Either way, if you don’t find her soon she might get into danger.

You sigh. Well, you can’t just abandon her; it’s your fault she’s down here and, hating you or not, you have to make sure she stays safe.

“Okay, I need to go and find Ratty again and maybe talk her down. Jitter, would you be willing to come with me? I’d feel safer with someone to watch my back, but… well, I don’t want to order you, or make you feel like you have to. You don’t feel, like… compelled to do what I say, right?”

Jitter rolls his eyes. “N-no, I don’t. But I’m coming w-with you, because you’re my f-friend and so is Ratty. Even if I’m still m-mad about… this, I guess.”

Well, that was a relief; he still thought of you as a friend. Which was… funny, when you thought about it, because before all of this happened you didn’t know if any of you could reasonably be called friends. Associates, co-conspirators, roommates... lots of things, but none of it really had the genuine affection of a friendship. And yet over the past few days, it seemed like the three of you really did finally have a bond—now you knew it wasn't just you that had been thinking it. Crazy what chance and a little time could make happen. Now, if only you can hold onto that...

“Right, then. Let’s get going."

You ready your rondel dagger while Jitter retrieves his rusted knife, and the two of you head deeper into the catacombs, in the same direction Ratty had stormed off. It wasn’t too hard to track her generally; many of the nearby rooms and corridors branching off from the main one you were on had either collapsed or were quite short, meaning it took very little effort to check and see if she had entered them, and the two of you gods-blessedly could see fairly well in the dark thanks to your feline heritage. You weren’t expecting to find her particularly close to the lair, either; she would have gone farther in case you had tried to keep following her.

As you are walking along, you both engage in some minor chatter about the lair and what you might be able to do with it, but the conversation soon stifles and dies out—not because you’re out of things to say, but because the deeper you go into the catacombs, the more damn eerie it’s getting. You keep seeing shadows of things move in the corner of your eye, and your ears frequently are picking up faint scurrying noises echoing through distant halls, and yet the two of you never encounter anything beyond broken stone and debris. It's fortunate for you that there was so much decay and collapse; if the enormous catacomb complex had been in in its height, there would have been dozens of different paths Ratty might have taken.

Eventually, the hallway you’ve been following comes to a larger room; there’s a bit of light shining from an enormous, ancient grate set high above you, illuminating the entrance to a deep cistern in the middle of the floor. There was clearly once a waist-high wall surrounding the cistern, but much of it has decayed and collapsed into the pit. Two other hallways branch off from the one you came from, neither showing any obvious signs of Ratty’s passage. One drops out of your sight shortly; as far as you can tell it’s a staircase heading down into a deeper level of the catacombs. The other hall continues into the darkness and out of your sight; you can see a large rat skeleton lying inside the entranceway, just out of the light’s reach. Well, the idea that you could just keep proceeding in a straight line and run into Ratty eventually had been too good to be true.

“W-which way s-should we g-g-go?” Jitter asks, the fear in his voice aggravating his stutter.