Hello again. Things are not going great.

We have plenty of food and fresh water. I have stretched the Ivers Dream as thin as I can to allow everyone as much space as possible. Julius and Lena even left altogether, following us in their own tinglewood craft.

And yet things look grim. The darkness weighs down on us. Invisible claws scraping at our sanity. The narrow tunnels press in on our minds. Relieved only by the odd cavern that simply underlines the oppressive dark with its deeper shadows. Then it's just another mind crushing corridor of dark rock and water.

We managed to stay pretty civil to one another yesterday. Tickle torture nonwithstanding. But today everyone is tense and stressed. Like an overdrawn bow. If we don't find some kind of release soon then the only question is whether the limbs or the string will snap first. If one of us snaps then the others are bound to go off in a cascading storm of flying splinters and whipping string...

Nobody would get out of that unscathed.

We all are dealing with the stress differently.

Julius sits aboard the Tyrant. Calmly counting out his loot and relaxing amidst his hoard.

He is taking this the best out of all of us by far. I wonder if it has anything to do with rabbits living in burrows normally? I've never seen him dig before, so I just assumed he didn't like being underground. Maybe it's the dirt he doesn't like?

The only sign he is stressed at all is his ears. They are constantly swiveling and twitching. It's cute, but worrying. Normally when he is with his loot he is focused totally on his shiny treasures. But today he is absentminded, unfocused, listening for something.

The wind if I had to guess. The air here is dead still. Any wind at all would be a welcome herald of open skys and the bright sun.

I miss them both so much already.

Lena is being uncharacteristically quiet and still.

She lies on Sibyll the snake and has been dozing and napping all day. She didn't eat lunch. She doesn't doodle or bother me to play with her. She hasn't even tried catching anymore gross white eyeless frogs since yesterday.

I am worried about her.

But what can I even do? Any attempt I make to draw her out of her funk only seems to push her deeper into it...

Maybe if I give her some distance she will come out of it on her own? I hate not doing anything to help her, but sometimes we can only help ourselves.

As for Fen... where is Fen?

Come to think of it, I haven't seen him all day.

I hope he isn't planning anything 'funny'. Hats have an odd sense of humor. I think, the one talking hat I know certainly does at least. He seems to enjoy physical humor the most. As someone without legs, arms, eyes, or y'know, anything really.

It vastly amuses him to see these appendages backfire. He likes tripping, zapping, blinding (temporarily), deafening (also temporarily), and causing sneezing fits wth a wind guided cloud of pepper. I have no idea where he got, or where he hides, his pepper.

Please, let him just be hatting somewhere quietly. If he tries to 'lighten the mood' right now he is bound to make the whole thing explode.

Onica is having the worst of it. She is stomping pacing back and forth the Ivers Dream. Any attempt to converse is met with a literal snarl and a glare. Her tail is lashing the air and her ears are laid flat against her skull.

I may not be a genius at reading body language, but calling her agitated is like calling a lion a big cat. While it might be true, it doesn't really carry the right weight.

She only stops to obsessively sharpen her already razor edged thin knives, and grind out some unsavory looking pastes and powders from her poison kit.

I just try to stay out of her way. I try to make a habit out of not catching any knives with my face. I have enough scars already.

As for me, I am coping by trying to juggle fireballs. It's a good distraction, keeps me focused on something other the steadily brewing storm that is growing on the horizon.

The flashing lights and occasional explosion seem to bother the others.

Hmph, so what? If they want to be irritated and annoyed, then far be it from me to stand in their way!

...Ugh. Yeah, that attitude probably isn't helping.

Another day over, another day in the dark.

Please, let us be close to the outside. I'm not sure how long we have before we are at each others throats.

Goodnight.