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The mines began to wear on you as you traversed them. Hardly a minute went by when neither you nor Mary coughed out some kind of dirt or dust. Part of you wished that Cora was here and had some kind of magical solution to watery eyes and dust in your throat, but you waved away that kind of wistful thinking with ponderings on why your sheepy friend wasn't being burned by the dirt here like she was at the train incident.
You passed by person after person, stopping to talk to nearly everyone you'd met, asking for clues as to the girl or her brother's whereabouts and directions around the mineshaft. Sometimes you asked the same person the same questions within a ten-minute span and found yourself apologizing on instinct.
To be fair to you, it was pretty hard to tell one miner from another, save for in height. Many of them were noticeably short-- whether that was just because you were taller than average, you didn't know, but you almost mistook some of them for dwarves or children in the deep dark.
Eventually it got too dark to think. You had to focus too much on avoiding obstacles or walls to think of much else, and asking for directions became futile.
By the time you'd reached the deepest parts of the mine, you were bent over like a dinner napkin at a fancy party trying to fit through the dirty holes that the mineshaft had deteriorated into. Eventually, however, someone who fit the prior description caught your attention.
A young man, probably no older than seventeen, sat at the end of one of the tunnels. He was rather still. Even when you got near him, he didn't move much. It took Mary calling from the entrance to the tunnel for him to do anything-- and even then, all he did was flinch.
You turned his face around to meet yours and were met with the sight of a kid whose face was almost too delicate to belong to someone mining in a place this deep. Tears stained his cheeks-- what parts of his face weren't visibly wet were instead covered by so much soot and dust that you wondered how he breathed at all down here.
The kid hiccupped and turned away from you, sobbing quietly, only speaking up a minute or so after you'd remained by his side. "W-what're you here for?"
>Be blunt. You're here for information from him, and nothing more.
>Try to cheer him up. If this really is the child's brother, you might as well try and uplift his spirits. You're going to find his sister, after all!
>Say you'll tell him once he gets out of this mineshaft. It clearly isn't doing him well to be down here.
>Write-in.
