Chapter 324: people

“Here, hold this,” says Basil, handing Fresh a woven basket that they had plundered from the streets. She bends down, picking at a few mushrooms, plucking a few larger ones out of the ground while leaving the rest. They’re inside of their secret farm room. Basil has been busy here and while it’s still very much overgrown and wild, there’s definitely a look to the place that signals that somebody has been here and has been working.

“So are we just gonna grow mushrooms?” asks Fresh.

“Well, they’re growing on their own, honestly,” replies Basil. “I’m not really doing much, except picking the ones that are good to take.”

Fresh looks at the mushrooms in the basket as Basil drops another one inside. “How can you tell?”

“It depends on the kind, but usually by the size.” She pokes the head of a large, flat one in the basket that Fresh has already forgotten the name of. “Most of these we want when they’re at their fullest, which is just something you learn over time, I suppose.” The priestess bends down, pointing at a small cluster of thin, spiky mushrooms. “These kobolds’ warts are different though,” says Basil. “We want them while they’re in adolescence. If we wait until they’re fully grown, well…” she shakes her head. “No good.”

“No good?” asks Fresh.

“No good,” repeats Basil, getting up and dusting her hands off on her robe as they wander to another patch.

Fresh looks around the field. Mushrooms sure are odd things. She likes plants and stuff in general and she likes mushrooms, but they’re weird. She doesn’t know how to really explain it, but they’re just… weird. Fresh stares down at the mushrooms in the basket. If mushrooms are plants, then they’re weird. So…

She blinks, realizing something.

“Basil,” says Fresh. “I’m a people-mushroom.” Basil looks up at her in confusion. “I’m people. But I’m weird. It’s like how a mushroom is a plant, but it isn’t. You know?”

Basil shakes her head, getting back to her work. “And yet here we are, trying to find as many weird mushrooms as we can.”

“Huh…” Fresh stares at the gnarled tree in the center of the farm. The spriggan is working around it. It’s not doing its odd dance, rather, it seems to be lightly pressing against the soil, as if massaging it, pulling out weeds and disturbances as it tends to the tree. Maybe she’ll do something with that rare-wood today.

“It’s not about how different you are in context to the environment around you,” says Basil. “Mushrooms are odd, sure. But at the same time, they’re some of the most useful things that we have,” says the priestess. She gets up and lifts a finger, poking Fresh on the nose, leaving a smear of dirt on the tip of it. “So maybe it’s for the best of us all if they’re odd. Like us,” says Basil, getting up and holding a mushroom on top of her head.

Fresh gasps, realizing. It isn’t just herself. Jubilee, Basil, Shamrock, they’re all mushroom-people and like such odd things, they have found a place to grow in together.

“Jubilee? What’s rare-wood?” asks Fresh.

Jubilee, sitting at the library table with their feet kicked up, looks up from their book and over her way. “It’s rare wood. What do you want me to tell you?” asks Jubilee. “It’s in the name.”

“Sure,” relents Fresh. “But what does it do?”

Jubilee groans, setting down their book. “You know how different materials have different strengths?” asks Jubilee. “Like how blackstone helps fire damage or how aquamarine helps water-casters?” Fresh shakes her head. She’s never heard of such a thing. Jubilee seems to ignore her denial however, as if being entirely unsurprised by it. “It’s like that. But for life.”

Fresh tilts her head. “For life?” she asks. “You mean like… forever? What does it do forever?” Fresh scratches her cheek. “I don’t get it.”

“No, I mean for li-” Jubilee shakes their head. “Just make something and find out, goo-brain,” says Jubilee, picking their book back up and hiding their face behind it, signaling the end of the conversation.

Fresh shrugs, looking around the library. Maybe there’s a book here on it?

She did not find a book on it.

What she did find however, was a book on core training and stretching. So she started doing that in the library until Jubilee took her book away, flicked her in the head and told her to get back to work.

Fresh now sits down in the basement, rubbing her forehead that has a sore dot on it now as she looks around at the empty room. Basil had already begun setting up some tables and stuff here that they had taken from the street, so Fresh supposes that it's about time to get a real workshop up and running too. She’s been taking it easy for a while now and they really need to reopen their store soon.

Nodding to herself, she starts with the usual process.

The basement is a rectangular room. The staircase down to it is in the north-west corner and the door to the bath and washroom is in the middle of the southern wall. The crumbled wall where they had found the spriggan is the eastern wall. Shamrock had cleared all of the rubble away from there. But Fresh has decided that she wants the workbench to be by the staircase. That would make it easier to just run up and down when there are little things that need to be fiddled with during the workday.

She supposes that they’re going to be doing repairs again here, since they don’t have the fairies to not steal competition from.

Fresh sighs. She hopes that they’re doing well. What if they need help with their house again?

She shakes her head. They’re strong. They raised them well. They’ll manage until the four of them can go back home.

She blinks, staring at the wall for a moment.

‘Home’.

Is this home? Or is the east home? No, those are both just houses. But they live here now. Who knows how long it’s going to be until the shield drops. Fresh just hopes that they don’t get found out or have to leave before that happens. Getting discovered and having to run here would be a real disaster. There’s nowhere left to run.

It’s an hour later.

Fresh pushes the workbench one last inch further, back against the wall. This time, unlike in the west, she was smart enough to have made it right where she wanted it to sit. Now they need shelves and storage.

An hour passes.

It looks a little dinky, since she used a lot of scrap wood for the shelves. But it’s just for their basement and most importantly, they’re all stable and mounted into the rock of the basement walls.

Three sturdy shelves sit to the right of the workbench, all next to each other. Then, in the back corner past them are a few large, wooden boxes and a barrel.

Fresh doesn’t know why they needed a barrel, but she decided that they needed a barrel. It just looks ‘right’, having a barrel in the basement.

She steps back, framing the corner with her fingers.

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“Yup,” she nods to herself, happy about having made the barrel with nothing inside of it. It just looks like she expects a storage corner to look like. There needs to be a barrel. It just is what it is.

An hour passes.

Fresh has made a few planter boxes and hung up a few lanterns. She assumes that Basil will be doing most of her gardening in the farm now, but still, she made a few planter boxes so that Basil would come down here in the basement to take care of them.

It’s bait, disguised as productivity.

In truth, Fresh just wants the priestess to come down here once in a while, so that she isn’t all alone while working downstairs all the time.

Fresh cackles maliciously to herself.

“Stop cackling like a ditzy crow and get back to work!” barks Jubilee from upstairs on the ground floor.

Fresh yelps, scampering to find something else to do.

Shamrock bends the pipe, pulling out the compressed segment of hot metal and setting it to the side. Tufts of steam rise out of the free end down below, the mass of the rising vapors displaced by the surge of the man’s heavy breath. The giant reaches over to the side, grabbing the new piece of pipe that Fresh had made to replace this one and then bends down, jamming it into place.

With a smear of a goop that Fresh made, liquefied crystal-drakonium mixed with glue, he runs a brush around the edges of the connections.

An odd clinking and groaning can be heard coming from all around the house, as something moves through it. Like blood flowing through old veins that had long since been dry, the steam rises up now throughout the pipes, rising higher, floor after floor. The cold metal of the old pipes expands from the sudden heat, popping and clanking noisily as it comes back to life, reawoken from its deep, long sleep.

The spriggan dances around Shamrock.

This new piece of pipe, Fresh had outfitted with a valve. So they can adjust the amount of steam that goes through with a twist of it. Though that does mean removing the stones covering it every time. For now, since it’s winter anyways, they just leave it at full heat.

It takes about an hour, but the house slowly starts to become very warm and comfortable. After about another hour, Fresh can’t see her breath inside anymore.

“Ah~” sighs Basil in relief, lying on her back on the floor of the library. Her head rests on Shamrock’s chest, he’s also laying on the floor. “That’s nice. What an oddity.”

“Never heard of anything like it,” says Jubilee. But they don’t seem to mind either, as they have their boots off and their feet on a particularly warm section of floor.

“It’s like with the shower,” says Fresh. “I think whoever made that in our eastern house made these pipes too,” she suggests.

Basil shakes her head. “I don’t think so, that’s very unlikely.”

“It’s a big world. There are lots of craftsmen,” says Jubilee.

“Hmm…” Fresh thinks for a moment. Maybe… She still thinks so though. But, oh well. It isn’t important, right? What’s important is that her family is warm and comfortable.

“Pakew?” asks the spriggan.

She turns her head, looking down at it. It’s holding a book up towards her. Blinking, Fresh takes it and looks.

‘How come orichalcum?’

Razmatazz

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