Michael was sitting across from a woman, in the body of a child, who was older than he was.
This was officially the weirdest thing he had ever seen.
"I tell you what," the woman continued. She had been talking for nearly an hour already, and had shown no signs of stopping or even pausing, aside from when she had had to go and get something out of the oven. "This guy, name of something-or-other, can't remember, doesn't matter anyways, he's got the craziest story what you ever heard."
They were currently living in a prayer, as the woman put it. The place where they were was situated inside of the zombie that had captured him, and there was barely enough space for the two of them and the thin table between them.
This lady had been telling him old tales about legends that came from where she grew up, a place she called the association. Michael wasn't naive enough to hope that this was the same group that Zoe, Luke, and the others were a part of, but he listened closely and remembered as much as he could regardless, on the off chance that it actually was.
Aside from that, though, they were very good stories. They had everything a good plot needed, and he would have called them cliché if they hadn't been thought of a few hundred years before those clichés had even been invented. At least, that's what it sounded like. From the girl's narrative, she had been around a couple dozen decades herself. Michael had gathered that something somehow aged her backwards or kept her from aging for certain non-constant amounts of time, although to be fair, her appearance and the way she talked were likely enough for someone to realize that. Their disparity had been obvious nearly since the moment she had begun to speak.
An hour ago, just before that milestone, she had pulled a sensory deprivation mask off of his head, and taken an oscillating translator device off of her own. Michael just barely managed to get a question in, and at his curiosity, she eagerly explained that the creature they were currently inside of ate as much as a couple pieces of metal or machinery a day. And although electricity wasn't a permanent solution, or even a viable one, in here, she had nearly been able to engineer these two pieces of equipment to work without it. The auditory portion of the sensory deprivation mask still requires batteries, because it had come in mostly as one unit, a pair of headphones swallowed a couple weeks ago, and while she had at first tried to deconstruct it and rebuild it to operate on potential energy, but once she actually had taken it apart, she had found that the operations that the thing's processor performed were much too complex to be made any form of compact or portable, so she had had to put it back together and use it with whatever spare batteries she could rig it with.
When she had first said oscillating translator device, Michael had assumed that she was just using the word because it sounded fancy, but that wasn't actually true. She called it that because that was what it was. By using a peculiar and precisely measured mechanism, she made her voice warble in a way that would pierce the noise cancelling headphones. The headphones did in fact work by broadcasting an opposite sound wave to cancel out every incoming sound, so her translator device modified her voice so that it was sounded in two waves at once, one precisely equal to her actual voice and the other slightly offset, at the same time. Because of this, when her voice reached the detectors of the headphones, they detected her normal voice, but ignored the offset sound, which was why she had sounded so strange when she had spoken to him prior to removing the mask.
"So, wait," Michael finally said after she stopped to breathe. It was the only pause she had taken yet, and she did seem to have been excited by his interest in the topic. She had probably used too much energy animatedly explaining the process to him.
"Yes?" she asked when she had settled back into her seat.
"How did you end up here in the first place?" Michael asked.
Her enthusiasm dampened slowly, and she let her head droop.
"Let's just say my family doesn't exactly approve of my career," she replied tersely after a few seconds.