Fresh stirs, as a loud thudding comes from the other side of her door. Sleepily, she opens her eyes, feeling the morning light shining in through the dusty window. Looking up at the window from the pile of blankets, she realizes that she still hasn’t taken the time to properly clean it yet. All of her work has been concentrated in the downstairs area of the house and when Jubilee had cleaned upstairs, they didn’t do inside of this room.

Fresh wonders if they actually even did any of the other rooms, apart from the pantry and the washroom, given that there’s still dust on all of the handles. Jubilee had forbidden her from entering any of the other doors in the house though.

The sharp knock comes again, louder now and clearly more agitated. “Hey! Get up! We have to get ready!” yells Jubilee from the other side of the door.

Fresh shoots upright in a jolt, her eyes opening wide. Today is their big day. She almost forgot! Jumping up to her feet, she only barely manages to find her balance on her wobbly, sleep-addled legs. “Okay!” shouts Fresh, holding her head which feels a little dizzy from her sudden ascent. The girl stretches, rising up onto her feet as she reaches for the ceiling and then bends forward, making another attempt to touch her toes. Her lower back pops and she winces at this newest back-pain. She hopes that maybe Jubilee can find time to level her up a little more again.

Fresh slips on her new robe with some pride and then meanders over to the door, pulling it open to look with her sleepy eyes at Jubilee, who is standing back against the wall with crossed arms.

“About time you woke up,” snaps Jubilee, tossing her a small, paper-wrapped bundle. Fresh looks at its contents. It’s a still hot, flaky, buttery biscuit with some kind of thick sausage inside. It smells great.

“Good morning! Thank you!” beams Fresh, rubbing her eyes before opening them further in wide delight, as she stares at this latest bounty.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jubilee waves her off and turns to go downstairs. “You’re eating me out of house and home, so eat that and then clean yourself up, because we’re open in half an hour.”

Fresh chokes on the bite that she was just starting to swallow and hits against her chest with her fist. Half an hour?! She looks around in a panic, grabbing her bag and then quickly pulls the door shut, eating her breakfast as fast as she can while she sprints to get ready for the day.

Voices can be heard outside, signaling that the plaza is slowly starting to fill with the usual bustling crowd. The constant sunshine of the evergreen-spring has returned once again. Fresh wonders if spring is just always really nice here, or if she’s just been lucky so far? Though now that she has a roof over her head and a book that she wants to read, she wouldn’t mind there being a rainy day once in a while.

Twenty minutes later, once she has finished washing up, Fresh stands in the middle of the downstairs space. Jubilee is straightening out the last few details and they stop to stare at one of the glass-chickens that is standing on a shelf next to a dozen others and take a moment to adjust it an inch to the right, so that the light reflects just a little better off of its matte surface.

Satisfied, they nod to it and turn around to stare as Fresh walks towards the window to look outside, walking with closed eyes and humming. It’s a little embarrassing, but she’s in such a good mood that she doesn’t even care if Jubilee hears her do it.

Feeling the sun on her face, she opens her eyes and reels back a step. “IAH!” Fresh stares at the face pressed against the glass, watching her curiously. One of the casters. Though they seem oddly familiar. Taking a deep breath, Fresh calms herself and smiles an uneasy smile as she waves to the figure. A red-robed wizard. “They’re very excited…” she says to Jubilee, uneasily.

“Well, casters are usually… mm… well, it’s complicated,” sighs Jubilee. “Let’s just say that hefting a heavy sword and armor around all day, covered in blood and guts, grounds you a little, character-wise.” Jubilee shrugs. Fresh turns her head to look back at Jubilee. “Casters just kind of, you know, use magic for everything.” They adjust the chicken again, looking at it curiously with their hand on their chin, as if trying to identify a problem. “So they get a little airy in the head, you know?” They rotate the chicken back like it just was a second ago. “Sometimes you just need a good punch in the face to help you become a more sensible person.” They turn the chicken one last time and step back a few steps, seemingly satisfied now. Jubilee looks back to her and points. “Maybe a few knocks to the head would do you some good too.”

Fresh laughs meekly, scratching her cheek and changing the subject. “So what’s the plan?”

Jubilee walks across the room. “The plan is, we open the doors, people come in and take stuff and then give us money for it.”

Fresh nods, following after them to the counter. It’s a good plan. “What if someone wants to sell us something?”

“What?” asks Jubilee.

“What if someone wants to sell us… you know… dungeon stuff?” asks the girl curiously.

Jubilee’s eyes twitch as they look up to her. “We only buy things that we can use. Mushroom-caps. Teeth. If you get offered anything else that you think you can make into something valuable, then let me know. Otherwise tell them to go down the street.”

Fresh thinks, tapping her chin. “What if someone tries to steal something?”

“What…?”

She looks at Jubilee, raising a finger. “You know, like a thief?”

Jubilee shakes their head. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Huh?” asks Fresh.

“Look. The merchants’ guild has a reputation, you know what that reputation is?”

“A bad one…?” guesses Fresh.

Jubilee crosses their arms and shakes their head. “No, dumb-ass. The people love the merchants’ guild.”

“Huh? Oh.”

Jubilee looks to the side. “They don’t know what you and I know,” explains Jubilee. “We’re in deep and I knew a lot before this all happened. But most people don’t. But you know who knows what the merchants’ guild does with thieves?” Fresh thinks for a minute, but doesn’t come up with an answer. Jubilee sighs. “The thieves’ guild.”

“- There sure are a lot of guilds…” remarks Fresh. “Isn’t it against the idea of being a thief if there is a whole guild for it?” she wonders out loud.

Jubilee locks their hands onto their hips. “Look, just don’t worry about it. They have an… understanding between themselves and we can leave it at that.” Jubilee looks to the door. “Are you ready?”

Fresh perks up, clenching her fists. “You’re gonna stay here today, right?” asks the girl, somewhat worried about messing things up if she’s by herself.

Jubilee waves her off and walks back around towards the door. “Uh? Yeah, you think I’d leave you here alone?”

Wet wells in Fresh’s eyes at her friend’s statement. “I can always count on you, Ju-!“

“- I bet you’d do something dumb if I left, like starting to giving away our stuff for free. Or burn down the house.”

Fresh lowers her hands in resignation and rubs her arm, looking away. “You could have just not been mean that time,” she mutters, with a somber expression. Jubilee stares back at her, a hand on the door. The room is quiet. But the buzzing of many voices outside gives the tension a very strange atmosphere.

“Sorry,” says a tense voice from the door. Fresh looks back up to them. They seem to be straining themselves to speak as they look away, back towards the door. “Let’s… both do our best, okay?”

Fresh’s eyes widen and she places her palms onto the counter. “Okay!”

Taking a final breath, Jubilee opens the door.

The world erupts into a burst of sunlight, colors and noise as the door swings open wide. Fresh stares in bewilderment as the crowd of colorfully-clad adventurers bustle and fight against each other. The red wearing wizard-girl and a particularly large man fight each other to be the first one inside and they wedge themselves into the door-frame, the rest of the crowd pushes in from behind them.

“Get out of the way!” strains the wizard, doing pretty well considering her disadvantage in size against him.

“You get out of the way, pipsqueak!” growls the man

“Both of you get out of the way!” barks an older man in a white-robe behind them and barrels in between both of them. All three of them fall to the floor, just as Jubilee steps to the side to get out of the way. Fresh looks at the three of them, fairly certain she’s seen them around town before. Or maybe in the adventurers’ guild? She isn’t sure anymore.

“Good morning, welcome!” calls Fresh out to the crowd, not sure what else to do, honestly. She’ll leave any rough stuff to Jubilee if she can, decides Fresh, as she watches the tussle.

The others behind them enter, thankfully not stampeding over the first three, who then rise up back to their feet and brush themselves off. The first of the crowd already makes a clear beeline for the potions, though some stop on their way to look at the other odds and ends that they had managed to procure for today.

“Ah! They’re so cute!” says a giant of a woman, wearing leather and carrying a sword that is so massive, that Fresh is sure that she herself would never be able to lift it, even if she got to level one-hundred. The giant, that Fresh would at first glance call an orc, is leaned over forward, gushing over the glass-chickens. Fresh beams. Clearly, the orc is a woman of refined tastes. While their companion is doing the same over the potions, sparing a moment to glance over to them.

“They’re just chickens,” they say.

“They’re just potions,” snaps the orc back at them in a sassy tone.

A man stands near the door, looking at the daggers. “How did they make this out of bones? It looks like one long piece? I’ve never seen a dagger like this.”

“Maybe it’s dry-crafted from a single giant bone?” asks a whispering voice next to him.

“That seems like a lot of work,” says the man as he looks at one of the bone-daggers.

The woman next to him points out, looking at the menu of the item. “Look! It does dark damage!”

“Huh? How did they… It's not even enchanted?” The man inspects it closely. “…This could be really useful for floor thirteen…”

Fresh can barely keep up with all the people walking around, looking at the assorted items. A girl walks up to the counter, the first of many, holding an armful of the blue, glowing flasks. “Hello!”

Fresh turns her attention to her, recognizing her as the same red-wizard she gave the free potion to a week before, the one who always had her face glued to the window, the one who got into a fight just now by the door. “Ah! Hello! So you liked the potion?” she asks, as the wizard sets down the five bottles that she has onto the counter.

The wizard nods excitedly. “Yeah! With a days worth of soul-regeneration, I got really far down into the dungeon! I even beat the boss on floor eight by myself!”

Fresh leans in forward herself, her own fists clenched in the same shared excitement as the two of them share the same body language. “Really?! That’s great!” She looks down to the five potions and thinks for a second. Nineteen each. Uh… her gaze softens.

“That’ll be ninety-five Obols,” says a voice next to her, as she feels an elbow jab into her side. Fresh laughs meekly, straightening her posture out and looking back towards Jubilee. With a nod the wizard slaps a single, large, silver coin onto the counter. Fresh stares at it curiously, but Jubilee takes it and slides five small, bronze ones back over in turn.

“Thank you!” says Fresh, waving happily to the wizard as she grabs the five potions and beams just as brightly, turning to leave the store. Not two seconds later, the old man in white comes with his own handful of potions and an antidote. The line seems to be growing longer very quickly as everyone gets their things. Coins clink in the bowl beneath the counter as the two of them work. The bowl is growing fuller by the minute, filling with more coins than Fresh has ever seen in her new life and people are still coming in and out of the store non-stop.

Jubilee seems to be doing most of the work at first. But shortly, after a few minutes, Fresh seems to get a grasp on the numbers at play here and takes over the counter. Letting Jubilee go upstairs to get more things from their pantry to restock the quickly emptying shelves.

The minor soul-potions are the real bread and butter of the operation so far. Sometimes an antidote will come across the counter as well and sometimes a bone-dagger. Fresh beams with particular pride in her eyes as the giantess comes with a glass-chicken under her arm. The two of them gush about it together, until Jubilee returns and nudges Fresh again, pointing towards the long line of agitated faces forming in the room.

[Mercantile: 2]{Give and take}