Chapter 43

One by One

The contents of my belly rose in a wave. My organs juggled. My eyes thrummed like beaten drumheads. A heat spread out from the center of my belly and suffused me. I felt bright red colors swarm my body. Bright red colors spilled throughout the layers of my irises. My fur wavered on end. And as if I’d eaten a thousand red besties, my fur took on a bright red color. From head to toe, I was red. The skin beneath my fur turned pinkish. I inspected my Composition stat.

[Red Determiner Diamond from the red bestie mines beneath Lavenfauvish.]

Composition:

75% Dreambon

15% Fish

02% Tree

02% Precious gems

01% Human

05% World

100% Ethereal

02% Red Bestie

All the besties around me took a few steps back. Except for Yuta. His hands dropped to his sides and he gaped at me. He took a step forward while his eyes went big.

He whispered. “By bestie lore…Red besties, we just witnessed our own history. Imagine that; after all these years.” He fearlessly approached me, and he touched my fur. “This is how the first red bestie came to be. Just like this.”

Boggo and Ella looked on, clearly amazed. If the first red bestie had eaten a red determiner diamond and turned red, Boggo’s ancestors must have eaten blue determiner diamonds, and Ella’s ancestors must have eaten yellow determiner diamonds. And there they were, thousands and thousands of years later.

“I’ve never eaten a blue diamond!” Boggo said.

Without taking his gaze off me, Yuta said, “Your progenitor has. And with other diamonds, Ella’s progenitor has. My progenitor has. They were silver besties.”

“The yellow call them clear-coats,” Ella said.

“I do not doubt they have different names,” Yuta said. “Each one ate a different diamond.”

“My Composition tells me they are called determiner diamonds.”

“Determiner diamonds!” Yuta’s face lit up with something like joy. Beads of water trickled across the bottoms of his eyes. He looked at me as though I were both a long lost son and a relic. “That is their name!” he continued. “What a gift to learn! How delightful! What a gift!” He closed his eyes and a tear streamed down one cheek. “…Determiner diamond! Ha! Everyone tell everyone! Goodness, Thrush! What a treat of a lifetime!”

[Appraise item level 1123.]

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[1.5 carat red diamond.]

[Appraise skill is too low to determine origin.]

[Value: Unknown.]

“I don’t know its value,” I said.

Deefa collected himself and returned to stand behind the stone slab. “Thrice the emerald per carat.”

“What happens if I eat one?” Ella said.

Yuta, who once again stared at me in awe, said, “This is something we have tried centuries ago before the purple colony went south. In fact, I ate a purple diamond—a purple determiner diamond, how about that!—and it does nothing. Some of the purple ate red determiner diamonds—Determiner, Ha!—and nothing happened to them. Lore states that it worked on the silver besties, or clear-coats, and now on Thrush here. My, my! An example of history before my very eyes! To be affected like my progenitor! Of course that makes you an honorary red bestie!”

Deefa groaned. “Our tunnels are about to get humongous.”

“No tunnel shall be less than the wiggle room for the fattest red bestie,” Yuta said with an upraised finger. “That is now you, Thrush! You are our fattest red bestie! We’ll have to bring this to the engineers!”

“I’m just Thrush.”

“Not today, Thrush.”

”I’m only two percent red bestie.”

“Does that mean…Will you get fatter?”

“Probably. My belly gets so big sometimes that I have to sleep for days until it’s back to normal again. I love being fat; it’s my favorite thing to do. Especially with smoked meat in my belly.”

“I can vouch for him!” Boggo said. “Gets so fat when he eats smoked meat! If I know Thrush, I'd say getting fat is indeed his favorite thing to do.”

I rubbed my belly. All the talk of smoked meats made me want to cut back to Hawkin’s camp and fire up the smoker.

“I’ll have to get back to smoking fish again now that I have my appetite back.”

“Construction is going to be a pain,” Deefa said. Everything is going to change.”

“You don’t need to widen the tunnels. I can cut through the world and appear where I want now.”

“Red bestie law is red bestie law,” Yuta said.

Deefa snapped his little fingers. “I suppose this means you’ll be getting the kin discount. So for six hundred thousand waterskins of warm-warm beer…”

Deefa executed more mathematics on paper. Then he and his assistants began making piles of specific gems. Deefa at last presented the heaps of gems.

“This is your payment, eaten gems accounted for.”

I sat at the pile of gems and—storing them away, not eating them—I began appraising each individual gem.

Deefa’s mouth dropped open. “I’m not trying to scam you, Thrush. We’re honest here.”

“I believe you. But if I appraise them all individually, it’ll help raise my Appraise skill and Merchant quest path level.”

“That’s going to take forever!”

Yuta shuffled over. “Is that necessary, Thrush?”

“No.”

It took me several days to appraise each individual gem. In that time, Boggo and Ella came and went. They talked about game mechanics, figurines, dice, and outlandish monsters born from their imagination. Deefa and his assistants took turns helping to shovel the dwindling piles of gems closer to me as I went through them.

In the end I counted: 1,550 various carats of topaz, 1,850 various carats of tourmaline, 3,200 of ruby, 2,300 of emerald, and 400 of red determiner diamonds.

When I announced that I’d appraised the last gem, Deefa woke up with a start.

“All done!” I said. “Let’s draft up a Merchant’s Contract!”

Deefa signed on the line and Yuta co-signed. It was Merchant Contract 2/5 of my evolution stone quest!

With all the gems secure in my inventory, I began withdrawing 600,000 ethereal waterskins of warm-warm beer from my inventory. There were a handful of plain hide waterskins in there too. The red besties carried them on their backs like sacks of grain and piled them deep in the cavern of the aquifer. The chimeric light of the waterskins filled the deep of the aquifer, like one spark at a time.

Boggo and Ella returned.

“So that’s it!” Boggo said. “We sold beer to the red besties!”

“We did.”

Boggo gave me a sharp high five. Ella jumped in for a high five as well.

“I think it’s time to sail to Fiberthorn cove to deliver more beer,” I said. “Barnacle-eyes should have her sloops up and running now. Are you ready, Boggo?”

Boggo’s tail went limp. His ears drooped. He looked at Ella with uncertainty.