Under the night sky with a crimson moon, Viriya sat outside the house looking towards the red-tinted sky, sometimes at the road ahead. Stars were visible, even though a decent amount of cloud was covering quite a bit of the sky.
At the road, sounds of carriages, people, and bells were almost always ringing. Viriya had the outside door closed, but still some tall people and carriages were visible. Some different, tall carriages were visible from inside where Viriya was sitting, those weren't the horse-style carriages they went on the previous day; these were more like miniature double-decker buses.
After a little while, Viriya heard a somewhat loud drop sound on a water surface at her right. It was the bucket where Ridhra usually stays. Before she could look properly at what it was, wind and rain both started to pour pretty heavily. The sky was almost dark then, but still some stars and the half-eaten moon were visible to Viriya. Because it was red and not a full moon, Viriya liked to think of it as a half-eaten moon.
Viriya went inside and sat on the bed at the side, closing the window so water wouldn't come in. She kept looking outside. Being alone and not knowing what to do, she just kept looking out. Maybe she was just dreaming all of this, and she or he would wake up in a hospital? Like the leaf of the tree? Sure, that was a long dream then. She knew, or at least could feel, that all of this was real. Maybe. But thinking that it was a dream wasn't so bad after all.
Sitting there doing nothing, It hit Viriya that she was at home alone, with no one to ask anything. Why was she wasting time looking at the sky? Maybe she could find out something about the tree at the house, if not that something else. Getting off the bed, she closed the front door and first checked the desk in that outside room. It was empty, other than a calendar and blank papers. She opened the drawer, inside it, there was nothing other than some fountain pens and ink.
Not finding anything, she went inside the room Ownad had come out of. It was her parent's room. The room was silent, but it had a weird, damp smell, which was cutting off the smell of the first raindrops.
The room was messy, clothes scattered around one side of the bed, which was left at the far side of the room. Ownad was lying down beside those. At the side of the bed, there was a closet, half opened.
At the right corner of the room, there was a bigger-than-normal sized table, a little smaller than half of the bed, with some boxes all over it and papers scattered around.
What caught her eye the most was a closed door near the table. Around the door frame, it had concrete-wooden plants grown out of from there, just like on the first day they were at the house, and also like at the university, the concrete plant trail. Some plants had grown upon other plants, creating a fluffy look. Some broken bits already were on the ground, but in negligible amount.
Those plants were also around her when she woke up that morning. That night she had the first dream with the long table. Those were made out of wood and fabrics.
She guessed that if she had to find information about the Imaginary Tree, it would most likely be on the other side of that door. Remembering that the plants in her room were fragile, she thought she wouldn't touch them or go near them.
But the door looked more mysterious than the table; she couldn't help herself and tried to go inside. She went near the door, and yes, some plants already looked broken. She held the door hinge and pushed lightly, which didn't open. She pushed a little harder; it still didn't open, but some of the plants did fall off from the jolt. She decided not to go there right then. It didn't even have any hole or keyhole so she could look inside. She wasn't really frustrated. The whole situation was weird enough that it didn't seem like any stretch.
Viriya decided to check the slightly-too-large desk in the room to see if any information about it, or anything else, was there.
She was missing her phone too much at that point. She could have just taken a photo first, and after checking what was there she could have left everything as it was. But she couldn't really do anything about that then.
She went towards the desk, around the boxes. Those were actually scattered papers, some blank and some with roughly drawn pictures.
Pictures? Viriya thought with a bit of suspicion. She took a half-drawn picture; it maybe was her, but younger it seemed like. It was just roughly done with a fountain pen, like someone was practising. In another, it had rough proportions of a man and a woman drawn side by side, like someone was trying to remember how to draw, maybe Pannavo? He was home alone when Viriya came home. Multiple of the pictures had some outdoor, environment pictures drawn in a similar style.
Those were already scattered around, so she organised them and put them in a stack. She had intentionally done it. Instead of trying to be sneaky about it, she could say later that she had come inside for Ownad and organised them since they looked scattered.
Then she opened one of the big boxes from there; it was most likely made out of aluminium. Inside it, there were multiple brass containers, like the one Viriya had taken the flower with, and many more. She dragged the container to check if anything else was in it, nothing other than those containers.
Putting it back in its place, she opened another box; it had fabrics in it. Some just white or black, some colourful. She slowly pressed against them to feel if anything was hidden underneath. She couldn't tell if there was anything else.
She hadn't checked the drawer here at the start because the one outside only had pen and ink inside. After searching through two boxes and finding nothing, there were still three-no, four more of those boxes left.
She dropped the box idea and decided to check the drawer instead. Opening it, there was pen and ink, sure enough, and also a blue-tinted black rectangular box with some patterns over it in lighter blue. After checking how it was positioned, she carefully took the box out.
It felt like smoothed-out obsidian. Inside, there were some tokens, stacked in rows, with some missing. Those were almost exactly like the encoded tokens Maam Khanti had given to Makriva to bring home.
She couldn't help but think, if encoding like this was possible, why were there still books and pens?
Those tokens were pentagonal. Not a symmetrical pentagon, but a square with one side extended as a triangle. They were blue-black, like the box.
She took one out; it was empty, nothing on it. Keeping it at the exact spot, she took another from a different row. It had a distorted line engraved in it, wrapped all around the token instead of just being on one side. She kept it as it was and took one from the last row; it was empty as well.
Inspecting the box further, she found a drawer-like compartment at the bottom. Opening it, there were some similar tokens, randomly scattered instead of neatly kept. Taking one out, Viriya saw it had a distorted line engraved in it. The line wasn't wrapped around the token, just on one side, almost exactly like the tokens from Maam Khanti, only the line's distortion was different.
She didn't have any decoder like Makriva had, or maybe she did and just didn't remember. She went to her room, keeping the box as close to its original position as she could, to check if she had one.
While she was outside the room, she noticed the rain was much heavier than before. Looking out from the window, the road was almost empty, other than some carriages.
In her room, she had already looked over everything roughly before. But she decided to search more thoroughly. The corners of her, or old Viriya's, closet and the desk. There was nothing much in her room. After searching a bit, she found it, not just one, she had multiple. She had six of them in her room, shaped as octagonal slabs, hidden in a compartment under her desk, along with a smaller bluish-black box like the one before. The decoders had multiple types of slots — square, pentagon, hexagon, and non-symmetrical versions of those as well.
She took the non-symmetrical pentagon decoder and went back to the parent's room. Taking tokens from the bottom drawer of the box, she tried to put one in the decoder slot with anticipation.
But it didn't work, it was the same shape but a different size.
After looking through them, she finally found one that actually fit the decoder.
When Viriya fit that token into the decoder and it started vibrating a little, it hit her that last time when Makriva used it, the tokens had turned into paper — and Viriya didn't know how to turn that back into a token. But she had already put the token in the slot of her octagonal slab and it had already started working.
Luckily, the token didn't vanish like last time when Makriva used it. It stayed as it was, but from the opposite side of the octagonal decoder, a token-shaped object fell off and turned into a paper. Viriya was relieved, for sure, seeing that.
She didn't look at the paper right then, she just quickly looked for other tokens that would fit in the decoder, and she found four more that looked and felt like they would work. Two more worked the same as the first one. On the third of those four, a token-like object fell off and turned into a paper, but it wasn't complete, it was half or less than half shaped. When she tried the fourth one, nothing happened. Or rather, not exactly nothing it still vibrated, a bit more than before, but with no result.
She wasn't sure what was wrong. She was a bit annoyed, for sure, but not being able to do anything about it, she put the tokens back in the black box and the box back in its correct spot in the drawer. Then she went to her room.
In her room, she first hid the decoders and her box under the desk. Then she sat on the bed instead of at the desk, and taking one of the three papers and the one unfinished one she started to read.
The date on the paper was 43-02-3716.