(D13LE, Bedtime preparation)

[Jiyo Ayumu]

Enough herbs for the three of us? Checked.

Bottle of fresh water at hand reach in case someone was to wake up in the middle of the night? Checked.

Tamed embers that will pleasantly keep consuming through the night without putting fire to the tent? Hopefully checked.

Small personal statue of Jurojin so worn out by having been carried around for years that it looked older than the Fortune it was supposed to represent? Can't do harm to put it on display, as if he was overseeing the whole operation.

Well, that will have to do it. He couldn't think of anything else he could do to improve their chances of getting a good night of rest. In better circumstances, he would also have washed their sleep clothes so they felt smooth and smelt good... But now that even the rain was corrupted, they couldn't afford to waste their reserves of water that way.

So he just sat, and cleared his mind while waiting for the others.

[Canary]

Kinyoubi is the first to arrive, yawning a little in the late evening. "Good evening, Ayumu-san. Are you all sorted out for tonight?"

[Jiyo Ayumu]

Ayumu slowly emerged from his trance and nodded:

"Good evening Kinyoubi. How was your day?

I think so. Unless you see something missing?"

[Canary]

"Aside from not sleeping well, it... well, it could be worse for being on the edge of the corrupted lands. Bad dreams, but I got a look at the ruins a little bit - as much as I could safely," she sighed, settling down. "I'm sorry if I interrupted."

[Jiyo Sora]

Sora was in a foul humor when he arrived, the clearly unnatural warping of their environment having gotten to him.

This. Shit like this is why we need to try the Nezumi's plan.

He ducked into the tent and blinked, trying to come up wit something reassuring to say to the two younger people.

"We ready for the bad part?"

[Jiyo Ayumu]

"Aside from not sleeping well, it... well, it could be worse for being on the edge of the corrupted lands. Bad dreams, but I got a look at the ruins a little bit - as much as I could safely," she sighed, settling down. "I'm sorry if I interrupted."

"Don't worry, you did not interrupt anything. My meditation might have devolved into actual sleep hadn't you arrive, and the lotus isn't exactly a comfortable position for a good night rest.

Not that a good night rest will be that easy to achieve either way, even with herbal help."

He waved at his harvest.

"Just enough for the three of us. Would have loved to get more, but the jungle wasn't as bountiful as expected."

[Canary]

"We ready for the bad part?"

"Well... No, but I don't think we can get more ready than we are," she replied wryly with a small shrug. "Especially thanks to Ayumu-san. I didn't... expect you to think of me, as well, in gathering the herbs. Thank you." She gave the younger man a small, appreciative smile.

[Jiyo Sora]

"Ayumu's always thinking of others."

Sora grinned.

"That's his problem, really."

[Jiyo Ayumu]

Ayumu chuckled:

"Well, there are far worst problems to have."

[Canary]

"I think it's nice that there's more room in this world for people like him these days," she noted. "It's harder to be that way when one is just trying to survive."

[Jiyo Ayumu]

"I hope one day it'll be the norm rather than the exception.

Though... Kinyoubi, you are a former Isawa too right? Our tribe wasn't exactly where life was the hardest, and we could already afford to be nice back then. I don't feel like I've changed much on that aspect since the Fall."

[Canary]

"That wasn't true for everyone," she pointed out. "That's why I left. I'd like things to be that way, for there to be room for that, for more than just the tribe of Isawa."

[Jiyo Ayumu]

"Well, we're working on it, one step at a time. So far, the results have been encouraging, even though there's still so much to be done.

And if that expedition has taught us anything so far, it's that in this new world of mutual assistance, we definitely need more people that can read, write and crunch numbers right. So many things would have required far less efforts and good will from everyone had we been just a tidy bit more organized from the start."

[Jiyo Sora]

"To put it mildly. I'm afraid we'll always need people who can thump heads, but I'd be quite happy if most people never had to even see it done."

[Canary]

She nodded at Ayumu's words. "Organization will be essential for the libraries, too. People won't really have full access to knowledge if they don't know how to find what they need. I think they will be an avenue toward fulfilling that wish, too, Sora-sama."

[Jiyo Sora]

"I'd kind of pictured a section for each Kami and their followers to have their writings, and a section for Nezumi transcriptions, but... subheadings would be important."

[Canary]

"Exactly. Do you know how much research on how many different things the Nezumi have done? It seems that rats' natural curiosity is reflected in their larger, intelligent counterparts," she agreed, nodding almost aggressively. "You'd have to have subheadings or you'd never find anything."

[Jiyo Ayumu]

"I'm not sure I follow. Do the both of you plan to put all of the world knowledge into a single library?

I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's definitely ambitious."

[Jiyo Sora]

"I leave the ideal of perfection and the deathly stasis that would follow actually achieving it to the Crane. The library should be ever-expanding- we'll never find it all, but we should always look."

[Jiyo Ayumu]

"I'm more of a fan of having many small libraries exchanging books regularly than a single big one. Simpler to manage for the librarians, more resilient to hazards, and fairer. If you let a single clan store most rare books in a cache on their own, you're giving them the absolute power to decide who can access knowledge, under which conditions, and what they're allowed to know."