“Hot! Hot!” yelps Fresh as she juggles the little orange ball back and forth in her hands. She quickly drops it down onto a plate. The small, doughy thing squishes together a little, as it flops down against the glassware surface. Fresh frowns, letting out a sad sigh as she stares at the next failure as it begins to break apart.

“Just use a fork, dumb-ass,” says Jubilee, shaking their head as they lean back against the stairway railing, watch her as she stands in the kitchen and experiments with her cooking.

“But a fork will make the surface uneven!” says Fresh. “They’ll stay round if they cool off, but they’re squishy if they’re hot.”

“Then use a cold spoon,” sighs Jubilee.

Fresh looks over at her friend and then back to the pot before her that is filled with small, doughy balls. She had formed some flour, some honey and a tiny bit of jam together in a ball with a sprinkling of mushroom powder for flavor. She had used a variety of different caps, though none from her inventory that they collected on the way. She doubted they were good to eat anymore. She had bought some in town instead, but they were a bit more expensive here, as mush-mushes weren’t so common up on the mountain. Only adventurers coming up from the forest below would have any, but thankfully there seemed to be plenty of those types around, as many beginners here were simply too weak to start off right away in this dungeon.

A cold spoon? She wishes that they still had an ice-golem-core and is about to say exactly that to Jubilee, but she stops herself before the words form in her mouth, as she realizes how insensitive that could come across.

Maybe…

Fresh closes her eyes, listening to the noises of the outside world seeping in through the open balcony door. She listens to the soft winds creeping through the house, listens to the sounds of her breath leaving her body, as she focuses on trying to find that one sound in particular that has always helped her so far, every time she was stuck and looking for a new idea. The fountain has never let her down yet, but there is no fountain here.

Opening her eyes again, she picks up a bottle of water and a second empty bottle and slowly pours one into the other.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Shh,” says Fresh as she stares at the water flowing into the other bottle. “I’m thinking.”

Jubilee doesn’t say anything, simply opting to sigh and to walk away, leaving her alone upstairs. Basil and Shamrock are out getting her some of the magical-crystals, or at least to see how expensive they are. But Fresh assumes they can’t be that pricey, given that they could be found right at the start of the dungeon. She wonders why she never saw anything like them in the north? They seem really useful.

The bottle in her hand becomes lighter and lighter by the second, but the longer she pours the small stream into the other bottle, the wider her eyes become as she stares at it, transfixed. She feels it, that whisper that seems to creep towards her from the sounds of the splashing wet. That small, quiet voice that seems to never quite differentiate itself from the whisper of the draft moving past her ears, but that she nonetheless notices, as she sees the hairs on her arms stand on end out of the corners of her eyes.

Her hand becomes lighter. The bottle is empty. Fresh sets it down, having her idea now. Excitedly, she turns around and runs into the pantry, grabbing one of their boss-cores and a heap of the dragon scales. “Jubilee!” she calls out over her shoulder. “I’m gonna use one of the boss-cores!” she says.

No response. Fresh shrugs. It’s probably fine then.

She hurries back to the stove and sets the small boss-core from the first boss into a pot, along with several ice-dragon scales and then holds her hands out over it. First she grinds the scales into a powder.

(Fresh) uses: [Crafting: Grind {Fine}]

Then she mixes it in with the water in the bottle, giving it a good shake. The liquid inside of the bottle turns into a pale, blue mixture. Most of the particulate dragon-scales don’t dissolve and end up loosely floating around inside of it.

Boss-cores are particularly interesting magical items, as far as she’s been told. Apparently there is something that adventurers just in general call ‘dungeon-magic’. It’s the magical force that runs through the dungeons of the world and it is what makes them work to begin with. The same magic flows through particularly strong monsters inside of them, making them stronger by condensing into specific points of their body. There, the magical energies compress together to form a physical core, from which it then leaks out into their bodies.

She holds her hands above the small core that came from the first boss of the western dungeon and repeats the process, before adding the new crystalline powder into the same bottle. It’s almost like ground glass and she doesn’t think it’s safe to eat. But that’s fine, she doesn’t want to eat it. She just needs its power for a moment.

(Fresh) uses: [Crafting: Grind {Fine}]

Looking over, she sees that Jubilee has come back upstairs again, standing now on the far side of the room, apparently having just come back up the stairs a second ago. Fresh smiles, looking back to her work as she is eager to show off. She’s sure this will work, the fountain has never led her astray yet.

As the dungeon-core powder seeps into the bottle with the ground up ice-dragon scales, there is a sudden sharp crackling sound. The wicking moisture that forms on the body of the glass bottle begins to solidify, as the core of the bottle begins to freeze over in an instant, far faster than she had expected it to. The glass splits, cracking in half loudly as the ice inside of it expands out much too quickly and presses the glass bottle apart. Fresh yelps, jumping back a step. As her breath leaves her mouth, she sees it form a thick cloud of vapor just before her eyes, as the air around her begins to freeze immediately. The temperature in the room has dropped far, far below what it was only a few seconds ago.

Something grabs her robe. Keeping her balance, Fresh looks down at Jubilee who stands next to her and gets ready to be yelled at for her latest blunder.

“Run away,” says Jubilee, gazing up at her.

“Huh?” Fresh blinks, looking at her friend who stares back up at her, not blinking at all, their gloved hand still clutching her robe.

“Demon,” says Jubilee’s voice, but it doesn’t stem from the figure below her, but from behind her in the shadow of the corner of the room. She feels a second hand grab her shoulder from behind and she lets out the start of a quick scream, just as a third one comes to cover her mouth and silences her.

Fresh shoots up in her bed, her sweaty, tousled hair flying past her face as she looks around the dark room. It’s the middle of the night. It was all just a dream.

It was all just another bad dream.

Fresh sighs, leaning back against the wall at the head of her bed, as she pulls the blanket higher to cover her knees which she holds against her chest. Basil and Shamrock are sleeping. Shamrock simply is splayed out over his bed, his arms and legs hanging off the sides as he lays there spread-eagle, still wearing all of his armor, as always. She makes a mental note to herself to make his bed bigger, so that his feet are inside of it at night. Maybe she can even convince him to finally take his armor off? Her vision of the giant is interrupted by Basil’s flailing form, as she flops around, her sleeping body kicking out in all directions every odd few seconds. Her blanket is knotted all around her, as if a snake were coiling around her body.

Lifting a hand, she places it onto the stone wall next to herself, feeling for Jubilee’s presence. With a quiet groan, the girl grabs her robe and covers herself with her blanket as she gets dressed beneath it and then gets up out of bed, feeling that she is unable to fall back asleep now, even if she wanted to. Fresh shudders, as her bare feet strike against the stones beneath herself, they’re icy cold. Her sleepy eyes wander towards the balcony door that is wide open. Did one of them open it in the night? She’s sure that they closed it before going to bed.

Quietly, she slips past her friends and heads out to the balcony. At first she just wants to close it, but as she sees the bright stars shining up above herself again, she can’t help but take a few steps outside to admire their radiance. The stars were always bright up in the north, but up here, up on the western mountain, they seem so close that she feels that she could touch them, if she just lifts her arm really high and stands on the tips of her toes. Fresh smiles, the beautiful sight of the looming heavens above fills her with a warmth that dispels the cool chill of her nightmare, that is already on the verge of being forgotten.

Someone breathes behind her, the exhalation of their soft breath touching her neck just above where the fluffy trim of her robe ends. Fresh turns around, staring somewhat shocked at first and then somewhat embarrassed at Basil, who stands there in the doorway in her white undergarments. “Y- you’re gonna get sick. It’s too cold out here with just that, Basil,” says Fresh nervously, not really sure what else to say in a spontaneously awkward situation like this. She looks away. Do friends usually see each other in their underwear? She isn’t sure. She certainly hasn’t done so thus far.

Basil lifts a hand, not saying anything as her palm presses against the center of Fresh’s chest.

“Ah… Basil…?” asks Fresh, looking down at the slender hand touching her body and then following its length with her eyes back up to Basil’s face. “What’s up?”

Basil looks at her, the icy night-wind that cascades down the mountains moving her long, strawberry-tinged strands past her brow, as it blows and encapsulates the both of them with its bitter chill. The starlight reflects off of the glossy surface of the priestess’ hair and as it drifts past her moonlit eyes once again, Fresh realizes that Basil hasn’t blinked once this entire time.

“Get out,” says Basil.

Fresh yelps, stumbling backwards with her arms flailing, as she flies back over the railing, shoved back by the sudden force of Basil pushing her over the edge. The girl plummets and then, a moment later, she dies.