All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 74: Ramping Up

Bee spent the morning reading through more books, trying to find as many ways as she could to awaken the demon when it was as weak as possible. Progress was slow, and she was getting frustrated.

There was no logic behind it, but she was having trouble staying focused. When reading about alchemy recipes, she lost track of time and could spend hours pouring over the instructions or reading about theory. However, demon properties just made her eyes glaze over.

Looking down, she figured Void was bored too. It had disappeared for an hour in the morning before returning. Now it was just sitting under her table reading a random book it had grabbed from the door. Every few minutes, she would hear it carefully turn a page. A thoughtful humming noise would come from it every once in a while, and she wondered what it was thinking about.

Eventually, Bee stopped bouncing her knee and stood up. Void rolled out from under the table as she did so. "Let's go check on Tony. I need a break."

Void let out a hesitant sound but seemed to agree in the end. As she carried it down the stairs, she went back to her thoughts from earlier. She had received a lot of experience from cleaning the bat guano. Not quite enough to put her at level 25, but enough that she felt she was close. Unfortunately, that would take a while to build up again, and in the meantime there weren't any large messes for her to clean for easy experience anymore.

There also weren't any enemies near her level that she would risk taking a broom to. Void had demolished the demon population while she was out getting supplies, and she didn't think she was quite ready to take on whatever Void left down in the catacombs.

If she got so many experience points from cleaning something difficult like the guano, surely she would get points for helping Void get on and down the stairs by itself. She was still getting points every time she carried her master up and down the stairs. Not as much as when she was cleaning, but not an insignificant amount, even at her high level.

She wasn't quite willing to farm experience this way as carrying Void up and down stairs when it didn't want to be carried didn't seem possible or advisable. Also, that wasn't in the spirit of how her class leveled.

Bee found Tony outside tending to one of the vegetable patches. It was a huge contrast to when she saw it last. No longer was it overgrown and nearly withered. Each row was neat and clean. The plants were trimmed nicely, and fresh little irrigation trenches ran between the rows.

"Hey, Tony! How's it going." She called out as she approached. Hearing his name, he looked around. Seeing her, a huge smile burst on his face. "Bee! Glad to see you getting some sun! It's been good. Here, I wanted to show you how the daikon is coming in nicely."

He led her over to another patch and pulled out a carrot from the ground. Bee remembered this plot of vegetables. "Hey, I tried one of those carrots a week or so ago. It wasn't ripe then."

Tony gave her an odd look.

"What?" She said indignantly. "This is a carrot, right? It's only slightly orange because it's not ripe yet?"

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"You really don't know anything about farming, do you?" Tony grinned.

"Not really…." Bee felt slightly insulted. "So what am I getting wrong?"

"Well, this isn't a carrot. I don't know where you are seeing any orange in this. It's white. Also, it doesn't taste like a carrot at all…." Tony explained. "Besides, carrots are always orange, and you can eat them at any time. Sometimes when they are too big, they can taste a little bland…."

Seeing her give him an uncomprehending look, Tony shrugged. "Well, these will go good in a stew tonight. I can't believe you don't know what daikon is…."

Bee followed Tony around for a few minutes as he worked. Trying to do her best to get over her embarrassment, she remembered why she had come out here. "Actually, I was going to ask for your help with something. If you have the time, of course."

"Sure, what do you need?"

"Well, you know how I have to carry Void up and down stairs? I think I mentioned I get experience for that because one of Void's ideals is hating stairs…." Bee cut off as Tony started chuckling. "What, did I not tell you about that?"

"No, no, you did. It's still just too funny."

Bee did have to admit it was pretty ridiculous. She just couldn't bring herself to laugh as Void after what she had seen it do. Luckily Void didn't seem to mind. "It… is a bit ridiculous. Well, along those lines, I wanted to try something…"

—

I watched at the top of the stairs as the humans started to put together some contraptions. It still wasn't apparent what they were planning on doing with the large number of planks and spare doors they had spent the last couple of hours gathering. Once they started gathering hammers and nails though, I started to get a bit concerned.

I didn't have any particular reason to doubt their skills, but watching Beatrice hammer nails into wood made my bristles twist with concern. I thought back to how much time she had spent damaged and all the other incidents she had run into so far. She didn't have a fallback of Automatic Maintenance that I did, after all. Well, maybe now that she had another human, she wouldn't have to perform self-repairs, and that might speed things up.

Of course, now that I had two humans that needed caring for, I might need twice as many spare human parts. Though I was starting to doubt that humans used spare parts. I had only managed to read through a few books so far, but not once did the humans use spare parts when they were damaged.

The tales of the Gerlaurdgaurd, the hero, I read about always seemed like he never got hurt, and all his enemies died the instant he hurt them. The only time the human repair was even mentioned was when his allies had to spend time healing. It seemed that time and a competent mechanic were all they needed. Though there was mention of an adventure retiring after taking a projectile to a vulnerable leg joint, that might indicate that not all things were repairable. But if time didn't fix that sort of injury, why didn't he just use a spare human knee? The only rationale I could think of was there were no spare parts. Of course, that was working under the assumption that humans were rational. I was dubious of that assumption after my experiences here.

Eventually, the project my humans were working on started to take form. It was actually quite a simple design. At regular intervals, short pieces of wood were nailed into longer planks. Once the first plan was set up, they laid it over the stairs. The stubby pieces of wood stopped it from sliding down.

Tony and Beatrice repeated this three more times before the planks covered an entire two foot wide section of the stairway. It was a ramp!

I let out a series of excited beeps before trying to roll onto it. The start of the ramp wasn't exactly flush with the top of the stairs, but with a bit of initial momentum, I was able to bridge the gap. With excitement, I trundled down the ramp. When I got to the bottom, it was difficult to disembark from the ramp. Eventually, I had to give up on getting off cleanly.

I had to let my front scrape against the ground. I also needed enough momentum to carry myself all the way to where my wheels would again touch the ground. Otherwise, I might get stuck. That would be extremely embarrassing. I managed it on my first try, though.

As soon as I zoomed off of the boards, I turned around to go back up. I had the same problems on both ends. Neither was insurmountable, though. I would have preferred a slightly lower-grade slope, but I wasn't going to complain! It would likely eventually damage my undercarriage, but with my repair functionality I didn't even have to worry about that.

I beeped a quick thank you to Tony and Beatrice before continuing to practice going up and down the ramp.

—

Bee watched as her experience rained in. Void flew down the ramp, and she earned a stupid amount of experience. Then it backed up the ramp, and she got a bit less, but still a staggering amount. It just kept zooming in circles, up and down, almost like a child rolling down a hill repeatedly. It did this a few more times before she leveled up again.

Between the day shoveling guano yesterday and the ramp, she had shot up an absurd amount in levels. She only needed one more level to get her new class.

Turning to Tony, who was giggling watching Void roll up and down the ramp, she said, "You don't know how much this is helping. Let's go set up a couple more, and that should push me over the edge."

They moved to the second set of stairs, which led from the plaza at the castle entrance down to the road leading out of the gates. However, shortly into the project they made an unfortunate realization. Neither of them was much of a carpenter. Tony had done some simple work on his family's farm, so they were not completely incompetent. However, it meant that they had massively underestimated the amount of wood needed.

Their logic had seemed fine at the time. They estimated the slope of the stairs, then they added a little for stops to keep it from sliding by resting on the stairs. Of course, some of the wood was twisted, and they broke some other pieces one way or another. This meant that they ran out of materials with only half of the ramp constructed. When they trudged back inside to find additional materials, they grabbed three times as much as they needed. Even with their inexperience, they hoped it would be more than enough.

As she looked over the stairs, Bee considered whether it was really a good idea to give Void access to the rest of the world. Ehhh, it's probably okay. She thought that it hadn't really shown any concern for the rest of the world outside the castle. In fact, Void seemed to prefer staying inside on the few occasions it had access to the world beyond. She wasn’t sure how long that would last though. No, the larger concern was whether the rest of the world was ready for Void.

Likely they weren't. Void didn't seem to harbor any intentional desire to harm anything, except for messes and maybe the cat. It seemed to have gotten over that last grudge though, as she saw them interacting just fine the other day. The cat even played with Void, chasing the light that her master emitted. She wasn't sure if Void was intentionally playing with the cat or not, but it sure seemed like it.

It didn't take long for her and Tony to finish setting up the ramp. Void kept them company, cleaning the little plateau area in front of the castle entrance. It seemed to be collecting a lot of dirt from between the stones. She just hoped that it would leave the mortar in place, so the structure stayed stable.

When they finished, and Void rolled down the ramp, she finally got the notification she had been waiting for.

LEVEL UP. LEVEL 25 REACHED. CHOOSE AN ADVANCED CLASS: PALADIN OF SPOT, PRIEST OF SPOT, HERETIC