Chapter 202: 203: Basilisk

“Hey! Hey! What’s this?” asks the fairy from the back of the cart. They had been flying around it the entire time. Fresh turns her head and then yelps, flailing with her hands as she jumps back at the sight of the dead snake. A group of fairies has carried it inside the cart.

Jubilee, who has their feet kicked up on a box and their hands behind their head, turns their gaze and lazily points at them with a single hand. “That’s a snake. They eat fairies.”

“We killed it!” says the group of fairies excitedly.

“Uh… good job?” replies Jubilee.

One of the fairies pokes the dead snake. “Was it a monster?”

Jubilee shrugs. “Maybe? It depends who you ask. I’m gonna say no, though. A snake is a snake.”

“But it eats fairies, you said, so it’s a monster?” argues one of the fairies.

Basil turns her head around. “Maybe the classification of a ‘monster’ is different for people and fairies,” she suggests. “For us, it’s just a critter. But for a fairy, it might as well be a basilisk.”

“Huh?” asks Tarja, her boot on the dead snake’s head. “Aren’t you a basilisk?” she asks the priestess.

Basil blinks, trying to understand the question for a moment. “No!” she says, turning her gaze back to the road. “I’m Basil.”

“Isn’t that just short for Basilisk?”

Fresh can see Jubilee wanting to laugh, but quickly stopping themselves. Appearances are important after all. She stares at them, unblinking, wanting them to know that she saw. Jubilee’s eyes meet hers and they know that she knows.

“It’s not. It’s a very nice herb, actually,” explains Basil, a little offended.

Fresh wonders out loud. “Did it give you guys experience points?”

“Yeah!” says Tarja. “Not a lot, but some.”

“Huh, really?” asks Jubilee, apparently interested now. “That’s weird. Last time I killed a snake, I didn’t get shit.” They think for a moment, staring up to the top of the cart. “Usually animals don’t give experience points.”

Fresh isn’t sure how she feels about this snake killing. She supposes that it’s one of those moral gray-zones of adventuring. Perhaps it is no worse or no better than killing a slime or a kobold. “Maybe for them, they really are considered monsters for the fairies by uh…” Fresh thinks for a moment. “- the universe.”

“Yes,” says Shamrock, nodding his head once. “The scales are weighed differently for all,” he says, looking at the little snake.

Fresh looks at him. “Really? So it’s like that?”

“It is.”

“Huh. Neat!”

Shamrock exhales. “Neat.”

“This was my first kill!” says Tarja.

“Congratulations, you’re officially an adventurer now,” yawns Jubilee, folding their hands over their stomach and sliding back a little to get ready to take a nap.

“Really?!”

“Yeah,” says Jubilee, waving them off. “Don’t sign up for the guild though, unless you want to be in debt. It’s a total scam.”

Fresh laughs to herself.

They ride on like that for a few more hours. Jubilee takes a nap, Basil drives, Fresh and Shamrock both just sit there, neither sure of what to do. They’re both bored of pat-a-cake at this point.

She doesn’t think that she’s ever had to sit still for this long and honestly, it’s getting to her a little. Her fingers are constantly tapping against her legs, which are constantly bobbing up and down on her twitching feet. The fairies meanwhile, fly around in a group and murder their way through the forest.

Fresh doesn’t like this at all. She’s fine with snakes and big spiders, especially since they were getting real experience points from them. But she cries when they bring in an owl which they had scorched with a fireball. Jubilee had classified this as a ‘boss-fight’ and sleepily approved of the carnage.

“Can we eat it?” asks Tarja.

“You can,” replies Jubilee, before returning to their nap. “Just cook it first.”

“It already is!”

Jubilee gives them a listless thumbs-up and goes back to napping without another word. Fresh, meanwhile, hides her face in the back of Basil’s robe and mourns the loss of Mr. Owl. “Bakaaaaaw~”

“It’s an owl,” corrects Basil. “It goes ‘who~” says the priestess, lifting a finger.

“Whooooo~” howls Fresh, clenching the fabric of her robe tighter.

An hour after that, they pass a tavern at the side of the road. But they have no reason or desire to stop. It seems pretty busy and there are a lot of carts and various anqas parked outside. Fresh lowers her head, hiding behind Shamrock, so that the birds don’t see her and chase after them.

Then, not long after that, the rain starts.

It’s only a little at first, but all of the fairies retreat back inside of their houses. Fresh does a head-count, checking that everyone is there. They are. After an hour, it grows more intense. “Basil? Are we okay?” asks Fresh, looking at their anqa, Thyme. It ruffles its feathers, shaking its body out.

Basil nods. “They don’t like rain,” she explains. “But they secrete oil over their feathers. It makes the water run off.” Fresh nods, understanding. “As long as the storm doesn’t get worse, we should be good to go,” says the priestess, turning back and smiling. Fresh feels relieved.

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The storm gets worse. Fresh is no longer relieved.

They’re too far away from the tavern to turn back now. Basil has taken the cart off to the side of the road and they find themselves nested in a grove, next to a rocky outcrop that shields them from the howling wind, which had threatened to overturn the cart.

“Stay inside everyone,” guides Fresh, shushing the last fairy into their house. She’s thankful that they had paid a little more for the waterproof tarp to cover the cart, otherwise they’d all be drenched right now. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t getting cold. With the strong wind and the pouring rain comes a strong drop in temperature and, even in her ‘mountain robe’, Fresh notices the chill. She has sat herself in the middle of the cart and dug out her blue-blanket and did her best to wrap it around everyone at once. Basil cooperated, sitting down in the space between the benches with her. Jubilee did not, so she had to break their personal boundaries again and essentially kidnap them. Shamrock was impossible to cover and he also declined needing to be.

“That’s what I said!” barks Jubilee, trying to get out of the arm that is wrapped tightly around them. Fresh holds them against her body with her left hand. Her right hand is wrapped around Basil, who doesn’t fight and all of them are now beneath the blanket. It’s very warm.

“It’s different,” says Fresh.

Jubilee sighs. “How is it different, goo-brain?”

“You’re like a fairy, Ju~ bi~ lee~” she says in a sing-song tone.

They glare at her. “You have three seconds to take that back, before I get violent.”

Fresh blinks. “But Jubileeee~” she protests. “You’re small, so you lose body-heat faster. That’s what Basil said!” Basil quickly looks away as Jubilee’s icy glare turns to her.

The fairies have simply retreated into their houses, closing the doors and windows and gathering together in the ‘fluff rooms’ that Fresh had made inside of them. She’s very satisfied with herself now, for having gone out of her way to insulate the magical-floating-fairy-houses. “I wish we had a fairy-house too,” sighs Fresh, grabbing Jubilee and pulling them tightly back against herself, before they can get away in their latest attempt. “Just bigger, like… us-sized, you know?”

“You mean… a house?” asks Jubilee, apparently stopping their fight now. “We had two of those already.”

Fresh thinks for a second. In a sense, Jubilee has a point there. But those houses were neither classifiable as ‘floating’ or as ‘fairy’ish’. ‘Magical’ as a description is still plausible though, in some senses. “What kind of house do you guys wanna get when we get there?” she asks, staring out the back of the cart at Shamrock, who sits outside in the rain together with the anqa. He didn’t want it to be alone.

“We could have got a fucking palace in the east if we just sold the house,” says Jubilee.

“I don’t want a palace, I want a house,” argues Fresh. “How am I supposed to find you guys in a palace?”

“Exactly.”

“Is land cheaper there?” asks Basil.

“Well yeah,” says Jubilee. They shrug and Fresh can feel their shoulders rubbing against herself. “The mountain being, you know, a mountain, space was at a premium. It’s expensive.”

“And the desert?” asks Fresh.

“It’s a desert. Don’t know what to tell you. Land is cheaper,” replies Jubilee.

“There’s the ocean there, right?” asks Fresh, her eyes shining hopefully at this prospect.

Jubilee nods. “Yeah, but that land is expensive again.”

Fresh sighs. “I want a house by the ocean! We could go swimming and we could fish and we could sit in the sun together and we could make sandcastles and -” this list extends on for a while, ending only after she gets to the topic of crabs. But, both of her friends, having seen this blatant attack coming minutes ago, begin pinching her first, until she surrenders.

They stay there the rest of the day.

Razmatazz

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