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Chapter 202: Silence in the Cafe Library
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2024-10-29 19:42:56It was far too silent.
The silence that filled the cafe was uncomfortably warm, and the lights a little bit too dim, unrelenting and almost reaching the threshhold of an annoying, buzzing, slight pain.
Emmet was actively stopping himself from looking over towards Lila, constantly hearing all the noises and little shuffles that she was making as she fiddled with the time machine, moving about it and messing with it far more than what Emmet had guessed that it required. Whatever she was doing with it, the time and effort that she was putting in far surpassed even Alice's best estimates of the extent of the system interface and how he supposed that the time machine was supposed to work.
Emmet's eyes lowered to ground as he thought about Alice, and he wished her a happy and bright future with Doctor Johnstone wherever they were now, lamenting silently, letting his eyes move and trace the seams where the wooden book shelves met the wooden, laminated floor.
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The voice of the AI did not deign to answer Lila's unspoken question - the provocative statement apparently being either too inappropriate or not nearly important enough to warrant a proper response or answer. Silence reigned throughout the halls for a longer than expected amount of time, and Lila had to raise an eyebrow at it; even if she had been been trying to get a rise out of the people upstairs, and the individual who was working with the translator, she actually hadn't been expecting some sort of prolonger period of silence. When there was the first indication of sound and a response, instead of the AI's bland one, without the natural undulations in pitch and volume and stresses that came with the vernacular and emotion of normal human speech patterns, an actual person replied to Lila - with all the features that proved to be just as she had been hoping for. It sounded rather tired and exasperated, all at on
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