When Dungeon Binder Lolilyuri woke up from restless dreams, she found that in her sleep she had not become a monstrous, verminous bug. This meant that a dragon hadn't descended upon her demesne in the night, which was always to be hoped for.

She did wonder why she had woken slumped upright, as if she had fallen asleep sitting up. Her neck ached from the position, familiar from years of sleeping in crowded dragon shelters where the only space to rest had been up against a wall. Lori straightened up, wincing as the movement brought more aches and pains caused by the position to her attention. Posterior, utterly numb; legs, stiff; back, aching. She had to shuffle a little before she could lean back and stretch, feeling her back popping into position again, then had to stop as the sudden change in position made heat rush to her posterior, and she lay back down on her side while she waited for it to start feeling better.

Ugh, she bet Deadspeakers didn't have to deal with this in the morning! They probably used their magic to fix it first thing when they woke up…

Lori lay there, staring sightlessly at the floor, and it took a while for her to realize she was looking at Rian curled up in his bedroll on the floor next to her table, his blanket half off, his hands inserted into the sleeves of his winter robe for some reason. It lay draped over him like he was wearing it backwards. On the table next to him were two wooden cups and a pitcher.

…

…what?

She looked towards her door, which was shut. Had she forgotten to seal it last night? She must have…

There was a thump, and the hem end of Rian's winter robe leapt up as he started kicking in his sleep. Ah. She'd forgotten that detail about his sleeping habits. She wondered how annoying the three found that habit. Then again, perhaps they all snored, and thus had no grounds to complain…

…

Wait. Rian wasn't supposed to be in her room.

That realization seemed to finally kick her mind properly awake, and she finally pushed herself up. Her posterior still tingled, but that faded as she began to move. Lori looked down at what she was wearing, and found herself still dressed in yesterday's clothes. The ties of her trousers were still knotted tight, so she probably hadn't been molested last night…

And honestly, why would Rian need to when he was hardly starved for more voluntary choice?

Though that still didn't explain what he was doing in her room.

Lori forced herself to get up, her body slowly righting itself as she moved, and grabbed her staff from where it stood beside her bed. She leaned on it a little as she made her way next to Rian's bedroll, where his leg was just starting to kick again. One bare toe nudged against his side. "Rian," she said. Her voice came out a bit too soft, and she tried again louder. "Rian." Much better. "Wake up."

Rian muttered incoherently, spouting off random syllables.

She nudged him again. "Rian! Wake up and tell me what you're doing in my room."

He turned over, moving away from her nudging toe.

Lori took a moment to consider if sinking him into the ground would work… no, she was above her core room, there was no ground to sink him into. She settled on poking his back with the butt of her staff. "Rian! Wake up!"

"Ouch…" he muttered, raising his head. Finally! Coherence! "Please stop poking me… also, your room is kinda cold… "

"What are you doing in my room?" she demanded again.

"Sleeping," he said, turning over and curling up his legs.

Lori poked him again. "Why are you sleeping in my room?"

"Because you insisted on eating dinner and then going straight to bed," he muttered, in the tones of someone who knew sleep was a doomed endeavor but was still going to try anyway. "Worried you'd throw up in your sleep and didn't want you to choke on your own vomit."

Oh. Well, that's…

Lori remembered a burning sensation in her throat.

"Ah. Well, good. Now get up, I need to take a bath and get changed, and so do you."

Rian groaned again, but rose to his feet. He moved with a lingering petulance like a child, but he didn't say anything. Despite it, he quickly rolled up his bedroll and wrapped his blanket around himself. He did hesitate about the cups and pitcher though.

"Leave those," Lori said, "I'll bring them down."

"Right, right," Rian said. "We'll talk over breakfast then?"

"Yes, yes," Lori said dismissively as she pointed towards her door. "Go."

"Going." Rian managed a sleepy smile before letting out a huge yawn, and thus walked straight into the passageway wall opposite her door. "Ow… "

He shuffled off and Lori shut her door behind him, sealing it with stone to bar the way. Finally alone, she grabbed the pitcher of water and drank, washing the lingering taste of stomach fluids from her mouth. Ugh, she wanted something sweet to chew on…

Sighing, she got ready to face the day.

––––––––––––––––––

Despite a start that was less than auspicious, Lori's new modified routine of conducting all necessary work and construction in the morning, and expanding the demesne in the afternoon was moderately successful, in her opinion. As it was the only opinion that matter, that meant it was successful.

In the mornings, she worked, reshaping her demesne and installing bindings and infrastructure to improve it. Spigots for drinking water in all the baths, which were warm and close to where people lived. Installing the mechanism that the smiths and carpenters devised to prevent overfilling of the reservoir, a simple nozzle that would be sealed shut when a hollow float was raised up too high by the reservoir's water level. It was the sort of mechanism Lori would have been hard-pressed to devise with her Whispering alone, and once installed—by turning the reservoir's water to ice, then laying planks on top of it so she'd have something to stand on without slipping, with the rest of the water removed from the reservoir temporarily—it allowed her to keep her Dungeon's water running unattended without worry.

Lori also took this opportunity to finally lay gold wire along her demesne so that certain bindings would be powered by the core directly into perpetuity, or at least until she died of boredom dozens of decades in the future and her core went dormant as a result. It was good that gold could be drawn very fine, because she barely had enough wire to go from her core to the reservoir. She'd ordered Rian to tell the smiths to turn the rest of the gold dragon scale into wire, but even then, she'd probably only be able to directly wire some parts of her Dungeon.

Still, it meant that by altering the lightwisps that lit the various levels of the dungeon and combining them into a single massive binding, she was able to keep it imbued with a single metal contact point along the wire. That way she didn't have to run wire down to the other levels to power the bindings of lightwisps there. Adding in the bindings that lit the Dungeon farm had been a bit difficult, since those bindings had been specially tuned to emit light that replicated sunlight, meaning it emitted unseen light as well as visible light, but Lori eventually managed it.

That was the limit of what she could do. She only had a few yustri of wire left after all that, which she decided to save for when she started experimenting with making bound tools. She would need to wait for the new wire from the smiths before she could wire anything else.

There were also other chores, such as regulating the temperature and humidity in the Dungeon farm, to keep the plants thriving and to prevent sudden condensing of water that would be dangerous to those walking around. Distributing the excavated stone around her Dungeon's entryway to better insulate against the cold and to be ready in the event of a dragon. Setting bindings in the kitchen which would do the work of heating the new metal pots, so as to help conserve firewood for people's houses. Making solidified air for their cold rooms to keep the food preserved. Keeping the lights on outside at night.

Then, after a morning's work and a warm lunch, she'd get to work expanding her demesne.

When Lori had initially done this procedure to create her core and founded her demesne, at the end of the process she'd… well, she'd started laughing manically in triumph. The process, while time-consuming, hadn't been exhausting, and she had been able to start work on the shelters almost immediately.

The process of expanding her demesne, she was coming to realize, wasn't anywhere nearly as pleasant. The first week of expansion left her extremely tired, and according to Rian's measurements the following morning resulted in the demesne growing an average of forty-two yustri. There was a correlation between how long she was channeling magic and affinity to the wisps at the edges of her demesne before she finally pushed outwards to expand, but… well, she needed to find a way to make the process more efficient.

The correlation came about after Rian insisted she set some water clocks to count down how much time it took between the moment she started channeling magic and the moment when… well, she claimed more territory beyond her demesne and she collapsed as a result.

"You need information," Rian told her over breakfast after the fourth time she'd expanded her demesne and he'd noticed the number of yustri had increased. "At the very least, you need to know how long you spent concentrating so you could compare it to how much the edge expanded. You need numbers to compare if you want to know how well you're improving. As a preliminary goal, we need to make the number of how long you spent concentrating to go down and make the number of how much the demesne grew go up!"

"Rian, have you been sitting outside my room in the passageway again?" she said. While she had grudgingly agreed she might require assistance getting up to her room now after dinner, depending on how tired she was, she had also told him he was not to sleep in her room again… So he'd started sleeping in the hall outside of it.

"I was there to make sure you didn't vomit in your sleep. Tonight, how about you only drink a little soup and we'll save the rest in a jar that you can eat if you wake up hungry in the middle of the night?"

That… did sound a bit more palatable—no, back on topic! "Rian, stop sleeping in my hallway! You have a perfectly good house with a perfectly… well, with a bed! Sleep there!" Mikon, Umu and Riz all nodded in agreement.

She did allow him to set up the water clocks though, putting up a series of shelves on her wall where they could be placed to flow down into each other. Rather than a single one, they used a series of them so that refilling the clocks didn't become a factor in how long they ran. Then, when it all went to waste because she was too tired to read the time, reluctantly allowed Rian to monitor the clocks and her, provided he didn't read her almanac as he waited to do so. He sighed and pouted about it but complied, and so they were able to compile more information. Rian wrote on stone tablets she prepared, writing down the time and growth. He seemed to obsess over them, and actually seemed to be far more invested in the growth of the demesne than she was. While she knew full well how important the growth of the demesne was, even she was mildly bewildered at how focused Rian was on watching a number go up!

After a week of this, Rian all but demanded she explain to him what she was doing.

"You need to identify what you're doing so you can break it down into elements that we can individually test the effectiveness of," Rian said as he began preparing the water clocks for that afternoon's expansion. "That way you can test how much each matters so you can focus on the elements that produce the most results. If you can find the right combination, we might be looking at a growth rate of a pace of expansion for half an afternoon's work!"

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Lori pointed out as she got her corner ready. The corner had been altered to better facilitate sitting with one's back against it, and with half of her bedroll as padding, it made for a comfortable semi-reclined seat. "You don't know a thing about Whispering."

"I know, which is why I'm asking you to tell me!" Rian had practically whined plaintively. "Or at least list them down for yourself and then isolate each variable and test what happens if you modify each of them in isolation! Think about it! A pace in half an afternoon! That means you'll have more time to rest! You can get more reading done!"

The idea was very appealing…

"Be quiet, I'm about to begin," Lori said instead, settling into her corner and reclining back.

Rian sighed and got read to pull out the wads of wax that sealed the spouts of the water clocks. "Ready," he said.

Lori closed her eyes and began channeling the power of her core. "Begin."

She heard the water start to flow, finally ending down in the catch bucket. The sound gave her something to occupy her senses without being distracting as she began expanding her demesne.

Two days later, a reluctant Lori sat down and began to list what she could identify as the individual variables that were part of the process of expanding her demesne.

Stupid Rian and his stupid good advice…