Chef surveyed the area as another groan of pain and disappointment escaped him. One and a half of his kilns had been destroyed since his last conscious thought. The second kiln made without good mortar collapsed in on itself at some point. It had probably rained or just gotten foggy enough for the moisture to bring it down while he was far from lucid.
The other kiln had more concrete reasons, its mouth having been destroyed from the inside as its prisoner clawed his way out. Or put more bluntly, Chef had flailed wildly and desperately until he escaped a puke prison of his own making.
He sighed, worsening his headache. Meditation helped as the gentle glow seemed alleviate more of his earthly woes than before. After a while he stopped though, still unable to fully ignore his hunger.
He needed more limestone to fix the kiln. Then he’d make some food to fill his belly. Only afterwards would he look over the spoils of his training session.
Of course, mining the stone wouldn’t be quite so simple this time. When last he tried, he had ended up using the adventurer’s bronze blade to pierce into the stone. Unfortunately for Chef though, a sword makes for a poor pick and broke after minimal use. Oops. He had gotten a good amount of limestone first, but not enough to fix this thing up.
This time he tried something vaguely similar. He went out and found a nice and hearty stick and made to tie the sword blade to its end. Unsurprisingly, the blade cut the thatch string. So instead, he decided to use a little bit of his leftover limestone to make a mortar and glue the blade perpendicular to the stick’s tip, making an impromptu mining pick.
That worked quite well, but a few swings at the hard material quickly broke it. To his surprise, it was the stick that broke first, snapping in the middle. Turned out metal was pretty hard to break when you didn’t do something stupid. He tried using it in its shortened form which worked for a while until that stick snapped in half too.
Chef finally gave up when he couldn’t fit even on hand on the stick anymore, simply tossing the sticks into his soon to be repaired kiln. Then he had an idea.
First, he fixed up the kiln he broke part of, getting it ready to go, then he prepared to make some clay. He formed a long and thick shaft from the moldable material, as tall as he was. He’d fire it in the kiln and then use that as the base for his pick so it wouldn’t break as often. Of course, Chef could have just fixed his technique or used a thicker stick, but this would work too.
When he prepared the final piece for the kiln, he stopped and looked at it. He’d originally installed this into the kiln without a second though, but his somewhat recently acquired skill was giving him some ideas about this metal breastplate. He could wear it; he was sure of that. Doing so would protect him from enemies and make him harder to kill. That’d be nice. Not dying was one of his favorite activities.
Some testing for another time. For now, he needed two working kilns. His new creation did wonders, allowing him to mine out plenty of limestone that he stored in the back of his cave. The first thing he did with his twin high quality kilns was start up cooking some stuffed boars. But his second course of action was making some more containers for the newly acquired limestone mortar. He couldn’t let it get wet once it had been powdered and storing it any other way was miserable.
Night came quickly with all the things he’d been doing, but he spent it meditating between cooking sessions. He didn’t let up until he was actually full, eating a dozen animals over as many hours.
A quick nap until sunrise left him feeling tired but not that tired. A bit more cooking and meditation led him to an exciting conclusion. Mediation actually let him rest a little now, not only delaying his need to sleep but actually counting just a bit towards it. In theory, he could probably just meditate nonstop now and never need to sleep.
What a boring life that would be. With his stomach full once again and his kilns rebuilt, Chef decided to look over his gains in more detail.
Name: Goblin Chef
Species[Level]: Goblin[72]
Class[Level]: Goblin/Peon[10], Goblin/Cook[10], Goblin/Chef[20], Chef/Baker[20], Sous Chef/Pastry[12]
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Health: 91/91
Mana: 58/58
Stamina: 69/69
Titles:
Cannibal
Skills:
Brawling IV Convincing II
Conniving IV Running
Climbing Identify
Kitchen Magic IV Butchering II
Poison Mastery II Sword Mastery V
Baking II Goblin Spreading II
Knife III Meditation II
Kitchen Heat Resistance III
Pain Resistance Armor Proficiency II
Throwing II
Spellcasting:
Create Cooking Fire Set Temperature
Stir Sharpen Knife
Wash Dishes Breadbox
Knead Summon Flavoring
Rise Summon Dairy
Traits:
Gluttonous Loathsome
Garbageman Thick Skin
Boons & Banes:
Exquisite Taste (F)
Goblin Confidence (C)
Light Synergy (B)
Attributes:
Power 35 Hutzpah 77
Gusto 59 Intestine 72
Alacrity 41 Waagh 0
Sense 42 Ability 35
Inexplicability: 30
That training session went a lot better than I thought… how long was I out for?
He couldn’t know the exact timeframe, but Chef had spent a little over five days in his poison fueled fugue. And that was after spending almost an entire week on training while mostly conscious. Still not enough time to raise this many skills without extreme resistance and added difficulty allowing for tremendous growth. Turned out that being heavily poisoned to such an extent counted for that.
Maybe I should do it again…
He continued to consider doing something stupid until he discovered a little bit more vomit on his hill that had yet to be cleaned up.
Yea, probably not. That shit was awful.
Instead, he just got to work on understanding his abilities.
The first and most obvious was his Poison Mastery, the evolution of Poisoncraft. He’d learned much during his drug addled training session but nothing more important than what he knew before just applied to a different skill. Poisoncraft, like cooking, gave him the desired effect no matter how he made what he made or what ingredients went in. But just like cooking, the results improved dramatically when actual technique was involved.
He could make non-goop poison if he just applied a little bit of strategy to it. And seeing the consistency and form of his usual goop, his tactics were simple. He treated refining poison the same as making oil.
He filled a pot with water, added in some goop, stirred it, and then applied just a little heat.
It worked out but in the opposite way. As in it mostly didn’t work at all. He just boiled off a not so powerful gas and was left with a dried husk that was still poisonous but less so than before. So really it was a complete failure.
Then he tried treating it like turning milk into cheese. This technique turned out to be much better with a simple caveat. It wasn’t the curds that were poisonous. It was the whey.
He knew because he tasted both and one had a much stronger effect. In fact, by draining out the poison whey multiple times and refining it down even further, he was able to concoct a poison much stronger than before.
How much stronger? Chef didn’t know, but he was excited to find out. He trusted his skill which warned him not to drink the thing, even if it was such a pretty shade of purple. Eventually, Chef was able to fill both of his newly designed brick balls with the substance, though these were quite a bit fancier than the initial model.
They were more egg shaped, not that Chef had much experience with those. The result was a ceramic shaped like an American football with a small hole for liquid additions. Once full, he added a tiny bit of clay and heat to make the seal. Not perfect, but it would work for now.
Sending both balls to his breadbox, Chef felt powerful, armed, and dangerous. Thinking about his newfound power left him a bit worried about his defense. That thought caused him to finally remember the breastplate and armor he’d obtained weeks ago.
“Oh yea.”
He never claimed to have a good memory. And considering the daisy chain of events necessary for him to recall critical information, no one else was about to make the claim either.
Chef pulled the breastplate out of the oven, completely impervious to the cooking heat by now. It was sturdy, that much he knew. Resilient, powerful, the perfect defense unless you were poisoned and stabbed in the neck.
Sadly, it was also much too large for him. It being so sturdy also made it impossible for him to change its shape to better suit its new owner. A dead end for now at least.
But that just didn’t sit well with Chef. He was liable to be attacked any day now and he needed to be ready for it. With his new weapons by his side, he was confident that he would be able to kill almost anything, but as he saw last time, the poison takes a while to affect his enemies. If the blade of light guy hadn’t been poisoned repeatedly and from a distance, Chef would have died that day.
He needed offense and defense. You could never be too prepared when so many things wanted you dead. Really, if he was ambushed while wandering through the woods looking for nuts and wild vegetables then anything could happen. Even being attacked by a dangerously high leveled monster showing up out of nowhere.
Looking over, Chef froze. At the base of the hill was a creature that gave off a terrifying aura. Even without his Intuit skill, his instincts screamed at Chef to run from the fearsome predator.
I’m about to die.
Greater Fanged Rabbit[???]