♕The Trip Begins♕

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The old, beaten down ship was not any faster than Tuofah had expected it to be. If anything, its mechanics were less functional than the young Tactile had hoped they would be. With its engine on at full throttle, it traveled at the less than impressive speed of twelve and a half knots. 

A sloth could finish a marathon before we get to Relorio, Tuofah thought to herself with a low grumble of discontent. She now understood why the Peenutz had estimated their travel time to the nearby city to be two weeks. 

Tuofah sat on the side of Naomi's bed- the only comfortable place to occupy in the cramped spacecraft. Even there, she was forced to pull her knees awkwardly up to her chest. Being the half-educated daughter of a single mother, she had never been one to be too picky. Yet, she found herself wondering if it would've killed Hugo to give his crew enough room for the comfortable accommodation of their entire bodies. 

"So, how are you liking being a Peenut so far?" Naomi asked. She had folded herself neatly to slip easily into the crack between the two bunk beds. With her short stature and slender build, the young girl could fit almost anywhere. That was certainly a desirable trait on Hugo's ship. 

"It's fine," Tuofah shrugged. In truth, she knew that it really wasn't that bad. If you ignored the minor inconveniences, the work was ridiculously easy for a job that payed a hundred thousand Marks in two months. It had been almost twenty four hours since they had embarked on their journey to the capital city of Homina, and the Tactile had yet to lift a finger. 

"It's so tired," Tuofah shook her head, trailing her hand across the flaky paint of the bedroom wall. Although the sleepy sense that the cold metal seemed to pour into her hyper-aware fingertips suggested that what she said was very true, the real focus of her silent investigation was not the stuporous state of the ship's skeleton. She was measuring the secret room. 

Over the past day, using her enhanced sense of touch, she had been able to conclude that the room was at least twice the size of the main hallway. This made it the biggest room on the ship by far. Now that she thought about it, Tuofah realized that it was obvious even to a non-Tactile that something about the ship's size didn't add up. It was no Reloriose space hulk, but on the outside, it looked far larger than its scrunched-up interior. 

There was no doubt about it. A secret room- or rooms- existed beyond the walls of the ship's bedroom. For all Tuofah knew, only a small fraction of the ship's total area had been made available to her. 

This thought made her very uneasy. 

If she was going to spend two months on an unfamiliar ship with an unfamiliar boy who forced her to follow his suspicious rule of no-questions-asked, she was going to need to know what exactly he and his crew were up to. 

It was at that moment that she made the decision.

Tonight, she would go exploring. 

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