Chapter 144: 145: Cold storage

Fresh fiddles with the thin railing beneath the sliding door that she is making, trying to get it to work just like the sliding doors that adorn most of the buildings here in this city. Though, her design for the sliding door is a little different. The doors here that she has seen so far were a wooden frame with a wooden grid inside, the gaps of the grid are usually filled with square sheets of dense fabric. She however, is just making a single, rectangular door-frame and fills the whole thing with one, large, single sheet of glass.

It isn’t a pane of Jubilee’s glass though. Fresh had gone into town and paid a lot of money to not only get these sheets of cut, polished glass, but to have them delivered straight away to the shop. For this idea to work, she needed glass that was transparent. The matte glass simply wouldn’t do in this case. She had explained as much to Jubilee, but that didn’t stop them from grumbling at her and the delivery-men, who, to her relief, weren’t spooky, living mannequins.

- As far as she could tell.

The shelved, open-faced cabinet, lined on the inside with crystal-drakonium padding for insulation, which she had already made, lays on its back on the floor. Fresh grabs the edge of the framed glass window and carefully lifts it upright, surprised that she is able to do so. “Strong,” mutters Fresh, doing her best impression of Shamrock, as she slides the glass onto the open surface and then nudges it into place. With a little more fumbling around, it clicks down into the groove on the bottom of the cabinet. Crawling around to the top of it, she grabs a second detached railing, fixed onto a thin wooden board and holds it against the top of the construction, popping it into the top of the window.

Bits of the left and right ends of the little board fall off as the glow dissipates, leaving a jigsaw pattern and a matching pair of holes on top of the cabinet. Dabbing some glue into the holes, she presses the top railing into place, making sure that it sits snugly and firm.

Fresh smiles, looking at the shelved cabinet with the large, sliding, glass door with a smug satisfaction painted on her expression. Though, there is one problem left. But it’s a quick fix.

Running into the pantry, she grabs a small iron chain from a bucket full of them and checks the length of the chain to find the right spot on the cabinet, before attaching it to the inside, against the ‘ceiling’ which is a dense, wooden grid with a hollow compartment above it. The other end, she attaches to the top of the inside of the door-frame.

Now, with the chain, the door can only slide so far and can’t jump out of the railing.

There is only one other thing left to do. The cooling and heating mechanisms. Though, this is going to be the cold one. Heating is easier, she can just place it with its back against the chimney pipe and with some metal rods and a little trickery, so that it didn’t start a fire, everything would work out fine.

Cooling, though? Sure, it’s cold outside. She could just make an air-shaft from the outside to the back of the cabinet, but she doesn’t like that idea. What if a rat crawls in? Fresh shudders.

Bending down, she sifts through the heap of crystals, trying to find one that feels right. Picking one up, she asks it - “Do you like water, Mr. Crystal?” The crystal doesn’t respond and she sets it back down. “I guess not.” Fresh frowns, picking up another one. Now, she knows that the crystals can’t talk or are even capable of understanding her. But she still looks for one that ‘feels’ right, that feels like it would be compatible with water. Does that make any logical sense? Not really, but she sticks to her principles.

“What about you?” she asks again, picking up the fifth crystal. “Do you like water?”

The crystal doesn’t respond, as expected. But as Fresh tilts her head, staring at the prismatic sliver held in her hand, she sees the light of the evening sun shining in through the balcony door pushing its way through the slender body in her grasp, setting it alight with a strong, refractive glow. She can only interpret this as a good omen. Fresh beams, nodding at the crystal. “I look forward to working with you!” she says, smiling at the crystal, as she sets it to the side and cleans the others up.

“Stop talking to the crystals, dumb-ass!” yells Jubilee up from downstairs, already knowing what her plan is. Fresh sticks her tongue out at the ground, aiming it towards the spot she thinks Jubilee is standing at.

Getting up, Fresh then closes the balcony door, shutting out the light of the sun. Grabbing a lidded pot filled with moonwater, she takes the chosen crystal and nods to it, before pursing her lips and blowing against it once, softly, to impart her intentions onto it.

“If you don’t like it anymore, let me know and I’ll get you out, okay?” says Fresh, setting the crystal into the pot of moonwater. She watches, as it glows with a vibrant, prismatic shine, which seems to intensify as it sinks into the water. So far so good.

Heading into the pantry, Fresh takes a deep breath and does something she doesn’t want to do. Grab a pair of the black, insectoid eyes from the snowmen monsters in the dungeon. The girl smiles a second smug, victorious smile however, as she slips on a crystal-drakonium glove that she had extra placed in here for just this kind of occasion. Then, with her gloved hand, she touches the gross things. They’re oddly hard, for eyes. Almost like they have a crunchy shell around them. She tries not to think about it or to squeeze them too much as she heads back to the glowing pot of water. One thing that is useful though and is exactly why she needs them, is that they seem to have just the slightest chill to their exterior. A magical cooling effect.

Fresh grinds them up into a fine dust, sprinkling it into the water.

At first, nothing happens, the black eyeball dust simply floating on top of the water. She had expected this though. Place her hands against the exterior of the pot, she closes her eyes and focuses on putting her energy into it. Despite her closed eyes, she can see the purple tinge shine through her eye-lids, stemming from the magic in her hands.

Then, the water begins to move. The crystal pulsates a little, fading in and out like a chest moving with constant, deep breaths. The water looks like it’s bubbling at first. Like a pot of boiling water on the stove. But there is a difference. The bubbles seem to form on the surface and push their way down to the bottom of the pot, as if it were boiling in reverse. Slowly, as the crystal finds its rhythm, this process speeds up. The black-dust begins to swirl with the water, being pulled down into the center around the crystal, before then being pushed to the sides of the pot by the stream and then rising back up along the edges, creating a constant cycle.

Fresh smiles, placing the lid onto the pot again and she waits a minute, leaving her hand on the exterior of its metal body as she feels the process continue, just beneath her fingers with a slight vibration. The metal of the pot slowly becomes colder and colder with every minute. This was a great idea! The snowman eyes would last about two or three days for each pair to keep the pot running. As for the crystal, well, it will probably last longer than she will, as long as it stays on the mountain.

A pair of heavy footsteps comes upstairs. Fresh looks over to Shamrock. “Hi, Shamrock! What’s up?” asks the girl.

“Closing,” replies Shamrock.

“Great!” says Fresh excitedly, smiling at him with her warmest smile. “I need your help again, please. When the customers are gone,” says Fresh, scratching her cheek. “If you have the time,” she says, adding on to the end. Shamrock nods to her, looking at the heavy cabinet that lays on the floor, as if he already knows exactly what is needed of him. The same thing as always. Fresh laughs, seeing his chest heave. “Sorry that I always ask you to do hard, boring things like this, Shamrock,” apologizes Fresh. She thinks for a second. “I’ll cook dinner tonight to make up for it, okay?”

“Yes,” replies Shamrock with an unusually quick nod.

After the customers are all gone a little later, Shamrock carries the large cabinet downstairs and Fresh honestly isn’t quite sure how he did it. She was sure that she and Basil would at least have to help keep the unwieldy thing steady on the stairs, but apparently not.

Fresh removes some of the shelves on the back wall with Basil’s help, next to the candies and then she has Shamrock place the new cabinet there in the gap, pressing it against the wall.

“So? Cold drinks?” asks Jubilee, sounding somewhat unsure.

“Mm!” nods Fresh, making the final adjustments.

“Do people even want cold drinks up on the mountain? Can’t they just leave their drinks outside?” asks Basil.

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“You guys don’t get it!” says Fresh with a laugh, waving them off. “After a long day of adventuring, a nice, cool drink is very refreshing!” she explains. “It’ll be just what everyone wants!”

“How would you know that, you slacker?” asks Jubilee, placing their hands on their hips.

Fresh turns her head away with a ‘hmpf’, pulling open the small compartment at the top of the cabinet, above the sliding door. Lifting the pot, she carefully sets it onto the dense wooden gitter and then slides the compartment back shut.

“That’s it?” asks Basil.

“That’s it!” replies Fresh excitedly, pulling on the sliding glass door to open it as a demonstration. “Ta-da!”

“Huh…” says Basil, sticking a hand inside. “Yeah, it really is a little cooler, at least up here beneath the pot,” admits the priestess.

“Don’t worry! By tomorrow, the whole cabinet will be really cold!” exclaims Fresh. “Especially if we put some bottles into it now!” she says, as she starts to do exactly that, removing some of the sweet-tea from the nearby shelf. “See? The cold air sinks from the top and it’ll make everything else cold inside too!” Fresh stops, holding onto the bottle in her hands as she looks back at her friends.

“Interesting…” says Jubilee, thinking. “I guess we can’t sell these, though, right?”

“What? The cabinet?” she asks. Jubilee nods. “No, they need moonwater and stuff to keep running. So we can’t really sell them…” explains Fresh.

“Too bad. Man, these would have been great during summer.”

“Yeah,” sighs Fresh. She doesn’t want to admit that while, sure, it would have been very refreshing, that she somehow holds the past summer heatwave as a very fond, nostalgic memory. Despite it only being a few weeks ago. It feels like it is already a year’s old memory. It feels like a distant, foggy, half-forgotten dream.

“Oh well,” sighs Jubilee. “Couple more months and it’ll be autumn.”

“Mm!” nods Fresh with a smile, as she stocks the cooling shelf with different bottles. She wonders if autumn is nice here too?

Razmatazz

Dungeon 7/11

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