat, now clearly made, build of countless smaller components. What could a tool like this theoretically make? More accurately, what couldn't a tool like this theoretically make? 

<3~ <3~ 

The surrounding neighborhood was, of course, much larger than the inside of small clay hut, but aside from that not significantly different. It was marginally more colorful, but still predominantly made up of assorted shades of brown. There was slightly more light, but even though it was still the middle of the day, a pervasive gloom still hung over everything, only occasionally broken by the sunbeams above which, even when they did manage to weave past the labyrinth of metal plates, beams and catwalks overhead, only seemed to illuminate the smallest of spaces before drifting away with the passing hours. Similarly, the arguments weren't quite as loud, but only because they were taking place further away, but were still both numerous and passionate. 

The home of the two siblings, one of the older buildings in the city, was comprised of a rounded dome, an almost perfect half-sphere for ease of construction and stability, as were a few others nearby. The simplicity of constructing such a shape, however, was quickly overridden by the lack of available real estate. Soon partial domes were formed within the spaces between such buildings, eventually simple flat roofs, with the outer walls of the old now acting as inner ones for the new, before more structures were built overtop those. By this point, security and ease of building were distant priorities, with the only desire being to fit in as many beds as possible, and should one of these ramshackle structures happen to collapse upon a sleeping mouse? It would be tragic, sure, but on the bright side, it would free up some much needed space.