D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad - Chapter 2188 Nice Distractions Part 2

— Lily —

Temporary distraction was now over. Sadness resumed.

Lily found that not knowing if she needed to poke at her major issue or not sent her spiralling. Not too much. This certainly wasn’t the worst she’d felt in the past few hours… but it certainly wasn’t a great feeling. Though in the spirit of testing things, Lily decided to embrace it a tiny bit to see if it would help. It was an extension of her previous idea… and it was a way to test things without being too much of an issue if she was wrong.

So Lily picked up a bunch of the rotten sheets from the various bedrooms and started to build herself a mouldy blanket fort in one of the corner while making sure the shadows were all a lot longer then normal. Originally, Lily had been planning to include pillows but they were AWFUL. She wasn’t sure if they truly counted as having ’survived’ all this time, and even if they had, just being in such a cramped space with the first two she’d grabbed already made her want to gag so they were swiftly BANISHED from her hideaway.

It was when Lily was frolicking around in her piles of mostly ok blankets she’d taken to substitute for pillows that she realised she was having fun. Lily paused. *Hmm… on the one hand not sure at all if this is helping my work through my trauma, or if it even counts as trauma instead of just being sad… but it IS distracting so I’ll take it.*

Lily continued to mess around with her fort for a while but eventually she ran out of ’good enough’ materials to gather as the rest were barely held together. Even moving them out to the foyer where she’d been building the forts seemed like it wouldn’t be the best idea. So Lily had a bit more fun with what she’d already gathered before putting everything back. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. She just didn’t want the foyer to look quite so obviously occupied if someone else came through.

Once that was cleaned up it was finally time to go look at some of the new offshoots… and Lily found herself nervous once again. For all that she confidently believed that she could explore safely and not get hurt… she did understand Kat’s worries and there was a desire to share what she was doing. Especially with the recent memory of getting kicked in the face.

Looking back, Lily wasn’t sure how much it hurt, not really. It was just so unexpected at the time, she hadn’t been prepared in the slightest and the attack had slammed right into her nose, which was particularly sensitive now that she was a beastkin. Of course… for all that it was something she could look past and be more ready for in the future it DID prove that some people, some things, could react to her.

Despite being Rank 3 and theoretically faster and stronger then anyone at Rank 2, Greaves had proved quite conclusively that she could punch FAR above her weight class in a number of worrying ways and the possibility that something could catch Lily off-guard clearly existed. Lily wasn’t sure what she’d do against a light elemental, or perhaps a fire one, just as an example.

So instead of actually exploring, Lily just found herself running around in a tiny circle for another half an hour. It was surprisingly distracting, and even if it was bringing her mood down a little bit… that was based on her fun times with the blanket fort. Arguably, her mood was still up from dinner time and Lily wasn’t too interested in breaking the cycle. At least, not before she consciously noticed what she was doing.

Which of course, meant that once she DID notice it sent her thoughts right to the issue she was trying to avoid. Her shadows rippled under her feet as shadowy hands reached out to grasp at nothing before Lily shoved her shadow back into its natural state. Shaking her head, Lily forced herself to go down into this new section. It might not have been smart, but it was an obvious and forceful distraction that meant she couldn’t linger on those previous thoughts too much.

Walking down the side hallway, Lily watched the ceiling for any sign of those spider-like golem drones dropping down but it seemed that so far, she was fine. What wasn’t as fine was the fact that the flooring seemed to have seen better days here. With cracked tiles and moderate sized holes in the floor, well moderate for Lily’s current size. If she wasn’t careful she could fall inside some of them!

Eventually Lily found the door to the next area and she was NOT happy to see that it had been blown off the hinges. The doorway was now just a straight shot and the door itself had been thrown into the wall. Lily entered far more carefully once she saw that, sliding up to the doorframe and poking her head inside… but it was hard to see. The lights inside seemed to have been destroyed at some point, and while her night vision was pretty good she needed at least some light to see. Lily knew for a fact there was a shadow spell to fix that… but it also had a bunch of warnings about it possibly exploding your eyes if you did it wrong so she hadn’t practiced that one at all.

What Lily could see was a bunch of shattered glass along the ground, along with quite a few more holes in the floor. Some of them were barely deep enough to count while others went down deep enough Lily couldn’t see the bottom. Their width also wasn’t terribly consisted, with some large enough for Lily to fall through while human, and others so small she wasn’t even sure her foot could get stick in them.

Which raised the question, what the heck made all of these holes and what were they for? Lily wasn’t certain, but she could hear some odd sounds coming from the area now that she was focusing on it. There was an odd bubbling and gurgling sound, sort of like water but it was just… wrong for that. It almost made her think of hungry stomachs but that was wrong as well. It wasn’t much like that at all.

Looking around, Lily glanced at the wall-mounted lights for a few moments as she debated yanking one off and using that to navigate her way inside… but she had no idea if they’d keep working or not. In that case… perhaps she should try a new spell. It wasn’t one she’d practiced properly, but she had seen it in her Paper Magic book. It was a ’Paper Lantern’ spell and it was meant to act as a light source in enclosed spaces.

Lily cast the spell… and the entire thing came out as ash. Shaking her head she tried again, and again, and again. Each time getting closer to correct, or at least she hoped so. Lily had a bunch of half formed paper lanterns, ones that were properly formed but didn’t glow as well as a more ash of course. Lily lost track of time a bit but eventually she managed one that worked… somewhat. It was a faint light that seemed to pulse and splutter quite regularly. Lily wasn’t sure that she could even make proper use of it for long…

The problem was, her next three attempts at the spells were complete failures. The first turned to ash AGAIN, the second was nearly perfect. It glowed brightly, it looked right, and for a few moments Lily was sure she was going to take that one into the dark… and then it simply went out. While the light that felt like it was dying kept going. Lily sighed and made a third attempt, but it was just a paper cube.

The issue with the light lantern spell, and the reason it wasn’t perfect or a different element, was that the white paper sort of ’trapped’ the light and then used it as a base to ’mimic’ that light outwards. It wasn’t a spell you could cast in a dark cave, you had to cast it outside and then bring it inside… and Lily wasn’t sure if her issues stemmed from the artificial lighting down here, her lacking memory of exactly what the spell instructions were, or some other additional factor.

Of course, the worry now was that the one ’working’ lantern would simply die once it was outside of the line of sight of the various light fixture in the hallway, so Lily wanted to test it. The problem as, she couldn’t just throw it into the dark room. The lantern wasn’t exactly sturdy, and with how poorly she was performing this spell it might be extra weak. Still, it didn’t hurt her shadow hands so Lily carefully lifted it up with one of them and guided it into the dark room. Illuminating just a little bit more of that black room.