I’ve wrestled with how to tell you this next part, dear reader. You’ve been such a good sport. How do I ask you to swallow yet another crazy bit? All I can say is that things never really settle down in this world. Just when I think I’m getting the hang of it, it completely throws me for a loop. So, sit tight. Grab onto something… and yes, this is what happened next. It just got weirdly normal, if that’s possible.
I went to work. Well, of course I did. Until Mabel officially fired me, I was a cook. I had dinner, dessert and a hundred potions to create before I could leave town to chase my nemesis. Only when I poked my head into the kitchen, Lily was already there.
“Did you need your herbs?” Lily asked, and I didn’t know what to say to her. She was bustling around cutting up vegetables like I’d been planning to do. “Chester is getting low on health potions again,” Lily filled in the conversation that I didn’t know what to do with. She pointed to a sack on the table and continued, “We got a new shipment of the herbs that don’t grow around here.”
“Thanks,” I said, automatically.
“I thought you said you were the cook,” Kat whispered into my ear. She was peering over my shoulder into the kitchen.
“I was,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth to her.
“Hey Kat,” Lily called out, like they’d known each other for years. She plopped the sack in my hands as I stood at the door with my mind flopping like a drowning fish. “You’re getting sneakier every day. I almost didn’t see you there. You two are up early.”
“The early bird gets the worm,” I tossed out like I had charisma.
“We’re headed out soon,” Kat told Lily, sliding around me into the kitchen. Kat picked up a piece of what Lily had been slicing and gave it a sniff. Kat was a picky eater, so I wasn’t surprised when she put the carrot thing back down. “We’ve got to take a trip to the city. We’ll be gone about two weeks. Anything we should do before we leave?”
I looked at Kat like she’d grown another head. What was she talking about? How was she so cool with all this? Then I remembered that she hadn’t been here the day before or the day before that. My mind was slow to catch up with all the changes, but she had never seen any of it. Kat didn’t know how different it all was. Lily had been a lovely little housewife who’d needed a magical antidepressant. Now she was bustling around my kitchen like she’d always been there. I itched to toss a few spices in that stew and feed my starter, but I didn’t dare. What would happen if I didn’t get with the new program?
“I’m sure Chester would appreciate some extra potions if you’re going to be gone that long,” Lily answered Kat as if this happened all the time. “He might have some things that you could get a better deal for in person. Just drop by the shop. I’m sure he’s got a list. You know him and his lists.” I didn’t know. He hadn’t been into lists the last time, had he?
“Thanks,” Kat nudged my shoulder and I blindly turned to leave.
“I wish I could go on adventures like the two of you,” Lily professed dreamily. I turned back to see her waving my wooden spoon around like Sammi’s wand. “You always come home with such interesting stories.”
I cast clean on a load of dishes that were piled up around my bucket. It was just that routine was so soothing. It had only been a routine of four days, but it was still something. And now it was gone. I repaired the center counter just for the excuse to stay one extra minute. The yeasty smell of bread rising combined with the sizzle of meat was comforting and I wanted just another moment to hold onto it before Kat dragged me out of the kitchen. It might have seemed stupid to get misty-eyed over something I’d only done for four days, but I did.
“Come on, Mom,” Kat urged me in a hush. “We’ve got potions to make.”
“We’ve got potions to make,” I repeated idiotically.
Kat pushed and prodded me until I sat at the edge of the well. That well. At least the well was the same. I took a minute to compare the things around me with my memory. The tavern itself was the same, and so was the pig pen and the stable. There were still not-pigs, one horse and three dachshunds pretending to be goats. Kat let me settle.
“I was a cook,” I muttered, dazedly.
“And now you’re a potion-maker,” Kat patted my hand. We’d come up together. She knew me. She was probably having trouble with all this as well, but she would put her stuff aside until I’d dealt with mine. Once I knew how to deal with it, she’d let me help her through it. We were partners and it worked in a way our old world hadn’t ever understood.
“Don’t open your mouth near the goats,” I told her. Queen of the non-sequiturs. That’s me.
“The dogs in the barn?” she asked, going along with it.
“They’re goats,” I explained to have something saner to talk about. What did it say that this was the saner thing? “They give milk and Lily said we could make cheese from it. At least she did back when Lily was… Lily… the other Lily.”
“They look like a whacked-out version of Grandma’s dogs,” Kat mused, kicking at small stones near her feet.
“Yeah, and they lick like them only they have tongues that can reach you from the fence,” I told her. I could feel my mind loosen a little. It just needed a little more time to adjust. I’d wondered how they would justify a new cottage out back. I’d had no notion that the world might just change everything.
“I’ll be sure to stay far back from them,” Kat assured me with a little laugh.
“You should see the chickens,” I joked, then moaned as I remembered. “I was going to get eggs today. I was going to bake a cake!”
Kat gave me a look.
“It was going to be chocolate,” I whined a bit. “They have these nuts that act like cocoa. I ground some up yesterday just in case the eggs were ready. The nuts give off enough oil that I wouldn’t even have to add…I mean I’d just need the sugar stuff. Sugar, chocolate, and milk. It was going to be a surefire hit.”
“It would have been great,” she patted my shoulder, but her eyes danced with mirth. “I prefer vanilla, but hey, if you made it, it would have to be good.”
“I hadn’t found vanilla yet,” I grumped, but only half my heart was in it. I was cheering up.
“Maybe we’ll find some in the cities,” she suggested with a smile.
“How do you know we’re going to the city?” I asked. If I could get some interesting ingredients in the city, that would surely make it worth it. Not that I’d be able to just come back here and become the next Willy Wonka.
“We’ll have to go through cities, at least,” Kat said with a shrug.
“We’re going to the city?” Terra asked.
“Where have you been?” Kat asked Terra.
“I was catching my breakfast,” Terra gave a kitty-grin as I relayed to Kat what Terra had told me.
“Breakfast sounds good,” Kat rubbed her stomach.
“I didn’t catch enough for all of us,” Terra put in, but my mind was spinning again.
“We’ll need rations, and equipment to travel,” I threw up my hands, overwhelmed all over again. “We’ll need money too. I only have a few coppers!” I processed this new information easier than the other changes. I knew how to make jerky and crackers? Jerky would take all day to dry. What else could I make?
“Let’s just take this one step at a time,” Kat put an arm around my shoulders and steered me back toward the cottage. “Chester needs potions. You have a cottage with a ton of ingredients already hanging all over the place, and I’m betting there’s enough food in the pantry to make breakfast.”
“Yeah,” I let her guide me. What if my new normal was that nothing ever stayed the same? I’d started out as some form of Cinderella, but what was I now? “I was going to smash that chocolate cake in Sammi’s face. He made fun of me about chocolate cake, and I wanted to show him that I could make it myself without his pony wishes.”
“I’d have paid to see that,” Kat admitted, leading me back to the cottage. I admonished my brain to act like the smart thing it was supposed to be. My brain laughed at me.
I had eggs for breakfast. It wasn’t cake, but my pantry had enough for me to supplement Terra’s breakfast too. Kat didn’t like eggs, but she liked French toast and I had day-old bread in that pantry. A little cinnamon-ish stuff and sugar-like stuff replaced the syrup. I used up the eggs, hoping that we’d be on the road by the end of the day. I wondered how much it cost to take the coach. I made a mental note to ask Chester.
We ate and I read over my new potion recipes. They were all neatly arranged in my spell book between my spells and my cooking recipes. Sammi must have counted the health and mana potions as new recipes even though I’d earned them from Chester before. At least they were now in my spell book so I couldn’t lose them. My newest potions weren’t powerful, but I liked them. One was called Baking Soda and that made me laugh.
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“What?” Kat looked up from some random book she’d pulled off one of the shelves.
“Sammi gave me a potion called Baking Soda,” I explained. She looked confused, so I continued, “They don’t have anything like it here. I was trying to make cookies and they were more like pie crust without eggs and baking soda.”
“One of those six new potion recipes they promised?” Kat asked, half her mind on the book next to her French toast.
“Four really,” I told her, scooping a small amount of eggs into my mouth while I read. “It’s more like a chemical formula. I feel like I could have figured some of these out with some access to an alchemist. Chemistry class wasn’t that long ago.”
“We never did well in labs,” Kat pointed at me with a forkful of French toast. “Just be careful with formulas.”
“It’s not my fault that they didn’t write instructions well,” I grumbled. No, we didn’t blow up the lab. At least not that they could prove. I’d followed the instructions in their stupid lab manuals. Just another Code of Conduct warning, whether they could prove anything or not. I’d written manuals back when I’d been teaching computers. I knew how to write directions. The professional college professors and lab technicians did not, not that you could tell them that their preciously immaculate lab manuals were defective.
My other potion recipes consisted of one called Keep Fresh that looked like a preservative of some sort, a Mild Poison, and something called Incoming that looked suspiciously like a Molotov Cocktail. Seriously, the instructions said to fill a bottle with oil and hard liquor, stuff in a piece of cloth, then shake, light, and throw. Mild Poison was worse in that it required a spoiled potion that I cast my poison on. I might have felt cheated, but the rest of what Sammi had given me was really helpful and with this overview, I was already brimming with ideas for more “recipes.”
“Whatcha’ reading?” I asked Kat, the turning of her pages catching my attention.
“It’s fairy tales,” she admitted, turning the book over to show me the cover. It was written by someone named Fizzbarren. “But it’s weird. I like to think I knew a lot of fairy tales, but these are like a mashup of fables.”
We’d done a few studies of fairy tales and classic stories during her homeschooling. I’d tried my hand at writing when she was really little, but published books didn’t equal income. Besides, she’d gotten far more fascinating than any stories I could make up. I liked to think we both knew fairy tales and fables pretty well.
“Like this one’s got a scarecrow designing the Frankenstein monster,” she flipped pages. “And this one starts with Oliver and ends with, well, I haven’t gotten to the end, but it’s already gone more toward Hansel without Gretel.”
She stuffed the last piece of French toast in her mouth and closed the book with a determined snap. “I’m going upstairs to see if we’ve got backpacks and a few changes of clothes up there. You want to check the pantry for something you can make that will travel well?”
“We can use our inventories,” I called out to her as she scrambled up the ladder. “And I’ve got a spell that cleans anything.”
“Our inventory will carry even more filled with backpacks and a change of clothes is always a good thing,” she suggested with a grin. “I didn’t play EQ that long and not learn anything. I’m buying pajamas at the first place that sells something like them. I didn’t sleep well in these clothes.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, snapping out of it. I marveled. How had she gotten so smart? My husband and I had been asking ourselves that for the past two years of college. The first two years of college had been dicey but the last two had been mostly her taking over and making things happen. My mind grabbed at information, but it was too early in the pattern to do anything with it all. I cleared the table and cleaned up quickly.
I had my head in the back of the pantry, when the banging on the cottage door made my stomach drop with dread. I considered crawling behind the bottom shelves for a moment before I heard Chester’s booming voice. “Delivery!”
Kat made it to the door first. She was getting good at sliding down the ladders. She was fast. I cast another repair at the ladder to try to get rid of any splinters it might have. I could imagine that her stats were sliding around like mine had the first few days. Mine didn’t slide around so much now. Maybe they’d settled down a bit.
Chester shouldered into the main room, lugging a rattling crate of empty bottles. I met him at the table and looked over his delivery. They weren’t clean bottles, but that wouldn’t take much to remedy. I cast clean at the whole lot and was rewarded with at least three dozen clean potion bottles. The new, upgraded clean spell affected an area instead of a single object. A repair spell later and I had another five bottles from the broken glass at the bottom of the crate.
“You gotta teach that to Lily one of these days,” Chester shook his head. “She’s always complaining about the dishes needing done. I do what I can, but with the shop and forge, I get busy.”
“I’ll try,” I told him, smiling. Yesterday he’d been my tank on new adventures, but now he was a homebody again. Lily obviously didn’t know all the spells I’d taught her. I wondered how much had changed. Would he and Lily jump back into the adventuring life if I suggested it? I considered it briefly, but if I was honest with myself, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to let them down by wanting to go to the city with Kat alone.
“Lily says you’re headed out soon so I brought all the old potion bottles I could find,” Chester wiped his hands on his leather apron and gave me a smile. I was glad we were somehow still friends. “Two weeks?”
“Yeah,” I answered, feeling guilty. “It shouldn’t take too much longer than that.”
“It’s all good,” he assured me, taking a pad of paper out of a pocket of his apron. It hit me that paper seemed anachronistic. If we could have paper, couldn’t we have indoor plumbing? Then again, I did have indoor plumbing now, so I supposed I couldn’t count on anything being specifically authentic to some history book I’d fallen asleep trying to read. We had books and pads of paper but no baking soda. Then again, I had baking soda now. The mind boggled. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t history. It was fantasy.
“Oh, I’ve got a few coins for you from sales,” Chester dug around in his apron pocket and produced two gold coins. When he plopped them into my hand, I felt rich. “I’m sorry its not more, but we had to pay off those recipes and the bottles were more of an investment than I’d anticipated.”
Profession Unlocked: Alchemist
“It’s more than I expected,” I replied, grateful for the increase in fortune. “Do you think it’s enough for a few tickets on the coach?”
“Two gold will likely get you both halfway to the capital,” Chester assured me. I was feeling more optimistic about this trip to the city.
“I have another two cases of empty bottles at the forge. Once they’re filled, that should be enough to hold us over until the end of the month.” Chester checked things off the list in his hand with a stubby pencil that was little more than a burned piece of black chalk. “Half mana and half health,” he noted carefully. I wondered that his big hands didn’t break the chalk into bits. “Why don’t you take a few potions for the road? You could sell them at the little stops like ours and earn the rest of your passage.”
I nodded inanely. It looked like I still owed Chester a hundred potions even in this new existence. I remembered that I owed him a hundred of each potion, even if he didn’t. I had bottles in my inventory too. Would there be enough before I went or would I need another bunch once I got back? Was I even coming back? Hadn’t I already asked questions just like this before?
“I don’t want to leave you short,” I hedged, but I did think selling potions on the road would be the best way to bolster our income.
“You’ll be back for the rest,” Chester grinned at me. “I trust you for it. You’ll be back faster if you can afford the coaches.”
“Is there anything from the city you want us to pick up?” Kat asked Chester, reminding me of Lily’s words from this morning.
“I can order most of it,” he admitted, but lowered his head and gave a look back toward the door. “The merchant’s guild has a good supply network for most of it. But magic is a bit backlogged.” That was the same. Good. At least something was reliable. There was still a merchant’s guild and magic was still relatively rare. “I’d like to get Lily one of those little books like you have.”
I pulled out my spell book and gave it a wave. “Like this?”
“Yeah,” Chester admitted. “Supposedly you’ve got to be some magical apprentice to get a book like that, but you got one without being guilded. I just wondered if you could find another one. If she could learn recipes that way, then maybe we wouldn’t have to rely on you so much for our potion supply. Just, if you’re going to be travelling more…”
I checked my inventory. I still had the two recipes he’d given me for the mana and health potions. Should I just give them back? I’d taught Lily spells before, and she hadn’t remembered them. She would be cleaning her own dishes if she had. I hated myself for selfishly wondering if I would have a job if Lily could do the potions instead of me? I didn’t even know if the recipes would disappear if someone read them off of the scroll.
“I could give the recipes back,” I offered more hesitantly than I wanted to sound. “I have them in my spell book now anyway.”
“No,” Chester pushed his hand toward me, but his face seemed confused. “Sell them if you want. Lily would rather learn them from you, anyway.”
It sounded false somehow. I could feel the air shimmer with it. It was like a cold chill ran across the back of my neck. Again, it was something that meant something, but I couldn’t grasp the whole picture.
“I’ll see what we can find about the spell book,” I assured Chester, seeing a weight leave him. The chill dissipated, but I marked it in my memory.
“Thanks,” he grinned like he’d forgotten the confusion altogether, and I knew I’d be helping him and Lily any way I could. “Oh, I almost forgot,” Chester snapped his fingers. “Mabel gave me this. She said you left it in the tavern last night.”
Chester laid Beau’s hat on the table on top of the box of bottles. With another grin, he was waving himself out the door.
“Nice hat,” Kat said, scooping it up. “A little gaudy, but…”
“You can have it,” I told her, numb of mind. She plucked out half the feathers and tried to put it on.
“It has coins in it,” Kat held the hat out to me, and I recalled that I’d gotten some coins from the patrons the night before. Kat emptied several silvers, and almost a dozen coppers out of the hat and then placed it jauntily on her head. I had no idea how far the coinage would get us. I dumped the coins into my inventory, and we had a whopping two gold, seven silver and five copper coins, my inventory automatically changing up the excess copper into silver. My potions would sell for a gold each, but I’d only get five silver of the ones I gave Chester, and only after they sold, and only if I made it back.
“You go help Chester with the potion bottles and I’ll get started on making them,” I suggested more than ordered. “You’re better at conversation anyway.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kat agreed readily. “I want to get a look at the forge and shop anyway.”
“Take your time,” I muttered scanning the recipes for each of the potions. “This may take a while.”
“I’ve got plenty to do,” she assured me, taking out a throwing dagger and spinning it in her palm as I had done with the kitchen knife a few days ago. It was something we’d practiced together and that settled me a bit. We’d practiced with foam daggers back at home… the old home. “I want to try to work up some of my skills.”
“Just,” I called out, unsure how to not sound like an overprotective Mom. “Don’t go into the forest. The bunnies have sharp teeth and poisonous ears.”
“Oh…kay,” she gave me a sideways look of surprise, but her nod reassured me. “I’ll practice out by the forge. There are plenty of trees I can throw my knives at without stumbling stupidly into the wildlife.”
“Thanks,” I let out a breath, knowing she meant it. She really was smarter than I’d been.
“So much for all that memorizing of animal life from biology,” she muttered as she left the cottage. It was harder to let her go than I wanted it to be. It was almost like she was my touchstone to reality. With reality sliding all over the place, all I could reliably hold onto was her.
“And me,” Terra told me firmly, wrapping her tail around my legs.
“And my talking cat,” I agreed half-heartedly, lining up my bottles on the long counter near the hearth. Terra chuckled at me, unoffended. I was glad my little familiar had a sense of humor. I know I’m a weirdo, but which part was weird and which part was normal? Was it coming to a point that I didn't really know?