Cecilia took a deep breath and exhaled almost in a rush, the gears in her mind turning quickly as she tried to prioritize. So much had happened since he was gone, but narrowing it down to the 'important bits?' Important was subjective. She thought a moment longer, and figured his version of important was probably pretty close in line with her own.
"A couple days after they took you out, they made Jack, Lennon, and myself sick. Really sick, worse than anything I've ever felt in my whole life. I was completely fine when I went to bed, and a few hours later I was practically out of my mind with it. They told everyone they'd infected us with their own special strain, and that they had an antidote, but they'd let us die unless the rest of the house 'earned' it. They gave them a time limit, how long it would take for us to die of dehydration. The house was in a pretty bad state, and everybody had to hustle to fix and clean everything. And then They cured us. The three of us woke up in the hospital in town on IVs feeling worlds better. After that, they made us vote on what we valued more. I don't remember exactly how they worded it, but one option was to have a fully stocked pharmacy; the other was to have them take on all responsibility for clean-up and maintenance. Fixing things that broke, cleaning up after us, whole nine yards. The pharmacy one, so we have that now." She gave Reginald a pointed look, as if to say that he needed to speak up if he felt sick again. "They only let me have access to the prescription medications, though. We're snowed in now, but I moved everything I could imagine us needing if we were stranded for an extended period of time into my room."
She hesitated a moment, and then decided to keep pressing forward. "There's been a lot of punishments. A lot of weirdness. Getting stuck in the house due to crazy weather has been more or less routine, and it's usually followed by something weird. They sent us on a vacation - a tropical Mount Zenith, basically, and for a couple of days that was great. Then there was some tropical storm and a lot of things I wouldn't have believed they were capable of. Not that they weren't sick enough to want to do it, but I mean logically and physically capable of. They made us see things in mirrors." Cecilia remembered what she had seen, and her hands clenched into fists. "It was like living through a ghost story. And then we just woke up back here. The people change a lot, we've lost a lot of people and gotten a lot of new ones." She frowned. "One of them is... despicable. He beat on people, started fights... a few days in and it just kept escalating. He tried to rape one of the girls, and we threw him in jail. There are people that didn't want to do it." She kept her personal opinions out of this retelling, for now at least. Reginald could probably see her displeasure in her face. "Then They gave us a security level, had us vote for who to be in charge, and we picked Owen. Then Owen held a vote to take on others as a sort of security council. I'm on it, along with three others. Newer people, no one you ever met. Simms is still in a cell in that basement security level. They seem content to sit back and watch, see what we decide to do.
"The past few weeks all sorts of things have happened, and I can't say that They're behind all of them. You could almost call them pranks, if it weren't for the fact that they're really hurting people. Someone cut the brake lines on the bikes, and that could be Them, but it seems more like someone here. We've had a couple of fires. The kitchen was practically destroyed; we just barely managed to contain it. They were all set. By Them, or by someone here. It's never felt to me like something They would do." She paused.
"Oh, and They gave me my dog." Cecilia blinked, then smiled sheepishly. "You ask me for the important bits. He ranks."