[center][h3]Varandas[/h3][/center]

[indent][i]Sleep. The great unknown everybody embraces at the end of a long, hard day, yet at the same time many people fear for it seems to take away a third of our already short time on this world for an unclear purpose. Rest and regeneration for our bodies, they say. Couldn't the gods, nature or whatever root cause for our existence you believe in have designed us in a way that we don't need such things though ? The sun doesn't tire and neither do the growing trees, so why do we have to ?

Luckily, research and basic thinking have made significant progress over the last few centuries.

The conclusion, to cut it short, is that you, my friend, under no circumstances should be tempted to think that your new body would allow you to just get away without sleep. You might no longer have warm blood flowing in your veins, no longer experience the primordial fear of death the very moment you can't breathe freely anymore, but you still have your mind. It working properly and being able to provide you with thoughts and memories in an ordered, understandable manner actually is a positive result of sleep, too. You will suffer the same mental deterioration as a drunkard or anybody else who is deprived of sleep, so don't even try.

You also shouldn't try to stray too far away from the sleeping customs you might have learned in your earlier life. A bed might be far less mandatory for you than before, but still it will save your bones and tendons some unecessary and hard-to-fix wear and tear if you don't spend your restful nights standing upright instead of on a pile of pillows. Also the people around you, probably already hard pressed by your mere appearance, might feel just a tad more comfortable in your presence if you don't burden them with too many weird, unfamiliar new habits.[/i][right]- Enthrallment in a nutshell. A pratical guide for newcomers. Madawc, 99852[/right][/indent]

A small cloud of dust burst out of the old, sturdy pieces of parchment as Varandas closed the heavy tome and put it down on the small table besides him. Would he ever have imagined to be given a manual for his body one day ? Probably not. And despite this, he had to admit internally that he had not even read through the massive book entirely yet. Too ugly some of the detailed drawings, too profound the fear of reading something he really didn't like because it didn't meet his hopes and expectations and way too great the urge to just try out everything like a small child who's been given a new toy to play with.

The most depressing fact however was that the text was one and a half centuries old and still many parts of it felt so far ahead of time. The world really must have turned into quite a shittier place over the last couple of decades. Or Madawc was just a madman who had taken his out-of-the-box existence and transferred it all too happily onto his thinking. Both, perhaps.

Anyway. It was time to get up!

The idea of obfuscating any weird, rotting smell with cheap perfume had been a very good one. Okay, Madawc had mentioned something like this in his book as well, but he hadn't mentioned a lot of the tricks Varandas had figured out himself to make it last longer! That stuff was not exactly super cheap, which probably was the reason why Varandas could merely bathe in the glory of nothingness coming out of the bottle today. Empty... Great. How was he supposed to get over with this ceremony without olfactory assistance ? People would start thinking he was overdoing things and already trying to exhibit post-mortem behavior even before having truly been sent into that dungeon of theirs!

Or wait... Maybe they had some fancy smelly stuff there for him to use ? One should never give up one's hopes prematurely!

So, step two: Getting into daytime clothes. Varandas could outright skip that -- even just trying to carefully maneuver his shirt over that glowing crystal in his chest at least twice a day had proven to be an unbearable and costly nuisance almost from day one. He had transitioned to just replacing the shirt when it was too worn out long ago.

So where was all his other stuff left then ? This rented tavern room was as tiny as it was dirt cheap, but still it seemed possible to lose track of things in here. Okay, he had just dumped all of his gear onto two large piles on the floor, too. Shame on himself! The brief period of searching also gave him the opportunity to ask himself another question though: Was appearing in full gear even allowed at this ceremony or would that be too disrespectful ? And should he ask the innkeeper for an empty barrel before he left ? There was the saying that a rich man's wine barrel bottom was a poor man's shield and maybe he could use that sooner than he would have liked, but on the other hand it would be more of a burden -- and a humiliating one on top of that. Hell why did he even think about anything like 'humiliation' at this point anymore now that he had embarked onto this journey of almost certain no-return ?

Even for something like this one first had to get to the starting point, however. When given the choice, people always preferred to give directions to a living person and not the walking corpse. Today however he could make people laugh by telling them it was for attending a living funeral! An ironic joke it was somehow in his case, really...