Yep. By the evidence of the dancing sparkles running up my arms this time, my hypothesis was either right on the money or I was playing with the equivalent of the childish game of shuffling your feet on the plush carpet to shock your sister. Not that I had a sister. Step-sister, yes, and yes she was awful. Real sister, no. No, I had a sadistic husband, who’d had brothers, who taught the game to my daughter the hard way and had me refereeing several of the shock wars in the house. That is that my husband taught it to my daughter not his brothers, as they had never deigned to visit our family, probably because my husband was indeed a sadistic bastard.
All I could think about the whole time I was doing it was that I needed to get my family back. The sooner I got this quest done, the sooner I could bring my daughter here. After all, I’d left her with that sadistic bastard, whom I loved dearly, but without a referee… What were they thinking? Had I just disappeared? I couldn’t even remember anything happening last. My musing only earned me a splinter as I levered myself up out of the ashy fire pit using the counters of my kitchen.
Beauty -1
Tired of fighting magic and my kitchen tools, I headed outside into the yard. What did this world use for sandpaper? It was just gritty dirt glued onto paper. I knew where the gritty dirt was. If I glued it to a piece of wood or a rock, would that work? Glue. Sugar? Could I get the sugar hot enough? Did the sugar-like substance here even work like that? I’d just use sand and that cake of too harsh soap to clean the dishes. What would happen if I just dumped a bunch of sand on the kitchen “counters” and then ran a smooth rock over the top?
Intelligence +1
I was broke a lot in my old world. A lot. I knew how to do laundry in a gas station sink with the grit they used to use as soap. I knew how to sharpen a cheap pocketknife with a bit of smooth cement. I could figure out how to make my kitchen counters quit attacking me. Water would just make them swell and splinter some more but oil and some grit? Maybe. I put my mind to it and dug out a bucket of grease that didn’t look good enough to cook with. I slathered the center counter with the grease and then wrapped a rock with one of those rags from the corner. After a few stops and starts, I’d gotten a combination of the gritty sand, rock and grease that took the majority of the worst of the splinters out of my center counter.
Skill Learned: Woodworking – how to unmake splinters and influence furniture.
I left another coating of the grease to seep into the wood of the rest of the counters and looked around for the next thing to keep my mind off of how much I missed my family.
If Beau was one day’s travel away from me for every level he was ahead of me, then I needed to somehow attain at least one level every day. I didn’t think a level or five in cooking skill was going to help me defeat him. I’d gotten a lot of skill levels and stat bumps in various things but nothing so far on how to get a level in a class. At this point, my mana and health were still at the default minimum, so I was pretty sure I was no match for whatever Beau had made of himself here.
Stew simmering, pies bubbling, kitchen clean and another set of dishes done, and I was ready to explore more of my world. The kitchen had four doorways. The one toward the yard was familiar now. There was another curtained opening that Mabel had disappeared into, a stairway behind the hearth, and a closed door. When I opened the closed door, I found a marvelous store of food that I spent more time than necessary exploring.
Constitution +2
Sacks of flour, something that was more like sugar, a small, lidded bucket full of salt, and enough root vegetables to keep me in stew for a month. There was a huge barrel of brining meat that held promise. It was pickled with some sea water, and I wondered if the town was close to the ocean. It occurred to me that I was like a child again, focused on my immediate environment of home and hearth until I got developed or brave enough to look out my front door and see a neighborhood or a village beyond. I knew I wasn’t ready for a world map. I sorted stuff. I stalled. Then I braved the curtained doorway.
Will +1
The main room was a tavern. I’d known it was likely a tavern from the rough dishes and recently tapped ale the grumpy woman had brought me. The room was large enough for about five large tables bracketed by long benches that might seat a half dozen patrons at each table. There were smaller tables surrounded by some backless stools nearer to the huge fire pit in the middle of the room and a long bar that guarded the curtained entrance to my kitchen. There weren’t any windows, but I knew from the open kitchen doorway behind me that it was getting near to dusk. What did the nighttime bring in a place like this?
My new boss was cleaning mugs in a classic barkeep way. There were shelves behind the bar and under it. The bar shelves were stacked with plates, silverware, mugs, and bowls that were neat and clean. Cups of every shape and size were lined up there too. The back wall shelves that were bisected by my doorway held liquor. There were large kegs and small ones, shiny bottles and dusty ones, a few clay containers corked with crumbling stoppers. The largest containers could probably fill a trough, and the smallest barely a glass or two. Yep, it was a tavern. If the stairways at either end of the bar were to the same place my stairs led to, I could tell the upstairs covered my kitchen area and half the main room, making this place an inn as well as a tavern. The rest was open with a balcony that belonged on a western set.
My boss and I were the only ones in the place. I caught her attention and she grunted at me. Without a word, she slid me a mug, her brows rising when I just leaned back and took a long sip. I smiled over the mug at her and wiggled my eyebrows.
Charm +1
“Name’s Mabel.” She finally smiled back at me.
“Nice to meet you Mabel,” I responded, not sure what to say my name was. I’d never liked the name I’d grown up with. I’d given my favorite name to my daughter, and I was planning on her joining me so I couldn’t take that. I thought of old gaming names, my fan fiction author name, nicknames from school, and the snarky comment on my character sheet about the name my parents gave me. Then I thought of Beau. He’d kept his name for the most part, just replacing his last name with his preferred occupation.
“You can call me Karma,” I told her.
Name Chosen: Karma
“I heard Karma’s a bitch.” Mabel smacked her lips at me with a calculating look.
“Only when you deserve it,” I snarked back.
Charm +1
“A cook named Karma.” Mabel puckered her lips. “Sounds like trouble at the very least.”
“My profession is cook, not troublemaker,” I stated commandingly, hoping that it would choose my profession and fill in that blank too. Nope. There was no notification. I’d get these gaming rules down at some point. I wondered briefly where my guide was, but just shook my head to myself and gave my attention back to Mabel.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“You gotta be paid for it to be a profession,” Mabel chuckled at me. “And folks gotta order food to earn ya a copper or two.”
I nodded and took another sip of ale with a little grimace. I wasn’t a beer drinker at home, and I didn’t often go to bars. A nice glass of wine with dinner or champagne at New Year's was my thing. I could make a good mudslide when pressed. I’d taken to having a shot or five of Fireball after finals, but I didn’t drink a lot. I was more interested in knowing how to make the drinks than guzzling them.
A crack of light split the wall opposite the bar, and I tried and failed not to flinch. The image of a grizzled old guy walked in, hunched over like he was wearing some invisible backpack that weighed half his own weight. He plucked a wide-brimmed, brown hat off his head and smacked it against his thigh, ruffling the fresh straw that covered the floor, but not enough to move it away from his solid, scarred boots.
“Hey Beryle,” Mabel called out to him, busying herself pouring an ale. “You want some stew?”
“Did you cook it?” he curled a lip in her direction, scrunching up the wrinkles on his face like a pug dog.
“Nope.” Mabel didn’t seem to take offense. “Got a new cook.”
I picked up the ale Mabel had poured and took it out to Beryle, who’d sat himself at a table near the huge fireplace that took up the very center of the big room. He kicked an extra log toward the pile in the middle with a loud thump and a louder grunt. He had a rough carved pipe in one hand that he lit by taking a pair of tongs and a coal from the middle of the fire pit. It didn’t smell bad, and it wasn’t anything I recognized.
“Give it a try,” I suggested with as charming a smile as I could muster up.
“I can smell something,” he admitted, placing two coppers on the table. “I’ll try, though don’t waste the charm on me. This old man aint got no extra coin for ya.”
I picked up the coppers and handed them over to Mabel who tapped them twice on the bar where they disappeared. I hurried back to my kitchen and spooned up a bowl of stew. After giving my ale one more look and my stew a taste, I dumped the rest of the cup into the stew and then sprinkled on a bit more salt. Another stir and it was bar food. I nudged the charred wood around and slid another log on. Then I took the pies out and gave them a test. The crusts were golden and perfect. With a smile, I shoved a wedge of the flatbread I’d figured wasn’t savable so deep into the stew that I hoped no one would notice that it was tough as Beryle’s boots.
Cooking +1
Bowl and spoon in hand, I returned to set the thing in front of Beryle. Two coppers. That had probably been one copper for the stew and another for the ale. That meant my earnings were going to be awfully meager.
“I’ve got a pie or two cooking up something sweet if you’ve got an extra copper for dessert,” I suggested, hoping no one was expecting dessert to be included with the meal.
Beryle took a long taste of the stew, and then took a longer look into his sparse purse.
“I’ll give you some time to think about it.” I backed away, not wanting to pressure.
No one gave me any grief over charging for dessert, so I was getting an idea of what a copper was worth. Now if I only knew how many coppers there were in a gold. I fetched my empty cup from the kitchen and returned to lean against my doorway to watch for a tiny bit. It wasn’t rowdy yet. I pretended to drink ale out of my empty mug.
Charm +1
I hadn’t been big on making a ton of money in my world. I’d been all about helping people and making the world a better place in whatever little way I could. It wasn’t until my homeschooled daughter wanted to go to school that I even thought about it. They wouldn’t let her into high school because she was too young, so I signed her up for college… at twelve. It only took a standardized test score and a transcript of her homeschooling experience that I whipped up in Excel in an afternoon. Now there was a smart kid, but she was still a kid, and I’ll admit, I was a little jealous since I’d never completed college… so I signed up with her. Yeah, crazy, but hey I’m full of crazy schemes that barely skate the edges of the rules.
When it was time to take a science class, I signed us up for the harder one on a lark. When we got really good grades, I wondered, hey, can we go to medical school? My kid’s a sweetheart and smart as a whip but she’s got confidence problems. Katherine, we call her Kat, told me in no uncertain terms that she could not become a doctor and she didn’t want to. Well, she told me the same thing about getting into college and the same thing about that hard science class and the same thing about just about every crazy scheme I came up with. Thing is, I didn’t take that standardized test that scored her in the top 15% country-wide of high school kids. I didn’t get her that A in science class and I certainly couldn’t have gotten her through all the coursework and then accepted into medical school. She thinks I did, but I didn’t. I’m not the only one who made the Dean’s List every year we went together.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted her here. She’d stomp around convinced that she couldn’t do anything here, but then she’d take up magic and…
The door to the tavern opened again for a dusty group of a half dozen travelers. It was like I’d walked into a DnD campaign. Leather clothing, sturdy boots, swords or other weapons strapped to their backs; they were adventurers. I scanned their faces quickly, my heart in my throat, looking for Beau. Would I even recognize him? I ducked back into the kitchen to spoon up a small plate of pie for Mabel and returned just as she was lugging a tray full of ales to their table near the door. I left the pie at her station. If she knew what we were serving, maybe I wouldn’t have to serve it.
“Sorry I’m late,” was hollered out over the traveler’s conversation by a woman with the build of a barmaid, the hair of an 80’s country singer, and the squeaky voice of Betty Boop. “I got that.” She grabbed the tray from Mabel and grinned at the easily charmed men who nearly drooled at her attentions. I retreated to my kitchen, but not before Mabel slipped me a key and gave me a nod toward the balcony.
I was tired, but I figured that I should set a few things up for morning. I mixed up a slurry of yeast from the sourdough starter, flour and some fruit that smelled a bit too close to spoiled for my liking out of the pantry. I fed the sourdough starter and banked the fire so that the stew would keep warm without spoiling too soon. I had to trust that Mabel would take care of it the rest of the night. After a final look around, I settled in to eat a piece of a pie. It was good enough for my second meal of the day.
“You the new cook?” the blond barmaid I’d seen before asked me as she swung into the kitchen.
“That’s me,” I sighed, taking another bite of what could almost taste like plum-berry pie. “I’m Karma.”
“I’m Marlo,” she said, scooping out a serving of stew into a bowl.
“Nice to meet you, Marlo,” I replied, getting up to break off a piece of the cracker-like bread and stuff it into her bowl. “You should try the stew and pie. That way you’ll know what you’re serving the customers.”
“Really?” She perked up. Not waiting for me to change my mind, she pulled a large wooden spoon out of her apron and scooped up some stew straight from the pot. She blew on it a bit as she eyed me in the darkening kitchen. She took a tentative sip, then a bit of potato-like stuff, and then groaned around a chunk of meat. “This is gooood.”
I pushed the half of my pie I hadn’t yet finished at her and she eagerly licked her spoon clean of the stew and tried the pie. I knew what it meant for a waitress to like what she was serving. She’d sell it better if she knew it was good. I’d never been a waitress but I tipped well, and they just naturally talked to me. I just raised my fork to her like a mug in a toast and she giggled in a way that made me feel totally out of my element. I wasn’t a social person by nature. Oh, I could make conversation with almost anyone, but it was more work than cooking. Marlo was obviously more social and good for her on that, but I was ready to withdraw for the night. I nodded mutely while she jabbered on.
“There’s a bard due in this weekend.” She talked with her mouth half-full so I avoided looking at her. “A lot of folks’ll come in for that. If they taste stuff like this, we’ll be full next week. You staying that long?”
I focused on the first part of what she was saying as my stomach dropped. “A bard?”
“Yeah, they come through for the adventurers who fill this place come the week’s end,” she explained, eyeing the rest of my pie. I just pushed it toward her.
“You know the name of the bard?” I asked as casually as my panicked mind could do it.
“I think it’s Jerry, or Taggert?” she waved her spoon around when she talked.
“Not Beau, right?” I asked, twisting my hands painfully.
“Never heard of him,” she told me, scraping the pie plate with her spoon. I didn’t hear anything else she said, though she was still talking while I figured out how to breathe again.