Karyn's head moved around as she tried to pierce the darkness with her vision. "Maybe we could use this place as a secret base or something," she said.
"A secret base?" Jon asked as he used the glow of the DTH screen to illuminate their faces. "Like a super-villain or something?" He couldn't help but giggle.
"It was just an idea, you clown." She pointed into the darkness. "We have this huge space with nothing in it. Seems like a big waste."
Jon's jaw moved from side-to-side as he more carefully considered what she had suggested. "There maybe some merit in the idea. As it is a closed system, if we hopped here we'd never have to do any travelling to reach it. Unlike with other universes we'd always arrive in the same location."
"See!" Karyn told him, "it wasn't stupid." She pulled off her trainers. "We certainly seem to have been doing a lot of walking." She massaged her tired feet through the socks as she gave a gentle yawn.
Being contagious, Jon found himself yawning too. "It's not practical though. Us just being here will be increasing the Carbon Dioxide content of the air. Every time we breathe we create more of it. It will become toxic at some point."
"Really?" Karyn said as the fear made her slightly more alert. "How long till that happens?"
"A place this size..." Jon paused as he pondered it. "Probably years."
Karyn lightly slapped him across the shoulder. "I started panicking there."
"If we use heaters or generate light with lanterns it will happen a lot quicker as we burn the fuel. We can use chemicals to scrub it out of the air but we'd have to bring those with us though. Eventually we'd start running out of oxygen."
"I guess it isn't that practical after all."
"Not for the long term but as a bolt hole it works just fine," Jon said as he yawned more loudly.
Karyn put her hand over her mouth and yawned loudly again herself. "This darkness just makes me want to sleep."
"I'm not surprised," Jon said as he tried to examine his watch. "With all the dimension hopping we've been losing track of time. It's worse than jetlag."
"Yeah, when was the last time we actually had a decent sleep?" She asked as she went from a sitting posture into a lying position on her side. She could feel the cold stone floor wasn't comfortable but she didn't really care.
Jon thought back as he lay down facing her. "I think inside the cage in evil Sarah's basement."
"We didn't get much sleep there. It seems like weeks ago," Karyn said as she closed her eyes.
"Closer to thirty six hours in our time. I guess we've crammed a lot in."
Karyn didn't respond to the statement.
Jon lifted his head to look at her more closely. She was already fast asleep. Jon turned off the screen of DTH plunging him into total darkness. He went to sleep on the hard floor himself.
