Of the three, she had always been the most rational.
As Adela had once put it, "We're a team. You handle the thinking, I handle the fighting, and Barbara handles being cute."
Jennifer was a girl who knew how to think things through.
She said quietly, "Actually, we overcomplicated things. We assumed these people captured us to sell us."
Adela patted her chest, still shaken. "Yeah. I thought I was going to become a sacrifice to an evil god."
Compared with the two of them, Barbara was a sheltered, well-behaved child living in an ivory tower. These were things she never encountered in her everyday life.
"Maybe we had the wrong idea from the start."
"What do you mean?" Adela asked.
Jennifer looked at Barbara with a complicated expression. "Barbara probably has the most say in this."
She pointed at the guards nearby. "Doesn't the way they treat Barbara tell you something? That's hardly how you treat a prisoner!"
"Hm?" Barbara tilted her head, her thoughts drifting back as she recalled how the guards had treated her during this time. When had their attitude begun to change?
She said uncertainly, "Could it be because there's something inside me?"
Just then, Adela sprang to her feet and exclaimed, "Transcendents!"
"This experiment is meant to cultivate Transcendents!"
For a moment, she could barely contain her excitement. "Does that mean we can leave if we succeed?"
The two looked at Jennifer with desperate longing in their eyes.
Jennifer shook her head gently, uncertainty in her voice.
"Perhaps we'll only know once we really become Transcendents."
Transcendents? What are those? Barbara looked at Jennifer in confusion. These things were beyond the little world she lived in. She asked quietly, "Are Transcendents people like priests?"
With her limited experience, the only important people she ever