Despite an invasion of victorious bunny girls, witch-duels, and Thunderpunks, Ozzy still had work to do. Serious work that he needed help with.

"Just sit yourself there and perk up your ears son. This is your introduction to some ancient and highly sought after magics." Joe was walking back and forth, pausing as he talked.

"Some of the scholars in the Imperial College of the Arcane will tell you that the first recipes we have records of came from the early days of the first Emperor. That's just bullshit. The art of curing bacon goes back a lot further than that. There are recipes I've seen that date from the early Draconic Kingdoms.

"Useless to us, of course. Nothing alive can make smoke like the old dragons, and the younger breed have no patience. They always chew up the pork belly before they've half cured it. Sad to see how far they've gone downhill. Uh...Not that you should really repeat that to anyone. It might be true, but truth isn't worth much when you slide down into a wyrm's belly."

"And it's not just dragons you have to worry about once you start smoking pork belly. There are folks who take their bacon right seriously, and are willing to go to war over those beliefs."

"Some ways of smoking are considered heresy among the Olde Faiths. There have been crusades launched just on the hint some necromancer was making Ur-Bacon. And don't get me started on the debate over whether the round stuff is real bacon or not. I'll leave that up to the philosophers and Maple Priests. My advice to you is to stick to traditional recipes until you get a few dozen years of experience under your belt. Just safer that way."

"Bacon starts with pork belly, and pork belly starts with a pig. There are some other critters than can be made into something close to bacon, but it's never quite the same. Those bellies you carved off of Hell-Pigs will work just fine. We need to add a little more sugar to balance the flavors, and depending on the recipe we might use apple, rowan, or creeping death-vine for the smoke. But their bellies will work for almost all traditional bacon recipes."

"Today I'm going to teach you the basics of two recipes: Traditional Maple-Pepper, and Mage's Delight. The first is just good eating. The second is popular with mages of the more destructive sort. You can make quite a few pennies selling it, and it will be good experience for you."

They started out with the easiest of the two recipes. Ozzy was put to work slicing up the large cuts of meat into five-pound slabs. Each was rolled in peppercorns and rubbed with a mixture of salt, sugar, and spices. Barrel after barrel was filled with slabs of the uncured pork belly, and a jug of maple syrup poured into each barrel.

The syrup had been more expensive than he’d thought it would be. Suzette had some of the merchants she worked with look for it for him. Each jug was made out of heavy clay and had a cork sealed with wire and wax. He’d half expected it to be some sort of magical concoction and was somewhat disappointed that it was normal syrup. Tasty though. He’d only every had synthetic syrup in real life. Just sugar, water and whatever they added to give it a bit of fake flavor.

These barrels would be stored for a week in the cooler to cure the meat before smoking. After curing, the slabs would be put into the smokehouse for another two days over slow burning fires of rowan, holly, and apple wood. The dark, bitter taste of the meat would be pushed out and replaced with apple flavoring. If all went well, Sedgewick would be swimming in bacon soon.

Like many other craft skills, there were cantrips that made the work a little easier. Joe taught Ozzy the cantrip for curing a barrel of pork. It took him about five minutes to slowly infuse some of his mana into the barrel using the cantrip. Joe told him it wasn't a necessity, but using curing magic would spread the flavor evenly and give a better result. Ten barrels of pork at a hundred mana each used up almost half of his mana.

Makken commented on that. "Damn No wonder you're wanting to learn some magic. That's a lot of mana you have hidden under all those muscles. How the hell do you have over 2000 mana? That's serious 3rd or 4th tier wizard shit."

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Ozzy explained a bit about contract workers. "ACME and the other corporations wanted us to be able to work all day, and that included stuff like brewing, smithing, and other trades that take some mana. Downside is, we don't have a hell of a lot to use it for besides cantrips. Suzette and Delbert are the best mages we have in town, but Delbert can only make magical freezers, and a lot of Suzettes spells just summon bugs, or illusions of pets."

Joe was tapping his foot. "If you have mana left, then let's get started on the next barrel. I need you to take a little trip before we get started."

The next recipe was much more arcane. Joe had brought out a large oak barrel, it's interior charred with smoke and fire. The outside of the barrel was decorated with a series of symbols that Ozzy couldn't pin down. Looking at them just gave him a headache as the runes crawled around to the other side of the barrel and out of sight. Joe had told him to ignore them. "Don't worry about those just yet. Pay attention to the food part of the project."

Ozzy got sent on a round trip to Gadobhra with the mission to fill the strange barrel with the Dark Mana that pooled in places there. He had just enough magical vision to find those spots. The building Suzette had pointed out was filled with the stuff. Ozzy had no intention of crawling down to the building. He'd brought a long rope to tie around the barrel and toss it into the pool. When the barrel was beneath the surface of the stuff, he hauled it back up to him.

It still seemed odd to him that any magic acted like this, but Suzette had said each type had physical properties if enough was present. Dark Mana became thick and oily, somewhere between a gas and a liquid, and still invisible to the untrained eye. As he hammered the lid on the barrel, he saw movement in the ruins. Quick moving, pale figures darted closer and closer to him. He picked up the barrel and moved back to the road. Seeing their prey leave, the creatures stayed in the shadows and let out high pitched screams. Somewhere a bell tolled.

"You things, whatever the hell you are, just stay down there for now. I've got meat to smoke. I'll be back to play another day." As if they understood him, the screaming increased and continued until he was passed the gates of Gadobhra.

Joe inspected the barrel. "Yep, this will do nicely. The meat already has a lot of dark and fire mana inside of it. The Hell-Pigs absorb it as they grow. We're going to spice things up a bit. We need 120 pounds of meat added to the barrel. Do it slow so the dark mana you scooped up moves into the meat and doesn't slosh over the edge. Layer in those hot peppers between slabs. Then pour in those jugs of Strawberry Surprise that our friend Makken made special just for you. That should fill the barrel up to top. Slam the lid back on and make sure it's on tight."

Ozzy scratched his head when done. "So, fire mages like hot and spicy bacon?"

Joe looked at him oddly. "Who doesn't? But that's not all they like about this recipe. We've added a few things that have the essence of fire to the mix, along with the destructive potential of Dark Mana. That would normally give the bacon a bit of a kick, but were going to go further. When we're done, we'll have a tasty snack that turns an apprentice fire mage into a destructive terror on the battlefield. Until their mana runs out, at least."

"That barrel is special made. We'll get to that lesson down the line a way. Put your hands on the barrel, and conjure up a memory that has fire and destruction attached to it, and force what's left of your mana into the barrel."

Ozzy searched his head for a memory, and settle on the battle with the first meat demon. Fighting some fiend from hell in a burning building that ended in a fiery explosion? It didn't get much more hot or destructive than that. The barrel grabbed ahold of his mana and pulled it from him eagerly. Within a minute he was exhausted and dizzy. The runes on the barrel had quit moving around and were glowing with a red fire.

Joe examined it. "Good. Really good. The barrel is primed and ready to go. Put it down in the middle of the firepit, right in the middle of the coals. I'm going to add some wood and a little screaming coal. The barrel is going to suck up all the fire it can and infuse it into the pork bellies. These won't need to be smoked or cooked further. A day in the pit will have them finished and we can see how much power they have. "

The dwarf, upon hearing that a barrel with four gallons of his whiskey was going in the fire, suddenly found other places to be. "I'm going to back off a half-mile or so. I need to lay out the ground where my fields are going to grow. How about we meet up tomorrow morning at sunrise out at my new farm and I can dicker with our new Mayor over the cost?"

Ozzy crawled out of his pit. "Sounds good. If you hear a big explosion and the town isn't here anymore, just assume the land is free."

The dwarf laughed as he walked away. "Hmmm, don't give a dwarf an idea, boy. Some of my family would sneak back to make sure that barrel went Boom! just to save some money."

After Makken had left, Joe yelled over at Ozzy. "Still work to be done! We need to do something with those ostrich wings, and you need to please your corporate master by putting another two-dozen sedge beasts down into the pit to start smoking. Get moving. You used up your mana, but I know you have a ton of stamina left. And after your normal chores are done, we have to get in some practice on smoke rings."