D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad Chapter 2227 When is a Hole a Hole?

--- Lily ---

Lily was trying to wrap her mind around the box in front of her. The more she looked into it the deeper things seemed to run. There were unique applications of space under several layers of interesting and unique applications of space. Just as an example, were the air holes she’d spotted. They let air in... but they notably didn’t let air out. The holes themselves were almost... inverted? Lily didn’t have the vocabulary to properly describe what she was feeling.

In practice though, it meant they were acting as one-way portals. That wasn’t quite true on a technical level, she could sense that much. But it was true in a practical sense. It meant Kat wasn’t going to suffocate any time soon... but where was the air going afterwards? If air could come in but not out eventually carbon dioxide would build up and cause issues. Well... assuming that’s how Kat’s lungs work? *

Lily just shifted over to the holes in question before transforming and putting her whiskers right next to one. With how sensitive they were it was easy to tell that air, was in fact, being sucked in like she assumed. With confirmation of that, Lily took a few steps back and sent a smug look Kat’s way.

Lily stopped and blew out a long hiss of air, glaring at Kat.

Kat shrugged.

Lily found much of her anger draining out of her when she heard that second suggestion. *

Kat sighed.

Kat pursed her lips, clearly debating if she wanted to insist or not... but of course the fact that she wasn’t shielding her thoughts at all meant Lily heard the entire thing anyway. Even if it wasn’t words exactly, she knew what Kat wanted to say. So Lily just sighed along with Kat. Letting the silence reign for a bit so that they could both just... exist with those thoughts for a while.

The box itself actually wasn’t one box so much as it was a series of boxes all nestled together. Lily assumed that was for structural integrity but couldn’t be certain.

The odd thing was that each layer of the box had a small gap between it and the next layer... and Lily had no idea how that would effect things considering Kat’s seemingly reduced size. Another thing Lily was unsure about. Did Kat just seem smaller? The box was obviously smaller visually and so was Kat... but getting a sense of how big it was with just her special sense was surprisingly difficult.

Feeling out the edge of the box wasn’t hard... but it came in layers, and it made identifying the ’central’ layer hard. When you combined that with the fact that even if each box is smaller than the last... it actually didn’t mean much when you were dealing with something that could manipulate space. It was possible the actual area of the innermost box was double the size of the one before it. Potentially an issue if Kat broke out... but yeah it was hard to tell.

Perhaps if she could feel directly into the box instead of through so many layers of abstraction Lily could have a better sense of things, but it’s not like her spatial sense gave her an inherent understanding of the size of the room she stood in, so perhaps it simply made sense.

Lily decided to do a bit of testing. Extending a shadow towards one of the invisible gaps, Lily shrunk it down as much as her control allowed, getting a single hair thin strand of shadows and then tried to guide it through one of them to see what happened. Annoyingly enough, the invisible portal seemed to act as a gate. Even as thin as her shadow was it still couldn’t fit through. Lily focused her senses on it as closely as she could... and still wasn’t sure why.

Was it a distance thing? Was the other side of the hole ’too far’ from her? Was there something that kept everything not air from moving through? Lily didn’t know... yet. Summoning a bit of paper, Lily tried to feed that through instead. She was glade she hadn’t been tempted to try a finger instead.

The paper was shredded to bits. A few of those pieces made their way to Kat... but it was impossible to tell if it had been shrunk during the process. All that remained was confetti essentially and there was a good chance that not all of her paper made it through. Kat could pick it up and count the pieces... but what did that help. It was all paper at the end of the day, and the cuts were so thin and precise that none of the edges were jagged at all.