Chapter 92: 93: Everything has a price

Fresh looks down, her eyes meeting Mr. Mushroom’s wary gaze as she holds a sweet-roll out towards him, as her bargaining token.

“Nyah?” she repeats her question and Mr. Mushroom seems to think for a moment, apparently somewhat unsure. Understanding that she has to sell it a little more, Fresh waves the roll around, explaining. “Nyah. Nyah!” She breaks off a corner and eats it. “Nyaaaah~” says the girl, holding her cheek in a theatrical display with her free hand as she eats.

“Nyah!” grumbles Mr. Mushroom and pulls himself back inside of the hole. Fresh smiles, her experience at selling things really helped her this time. Sometimes you need to make a customer know that not only is your product good, but that they need it. Even if they don’t. You need to convince them that they do, at least until they buy it. No refunds. She smiles, listening to the rustle coming from the inside of the hole. A minute later, a large silhouette comes out, several woody, flowering bulbs clenched in its mouth. Mr. Mushroom drops the root-flowers at her feet.

“Nyah,” he says, watching her carefully.

“Nyah!” beams the girl, reaching down to give him the sweet-roll in turn. Mr. Mushroom gently bites down on it, pulling it free from her hand and backing away slowly back into his hole. The trade is complete. The pact is sealed.

Traded: [1 Sweet-roll](Normal)

for

[3 Root-Flowers]{Small}(Normal)

“Nyah nyah!” waves Fresh down into the dark hole, taking the root-flowers and then turning to leave the dungeon again. This was a good idea. She was always looking for more resources to help her crafting and the root-flowers were right in-front of her face the entire time. Plus, maybe she can convince Mr. Mushroom to be her friend after all? She hasn’t given up on that secret hope just yet. Maybe the two of them can set their differences aside, one day?

Smiling, she heads back out of the dungeon and back home. It’s still before sunrise. She had woken up unusually early today and is taking care of a few things that she had wanted to do for a while now. This trade with Mr. Mushroom was one of them. She doesn’t know just yet what she wants to make out of the root-flowers, but she’s sure that there’s something to do with them.

After they had closed last night, Basil had taken a large bag with the dozen balls in it with her, very gratefully, and promised that she’d give them to the children when she sees them in the morning. So probably right around now actually, thinks Fresh, very happily. After the ‘incident’ yesterday, she had moved the balls out of her room and into the pantry to warm them up a little, before she gave them to Basil. If only to cover her tracks.

She sets the root-flowers down onto the counter and looks around. Jubilee isn’t awake yet and she still has more than an hour left, if she had to guess. Fresh scratches her cheek, looking around the store and thinks about what to do next. The next idea comes to her pretty quickly, as a distant glimmer catches her eye. One of the glass-chickens on the shelf reflects the early morning sunrise that is starting to break through the window, sending a shimmering, multi-colored projection onto the wooden boards of the floor. The spectacle gives the room the faintest appearance of a colorful autumn-washed forest, if only in her mind’s eye for a fraction of a second.

Excited, Fresh picks up her bag again and heads out for the second time today, this time turning right and walking towards the entrance plaza.

“One sweet-roll please!” she asks the baker.

“Again?” he laughs. “You just had one.”

“Mm!” nods Fresh, happy that the giant man isn’t nervous around her anymore. “I shared it with my friend!”

“So you want one for yourself now?” smiles the baker, wrapping the sweet-roll in parchment and taking her coins.

(Fresh) bought: [Sweet-roll](Normal)

for

[{9} Obols] !

Fresh shakes her head. “No. I want to share this one with another friend,” she laughs, waving goodbye to him, as she goes down towards the gate, rather abruptly stopping only just short of the other side.

The girl stands in the giant archway, the entrance to the city, and stares up at it from the inside. Her eyes wander up the body of the towering structure. It’s massive. She wonders how long it took to build? How many people? How many days? Months? If not years? Or was this massive gate just always here? As present in the terrain as the dungeon itself, crafted by some higher power?

For a moment, Fresh wonders why she isn’t moving. She’s just standing at the precipice, on the inside of the city, five steps away from what lies beyond. Since she’s arrived here, she’s never left the city once. Well, except for the time that she died. But that doesn’t count in her eyes. The city behind her is filled with life and even though her gaze isn’t turned back towards it, she can still feel it, hear it, hear them. Hundreds of voices. Loud, happy, laughing, jovial voices fill the air of the dawning summer’s morning. Voices of humans, elves, orcs, birds and cicadas. All of them come together to make a harmonious collective. They sound so happy, as a whole.

Fresh doesn’t turn her head around, she just stares up towards the massive gate, listening to the happy world behind her, rather spontaneously realizing that she doesn’t really belong to it. Sure, she lives here. But she doesn’t belong. Does she? Not in a true sense. She’s hiding. She spends every day hiding, in a manner of speaking. Out of fear of being found out. She’s just pretending to belong. Even if she has Jubilee and she ‘has’ Basil, she still doesn’t belong to this collective of life. She’s an outsider, despite all of her efforts, simply due to the nature of her calamitous rebirth.

What is this feeling? She lifts her hand, rubbing her arm as she stands there in the shadow of the gate, somewhat lost and awkward. This feels like… like her old life. How can she feel so strangely melancholic and blue on a beautiful day like this? And so suddenly?

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Her eyes lower themselves down for the first time in minutes and Fresh takes a deep breath, stepping forward and leaving the city for the first time of her own volition, since she had arrived. It’s not like it’s for forever. She’s just going outside for a minute.

Pressing forward, not looking back behind herself, the girl hurries down the way. The forest road that leads up to the city is still filled with a lush, ardent green. But the shade is less vibrant than it was when she had initially found it. The colors of the foliage are a little more muted and dull, as if having been sapped of their radiant spring-tide energy by the summer heat. It feels weird, being here again. Though she isn’t quite able to put it into words.

Fresh stands at the crossroads, having reached it a moment later and her body turns right. Her head, however, stays locked forward, her eyes wandering down the path that lies straight ahead. Down the way she would have gone back then, if she had gone right after her rebirth. She wonders quietly to herself, if it’s true, what the fountain told her? That if she had gone right, that it would have made her a priestess instead? She tilts her head, which is still at an angle. She wonders if she would have ‘belonged’ then? Maybe she wouldn’t have had as much money. She also probably would have never met Jubilee. But who knows what that life could have been.

Despite her eyes looking down the way, almost longingly, her boots seem to be marching forward on their own, as if her body itself was sick of her mopey nonsense as it walks down the path, down towards the clearing with the small fountain. Eventually, once there is nothing left to see to the side but forest, her head turns back forward and her eyes follow the road towards the opening ahead, from which she can hear the stream of a gentle trickle of water.

Fresh stops, taking a deep breath to prepare herself. The brown parchment paper crinkles beneath her fingers, as they clasp down tightly on it in her nervousness. Exhaling deeply once, she peers cautiously out and around a tree, looking into the clearing to see if he's here. The rooster. Are roosters supposed to eat sweet things like the roll that she had bought for it? Probably not. But she’s sure that one little treat won’t be too bad for it and maybe it will like her too, then? After all, if someone brought her a sweet-roll, she’d like them. So it only makes sense to her that it works the other way too.

Gulping, Fresh steps out into the clearing and looks.

Nothing.

There is no rooster anywhere to be seen. There’s only the small fountain, the one she ‘arrived’ in. The one she is reborn in, when she dies. Fresh turns her head, looking over to the construction, somewhat let down that the rooster isn’t here. Walking over to it, she stares down at her own reflection, shimmering in the water just as a lazy ray of sunlight breaks through the clouds from above, revealing to her the visage of the girl in the fountain. The two lonely creatures stand in the clearing, both of them staring at each other for a time, accompanied by the sound of running water as a trickle splashes into the basin.

The reflection lifts its hands, holding out the sweet-roll to her.

“Do you want this?” asks Fresh and she then nods affirmingly a moment later to her mirror image, which does the same. The girl sighs and sits down on the rim of the fountain and looks down at the paper bag in her hands. As she sits alone in the forest, her back turned to her reflection, as the water trickles on, splashing into the basin with a constant candor, she can’t help but think as she listens to it, that it sounds just a tiny bit like a giggle. Like a snide chuckle. It sounds like her reflection was doing its best to not break out in a fit of laughter, as if it had seen a joke that she herself hasn’t realized yet. As if it was just waiting for her to finally catch on, before it can freely laugh as loud as it wants to.

Lowering her gaze down to the ground, looking past the thing in her hands that she doesn’t even want anymore, Fresh looks at the strange thing between her feet. Setting the bag down onto the rim of the fountain, Fresh bends over forward and picks up the small, shiny, long thing that seems to glisten in the morning sunlight. Shimmering with such intensity as if it were set there, right between her feet as if to specifically catch her attention.

Fresh carefully holds the bent, long, brown feather out in front of herself. She looks at the fresh, bloody trickle that runs down its length. Red droplets strike against the grass between her feet.

The fountain continues to laugh, as it always has.

Razmatazz

Bakaw =(

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