When Danielle woke up, she immediately wondered how she could possibly have slept through the building up of so much pain. It felt like every part of her body hurt, from her sore and swollen feet to her inexplicably aching head. Her bladder was full and her stomach was achingly empty and she was thinking something about not being any thirstier if she’d hiked across a desert instead of a mile or two of forest, when she realized that she was Outside, and both hiking across arid plains and being much thirstier were theoretically possible for her future.
It was dark in the room, though a thin line of light under the main door assured her it was light out. The light in the bathroom had been left on behind a half-closed door for safer navigation of the room.
She rolled out of bed with a hiss of pain as her feet hit the floor, and hobbled to the restroom. The bladder, at least, could easily be dealt with. It won’t be so easy if you have to leave camp overnight, the pedantic side of her brain whispered. Or even just for a full day. Yesterday we kept coming back here, and we used the restroom during our breaks. What if we end up doing a longer trip, though, to get clear of the disputed hunting territory or to find that access point that’s mostly south? Danielle firmly set that thought aside for at least the third time in as many days; yes, that’s what the shovels were for, and no, she’d never attempted to use a squat-hole before and all of that was a problem for another day regardless. Today’s problem was her aching body. Most of it had to be from overdoing it yesterday, surely. Maybe a hot shower would help?
She hobbled back to the bedroom to get her soap and clean – wait, she didn’t have clean clothes. After staring into her footlocker for far too long, trying to make her brain resolve that riddle, she finally just took clean underwear and socks to the shower with her. The other three, she noticed, were all still asleep. All well and good; she didn’t have to debate whose turn it was in the bathroom. Still, anyone else might wake up with the same need anytime, so best to be quick.
In the bathroom, she took off her dirty underwear, but put her shorts and T-shirt back on and got into the shower dressed. It was only marginally warmer than the day before. She soaped up the clothing first, taking special care to scrub the spots most likely to collect sweat. Then she took the clothes off, and held them up to the showerhead to make sure she sprayed all the soap back out of them. She wrung them out as best she could, then lay them out over the toilet tank to dry as best they could while she washed herself. She turned off the unsatisfyingly warm-but-not-hot water, and wrung her hair out, and shook as much water as she could off of her arms and legs.
She stared unhappily at the damp clothing dripping down the cold ceramic back of the toilet, more excessively practical yet unhelpful thoughts crowding her head. That’s going to be so cold. Not as cold as in winter, though. When did they expect us to do laundry, and did they imagine we’d be doing it naked? I suppose if I did this yesterday I could have dried that set while I was wearing this set. Is that why there are so many hooks by the sink? It’s not enough to dry both pieces for all four people, though. We need a clothes line. Where could we put it and not have things stolen? There’s no breeze in here.
There actually was a breeze, though, and a faint thrum which Danielle had been blaming on the light, but now she held out a wet arm and realized that there was quite possibly a ventilation fan running, drawing a breeze under the door. The bathroom door by no means touched the floor – there was probably room to feed a towel in through the crack at the bottom. A thick fluffy towel, even, which they did not have. Danielle shook her aching head. OK, so the bathroom was ventilated, and it came on with the light. They needed to leave the bathroom light on while cooking.
Reluctantly, she got dressed in her clean underwear and damp but mostly clean T-shirt and shorts. It was not a pleasant feeling, and she was still sore underneath it, though perhaps a little better than when she first woke up. She sighed and walked back to her bed, kicking the dirty underwear under one corner with the previous two days’ worth. At least they had enough underwear not to have to wash that every day.
The others still seemed to be asleep. Considering how late they’d been up, and how much hiking they’d done the day before, Danielle couldn’t blame them. She pulled on her denim layer and got her watch back on, wondering whether it was early enough to justify trying to get some more sleep (and whether she could manage it in the wet clothes). She went back to the bathroom to be close enough to the light to read the watch face, and blinked at it in befuddlement. It was after noon! Even Akari and Sadie had slept a full twelve hours.
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“I’m gonna be glad for those alarm clocks,” she muttered to herself. She wandered back into the main room, pausing uncertainly at the half-wall that separated the kitchen from the main room. What should she do now? Wake everyone up? The plan was for a rest day, so it wasn’t as if they had things they needed to do on a schedule. After a few minutes of thought, she remembered that they all had oatmeal packets – the ones that had been in the boxed dinners from Decision Day. “Right, oatmeal and jerky was the brunch plan,” she reminded herself. “OK, so the next step is hot water.”
Danielle turned on the kitchen light, and a little rummaging in her footlocker produced the distiller pot and a metal camp plate to help keep the water in, not distill it out. She washed it, since it was brand new, then filled it with water, mentally thanking God that they didn’t actually have to distill every drop of water they wanted to drink, here in the rooms. She supposed even at a campsite, if they could find clear water, they could settle for boiling it. Now, she brought the distiller pot back to the kitchen, and centered the camp stove on the counter. The instruction book wasn’t too far away, so she read it over quickly to make sure she wouldn’t do anything unwittingly dangerous. Her family had never done much camping. Her father had talked about doing more camping in the next few years, but her mother hated being Outside with no roof over her head, and now it was just too late. Still, the instructions were easy enough, and Sadie’s sparker was even still there on the countertop.
She got the flame going, and the water over it, and looked around the room more thoroughly now that the kitchen light was casting better illumination over the main area. Sadie had a T-shirt and shorts laid out on the bed, draped over her and her blanket. Akari had one of the books on the bed next to her pillow, though it was safely closed, not lying open. Danielle supposed she must have been reading in bed, and simply set it aside when she was ready to sleep, without getting up to put it away. Heather’s blanket was wound around her, as if she’d done a lot of tossing and turning.
Danielle decided that a little reading wasn’t a bad idea. In fact, hadn’t they been talking about re-activating their Academy Student Careers and having a study day? She got up and hobbled over to the bookshelf, where she snagged Useful Crafts for Skill and Trade. Then she stopped at her footlocker for the sky-blue mug that came with the room, the lopsided brown cup from the Rangers, and the extra bag of mint tea she hadn’t used at yesterday’s breakfast, and returned to the kitchen to perch on a stool while she waited for the water to boil. As a bonus, her feet didn’t have to touch anything there!
Instead of diving straight into the book, she started with a look at her System. She frowned pensively at the mana pool indicator. 19 mana – almost double what most people her level could have. Should she keep it down closer to normal levels, so as not to let on to strangers (or even casual acquaintances) that she had extra? It wouldn’t give her as much to draw on in a fight or other emergency, but on the other hand, moving it to payment plan would give her more Skills (or Traits) sooner, while making tokens day by day would give her more money – and she felt sure that scavenging or not, they’d be glad to have money when the catalog thing happened in four weeks. Yet, again, having improbable amounts of money would be very noticeable.
She decided she definitely wanted to spend five mana adding to the healing stash, and put another five in her own stash; but that would require twelve mana spent for only ten saved. If she just made one ten-point token, that would cost eleven, right? She prodded her interface, as if to use the Skill, and sure enough, a ten-mana token would cost eleven mana to make. Splitting up her tokens would cost extra. Maybe she should wait and make a ten-mana token later? She still wanted to add five to the healing stash, though.
She noticed the ‘teakettle’ was quietly boiling – well, relatively quietly, she’d also been a bit distracted. There was no whistle on this slightly makeshift model, though. She reached for it, only to pause when she realized she was reaching for a metal handle. Grumbling under her breath, she went rummaging in the bags under the end of the counter space. “I’m sure there was a pack of decorative kitchen towels,” she muttered to herself. A moment later, she triumphantly added, “Oh, good, we did bring it!” She pulled off the plastic keep-together and the cardboard hang-card packaging, tossing them back into the bag with two towels from the three-pack. The third, she folded up and used as a hot pad to hold the hot distiller pot and pour water into both cup and mug. To the cup, she added her saved teabag, and to the mug, one of the two oatmeal packets. “One left for tomorrow,” she said with satisfaction.
“Wha’ y’mumblin’ about ov’r there?” Heather asked sleepily.
“It’s tomorrow!” Danielle answered her, raising her voice. “I boiled water for those oatmeal packets. Come and get it!”
Groans came from both Heather and Sadie, and Akari looked up and blinked at her owlishly.
“Did you have to wake us up, though?” Sadie complained.
“Well, it’s after noon, and the water won’t stay hot forever,” Danielle said.
That got the others moving. Heather hobbled past the kitchen to the toilet, while Akari rubbed her eyes and rummaged in her footlocker for her mug and oatmeal packet. Sadie pulled the clothes that were draped over her under the blanket, and pulled them on before re-emerging to fetch her own mug and oatmeal. Danielle poured for them in turn as they came over to the kitchen, and they added the contents of their packets to the water in turn.
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