Dungeon Item Shop - Chapter 318: Soup day (Patreon)

Fresh sweeps through the house with an old broom that she had found on a trash-heap. It seems that today is the day of the month when people are throwing out their old furniture and larger items from their houses, for the people in charge of the city’s disposal to pick up. While she honestly didn’t see anything during her excursion that caught her eye apart from this broom, Shamrock and Basil are still out there, gathering what they can.

Most of the furniture is just kind of ugly, honestly. But they’re gathering what looks useful, not to decorate their home with, but to take apart for solid pieces of wood, for nails that could be reused, for fastenings and little panes of glass. Anything at all that they could add to their very minuscule stockpile of ingredients.

Fresh still has some stuff in her inventory window, but most of the items that they had packed in the west, they had left sitting at their house in the east.

She sighs, trying to remember if they locked the door or not? But surely they did?

The east… it’s only been a week or two and it already feels like an oddly distant memory. It’s just about as foggy and as jumbled as her memories of the west or of the north.

“We’re back. Again,” says a very exhausted sounding Basil from downstairs as the door opens and the two of them come inside. Fresh looks down the spiral staircase from the library.

“Welcome home! Again,” she says for the seventh time today. Her stomach growls and she clutches it.

“I heard that all the way down here,” laughs Basil.

“You didn’t find any food, did you?” asks Fresh, for the seventh time today.

“No, just an old cabinet this time and an empty crate,” replies Basil.

Metal rattles downstairs as Shamrock walks. “A shelf,” he says, setting something heavy down.

“Why don’t we just eat the spriggan?” calls Jubilee from upstairs, also for the seventh time.

“We’re not going to eat the spriggan!” argues Fresh. The spriggan, as if knowing what Jubilee’s intentions are for it, runs away down the staircase, making a hasty escape past Fresh and then the other two as it heads towards the basement. They still haven’t figured out where exactly it’s coming from. Any attempts to follow it have been met with failure so far, as it seems to know when they’re watching it and then refuses to go to wherever that spot might be.

Basil comes upstairs, dusting herself off.

“You look like the dragon got you, Basil,” remarks Fresh, staring at the exceptionally dusty and ragged priestess.

“I feel like it,” she sighs, rubbing her dirty face on the inside of her dirty sleeve. “I had an idea about dinner,” she says.

“Yeah?” asks Jubilee from upstairs.

“The spriggan seeds,” says Basil.

Jubilee raises an eyebrow, looking down from the upper staircase. “Those are worth six Obols each. We’re going to eat you before we eat them.”

Basil rolls her eyes. “We’ve got to eat something no matter what and food costs money. Unless you want to go into the dungeon and eat mush-mushes?”

“I know how to cook those,” offers Fresh.

Jubilee sighs. “Fine. Let’s hear your idea.”

“Bread,” remarks Basil, shrugging.

“Bread?” asks Jubilee. “That’s your great idea? Bread? Bread has existed for thousands of years and I can tell you, we don’t have what we need to make bread.”

“We’ll make seed bread,” suggests Basil, pulling up the little pouch of spriggan seeds. “We’ll sell four of these and buy a bag of flour,” she explains. “Then we’ll sell one more to get a fistful of normal seeds and grains. With some water from the mineral pool we’ll mix it together and ta-da, bread.”

“Sounds like shit.”

“I think it sounds great, Basil,” says Fresh. “Jubilee’s just cranky.”

“I know,” sighs the priestess. “This is the best way to stretch our money though. Flour goes far and seeds are nutritious. I’ve survived a few winters off of it already. One more won’t hurt.”

“Fine. Go for it,” says Jubilee, waving Basil off and vanishing as they return to their work upstairs.

“Did you do that thing I asked you about?” asks Basil, looking back at Fresh. Fresh nods, pointing at a pile of plants and mushrooms sitting in an old basket. Some mushrooms and grasses that were growing from the floor and the walls.

“My botany ability isn’t good enough to let me see which ones of these are good to eat and which aren’t,” says Fresh. “So maybe you can look through them, Basil?” she asks. “I’ll take care of the bread then.”

Basil nods and the four of them set to their work with Jubilee getting the upstairs cleared out and inhabitable, Basil sorting through their plants, Shamrock gathering more materials and Fresh being in charge of dinner.

The spriggan simply does whatever it is that spriggans do.

___________________________________________________________________

“It’s a good thing they left this old oven here,” says Fresh, pulling the extremely lumpy loaf of bread out of the oven with a cloth. She smells it, taking in a deep breath. It smells great. They don’t have any salt and it’s literally just flour, water and some seeds, so it’s hardly bread in her eyes. But it’s still very fragrant, the dough having been permeated during baking by the oils of the seeds.

Basil nods, stepping back to the stove as Fresh closes the oven door again, stirring the pot filled with a thin soup that she’s making from several mushrooms and some roots.

Fresh shivers, holding herself as she sits down on the floor next to the kitchen, where she can still get some heat from the oven but isn’t in the way. It’s cold in here. Even now that the roof has been patched, the winter’s chill still sits deeply in the building that has lacked any real warmth for a long time. “You did a good job, Jubilee,” she says, looking around the upstairs area. It’s as clean and as ‘ready’ to be furnished as can be, given the circumstances. The old bed they took apart, adding its wood to their collection and the old mattress they had thrown out. The floor is clean and all of the loose boards have been realigned. The walls are free from most of the overgrowth.

She reaches over and grabs Jubilee, straining herself to scoot them over towards herself as she latches her arms around them, in an attempt to share their warmth. Shamrock sits there with crossed legs, staring at the spriggan that seems to have taken him as its person of interest for whatever reason. It stands in front of him, looking up at the slits of his helmet as it waves its stubby arms around.

Jubilee just sighs.

“Soups almost done,” remarks Basil. “We can eat in a minute. But… uh…” She looks around. “I just realized that we don’t have any bowls.”

“Oh!” Fresh looks up, letting go of Jubilee and running downstairs to their wood stockpile. Hmm… no. This wood is all porous and maybe it’s been treated with some weird gunk? Better not.

She shakes her head and goes to the basement, into the cave until she finds a big rock.

(Fresh) uses [Craftsman: Extract(Sphere)] x 2

Two large, stone spheres fall out of the rock. Holding her hands above them one at a time, she cuts them in half.

(Fresh) uses [Craftsman: Cut] x 2

The two half-spheres fall apart. Now all that she needs to do is hollow out the insides.

(Fresh) uses [Craftsman: Hollow]

[Stone Bowl]{Excellent}

A crude bowl, made out of cave stone.

Capacity: 275ml

Weight: 0.3kg

Value: ???

Smiling to herself, she takes the four bowls and stacks them on top of each other, bringing them over to the pool of water to wash them out, before heading back upstairs with her heavy load in hand.

“Ta-da!” she says, setting the four bowls down and spreading them out.

“Great work,” smiles Basil and shoos her away, before she pours the contents of the pot into them.

Basil sets down a bowl for each of them and they set the loaf of bread into the center of their floor-circle. It’s a humble meal, in all honesty. The soup is really mostly just water and a few mushrooms. The bread is just flour and a single handful of seeds.

But it’s hot and nourishing and Fresh can’t help but feel, as she takes another bite, that she is being generously rewarded for all of her hard efforts. She beams, breaking off a piece of her bread and dipping it into the steaming soup. Extending it out, she pokes the confused spriggan with it. It’s still sitting in Shamrock’s lap. He doesn’t seem to mind its presence.

“Here you go, little guy,” she smiles.

“Don’t feed it, you idiot,” barks Jubilee. “It’s not a pet. It’s a pest.”

The spriggan grabs the piece of bread with its stubby arms and Fresh watches in mesmerized enchantment as it does its best to eat with its stubby, fingerless joints.

“How do they even survive?” asks Basil, watching the creature try its best to eat. “They’re so… helpless.”

“That’s the great part,” says Jubilee. “They don’t survive. Spriggans are the lowest of the low. Even mush-mushes are better monsters than them.”

“The bigger ones are kind of tough,” remarks the priestess, thinking. She seems to consider something for a moment. “Maybe we shouldn’t feed it? What if it grows?”

“Then we’ll be friends and everything will be fine, right?” asks Fresh.

“Pakew!”

“So. A cage?” suggests Jubilee. “We can get some iron tomorrow for the bars.”

“We’re not putting it in a cage!” argues Fresh. “We’ll just have to learn to co-exist, like with the crabs in the east.”

“And the fairies in the west,” remarks Basil.

“I miss Veli,” sighs Fresh. “And Tarja and Sauli and Pauli and Liro and -”

Jubilee lifts a hand, stopping her. “Are you just going to list everybody?” Fresh thinks for a second and then nods. “We get the point.” They shake their head. “Good soup.”

“Thank you,” says Basil. “Eating something like this is…” she thinks for a moment, swirling her last piece of bread around in her bowl. “- nostalgic.”

“Growing up poor must be shit,” notes Jubilee.

“It is,” says Basil. “But I guess in a weird way, I feel really at home right now?” she puzzles, looking around the empty, cold, dark room that they sit in, illuminated only by the dying glow of their last burning wood for the night. “Is that weird?” 

Fresh shakes her head, before drinking the last of her soup.

She doesn’t think so.