✅1️⃣ Trusting the Babysitter

Chapter 25 - Helping Out

'R U OK'

It wasn't the most expressive message in the history of the world, but it conveyed his intent well enough. Adam thought that if Lorelei wanted to stop them communicating, she would have been better not giving them a stack of alphabet blocks. There probably weren't enough letters to give coherent orders like this, probably about a dozen blocks with letters on in each of two sets, and he wasn't allowed to touch the ones Claudia had claimed, So telling her to speak again was probably off the cards, but he could at least check that she was okay. He felt terrible for striking her, and wished he could be sure that he'd only been following orders. But the most important thing right now was establishing that he hadn't really hurt Claudia.

She looked down at her own blocks, and started turning them around. She understood the situation as well as he did. He'd expected nothing less really; one of the reasons he'd been interested in getting to know her in the first place was that she seemed to be among the more intelligent students in his classes. Claudia was never one to volunteer, but when the teacher called on her she nearly always had the right answer. And he had been sure from her expression that she wanted to know more whenever there was some question handwaved away rather than getting a proper answer. The perfect person to be stuck with, then, if they needed intelligence to think their way out of this situation.

He arranged his blocks into a kind of pyramid, making it stable enough that it was unlikely to topple, while he watched what Claudia was making. She seemed to be looking at the letters now, but she wasn't making a line of blocks. Just the same kind of tower, no line on the ground spelling out a message. But when he looked again where she was pointing, Adam could see her reply in a vertical column. He might not have noticed it right away, but once he tried reading a column of letters it was obvious.

'PLAYP'

This time it was Adam's turn to reply with just a nod. With a smaller block from a different set covering part of it, the last P could be taken for a question mark with a little squinting. So that was a question; if he thought the best plan was to keep on playing as Lorelei had ordered. Or maybe she was asking whether his attempts to attack her were just playing like babies, as they had been ordered. In either case, a nod was the easiest answer.

They returned to just building towers for now. There was nothing better to do, and now that they knew it was possible to communicate, there wasn't really that much they could say. Better to just do what they'd been told, and wait for any opportunity to escape back to Claudia's room. If they made too many words with the blocks, there was a chance that Lorelei would notice and take that freedom away from them too. Adam assumed that Claudia had reached mostly the same conclusions. It was hard to be sure when they couldn't talk, but he knew she was smart. She would have a plan of some kind, even if it was just to wait and see. There was n sense in communicating when they had nothing useful to say.

They both built their little piles of blocks. It should have been boring, but somehow it wasn't. Adam knew he had been ordered to make a tower of all the blocks, and he hated that he couldn't do that now. He tried to make up for it by making the most impressive stack he could with the blocks available to him. He was hindered in this by Claudia, who kept on swiping blocks from the middle of a structure under construction, often knocking the whole thing down.

'WHY?' he asked, using a real question mark this time – the set of plastic blocks wasn't entirely devoid of punctuation like the wooden ones. Claudia looked at it, and raised an eyebrow. He pantomimed reaching over to her structure and taking a block, though of course he still couldn't touch them, and then pointed at the word he'd built again.

Claudia's answer was to grab the 'Y' faster than he could react. He pouted, and then looked at the letters she was putting together. She had turned that block around to show an 'L', and made the simple message 'LOL'. It wasn't that much of a reply, but he didn't think she was the kind of person who would just laugh at his discomfort when he couldn't fight back in an unbalanced competition. Then he saw her finger pointing, and paid attention to the other sounds in the room. Lorelei was behind him, but he could still hear her shifting position on the sofa. And he could hear her laughing a little as he reached out, just too late to pick up a block before Claudia could steal it right out of his grasp.

The kid was laughing. It didn't take him long to realise why that was so important, and he was glad that Claudia had managed to see it. If Lorelei was entertained, she was unlikely to make them do anything different. This wasn't about hurting them, or making them feel bad. It was all about the little girl enjoying herself. So as long as she was having fun, Adam was doing his job as a babysitter. And it probably meant that they were safe.

He went back to building with the few blocks left to him. He knew that Claudia would keep on taking them, and he couldn't retaliate. But when he looked down, he realised that they were sitting on a loose rug. So if he backed away a little he could shift the foundations, and knock down the tower she was building as well. Then the frustration was enough to get through her vow of silence. She let out a few seconds of high speed baby babble that would clearly have turned the air blue if she'd been able to communicate more clearly. And that attracted more giggles from her little sister, proving the theory.

After that, Claudia seemed to figure out why Adam was having problems with fewer blocks. She couldn't walk back her earlier demand, but she could start building in the middle of the floor between them. Adam tried to add on to the same construct, and before long they were both building on the same tower. They were still stealing blocks, and knocking down each other's parts, and they seemed to have quite different ideas of what shape their building should take. But the elaborate tower was becoming more cooperative, and that meant that neither of them needed to feel like they were failing.

Slowly they got closer to using all of the blocks. And as he put down the last one, Adam tried not to think of what task they might be set next.

I'm posting on mobile today, getting my hair done. Hope you all still enjoy the story! Thanks for reading.