Nightshade limps through the dungeon, trying her best to keep her weight off of her single grey hoof, cursing to herself all the while. This trip had been a successful one for the most part, she'd found exactly what she'd been looking for; valuable trinkets she could sell back on the surface, for coin to help the family business. The grullo Courser had even made it most of the way back to the Furnace's entrance without incident, a win she'd normally be more than willing to take; the sweltering heat alone has been more than enough to cut her expeditions short before. But nothing glamorous had injured her this time. She'd simply failed to notice a small ledge before tripping over it.

It's not exactly a bad injury, all things considered; even such a mundane accident could easily have gone far worse if Nightshade had been marginally less lucky. But the sprain is still going to force her to spend time resting to let it heal if she doesn’t want the injury to get worse, or to hurt herself in worse ways by not being in peak condition, but it’s time she doesn't even know if she has, and it's incidents like this one that make the dark maned mare really wish she had more consistent adventuring partners. Sure, an extra set of eyes may not have saved her from the ledge in the first place, but an extra set of hooves might have given her a chance to take some extra weight off her bad leg.

Her ears flick bitterly at the thought. Maybe adventuring with company would be safer, and it’d almost certainly be a far more pleasant experience, but who'd even want to team up with Nightshade? She's so inexperienced, so inconsistent, that she can't imagine any hypothetical teammates would have anything to gain from such a partnership themselves. Unless, of course, they were only in it to screw her over at the first opportunity, and run off with all the spoils of a dive, claiming it all for themselves. It feels mean to assume that even just a hypothetical stranger would do such a thing, but it’s an ever constant source of anxiety for her, even if she usually manages to keep it in the back of her mind. She can barely afford to have a bad dive by herself, let alone be actively stolen from, and her family certainly can’t afford for her to fail…

The tall Courser grits her teeth, pushes through the searing pain in her foot, and keeps on moving towards the exit; Nightshade’s gotten good at memorising the paths she takes through the dungeons, she knows she can’t be too far away now. As she trudges along, the grullo horse wonders if a pet could possibly be a good middle ground. It probably wouldn’t be able to help her with an injury at all, but an animal companion would at least be an extra set of eyes; not to mention it'd keep her company. The dungeons get so lonely at times… If only a pet didn't cost more than she could spare.