Mimi woke blearily. For a few minutes she wasn't sure what she was or what she was doing. It took her a while to get used to the motion again, the constant nauseating bumpiness of riding on a giant bug running through a dark and labyrinthe series of tunnels.
"Sweet dreams?" Dimentio asked, the tips of his hat bobbing up and down in the wind. His bells jangled faintly.
"No," she said, and petulantly didn't answer the rest of his questions.
Finally the stag came to rest at another wrought iron station, this one in much better standing than the previous. No cobwebs swaddling everything, no spiders skittering. It looked almost clean and ready, if you ignored the emptiness and all the crushed and broken parts ruined by time.
"Your destination," he said, inclining his head. "Getting to the mines from here should be simple—go up and past the toll gate, if I remember. I must be off now... I hear the echo of the bell calling me in another cavern. Ring again if you want, and I will return as soon as I can. Farewell."
Mimi waved as he rumbled back into the dark.
They had surprisingly little trouble getting to the toll gate. There were some odd bugs here and there that went after them, with the same single-minded desire for violence that afflicted every other step of their journey and made it impossible for her to enjoy anything, but it wasn't that bad. After Spider Hell, nothing here was that bad.
The gate, too, was open, and didn't require the money that Dimentio told her was the local currency. Good, because they didn't have that much. Some had fallen from the bugs in Spider Hell, scattered from chinks in the carapace or the ruptured guts of bugs who'd eaten the previous owners and couldn't digest the currency. But it'd been hard collecting when most of it fell into spike pits, and though Mimi was a bit of a kleptomaniac (she was willing to admit that to herself), she had standards. She wasn't hoarding what amounted to a bunch of rocks even if Dimentio assured her they were actually valuable. "Geo", really. What a dumb name for a dumb, dull, drab currency. And she couldn't even spend it on anything, because they hadn't seen a single shop and everyone here was dead!
The landscape changed rapidly after they passed the gate, from gray stone and haze to pink stone and haze. The drabness of yesteryear was forgotten. These caverns were beautifully illuminated, dappled in rosy light.
Mimi didn't want to pay this dimension any particular note after it had destroyed her first outfit. But like many people, she had a weakness for shiny things. (The first and foremost among them being her beloved rubees, which she carried with her at all times.) Far grander than any mines she had seen, these mines carried on for untold leagues in the dazzling half-darkness of an enormous cave system. Surrounding them was a resplendent expanse of crystal, stabbing out from every discernible surface, a bounty of gems. Light glinted off reflective surfaces which were granted a beautiful clarity. She wanted to do something to those gems. Eat them, maybe. Take them with her forever. Never part from them.
Yep, she had to admit it: this place looked nice. Snazzy. Not fancy nice, not the place where you'd hold a reception for someone you wanted to impress, but natural beauty nice.
She'd seen a lot in her travels. Various palaces and castles, luxurious mansions nestled in forest glades or distant comets or what have you. She'd worked at a few, or owned them, or worked at them and then murdered the owner to become the new owner, or pretended to be the owner's daughter so she could become the new owner after the previous owner was mysteriously murdered by the maid who was then never seen again. (Fun times!) And out of all the places she'd seen, this one had be near the top of her list.
She was more a fan of man-made regions than natural ones. The halls of the palace, for example, with their vaulting arches and dark glamor. But this place had its own glamor. There were crystals larger than she could ever be, towering over her and cleaving through the halls. Mechanical marvels covered every spare inch of wall, crystal-harvesting machines that kept going long after the death of their creators. Conveyor belts and wheels. Minecarts spiraling up and down rickety tracks without organization, a maddening motley of industrial spinners and crushers reducing crystals into smaller fragments which headed into separate tunnels which split which...
It was almost giving her a headache.
To distract herself Mimi pulled on a second outfit. As befitting a visit to a crystal mine, this one was bedecked in gems, sequins, all things that sparkled. She did a pleasant little twirl and let them spin out, casting radiant reflections on the cavern walls.
"Where do you even keep those?"
"The same place I keep rubees to stab people with and maybe you if you keep asking dumb questions. Let's go!"
A lot of traveling and dodging later (who knew pickaxes could be so painful when they were being aimed at your head by zombie mine workers?), they floated over a satisfyingly large cave full of shiny crystals. Glittering, shimmering, scintillating, every possible word you could use to describe shiny crystals, they all applied. These crystals were ridiculously shiny. And probably ridiculously valuable. All they had to do was get them out. Mimi sighed in relief, of the this will soon be over and I can finally go home flavor.
"I did say you would approve of the end result." Dimentio nodded satisfyingly towards her future source of income.
"No, it still totally wasn't worth the trouble. But now that we're here, how much stuff do we take?"
"You're in luck, Mimi. I've created an entire dimension just for that purpose! Yes, really. Impressive, isn't it?"
"Depends on how well it works."
He gestured. The individual atoms of the world seemed to shiver, and then they revolved. A queasy sensation as the world thinned into a line, then regained its full color and dimension. Mimi felt like she'd been vaporized and painstakingly rearranged.
They were in a room with no doors or windows. The walls were an impressive shade of shimmering, sparkling pink. She touched one. Smooth and cold, like glass. Or crystal!
"Gee, you even decorated the place?"
"The backdrop must suit the setting, after all! What do you think of it?"
Squares and lines shimmered in and out of existence, some dimensional stability thing, if she remembered her physics right. Although it had been a while. Either way, she had to admit, grudgingly, it didn't look horrible. Actually, it looked pretty good. Actually...
"Fine, actually, this would be the perfect place to store a bunch of crystals. We put them in here and dump them out later, right? So now we gotta break down one of the big ones so you can fit the pieces in. Until we have as much as we can stuff in there."
"Precisely." He snapped his fingers, and the world dropped out around them again. Lines and polygons arranged themselves into the pink-hued caverns she'd come to know and love over the past few however-long-they'd-been-there.
"So, we should probably get started soon, huh..." Mimi stared at the crystal in front of them. It dwarfed them both, imposing in size, a massive monolith of pink. They would have to chip away at it. Slowly. Tediously. Painfully.
"I can tell you're looking forward to this," Dimentio said.
Mimi groaned. This is for a good cause, she told herself. And I can use the leftover money for whatever I want.
Much painstaking work ensued.
The repetitive act of hacking at these giant pink things was almost relaxing, if it wasn't for the mine workers who kept trying to kill them. And occasional crystalline bugs who'd been practically zombified by a giant mass of crystals growing from their bottoms, which they kept on trying to fire at her. Crystals, Mimi realized, were a lot less pleasant when someone was using them as weapons against you. Now she knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of her own rubees, and she didn't like it.
The monotony of mining was only broken up by attacks from those rabid bugs, and Dimentio's monologuing. Okay, it wasn't horrible monologuing. Sometimes he went on long tangents about about what role the mines could have played in the history and formation of the kingdom, and continued speculation on what exactly made everything here want to kill them, topics she preferred not to think about. It gave her such a headache. He was more interesting when he went on about the treasures he'd seen in various worlds, and all the people he'd stolen from. She liked stealing. Stealing was fun. Thinking about going into the the palace of this stupid kingdom, (wherever it was) and hauling off all the king's treasure was therapeutic. It was the king's fault that she was here, after all, losing track of time. Banging on these dumb crystals for days, weeks, continuously picking them apart with a pickaxe. Actually multiple pickaxes. When one broke, she'd steal another from the corpse of a nearby mine worker, and go back to work. Efficiency!
Then, before she knew it, she was done.
She didn't know how she knew. She just knew, somehow, that the pile of crystal shards in front of her was right. The pile satisfied her. So tempting, so shiny. She wanted to absorb them. She wanted to jump into a pile of them. Hug them. Stare at them. Put them on rings, make a new brand of designer jewelry focused on them, wear necklaces, bracelets, crowns...
"Are you quite done staring into space yet?"
Mimi blinked. "Gee, what? Yeah? Sure, I'm done." But she wasn't done. Not yet. She was exhausted. She had to sleep, even if she'd already extended her sleep quota for this visit and she wasn't sure how much she could take. But if she got up tomorrow, she could get more crystals. Spend longer here, get more crystals. Made sense. "I think I should look for more crystals."
"More? We have more than enough already—" She was floating away. Light burst in her vision.
"Mimi? What are you doing—"
She didn't hear him.
