A fresh set of clothes adorn my back and a cup of tea is in my hand. Both of them are ornately decorated and probably cost an arm and a leg (even discounting their historical value) but I pay it no mind. I’m far too classy to care about such trivialities as wealth. Instead, I swirl my tea as I ponder the deepest mysteries of the universe. What is love? What is beauty? 

And what in god’s name is an empty mansion doing in the middle of a forest?

The cup isn’t holding tea, by the way. It’s a mixture of hot water and pine needles I put together to taste literally anything other than sugar and water. Oh, and I found the bird. It wasn’t actually a bird.  It was an antique coockoo clock in an empty mansion in the middle of the woods. Because apparently what I thought was creepy wasn’t enough.

But I digress. There are worse things in life than free food and free rent. Even if the provider is a haunted mansion. The haunted part is arguable, but the point is that it’s spooky and no one else is around to complain.  

“CAWW, CAWWW”.

Oh yeah, did I mention that the coockoo clock is loud as hell? It doesn’t burn, and I can’t figure out how to disable or move it, so I’ve left it be for now.  Then again, that might just be my newfound laziness. I’ve been sleeping 16+ hours a day to catch up since my ultra hardcore walk-in-the-dark-athon. I then spend the remaining  eight hours eating cookies and lying around and otherwise basking in my newfound wealth. Which, in combination with my acquired habit of pompously swirling around tea and being chronically unemployed, is actually pretty much historically accurate. The main things I still don’t have are servants to harass or socials to attend. Or for that matter, people in general.

 About two weeks have passed since I found this place and I haven’t seen a single soul.  And while the plate of cookies is restored every day by some mysterious power, I’m beginning to feel the effects of vitamin deficiency. 

Generalized lethargy seems to plague me no matter how much I sleep and my appetite never really grows or shrinks. 

At least I’m not growing fat. That would indicate an entirely different situation. 

No, rather than livestock being fattened for the slaughter, I feel like a pet being kept. Everything, my food and my clothes and my bed are all provided for and no matter what kind of mess I make, it’s all cleaned up by morning. I stayed up one night in an attempt to see it happen but it stubbornly refused to occur while I was awake. I’m pretty sure I got reprimanded with less cookies the following day. 

Obviously, whatever is caring for me possesses some degree of intelligence. It fixes tears in my clothing and properly sets my bed when I’m not looking. But there are moments where it displays what I can only describe as clumsiness. Once, as an experiment, I brought pillows from  every guest room into mine, and slept on them instead of the bed. I wanted to see if the intelligence would take the pillows out from under me to return them to their places. But instead, bafflingly,  it took the bed out of my room and arranged the pillows decoratively, like it thought I wanted pillows as my new sleeping arrangement. I had to sleep in a guest room’s much harder bed for a couple of nights before it got the message and returned my room to normal.

 Another time, I tried sewing together sheets in a half baked attempt at creating a hot air balloon, but it got confused and thought I was too cold and needed blankets. I only figured it out after a while of puzzling why my room was suddenly being kept ten degrees hotter. I think I convinced it to stop by walking around naked for two days. Oh, and when I say my room, it’s because it’s the largest one on the ground floor. For who else but me deserves the master bedroom? 

Yes, because I am the master of this house, definitely not the other way around. In no way, shape, or form am I hinging my survival on unsubstantiated hopes or assumptions. Like, for instance, the assumption that the supply of cookies is unlimited or that the intelligence taking care of me is smart enough to prevent my death via malnutrition. I’m not relying on those being true at all. That would be ridiculous, haha

. . .

So yeah, there are a few problems with my current living situation. I can’t survive on cookies forever and I don’t have any sort of ouji board to communicate my needs.

That’s actually part of the reason I adopted the habit of tea time. Hopefully, it will recognize what I’m doing and begin to provide tea of its own accord. Otherwise, I might need to test it’s responsiveness with more extreme measures. Will it take care of me if I begin to exhibit symptoms of depression? Self harm? If I begin to starve myself, to what extent will it intervene to keep me alive? These are questions I want to answer before solitude erodes my rationality, not after. Still, I’m a bit apprehensive about doing any radical experiments. Poking the bear to get a reaction is rarely a good idea. What if it assumes I don’t need to eat food or something? If I force it’s hand, it might not behave nicely. I could end up losing everything I gained, and the thought terrifies me. But that’s the key word, “terrify”.  How much of that fear is caution speaking and how much is low grade trauma surrounding my time in the dark? I still don’t venture outside because I’m afraid of getting lost and being unable to return, and that’s not exactly rational.  Could I be holding myself back due to my emotional weakness?

“CAWWW”

Damn bird.

All things said and done, I don’t exactly  feel the need to push myself. I’m fed and clothed and already far less desperate than I had been before. No good can come of getting in over my head.

Except in the case of baths. Did I mention there’s a bath here?

 In the fourth door on the right of the second floor is a room solely dedicated to bathing. I have to heat the water and carry it myself (curtesy of being alone), but when I do it’s one of the most relaxing things I’ve  experienced . I don’t often go through the effort, though.  Too many buckets for my taste, and far too many stairs.

There’s also a study with an empty notebook and an old fashioned pen, which I’ve been meaning to start a journal in for my psychological health but haven’t felt the motivation to do so.  Is that itself a sign of psychological unhealth? I don’t feel the motivation to answer that question.

Most of the guest rooms are also kept on the second floor, cruise ship style with outward facing windows. These take up all the exterior rooms, leaving the rest to be what I call “utility rooms”. To be clear, that is not because they are useful, anything but.  The coal room, for instance, is a 6 foot cube filled to the ceiling with loose pieces of coal. I got  half buried when I opened the door for the first time and have only reluctantly opened it ever since. While the coal does burn, it’s a real, actual burn with realistically awful emissions and soot. Given how none of the architects seem to understand the concept of ventilation,  and how an alternative, never ending fire source is already available (although admittedly not as hot), I see no reason to ever use the coal room. It does refill at the end of each day, which is the only point I’m willing to give it.

 Another is what I call the “sketching room”. Or rooms, rather. This pair is much less mundane than the coal room, although equally useless. Whatever you “sketch” into the surface of one room will reappear in a random surface on the other. So, if you make a scratch or spill a glass of water on one room’s floor, the leftmost wall of the other will copy the result, becoming wet or getting scratched. The exception to this rule seems to be the door, as well as any objects brought in from outside. If it wasn’t for this property I could have tried to use it to inscribe glass or metal, but as it stands the only use I can think of is communication. Which, considering how the rooms are within talking distance from each other, is rather useless. 

Following are a series of rooms containing cabinets with different types of glassware, ranging from tea cups to dessert plates to some finely crafted jars. Some of the wineglasses fill up faster than possible, which sounds cool in theory only to disappoint with an equally fast emptying rate. Maybe if I wanted to fake a high alcohol tolerance or  something. I don’t really know. The last room on the second floor is packed with low tech bunk beds and looks like it could be servant’s quarters. I considered looking under every mattress at one point but gave up half way through because there wasn’t any point. I know a dead end when I see one. 

Speaking of dead ends, the door at the top of the third floor staircase opens to a wall. And not a hollow or soft one, as my bruised fist can attest. Which really shouldn’t be possible: even from the outside it’s clear that there is a room on the third floor, one with light and windows and everything. So the fact that the staircase leads to nowhere is somewhat baffling to me. No matter how screwed in the head the building’s architect was, there’s no way any human would make a mistake so glaringly obvious. Right? 

Usually, I would assume that I am missing something. A trapdoor, a hidden staircase, anything. But I’ve checked and double checked and there really isn’t any way to access the room on the third floor. Maybe with a sledgehammer, and a lot of time. Personally, it sounds like a lot of effort and I’m not that interested, so I’ve decided to look for alternative routes. Like making a hot air balloon and sneaking through the window. Although, due to other concerns, that project has been suspended for now.

“CAWWW”

Where was I? Oh, right, the layout. 

The ground floor has all the fancy features of a mansion you would typically expect. A cavernous ballroom with chandeliers, six bedrooms equipped with king and emperor beds, an entrance hall decorated by several empty picture frames, all things good and mansion-y. It even has one of those ridiculously oversized double doors that seem designed to be slammed open for dramatic entrances. It’s so cliche I can already hear the lines.

“Hendrickson! You have spurned me for the last time. Come duel and die at heathen peak at ten o’clock tomorrow, or lose your honor as a coward. One way or another, I will take Agatha’s hand, and all that is rightfully mine, mwahahaha”. 

The speaker would then die an ironically gruesome death, and the challenged couple would live happily ever after. But an integral part of that scene is definitely the dramatically large double doors. Can you imagine otherwise? 

There’s also the dining room, whose main feature  is its automatically replenishing plate of cookies. Fine dining, by any six year old’s account. The plate itself isn’t special, by the way. If you take it out, the room just uses another one without refilling the original. Sadly, there is no cornucopia for me. 

Other than that, the ground floor has one more room, which I’ve identified as some sort of living room or parlor. Its main features are a couch, a rocking chair, and sewing supplies. It’s a cozy place to sit and drink tea, but that’s about it. 

Which leaves the basement. To be perfectly honest, I have not explored the basement as thoroughly I as I probably should. But the basement is dark and scary so I don’t regret it. There are no fireplaces or candles there besides what you can bring, so most of the available light is spilled over from the door at the top of the staircase. It’s quiet and suffocating down there, such that every time I go I can hear the sound of my heartbeat.  A well in the middle goes who knows how deep and holds a bucket and a much too long line which, due to the need for daily drinking water, I’ve become all too familiar with pulling.

Every time, I end up looking over my shoulder at the door and thinking about what would happen if it closed and didn’t open again, about how easy it would be to strand me down there in the dark. Even though I hurry to speed up the process,

I’m still left pulling there for a number of minutes before I’m able to escape upstairs .

It’s also extremely inconvenient whenever I want to take a bath, as its location forces me to walk up two flights of stairs dozens of times with a bucket of water in my arms.

That being said, the basement might actually be good for me.  It’s pretty much the only source of discomfort in my life, so without it, it would be easy to forget how far away I am from home. 

One day, I’ll be prepared to return. Until then, I’ll be stuck in here, sipping at my tea.

Which, by now, has gotten cold. 

“CAWWW”

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 Things began to go downhill about a week ago. I was continuing to experiment for the sake of understand the nature of this house and its mysterious caretaker, but my condition was noticeably worsening. My skin had gotten paler and I was losing weight, and I was still sleeping abnormally long hours. I attributed it to my body adjusting its metabolism. I was, after all, taking in considerably less calories than was advisable for a young man my age. 

But more concerning than that was the loss of strength and stamina. Weights I could carry with one arm a matter of days ago now required two, and I became winded far more easily. I no longer had the confidence to say I could make a three kilometer walk. Which, considering how vast the forest surrounding me was, did not bode well for the prospects of my escape.

Still, I did not panic. Although I had failed to do so in the past, tree sap remained a feasible source of calories if I could eat it. I simply needed to find the method of collecting and processing it.

 Unfortunately, circumstance would not wait for me to find a solution . 

Three days ago, on the day I tried to take a bath, I discovered my situation  was drastically worse than I had thought. I went downstairs and pulled the line as usual when I began to feel dizzy and was forced to drop my grip. I recognized the symptoms immediately: between the dizziness and the paleness, I was almost certainly suffering from anemia. Most likely a result of iron deficiency. Which was very bad news.

Firstly, it meant the caretaker was not paying attention to my nutrition,or at the very least did not understand what was necessary to keep me alive.

Secondly, it meant that tree sap was unfeasible, as it would only increase my daily calories without providing nourishment . Which left me with an extremely tenuous and risky method: attempting to alter the contents of the cookies themselves.

The pillow incident had already proved that the intelligence was adaptable and willing to change to suit my needs.

There was no doubt in my mind that, assuming the caretaker knew exactly what nutrients the cookies were lacking, it would correct itself. Unfortunately, getting that far was going to be a difficult task.

Written communication was a no-go, as earlier attempts to use the notebook were never met with success . Either it didn’t understand english or could not sense things visually. For that matter, spoken was too, although I think that had more to do with the caretaker’s general lack of reactivity than anything. That left me with a difficult puzzle: how could I, through actions alone, convey something as complex as mineral deficiency?

I had considered an elaborate display of charades for a while before it struck me that I was thinking like a person instead of a pet. People are prone to getting caught up in the details, unconsciously relying politeness and subtlety to maximize their chances. Pets, on the other hand have no use for precision and settle for broader strokes instead.

When a pet wants to communicate a problem, they create messes and throw tantrums and skip meals, all with the focus of getting across that something’s wrong.

So that’s exactly what I did.

I took out every piece of glassware in the house and smashed them, shattered every window and incinerated the curtains (not an easy feat when you run out of breath every ten seconds), fasting all the while as I awaited the results.

No reaction. By the time I woke up, the caretaker had cleaned everything up as usual, and the mansion was perfectly restored. It seemed my actions, extreme as they were, weren’t enough to warrant its attention. If that was the case, misbehavior alone wasn’t going to suffice. I had to engineer my behavior specifically to get a reaction out of the caretaker.

But what exactly did the caretaker respond to?

It cleaned up messes and repaired things, yes, but there was no personality or autonomy in these processes. They were robotic and unconscious, almost mindless.  I needed it to display sapience and problem solving, for it to make an effort to interpret my intentions.

Unfortunately, attempts to control the caretaker in this area had yet to meet success.

It had completely been completely unresponsive to my attempts to tell it “I always have tea time at quarter to nine”, and now it couldn’t understand “I’m 

 malnourished and at risk of dying” either. At some point, the messages were not getting through. It was  as though  the caretaker hadn’t noticed any difference in my behavior. But how? It had noticed much subtler changes in the past, so the idea that the giant racket I just made could go unnoticed seemed ridiculous. It seemed like something was missing 

Innovation, as it turns out, does not always entail the smartest solution. But that also means reflexively that the smartest solution does not always entail innovation.

If the issue was getting the caretaker to i actively interpret my intentions, I already had the solution. Simply repeat every behavior that had prompted responsiveness in the past. The caretaker clearly had both conscious and unconscious parts, similar to a human. Repairing, cleaning, and feeding might be likened to breathing, eating and sleeping. If my theory was correct, it was only when one of these processes were interrupted that it paid any attention to the fact it was doing it.

My plan, then, was to cause it to sneeze, and by virtue of sneezing, notice the piece of spinach between its teeth. 

Yesterday, I laid the ground work, and today I execute the plan. 

 I start by creating chaos.  I walk around all day naked making disorder everywhere I can. I take the picture frames off their wall, bring in armfuls of sticks from outside, dislodge the bathtub and throw it out the window, put a bucket over the coockoo clock and open the door to the coal room before stealing each of the guest rooms’ pillows and depositing them on my bedroom floor. Then, still nude, I take the other necessities: cookies, sewing supplies, and several large pieces of cloth. With everything I need in my room, I can begin sewing together “blankets” until late into the night. I take a break to dump the cookies on the floor and step on them. And then, I simply watch. The pieces can’t be disposed of while I am watching them, and I have become a master of patience.

Eventually, the bird’s croon marks the passage of morning.

I’m starving and dead tired, but I can only hope that it was enough.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Well that was a poor idea”, I think to myself in the relative safety of hindsight with a tea cup in my hand, pinkie extended. 
Poking the bear is rarely a good idea, after all, and that certainly was what I did. Ah, but alas, we cannot know the future, and can only lament the past. Is that not what it means to be a human?

A new set of clothes adorn my back and a fancy clip holds up my hair, the both of them ornately decorated and probably worth a fortune, but I pay it no mind. Rather than the trivialities of material wealth, my mind is focused on more important manners.

If a tree falls in the forest when no one is looking, does it make a sound?  Are humans alone in the universe?

And why in god’s name am I a girl? 

The tea isn’t tea, by the way. It’s a mixture of water and crushed charcoal  I developed to clear my head of the intoxicating feeling that follows me everywhere due to what I suspect to be  drugs in the cookies.  Fortunately, I’m pretty sure their nutrient balance also got adjusted because I don’t sleep as much or get dizzy anymore. They would be perfect if it weren’t for how creepy it feels to be happy all the time. 

Oh, and the bath got relocated to the basement. A side effect of the great sneeze, I suppose. I don’t feel as uncomfortable in the basement anymore due to the improvement of my night vision. 

My eyes no longer need to take as much time to adjust, and when they do they’re much more effective. It’s a nice perk, but one I really wish I could have gotten without losing a foot in height and most of my physical endurance. Am I embarrassed?

Well, it would be lying to say it wasn’t a little off putting to wear girls’ old fashioned pajamas (I think they used to call them nightgowns), but they sort of came packaged with the rest my survival, so I couldn’t really refuse. If I tried to undo it now, who knows what sort of side effects it might bring. Besides, this life is not without its perks.

Being young again is a major one, mostly for the energy I’ve gained. I didn’t think of myself as old for having loved to seventeen, but after going back I can definitely feel the difference. There’s also the matter of the night vision, and some worries about withdrawal, so no, I don’t intend on reversing the changes.

I just hope this doesn’t mark some sort of awakening in me. That would be awkward.

“Cawww”. 

The bird is much quieter than it used to be, perhaps because someone or something heard my complaints. Conveniently, it also marks the beginning of meal time, which I rush toward a little more eagerly than I probably should. “At this rate I really will become a pet of the house”, i think without slowing down at all.

But today I’m  shocked to find something different when I come across the table.

Lying there, innocently, is not one but two plates of cookies. It is at that moment that a noise erupts from the front of the building, one suspiciously reminiscent of double doors being slammed open.

No way, right?