Penicillium - Chapter Thirty-Three
I complained, but he didn't even bother to reprimand me for it, or say anything really. He just carried me up the stairs without pausing.
Eventually I went limp and stopped whining. It was too tiring, and I couldn't fight the kind gesture if I wanted to. Somehow, much to my mortification, I fell asleep and only woke up when Phillipe was setting me down onto the ground.
"Huh?" I asked as I snapped awake.
"Tyro, can you help me smash some of the furniture in here? We'll start a small fire, cut out the humidity, maybe keep some of it to cook in the morning."
"I can help," I said as I started to rise.
"Hey, nah," Tyro said. "Get some sleep. If you start cooking you're likely to keel over into the fire. Look, we have blankets and stuff."
I protested a little more, but even I could tell that my voice was on the wrong side of drowsy and my eyes felt heavy. Eventually I just gave up and laid down atop a blanket, Sir Nibbles curled in close to my chest while I covered myself.
The boys moved about and prepared camp, and soon enough I could feel the warmth of a fire filling the room and lulling me to sleep.
When I awoke it was to a darkened room, with nothing left to light it and any of my low-light vision mushrooms very much metabolised already. I fumbled about for some time, then found and lit one of the lamps the boys had brought. It still had a bit of oil left in it. I had no way of telling when it was, but I had the feeling it was early in the morning.
Still, by the light of the lamp I started the fire up again, using what wood was left, and I started cooking an early breakfast.
Phillipe woke up next, and I asked him to keep an eye on things while I went to the next room over for some morning ablutions.
Really, the biggest downside of all these dungeons was that they didn't have public washrooms.
Maybe that's what the ritual would do? Introduce the world to good public infrastructure and guilt everyone into doing the same?
Well, I could hope.
I returned and finished up the cooking just as Tyro yawned himself awake. Then we had a quiet breakfast around the fire. Today we were going to make it through the fourth floor, and if we were lucky, we'd encounter a team heading down on the third floor and make it to the surface before the day was completely gone.
Meeting someone going down would be nice. A sign that maybe the ritual's impact wasn't as terrible as I worried it might be.
I'd have to see once I got back to the surface, I supposed.
One way or another, I had the impression that Feronie's goal wasn't so much destruction as destabilisation.
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