Jason awoke with the dawn, refreshed and ready to face the day. It still weirded him out a little how fast he’d managed to adapt to waking up as the sun was just peeking over the horizon and going to bed shortly after it got dark, but a general lack of modern electrical lighting had mandated some general changes to routine. Sure, Lumi could throw light spells around, but it was unfair to ask her to constantly spend effort for his convenience just because he preferred to sleep in and stay up late.

The same didn’t seem to hold true for the girls though. Going to bed early or not, like the previous day neither were up yet, so Jason got to be the first to experience his kludge-effort hot shower, which turned out to have been absolutely worth the effort, even if he did have to deal with it being poorly lit through a single small window.

A curious Ceri also creeped out from the ‘stable’ side of the room to clamber up the pole to stick his head into the spray. Apparently the drake found the heat to his liking, and jumped down to the floor, splashing about Jason’s feet in the spray as Jason scrubbed away with some soap and a few loose rags.

Jason resolved to mention to Kera that she should probably not check in on her pets with [Share Senses] in the morning until she was sure nobody was in the shower. Not that he particularly cared if she did peek on him. He was rather cavalier about that sort of thing after all; if someone wanted to use him for eye candy, that was kind of a compliment as far as he was concerned. Lumi, however, would emphatically not share his views on that, so it would be best if he made sure there weren’t any… accidents.

After his shower, Jason rolled up the [Mat of Absorption] and emptied it out into the bucket, where the water would be purified and then drained back into the shower head. Then he dressed and headed to the kitchen, where he prepared another pancake breakfast for himself and the girls.

While he worked, he spent a bit of time reading his lorebook on common enchantments, which he placed off to one side, clear of any potential mess. He’d given some more thought to what to focus on during his shower, and seeing as he was probably doing the provisioning for the near future, he figured he might as well continue where he’d left off with the food and drink purification stuff.

Rune Learned: Temperature

In addition to a new rune, he also learned a fair bit about common sequences and how runes for storage, preservation, purification, and resistance worked and could be combined in various ways. Since he had some time to kill in the morning and they’d be down at the marketplace anyway, Jason decided to make what amounted to some refrigerated grocery bags, and to carve some enchantments into his storage cabinets.

Not only would it be good practice for the eventual greenhouse construction, it meant he wouldn’t need to go down to the market every morning when he wanted things like fresh milk, eggs, meat, or other similar perishables. He could just have them delivered in bulk and store them until needed.

Eventually, the smell of cooking drew Kera and Lumi from their beds, just as it had the previous morning. After Jason had passed on his warning to Kera, the two girls took their own turns showering, after which Kera went to look after Ceri and Echo, and Lumi elected to get some early morning sword practice in.

“Does that even help?” Jason asked Lumi when she announced her intention.

“Sort of,” Lumi replied. “Remember how I spoke with Therissa before we left the Lodge last night? Skills and stats do apparently decay if they go unused or whatnot for too long, and if you work hard enough you can get some stat boosts from training. Like if I was to just laze around all day and stuff my face with your pancakes, pretty soon I’d find my Might dropping rapidly, but if I work out a lot, it’ll go up, yeah?”

“Makes sense. I’d sort of wondered. Where are you headed, though?” Jason asked.

“I’ll be joining Sevani down at the guardhouse in the mornings,” Lumi replied. “Therissa told me they've got a training yard there, and Sevani uses it as a kind of work-out gym, I guess. Therissa suggested I see if she’d be open to some company.”

“Alright. See you at noon then?”

“Probably sooner,” Lumi said. “I’m going to want to shower before I meet our new guild-mates.” She gave Jason a wave, and after strapping on her sword belt, made her exit.

That left Jason to his own devices, so he got to work enchanting.

The first step was to make some more arcane powder, and some more magical ink to assist him in engraving. He had that book on inscription processes, after all, and though it might be worth seeing if he couldn’t unlock something along those lines. Besides, he had another motivation involved as well.

So Jason began by setting up some longer-term refinement of his alchemy ingredients. As he had dozens of prism scarab eggs from their run, he began with those. Breaking them open was easy work, and while it was an unpleasant process, rendering down the contents and crushing the shells into powders wasn’t a difficult task. Then it was only a matter of leaving the leftovers to process over time, through heating and condensation with the glassware he’d acquired, to filter out any impurities. He could safely leave that to happen over the course of the next few hours, and could check back before it was time to leave.

Next up, Jason mixed a few batches of multiple least potions out of the common, cheaper plants, and converted them into arcane powder, leaving him with roughly three dozen vials of powder. He was going to need to pay another visit to Flora soon; he was beginning to run low on the cheap stuff and he hadn’t even gotten started on making good on his promise to assist with beefing up the town’s defenses.

Since he was already in his lab, and had his crucibles fired up, Jason decided to get one more thing out of the way: making Lumi her oft-requested hair dye.

It was only a few minutes work to examine the bundles of armor dyes, briefly consult his phone, and skim the book he had on inscription for any notes about magical inks. Jason had even already picked up the right ingredients during his previous market trip, but time constraints and his own mishap with the transmutation had meant he hadn’t had the time to actually put his plan in motion. Now however, he had both some time to spare and already had his crucible fired up, so now was the perfect time; it shouldn’t take much more than a few minutes.

First he pulled out a small jar filled with rendered animal fat that he’d acquired from the butcher, and began the process of melting it back down from its congealed state. While that happened, he ground up two different types of red flowers that he’d gotten from Flora, as well as pulled out the remainder of the lavender oils left over from making his batch of Sereni-tea.

All four ingredients went into the same bowl, which he then mixed together thoroughly along with a single unit of arcane powder and a small amount of water. After an infusion of mana via synthesis, he had what he wanted: A thick, dark red, pasty goop that would thoroughly stain any organic matter it came in contact with, and thanks to the trace amounts of mana imbuing it, you wouldn’t have to worry too much about getting it on the wrong things or needing to bleach first.

Jason thought it looked a bit gross, and it certainly didn’t smell great, but it would do. If Lumi liked the results, he’d see about adding some cornstarch or similar to convert it into a water-soluble, powdered form, but that could wait.

For now, he scooped the dye into a jar, labeled it clearly and stuck a brief note to it, and placed it in the shower room for Lumi whenever she returned.

After double checking that his refinement processes for the prismatic and swarm traits were proceeding as they should, Jason grabbed his pack, scooped up his batch of arcane powder, and returned to the kitchen.

He set the pack down on one of the counters, and pulled out a pair of the plain, leather satchels that he’d picked up as part of their general supplies. They’d do for now.

It took Jason a few minutes to figure out the best way to do it, but he was soon engraving away at the metal buckles and snaps, working in runes where he could. The process wasn’t anywhere near as complex as his attempt at the shower, since for this all he needed was some basic preservation effects, but it brought home to him the idea that he really should invest in inscription just as much as engrave, since leather and cloth were just too soft to carve into - he’s just end up ruining the item if he tried.

Regardless, a half-hour’s work later Jason had himself a pair of what amounted to extra-spacious grocery bags with preservation charms. They weren’t anything special, but it meant he wouldn't need to keep using his haversack for everything.

Next up was enchanting the cabinets. This turned out to be simultaneously simpler, and more work intensive than Jason expected. Simpler, because all he had to do to get at the insides was to just activate his [Arcane Deconstruction] skill to tear apart the cabinets, and more work because they were big, and he needed to enchant multiple segments with complex runes.

He couldn’t just enchant them with a simple preservation rune on the door, for instance. Sure, that would work, but it wouldn’t last particularly long - he more he wanted to store in there and the longer the duration, the bigger and more complex the sequence he needed. It was actually less complex as well to simply lay multiple, different charms over the space than it was to try and work them all into the same, massive enchantment, which meant putting different circles on different segments of the cabinets.

All told, it took him a good three hours’ work and two mana potions, which he had to make, but he placed enchantments for preservation, purification, and temperature control on all the cabinets and storage barrels, using [Arcane Reconstruction] to reassemble them when he was done.

For good measure, he enchanted a mug with temperature control, too, because he’s be damned if he wouldn’t give himself the ability to have cold ale or hot, spiced mead whenever he wanted. Of course, he’d have to buy some somewhere first, but… details. Maybe Therissa could supply him some, or he could set up a nano-brewery or something.

Afterwards, Jason sat in the dining room, just relaxing for a bit and massaging his hands; engraving was tough, tiring work. While he rested, Kera came to check up on him.

“Done crashing around?” she asked. “What have you been doing, anyway?”

“Made us a magic fridge, freezer, and pantry,” Jason replied. “While you talk to Nissette in a bit, I’m going to be placing some orders for foodstuffs now that I don’t need to worry about perishables going bad. In fact, I’m debating if I might negotiate with some of the local farmers - barter some preservation enchantments for regular deliveries, you know?

“What, really?”

“Yep. Go check it out. I even stuck one of out waterskins in the freezer; I'm thinking I can make some crushed ice once it solidifies.”

“Uhh, wont you have to rip it open to get the ice out?” Kera asked.

Jason grinned at her. “Mending, right? I can just smash it up with a hammer, tear it open, dump out the ice, and then fix it up.”

She laughed. “That’s cheating.”

“But the good kind,” he replied. “So, any progress on the shapeshifting stuff?”

“Yep,” Kera said. “It’s tiring, but I’ve just been sitting in my room practicing switching back and forth. I’m getting faster, little by little. Its definitely like training a muscle, you know? Right now I gotta think about it, but it’s getting easier with practice. Which reminds me… do you think you could make me some stamina potions?”

“Probably,” Jason replied. “I’ll have to find a Stamina trait first, though. I actually bet cooking will help with that; its common for foodstuff to restore health and things in games, you know?”

“I’ll start keeping an eye out, and I’ll check around in the market,” he finished.

“Thanks.”

Kera then wandered off in search of her pets, and Jason stood, stretched, and returned to his lab, where he spent the next hour and a half continuing to refine ingredients, mixing his refined traits into powdered form, and placing them into labeled, stoppered vials. He made a note to ask around about getting some kind of wood or leather case made to help sort and store them, but for now he simply wrapped them in folds of cloth and sorted them out onto his shelving.

Jason also set a simple experiment in motion by setting up some more elemental shard synthesis, this time using several doses of Prismatic, placing his projects under different conditions. Two were immersed into a bowl of water, two buried in a pot filled with dirt and loose stones, and two more placed into another into one of his sealed, heated crucibles. All three skill activations seemed to work, though Jason knew he’d have to wait until later to see the results.

Then Jason took a break, sitting down in the kitchen to read his tomes a bit, where Kera joined him in order to study her own books, the ones on various monster species that she’d earned her Monster Lore skill from.

Not too much later, just before noon, Lumi returned to take her much-needed shower, after which Jason got a huge, damp-haired hug for having provided her some new hair dye. She hadn’t used it yet, explaining that the process would take time and repeated applications to make sure it set in properly, but Jason couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s enthusiasm at the prospect of not having to go back to her natural color.

Lumi disappeared into her room to change into her armor and get her gear together, and then it was time for the three friends to head out.

————————

Their first stop was, of course, the marketplace. Kera headed off to Fanciful Finery, with Lumi in tow, while Jason made a few brief stops around the main market, speaking with various the owners of various stalls regarding getting food supplies sent to the house. He was surprised to learn that Arnvale had a relatively thriving bee population, and thus he was able to purchase a fair supply of honey, and along with the ready availability of beet crops, meant that he could buy sugar as well, albeit it was on the expensive side. Still, it meant his cooking options were much wider than he’d expected; if he had ready access to sugars, and he knew more or less the chemistry principles for producing powdered yeast and baking soda, he could probably figure out baking powder, since it mostly involved stuff like spoiled milk, corn starch, and processed animal bone. And baking powder and sugar meant… all sorts of things.

So Jason ended up throwing around a bit more money than he’d planned, and left several highly confused but moderately richer townsfolk in his wake, requesting anything from basic foodstuffs to waste products to scraps of cloth, leather, and hammered metal, and paying extra to get much of it delivered directly. The rest went into his new grocery bags, which he simply then buckled onto his belt after filling.

Some of what he requested wouldn’t be available for a few days, but it would be worth the wait; if he was going to stick with the whole [Legendary Fare] thing, he might as well go the full mile.

Afterwards, Jason met back up with Kera and Lumi, and together they headed to the Lodge.

It was just as busy as it had been the last few times he’d been there, and Kera immediately made a bee-line towards the handful of non-humans present, ostensibly so she could get a good look at them and add their species to her list of potential shapes. She was still in her baseline changeling form, and it drew more than a few stares.

Jason left her to fend for herself, and approached Therissa at the front desk. He gave her a slight wave.

“Hey. Reporting for duty, or something along those lines,” he said. “Aurion said we’d be meeting someone?”

“Ah yes. Ravs and Aldin. Third table, right side,” Therissa said. She gestured with one hand without even looking up from her endless stacks of paperwork that seemed to always be present on her desk.

“Thanks.”

Jason and Lumi collared Kera, and made their way over to the indicated table, where two people roughly of similar age to himself sat, clearly waiting.

The first was a young man of average build, with shoulder-length, plain brown hair and lightly-tanned skin. If it weren’t for the short, pointed dog ears and yellow-brown eyes, Jason would have assumed he was human.

The girl one the other hand was decidedly not human, but what he thought of as a ‘typical’ elf you’d see in fantasy games back home: Skin that leaned on the pale side without being unnaturally so, long silver-blue hair, and pointed ears that slanted back along the sides of her head. She was also clearly one of those spellcasters who dressed the part: while her companion was dressed in a relatively simple affair of cloth tunic and leather vest and breeches, looking for all the world like an ordinary peasant, she was dressed in a silk dress of pale purple, with blue and gold embroidery down the center. A black cloak wrapped up and over the tops of both her shoulders, pinned in place at the breast by an ornate, gold clasp inscribed with runes.

Jason gave a small wave of greeting as he and the girls approached.

“Ravs and Aldin?”

“That’s us,” The girl said. “You Jason?”

“Yep.” Jason replied. “This is Lumi and Kera. I guess we’re your new squad mates for the raid?”

The dog-eared young man looked Kera and Lumi over appraisingly, though he wasn’t especially rude about it. Without even looking at him, the elf girl reached over and twisted his ear lightly. He yelped and clapped a hand to his head as she released him.

“So, a changeling, huh?” the girl asked, dropping her hand and ignoring her companion’s half-hearted grumble. “Surprised to see you walking about in what I’m guessing is your real skin.”

Kera shrugged. “I like to mix things up. Still deciding what I’ll play at being next. In the meantime, I’m fine just being me.”

“Good philosophy. I’m Ravs, by the way. Short for Ravindra.” She held out a hand towards Kera.

Kera shook hands with her, and Ravs offered her hand to Lumi, and then Jason. Her hands were slim and delicate, and Jason had a sudden urge to take her hand and bow over it when she extended it to him. He didn’t though, since he’d yet to see any kind of overtures of deference amongst the townsfolk, and Kera and Lumi hadn’t either, so he simply shook her hand lightly.

“Good to meet you.” He said.

“Man, I don’t know what you did to impress the ol’ prof,” Aldin said, “But it must have been something big for him to reshuffle the plan and let you into the class mid-session to boot. He’s a real stickler for the rules.”

Jason chuckled lightly. “Well, I’m sure you’ll hear about it eventually, but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep a lid on it for now, until I hear back from Aurion.”

Aldin grinned at him. “Oh, that’s fine, I’m used to secrets. Ravs here is a Feypact Warlock. She’s got so many secrets that she even puts up wards against scrying when she goes to the bathroom.”

“I do not!”

“I think I begin to see how you got assigned tutoring duty,” Lumi commented dryly.

Aldin coughed lightly into his fist. “Yes, well. Things may have gotten a bit out of hand. But you’ve saved us the drudgery of being assigned to help do paperwork, so I’m gonna call that win.”

Ravs eyed him dubiously from the side for a moment, then turned to Lumi.

“You three look like you’ve got at least some experience, anyway,” she said. “Might as well get to know each other before we hit the books. As Aldin already spilled the beans, I’m Feypact, with some levels of Sorceress on top of it. I specialize in crowd control, illusions, and mobility. Aldin here is a straight up Shaman, with a little bit of everything going for him. And before you ask, his ears are a mixed-heritage thing. His mother was a mana-touched, and some of it passed on to him.”

“Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what’s Feypact mean?” Jason asked. “Where I come from the, uh, term ‘warlock’ can have a few different meanings, not just class.”

She just looked back at Jason with a small smile. So of course, Aldin was the one who answered.

“Warlocks are spellcasters who get their spells in a different fashion from your standard wizard,” he said. “They learn specialized skills and spells by performing difficult tasks for a powerful patron of some kind. Hers is some kind of powerful, ancient forest spirit from her homeland, hence the name. She won’t tell me what it is or why she made a pact with it, because patrons seem to like their privacy and only grant their gifts for their own mysterious reasons. Most patrons aren’t particularly… nice… but some are better than others. Greater Fey are one of those patrons that tend to learn on our side instead of, you know, wanting to tear down cities and turn them into their own personal larder.“

“Like I said… secrets,” he finished with a wink.

“And the Archive doesn’t actively hunt down warlocks?” Jason asked. “Sounds iffy to me.”

“Meh.” Ravs blew a wisp of hair out of her face, flicking a dark-gloved finger dismissively. “Only if you’re stupid, and make a pact with something you shouldn’t.”

“I assume there's some kind of vows involved, there,” Jason said. “What happens if you break them, or want to try and break things off?”

“Bad things,” Ravs replied simply.

“Fair enough,” Lumi said.

“Now that I’ve aired my dirty laundry, how bout you spill yours?” Ravs said with a smirk.

“Actually, I’ve maybe got a better suggestion,” Lumi said. “If I’m guessing right, you two have been amply tired of running guard shifts or whatever while me and my friends were out doing the real work on an expedition to the Wastes, yeah?”

“You bet,” Aldin replied.

“Well, Jason here’s an Artificer,” Lumi said, jerking a thumb in his direction. “He learns new runes basically by just watching us show off our spells, and Kera and I just earned a whole mess of new stuff on our trip. We were actually hoping you might be willing to join us and show off some of your own talents if you had ones he can learn from, and that way you can also see some of our own in action. Make an early start to maybe training together in preparation for the raid, do some sparring if anyone feels up to it?”

“That sounds way better than sitting around doing tutoring work,” Aldin said.

“Great,” Lumi said. “I actually already reserved a section of the expanded training grounds over at the guardhouse, so how about we grab an early lunch here and then head over?”

Ravs tapped a finger against her lips twice, then nodded. “Sounds good to me. But what about the tutoring? Aurion will ask.”

“I actually bet we know most of that stuff already,” Jason said. “He sort of assumed we were clueless, but we’ve got… tangential experience, let’s say. I don’t suppose you have any kind of textbooks or something we could borrow? Skimming to see what’s different might be faster than outright sitting through lessons, and less work for everyone.”

“Different?” Ravs asked with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s complicated.” Jason said.

“Hmm.”

Aldin snorted. “Stop trying to play all cold and mysterious, Ravs. They’ll learn soon enough you’re really a big softie.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

He turned to Jason. “I can lend you my books if you want. Not like Aurion’s holding classes anyway while we’re here.”

“Training ground it is, then,” Jason said.