By the time Mel and Berry returned, I was well and done with the washing up and the cooking.

You should have seen their faces.

My mother always told me that cooking a good meal for folks was a great way to celebrate friendship. That the joy it would bring others would be worth the pain and time it took me.

But you know what else made friends?

Stories about being a badass adventurer.

And chicks digged scars.

In the end, I think I made the right decision in life. At least, you know, so far. Being an adventurer first allowed me to see and taste a lot of different dishes. It helped me learn to think on my feet and my time with a sword taught me a lot about becoming a better person.

But now that I was cooking? On my own (well, with Mel’s help) and caring for others?

It was magical.

Best thing I could have asked for.

[Mel’s Spaghetti and Meatballs] went over well, too. Not just because the presentation was nice, or the stats were above and beyond what Mel and Berry thought were possible on a dish.

As it turns out, I wasn’t half bad at this whole cooking thing.

I wouldn’t know.

Or, at least, not for this dish.

I didn’t have a bowl. I really, really wanted a bowl. It smelled fantastic, and I was a sucker for anything with pasta involved.

But I had an eatery to open this afternoon, and if I ate a giant bowl of carbs I’d be asleep before the doors opened.

So, instead, I just watched them eat.

There is something vaguely intimate about watching someone eat. Like, not even just the number of terrible double entendres and jokes I could make about Mel eating my balls (which all sounds a lot funnier in my head, let me tell you what). Instead, it was about the actual enjoyment.

Mel and Berry both were making little encouraging sounds that made me feel like a voyeur. They smiled and laughed and enjoyed their meal, and I just sat there being uncomfortable and at the same time unable to look away.

Never said I was a good person, okay?

But aside from creeping on my friends, I learned a lot from their consumption of the meal. The meatballs were just a little too big each. They couldn’t be eaten in one bite, and trying to cut them up just resulted in them falling apart.

And apparently the pasta was just slightly under cooked. It had a bit of a snappy bite to it that was apparently not unpleasant, but it wasn’t the texture I was going for.

On the good side of things, apparently the three different meatballs worked well together. They each had a different texture and consistency, but they didn’t feel out of place.

And I made a decent red sauce, according to Berry, which I didn’t see as a difficult thing to do, but apparently she’d had some pretty terrible red sauces.

I just went with what I remembered my mother making on holy days and special occasions. Lots of [Garlic], some [Basil], a pinch of [Processed Sugar], and enough [Ripened Tomatoes] with the skins peeled off. Keeping the skins on would only gum up the sauce (according to my mother) and take away from the acidity.

Didn’t know if that was true or not (the acidity part; any numbnuts with a brain would see the skin would make the sauce more like a jam than a sauce), but that’s why I did it.

I also didn’t over salt.

You only over salt a sauce once in your life. There’s no turning back. People who tell you to stick a raw [White Potato] in the sauce to let it soak up the salt have never stuck a raw [White Potato] in an over-salted sauce. All you did was add potato gunk to your sauce, which ruined the fucking sauce.

There was no amount of potato you could add that wouldn’t do that, and no amount of potato could absorb enough salt from an over-salted sauce.

So those people? Those asshats who acted all high-and-mighty about how to fix an over-salted sauce. Fucking garbage humans.

Was I being pretentious about a bit of potato gunk in my sauce?

Absolutely.

But I was also right and therefore my pretentiousness was justified.

By the time I was finished ranting to no one about nothing, Mel and Berry had finished their meal and were currently trying to fight off the pasta-for-midday-meal snoozes.

I took it as a compliment. Even though they had both filled up on amazing curry this morning, they were willing to eat an entire serving of [Mel’s Spaghetti and Meatballs] each. Kinda impressive, kinda stupid, but wholy complimentary.

While they struggled to stay awake, I cleaned up. Not only their dishes, but whatever was left in the kitchen as well.

After I’d cleaned all the dishes, I inspected what I still had lying around.

Ultimately, I had three servings of [Mel’s Spaghetti and Meatballs] keeping warm, and two servings of [Mari’s Massaman]. Due to my ingenious trick of putting them under a metal bowl, the dishes were keeping their [Hot Food] buff even though it had been a while since they were made.

They also weren’t getting any weird debuffs, so hopefully the quality of the dish would be fine… but I knew they wouldn’t last that way forever. Thankfully they didn’t have to.

I was still down to only one pot. That would make cooking kind of a bother. Thankfully, with the way Ambition was set up, we wouldn’t be able to take on too many people at once anyway. So perhaps I could use my stored reserves and some creative cooking to fulfill orders.

It meant I was going to need to start a pot of [Duncan’s Delight], if only because it took so long to cook and I wanted to make sure I had some of it going.

I briefly entertained the idea of making more [Mari’s Massaman], but since this was our first night, I really didn’t feel like I had to be overprepared.

We were just finding the kinks so they could be ironed out.

And, you know, introducing the entire town to my cooking and eatery. Through whomever came through that door first.

No big deal, right?

I was so in my own head that I didn’t notice Mel come into the kitchen. It wasn’t until her hand was on my shoulder and I emitted a very manly bellow in response (totally not a high-pitched wail) that I realized.

She didn’t say anything at first, just watched the panic course through my brain, I guess. When I was able to breathe like a normal person, I shrugged her hand off my shoulder and grabbed a towel to focus on cleaning a spot I’d already cleaned. Anything so she didn’t see how embarrassed I was.

Or how worried.

“It’s going to be fine, Harper.” Mel’s voice was like a cold mug of mead on a hot day. “I didn’t see Duncan anywhere in town. I think he’s left.”

I almost laughed.

Of course she thought I was worried about Duncan. That was, of course, the last thing she’d seen me really freak out about. But I had a whole slew of new worries, and most of them were firmly based in self doubt and a borderline destructive need for control more than one lender who might want to kidnap me.

But I couldn’t tell Mel that. I couldn’t admit to every flaw I had deep inside. She’d never look at me the same way.

Instead, I faked relief. “Alright, good. Maybe he won’t show back up like the cockroach he is. I can’t have him harassing my customers, Mel.”

The pixie nodded solemnly in response, and I almost burst out laughing. I guess I was a better actor than I gave myself credit for.

But laughing would ruin the whole gag, and so I just nodded solemnly in response. “Did you see Mari Belle at all, either?”

“No, but I saw some of her thugs in the marketplace. Still doing her dirty work of shaking down those who haven’t paid, I guess. So she’d got to still be around. Licking her wounds, most likely.”

“Mourning the loss of Dumb and Dumber.” I looked to the spot on the floor where there was still a hole in the wood. “Or whatever their names were.”

“I don’t know if Mari Belle is the type to mourn a pawn, other than the energy wasted in the creation of them. She’s… well, she’s very much a pixie.”

I didn’t know what Mel meant by that, even though I sorta inferred. Mel acted differently than other pixies, at least around me. Like I was her pet project or something. But other pixies I’d come across were a lot more territorial and angry and uncaring. Maybe it was a commonly shared set of traits.

Seemed to fit Mari Belle’s attitude so far.

I scrubbed at the work space’s countertop for a moment before I threw down the towel. “There’s still some stuff we’re missing to keep this place going. It feels like an endless list. Every time I do something, I find something else.”

“Well, that’s why we’re opening tonight, right? To let you see where the flaws are?”

“Yeah.” I thought about saying more, but I knew it would be a flood of complaints and worries that would boil over and make apparently every insecurity I had.

Now was not the time.

“I think, at a minimum, we’ll need to get another cookpot or two. I’d love to have one per dish, but I don’t know that our stove would be able to accommodate all three at once.”

“What if you adjusted the recipes to make less servings?”

I frowned. “It could work, but then I risk unused ingredients. Where as, even if I don’t sell the extra dishes, at least I got the experience for the full thing, ya know? Not to mention I’m increasing my chances of making a well-cooked meal.”

Mel looked to the metal bowls on the counter. “Are those the extra meals?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how else to keep them warm. The [Warm Food] buff doesn’t last a long time.”

“No side effects?”

“None yet. But I suspect after a long enough time they’ll get soggy or something. Not to mention rotten.”

“And no one wants to eat spaghetti that’s gone off.” Mel nodded along to her own statement. “Well, I mean… we could always wait and see. But I feel like that would be a dumb idea. Instead… is there any reason to not open up?”

“Like, right now?”

“Doesn’t have to be this moment, but yeah. Berri ran into some adventurer friends in town and she boasted about your food. We’ve already gotten some people poking their heads in to see when we were opening up.” Mel looked towards the door. “We’re going to be limited in how many we can take, but the sooner we get it started, the better chance we’ll have of finding all the kinks.”

My mouth went dry at the idea of opening, but I nodded anyway. I was going to have to get over myself. I couldn’t have a successful eatery without opening the doors, no matter how scary it was.

“Alright,” I said, trying to keep the shakiness of fear out of my voice. “Let’s do this.”

With a slide of my finger I changed the status of Ambition from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’.