“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” ― Ernest Hemingway

  It was well past midnight when Sir Milback had finished clearing the basement of the library from stray bits of void mana, and to be frank, the aged gnome looked exhausted and nearly stumbling. Still, he didn’t seem remotely willing to remain and rest at the site of the metaphysical struggle. He’d secured the book carefully in a well-used leather sack that had been clearly enchanted not only to be bigger than it looked but also to be resistant to a variety of evils from what I could make out of the runes involved. It wasn’t quite ideal for any particular artifact, I assumed, but added another layer of restraints and would prevent detection of its contents by interested, potentially dangerous, parties.

  I’d unsealed the room when he started packing up, and he’d eyed the re-emerging stairs appreciatively. “I’d love to stay and explore the city longer, but I’m too tired, and I can’t really expect the orcs to wait for me. I could get off the island by myself, but it’d be good to catch a ride with them.” He trudged up the staircase in the plodding, head down manner of the determined but exhausted, one step at a time without pause. For all that there hadn’t been a physical component to the battle, it had still been quite draining, and coupled with his short sleep and the physical strain of his hike to the city, he was in pretty rough shape.

  I considered trying to steer him towards the void dwarf settlement/shrine space to get a look at what was there, but I didn’t get the impression it was truly necessary. Unlike the book, nothing there gave off a truly alarming aura; it wasn’t ever going to be a vacation spot, by any means, but I didn’t get the sense that it was existentially dangerous. Void-based creatures weren’t inherently evil, hostile, or wrong, as far as I knew. Creepy, though, certainly. Still, creepy wasn’t enough to recruit a paladin for, so I dropped it for the time being.

  I led him back out to the central plaza, and he did, ultimately, snap out of his exhausted haze enough to take it all in for a second time. In the end, he simply shook his head with a sigh, muttered a prayer to his lord for those long gone, and headed back the way he’d come. I considered steering him in the other direction, up the sloping ramp that I was confident would lead to the surface, but I hadn’t really explored it all the way, much less cleared and claimed it.

  Still, I felt bad when he reached the base of the first carved out ladder representing the first of four ascents. I think in his exhaustion he’d mostly forgotten about the climb on his way back, and the look on his face was not one I envied. Sadly, I didn’t have any good way to lift him up the shafts; I considered it vaguely possible that a cave wyvern might be able to carry him, but the shafts were too small to make that truly feasible – even if he was okay with being carried off like prey.

  In the end, he’d simply stared blankly at the wall for a minute or two, then tiredly dug into his pack to pull out a virulent green stamina potion. “I’m going to regret drinking this, but I don’t think I have a choice.” He swigged it down with a grimace at the taste, and I could see it forcibly extracting energy from his body and pushing it into his muscular system and his adrenal glands (at least, I assumed that was why the area around his kidneys lit up). “Once this wears off, I’m going to collapse for hours and be weak as a kitten for a full day – with aching muscles to boot. Uggh.”

  The potion got him moving alright, and he scaled the ladders of the successive shafts with no obvious difficulty, but if anything, his awareness dimmed a bit – as though his body continued on, but without any direct supervision from his brain. I supposed the energy drain had to be paid for somehow, but I’d somehow expected it to be funded by the ambient mana. Maybe some higher-end potion could do that, but he seemed not to be the beneficiary of anything quite that advanced.

  It was nearly three in the morning by the time he stumbled into the orcs’ camp, briefly concerning Lugrub who was manning the watch. I got the sense she’d momentarily taken him for some sort of undead creature from his plodding, shuffling gait, but that first impression had passed once she recognized him.

  She called out to him, quietly, “Sir Milback! Glad to see you made it. I take it you were successful in your task?”

  His eyes focused just long enough to identify the orcish woman and her camp, and he paused in his step, swaying as he attempted to focus enough to respond. The pause was a long and rather awkward one before he slowly nodded. “Aye, lass. A success...”

  He took a few final steps forward, slowly lowered himself to his knees before making some sort of hand gesture I took as devotional, muttered a brief prayer to Zymther, then gazed dully about the space before simply tipping forward into the soft grass and falling immediately into an exhausted sleep.

  *********************************************************

  Lugrub had checked his vitals and apparently found nothing to worry about, particularly, so she’d simply thrown a blanket over the exhausted gnome and resumed her watch.

  Figuring I had another three or four hours before the rest of the orcs began stirring, I thought I’d do a quick check of my other residents and then check out my new institutional class reader.

  As I’d expected, given the hour, Hakdrilda was asleep; curled comfortably around a half-drunk bottle of dwarven whiskey. I assumed she was having a little trouble sleeping in my dungeon, and maybe still struggling a bit with trusting my good nature. That seemed fair, but I hoped it wouldn’t translate into any lasting bad habits or negative effects. She seemed to still be getting work in during the daylight hours, and I found I was able to at least nominally review what she’d been up to, even though I hadn’t been paying conscious attention. I assumed that was the combined effects of my eidetic memory and the odd, dungeon-specific nature of my disseminated awareness. I may have a single consciousness, but it was, on some level, aware of everything that happened within my domain. I didn’t think I was up to holding multiple conversations at once, but I could at least kind of pay attention to what others were doing.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The Redcrests were also asleep, at least mostly. They continued to keep a basic watch at the entrance to their village, and those two warriors were awake and chatting idly. Otherwise, the only other person awake was an older individual whom I knew from my semi-aware attention frequently had trouble sleeping and who apparently suffered from what looked like nightmares and insomnia to me. I knew from past experience that those often went with PTSD, so it may have been some trauma-induced sleep disorder. He seemed to be coping fairly well, but I made a mental note to mention it to Orentha, since her remit as tribal shaman seemed to cover addressing these sorts of issues.

  Leaving them all to their own coping mechanisms, I returned my focus to my core room and the new reader. I double checked its placement, finding that it wasn’t particularly sensitive to the ambient mana flows, so I left it at one end of the table, with the scanner on the other. I did the magical equivalent of booting it up by providing it with a linkage to my mana pool; the drain was negligible, frankly, but I assumed most individuals using one of these devices would have access to much smaller pools and might need an external source of mana.

  After a few seconds, the enchantments on the sizeable device were refilled with mana and the main screen lit up and text began to flow downwards.

  Position Established

  Compensating for Movement

  Mana Link Stable

  Seeking Archive Connection

  Connection Found

  New User Identified – Dungeon Sylvanus

  Create Password

  This wasn’t exactly like the PC in my office during my old life, but I could see certain parallels at least. I used one of my old passwords out of habit, a reference to a very old science fiction story I could now remember word for word. It struck me that with my eidetic memory I could, totally, use one of those random alphanumeric strings that password generators loved, but that I’d always refused because I knew I'd forget them. I refused to do so now, too. Frankly, if anyone made it into my core room without my permission, I had bigger things to worry about than unauthorized use of my reader.

  Password Accepted

  You have 12 New Messages and 4 Contact Requests

  That was interesting, and a quick glimpse through the relevant entries was informative.

  Most of the messages were standard new user messages identifying the appropriate procedures for both borrowing works and for uploading new works, as well as identifying the level of access I’d been granted. As near as I could tell, the Goddess of Knowledge, and by extension the archive, had decided to offer me a certain degree of trust which could be either restricted or expanded as I demonstrated my responsibility and degree of trustworthiness. For the time being, I was mostly restricted from higher-level magic texts and secrets maintained by the library for a variety of mostly good reasons (at least according to the archive). As the goddess was apparently aware of my autoredaction skill, anything I uploaded would be made accessible to other readers, though with a standardized disclaimer/warning that the work was otherworldly in nature.

  The contact requests included Janelle, which was unsurprising, Semyaza, whom I recalled Janelle complaining about rather bitterly, and two professors at her academy – either related or married, by their shared name. I’d only skimmed through the messages and didn’t plan to respond this evening – the most interesting were those from the Professors, each of whom had apparently submitted a formal request for further works in their respective fields, which they had delineated in fairly extensive detail. I thought I should be able to accommodate them, at least up to a point – as my knowledge of advanced mathematics and the natural sciences was what I would call broad, but not particularly deep. Still, I wasn’t about to spend my precious, limited time this evening transcribing a calculus textbook. Instead, I went shopping from my laundry list of titles I’d assembled earlier, snagging a few titles on topics ranging from modern geopolitics to dragons to crystallographic magic to the void. I didn’t know when I’d get a chance to actually read them, but I downloaded them for whenever that time turned out to be.

  That done, I shifted my attention back to the combined party of orcs and gnomes, curious to see how they would proceed.

  ******************************************************

  As it happened, they were debating that themselves when I returned to watching them. Sir Milback was still asleep, and while the orcs were being respectful enough, they weren’t exactly quiet.

  Most of the debate centered around what to do with him. The orcs were rested and eager to get back to delving – apparently having shaken off any lingering trauma from Ushug’s near death experience. That said, given Lugrub’s recounting of the gnome paladin’s condition, they didn’t want to wake him, yet they were too responsible to leave him lying asleep and unattended in the dungeon.

  Lazgar and Orbul were willing to simply abide and wait for him to awaken naturally. Lugrub and Ushug had voted for waking him and bringing him along. In the end, they’d sort of compromised, and Shuzug had offered to carefully load the sleeping gnome onto his pack and simply bring him along – hopefully still asleep.

  The exhausted gnome hadn’t even twitched when Shuzug carefully deposited the senior paladin into the makeshift nest they’d constructed on his pack. They hadn’t tried tying him down or anything; it seemed too disrespectful. Instead, they’d repurposed a mid-sized metal pot filled with some polishing cloths to hold him, and tied THAT down instead. For all that it took 15 minutes of jury-rigged experimental work, it seemed pretty secure, and the party was headed for the manor house shortly thereafter.

  I doubted that the compromise would really work; my sense was that the first time they got into a fight, the gnome would be awake like a shot. Exhausted or not, you don’t get to be a senior paladin without waking at the sounds of battle. Still, if he managed to sleep through an encounter, it would be because he needed the sleep desperately.

  It didn’t take long for me to be proven correct. The orcs had effectively marched right up to the front door of the manor house, inspected it for traps, and barged right into a fight in the main room. Fully rested and prepared, the party really didn’t have much trouble taking down the three greater and two lesser skeletons, with Lazgar effectively turning the two lesser skeletons and Ushug and Orbul dismantling two of the greater skeletons in rapid strikes – one with an axe blow that bisected the skeleton just below the rib cage, one with a magic missile that essentially exploded the other's skull. Ushug’s target was still trying to attack, but without any legs it was reduced to ineffectually scrabbling at his heavy boots. He dispatched it shortly thereafter with a casual stomp as they all reoriented on the remaining skeleton – already sporting damage to its weapon arm from Lugrub’s more cautious attacks.

  Sir Milback had awoken at the first exchange of blows, rather groggily peeked his heavily bearded face over the edge of the pot, and simply shook his head, pulled himself painstakingly into a more upright seated position and waited for the battle to end. He had enough experience to know that there was nothing to be gained and much to be lost by interrupting a battle already in progress.

  In any event, it really only took another minute or so for the party to dispatch the final greater skeleton and the lesser skeletons still trying to flee mindlessly in the corner of the room. They eyed the room carefully, looking for any indications of further traps or additional monsters, but gradually relaxed, smiling as no further threats emerged.

  As the adventurers regrouped and did a quick self-inspection for minor wounds, the gnome coughed loudly to gain their attention and spoke. “So, what did I miss? And in Zymther’s name, who thought it was a good idea to bring me to battle in a cooking pot?!”