Chapter 2

Something About Us

Brewer’s Reputation: 3,999.

Dream Cutter Stone Shard Quest: 13,300/15,000 shards.

Hawkin

Warm weather at last.

The sea splashed against the barnacle encrusted pilings. Half the sea was covered in orange. The early morning sun shimmered upon the sea like metal foil. The other half was in the shadow of the wilderness. A shadow that was quickly sliding toward the coast as the sun continued its climb.

I cast my fishing net wide. It cut a perfect grid onto the surface of the sea. The weighted corners splashed down. The net sunk. As I gathered the line and heaved the net in, I felt the vibration of a chaos of fishes.

As I pulled, the line pressed into the crease of my fingers. The sea came with it. Salt water dripped from my hands and my elbow. A murk of sand bloomed in the water as I continued pulling. I hefted the net that held nearly a dozen different fish from the water and laid them on the dock. There were striped waterbills, sunfish, frillgills, and a number of brown bream. Big fish for being so close to shore. They flopped and smacked the dock.

I wrestled the net open and carefully moved each catch into one of my barrels that was made of a wrapped Ethereal Forged Label. The shimmering scales of each fish was nothing next to the incandescent label.

The sun breached the canopy of the coastal trees and fell upon the barrel. Pearlescent colors sheened in the label’s material. Chimeric colors reflected upon the dock and on the water. And I was mesmerized by the movement of the sun on the sea and its mix with ethereal colors.

I used my level 1999 Brewer’s Bubble skill to lift 20 gallons of seawater into the air. The water came up as a single sphere that wobbled. A haze of salt stirred within. With another small draw of my mana, I separated the salt from the water and collected it in a clay jar.

That effort rewarded me with nearly 2 pounds of salt. I used to spend an entire spring evaporating saltwater to get that much. I repeated the process a number of times until the clay jar was full. Then I deposited the jar in my personal inventory. I felt the fractioned weight instantly.

But something else weighed on my mind. The desire to brew.

A refreshing cold wheat ale sounded divine. I used quest earned wheat, ethereal hops, fresh water, and local yeast to brew the beer. After using the Crumble Cloud Foam Cascade sub skill, I use Brewer’s Chill for a third time to bring the beer down to an almost icy chill. The drop in temperature turned the clear malt into a hazy yellow-bronze.

My Crumble Cloud sub skill rose to level 531, Brewer’s Chill rose to level 1688, and Hop Wallop rose to level 1999. My quality tier hit the all time high of 99/100 Lesser Honorable. But I still did not break into gold rank. My chances of brewing a golden chapter beer was still low—though not impossible.

I filled my silver drinking boot with the beer. Foam rose over the rim and continued to column up. The Crumble Cloud foam was soft, as though sugar cookies had been baked into crumbs that melted like cotton candy. There were specks of graham in the foam. Esters of orange and orange honey blossom rose from the beer in a rushing breeze.

The flavor of the beer was like toasted wheat that knew its soil and grew there year after year. There?—wherever it was grown. Under a hotter sun than mine. Judging by the sweetness of the wheat, perhaps by neighboring orchards of plums.

When I tasted the ethereal hops, it wasn’t a flavor that I experienced. It was a nostalgia. My mind recalled a summer in Lunstad when I was less than 10 years old. I couldn’t recall where my parents were; my friends were absent, and I was alone. My hands—they were sticky. They smelled of lilac honey and pine resin. I closed my eyes to better peer through time into the memories of looking down at my hands, then up at an old city pine that I had tried to climb. My knees were scraped and bits of pine park lay in the ground around me. I had fallen from the tree for the first time.

I opened my Collector’s Journal to read the entry.

[Wheat ale.]

[Silver rank. 99/100 Lesser Honorable.]

[Brewery Hawkin.]

[Brewed with Lesser Honorable silver rank wheat, this ale is almost up there with some of the best silver rank beers in the world. The wheat is dry and sweet like dew on orange trees. Near perfect fermentation brings out esters of old banana and white honey. Hops: unknown.]

Footsteps clapped on the dock. Against the sun, the figure was an approaching silhouette. I held a hand up to better see Abigail. After a small hello, she congratulated me on successful fishing. She took a seat beside me and dangled her legs over the water. She leaned against a piling and gave her attention to the last few chapters of a rough-handle book.

I poured the last half of my beer in a silver boot and slid it over to her. We rank in companionable silence. I continued fishing. She continued reading until she closed her book and sheathed the bookmark in a new book.

We laughed back and forth for some time over one of her gold rank ales. It was a wheat ale with flavors of juicy kiwi and mango. The foam she used was a style whipped meringue. It was stiff, but melted back into beer when sipped.

After her beer, she turned to me and said, “I need to know something about us.”