Harm and Harmony

-Chapter 22-

Day: 3

Days Left: 5477

Lives Saved: 0

"And thank you, for saving me earlier," said the young woman to the chimaera. "And all those times before. I don't really have any way of repaying you- apart from cooking."

'I am still repaying you' wrote Harmony.

"Ah, for trying to kill me?" Corinna smirked. "Stop worrying about it." She snuggled her forehead against her knees. "Regardless, just let me do all the cooking, please? I don't like being so idle. There's not much to do around here."

The chimaera nodded.

Corinna smiled. "Thank you." She stood up. "I'm going to the bathroom. And then I'm gonna do the cooking," Corinna headed to the bathroom and locked the door behind her.

She was confronted by her reflection in the mirror.

Before she had avoided it, bearing only glances, not wanting to see herself- to see what the Eternal Abyss had done to her. But this time she faced it directly.

Her eyes were the same. They were still her own eyes. Despite all she had been through they had not changed.

She examined every part of her face and body. With how speckled and spotted her body was, it was difficult to determine whether they were freckles or dirt. Corinna splashed her face with water.

She took off her white dress and washed the rest of her body, turning around to inspect the scar on her back, where she had been impaled by an imp's spear on the first day. The wound had healed, leaving only a dark mark of skin and an indent. Corinna had never seen a magical ointment so potent as the one Harmony had used to treat her wounds. The claw marks on her waist had healed within a day without a trace. Such a deep wound on her back would soon likely disappear tomorrow.

"What was in that stuff?" Corinna turned fully around, feeling the indent of the scar on her back.

After drying herself, Corinna exited the bathroom to find the trap-door slammed shut; Harmony had gone down into the basement.

Heating up the water in a pan, Corinna began cooking the food packets, after she struggled to reach up of the cupboard, having to kneel on the counter to finally retrieve them. She looked down at the pan, at the boiling and bursting bubbles but her eyes would wander back to the trap-door.

What was down there?

What was Harmony doing down there?

Corinna read the back of the food packets, to amuse herself, and found that they could be heated in a microwave.

"If only we had a microwave..." She sighed.

Her eyes retreated back to the basement.

Harmony eventually returned to the surface and opened the trap-door to find Corinna crouched down near the entrance. Entwining her snake-tail around the ladder, Harmony balanced herself, preventing a fall caused by Corinna's sudden appearance.

"Sorry." Corinna stepped back. "I was just wondering what was down there. " She tried to look past the chimaera, down the ladder but saw only darkness.

Harmony was carrying a small stack of boxes, which Corinna took off of her before she attempted to climb up the ladder with one hand.

Corinna looked down at the boxes. "Board games?"

They sat back down by the fireplace again, where Harmony had left her whiteboard, and placed the stack of board games down.

"So you had board-games down there?" Corinna rifled through them, recognising almost all of them, apart from a few in foreign languages. "What else is down there?"