Chapter 1: The Re-Opening
He dusted the display stands and shelves, he pressed his clothes, and he had labeled everything. He was prepared as he could be for the opening—or reopening, as it were. His smile had even been stretched to its widest, waiting for the first customers to arrive. Any minute now. His cheeks hurt from smiling so much, but it was their brand.
Wouldn’t be the Happy Cure-All if he weren’t happy, right?
Forty minutes passed. Don was just undergoing the revelation that smiling to yourself in an empty shop was creepy and he shouldn’t do it anymore when the bell above the door rang.
“Welcome to the Happy Cure-All. How can I help y- Oh, it’s you.” His smile dipped. “Your tunic’s on backwards.”
“Is it?” asked one Etta Last-Name-Not-Provided. She craned her neck and seeing that her tunic was, in fact, backwards, she shrugged and sauntered further in, uncaring.
Etta was a capital-M Mess, and that was putting it lightly. She was around the same age as him, Don was sure, 18 or so, but her choice of clothing, either too big or backward or inside out, made her look younger than she was. Add in a lack of common sense that couldn’t tell the difference between a whetstone and a wet stone, and it was a wonder how she had survived this long.
“So where have you been this time?” he asked.
“You know, here and there,” said Etta, eloquent as always. Another quirk of Etta’s was that she could disappear for months at a time, only popping up whenever she felt like. She had no family, or, at least, none of that she spoke of, though not that unheard of. She was not the first orphan to pass through Agrivik’s walls in search of job or money or fame, and she will certainly not be the last.
“So,” said Etta as she drew nearer. Her fingers left oily prints on the display stands as she passed. “Where’s your mom? You covering for her while she’s out or something?”
His smile fell completely. “She’s sick.”
Etta ducked her head as she looked at the potion bottles. They were helpfully labeled Potions of Healing. “Oh? Well, give her my well wishes.”
There are times, small windows of light where one must ask oneself: do I go farther down this road or do I let this go? It wasn’t any of Etta’s business, but if she was sticking around, then she’d learn, eventually.
His voice came out strangled as he replied, “I don’t think they’ll matter.”
Etta, for all her obliviousness and poor manners, caught on immediately. She popped up from the potions and stared at him, her dark brown eyes wide. “Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure? Have you gone to the healers?”
“We’ve gone to the temple healers, the guild healers, hired two different physicians, and a cursebreaker. We’re sure.”
Etta fidgeted with the end of her tunic. “How long has she been sick?”
He thought back. It was hard when you’re taking care of someone, when the prognosis gets worse and worse, to imagine a time when the sickness wasn’t part of your life. He tried to remember the last time he saw his mother brewing potions in the backroom or walking the streets.
“A month after you left, I think. So… five months ago.”
“Oh,” repeated Etta.
The Happy Cure-All was not at all happy at the moment. In fact, it was coalescing into a thick, ill-tinged suffocating cloud, which had become Don’s new normal. New normal or not, though, he needed to run a business or risk adding financial ruin atop of every other problem they had. He was about to suggest Etta leave and come back later when she interrupted him.
“Maybe I can help you run the shop? I can… make some potions in the back?”
“The last time you tried to make a potion, you exploded the cauldron.”
“Well, I can sweep the floors or, I don’t know, take inventory?”
It was clear she wanted to help. If he were younger, he would’ve rejected it, filled with too much pride, but pride was for people who didn’t have sick mothers and missing fathers.
“I already swept and cleaned everything. You can do inventory. There are a few items in the back that mom got we couldn’t identify. List down what you can find out about them.”
She did a brief salute before hopping over the counter—clipping her ankle as she did and then cursing every god there was before limping back to the back room.
“And Etta?”
She turned. “Yeah?”
“Please don’t blow anything up.”
She gave another, sloppier salute. “Wouldn’t dream of it!”
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Lunch passed by with no customers. Etta, her ankle apparently healed, sprinted out the doors the instant he said, “Lunch br-“. Meanwhile, he prepared stew for him and his mother. He had only descended the stairs, ready to return to work, when he realized the counter was occupied.
“I just cleaned that this morning,” he said. And then, “Wait, how did you get back in? I locked the doors after you left.”
Etta, in a clear bid to wear the title ‘Most Annoying Helper’, sat cross-legged on the store’s counter, a sloppy joe in one hand and no napkin or rag in sight. No, not any sloppy joe. He recognized the pungent smell which followed each of the Hole in the Wall’s creations, which meant she had brought back the sloppiest joe imaginable.
“I locked picked them,” she said in between ravenous bites, “and you can clean it again later.”
“I’m trying to attract customers here.”
“Then attract them.”
“I can’t attract them when the first thing a customer sees through the window is you getting sloppy joe everywhere.”
“No one cares about that.”
“You don’t care about that, and just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others won’t. Off the counter.”
“Ugh, you’re worse than your mom.”
Etta hopped off the counter as the shop’s bell rang for the second time that day.
And oh, how Don wished it hadn’t.
Entering the shop were four people: a dwarf, a dark elf, and two humans. But not any dwarf, dark elf, or two humans. They were the Fuck U Ups. The Fuck U Ups, or the Fuck Ups, as most of the town liked to call them, were an adventuring party that could not shut their yap and behave even if it paid them 1,000 gold. Don had learned early on from his father that the customer was always right unless they were the Fuck U Ups, in which case they were very much wrong and will try to scam you out of your underthings. While having never had the pleasure of serving the Fuck U Ups before, he’d seen them around town and wasn’t impressed.
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The last time the Fuck U Ups had entered the store, his mother swore she almost had an aneurysm, and that was before the sickness took hold of her.
Still, Don smiled. This was the Happy Cure-All, after all.
“—and can you believe them? I mean, everyone knows we’re the better team,” said the human girl. A haggler, his parents warned.
“Well, they’ve certainly learned that now. Having one foot less teaches that lesson intimately,” said her male companion. He had a wicked scar over his nose that Don used to admire, when he was, like, four, before he learned the guy got it from being too drunk to understand chucking glass at the ceiling directly above your head is a bad idea.
He clapped to draw their attention. Have to stay in control. “Hello there. Is there anything I can help you with?”
“Oh, just browsing,” said Haggler.
“Ay,” said Cut Nose, “how much for this?” He pointed to a belt in the far corner of the room. It was a beat-up belt, an item he’d found in the backroom gathering dust and enchanted, so its buckle lit up when you twisted it. It wasn’t worth much, 15 gold, give or take, but Cut Nose didn’t know that.
“40 gold pieces.”
“40?” Cut Nose raised his brow. “And what makes it worth 40?”
“It’s a Belt of Beacon. On your command, it will shine a light that will guide you home or guide your companions to you so you’ll never get lost.”
Embellishments, as his father said, were never a crime. At least, not in Agrivik.
Cut Nose hummed. No way was he buying it, but he pretended he did, looking the belt over. “Show me how it works,” he said, gesturing Don to come closer to his shadowy corner. His shadowy corner where Don would have a terrible position to spy on his friends. Asshole.
“Well, if you come here with it, I can show you,” said Don with his most-pleasant retail voice.
Cut Nose dithered a bit, grumbling, but he brought the belt to the counter as asked. He then fluffed up like a peacock while imitating a mating dance, doing his damnedest to block Don’s view of the rest of the Fuck Ups.
“Hey, you. Can you help me out? What’s this over here?” called the dark elf, holding up the obviously labeled Potion of Invisibility aloft. It was only then that Don realized Etta had taken her spot on the countertop again, her beady little eyes following the Fuck U Ups with intense scrutiny.
“Oh, I don’t work here,” said Etta.
They turned to him for confirmation.
“She doesn’t work here,” he confirmed.
The dark elf grumbled. A scowl flashed across Cut Nose’s face before it smoothed into a slimy grin. He ditched the belt with a, “What was I thinking? This doesn’t go along with my outfit at all.”
By the time the Fuck U Ups were done shopping, they had gathered a few healing potions, the potion of invisibility, and a few enchanted daggers.
“That’ll be 450 gold—“
“382 gold and 5 silver,” said the Bane of Don’s Existence as she curled a strand of blond hair around her finger.
“I’m sorry,” he said with a stiff smile, “we don’t haggle here.”
“Oh, but you offer guild member discounts, don’t you?”
She adjusted her green cloak, drawing attention to the gold pin holding it together. She flicked it smugly. “We’re gold-ranking members, which means a 15% discount, doesn’t it?”
Like hell, she didn’t know the exact discount rate being a gold member afforded her. Inwardly, he was screaming. Who the hell was giving the Fuck U Ups gold rank? All his life, they’d been bronze members, and only in the last few months had they gotten silver. Who in creation was giving out gold rank willy nilly?
Outwardly, he smiled and eyed the rest of the team. The dwarf’s pin was half-hidden by his beard, the dark elf had hers resting near her hip, and Cut Nose pulled his from the pouch hanging 'round his neck with a smile which showcased his bright but stinky pearly whites.
“I’m sorry, but may I see your pins?” asked Don. “It’s not that I don’t trust you—“ I definitely don’t trust you “—it’s just story policy, you understand.” He held out his hands and immediately regretted it.
Don’s eyes watered as the Fuck U Ups put their pins needle-down into his hand with sadistic relish. He didn’t flinch, but it was only out of spite. Carefully plucking out the pins, he laid them out on the table and compared them to the pins in his dad’s journal. He turned the pins round and round, checking and rechecking, but couldn’t find anything wrong with them.
Even though the transaction would be red in the accounting ledger, he returned the pins and took their gold. “Everything looks fine!” he said. “Hope you like your purchase. Come again!”
Not.
Despite everything, the Fuck U Ups left the Happy Cure-All entirely too happy.
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Besides Old Lady Agnes, who dropped off a few plant potion supplies and buy some incense—less for any personal use, but more out of support—the shop didn’t receive any other customers. Don had known the first day would be rough, but he’d thought it would be from too many customers, not too little. The Happy Cure-All had been Agrivik’s premier location for enchanted items, spell scrolls, and quality potions for years, and even after his father went missing and the enchanted items and spell scrolls ran dry, his mother’s potions had been more than enough to bring people by.
But now that his mother was sick…
“You look stressed,” remarked Etta as she handed him a complete inventory of their enchanted items. At a glance, most of them were duds, not worth the penny his mother paid for them, but they were sellable. Barely. “Wanna walk around the temple and freak the tourists out?”
“Nah, I have to check on mom.”
He’d checked on her briefly a few hours ago, but hadn’t since. It was okay, though. He’d given her a bell to ring if she needed something, but knowing her, she’d hate to ask for help, especially with the store open.
“Can I come with?” Etta asked softly.
“Yeah,” he strode across the floor and flipped the open sign to closed. “Mom would love to see you again.”
They climbed the stairs to the flat above the shop. As they climbed, the air turned from open and airy to heavy and bitter; the dried out herbs Agnes gave them hung from the ceiling like floating bags of tea. He led Etta past the tiny kitchen and into the hallway, ignoring his room on the right and leading her to the little nook on the left. He knocked on the door.
“Mom, we have a guest.”
The door was half ajar and his knock opened it further. He peeked in and his blood ran cold.
“Mom!?”
His mother, who had been a little lethargic, but awake during lunch, lay half off her bed, her hands stained a sickly, deathly black.