His jaunts over for a time, Faustite relegated himself to the very bowels of the castle. It was dim, dreary, and dusty where he passed from the more habitable portions of the structure to the old, nigh abandoned areas that had seen no better use than as glorified storage lockers. Faustite could only guess the original intentions with such spaces — maybe this was a part of the Negaverse's transition to tablet technology and they had to do away with papers not yet catalogued, or these were remnants from a shift in leadership, or some other momentous occasion that Faustite wasn't around to see. Had he been more excited about the prospect of sifting through low priority garbage, he might have thought to ask Axinite about the origin of all this junk.

Instead, he went down with no more than a couple carafes of tea kidnapped to his subspace and a cincher to keep himself from setting the entire room on fire. Naturally, he sent along his love and best wishes to his closest boys, in case the room collapsed in on him or he died of boredom. But that was all he spared before he resigned himself to his fate.

Normally, Faustite was used to being his own light source. With his fire pent up behind the cincher, he could make no use of it in such a manner. After entering the dark room, he fumbled around for a light switch, and thought no more of it when he flicked it to what he presumed was 'on'. instead of being greeted by light, he winced for a bright, brief flash before the room fell dark again. Faustite huffed his displeasure.

Fifteen minutes and two new lightbulbs later, Faustite perched upon a dusty stool at a desk that was cluttered over with boxes upon boxes of miscellaneous files. Faustite could only imagine that they were organized by a horde of nonplussed Lieutenants, for each box had different handwriting on it than the last. Many of them looked quite faded, too.

He had no great guess for a proper time period, so Faustite began sifting through the boxes based on which were leftmost to where he sat. The first box featured a wide gap in years and an even wider gap in subject matter: he found bills from mechanics, grocery lists, coffee orders, carbon copies of faxes that were no longer legible, a coffee-stained napkin with a phone number written on it, some lost card from someone's graduation many years in the past, an old and faded telegram, a photo of a stranger who wasn't smiling, a vintage ad for an arsenic cream, a doctor's prescription for some kind of ancient remedy, and a few newspaper clippings that he could only explain as penny dreadfuls. He quite liked the penny dreadfuls, of course, so those were set aside for his own personal collection before he foisted the box off the desk and onto the floor.

By doing so, he unearthed a monstrous cloud of dust that had him coughing hard enough to retch. It was only after his recovery (and an entire cup of tea) that he forced himself into the next box. And, as to be expected, he found much of the same frivolous inanity as before. So much of it was simply words on a page that ceased to have any meaning, and as he waded through that box, Faustite often caught himself daydreaming or thinking about tasks that had nothing to do with the matter at hand. A dozen times he had to double back and comb over his own work again, a growing sign of burnout that nevertheless frustrated him.

The third box fared no better than the second. Nor did it contain anything of value — or entertainment. Not even a journal reflecting a touch of vintage Negaverse tea.

It was a third of the way through the fourth box that he stumbled upon something worth reading. initially, he skipped over it, caught himself in another daydreaming daze, and doubled back to check it over again. It looked like a bill of lading (as if he hadn't seen a dozen in the past hour alone), but none of the others had notes scribbled in the blank spaces around the important-looking numbers. The notes were in black, whereas the bill itself was in blue pen. Shifting on his stool, Faustite peered at the messy handwriting.

The backwards sentence structure had him rereading much of it to assure himself that he understood what it was saying; his middle english was sorely unpracticed for the length of time that he'd been out of prestigious English classes. Faustite guessed that whoever was supposed to receive the shipment had written all over the bill. Something about the shipment being lost at some interim destination, or intercepted or something.

Below that, the same hand wrote in a date and a declaration that they filed a complaint with… Faustite couldn't tell who. The ink was too faded to read. Further down, more dates. A note, too — something about inquiries that went completely unanswered. Faustite checked the following page.

He saw an itemized list of goods and their estimated worth. He only recognized a few names of gems on the list; the rest must have been archaic, outmoded names for more of the same. But like before, some notes floated about on faded margins and haunted the blank spaces for the bill.

This time, the notes mentioned hiring a ship. Many complaints about the crew, too — something about using deleterious electrical storms as a poor excuse for laziness. Another couple dates citing no word from the ship. Faustite expected more of the story on the back of the page, but if anything had been written there before, it was faded beyond recognition now. Brows furrowing, Faustite set the pages aside.

A few more baubles passed through his hands. One was an advertisement about some off-world fair, and another was a recruitment flyer for an army he'd never heard of before. Following that, however, was a handwritten note. Looked like some kind of a report.

In it, the ship's captain made only terse mentions of electrical storms delaying their journey. They reached the planet of interest for the person who hired them, or thought they did, but found nothing more than rubble and residual electrostatic. They had issues navigating away from the scene as the static wrought havoc on their navigation, but any and all starmaps they had assured them that the planet was at that location. Whatever they were hired to search for, the end result was inconclusive. And the margins were peppered with insults that were written in a familiar hand. It must have been the report that the person with the bill of lading was expecting. After some accusations of incompetence, the furious writer concluded that they must have been paid off. Something about being financially ruined by pirates.

For the better part of an hour, Faustite combed over the pages again and again. Then he finished perusing the box, though he found no more pieces related to that story. And no matter the number of times he returned to the battered, folded pages, he could glean no more than the faded words and disjointed report.

Most of the date on the bill was wiped clean by time, but if he was reading what remained correctly, then the bill was from the year 817. What the ********>, he mouthed to himself. It sounded quite accurate to everything they knew about the world eater, but this was hardly the shining example of documentation that Faustite hoped to find. The girl with the wings said she thought the creature was just a fairytale, and the person with the bill gave it just as much consideration. Were they just so ******** lucky that they were getting a visit from the universe's oldest bogeyman?

Well. Whatever else he might find in this death sentence for asthmatics would have to wait. He was going to nose up some bourbon for his tea before he waded any further into the detritus of millennia past.