All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 67: V is for Vacuum

Chapter 67: V is for Vacuum

I followed Tony and Beatrice as they left the library. But they headed for one of the nearest smaller bedrooms. When we got there, I watched with a mixture of horror and interest as they removed a mattress from the bed. I didn't know beds worked that way. Did they just destroy the bed, or are they disassembling it? What are they doing with it? Amidst my confusion, they carried it back to the library together and set it down on Beatrice's charging spot.

Oh. It dawned on me. Beds were the best human chargers, and Beatrice hadn't been using one. I didn't realize you could just move the bed to where she was sleeping, though. That was very smart of Tony to figure out. Why hadn't Beatrice thought of it though? I wonder what the improved charging efficiency would be? Would they charge faster or did this somehow change their maximum charging capacity? Truly, humans are fascinating creatures.

They returned and grabbed another one for Tony, along with blankets and pillows. I felt the need to be helpful, so I carried the pillow for them. It was much easier than it was the first time. I actually didn't carry it in my claw as I was worried about dragging it on the floor and getting it dirty. Sure I knew the floors had been cleaned recently, and my sensors confirmed that there was not a speck of dust on them, but it was more the principle of the thing. So I placed it on top of my chassis and just carried it there.

Beatrice looked a little bit mortified when I did that, but Tony gave me a smile. Really, Beatrice would need to learn how to relax. She really did think too much of me. When I dropped the pillow off at Tony's bed, I received a nice set of head pats. I'm glad he hadn't taken my rebuke earlier too personally.

I then went over and made sure that Beatrice was fully in the proper position for charging. I sat and watched the door until they were both in sleep mode. Then I decided I would make sure everything was clean once more. Just in case.

Doing a round of the castle was no longer nearly as time-intensive as before. When I first dedicated myself to making sure that this castle was livable, the plan I came up with was a once-a-week full rotation to cover all areas. However, the entire area I had access to now took me less than a couple hours to clean.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum. What was there to do? There was not really anything I could clean that needed it. Sure I could clean again, and there was some very minuscule fraction of dust that had collected in the last hour, but there were really diminishing returns there. I had even sanitized all the floors and areas where there were significant concentrations of minuscule germs. All the door handles had apparently collected a significant amount, I had noted. More than I would expect compared to any other metal surface.

Eventually, I saw the cat coming downstairs. It stared at me, and I stared at it for a little bit. I rolled towards it slightly to see what it would do. It simply popped to its feet, ran a few feet away, sat down, and continued watching me. I thought we had been forming a bond while Beatrice was away, but clearly, it was still a bit wary. I'm not sure I would ever really understand cats.

With a complete loss of things to do, I returned to the library. I couldn't clean here as there really was nothing to clean, and I didn't want to wake up the charging humans. With nothing better to do, I started inspecting the book that Beatrice always seemed to be reading. It wasn't a very thick book, but it seemed to be her favorite.

As I looked at the cover, I gently took the book down from the table and placed it in front of me. My claw very carefully cracked open the book like I'd seen Beatrice do many times before. I scanned each page. I wasn't intentionally trying to commit them to memory or anything, but I was pretty sure my memory banks would have no problem containing the entire contents. However, I wasn't really trying to understand the book but rather looking for patterns in the squiggles.

The book was divided into 28 sections. It seemed there were 26 main sections; there were some smaller ones at the beginning and end. Each section was dedicated to one separate squiggly shape. Overall I saw there were at least 75 different shapes. However, judging based on context clues, it seemed a good proportion of them were more structural rather than content. I don't know why humans need so many structural indications in their encoding, but they do whatever they want.

After I finished some basic analysis, it seemed that there were 52 different squiggly characters. Half of the characters were covered in this book. But I noticed a symmetry. It seems like of the 52 characters, 26 of them corresponded exactly with another 26 of them. Of course, there were minor deviations and character shapes depending on which character surrounded it, but those differences were pretty easy to group together.

So it seems that maybe these 26 characters represented half of the lexicon. The other 26 might either correspond to the first set or be somehow paired as some sort of interchangeable thing. There was definitely a pattern with the 26 characters that the book's chapters were dedicated to being used less frequently. There was also the fact that they were almost always after a small round punctuation indicator that seemed to separate lines of information.

I spent a decent amount of time trying to decode the book, but I was missing something. I needed some sort of connection to unravel the mysteries of these squiggles. Even if I just knew a little bit about what the book was about, it might work, or even a few sentences read out loud to me while I was able to watch. I was pretty sure I would understand that.

---

When Bee woke up, she saw Void flipping through her ”A is for Alchemy” book. That was interesting. She had never seen it show any interest in the books before. She'd always put that down to the fact that it likely knew all the stuff in the books already. But the intensity with which Void was studying each page made her question that.

As she sat up, Void heard her and left the book to come over and say hello. She gave it a small bow of her head in greeting. It just waved its arm at her.

She moved quietly so as not to wake Tony. He did have many levels on him, and yesterday must have been a much harder walk for him than it had been for her. Normally she would just go about her day at this point. She'd probably do some cleaning with her master, some research, and maybe start exploring the upstairs today. But she didn't want to leave Tony just yet.

So she went looking for a book to read. She had not finished everything, but she didn't have any more need for more advanced alchemy right now. So scanning shelves, she began to look for books that might be useful or interesting. Unfortunately, there were a lot of really useless things in this library.

She skipped over some things about demon containment; she had got a pretty good grasp of that already. There was a more advanced bestiary of known demons, but that wasn't quite where she was looking for either. Eventually, she found an advanced demon-fighting guide. This might have promise.

Demon Fighting for the not Entirely Inept and Useless Person. The titles here were always slightly questionable, but she would say she had gone from “inept anduseless person” to “probably competent”. It was a book she remembered seeing when she was looking for ways to fight or contain demons for the first time, but recently her knowledge had been more focused on alchemy and healing. It might be good to do some undead research eventually, but that might have to wait. There still was that odd undead rat thing she had passed in the catacombs to deal with. She hadn't forgotten about that, but the demonic threat seemed much more pressing. Especially if they were to go exploring.

While she had passed up on this book earlier, it fit her much better now. She pulled it off the shelf and began flipping through. It actually had a decent amount of advice. Apparently, it was written by some ex-adventurer who had spent some time training in a demonic college, almost like what she was doing. Of course, it was several hundred years ago, but that didn't make the advice much out of date. Demons hadn't changed very much since then.

One of the things that sold her on this book was the author’s honesty. The author admitted that there were many times when various chemical forms of demon-fighting were relatively useless. The passage she was referring to read something like: "if you're getting chased by a freaking huge air demon and you throw some little bit of dust at it, even if that dust is demon’s bane, it ain't going to do jack. Any air elemental that you need to run from should be high enough level that it will recognize an attack and simply not let it hit it. Sure, demon’s bane cuts through most demonic magic, but literal air flinging it out of the way is much more effective. A low enough level air demon that wouldn't be able to do that isn't worth the price of the demon bane you just flung into the wind. And this is why it's always important to have heavier objects on hand too…."

The book went on, but this passage was incredibly useful. Most of the people who wrote books like these were scholarly mages and tend to forget practical aspects. Like the fact that air demons can control air. Or the fact that earth demons are massive and require much more material to deal with them because of their sheer size. This hadn't been an issue to Beatrice yet as she had never tried a lot of their suggestions, but it made her realize that some of them were quite impractical.

As she was engrossed in the book, she didn’t notice when Tony actually woke up. It wasn't until he sat down across from her, muttering good morning, that she realized she was no longer alone. She returned the greeting, and they went about planning their day.

Tony really wanted to get started on some of the gardens she had shown him yesterday, along with the chicken coop. She was willing to help, but he said it wasn't necessary. It was a bit of relief. She really didn't like farming. It was almost as bad as being a maid. Though with her luck that meant Void might decide that farming deserved a solid place in its value system any day now. Plus, getting dirty was probably going to give her some class penalties if she had to guess. Better to spend time leveling up or exploring the castle.

As they went their separate ways, Bee decided it was long past time that she checked up on the lieutenant. With her much-improved version of Scan, she should be able to tell more about it, along with judging how much time they had left.

As she and Void made their way towards the Lieutenant’s prison, a thought struck her. She realized she had forgotten something. "Master, where did the woman we rescued go?"

In her excitement to get back, she completely forgot about the injured woman she had left behind. She hadn't seen or heard of the adventurer since she had been back, so she half expected to find out that Void had eaten her for some perceived slight. Through a series of complicated beeps and arm motions, Void had been able to convey that the female adventurer had left abruptly. He also seemed to be indicating that she was quite rude.

Bee thought that was rather odd, but if the human had the strength to run, she was probably fine. She hoped she was doing ok.