A yellow-robed adventurer stands outside of the door of the store, her group forming a half circle on one side of it, as she holds the bottle of pre-brewed coughee in both of her hands. “Aaaah~ it’s so warm,” says the human, as she holds the bottle snugly against her face.

“I don’t know about the taste,” replies the bearded wizard standing across from her, swirling the bottle in his hands around a little. A tiny draft of steam rises up from it, flowing out into the cool tunnel. “It tastes a little bit like sour dirt?”

“That’s because you got the dark one,” says a hooded man next to him. He points to the label on the bottom of the bottle that says ‘bitter’.

“Huh? You got a bitter one too,” he asks, puzzled.

“Mine’s cold though,” he shrugs. “It’s different.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” laughs the yellow-robed caster at the hooded man who has an icy bottle of black coughee in his hands. He looks at it and shrugs. “It tastes better cold.”

Fresh smiles as she listens in on the conversation. The weight of her tired eyes is made lighter by the happy feeling that she feels in her chest, after hearing them talk about the thing that she made. It was worth it, staying up a few hours longer to make the second cabinet for the hot drinks. As planned, it’s heated by the chimney pipe and some metal rods. The crystal-drakonium really does an excellent job at insulating the heat. The cabinet isn’t hot like an oven, but it gets hot enough that it makes the bottles too hot to hold comfortably with just your bare hands. So she had to put up a warning sign on the cabinet.

But it seems to have been working well so far. In fact, it seems to have attracted a lot of attention, as people started looking at the new cabinets and playing with the sliding glass doors. So much so, that Jubilee had to start yelling at them to stop letting all of the cold and hot air out. The sweet-teas, which had only been moving fairly slowly these past few days, mostly as a novelty, had already sold twice as many units as usual and it isn’t even midday yet. There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus on what is more popular in general, the hot or the cold drinks, to her surprise. She was sure that the hot drinks would sell a lot more up here on the frigid mountain. As far as she can tell however, it just seems to come down to everyone’s individual preferences. Same as with the sweetness of the coughee.

Fresh had gotten up early after staying up late to brew a large, new batch of it, which she had filled into bottles with varying amounts of milk. Half of them went into the cold section, half into the hot section. The heated cabinet fills the storefront with a deeply warm fragrance. The smells of the hot herbal and fruit teas, mixing in with the more baseline, bitter-note of the coughee. The combined aroma gives the entire store a strong, but welcoming and very comforting smell. The scent overpowers the old scent that seemed to linger in the forgotten building. That odd tinge of dust and wet rock, neither having left together with the ghost, both being overwritten by the new, beckoning odor that seems to draw more than one person in, judging by their wiggling noses as they step through the door and look around.

“Don’t drink any before bed,” says Basil, handing a customer their bag with a jar of the dried coughee powder. “It’ll keep you up all night.”

“That’s perfect!” says the customer, too young to be an adventurer in Fresh’s eyes. She is wearing, to Fresh’s extreme delight, a flower-crown lined with many different yellow flowers from outside of the city. Though age seems to have little meaning here in that regard, those who needed to earn money went into the dungeon one way or the other apparently. “I’m getting my class in a few days, so I still need to study a lot!”

“Oh, congratulations!” says Basil, handing her the bag and her change. “What class are you taking?”

“My family runs the forge down on the second plaza,” she explains. “But I don’t really have the body for it. So I’m going to become an enchanter instead!” says the girl excitedly. “But I need to pass the exam first, or I won’t get accepted into the academy,” she sighs.

“Do your best, okay?” says Basil. “That’s an excellent class choice!”

The girl nods, grabbing her bag and leaves.

Fresh scratches her cheek, walking over to Basil. “Isn’t enchanting a sub-class?”

Basil shakes her head. “You can take any class as a primary class.”

“But how do you fight in the dungeon, then?” asks Fresh.

“You don’t,” shrugs Basil, leaning over the counter towards her as she explains. “People with primary crafting classes only ever craft. Enchanters, well… they enchant things that other people make.” The priestess nods. “If her family already runs a forge, that’s a great choice. She can accentuate their already existing work.”

“But why not just take it as a sub-class?” asks Fresh, scratching the back of her head.

“Not everyone wants to be an adventurer, goo-brain,” throws Jubilee in from the side.

Fresh looks back and forth between the two of them. She had never even considered that. Why wouldn’t someone want to be a dungeon-crawling adventurer? Though, after a moment of reflection, she supposes that it does make sense. It’s a dirty, dangerous job and there isn’t much glory in it. Now that she thinks about it, she doesn’t think she’s ever even seen someone who is very high-level, apart from Shamrock. Which means that either it takes a long time, longer than any human has to live. Or that simply nobody ever lived long enough for that to happen to begin with.

“Anyways,” says Basil. “Having a primary crafting class has its merits. Sub-crafters can’t make items of a higher quality than ‘excellent’,” she says. Seeing Fresh’s confused expression, she adds on. “That’s what comes after ‘high-quality’.”

“Oh,” says Fresh, tapping her chin. “So does anything come after that?”

“Yes, there are two more levels, but only primary-class crafters have access to them.”

Fresh sighs, not really excited to hear this news. Sure, it means that there is still progress for her to make with her craftsman-sub-class. But it also means that there is a cap approaching that she can’t do anything about. A limitation. A boundary that she can’t cross. That bugs her a lot, even if it’s still a far away problem.

“They’re floating!” shouts an excited, raspy voice. Fresh turns around and looks at the customer. She can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl. The person, wearing a hood with two lumps beneath it, points at the crystal-drakonium boots on the shelves.

“Yeah,” says someone next to them. “I wonder how you walk in them? The stats are really good though for this price.”

“Wouldn’t you just fly?” They press down on the boot, it sinks to the shelf. “Ah, no, look,” they say, still sounding fascinated however, as they let go and the boot rises back up into the air. “Weird. Why does it do that?”

“I bet it’s the crystals,” says the strange customer, pointing at the glitter in the leathery material. “They probably have some screwball enchanter here,” they say, laughing.

Fresh frowns, puffing out her cheek, as she heads down to the basement and closes the door tightly behind herself. She returns to her work, trying to come up with new items for the shop. Things have been going very well so far. She thinks that she likes the west a lot. Despite everything, people here seem to be… well, she isn’t sure if ‘kinder’ is the right word. But there’s certainly an openness here to the customers. That polished veneer of a polite society, enforced by the church in the north, simply didn’t exist here. People were open and loud and honest and liked eating and drinking and celebrating just as brashly.

Grabbing a small log, she tosses it into the fire, feeding it a little, before placing her hands on the table and looking around, trying to come up with something new. She still needs to think of some more crystal-drakonium armor. ‘Celebrating…’, the word from a moment ago returns to the forefront of her mind for some reason. She wonders if the others would go with her to the adventurers’ guild to celebrate? Though she doesn’t even know what. Maybe they could go to just have a fun night once, all together.

She likes the quiet life together with them, but maybe getting a drink or two and joining in on the never-ending party could be a lot of fun? Isn’t she here to try out new things and to live a new life, after all?

Fresh looks around the basement that she has retreated down into, noticing rather abruptly that she is all alone. Somehow, that bothers her much more than usual right now. She sighs, lifting her hands from the table and goes back upstairs, seeing if there is any store-work that she can help out with.