She sleeps

"A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist."

- Stewart Also

Three Hours Later.

Morginn managed to fight falling asleep for roughly 30 seconds before the drowsiness wrapped it's comforting arms around her, lulling her down into its warm fuzzy embrace and pulling her under to float in that wonderful place between consciousness and true, deep dreams.

The liquid mattress of the bed moulded itself to the contours of her body as she stirred, and she wiggled against it, allowing herself to sink deeper into it. You've never experienced real comfort until you've spent a night asleep in a bio bed. There's no other feeling quite like it. Flexible solar panels over a liquid battery, they drew and stored the excess energy from your body as you slept.

Every bed in every dorms down here had them installed, and between the inhabitants they managed to provide enough power to keep this place running indefinitely.

Mist'holme functioned as a self contained, semi-symbiotic ecosystem nowadays, totally off the grid. Not that there was a grid anymore. The inhabitants fuelled the batteries, and in return, they powered the water systems, recycled the oxygen for them, powered their machines, and kept the heating running.

Lumokinesis.

All your energy needs answered.

It took them years of trying to finally figure out the answer to the problem. Food had been gradually running out at a steady pace, with almost nowhere left to grow crops on the surface, and any that did sprout dying to the permanent cold. The survivors had long since burned their way through the planets reserves of fossil fuels trying to stay warm enough to survive, and every scrap of nuclear material left that they could lay their hands on had been turned into weapons trying to launch a counter offensive. Mankind was heading back to the Stone Age, and trying to fight a war with flint axes and wooden clubs was a loosing battle. Especially when you're wielding the smaller club.

So, as with many thing in their past, they turned to nature to solve their problem. To photosynthesise, in fact.

Groups of scientists had spent decades trying to unlock the key, to find a way to trigger a mutation in the melanin gene in human skin cells. The idea they clung to had been to find a way to let people directly absorb solar energy to sustain their bodies, just like the leaf of a plant. A plentiful, and most importantly, easily available source of nourishment for humankind. Eventually they cracked it, and humanity became more than it had ever been.

Hunger soon became a distant memory, something you told your children about as a bedtime story, a relic of their shared past. Whilst they could still eat food for nourishment, and did so when they could, it was done for pleasure, not out of necessity. The survivors begin to work together in relative harmony once the survival of their species no longer depended on how many crops farmers could grow, or how many herds shepherds could raise to eventually slaughter for meat. Vegetarians rejoice.

Water was still an essential resource, but in plentiful, if mostly solid, abundance most of the time.

They turned to other things for pleasure too, when food no longer held the same appeal as it once had. Sex became more than a release, it became a necessity, and was encouraged whenever and wherever possible. Social taboos fell away as the past was forgotten. Brothers mated with sisters, fathers mated with daughters, and daughters with whoever they wanted.

But when you tamper with evolution on that scale, it has a way of hitting you back in ways you least expect. By the time the gene had successfully been passed onto their offspring, the survivors started to learn the cost of interfering with Mother Nature. The children could not only absorb the solar energy, but store and discharge it too, sometimes with painful, even fatal results.

The power they absorbed could be used to generate and release focused solar energy from within their bodies. Over time, most of the kinks were ironed out, but occasionally things still went wrong. Once it was fairly safe to use, they began to undertake research into using it as a new power source, and eventually, as with most things mankind has ever invented, into a weapon. Give humanity a gift, and they're always looking for the sharp pointy end of it.

Eventually, every piece of technology that was left to them to use ended up being adapted to run on this new solar energy. Being able to take their fuel, and their food everywhere with them, not to mention never have to carry any extra weight, became a major advantage.

It could be used to fight back, finally, and this new gift packed a punch.

But for all of the innovation, all of their advances, the single best invention humanity had ever made as a species had to have been the pillow in Morginn's book. Plumping the one under her head with a fist as she rolled over, she was determined to enjoy every second she was being given to get reacquainted with hers. Slumber beckoned her back into it's waiting arms, and there was no power on this Earth that was going to be able to make her leave the pillow she was clinging to for the foreseeable future.

In the end, it was a power six miles under the earth that was responsible for ending the peaceful sleep she was trying to enjoy.