The first day, Arlott slept for nineteen hours straight.
He woke only once, groggy and disoriented, to shove a piece of bread through the cupboard door and mutter something about Emily needing to "stay alive, not comfortable" before collapsing back onto his bed like a puppet with its strings cut.
The second day, he slept for twenty-two hours.
By the third day, he'd perfected the routine: wake for barely twenty minutes, feed himself and Emily, allow her out just long enough to relieve herself and stretch her stiff limbs under his watchful eye, then bind her again and collapse back into unconsciousness.
'This is the life,' Arlott thought hazily during one of his brief waking moments, chewing on a piece of dried meat while sprawled across his bed like a starfish.
The system hummed quietly in the corner of his vision, ticking upward with every passing second of glorious, uninterrupted laziness.
