[Woe finds it garish to make unnecessary shows of power, but more to the point, it does not occur to her that one might be reassuring for her companion to witness. Years of prowess and sainthood bred a kind of expectant solipsism into her that is hard to shake with only a handful of months of obscurity and weakness.]

Since spring. About six or seven months, intermittently.

[Information she peels off like it's meant to be discarded. The duration is a curiosity to her, and she doesn't know what value it might have to him, so she is free with it. She even sees fit to explain a bit further without prying.]

By which I mean I have spent as much of that time as I have been able submerged - although as a solution to your confinement here, I can't recommend it. The game players are loathe to give up their pieces at the pieces' discretion.

[They have that much in common. Disdain for the Pthumerians is a point she can agree on nearly anyone with. It's what wrinkles her nose in distaste as the grinding resumes closer to them, her hands curling into sharp-knuckled fists as she shadows the taller young man. There's something deliberate to the nearness and the timing of the noise that offends her for its attempt to frighten them.

The wall that looms out of the fog ahead of them does much the same when she spots the narrow, broken drainage pipe that extrudes from it, far too tight for Light's shoulders even at a glance. She hisses through her front teeth like a grass viper, whispering and slight.]

I should have stayed in bed. [She complains, pettishly, stepping around him and approaching the pipe - which of course is only just large enough for her, and extends a shadowy and unknown distance forward.] Appalling - no, trite! It really is, you wretched edifice, you monumental tediousness!!

[She appears, for all the world, to be conversing with the wall.]