A little bit of awkward, aggressive flirting was apparently what was needed to ease out of the tension of being hunted.
Aluca and Hughestace were quiet on the matter, but Naw-Naw was a storm of restrained looks that demanded more. The whole match-making thing was splendid and they could just eat it all up! Holding back from pushing the two kobolds together with a gently spoken ‘now kiss’ was taking a lot of self-control that the others were not appreciating.
Rora and Mila… well. Each glance given by one had a habit of being found by the other, and even though Rora had given a good game at teasing, it did not stop her cheeks from heating up too. It was all the more embarrassing by having their friends fully aware and cheering them on, somehow.
It took a couple hours before Mila was able to wrassle her way through the vague, pleasant discomfort. When she finally managed, she tossed the conversation directly at the nearest distraction - continuing to refine what tests everyone else would be doing. Rora’s and Hughestace’s metrics were further refined down, being rather straightforward.
Naw-Naw and Aluca continued to stump Mila, and then the others. The ideas they had been hovering over were impressive displays of skill, absolutely, but Mila had no idea on how to compare datasets of differing accuracies. Did you mix the test items up to prevent memorization, when it came to making recipes or performing the steps for a spell? Almost certainly. But how did you keep them roughly equivalent between tests? How did an improvement of 97% from 95% actually translate?
Mila had no idea, and when she explained her concerns, nobody else knew either. Most of them did not… well, it was not that they did not care. But they cared because Mila cared, and it was mostly a game to them that would help her out with her latest harebrained idea. The minute details were not something they latched onto, mostly. Aluca got it though, and eventually admitted that he did not know how to do the comparative analysis or maintain usable standards for something like that.
After several hours of brainstorming, they had come up with a few tests that would work. Unfortunately, those tests were not practical - timing Naw-Naw’s ability to dress and cook a deer or something would be contingent on having access to a deer for each set of tests, and timing Aluca’s ability to throw down a randomized, called out order of spells would require a lot of materials. Neither were viable, even if they seemed to be the best actual measurements.
While that prevented them from being proper research subjects in her little experiment, Mila was still happy and the two were still settling on what they were going to do to showcase their skills anyway, damn the science! Which was fun as heck, it turned out. Rora and Hughestace alone were expanding her pool of research subjects by 200%, way more than she had been accounting for.
The talk helped keep tensions low, but that sharp spike of adrenaline still pulled at muscles and minds alike. Given that their job was not actually time sensitive, that meant they ended up calling a halt to the day’s walk earlier than usual, the sun still up but only shining at an angle, through the trees. It gave everything a fresh, green feeling as Mila lashed up the supports for their pavilion-style tent, and she soaked it in.
The evening faded to night as the green was overtaken by the orange cooking fire, and Rora found herself not-so-expertly manipulated into plomping down on a scrounged-up-and-brushed-off log next to Mila. They did not say anything about it, there was not any leaning into each other outside of when the wind changed direction and blew smoke at them, and when time came, both hopped off to get ready for bed without a fuss. But for all that nothing unusual happened, it was very nice.
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The following morning, it was decided by a show of hands and a growling of stomachs that Naw-Naw would be up next for demonstration of skills. The gnoll handled most all their food preparations and management while on the job and everyone was immensely thankful for it - it was very notable that they ate better on the road than most folks ate at home. And they were always appreciative of it, but they were rarely a true audience for the cooking.
Today, they were a ready audience, posting back up on their logs from the night before and trying to ignore the dew-dampened bark pieces that were going to be stuck to butts when they got up. Rora, in her metal plates, did not have to worry about bark.
With the scientific emphasis not really needed, Naw-Naw had decided that their ability to make a full meal from minimal ingredients would have to be tested, no measuring implements and cookbook, only instincts and experience. Actually having all eyes on them brought forth a bit of that Rector nature though, and set them to instructing while they worked.
“‘N’ puttin’ some water on the bacon th’re, ‘elps make sure t’ fat gets off’n it. Need it for later,” taught the giant as the pan hissed and spat, the water boiling off of the flame-heated metal after apparently absconding with the fat.
Given the perfect crispness of the bacon that Naw-Naw plucked up and set to the side, clearly that had been the right move. The bacon grease also got put to the side before sausage was slapped in the pan, its grease also separated out and getting saved for later.
Mila did not say anything, unwilling to disrupt her imminent breakfast’s preparation, but she did just watch Naw-Naw pick up the sizzling food off the pan with their bare paw-hands. Sure, there was thick fur along the backs of those hands, but that meant little when grabbing actively very hot items from where they had just been cooked. Mila or Rora maybe could have done the same, scales insulating a bit from heat and being tough women. Naw-Naw did it without thinking.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
So if Mila had any reason to guess, this was more ‘practice’ nonsense. And while it would be easier to test with a forge or something, there was no way she was about to request her friend take that particular commitment to science.
Instead, Mila quietly continued to watch as some of the fat from the sausage and bacon was put together with flour and a bit of buttermilk before being thoroughly kneaded together. Naw-Naw continued, describing how you could tell when you were done by how it felt as you pulled your fingers away from the uncooked food, but that slid right off of Mila’s brain.
What did not was how small each pinch of dough was in the midst of their palms, as Naw-Naw shaped the biscuits and slapped them in a smaller pan. They’d expand while baking of course, be big enough for Mila to justify more than one bite when ready, but they looked tiny now because Naw-Naw was massive, something their hunkered posture rarely capitalized on.
Once the biscuits were over the fire, off to the side a bit to keep them from cooking too fast or too hard, there was a lull in the action long enough for the conversation to wander. “Any ideas on what to actually use this payday for? I know we’ve all got pie in the sky dreams, but this is a chunk,” was Aluca’s pivot, which started Mila’s mind to rumbling down some train tracks that had kind of been laid out before, back in town with Grant.
Hughestace, ever—straightforward, put forth, “Save it. For when we need it.”
“If it ends up being even a bit of that danger pay, that’s more than enough for our funds with plenty more. And we could use that to help a lot of people,” was Rora’s much more generous contribution, and Naw-Naw inclined their head in thoughtful support.
“A waste of money! I get that folks need help, but this is a payday of a lifetime. Squandering that by handing it away is too shortsighted.”
“Helpin’ ‘em that needs help ain’t squanderin’, never is.”
Their cook’s steely statement did not quite have a growl to it, but it was a near thing. It set Aluca to grasping at nothing, twisting fingers trying to claw from thin air a way to explain his logic from his merchant upbringing.
Unfortunately, in a way that Mila brutally sympathized with, the silence was not filled with easily found words. Instead, his strangled thought process stalled out into awkward silence that would be metaphorically lethal to Mila if she were actively paying attention.
Instead, she let her tail thump down and up on the ground behind her log, processing, each impact propelling her forward a bit more. Hughestace was the first one to notice and really look, to see Mila biting at her stuck-out tongue, eye ridges drawn together fiercely.
“He’s… Aluca is kind of right,” was her slow verdict. A beat later and she nodded deeply. “Yeah. Not that we shouldn’t help, but that with this much money in our laps at once, I think we should try to do something big with it?”
Mila was not sure what the big thing was yet, but helping individual folks, while very important in so many ways would have a limited impact. “We should try to do something that helps a *lot* of people. An ongoing thing, if possible.” It was a lot of money, after all. “And we involve folks who need help right now, if we can? I dunno. Still working on what and how,” she admitted.
It got thoughtful looks from her friends, at least, and nobody immediately moved to voice a problem with it. Although that just might be because they wanted to avoid a return to the uncomfortable quiet.
The smell of biscuits was enough to hop away from conversation wholly, for the time, and Naw-Naw began to make gravy from the sausage, leftover fat, buttermilk, and flour, working their way towards a hearty four ingredient breakfast, which really was impressive to Mila. The instruction on the dozens of types of gravy was a bit much for her but was still fascinating, to boot.
Even still, Mila could not quite dislodge her own idea. “Think global, act local”, she muttered to herself, the refrain of so many people who wanted to make the world a better place in Scienceland echoing through her mind. A refrain that was far too often crushed.
Mila did not notice, distracted as she was by hunger and her own thoughts, as Rora tilted her head and mouthed the same words to herself, chewing on them in her jaws and finding them particularly meaty.
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Naw-Naw’s tests were a resounding success, in spite of the bit of crunchy awkwardness in the middle there. The biscuits and gravy were splendid, and Mila made herself some bacon-biscuit sandwiches that were exactly what she needed to start the day off well. And it was a good, otherwise uneventful day to boot, so clearly her good luck breakfast sandwich had worked and it was in no way happenstance.
The following day was Hughestace’s tests, which were just as much a group activity but this time had everyone else actually doing work, hiding things around the area as Hughestace did his best to not cheat. By his own admission, the skulduggery was not all that successful - most of their group was heavy of foot, so left tracks every which way.
Even taking that into account and how it would be the same for future tests, and thusly acceptable, the elf was a monster at noticing things and picking things out of their surroundings. The mountain lion had no chance in hell of actually sneaking up on them completely unknown, evidently. His accuracy with his javelins was put to the test too, and was scary.
Aluca’s tests of reasoning and memorization, all while also timing himself, were their own kind of impressive. The children’s game of picking putting cards face down and choosing two to flip and remove if they match was, naturally, a children’s game.
Aluca’s ability to put together a strategy for forty cards, some unpaired to throw him off, and then execute that strategy was much better than any child was ever going to approach. And like everyone else so far except maybe Naw-Naw, and that was due to their inability to come up with good tests for them, Mila was pretty sure that it was probably better than whatever they were rocking in Scienceland. It even kind of ended up being a usable measure to benchmark with, even if the other tests for the mage weren’t.
Rora’s feats were impressive and otherworldly, of course, but as the final set on the final day of their first batch of tests, Mila found herself distracted. And it was definitely because of the growing evidence that there was something at play.
It was definitely not because watching Rora’s muscles strain against the weights arrayed against her were very distracting in and of themselves. Mila definitely had no strong desire to see them straining and squirming in any other contexts, no ma’am. She was far too serious a scientist to be distracted such silly things as how pleasant and firm those scaled muscles would feel under her touch.
Even for all her purely scientific distraction, though, Mila wrote down all the results nonetheless. This was good, quietly terrifying data, and she was not about to let that go free.