Utterly Mad

Shush you. Shush you shushy face. LET THE SHUSHENING COMMENCE!

I'll get screenshots in a bit, nothing really worth screenshotting. As for story and events though.

It had been five days. Five days in a car. That's what it was for sure, Catnip had seen plenty of cars in one of her favorite books. She didn't think five days in a car would be so boring though. Nathan kept her wrapped up tight in a blanket so people couldn't see her. "Too much of an anomaly." He would say to himself, "Too weird for the rest of them, not that it matters much anymore." She got to try all sorts of new things though. Different foods, especially foods. She was particularly fond of chocolate. To her dismay, the chocolate melted when she left it in the sun. The sun was another thing, it hurt her eyes. It made her uncomfortable. On the second day, nathan had bought her a cheap pair of black spectacles, and the sun didn't hurt so much after that. There seemed to be a lot of panic on the radio, but a while ago the radio went mostly quiet. On the fourth day, the car went quiet and they had to walk. Nathan led her into a place full of trees. She'd seen trees through the windows in the car, but she hadn't been allowed to leave the car most of the time. Not even to look at the trees. The smells of this place were a wonder to her. The sounds too. What were all these sounds? Gone was the low drone of distance machinery and the hum of the lights in her room. Just the wide open spaces, the lonely howl of the wind, the chirping of, what Nathan assured her, were birds.

"Ok Catnip. Go." Confusion. Go? Go where? What? "You're free now Catnip. Free to do whatever you want. I'm sure you can survive out here fine, now go on. get out of here." Out here? Go? Free? "I don't understand." Said Catnip. Nathan had brought her out to the woods to... what? Abandon her? Absurd. How absurd. Yet, here they were. "Of course not. Listen. The world... The world isn't as it should be anymore. There's so much I could tell you, but you wouldn't understand a word of it. So, just go alright. Stay away from houses, stay away from people. They aren't friendly. Not anymore. If you see people and they won't talk to you, run away, got it?" Catnip got it. Simple instructions. She could do that. But she wasn't sure what to do beyond that. "But what do I do?" She asked. "I don't know Catnip. Whatever you want. What do you want to do?" Catnip thought about it. Unused to the outside world, and not well educated, her scope only extended to what she did know. What she had taught herself from the books she had been allowed to keep; trains, planes, and automobiles. "I want to build a train." Nathan smirked at that, "Catnip, you don't even know what a train is." "Yahuh! I seen pictures in books! and I learned how they work!" He wasn't smirking at her anymore, in fact he seemed a bit suspicious. The kind of suspicious that she knew usually bloomed into anger. "How do you know? How did you learn?" She backed away, "I... books?" 'Of course,' Nathan thought, 'Of course. She can't read, she must have taught herself from those outdated manuals we let her keep. I'm having a hard time believing she could learn from pictures alone... Nothing else to read but those and she...' She learned. She was probably a fairly adept mechanic at this point. Hell, she probably could have fixed the car when it broke down. Hell, it occured to him that she could have used that knowledge to escape, but either she was too stupid to make the attempt, or the thought never crossed her mind. That irritated him even more. "Just... just go Catnip. Here, this is called an 'MRE.' It won't taste great, but it'll keep you fed for at least a couple days." She looked at the silvery package he handed her. "Roast Beef In Gravy." She didn't know what "roast beef" or "gravy" was, but she knew, from what Nathan said, it was food. "Are you sure you want me to go?" She asked, not really wanting to leave, but Nathan was already disappearing into the foliage. In only a moment, she was alone in the woods with nothing but the sound of the wind and rustling leaves around her.