Helen laughs, and turns away from the stove— to Erskin's piteous whine— to pull out her notebook. "Here's a partial mapping of this area," she says, flipping open to the set of pages. "The rooms are numbered and lettered in the middle. Everyone's got their own notation system for departures from the mundane, but our Agency just uses letters. A rooms— or other areas— are reachable from and to the outside world. For instance, if you broke through enough A-room walls, you'd be outside again. B rooms are only reachable from A rooms. You couldn't get back outside from B rooms by going through the walls, you have to retrace back through A's. And C is only reachable from B rooms, and so on. It's pretty rare to get past G, and extremely inadvisable. The further the space is detached from outside reality, the more it relies on its own set of rules, and they're not usually rules that favor visitors. Think of, oh, diving down to the ocean depths. Or into specialized internet forums. I have a friend who did a thesis on internet forums, it was terrifying."
Delicately, giving her a chance to pull it back, you take the notebook from her with your teeth and lay it down on the floor so you can study it. ARE THEY FRACTAL you tap after a little while. "Oh my god," Pancho groans, putting a paw over her nose. NERD TIME. DAMN RIGHT, you reply absently, caught up in thoughts of nested dimensions and relativistic spatial interactions. You desperately wish you'd studied more physics.
"Ehhhhh," Helen goes, and waggles her hand back and forth. "It's debatable. Spaces like these do tend to continue similarly to how they started out— same construction materials, same sorts of objects, at least for awhile, hence, self-similarity. But I don't think so. You never see anything as tidy as a mandelbrot set or a menger sponge. I haven't mapped too much but you can see there are more B rooms than A, and more C rooms than that, but D rooms drop off sharply. Doesn't look like this place has gotten to E, and it might never. "If you want to compare it to natural mathematics, it's less like the orderly arrangements of pinecone scales or sunflower seeds, and more the random opportunism of a root system. I actually like to argue that they are root systems. The buildings come alive, in certain conditions, and then sprout." Helen grins. "The thought gives lots of people the spooks. And it's always fun watching a room full of college degrees fall all over each other to explain why anything that freaks them out can't possibly be true."
You process this with your mouth hanging open, tail slowly waving. ROOTS SPREADING, you tap out eventually, thinking out loud in a way, and then, a minute later, INTO WHAT, and wish there was a morse code for a barrage of question marks. The thought of a sort of meta-medium into which spaces grow pendant spaces makes your brain kind of do jet engine noises, and you haven't itched for hands so hard during a change since the first one. You want a mechanical pencil, a full pad of graph paper, and six or seven quiet hours with a calculator. Distantly, you note Pancho leaning on Erskin and pointing out quietly, "Hope you like nerds, bro, because Bel put some nerd in your nerd so you can nerd while you nerd." You, too, hope he likes nerds. Possibly even slightly more than you hope someone in Helen's and Reginald's organization has done a computer simulation of this self-similar space-branching business.
"Somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't here. Whatever the meta-medium our universe itself seeded in, is a popular thought." Helen's been wrangling nerds— and nerd werewolves— for long enough to recognize the frustrated desolation of a person who needs significantly better mental and physical anatomy than they currently possess. She gently eases away from the notebook and picks up the can opener before she can get roped into working out any equations or manipulating the buttons on any calculator. "It's all still going to be here for you when you've got your monkey suit back, sweetheart," she says, and picks up a can of little sausages. She opens it, judges the diameter of Erskin and Pancho's muzzles, presses down the sharp rim all around with the side of the opener, and holds it out for them. It's narrow enough that they can put their snouts in but then only barely open their mouths wide enough to bite one of the slippery little meat bits, and taking turns attempting to should keep them entertained for awhile.
While she's doing that, you're bouncing around the room working out your frustration, but the smell is like a noose around your hindbrain and reels you back in. "Sausage treats," you laugh. "They bring all the wolves to the yard," Pancho agrees, and is the first to try to get one out of the can. "And I'm like, damn right, they're better than yours." "Mfhmfhm," Pancho completes the verse, and you laugh. You give up fussing about all the math you can't do right now and try to focus on the present. Bringing Erskin a blanket off the nearest cot is a good start, and while he's taking his turn at the sausage can, you wash his shoulder. "Is it sore still?"
"Mmhm. It'll be another day or two before I can get out of thise sling, I think, so I'm just going to have to lump it. God knows how I'm going to get enough exercise in. Still! That's a problem for later." You succeed at fishing out a sausage by pinning it with your nose and levering it gloopily free. You are very smart.
You think it must be your turn now, but when you go to attempt it, you check yourself and look up at Helen mournfully; your snout is too wide to go in the can.
Helen is very polite and only laughs at him a little. She puts the little sausage can on the ground with an admonishment— "Don't tip it over!"— and goes back to the stacks of cans until she finds an ovoid container of canned ham. "This is going to be completely disgusting," she says admiringly, and opens up the pull tab. The inside features a perfectly level expanse of meat from edge to edge. "Wow. Yep. Have fun getting that out of there." She puts it down for Bel and sits back to watch.
You study the situation for twelve whole seconds before you roll your eyes, huff annoyance at yourself, turn the can upside down and give it a sharp shake. The ham substance splats out onto the concrete floor. You devour half of it in a single bite, then bring the other half to Erskin while Logan licks up the spilled juice. "It's disgusting and wonderful," you tell Erskin as you deposit the meat chunk in front of him like a bouquet of roses. "Eat and heal up so we can run around."
"It's a date," you agree, tucking in. It's indeed disgusting: slimy, metalic, salty, subtly off. Your tail wags like hell. "If I knew I'd be eating so well I'd have broken my leg earlier," you remark, and tip over the sausages. Helen makes a disgruntled noise. She gets another can of sausages and opens it only a third of the way, before bending the open portion of the lid inwards and pouring the excess liquid off into the ham can. Now the new sausage can forms a clumsy but serviceable kong toy that has to be rolled around and shaken vigorously to yield a snack. "There you go. And you'd better lick that floor clean when you're done playing, I don't want meat foot if I get up in the middle of the night," she orders. Evidently retiring from canine care, she flops on to one of the army cots, pulls her boots off, and opens a phone game.
HA HA MEAT FOOT you laugh. Then you go over and lick her hand politely. THANK U. Because she really is being much more than helpful. Providing entertainment may or may not be in her job description; you appreciate it either way. Logan is drinking the sausage juice from the ham can. Pancho is playing with the sausage kong. Erskin is... super adorable. Wow, he is just really cute. "You're the cutest," you tell him happily, and decide your amusement for the evening will be spoiling him rotten. (ok now i'm going to bed for reals)
"Aw!" You say, wagging. "Yes, it's true. I am the cutest." You pose coyly next to the loose blanket. When he comes in for a snuggle you whisk the blanket up and drape it over his head. "Haha, too bad you're blind now," you tell him. "There's no cure!"
"Welp! So much for my secret agent career." You make a great show of tripping over Erskin and trampling his tail.
"I don't even want to be a secret agent, don't cripple me," you protest, trying to get yourself out of the way of his big elephant paws. It doesn't work and you go down in a huff— luckily, on your good side— of blankets and elephant. You curl up around his shrouded head and bite as much as you can reach.
"Aah, what's biting me? Wendigos! Pancho, help, there's wendigos!" "Ah, how like life," Pancho says unhelpfully, busy playing You Can't Have Any Sausages with her dog. You manage, in your seemingly random flailings, to roll Erskin up in the blanket. "Taco Bell's new menu item: the Wendigolupa."
"The snack that eats you back," you decide, and get your teeth around Bel's hind leg. You hang on tightly enough that he has to drag you across the floor.
Unable to escape (and not particularly interested in doing so), you try to join him in the blanket. There isn't room for you, but that's the challenge!
"No, get your own!" you demand. It's difficult to fight him off while also keeping your jaws locked on his leg, so the two of you go in circles for awhile, kicking and growling. Eventually your bad forleg's been jostled and bopped a few too many times, and wrestling's not fun enough to be worth it anymore. You let him loose and unroll yourself, then shake vigorously and trot off to explore the water facilities. The grate is dry. The bucket is dry. The big containers of water have difficult caps. You give a long, plaintive whine at the human in the room. "You can crush deer legs with those chompers, you can unscrew a plastic cap," she calls, and goes back to reading a paperback. You whine at Bel.
"I've got it!" you promise gamely. There follows a long, apparently hilarious (from Pancho's reaction) battle of wits between you and the water jug. Who knew twisting would turn out to be such a tricky prospect in wolf form? You persevere, though, and eventually you are able to tip the open bottle over toward the water dish, let it glug a while, and then prop it neatly back upright. "There you go," you say, puffed up with pride.
