[The alarm went off, it was 6 AM. Jason was ready to get to work around the farm. He had 39 starting actions]

[Tess’s Almanac: 90th day of Summer! 1 day until the Summer Festival. This’ll be the coolest day yet, folks! Expect a return to warm temperatures tomorrow, and then after that… Fall!]

Jason rolled out of bed and struggled to his feet. Welts from Juun bug bites covered his body after the previous day’s planting, and he groaned softly as he staggered to his window. As he came up and gazed out across his farm, he took a deep breath. The wheat sprouts would have emerged overnight, and while he wasn’t at all expecting to have a good crop, he was planning on heading out to Jeremiah’s house later that day to work on an application method for the insect repellant, and hoped to be able to figure out, with the crop, how to solve his problems.

Of course, that whole plan required something to be able to test the spray upon… Which was going to prove rather difficult, given that every last ounce of green sprout appeared to have been eaten. Anger flared through Jason’s body, and he turned and marched for the door. His steps rang out loudly as he stormed down to the ground floor, and he didn’t even stop in the kitchen long enough to grab a bit to eat. Instead, he simply swept out into the yard, fought his way through a swarm of crabgrasses that had made their way onto his farm, and came up to the fence.

Swarms of Juun Bugs flitted across the field in a thick mat, almost looking like a living carpet across his topsoil. He screamed in rage, but the bugs didn’t seem to pay him any mind. It was true. Every single stalk of grain, every last bit of his freshly-planted wheat had been gobbled up. He balled his hands into fists, and had to restrain himself from just jumping over the fence and stomping on the monsters. Who did they think they were, anyway? Didn’t they know that if they put him out of business, they’d be out of food to eat?

His fury only continued to mount as he took Lady out to her hitching post and realized that he was out of oats. Great. He couldn’t feed Lady (the Juun bugs had eaten up most of his grass as well), his crops were gone… It felt utterly hopeless. He scowled and thumped back into the house, where he gobbled down a plate of sausage and greens about as fast as he could manage. When he finished, he went back out, threw a saddle on Lady, and started out.

The ride took a bit of the edge off him, and when he came up to the Lazy-H, he found Jeremiah sitting on his porch, smoking a pipe and waving amiably. Jason soon rode up to the hitching post, and one of the hired men walked up to take her.

“If you’d be willing, she could use a bit of feed.” He nodded at the man. “Much obliged.”

The hired man nodded and led Lady away, and Jason walked up to the porch. Jeremiah gestured at a chair just next to him, and Jason gladly sat down. They stared out at the prairie for a few seconds, and Jeremiah took a long draw on the pipe.

“You look like you could use one of these.” Jeremiah remarked after a few moments. “You ever try it?”

Jason shook his head. “No, and I can’t say as I’m going to start.”

“Pity. Yet another victim of the modern health movement. Can’t do anything that might hurt your body, even if you die of stress.” Jeremiah took another draw on the pipe and shrugged. “You mind telling me what’s going on? Not troubles with Tess, I hope.”

“Nothing of the sort.” Jason shook his head. “No, everything’s going well with the wedding. I think. I know Tess is making a bunch of the arrangements. She’s bringing me in on all of the important stuff, but I’ll admit that I’m not exactly sure what all those are.”

“And that’s the way it should be.” Jeremiah sighed. “You know, when I got married, Delilah insisted on making these bumblebee pins that everyone was required to wear. Apparently it was a reference to someone who, when she and I started dating, said that the two of us were as cute as bees. She was so excited, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was deathly afraid of bumblebees.”

Jason chuckled. “Does she know now?”

“We had a laugh about it… Oh, I think I told her at our five-year anniversary. Something like that.” Jeremiah shrugged. “Anyhow, glad to hear that everything there is going swimmingly. Now, what’s ailing you today?”

“Juun bugs.” Jason scowled. “What’s the point of farming if everything I plant is just going to get eaten anyway?”

“You do realize that everything you produce will get shipped off to Illumitir, where it gets eaten anyway, right?” Jeremiah raised an eyebrow.

“You know what I mean.”

Jeremiah chuckled deeply. “Yeah, I do. Monsters aren’t exactly the best about tipping you for your service, I’ll certainly say that much. Well, then, if that’s your trouble, then I imagine that we’d better be about our day. Ahh! Looks like the rest of the party just showed up.”

Jason looked up as Tess rode into the yard mounted high on Angus. They both beamed as Tess dismounted and walked up onto the stairs, and Jeremiah emptied the ashes of his pipe into a small bowl and rose.

“Now that you’re both here, I think it’s time to get to work. Come on out back, we’ll get this figured out.”

Jeremiah quickly led the way around the side of the house to the back, where Weatherhand was standing next to a table with a variety of odds and ends. A cannon stood just next to the table, and Jason blinked.

“Did you know I was going to be here?” Jason whispered.

“What do you think?” Tess hissed back. “Of course not! Jeremiah made it sound like we were going to surprise you. I mean, it looks like we did, but not quite in the way I had anticipated.”

“That does sound like Jeremiah.” Jason chuckled. They walked up to the table, and Jason looked down at the assorted supplies. Suddenly, Delilah came walking out of the house with a large stew pot, which she set down at the end of the table. A horrid, yet quite familiar, odor came wafting out, and Jason choked.

“At least I know I made it correctly.” He coughed and waved away the smell. “Gotta admit, I was afraid I had done something wrong.”

“It’s a hard recipe to mess up.” Jeremiah chuckled. “Now, one thing that did cross my mind after you’d already left was the fact that this was a pour-on insect repellant. We’d put it on the cattle to keep away bugs when we had them in the chute for other sorts of medical examinations, we weren’t just spraying it over the pen. Tess told me about your troubles with the sprayers clogging, and… Yeah. I’m rather impressed at your perseverance, to be honest.”

“So what’s your plan for today?” Jason asked. “Why do we need Tess? Not that I don’t want her here, of course, but I’m a bit confused.”

“Of course, of course.” Jeremiah smiled. “She’s here because we’re inventing things, and Delilah told me that if two guys got together to invent something, and explosives were involved, we’d better have a girl around to make sure that we didn’t do anything too stupid.”

“Explosives?”

“Explosives!”

Jason raised an eyebrow, but Tess sounded downright excited. At that, Jeremiah chuckled.

“Oh, Delilah is going to regret the fact that she let Tess be the one to supervise us. Weatherhand? Give them a demonstration!”

Weatherhand nodded, then walked over to the cannon. He struck a match, then lit a fuse and braced himself.

With a powerful KA-WHUMP, the cannon erupted. Smoke poured from both ends of the weapon, and a fiery projectile flashed from the muzzle and sailed out over several of Jeremiah’s pens. A moment later, the cannonball exploded with enough force for Jason to feel the blast in his chest. A brilliant red dust showered down on the cattle below, making them stamp and churn about.

Jeremiah laughed, Tess grinned widely, and Jason blinked in surprise.

“Now, what do you think about that?” Jeremiah clapped his hands. “What I just fired was a bit of mineral powder. Nothing too extravagant, and harmless to the cattle. Might make them lick each others’ coats, but that’s nothing they don’t do anyway every now and again. I used to use this method all the time for giving medicines to the entire herd, but it does kinda rile them up, and Delilah told me that it was breaking too many of her canning jars in the house.”

Jason nodded slowly. “It’s… It’s interesting.”

“So when I propose something like this, it’s crazy, but when he brings it up…” Tess began, even though there was a smile firmly upon her face.

“You suggested just putting a bomb in the middle of my field.” Jason countered. “This is something entirely different.”

Tess paused, then nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Anyway, the principle is solid, but we’re going to have to do a bit of experimenting, like I said.” Jeremiah continued. “I don’t really know how much this stuff weighs, so we’re just going to have to fill a bunch of these cannon balls up and do a whole bunch of tests with different amounts of repellant and gunpowder.”

“We could also just do the math.” Tess suggested. “I didn’t bring it with me, but back at the Guild Hall, we have a bunch of calculations for these sorts of bombs. Densities, volume, viscosity, all that sort of stuff. It might save us a bit of time and supplies.”

Jeremiah nodded slowly. “We could. Or, and hear me out… We can make up a whole bunch of cannonballs and spend an entire day doing nothing but playing with inordinate amounts of gunpowder and explosives.”

The door of the cabin opened and Delilah whacked the side of the house with a spoon, and Jeremiah backtracked.

“Alright, not playing, per se, but…”

“I vote for the trial and error.” Jason spoke up. “After all, it is more likely to produce better results. Calculations are one thing, but you can never be certain that the final result will work the same way as you’d think.”

A smile grew on his face as he muddled his way through the hocus-pocus excuse to play with the cannon. Delilah rolled her eyes and pulled back inside, and the door fell shut with a thunk.

“And there we go! Permission!” Jeremiah grinned. Weatherhand picked up one of the cannonball casings, and he showed it to Jason and Tess.

The cannonballs were hollow, and consisted of two casings, one inside the other. The inner casing held gunpowder, while the space between the inner and outer casings was filled with the chemical. The cannonball was then corked and rammed down the barrel of the cannon, after, of course, a generous amount of gunpowder was poured down the barrel first.

“How does this work, exactly?” Jason asked as they prepared for their first test-fire. They had decided to go for broke, and filled both the inner casing and the outer casing as full as they could make them. “How does the inner gunpowder know when to go off?”

“There’s no exact science.” Jeremiah shrugged. “When the first explosion goes off, there’s a ton of heat. I mean, you can’t pour more gunpowder into the cannon for a solid thirty seconds after a shot, and you wouldn’t want to touch it with your bare hands for five minutes or so. That heat just goes right down to the gunpowder at the center and causes it to go off, but because the cannonball’s already been thrown up into the air, by the time the heat gets to the center, the cannonball has traveled a few hundred feet or so.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, but we’ll go with it.” Tess shrugged. After a moment, she nodded at the direction the cannon was facing. “If for some reason the cannonball doesn’t go off, there’s nothing off that way that we’re going to hit, is there?”

“I’ve got pasture for five miles that way, and I’ve already cleared all the cattle away from that part of the ranch. Beyond that, there’s nothing but open prairie for another ten miles until you come to Old Franklin’s farm, and if the cannonball does happen to get that far, he’d deserve whatever damage it happened to cause.” Jeremiah shrugged. “Not that I expect that to happen, of course. This this is foolproof. Weatherhand? Let it rip!”

Weatherhand lit the fuse, and their first test began. A moment later, the cannon went off with a resounding blast, and the cannonball flashed up into the air. Defying Jeremiah’s expectations, quick as a blur, it flashed over his sorting pens and barns, and out in the pasture, there was a sudden blast of soil as it struck the ground.

“Hmm. That doesn’t usually happen.” Jeremiah stroked his chin. “That stuff must be better at absorbing the heat than I thought.”

“I didn’t want to say it, but liquids are notoriously bad when trying to make fog bombs.” Tess shrugged.

“Then we’ll just have to try again!” Jeremiah grinned. They brought out the supplies, and soon had a new cannonball to test out. This time, they filled the inner shell all the way to the top, but the outer casing they only filled about half full. Weatherhand quickly packed it into the cannon, and Jason stepped back as they prepared to run a test again.

“What happens if it goes off too quickly?” Jason glanced at Tess.

“Well, Delilah’ll be madder than a hornet, and that’ll be worse than just about whatever the bast could do to you.” Jeremiah answered. “Let ‘er rip!”

Weatherhand lit the fuse, and Jason glanced at Tess. She took out her shield and held it in front of them, and the cannon went off a moment later.

This time, the two explosions nearly sounded as one, and Tess groaned as a great deal of shrapnel rattled against her shield. As she lowered the shield, Jason found a large plume of smoke hanging in the sky only fifty feet away from them. Jeremiah had a small trickle of blood running down his arm, and Weatherhand looked rather shell-shocked himself.

“Well. That was a bad idea.” Jeremiah frowned, then shrugged and walked up to the table. “That said, we did get a good mist from the spray. We’ll just have to try again. Maybe a little less gunpowder to go along with less spray.”

Jason couldn’t have agreed more. They spent the next several hours pouring gunpowder and the thick, sludge-like chemical into the cannonballs. It really was a science, and it wasn’t long before Jason found himself immersed in trying to create the most consistent result. Finally, they determined that for optimum performance, the outer casing needed to be filled about three-quarters of the way with chemical, and the inner casing needed to be about half-full. With that formula, they were consistently able to make the cannonballs exploded in the same place, about two hundred feet out from the cannon’s position. Jason whistled softly as they set down the recipe, and Jeremiah began scribbling some figures.

“Alright, then. I’ll come by tomorrow with a load of a hundred cannonballs, and we’ll see what we can do. Tess, if you wouldn’t mind coming out as well, tomorrow’s going to be a lot more sweat and a lot less fun.”

“I’ll be there.” Tess nodded. She turned and gave Jason a kiss on the cheek, then started striding back toward her horse. Jason sighed and watched her go, then nodded at Jeremiah.

“Much obliged.”

“Oh, you’d do the same for me if the tables were turned. You have, in quite a few ways.” Jeremiah shrugged. “We’re neighbors. Eventually, you’ve just got to stop counting favors and just accept help when needed and give it when necessary.”

Jason nodded as he watched Tess ride away on the horse. “Well, I’m still grateful.”

“You can be grateful tomorrow when this actually works.”

Jason chuckled and started walking over to the barn, where Lady had been stabled. As he did so, he heard Jeremiah chuckling behind him.,

“You know, Jason, I have to admit that you’re one of the oddest sorts I think I’ve ever seen. You’re either at the top of your game and nothing can touch you, or you’re so miserably down on your luck that anyone with half a brain would have packed up and went away.”

“Then call me half-brain.” Jason chuckled. “See you tomorrow, Jeremiah! Can’t wait!”

With that, he soon rode away, smiling and sighing deeply. The next day was both the Summer Festival and the day that he would spray his crops with a cannon.

What could possibly be better than that?