Resting, Lori soon found, was boring.

How was that actually possible? She'd used to love her rest days, the times when she'd been too sick to go to school or work but not sick enough to need to be taken to a Deadspeaker or doctor! Just staying at home alone, the window open and a binding in place to keep air circulating, lying back on her bed with a nice book and—

Oh.

Rainbows.

To be fair, it wasn't like she was bereft of books. There was the almanac up in her room, after all. While it was a nice book, and very informative, there wasn't much of a plot. Or characters. Or much excitement, unless you counted the passages with warnings about how it would cause explosions or make poisons or to check the structural integrity of materials first in case of collapse.

Should she find the lack of such warnings in the entries devoted to Mentalism concerning? The only thing like a warning the Mentalism sections had was 'beware endless recursion loops'. She had no idea what that meant.

Rian had left after breakfast, heading out of her Dungeon. A number of people had gone with him, including Riz. From the distant sounds and the feeling of voids in her awareness when she concentrated, he was probably organizing the effort to dig up the soil along the river bank.

Umu had left as well, but to Lori's surprise the blonde weaver had come back carrying a sack full of clothes, and had started sewing after pointedly putting a roll of thread and a needle next to Mikon. The other weaver had taken the items with a smile and had begun sewing a shirt with a hole in the shoulder seam while waiting for Lori to finish with her move on the sunk board.

With nothing else to do, Lori had wordlessly cleaned up the board after that game finished and taken it back upstairs to her room. She had come back down with her other game board to find Umu and Mikon still at the table, the latter just finishing with the shirt. After cutting off the thread with her belt knife, Mikon had grabbed another garment to sew—a mitten—while Lori had sat back down opposite her and wordlessly begun setting up the board for lima instead of chatrang.

It had been some time since she'd last played lima. Not because she actively derided it the way she did pincer, but because she preferred the relatively faster pace of chatrang. One could attack at any time in chatrang as long as you had an opposing piece in range. She remembered games where pieces were lost at every turn until the board was wiped clear.

Lima was different. It wasn't about attacking pieces, it was about entrapping them and controlling areas of the board. As a game wore on, it took longer and longer to be able to set up such traps, especially if you were playing on one of the larger boards. Lori considered herself good enough at the game, but she was willing to admit the slower pace didn't provide her with as much enjoyment. Still, once she got into the game, she liked it well enough, as long as she managed to win.

There wasn't really much else to do, really. She could go back to her room and sleep or read the almanac again, but neither really appealed right then, and unlike some people, she didn't consider just sitting around naked in the baths an enjoyable waste of time. She could have gone down to the alcove where the large broken bead was kept and done more experiments, but without Rian to take notes and occasionally say something actually useful…

Playing board games it was, then.

…

Lori really wished her bench had a back rest.

Mikon brightened when she saw the lima configuration of the board, even as her fingers continued her sewing. Lori made the first move, playing as black, setting down a stone halfway between the center and the edge of the board. Supposedly, the board was the world, and the stones represented Dungeon Cores or demesnes, showing how the world was civilized.

One place at a time.

The pink-haired weaver responded almost immediately, putting down her own stone on the other side of the board, but closer to a corner. She didn't even stop sewing, pushing the needle with one hand for the time it took to put the stone down before seamlessly going back to using both hands. Silently, Lori responded.

Ah, this was nice. With the meals finished, the dining hall was quiet, with only the sound of those cleaning up, low conversation and other games being played to interrupt. From the second level, Lori could hear the sounds of the children playing. Or possibly getting into a violent brawl. It was hard to tell.

Lori had expected the two weavers to start talking to each other as they sewed, and was surprised they didn't. Instead, Umu seemed intent on her sewing, fingers moving with deft practice and familiarity, and while Mikon had her attention split between her work and the game, her fingers moved no less deftly. The way they moved was familiar to Lori. She'd seen it in the craftsmen she'd once worked with and for, the ones who'd been good at their work and had been doing it for so long that every movement was like breathing for them. It reminded her of some of her teachers in school, who could make a binding while in the middle of lecturing without missing a beat, binding airwisps while speaking without even a pause for breath. Even now, she'd have been hard-pressed to do the same outside of her demesne.

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The relative silence continued as the two women worked and the game progressed. Lori soon found herself trying to entrap Mikon's pieces, only to have the woman seemingly abandon them and start putting pieces down on another part of the board. What followed was… familiar to Lori. Her mothers always told her she concentrated on trapping her opponent's stones too much, but it was the way she liked to play.

Partway through the game, Lori had left to go upstairs and returned with some of her own clothes that needed sewing. One of her trousers had a worn hem on one leg near the heel from where it sometimes rubbed across the ground, and another pair had unfortunately worn areas high in the inseam where the fabric rubbed together when she walked. Other than that, the trousers were still good. The cloudbloom fabric was tough and hard wearing—except, it seemed, when it was the hem scraping across the ground at every step or between her legs—so unless there were any unfortunate tearing accidents, they should still last her another year or two, enough time to find a way to buy new ones.

Her hands were not so quick, confident or skilled as the two women sitting across from her, but Lori knew how to sew her own clothes. Er, that is, knew how to sew to repair her clothes. She had material to patch it with, from a roll of fabric that used to be the leg of another pair of trousers she had outgrown years ago she had brought with her for this purpose—the other leg was her cleaning rag—and so she got to work, keeping an eye on the board.

It probably wasn't Rian's notion of getting some rest, but she had to find time to do these repairs, and unfortunately trying to do it while she expanded the demesne hadn't worked, even when she was only imbuing.

The game, already slow because her lima board was so large, slowed even further as she took more time studying the board so she could sew. A part of her couldn't help but feel envious at how quickly the other two were getting through their own pile.

When the smell of bread started to fill the dining hall and people began coming back inside in anticipation of lunch, Lori decided to end the game, signaling by putting down a piece to one side of the board. Mikon did the same, and they momentarily put down their sewing to tally up the board. Lori had thought she was sufficiently ahead, but after she counted the spaces she controlled and the number of Mikon's stones she had trapped, it came out the weaver was ahead by five stones. Even though Lori had been half-expecting to lose—after all, she could only win or lose in this game, even odds of either result—she still glared at the board in annoyance.

Well, clearly Mikon would be better than her at this, after all she'd see the other woman playing lima with her feet while weaving, so obviously she had a marginal advantage over Lori. And it had been some time since Lori had played this, after all, so it was to be expected she was a little out of practice! After a few games, she would be able to continue her streak of beating Mikon when they played.

Setting aside the board for the moment, Lori picked up the clothes she'd managed to sew—the trousers had been repaired, even if she'd needed to fold up the hem slightly into a thick roll that had been hard to sew into—and took them back to her room, rolling them up and setting them aside in their niche. When she came back down, the dining hall was full of the smell of sweat, humidity, wood smoke and people.

At the table, Riz and Rian were both very aromatic, such that Umu actually put some distance between her and the lord. The towel that for the past few months had been wrapped around the lower part of Rian's head was on his shoulders, and it looked like it had been used for its intended purpose of wiping himself off.

"You seem like you've been busy," Lori noted dryly as she sat back down on her bench.

"Well, there's a lot of soil to dig up," Rian said. "Before you start building the flood barrier, you might have to dig up more farm plots in the Dungeon Farm. Even if we're just going to use the dirt for tuber planters, we need somewhere to put it all so it's out of the way."

"There's that much soil?" she said.

"There's enough," Rian said. "Even after we had to make a detour because we hit clay. I had them cover it up and pack down the dirt on top of it as best as we could. I'm not sure how good clay is for farming, but we need it for pottery, so might as well keep it from being washed away in the flood. It's actually not that bad. Means there's overall less flood barrier to build." He sighed, then glanced at the game board, then at Lori. "So, how was your day? Restful so far, I hope?"

"I played lima and did some sewing," Lori said challengingly. "Probably more sewing in the afternoon."

"Well, I hope you're having fun."

Lori shrugged. "It's been some time since I've played lima. I am out of practice."

"Is that Lori-speak for 'lost the game'?"

"I am out of practice!"

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After lunch—where the bread was delicious, especially when dipped into the soup—Lori went to the hospital to borrow scissors to cut her hair, which had grown long enough to fall down her neck. It was becoming annoying, having hair tickle her cheeks when she lay down. So, time to cut it again.

The hospital was warm and bright, bindings of lightwisps illuminating the interior as a fire burned in the fireplace. The doctor whose face she recognized—not that she knew their name—didn't even bother to ask why she was here. They just went retrieved their medical bag, opened it, drew out scissors from inside and handed them to Lori.

"Thank you," she said, because she hadn't been inconvenienced or had to say anything else, which was something to be thankful for.

She stepped outside and after making sure Landoor wasn't around to try and gather up her hair—she didn't know what he thought he could do with it, but it probably had to do with some story that he thought was how reality worked—Lori reached back to grip the excess hair in her fist and started to cut with the scissors

Soon, dark purple hair began to fall.

Really, she didn't know why other people wasted so much time sitting still and having someone else do this. It was so easy to cut your hair yourself.

Once the hair on the back of her head had been shortened, she cut off the excess on the side, making sure to get at the hairs behind her ears. The last thing she cut were the ones that fell down her face. That was the most time consuming since she had to ruffle her hair several times to get it to fall so she could identify which ones to cut. Eventually, however, she managed to get rid off all the hair long enough to fall over her eyes.

Nodding in satisfaction, Lori headed back to the hospital to return the scissors.

There was still plenty of day left. Maybe she'd do her laundry…