Silence was filling the whole room.

Its rusted iron walls had been painted white many centuries before. They were completely dark at that moment, though. None could see their real colour, or the control panels hanging on them. None had come inside for many years.

The room had been silent and still since they sealed it shut. That happened in a very remote time, so none remembered about it in the outside world. The box in the middle of the room could not absolutely be shown to sunlight another time.

None had seen the floor, as white as the walls. It hadn't rusted since it was made from concrete. Anyway, the surface was rather smooth, but rough enough for dust to lay in the irregular-shaped spaces after falling from the quiescent machinery.

Quiescent.

Something had been beating, pulsing, pushing underneath those dead bulbs, rusted gears and buttons which didn't work anymore. But while switching it off, they'd known it would awaken one day.

That was the day.

From a device, which had been waiting for thousands of years after being put inside, a discharge sprang.

The machine felt it. Obeying to the order, it started sending electrical shivers through the structure. The gears awakened and began to roll again, whereas the bulbs got slowly turned on.

The Rouser was working.

The bronze box in the middle let out a mechanical noise, then a puff. Eventually, the slight metal sheet that had been sealing it was a bit raised, then slid to the side.

Below the empty space that was left, a golden light shone.

They blinked a few times before slamming their eyes fully open.

He let out a puff. She sighed.

After staring for a while at the ceiling, invisible to their eyes like the whole room, he stated: "Looks like we've been sleeping long."

She rubbed her eyelids, her eyes widening. She was attempting to find something to give her brain.

"Did you have a good sleep?" she asked, smirking.

"Yeah," he answered, angling his elbows to look past the box outline. "I'm pretty ready to come back and play."

***

In the while, many kilometres away, Hypat pushed her head against his chest, causing Pytag to smile.

"Stars are so wonderful," she said. "And more so here with you."

His hand touched the short sleeve wrapped around her left arm, then slid down across her skin toward her wrist. As his fingers ran on her flesh, they bred happiness shivers in her clouded mind.

No touch of his could calm her, though. That's why she freed her arms, which his hands were curling around, and raised hers to his neck, hugging him. She rolled over her body so that she was lying on her right side. His arm then held her back, covered by a long and blue flower-painted dress. Then, her glasses tilted to the side.

She was smiling so strongly her cheeks hurt. 

Their noses were almost touching after she pushed her mouth against his face, her lips rounding to kiss him. His arm glided along, so he could slide his fingers under her smooth black hair.

Brushing his white shirt with her arm, she moved it toward his right cheek. With both of her hands she took his head like she was blocking him.

It was quite a long kiss. After some seconds, she reached his short golden hair with her fingers and moved them across his head. In the while, his hand curled (caring not to hurt her) around her wrist until it ended.

Then, they stared at each other for a second, their mouths both smiling. Even in the dark night, he saw she'd blushed as red as an apple, while she was saying: -Love you, honey.

He smiled even more. -Love ya too.

He turned to look at his watch and lit up its hands. "Midnight" he said, his voice emotionless, even though his mind was saddened at the sight. "Looks like it's time to go."

Her face turned pale pink, her normal skin colour. "What a bore."

"Don't worry, Hypat" he said, rising to sit on the wicker lain laid on the grass. "We're meeting tomorrow."

Pulling herself to her feet, she thought: "Yeah, but it'll be a pain to stay without you tonight." He thought that as well, and he knew it when he picked up their flashlight, next to a flower. Things were to be that way. It was very hard for their clouds to go away. But isn't that normal for anyone in love?

She coiled the wicker, while he held the flashlight.

Their mouth didn't pull any word out.

Silently, they took each other's hand and started strutting away from that place, towards their town. Towards their houses.

***

Hypat had said bye to Pytag one minute before. She was walking across Compass Square, eyeing the giant Compass Statue.

Hypat had seen it every morning since she bought her first house near there, so she didn't care about it anymore. But that square was quite strange: anyone from an outside planet, or just from another village, would admire it. Two large benches stayed in the middle, drawing a right angle. In the exact point where they would have crossed (if they'd been connected), an enormous steel cylindric needle pierced the stone ground. On it, one steel leg of the Compass stood out to the sky, up to the hinge, made from steel just like the whole compass. The second leg slanted, and its black-painted pencil touched a point on the ground. It wasn't a random point. A quarter of a circle was drawn on the rock bricks, its edges connecting the sides of the benches. That pencil cut in two identical halves that curve. Also, they'd painted a yellow pi in the space between the line and the benches.

It was one of the most complex statues ever. Though it looked quite simple, building it had been so difficult. At that time, none had memory of how difficulty it exactly was. But anyone, if you asked, would tell you it had taken one year. In that world, it was quite a record, which Cantortown citizens were all proud of.

However, Hypat would never care about it since she'd found it in front of her house for so many months. You'd have behaved alike in her shoes.

Accordingly, she walked straight to the door, her feet shuffling because of tiredness, then tucked her keys into the lock. While turning them around, the metal whirring, she brushed her hair, as she often did when wishing to stay in her bed and be surrounded by dreams. She didn't even glance for a second at the square, or at the other buildings, whose brick walls enclosed it except for the narrow road Hypat had come from.

After the door clicked, she pulled the keys out and reached for the handle. After pushing it down, she flung the wood surface open and stepped inside.

She drawled her soles on the concrete floor as she came to the table, slipped her bag off on it, and puffed in slumber.

She flicked the light on. The living room was lit up, the square-shaped table weakly shining in front of the red armchair next to the window.

As she pressed the switch, she suddenly realised thirst was draining her throat dry. So, she entered the kitchen, her feet still shuffling on the concrete, and opened a drawer. After taking one from a heap of identical glasses, she turned to the sink and pushed the blue cold water button. The transparent liquid spilt from the iron tube, dropping into the pottery, and flowed into the sewer. But she stopped that flux by holding the flower-painted glass under the small river. It was topped off fast because it was quite short. Just five centimetres high. Luckily, since it was bucket-shaped, there weren't any empty space drops wouldn't fill. Hypat was going to avail herself of the whole of it. But the whole was few. In fact, after that first sip, she was still thirsty.

"I just wish they were a bit taller... if only high glasses didn't cost that much..." she thought, while putting the glass down and turning around to switch on also the kitchen lamp, since she couldn't see with the living room one only. 

As her head turned back, the room suddenly brightened, she saw something that caused her to wince. If she hadn't controlled herself, the glass would have fallen and broken into pieces.

Many pieces.

Because it was five times higher and wider than before. The water was filling just a fifth of its capacity. The flower image on it was respecting the previous ratio, though. Every blossom was exactly five times bigger like their paint had been stretched larger. Like the whole glass had grown five times larger. And that had happened out of the blue, the matter had bloomed from nowhere.

Her eyes widened as she stared at the bright glass. "What the fuck?" Hypat thought.

***

"You'll never guess what happened to me yesterday," Marin said to Hypat. They'd been walking across the street to go to work together for a minute, as they always did, greeting and both complaining for they felt sleepy. They were boarding the elevator to their offices, ready to start a new day. However, it is was in the air that that day wouldn't be a normal working day.

Landing her feet onto the carpet, she responded: "Tell me."

"Like, we were having a starter before dinner," Marin started telling. "We cooked twenty salmon canapes. But my son was rather hungry because he'd been playing football all day, so he ate fifteen of them!"

"He's quite a vacuum cleaner" Hypat commented, and they both laughed.

"Then, I was thinking: I wish we'd cooked more of them..." she gulped while the number two on the counter switched to a three. "Three other canapes appeared out of nowhere!"

"What?" Hypat answered, her eyes widening. She remembered immediately what had happened to her. "Listen to me then," she drawled, her palm catching and holding weakly her wrist.

"Like, I went out watching the sky with Pytag..." as her lips slowly spat his name, she blushed. Marin winked. "When I came back home, I was thirsty, so I took a glass to drink. But they're so fucking short I would have had to sip three times. But, as I thought I wished they'd been larger, it did became larger!" Her eyes widened even more.

"Heck," Marin answered, then tried to change the subject, shifting from that creepy topic. "How are you two doing?"

"Quite well," Hypat said. "I'm so happy we've finally done such a lovely thing after so much time. I've been so busy recently..." she puffed from the thought of her tiredness. "By the way, some days ago I read a thing about parallaxes" she changed the topic again. "I haven't discovered any new maths for a while. Then, it was surprising that is related to stars."

"Really?" Marin questioned, interested. "Explain me, you know I do love astronomy..."

They chatted about parsecs and parallaxes until they came to the corner of their floor. It was time for each of them to go to their own offices. They had to work.

Those people were this way. They'd be interested in anything about maths and would never refuse to talk about it.

The door was flung open. Hypat inched forward to inside, squinting at the laptop.

She knew she'd have a lot of articles to control.

She worked for a newspaper. She had to read the articles in the first eight pages and correct their grammar. Even though an automatic software would do most of that rough work, it was quite tiring. You wouldn't notice normally, but eight pages of a newspaper are quite a lot to write. Letters are that small, you could pour more or less twenty thousands of them in one paper. Eight times, that is one hundred and sixty thousand letters, about thirty thousand words. And, if you were in Hypat's shoes, you'd see that those times weren't exactly shiny for grammar. But she would, or at least attempt to, bite your nose every time you said "I didn't see nothing". About fourteen percent of people were likely to talk like that every day. Luckily, the world had such men (and women, like her) to owe resistance of good speech to.

She read four pages and corrected like a machine. 

While she was reading, one article struck her.

Its title was "Strange powers rousing".

"Many Cantortowneses, yesterday evening, reported they'd seen something incredible. While at home, they said, as they wished something to happen, it did happen. Examples include a man who stated that, while watering his flowers, wished he'd putted " Hypat's eyes were struck by that "putted", which she had a shock for, and her fingers ran to the keys to delete the "ed" ending. Besides, that article was badly written as a whole.

"wished he'd put more water in the can, and as he did, it was suddenly filled up again."

She blinked. What?

In another article, she read something similar. A woman's husband had been reading all day his football magazine, and hadn't even stood up to help her cook dinner. She'd wished those papers to break into pieces. As she'd thought that, the paper had really broken. On the floor nine pieces had fallen. But they'd been rather strange; in fact, eight of them, despite having very different shapes, had exactly the same area, like they'd been cut by scissors and measured with a set square. The last piece had been smaller though. At a glance, she'd estimated its size to be exactly two sevenths of the others.

Something was happening. Something was changing.

She stopped for a moment. She inhaled.

"So, I'm able to increase any dimension?" she wondered. She glanced at her pencil besides the keyboard. "What I wish to have more copies of that pencil...?"

Her eyes stood still for a moment, widening, waiting for more pencils to suddenly appear out of the blue.

Yet on the desk only one stayed.

She blinked again. She eyed at the two papers to write down on, on the desk, next to the monitor. "And if I wish I had more papers?"

Two more papers were now upon the others. They were an exact copy. Even their placement and angling was the same, like someone had taken a photo of the two initial papers and then turned that image real. Even a scrawl she previously had cast on the upper paper while taking a pen was on the new sheets.

"What the hell?"

She said that out loud.

"Hello?" You might think she would first try another time. Or call for someone to explain. But instead she phoned Pytag. "Pytag?"

"Hypat?" he answered. "What's going on?"

"Pytag... has something strange happened to you?"

His mouth didn't open for some second. Then it unsealed. "Something like...?"

She caught the question mark. "Like you wished something to grow bigger or to increase in quantity, and it happened...?"

He thought for a moment. But he made it to respond: "Yes."

Her ears awakened to listen. "I had just one sock pair in my drawer" he started telling. "I wished I had more of them. And, after a second, there were actually more. They were three." He let out a loud frustrated puff. "Very fortunately, they were all ripped."

It took a second to Hypat to understand he was sarcastic. But then, she smirked.

"But perhaps I know what has happened."

***

Hypat had hurried up and worked so bad and hard to finish reviewing earlier than usual. Her director would certainly bestow her with a smile if he saw her. But when the whole newspaper was corrected, she fled out of the office and then the entire building. She ran unstoppingly straight to Pytag's house, which from her workplace took at least ten minutes on foot.

But since she'd been running, she arrived after five minutes.

After climbing the stairs, jumping a step every two, up to the third floor, she flung herself to the bell, her finger aiming at it.

She rang it nine times.

"Pytag! Pytag! I'm here!"

For one simple information, she'd been driven mad. Even her heart was pounding and claiming out for an answer to that unexplicable mistery. Wasn't it? She had got such a specific power suddenly. I think you'd behave in the same way if you were her.

"Wait and STOP!" he shouted, growing angrier because of her impatience.

But as he pulled the door open, the sight of her made him calmer.

"So, you're really about to explain to me what these powers are?"

"Yes" he answered, unblinkingly.

"Sorry for the noise I made anyway" Hypat apologized.

"Don't worry" he shrugged. "Just come in. It's going to take quite long."