Shhh was a very useful spell, but I only got it up to five before Dom came in the back. I fumbled the spell as he leaned against the door frame. The mouse became quiet instead of Terra, but it didn’t do it any good because she caught it seconds later.
“That’s why she was so upset,” Dom nodded toward Terra’s enthusiastic snack. I just cringed and cast a Shhh on it so I wouldn’t have to hear the crunching of tiny bones. It didn’t silence it completely at this level, but I could almost ignore it.
“Ready to clean?” I asked him. I’d waited to do the chores together so that we’d both get the skills up and profession experience.
“With spells, right?” he asked, casting Clean at the pile of dishes.
“Of course,” I replied, casting Repair on the counters.
“What are you drinking,” he asked me, his Clean spell taking a few extra shots to finish the dishes.
“Ale,” I shrugged and handed him the cup.
“No thanks.” He held up a hand to stop me, using his other to cast the spells.
“How do you feel about figuring out how to butcher one of those not-pigs out back?” I asked him.
“Fine, but we should hit the forge in the next hour or two if we want to have any time to make anything.” He ran out of mana, and I saw that he’d taken up the same kind of twitch I’d done. He rubbed the fabric of a pouch that looked like he might have bought in Chester’s shop. Yes, it was rabbit fur.
“Pans!” I hopped off the cleaned and repaired center counter with excitement. “I almost forgot. I miss muffins and cakes. I can’t wait to make cupcake pans.”
“We might as well finish cleaning up this place first.” He gave the pantry a curious look and I was reminded that this was the first time he’d seen this place. “Chester is hovering over Lily as she learns the spells. She doesn’t have a big mana pool, so it takes a bit for her to take them all in.”
“I didn’t think of that.” I brushed some ash back into the fire pit with my boot and then cast clean on the boot, inadvertently emptying the hearth of ashes.
“It’s okay,” he shrugged and peeked through the curtain into the tavern. “She learned that Lift Spirits spell first, so it was the hardest one.”
I shoved a few logs of wood into the hearth and lit them up with a dimmed down version of Flare.
“This lead up to the rooms?” he asked, pointing up the narrow stairs by the hearth.
“Yeah.” I cast a Clean at the hearth that I’d just disturbed, content that the new wood would put enough coals back in the hearth for a proper bank of the fire tonight. I didn’t know why I cared. Would it even matter? Was the world that realistic? These are the thoughts that plagued me as we trudged up the stairs.
Dom had the mana to clean one room before we needed to sit and rest. Needing the familiarity, I plopped down on the bed in my old room. Dom closed his eyes and leaned back to meditate, but I had plenty of mana, so I scooted over so I could use the mirror and play with the new spells.
The Lesser Disguise spell only slightly altered a single part of my face at this low level. I didn’t care because I could feel where it would go when it got higher. The Lesser Glamour was harder to work with, but if I focused on it, I could change my hair or eye color with the Beauty bonus. As I changed what it modified, it allowed me to cast it more often.
“What are you doing?” Dom interrupted my mirror play time.
“I’m practicing the spells you gave me,” I replied excitedly.
“I can see that,” he waved a hand at my now black hair.
“The red is too conspicuous in a crowd,” I pointed out logically, changing the color of my eyes to a muted grey. With a giggle, I changed his hair so that it was straight instead of super curly. Not liking it, I changed it back.
He gave a signature heavy sigh. “I don’t see the use to these things that you do,” he admitted.
“It’s easier to see things like that when you know where we’re going,” I said softly.
“I just realized that this is the first time I’ve stopped doing something all day.” He laid his head back against the wall. His comment made me think.
“I remember the first time I was in this room,” I let myself stop next to him. I knew what he meant about stopping. It was easier to get caught up in it all than it was to stop, at least for me. I told him about first meeting Sammi as I practiced the disguise and glamour spells. I told him about begging for my family first, but then finally getting Terra. Dom smiled when I talked about how flustered I’d made Sammi in that first meeting.
When Dom started casting Clean again, he noted that the spell had leveled up. He was right. We’d worked through breakfast and lunch and then I’d rushed him right into the next job. It was important to level him up, but I had to be careful not to push him too hard. Dom had a habit of overworking himself or stopping altogether. As we worked through the rooms, I told stories about Sammi and Mabel and Beau. Dom loosened up again, laughing at his old friend Beau more than he probably should have. Then again, Dom wasn’t the nice guy Beau and his crowd had thought he was.
We cleaned the tavern and all its rooms and headed out to the stable, my stories having him laughing at the sort-of horse, the not pigs, and the frog-tongued goats. It only took one smack on the tongue by Dom to discourage the lick-from-a-yard-away habit of the goat-dachshunds. When we got to the outhouses, Dom got the next level of Clean. I got my next level of the Clean spell when we slaughtered the not-pig, which was a lot harder than I’d have thought. We chopped up the meat haphazardly and dumped the chunks in the brine barrel of the tavern’s pantry. If it hadn’t been for the Preservation spell and being able to Repair a roast into a proper shape, we’d have gotten nothing for the whole experience.
We were making a tanning rack for the pigskin out of the wood Dom had chopped that morning when Chester finally came out. He detoured from heading to the forge and met us out at the very rickety rack. I’d found that we only really needed to get a basic shape for my Repair to work the object into what I wanted it to be. Dom’s Repair only helped something go back the shape it had been to start.
“You think that contraption will hold that pig skin?” Chester gave us a dubious look.
“Yes,” I said, casting the Repair spell at it. It transformed into a perfectly beautiful tanning rack.
“Holy!” Chester exclaimed and I preened. “Can you make me a few of those?”
“Copper!” I demanded, holding out my palm for payment.
“Sold,” Chester placed the copper in my palm and Dom shook his head at me as we both got Woodworking and Carpenter boosts.
“Ready for us?” Dom asked a goggling Chester.
“Just need to warm up the forge,” he gave a shrug and looked up at the sun which was still a good two hours above the mountain’s edge.
“I can help.” I rubbed my hands together playfully.
My stories seemed to have given Dom a second wind. He cast the Breeze spell as I cast the Flares until the forge was hot enough for Chester’s expert eye. I ruined two sheets of metal before I made something that even my Repair spell could make into muffin pans. I paid Chester a silver to sell me the pan. What I really did was sell it to Chester as a lumpy sheet of scrap metal, cast Repair on it, and had him sell it back to me as a muffin tin. What it got me was the profession of merchant and that was an odd way of going around the block to get it. At least it did when we did a bunch of versions of that transaction. Then we got the Merchant profession for Dom the same way.
“You out sang Beau?” Dom queried, banging out something that almost looked like a dagger.
“Not really,” I admitted, heating up a blob of something that I was hoping to turn into a horseshoe. I didn’t need a horseshoe and nothing I could make would fit the horse out back, but I wanted something easy to get my skill up. It turned out that a horseshoe wasn’t easy.
“She got him to give up before the song was even over,” Chester put in, and I wondered that he remembered. He hadn’t last time.
“Beau just gave up?” Dom asked, knowing that was very un-Beau-like.
“We played a game of chicken and I won,” I summed it up, more focused on my blob than the conversation. “He thought he had enough health to get to the end of the song, and I thought he didn’t.”
“We didn’t see anything but the bard giving up,” Chester told Dom, correcting Dom’s posture over the anvil.
“The Poison spell?” Dom asked.
“You used poison?” Chester stopped to stare at me.
“I offered to heal him if he conceded, so he conceded,” I pulled out my blob and watched it wobble at the end of the stick it was on.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“It’s best you don’t tell anyone else that story,” Chester warned. Dom moved his dagger-ish thing to the forge to warm it up as I took my blob to the anvil. I hammered it for some skill points, but I knew I really didn’t want to do anything with it.
“Why?” I asked, hammering it flat as Dom quenched his blade in a barrel of oil.
“The use of poison has penalties.” Chester checked the temper on Dom’s new dagger, his file skating across the blade.
“I didn’t kill him with it,” I reasoned, finally finding a shape that could be useful in my bit of metal. I hammered a thin wedge, rounded at the top and flatter at the bottom.
“Death isn’t prohibited,” Chester explained, handing the dagger back to Dom. “Just poison.”
“This is new,” Terra piped up, her game of chasing small embers having grown boring as soon as she’d found that catching those embers singed her fur.
“I know poison potions are black market items, but using poison is against the law too?” I asked, trying to keep my wedge thin and still rounded like the peel of an orange wedge.
“Prison sentence,” Chester nodded, directing Dom to the grinder that was much better than the one in the gnoblin dungeon.
“Is someone going to come out here to arrest her?” Dom paused his play with his dagger to ask.
“I doubt it,” Chester shook his head.
“You don’t look too concerned,” Dom said in our link, summoning Terra after a quick warning.
“It’s Fizzbarren being Fizzbarren,” I blew out a breath on the metal, pretending to be focused on my work instead of our mental conversation. “When he doesn’t like something, he finds a very shallow way to circumvent it.”
“He wanted her to find out,” Terra put in, for once not complaining about being used as a communication device.
“Then he could be reading what we’re thinking so keep the shock to a minimum.” It was as blatant as we’d been in talking about Fizzbarren or thinking about him. I could only hope that Sammi, the Quill and the engine were on my side enough to redact the conversation but that wouldn’t hold up if Fizzbarren was watching closely enough so I shut my mouth mentally and physically on the subject.
“I know what I want to do with this,” I announced, changing the topic as calmly as I could. “With a little glue and some judicious use of Repair, we could have steel-toed boots!”
“Sounds good,” Dom agreed out loud, letting the mental connection slide away.
“Steel toes?” Chester asked, so I pulled off my boots to show him what I meant. I didn’t touch the hot metal to my boots, but he got the idea when I held it over the outside.
“I’ve got some glue I use on the handles,” Chester nodded, rummaging in the workbench as we exchanged pointed looks over his head.
We didn’t leave the forge until well after dusk, and when I noticed the time, I rushed us to the tavern for our night gigs. Mabel gave me a frown as I scurried in. Only then did I realize that I was covered in soot, and I only realized because Dom was worse than I was. I patted down my clothes while casting a Clean that covered us both. Dom and I both cast Lesser Glamour and I could only hope that we looked presentable as I didn’t think Mabel was going to wait for us to go upstairs for a quickie before we started work.
I pressed my lips together to hide my smile. There was just something about annoying Mabel that made me happy. I waved at a few of the adventurers who waved back as Dom and I strode over to the bar and Mabel’s adorable scowl.
“You,” she pointed at me, “take up that tray and serve the table that just walked in while I teach this one how to pour an ale.”
Dom rolled his eyes behind Mabel’s back, causing Terra to giggle from her perch on a stool near the central fire pit. I think Dom got the comedy skill just from making faces behind Mabel’s back while she instructed on each type of brew that they had along the back wall. I’d only ever seen her serve ale to the adventurers, but if it made her feel important to think her job was tough, more power to her. I itched to make a proper pina colada just to show her up, but I was stuck plopping ales in front of adventurers that I knew I could kill in a minute. I sighed and did the job to get the profession boosts.
I thought of the almond syrup I’d made that morning and the banana thing we’d squished for the pancake flavoring. I ducked into the kitchen and out the back door to our place to rummage around in our pantry for ten minutes before I headed back for my turn at the bar. I nodded while Mabel pointed and I took note of a jug she called vodka and another darker one she called rum.
“I’ve got an idea,” I announced loudly to Mabel who scowled at my interruption.
Dom gave me a look as he slowly lugged another tray of the abhorrently boring ale. I just grinned and banged a metal mug on the bar to catch everyone’s attention.
“I’m going to pour a drink into this tiny little glass.” I held up a shot glass. “It’s going to taste like banana pie and… and… if you can drink four of them and still say the phrase… double baby buggy bumpers five times without slurring, the four drinks are on me.”
A cheer went up around the room. What can I say? I was in a mood. Mabel scowled and tried to get me to shut up, but I got up on the bar to continue.
“But,” I yelled out over the sound of them loudly making their way to the bar, “if you slur or pass out or somehow fail to say double baby buggy bumpers five times very clearly at the end of it, you owe me a silver for the drinks!”
A roar answered my challenge. I jumped back down as they ribbed each other and a few of the higher levels were goaded to the front of the queue. Dom watched me shaking his head. We’d seen Coyote Ugly together. It was worth it just for the fun.
“If they spew all over my tavern, you’re cleaning it up,” Mabel threatened me, her hands waving around like I’d set the inn on fire. I hadn’t this time any more than I had the last time.
“How much for both those jugs of the vodka and rum?” I asked, doing some quick math in my head, and hoping I had enough to cover it. I was running low of my gnoblin dungeon money with all these deals I was making.
“Two gold,” she blustered.
“Bullshit,” I countered. “One gold max.”
“Fine,” she brushed me off and handed me the two jugs as I handed her my last gold.
“You know the phrase is rubber baby buggy bumpers, right?” Dom said into my ear as I mixed the drink.
“Like they know the difference?” I countered. I shook the contents in a pitcher I barely managed to cover with a rag-covered wooden plate. I gave the concoction a taste and added a bit more banana and shook it again.
When I was done, I lined up a row of every shot glass in the house and poured it out as I shouted out the rules. “Here’s how it’s done! You take a shot, toss it back like this,” and I downed the first shot like a pro, casting Cure Poison on myself as I did it. I already knew that it countered the worst of the alcohol, but it didn’t block all of it. “And then the next until you’ve downed four in a row like this.” I downed another three and almost couldn’t get the spell out around the daze of the third one. “Then you say it, double baby buggy bumpers, double baby buggy bumpers… five times and you win!!”
I shoved four shots forward and yelled, “Who’s first?!”
It tasted vaguely like banana pie, not that any of them managed to complain about the taste when they’d done a few. Ten tried the game, two of which passed out after the last shot, three of which managed to say the phrase once, three of which immediately threw up, one of which managed to say it twice without flubbing the line and one of which actually beat the game. He passed out a half hour later after being showered with several celebratory ales from his buddies.
I let Dom cast Cure Poison on everyone who tried it, but only after they’d lost or passed out. They also didn’t notice us casting a lot of spells all over the house. Most of the participants were at least half-carried to rooms upstairs within an hour of our fun and games. The rest settled back for a quiet evening of food and moderate ale consumption.
Dom and I finally got our own dinner an hour after that, a dinner that no one interrupted. Marlo delivered ales on the house from Mabel, both of which I drank because Dom didn’t care for the stuff. He did drink one of my banana shots, but only because I dumped the shot into a whole mug full of banana juice. He still drank it slowly. Where was an ice spell when I needed it?
You’ve probably noticed that I stopped including the near-constant stat, skill, and profession updates on every other line. I’ve been saving it for the end of this chapter. It’s a surprise, so just sit back and enjoy the story until we get there. Then I’ll give those of you who like stat stuff and numbers a lovely little surprise of character sheets for both Dom and I. For those who don’t care much for those things, you can just skim through the final reveal of what Dom and I managed to accomplish in one day.
Name: Karma
Class: Mage-ish
Level: 12 (16,584/30,755)
Profession: Cook (Level 6: 330/2700), Blacksmith (Level 4: 100/1200), Storyteller (Level 4: 80/1200), Teacher (Level 4: 50/1200), Alchemist (Level 3: 100/800), Carpenter (Level 3: 50/800), Singer (Level 3: 40/800), Bartender (Level 2: 20/500), Maid (Level 2: 20/500), Butcher (Level 1: 20/300), Leatherworker (Level 1: 20/300), Merchant (Level 1: 20/300), Seamstress (Level 1: 20/300), Stablehand (Level 1: 20/300), Tanner (Level 1: 20/300), Waitress (Level 1: 20/300), Woodsman (Level 1: 20/300)
Health: 4335/4335
Mana: 4641/4641
Intelligence: 44
Will: 47
Strength: 42
Constitution: 43
Charm: 40
Beauty: 17
Perception: 43
Dexterity: 51
Luck: 46
Skills: Blacksmithing (52), Dodge (46), Identify (45), Knife Fighting (43), Cooking (38), Meditation (38), Leatherworking (37), Duel Wielding (28), Bartering (27), Multiple Foe Combat (26), Piercing (26), Storytelling (25), Woodworking (23), Alcohol Tolerance (22), Mana Manipulation (19), Singing (19), Intimidation (17), Comedy (16), Kick (16), Sewing (14), Unarmed Combat (13), Dancing (12), Flirting (12), Grapple (12), Sneak (12), Manic Charge (9), Teaching (9), Barricade (7), Disarm (7), Poison Resistance (4), Tanning (3), Skinning (2), Slashing (2), Milking (1), Swordplay (1)
Spells: Cleanest (66), Blast (60), Poisoned Mana (56), Repair (53), Healer (43), Create Spellbook (41), Mana Vision (37), Preservation (26), Buff (22), Casting Stone (16), Cure Poison (16), Soft Breeze (16), Moisten (15), Lift Spirits (12), Summon Witch’s Familiar (12), Lesser Disguise (11), Lesser Glamour (8), Shhh (6)
Recipes: Too many, Besides, you’re not really paying attention to this, are you? You’re skimming… like a college student.
Name: Dom
Class: Serial Killer
Level: 4 (690/1200)
Profession: Alchemist (Level 2: 100/500), Blacksmith (Level 2: 100/500), Carpenter (Level 2: 50/500), Cook (Level 2: 30/500), Maid (Level 2: 30/500), Teacher (Level 2: 20/500), Woodsman (Level 2: 20/500), Bartender (Level 1: 80/300), Butcher (Level 1: 60/300), Leatherworker (Level 1: 40/300), Merchant (Level 1: 20/300), Stablehand (Level 1: 20/300), Tanner (Level 1: 20/300), Waiter (Level 1: 20/300),
Health: 850/850
Mana: 825/825
Intelligence: 16
Will: 17
Strength: 20
Constitution: 14
Charm: 15
Beauty: 12
Perception: 19
Dexterity: 22
Luck: 18
Skills: Flirting (18), Meditation (16), Identify (14), Cooking (13), Blacksmithing (11), Woodworking (6), Dodge (4), Intimidation (4), Leatherworking (4), Poison Resistance (4), Skinning (4), Tanning (4), Bartering (3), Teaching (3), Comedy (2), Grapple (2), Hide (2), Sneak (2), Piercing (2), Unarmed Combat (2), Alcohol Tolerance (1)
Spells: Clean (22), Basic Repair (20), Shhh (16), Basic Heal (15), Spark (10), Summon Witch’s Familiar (10), Mild Poison (6), Soft Breeze (6), Lesser Disguise (4), Lesser Glamour (4), Moisten (4), Casting Stone (3), Cure Poison (3), Lift Spirits (3), Minor Buff (3), Create Scroll (2), Freshen (2)