After what I suspected was hours, Krim stopped the truck, and helped me out of the cage. In front of me was the largest, shiniest, and most intimidating building I had ever seen, not that I had seen many buildings in my lifetime. Krim walked me to the front door of the building, only to pause and seem to either change his mind or remember something and walk me around to the back of the building instead. He messed with some pad on the wall, and a second later an annoying buzzing noise started going off and the door opened. He pulled me inside. Moments later we were in a small room with a grey and brown color scheme that bothered my eyes with it’s almost but not quite matching patterns and colors. Krim sat on some sort of soft-looking bed-like thing. The leash was still in his hand, but he didn’t seem like he was too worried about controlling me at the moment, just keeping me in the area. I eyeballed the… bed-thing, and Krim seemed to notice.
“What, ya’ want to sit? I don’t want ya’ on the same couch as me, but ya’ can sit on the floor or that other couch if ya’ want, I guess.”
So the thing was called a couch? I wanted to ask Krim questions, but even if my mouth wasn’t still gagged, I didn’t find it all that likely that Krim would answer me. More likely he would hurt me in some way and tell me to be quiet and stop disturbing him. I sat on the floor a few feet away from Krim, but not the full length of the leash away. As much as I wanted to try sitting on a couch, he had said to sit on the floor, even if he had presented it like I had an option. We waited awkwardly in that room for a while before an extremely hyper and positive woman burst into the room, humming. I instinctively jumped away from the direction she was coming from a bit, and I felt the leash tighten as Krim gathered up more of its length to make sure I couldn’t move too far from him. The woman excitedly introduced herself as “Jannah, basically the person in charge of getting guests situated” in an accent that was too similar to Krim’s for me to be comfortable with her words. It took her a good minute or so into her ramblings to actually notice me.
“Oh! I hardly even noticed ya’ down there! I bet yer excited for the show aren’t ya’!” switching her attention back to Krim, she asked, “Does he hafta be all wrapped up in a bunch like that? With that… gag… thing… he won’t even be able to do his job on the show!”
Krim looked at her with unusual patience, and explained, “He’ll get it taken off just before the actual show. In the meantime it’s just a countermeasure to make sure he’s not endangering anyone. Bossman doesn’t want to risk anyone getting hurt.”
I noted that in front of the owner he felt comfortable voicing his opinions, but in front of this woman he seemed to be acting almost apologetic and blamed what was his idea on the owner. I wasn’t quite sure why I was observing his behaviors, but I thought maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was his job to do the same to me and I wanted to be even. Nothing I saw about Krim ever made him even the slightest bit redeemable until now. Around other humans, he acted like he cared. It felt a bit like a strange dream, where I would wake up and Krim would be hovering over me ready to “train” me. But I didn’t wake up because it wasn’t a dream. He was being at least half-decent and it scared me to see him out of character. I scooched myself over towards him and pulled on his pant leg. He looked down at me immediately, and even asked me what was wrong rather than yelling at me. I couldn’t even see an irritated hint on his face, which made me debate whether he was actually being courteous or if he was just really good at hiding his emotions. I realised, for all I knew, Krim could have been acting awful to me for that sake of his job when the owner was around and gone home every night regretting what he had done. I was by no means thinking that this was actually true, but the possibility of it made me curious.
To respond to Krim’s are you okay, I just pointed to the gag and tilted my head. He looked hesitant, and in the end asked me if I could explain it without words. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with his attention anyways, as all i really wanted to do was figure out whether he would revert right back to treating me badly if Jannah wasn’t there, which evidently I could only do if I could make Jannah leave. I glanced at Jannah and back to Krim, trying to force a pleading look.
“What, ya’ want some privacy?”
I looked back to Jannah and then to Krim again, and then did my best to shyly nod.
“Oh! My! I’m sorry to disturb ya’! Did ya’ want me to get someone else? I don’t want to make our guests uncomfortable, but someone should really do my job!”
Krim looked to me, unsure if I wanted rid of her or just people in general. I pointed to her and nodded. Krim seemed to interpret this properly as me not minding her specifically, just wanting privacy. Jannah just looked perplexed, but Krim translated for me.
“I’m pretty sure Eclipse just wants some privacy for a bit, he’s not upset or anything. I think he even appreciates yer help.”
I nodded at her for emphasis.
“Oh! I was worried for nothing then, haha! Sure, I can come back in a few minutes, then?”
Krim didn’t look at me to respond, “That should be good, thank ya’.”
Once Jannah left the room, Krim turned to me.
“What do ya’ want? Why’re ya’ sending kind ladies away who are just trying to get ya’ ready for the show?”
I pointed at the gag again, and Krim just laughed.
“As if. Just leave me in peace for a few minutes.”
And like that, Krim was back to being himself. I had no reason to worry that maybe he was actually a somewhat-decent human being. In fact, how could I have ever thought that? What he did to me… No decent human being would do that to another being. Even if I was lesser than a human in his mind, it was still just plain cruel regardless of what his job was. And the owner had known Krim was good at his job which meant he had done it to some other poor poisonbird before me, too.
Settled with the answer I had received, I repositioned myself on the floor, reminded myself that I had to be good, and waited for Jannah to return. She was back in a couple of minutes, her tone still high pitched and excited.
“Y’all okay now? Good!” she said, immediately going back into her speech about how the show was recorded and what we needed to do and what signals we should look out for.
“One final thing to mention, the cameras are all automatic now. It’s a new setup and they are still trying to get used to it. Anyways, if for whatever reason ya’ need to stop being live, yer just gonna have to step out of the camera’s range, because they aren’t going to stop sending live show to TVs around America until our 2 hour reserved time slot is up. They haven’t even gotten a filler screen programmed up yet. So literally even if it’s just an empty studio, that’s what’ll air.”
Krim nodded and “okay”ed through her entire explanation, and when we got to the end, she glanced at her watch.
“Okay! Ya’ guys ready to go meet the hosts? It’s almost time to go on and we try to make sure y’all at least met before yer thrown on stage together, haha!”
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