(Draft v1) Demesne Chapter 15(incomplete) (Patreon)

Well, this is embarrassing. Apparently the first time I had Lori doing laundry she had no trouble drying her clothes using Whispering. I honestly forgot that. This reread/edit is really making me cringe at my own forgetfulness. This is what i get for thinking i'd remember every detail of my own story...

Looks like I have to fix the more recent chapters. The other such scenes in the middle of the series, I’ll fix when I edit them for publication.

Lolilyuri had not been looking forward to this. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"I hate laundry day," she grumbled. She looked at Rian across the table blearily. "When are you doing your laundry? Maybe I can just mix my clothes in with yours and take care of it that way."

Rian, who was tugging on each of his fingers to make the knuckles pop and flexing them in satisfaction afterwards, twitched. "Don't even joke about that," he hissed, leaning forward even as he frantically looked around everywhere, even directly behind him—Umu, Mikon and Riz (and she was annoyed at realizing another name had somehow snuck its way in again, ARGH!) all pretended to be casually talking even as they glared at each other pointedly and all they did was flap their mouths and make nonsensical sounds—as if afraid of people overhearing them. "Do you want weird rumors to start?" He paused. "More weird rumors, I mean."

Lori knew she shouldn't ask, but… "What weird rumors?"

"You don't want to know."

"Probably, but I'm morbidly curious anyway."

"Well, there's still the one that made you gag," Rian said, listing them on his fingers. He counted strangely, using the whole finger instead of each knuckle. Did no one teach him to count on his fingers properly as a child?

"Which one was that?" Lori said, before remembering and gagging. "N-never mind, I remembered and wished I hadn’t."

"I told you that you didn't want to know," Rian said, not sounding sympathetic at all and seemingly taking pleasure in her pain. "There are the rumors that grow from that, like already being married–" She gagged. "—secretly having children–" More gagging. "—you secretly being a man–"

"Wait, what?" Lori said, blinking.

"You are apparently so unfeminine that people wonder if you're a man, and if I therefore prefer men by extension," Rian clarified.

"That's literally the stupidest, most idiotic thing I've heard all month," Lori said.

"And you just suggested mixing our laundry together because you're too lazy to do it yourself," Rian… agreed?

"I'm not too lazy to do my own laundry, I'd just prefer not to," Lori corrected loftily.

"My apologies," Rian said, glancing towards the kitchen, which was just finishing up the food. "I can criticize you of many things, but laziness isn't one of them."

Lori nodded sharply, then paused. "What things?"

"No people skills, bad communication skills, bad at socializing, bad at remembering people…" Rian started listing again.

Oh. She'd thought they were actual criticisms, not nonsense. "That's what you'refor," she said.

"And you're surprised there are rumors we're secretly married," Rian sighed, rolling his eyes.

"What does that have to do with anything?" In her experience, people got married so they could outnumber their poor child.

"If you have to ask, then you're too young to understand."

"I'm fairly sure I'm older than you."

"Maybe, but you're not my sister, so it doesn't count." What? What did that mean?

Rian went up to get breakfast, leaving Lori in peace to put her head down on the table and close her eyes. Once upon a time, when she'd been on a ship heading for this new continent and thinking what she would do once she was an all-powerful Binder, she had decided she would never wake up before mid-morning again. What had happened to her convictions?

––––––––––––––––––

Breakfast was adequate and involved some new fungus that Lori had never tried before, but had apparently been on the late Binder Koshay's List. It was nice and firm and lent a nice new flavor to the stew. Lori made a note to herself to have Rian save some spores before people ate all samples of it, since fungus growing was traditional in a Dungeon. Then told Rian to do it so she wouldn't forget.

Then she had to go back to her room, and her private bathroom, to do her laundry.

It was long, grueling work, and she had to keep taking bits of stone from her wall to bind and reform into containers for hot water, soaking water and washing water as she took her scrubbing rock and soap to soak her clothes and pound the bits that weren't dirt off. She did this by hand, since even after weeks and weeks and weeks of trying, she still hadn't managed to come up with a binding to clean her clothes for her.

It was never something she'd had to devise, growing up and learning to do magic. She and her mothers had lived in an apartment, and had taken their clothes to a laundry to get them cleaned. The closest Lori had been to 'doing laundry' had been bringing their laundry to the old woman who ran the laundry shop and picking them up later when they were clean.

Someone had needed to teach her how to do laundry after they'd left Covehold Demesne and had already traveled for several days. They had stopped to do repairs and Lori had imitated the other women doing laundry, getting her clothes wet and hitting them on rocks. Fortunately, someone had taken pity on her and had shown her how to do it properly, using ash mixed with oil, or just ash if nothing else (but that was harsh on clothes), how to scrub the fabric to keep it from being damaged…

The woman had died at some point on the way to where they were now. At least, Lori assumed so. That or Lori had just forgotten what she'd looked like. That was a very real possibility.

Perhaps Rian had a point, and she should put some effort into remembering people?

…

No, that would be a silly waste of time. The woman probably just hadn't introduced herself. If Lori remembered her, but didn't have a name to go with the memory, the name obviously hadn't been given to her. or she'd just never talked to the woman again. Besides, remembering names was hard.

She went back to hitting her clothes with a rock to get them clean.

At one point, she thought she heard someone calling her name, but as she was naked and completely wet with laundry soap and water and was getting into a good rhythm, she ignored it. The calls eventually faded, meaning it couldn't have been very important or they'd have kept bothering her for whatever stupid reason.

Finally, after long, tiring work, Lori finished doing her laundry. It wasn't all her clothes—that would just be silly—but it was still a lot. She had to take care because until they managed to start viably producing some sort of fabric from ropeweed, then the nearest source of new clothes was Covehold and that was a long way off.

While she couldn't devise a binding to wash and clean her clothes, drying them was easy. No messing around with long cords and poles and drying lines. Just binding the waterwisps in the clothes and gently drawing them out, pulling the water out with it, and she was done. She had to be careful not to draw out all the waterwisps, since that would damage the threads, but she'd had practice in doing that. When she was finished, her clothes were… well, technically not completely dry yet, but that wasn't anything being left to air for an hour wouldn't fix.

After that came the time-consuming flattening and folding so she could pile it all on her bed and later put her raincoat—which she'd oiled recently to keep the leather from cracking—over it so she'd have something soft to lie down on.

Lori  was balling up her socks for last when she suddenly frowned in displeasure. Finally, the worst possible thing had happened. One of her socks had a hole in it.

She'd brought a sewing needle, right? And thread?

Setting aside the one sock and its pair—she guessed it was its pair, all her socks looked alike—she folded the rest, checking the other socks for holes too. Fortunately, none of the others had holes in them, which was a relief.

Lori then had to go through her non-clothes things and the spoils she'd liberated when the other two wizards had died before she'd finally found her sewing kit. It was a small, round metal tin with a tight-fitting lid, to keep the contents from spilling out. It had used to contain shoe polish a long, long time ago before she'd repurposed it in her school days to hold quartz, coals, and other materials, until she'd been able to afford glass containers and cases. Now it continued her sewing kit, such as it was.

After twisting it open, she found she had more than one needle. She had several, of differing sizes, as well as curved ones for surgeons that she'd bought on a whim, several pins, and some large buttons.

She had to go through her things again to find the tin that contained the threads.

"All right," she muttered, sitting down on her stone chair in front of her stone table that bore no resemblance to any sort of sacrificial altar whatsoever, and moving the bound lightwisps behind her head for light. "How do you sew up socks…?"

––––––––––––––––––

"Where were you?" Rian asked as she sat down irritably. "You missed lunch. You never miss lunch. I was looking for you all day. I was worried you'd gotten secretly murdered and we'd have to send someone to River's Fork for Shana so she could claim the core."

"I told you, I was doing laundry." Lori said, still annoyed.

"It took you that long to do your laundry?"

She gave him a very level, piercing look. "And how long does it take youto do your laundry?"

Rian looked aside. "Okay, that's fair, you have a point, obviously you needed all that time to do your laundry." He sighed. "Maybe you should put up a sign. 'I'm in my room, go away'."

"I shouldn't need to put up a sign, it should be obvious people should go away from my room," Lori huffed, taking out her sock, the needle still dangling from it by a thread, and started trying to sew the hole this time without folding the material.

"Is that a sock?" Rian said, leaning back.

"It's freshly laundered," Lori said. "Don't be dramatic."

She held the sock flat on the table with one hand as she carefully used the needle to pry up the fabric and stitch only the hole and not anything else. She'd learned the past four times, so she was sure she could do it now…

"You have no idea how to sew socks, do you?" Rian said blandly.

"What makes you say that?" Lori said.

"The fact you sewed one side of the sock to the other three stitches ago and still haven't noticed."

Lori stopped, then sighed. Carefully, she began to undo the stitching.

"Are you… trying to get the need back in through the same hole to undo a mistake?"

"It worked the last four times," Lori said.

Rian let out an annoyed breath. "Oh, give it here, or you'll be stuck on that all night!" he said holding out an impatient hand.

Lori paused and gave him a look. "You can't do laundry, but you can sew?" she said skeptically.

"Why not?" he said. "You do it the other way around. Come on, give it here." He beckoned his fingers in a vaguely obscene way.

Shrugging, Lori handed him the sock. She watched as he stuck his hand inside her sock and pulled the fabric taut, then began carefully but confidently stitching in a vaguely circular way. "Where did you learn how to sew?"

"I'm an unmarried man without his parents who lives alone," he said, not looking up from the sock. "The world has forced the necessity of learning upon me. Did you get anything done today?"

"I got my laundry done. As the one sitting in front of me, be grateful. That's what you said, remember."

"Colors. How can I argue against you throwing my words right back at me?" Rian said blandly. "So, I take it those pots for the hairy blueball seeds have been moved to tomorrow?"

Lori stared at him. Then she sighed. "I'll be right back," she said, and headed out towards the large pile of excavated rock outside the Dungeon.

By the time she got back, Rian had finished with her sock and had it folded neatly on the table, the needle keeping it folded like a pin, next to three bowls of food.

She frowned. "Why three?"

"Didn't you miss lunch?" he said.

She considered that and pulled two of the bowls towards her.

"Your pots are outside," she said, and dug into a food.

"Thank you," he said, and joined her.