Steven tossed the dice in the air and watched the dice land on the floor. He hadn't actually grabbed enough of them to spell his name, and sure enough, they didn't spell his name when the landed. Instead, there was a jumble of five letters on the tiny scattered blocks, and only two of them were in his name: V and E. Steven stared at them for a second and frowned. The caretaker giggled.
"Stupid toddler toys! I should have known they wouldn't work," griped Steven.
"Oh, well, I'd better go fix us our afternoon snack. Try not to get into too much trouble with those! Hee, hee," chimed the caretaker, strolling away toward the snack kitchen.
Steven was about to toss them again, just for the heck of it, when something caught his eye. Maybe the dice didn't spell Steven, but perhaps they might spell something. Something about the letters looked like they could be a word, or something like a word, if they were arranged just right.
Hmm, OVE, could it be trying to spell LOVE? No, there were no Ls. Perhaps it was OVER? No, there was an extra R. Aha! ROVER. That was odd. Kind of funny, really.
"Well, what do you know, they've managed to spell a name after all, even if it was the wrong one. Looks like a dog's name!"
Steven was about to go back to playing with the dice and trying to spell more words with them, when the strangest feeling overtook him, and caused him to grab his forehead in discomfort. There was a sharp stinging in his ears and eyes and nostrils, giving him quite the headache and blurring his eyesight a bit. It was as though everything around him were getting closer and more noticeable as the seconds passed, overwhelming him a bit in the process. The previously quiet room was louder with sounds from outside and from around the mansion, plus an inestimable number of strong odors and aromas along for the ride. The stinging stopped, but he was still a bit rattled, given that his nose and ears still felt overly sensitive. He sniffed the air and almost had to cover his nose, because the scent of the caretaker's body odor (and his own) was still hovering throughout the room.
The snack kitchen was in a whole other part of the house, but still, Steven could smell what the caretaker was preparing: a bit of pasta, but also some sort of canned meat? He felt a twitch in one ear, and he could hear the pasta boiling while the meat was unceremoniously dumped in a bowl.
"I'm not even near the snack kitchen! How can I possibly tell what's going on in there?" he said aloud, though his sentences sounded a bit sloppy, since he couldn't quite get his tongue to work right. He took a few deep breaths and tried to gather his thoughts, and he he was starting to feel a bit better, when ...