Fresh stares at the ball of ice. It’s late in the day and the three of them are starting to close the store up once again. Not much had happened during the rest of the afternoon, apart from the three of them standing around the golem-core for several hours. They didn’t even talk about much, but for Fresh, it was the most fun she’s had in a while. Just standing in the room with her friends, with all of them being a little less miserable. Just that was enough to make her happy.

She stares at the ice-golem core which has already shrunken in size considerably, to about half of what it was when they had received it. By tomorrow morning, it would likely be entirely gone and the heat would return, staved off for only a single day of the entire summer.

Fresh sighs and stares at the dwindling thing. It’s not just a block of ice. Apparently, ice-golems are fairly large constructs that roam deeper down in the ‘ice segment’ of the dungeon. Each of them have a single core inside of themselves, like this one, that could be extracted. Assuming it isn’t destroyed during the fight. But now, during summer, they could go for as much as just over a thousand Obols each. Demand is sky-high and only decently leveled adventuring parties even have a chance of getting them, let alone affording them as a daily luxury.

Apparently, most of the parties here are considered ‘low-level’ and the average group makes it to about floor twenty-four to thirty-two. A far cry away from the supposed hundred floors the dungeon has.

She tilts her head. How devastating must monsters be at floor forty? Or sixty? Or what about floor one hundred? Is there some kind of final-boss to the dungeon? Fresh doesn’t know and apparently neither do Basil or Jubilee. Apart from myths and rumors, nobody here really seemed to make their way down that far. Not even the fabled hero-parties, who always end up having something better to do than dungeon-diving.

“Are you just gonna stand there, or are you going to actually do something?” barks Jubilee and Fresh jumps up to her feet, snapping out of her wandering thoughts.

“I was just thinking about the core,” says the girl, getting back to her sweeping as she looks over to Jubilee who is doing the day’s calculation together with Basil.

“Well don’t think about it too much, because it’s gonna be gone by tomorrow,” says Jubilee.

“I know,” sighs Fresh in defeat and sets to work.

Basil leaves for the day. She hasn’t been earning much of a commission lately because of their slow business, but her daily salary is enough to keep her above water, as far as Fresh knows at least. She does feel a little bad, since the two of them make so much money. But Jubilee yells at her and tells her to get it together.

“It’s our shop, so why shouldn’t we make money? We already pay her double on average what any store here would pay her,” argues Jubilee and Fresh relents. She supposes if Basil needs more, she can just ask. But the priestess makes anywhere from fifty to three-hundred Obols a day anyways. Looking back on her own life a few weeks ago, Fresh realizes how much money even that really is.

The two of them finish up for the night, restocking all of the shelves. Fresh takes a while to make all of the new items for the next day. Their list of wares is slowly becoming larger and larger. But at the same time, so are their savings.

“How much do you think we need?” asks Fresh, carrying a load of soul-potions downstairs, the little glass-chickens rattling in the box in her hands. “For a cart and an anqa and all of that?”

“Well..” Jubilee thinks, placing some talismans into the bin with the rest. “We’ll need a second employee. So that’s another Basil.” They tap their mask, thinking. “We need a cart and an anqa,” Jubilee counts with their fingers, lowering another one as they go on. “You obviously can’t take care of it, since they apparently hate you.” Fresh frowns, she really wants to pet one of the anqas. But it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

“Plus someone to take care of it, feed it and drive the cart and carry all the stuff to and from the guild. So that’s a third employee plus those costs. Uh.. I guess you want some tools and some stuff for the guild space too?”

Fresh nods. “Mm!”

“Yeah, so we’re probably looking at twelve-thousand? As an initial sum. Most of that is the anqa and the cart, honestly.”

“That’s not so bad, we have that already, don’t we?” asks Fresh.

“Yeah, we’ll see if we can figure it out. I have no idea where you even buy a fucking anqa,” says Jubilee, shrugging.

“Huh..” Fresh thinks for a moment. “Maybe Basil knows?”

“Maybe. Anyways, let’s finish here. I wanna get some sleep tonight,” says Jubilee, rolling their shoulders, as if their body was stiff and aching.

“Mm!” nods Fresh in agreement as she goes to restock the shelves.

The rest of the night passes without any noticeable events happening and Fresh happily falls asleep, pushing the lantern she had made for Basil out of the way, as it obsessively floats towards her bed while she’s trying to sleep. It’s a little annoying, honestly. But eventually her eyes fall too heavily shut to be bothered by something like that anymore. The pale, white light of the lantern seeps out of its metal slits, silhouetting the form of the angel as it washes over her sleeping shell, like beams of pale moonlight.

Something trickles in the distance.

Fresh opens her eyes in an instant, as the flash of midnight inspiration reaches her. The girl shoots upright, the lantern only just moving out of the way a second before she smashes her head against it.

“That’s it!” she says excitedly and runs downstairs in a hurry, before it’s too late. She stops on the stairs, half-way there and then quickly runs back to her room to put her robe on. A minute later, she runs out again, hoping it's not too late. Hurrying down the stairs, into the beyond chilly store-front area, she grabs the bowl with the melting ice golem core inside of it and looks at the little pebble that is sloshing around in the melted water. Is this still enough? She hopes so.

Grabbing the bowl, she quickly runs upstairs and back into her room, grabbing some glass from the pantry on the way. Yanking the flying lantern out of the air, she throws it back inside of her room together with herself and then quickly shuts the door.

Setting the bowl down, she grabs the block of matte glass and begins carving a hollow square out of it. It’s a bit of a rough process, as she’s never made something like this before. But compared to the half-intricate work of the chicken bottles, this is easy enough. A few minutes later, it’s ready. A hollow, matte-glass cube with one side open.

“That’s great!” she mutters to herself, spinning it around to look at it. Her eyes wander down to the golem-core that is already almost entirely gone now. Hurrying, she gets up and carefully dunks the glass cube into the cauldron of rebirth, doing her best not to get any of the water on her hands.

Fresh sets the full glass bowl down and then, picking up the ice-cubed sized golem-core, drops it into the new ‘mini-cauldron’. Quietly mumbling to herself, she hopes this works. Tonight isn’t a moonless night, so maybe this won’t be good enough to make a new cauldron in and of itself. But she hopes that it doesn’t count as ‘making a new one’, as the water is already enchanted from last time.

The little pebble of ice plops down into the container and she holds her hands out over it, closing her eyes as she channels her magic into it. She feels a soft glow touch her eyelids, coming out together with a slight crackling sound of regrowing ice.

A moment later, she looks down in delight. The golem-core has been fully restored, sitting snugly inside of the square, glass bowl. A little water splashes out from the sides, displaced from the growth in size and the wet stains the floorboards. But that’s okay. In glee, she feels the cool air emanating out of the little construction. Grabbing a leftover piece of glass, she flattens it into a flat square with a little handle and then sets it on-top of the jar as a lid.

With smug pride, she looks at the thing sitting before her. It had cost her an hour of sleep, but with this, she can assure that she and her friends are comfortable all summer long. They can get so much work done and not even the scorching light of the sun will be able to stop her.

Her eyes wander towards the depiction of the guardian angel that floats next to herself, the gentle streaks of soft light that shine from its body, filling the frigid crystal that is suspended in the water with a meek glow. The suspended aura fills the room with an eerie light that is similar to the haunting aura of the full moon.

Razmatazz

Thank you kindly for reading!

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