Chapter 220: 221: Shiny things

Fresh fiddles around with the pile of materials laying before herself, sparing a glance at the broom and fabric in the back corner of the room. The apple, for some reason, she had thrown into her inventory window. She supposes that it wouldn’t be wise to eat it anymore. A shame, it was a really nice apple.

“Items. Items,” she mutters to herself, rolling around the few bits and bobs. Her eyes wander between the many things. They need something simple that could be quickly produced en masse, but also offers strong, easily accessible benefits. Something like the potions from the north, or the coughee and snacks from the west. Bread and butter.

But what could be interesting in a town like this, one that is already full of exotic goods from all corners of the world?

The vaguely indistinct sunlight, shining in through the opaque windows of their room in the guild, strikes against some matte glass-beads. “Ah!” Fresh claps her hands together, getting her idea.

Grabbing a ball of some thick, black cord, she begins pulling some of it free and starts braiding it. She doesn’t actually remember having ever learned how to braid, but here she is, braiding. It’s funny how classes work here in this world. She decides to do it by hand, if only to keep herself busy for a while.

A few minutes later however, she’s already finished. It’s a small thing, a black, braided cord, only a finger and a half in length, give or take. Setting that to the side, she grabs a still damp iron-bar from the floor. For this she’ll have to use a crafting recipe though. Being prepared this time, she sets the ingot into an empty, large bowl that her breakfast bread had come in. Iron-bars sure are light these days, she remembers how she used to have to struggle to even just nudge one.

“Strong,” mutters Fresh under her breath, closing her eyes and holding her hands over the iron-bar.

The glow dissipates a moment later as a nigh-hundred small, little things fall down into the bowl and rattle around inside of it. Opening her eyes, she looks at the small clasps, nodding in satisfaction. Now she just needs some glue to stick the clasps to the thin bits of the cord-bracelet. This is easy enough and she does this by hand as well.

Bead slots

Fresh nods. Step one is complete. She looks at it. Yup. It’s a bracelet all right. Nothing really fancy about it. It’s well made, but it doesn’t really do much, except look fashionably trendy. She thinks so at least.

Now for the interesting part. Fresh grabs a bottle of harvest-moonwater from her inventory, popping it open and shaking off her wet arm. Grabbing the glass beads from the heap on the floor and now…

Hmm… no. No, it isn’t right yet. Fresh looks around, trying to figure out what the problem is now. “Ah!” she realizes, writing a note to her friends that she’s running into town. Everyone else is out there now too, doing their ‘chores’. Grabbing her bag and some money, she leaves and goes out into the city.

Half an hour later, she comes back into their room. Her note is exactly where she left it. It looks like the others are still gone. Taking it down, she sits back down on the floor and takes the many bottles of newly bought dye out of her bag, together with the stack of bowls she had bought. Nodding to herself, she portions the beads out into all of the bowls and then fills them with fabric-dye. Now, obviously, this would never be a feasible way to color glass. But that’s what magic is for, right?

The dye dries up in the bowls laid out before herself, leaving only several stacks of differently colored beads. Then she grabs her harvest-moonwater anew from her inventory and pours a large sip into each bowl of beads.

The bowls glow with a strong, purple aura which then dissipates a moment later, fading away like a cloud of mushroom-spores. Beaming with pride, she picks up a bead from the red bowl.

“It’s perfect,” she says, relieved. Sifting through the bowls, she grabs a mixture of different beads. Each color represents a different attribute. The idea is simple, adventurers could buy a bracelet and then buy their own custom set of magic-beads. This would allow them to mix and match to their hearts' desires. Plus it would allow a lot of future innovation.

For now, the beads just raise stats, but what if she makes some charms? Little metal hearts and stars and things like that? She’s sure the magical properties could be very eye-catching.

Fresh finishes sliding the four beads onto the ‘prototype bracelet’. One red, one green, one purple and one blue. In theory, she could also do four reds or two greens and two reds. But she wanted a more diverse mix for this test item.

Bead slots

She holds it up into the air. Project-bracelet is a success! Her friends are going to love these. She can’t wait until they get back home!

Fresh sits there, holding the thing up in the air above her head quietly for a while. Her smile vanishes. She lowers her arms. No…

It’s a good item. These will make them a lot of money, especially with the combined sales of the many different components. But this isn’t scratching that itch that she has in her brain. This isn’t what she wants to make. This is useful, pragmatic. But it won’t make people smile like she wants them to. She sighs, feeling a sudden melancholy, born of disappointment, come over herself.

Fresh looks around the room, wondering what it is that’s bothering her. In the north, she had made the potions that people had gone wild for, given their desperate need. In the west, she made nice colorful and tasty drinks and snacks that people on the cold, gray mountain had a strong desire for. Both of those things made her happy to be selling. What do those two things have in common? What is the connection there? What is it that triggered her happiness with those particular ideas?

Basil comes in through the door, sighing as soon as she enters inside the somewhat cooler room. Even from here, Fresh can see that her face is dripping with sweat.

“Hey, Basil,” says Fresh.

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“Hey,” says Basil, dragging herself inside. “It’s really brutal out there during the afternoon.” The priestess sighs, dropping her big hat to the floor and shuffling inside. “I really wish we had some cold tea right about now,” she says. “Do you think you can make one of those cold-cabinets again?” she asks. “And maybe put a bed inside of it?” she jokes. Apparently, the brutally hot desert-sun has tempered her worried mood.

Fresh gasps, jumping to her feet. “You’re the best, Basil!” she exclaims, grabbing her bag and running past the confused priestess. She stops and ‘steals’ her hat. “I’m borrowing this, be right back!” calls Fresh.

“Huh? What?” Basil stares after her as she runs out of the door.

Twenty minutes later, equally drenched with sweat, Fresh runs back inside of their room in the guild. “Welcome back.” Basil is sitting on the floor, playing with the bracelet. “These are really great!” says the priestess. “What happens if you make something like…” she thinks for a moment. “- a charm instead of beads? Like a small, metal chicken or a mush-mush?”

Fresh feels her heart flutter. She’s never felt so understood as she does right now, in this very second. Setting Basil’s doubly-sweaty hat down, she pulls her bag off of her shoulder and sets it down. The sound of clinking glass rings out. “It would be really great!” explains Fresh, already expecting as much.

She opens her menu, getting all of the things she needs to make a new cooling-cabinet, a stronger one.

“What did you get?” asks Basil, leaning over to look inside of the bag.

“Milk!” says Fresh, pulling a bunch of junk out of her inventory.

“Milk?” asks Basil, curiously. “I don’t know if milk is great to drink here in such a hot place, it’s so thick and sticky.”

Fresh nods, understanding the sentiment. Clean water or, at the most, some kind of light tea really is the best in this kind of environment. “We’re not going to drink it, Basil,” explains Fresh. “We’re going to eat it! Ice-cream!”

“Ice… cream?” asks Basil, not understanding.

“ICE-CREAM!” exclaims Fresh and she gets to work. The thing that all of the other items had in common, the ones that really made her happy to make, was that they were consumed by people. The potions, the drinks, the snacks. Feeding people, stemming their hunger, quenching their thirst makes her happy in a way that she has never realized until just now.

Razmatazz

Yo dawg, I heard you liked tables. So I put tables in your tables.

Thank you kindly for reading!

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