“Jubilee!” argues Fresh, her voice echoing around the basement. “I have no idea how to make a heating bead that big!” she protests. “It’s not even a bead anymore, it’s like… a heating boulder!”

Jubilee shrugs. “Nobody could have known that by ‘a small child’ he was referring to an orcish kid.”

Fresh groans, looking at the small heating bead on the table that she is using for reference.

Making these is one thing, but she isn’t really sure how she’s even supposed to start on one in the size that the man wanted for his forging operation. Plus she isn’t really sure how a heating bead, even a large one, could be useful for a forge. They certainly don’t get hot enough to melt metal. But the man is from the family that runs the orichalcum forge and he seems to have some use for it. So Jubilee told her to ‘just shut up and make it’.

“Can I go to bed?” asks Fresh.

“No, you’re staying down here until it’s done,” says Jubilee, crossing their arms and leaning against the wall.

“But Jubileeee~” protests Fresh. “I don’t want to be the prisoner of the evil fairy-queen.”

“You’re pushing your luck,” replies Jubilee, raising an eyebrow. “Look, we need the money and even more importantly, this is a big chance for us.”

“You think?” asks Fresh.

“I think,” replies Jubilee with a nod. “Don’t you get it, goo-brain?” they ask. “They won’t let us anywhere near the forge, but it’s still going to be good for us to have a connection.”

“You think?” asks Fresh again.

“I think,” replies Jubilee, nodding a second time. “We need a way to explain our orichalcum away. If we get on the good side of the forge, we might just be able to figure something out.”

Fresh sighs, looking back towards the workbench. She supposes that Jubilee has a point. “Okay, I’ll get started,” she relents. Though, she really does want to go to bed.

Oh well.

Snow continues to fall outside of their home.

Fresh stands down on the street, staring up towards the high branches of the world-tree, up towards the casters who are standing atop its middle boughs and covering the city with snow. The snow that falls outside of the shield fails to reach inside of it.

“Hey, Basil?” asks Fresh, turning her head towards Basil. The two of them are outside on a run to the bakery, to get some fresh bread rolls for breakfast. “Why is it so big?” she asks, looking back towards the tree.

“The tree?” asks the priestess. “It’s been here for eras,” she explains. “The books say that there was a war a long, long time ago,” says Basil. She shrugs, looking at the paper bag of warm bread in her hands. “It was so long and so terrible, that there was so much ash and death covering the world, that it made up an entire layer of dirt all by itself.” Basil points up towards the tree. “And then, the tree began to grow from that, using all of those minerals and bodies to become what it is now.”

Fresh blinks. “Wow, uh… that’s kind of dark, Basil,” she notes, looking back towards the tree.

“Mm,” nods Basil. “That’s why it’s a sacred thing that nobody is allowed to ruin,” says Basil. “It reminds us of where we came from and shows us what we could be.”

Fresh stares for a moment, the cold winter’s wind pressing past her face. She likes that thought, in a way. Sure, the origin is dark and terrible, but the place that it is going, the thing that it has become, born from such circumstances, is good. The tree is big and strong and proud despite all of the things that its once, minuscule seed might have been buried beneath.

Fresh decides that she wants to be more like a tree. Like this tree, in particular. It’s a good tree.

“Come on,” says Basil. “Breakfast is going to get cold.”

“Mm!” nods Fresh, turning around and running after Basil, as the two of them walk home together.

Down in the basement, Fresh looks at one of the bottles of Basil’s expired medicine that she had removed from the shelves the other day, but hasn’t had the heart to throw away yet.

“Hmm…” she mutters, looking around herself. The basement is empty.

Picking up the bottle of tincture, she slowly scoots over sideways to the cauldron and ‘accidentally’ drops the bottle inside of it. “Whoops!” she says, looking around the room.

There is still nobody there.

The cauldron bubbles and shakes and a second later, the glass bottle shoots back out of the cauldron, feeling significantly heavier.

☠︎ [Orichalcum Tincture](Masterwork) ☠︎ A tincture made out of liquefied Orichalcum particulate, suspended in an oily base. Warning: FATAL POISON: Every minute, deals DMG equal to your MAX-SOUL for the duration of 8 hours * mL ingested Weight: 0.25mL Value: ??? Obols

“Oh, wow,” says Fresh as she carefully sets the pink vial down and pushes it away. That’s super bad. That’s really, very, incredibly super bad. She looks around the basement. There’s got to be something here somewhere that’s good.

“Ah!” she picks up a spriggan’s seed from the bundle on her table and plops it into cauldron. The cauldron rumbles, shaking and a second later, a glint of metal flies out for her to catch.

[Anti-magic Seed](Unique) A condensed seed, flush full of anti-magical energies, made out of a naturally occurring mix of radiant orichalcum and rare-dirt. When planted: Grows into a SOUL-DEVOURING PLANT that consumes the life-forces of everything around itself. Weight: 0.15kg Value: ??? Obols

“Oh… huh… wow…” says Fresh. “That’s also super bad.” She stares for a moment, blinking. The seed clacks as she sets it down onto the table next to the poison. Boy, orichalcum sure is hard to make nice things with. Everything is always super dangerous.

She looks around the room, searching for a third thing. There’s got to be something here, something that can turn out well…

An Obol lays on the workbench, just against the wall. It’s an old coin that she found in her pocket the other day.

“Hmm…” Her fingers reach slowly out towards it.

Someone clears their throat next to her. Fresh stiffens up, slowly turning her head to see Basil standing there. The priestess rolls up her sleeves, shaking her head. Fresh laughs nervously. “…Hi, Basil.”

“You know,” says the priestess, adjusting the fabric of her sleeve around her elbow. “Back in the orphanage, we often had to discipline the children,” she explains, calmly. “Usually this was just a stern talking to or some extra chores, but in those cases when someone did something really bad that endangered the others, we’d have to take more drastic measures.”

“Uh…”

“I never liked it. I think it’s wrong. But now, I see the necessity of the act, even if it’s distasteful,” says the priestess, grabbing a strip of leather from the table.

Basil narrows her eyes. Fresh yelps in terror, dashing away to make her escape, first to Jubilee, who tries to sell her out to Basil almost immediately. But then after her second escape, she manages to hide behind Shamrock until Basil is convinced to let it slide, this time. Though, Shamrock does flick her forehead with one of his metal fingers, so that kind of stings. Though, in the end, Fresh feels like she got away pretty lightly with it.

After that, she promises to stop playing around with the cauldron and endangering the others.