I watch my companion fall asleep later that day, unable to rest myself. When her breathing slows to a calm, steady rate, I allow myself to reminisce over the past.

The child had been trapped in the strange casing for a while now. I could see her through the walls of it, little tubes connected to her frail body. I watched her constantly, finding some joy in observing this baby and her teeny tiny features. Unseen, I observed all. The father mourning his late wife over his sleeping childing, holding a shiny container which seemed to contain wine. The nurses who gossiped and giggled in the corner. The elderly woman who stroked the widow's head with a pained look on her face.

I had sat in that room for a long time, feeling no urge to leave, watching everything. Some doctors, as they were called, said that the child made a full recovery one night, while I was looking at the strange paintings on the wall, reading about the human body. The father looked up, pain written on his features, and asked whether she could finally come home. I frowned, confused. I thought this was their home? They slept here and ate here, and surely one would not leave his own house to have a child?

The doctors, however, nodded, and gave him some paper to fill out with a strange device they called a pen. I marveled at the lack of an ink well as he wrote down the child's name and his own, as well as his address. His mother, or at least who I assumed the old woman was, noticed the girl's title and gave him an incredulous look.

"Daffodil? Reginald, that child is not a flower. I thought you and Gloria agreed on a nice name like Alice?"

The man gave a sad little smile as he looked at the baby, who stirred in her sleep. "I thought this name suited her far better than Alice."

In another hour or so, we all left the strange-smelling room and went out into the hallway, little Daffodil in her grandmother's arms.

I had followed them after she was released from her clear cage until we reached the "cafeteria," which seemed to me to simply be an immense dinning room, though strangely laid out. The tables did not connect as one large, rectangular eating space, but were separated and rather circular. I ogled the foreign layout and incredible amount of space dedicated to one room, and blushed in spite of myself. Who can own such wealth as this?

While I hesitated to observe, the small family made their way out of the building. I could feel the distance grow, for it seemed as though the farther away they were, the tighter my heart felt. It almost seemed as though it would explode, and I fell over in pain. My cries went unheard, however, and so I forced myself upon my legs, which shook terribly, and tried to find the child. It was an agonizing game that I used to play with my sibling when we were small children, the feeling in my very being getting better or worse as I stumbled through the blindingly white halls. Finally, I tried to hold myself up against a wall and unceremoniously fell right through it.

Without thinking twice, I rushed straight to where I saw the little group walking in a field of black stone. Odd contraptions filled the field like trees in a multicolored metal forest, and I might have been tempted to stop and better inspect one if I didn't see them climbing into a red...thing.

I rushed to take my place next to the daughter in the "car," for that is what I heard them call it, floating now out of excitement for hurrying. I held onto her tiny finger as it started moving, thinking not only to soothe her but myself as well, and looked out the window at the foreign scenery of stone and metal.