Consoulia Chronicles: Booting Up [~ read description]

Chapter 3: Safety

She awoke with a start just as her vision faded into focus. She looked around frantically in the room she found herself. She caught her breath, but it was still shaky when the child slowly sat up and swiveled her head to scan the darkened room. 

It was lit up only by the morning sunlight doing its best to penetrate the closed beige curtains. It wasn't the brightest, but there was enough light to let her to evaluate her knee. It was wrapped in white linen with shades of brown and light red splotched in no discernable pattern like some sort of abstract art from her world. 

 Although she jolted in pain each time she attempted to bend her knee, she could at least move her whole leg, but thought it better to keep it straight for now. The sticky strips that kept the bloodied linen in place would require her to get used to the numbing sensation of tape. 

"Ah, you're awake!" The child looked up into the chestnut brown eyes of the young lady that smiled down on her. "How are you feeling?" 

The girl's eyes started to well up as everything came back to her. "Let go, Iris!" She was thrust into outer space, only getting to see the face of her grandmother for only a few short minutes from her flashback. 

Clover's smile morphed into a concerned frown, her hand landing on the youth's shoulder. The little girl's face was streaked in tears, flinching in response to the direct contact, but the second attempt was a little more successful. She buried her face in Clover's shoulder still trying to resist sobbing. "It must be scary not knowing where you are or what's even happening, huh? My name's Clover." 

"I'm Iris." 

"What a pretty name. Do you have any family members we can contact?" 

Her pseudo smile turned into a gaze that averted Clover's image. "No. They're all really far away. They'd never find me. Not even my grandma." 

"Did you run away?"

"Yes." 

 Great, they had a runaway child. She could be a liability if she and Zander got caught having her around. She wanted to get her to a hospital, but Zander had already admonished her about health insurance ripping them off. "So, who can we contact? We can't keep a hurt, lost child under our roof." 

Zander came into the room. He wasn't as warm as his sister, but he looked over the child. The bruises on her body healed nicely, at least. "How's the leg?" 

She remembered that she didn't feel any pain, but even as an android, she looked as human as the siblings. "It hurts to move," she lied.  "Was it bad?" Iris's eyes were aglow in a soft, blue light; not like the light that hit human eyes that brought out their color, but more like light that came from a bright incandescent bulb. 

"It was pretty bad, yeah, but it's getting better now since you can move it. You've been out for so long that we thought you wouldn't wake up." Clover sighed, looking over at Zander. 

She thought about her friends and grandmother who must've been lost themselves. She shook her head and threw the bed covers away. "I need to find my friends and family!" Iris hastily rose to her feet, but her knee protested her actions, prompting her to fall towards the ground. Clover knelt and picked her back up. 

"Well, you can't look for your friends and family with an injured knee, y'know." She turned her attention to Zander with a stern look on her face. "Hey, Zander, mind getting some pain killers and some crutches for Iris?" 

"Fine," Zander shrugged. "I'll be sure to pick up some medicine on the way back home from work." 

"Now." Clover insisted. 

"Fine. Before I go, there are some house rules you must follow. No wearing shoes in the house, nobody disrespects Clover except for me," he ducked a thrown shoe without missing a beat, standing tall again he continued, "you can't leave the house without an adult, and absolutely no going into the basement. Any questions?" 

"Leave the house without an adult, then wear muddy shoes in the house while I "accidentally" spill water on Clover on my way to the basement? Sounds clear to me, chief!" This defiance came as a shock to  Zander while his sister was fully amused. 

"What's so funny?"

She stopped laughing for a minute to say,  "oh, nothing," looking away and smirking while she approached Iris. "Don't listen to him, kid, he's just salty because he's now being a host for the first time in his life." 

"I'm your first guest? Sweet!" Iris giggled, probably for the first time since she came under the siblings' care. 

"Well, it was either leaving you out on the streets, giving you to a hospital around here that doesn't take our insurance- ow!" Zander nursed his ailing foot while Clover narrowed her eyes at her brother whom was jumping on his good foot. 

"Oh, right! I can draw you a bath while you're here. Hot water is supposed to be good for healing." She looked over Iris; she looked to be seven years old just by pure looks alone as well as by the sound of her voice, so she shouldn't need to necessarily help in washing her. Getting her in and out of the bath was a different story, but all this did was remind her of her days of babysitting her baby cousins. "Hey Zander? Bring some extra bandaging from the kitchen, would ya?" 

With a sigh of frustration, he rose to his feet. "Yeah, sure." She's going to make me late for work, he thought

A few days passed. Iris's knee had begun to heal ever so slightly during her stay with Clover and Zander as much as it could without straightening out. While the two siblings didn't have a method for straightening out bones, at least the bandaging was less bloodied as compared to the first night. She was still unable to feel pain, which was the good part. 

Iris seemed pleased with her living arrangement. Although it simply came with a cot and a few generic motivational posters hung upon the walls, it was cozy in comparison to just earlier in the week in the vast expanse of space. Here, Iris slept, nestled between the blanket and cot itself, and counted herself lucky that the blanket was thin; she could've overheated easily otherwise.

At night, she presumed that Clover and Zander were still asleep. At the foot of the cot was a console that was square and gray, with a controller accompanying it and some games nearby; Mugsy 3D and some sort of game about nighttime symphonies; that latter game was something Clover had bought for herself. Iris hummed to herself, a small smirk crawling onto her face. She thought it was cute that humans needed read-only memory in the form of cartridges to get games to work. 

She reached up to the choker on her neck; what looks like a bulky fashion statement was really a choker with a circular screen in the middle of it. Usually it was turned off to disguise herself, but with the press of a button, she revealed a hidden compartment behind the screen. It was a wire unlike anything seen by humans. One side was already attached, the other ends colored in white, yellow, and red connected to the TV on their own as if powered by telekinesis. 

She leaned back as the TV powered on and the logo of her exact console appeared. Her eyes were aglow with different colors as she had gone into her internal memory. She could play anything from here, no cartridge needed.