All Chapters of The Boy who Circled Time: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

"Your choices of entertainment for your one free hour, away from your work, are as follows," another stated at the front of the room.He stood in front of Gretel and the rest of all the others from Gryaz, who were still all sitting down and clueless and aimless, not knowing what was being expected from them and what they should be doing for the Empire that had kidnapped them and was using them as free labour."There is a library, you may use your shared office space as a common room, you may use the computers offered for your work service to play games that will be locked when the allotted hour for free time is complete, you may also play music from a list of certified songs and genres..."Gretel stopped listening as soon as she heard the word 'library' knowing immediately where she would be going to try and have some alone time, in complete isolation, away from everybody else, even if there was still a camera on her.Safety in numbers was certainly a val

Gretel remained in Yolanda's arms, even after she stopped crying, happy to stay there and stay warm.Silver looked away the entire time, sitting at his computer watching the screen without moving away from it, acting as if he wanted to look cool, calm, and unaffected but was in fact still quite awkward around the fact that Gretel had burst into tears and had received hugs,He hadn't moved the entire time, the computer still not turned on and the selection of sound stickers to listen to music privately, still remained untouched and undisturbed.He was just sitting there without doing anything, staring at a wall as if it was the most interesting thing in the world with his stiff shoulders and posture, actively looking in the opposite direction of Gretel and Yolanda."You sure you don't want to join the hug," Yolanda called out again, this time without any of the sarcasm of before, her voice perfectly sincere and polite, injected also with a layer of worry a

Everything about Yolanda seemed subtly wrong and there was something uncomfortable about how she constantly flickered between emotions and personalities as if she was simply substituting the people that she had simply met previously in her life in front of her actual person as it fit the situation and rise and fall in conversation.Gretel knew that Yolanda was borderline sociopathic and probably a psychopath with her master manipulation and use and control of herself, tugging Gretel and Silver in all sorts of directions, pulling answers out of them and having them dance to a tune that she alone was orchestrating, the two of them simply puppets on strings for her, but at the same time, what she was doing to them, how she was using them felt inexplicably kind.Gretel felt, deep down, that Yolanda, despite how uncomfortable that she was making Gretel and Silver feel with her flirting, her touching, and her general quickly changing attitude, she was preparing them somehow.

Gretel and Silver had their fun as he continued to teach her how the interface worked and how he had managed to figure out that the system was an older model from the lack of integration between the screen and the touch pad, and explaining how easily it would potentially be to do so once the technology, as displayed in this device, had been demonstrated and established to work in a functional product."We were working on something like this as well, back in the workshops back home for the company that I was in the research and development department for. We were trying to get our motion sensors to be as small as possible for more commercial and personal use of technology that we could sell to the public and those who couldn't afford the contact computers.We had no idea on how their tech worked, because of trade and company secrets and all, but we managed to piece together a few things by looking at the patents and when we bought a few and messed around with them for a

It was cold.Gretel was in a cold, cold place.It had only ever snowed once in her entire life, but, back then, she had felt warm, burning even, as she had laid down on the floor, rolling around and playing with the white frozen water.Her mother had been there too, sitting on their doorstep, all wrapped up and tucked tight, cheeks ruddy and glowing.Back then, Gretel hadn't been cold, but she was now.Huddled and small, damp and shivering, Gretel held her arms around her knees, continuously tugging the bones of her legs to dig into her ribs as she huddled below the metal grate while the world around her froze.It wasn't snowing, not at all in the slightest, but even then, Gretel felt as if, that at any moment, her fingers were going to drop off from her hands, falling loose onto the floor and create a great, big stain of red around her.It would have been pretty.Her blood would have been warm.She would have been able