Being an adventurer can be a very anxiety inducing way to live your life. That’s what Fresh has realized. Sure, there is the allure of some great, vibrant destiny that always seems to sit just on the edge of the horizon, there where you can always see it, but you are never quite able to reach it, no matter how long you chase after it. Promises of exotic places and things, promises of rare experiences and lifestyles that could cause your blood to rush so fast that you might never sleep again, in that fervent desire to see more, to do more, to be more. To become stronger, lauded, loved, happy.

Those were just the promises that the ever-distant horizon made.

But for it to keep them, well, those things come at a cost and they might not be what you expected them to be, should you ever get them. When you arrive, you might be stronger, but have no-one left to protect with your strength. You might be lauded, but can not look at yourself in the mirror, because you only see the failures that you made during the journey. You might be loved, but have nothing but distaste for the world and the people that love you. Happiness is the one thing that seems to remain, but you could have gotten that without the adventure, without the pain.

Adventures have to be paid for in either the currencies of blood or of innocence. Nobody has an adventure ‘for free’. Nobody leaves an adventure unchanged, untainted. Those who come out the other end are awash and soaked through to the bone either way, in the blood of those they had made those strong memories with or in the blood of the thing that had beckoned them to adventure in the first place.

Innocence? Childhood naivety? Fresh isn’t sure what exactly that other thing is, that thing that you lose during the journey. That initial drive that causes people to run after the horizon. That includes herself. Is it bad to lose that thing, whatever it is?

No, she doesn’t think so. Adventures hurt. But they’re important. Without her adventure, Fresh would have never gotten so far towards becoming the person she wants to be, even if she isn’t even close to being there just yet.

But she has friends. She has a home. She has a life that she enjoys waking up to every day and those three things are enough to make her want to keep running towards the distant horizon, even if it will hurt now and then.

It is late at night and she lays in her bed, staring at the ceiling with tired eyes that find no rest. Her mind has been darting left and right ever since her heart to heart with Jubilee.

It was a very clarifying, healing moment for the two of them. But it was eye-opening in a way that she hadn’t expected it to be. In a way that troubles her, even at this midnight hour.

How much weight has Jubilee been carrying, to break like that at a single sign of true affection? Her head turns over to the side as she looks at the others who are fast asleep. How much is everyone carrying with them? What looming specters do they have in the dark shadows of their minds?

Basil jolts in a sudden series of twitches, her arms flailing for a second, but then finding their way to the dream-sheep that Shamrock had placed on her bed. She grabs it, clutching it against herself, as she falls back into silence. Shamrock just lays there, same as always. Fresh sometimes wonders if he’s dead while he’s asleep. She never sees his breastplate moving at night.

She sits upright. She realizes that she does a lot too by herself in the store, in the house. She makes just about everything that they sell. She cooks. She cleans. She shops. She carries so much weight herself. But as she sits there upright in her bed, her blue blanket falling down to her bare stomach, she realizes something as she rolls her shoulders, which carry on them light scars from the straps of her overladen bag that had constantly torn into her soft skin over and over.

She realizes that she can carry more weight.

As she sits there and sees the glint of Shamrock’s armor in the moonlight of the open balcony, as she hears the troubled mumbling of the priestess, Basil, as she remembers the smell of Jubilee from when she pressed her face into their shoulder, Fresh realizes, that she can and wants to carry more weight.

They can handle it. She’s sure that they can. But she wants to do it. There is some… matriarchal urge, some nigh-motherly instinct now present in her, as she realizes how vulnerable all of her precious friends are. She’s an adult. She’s a witch. It’s midnight.

- It’s time to get to work.

Fresh gets up, slipping on her robe. Quietly, she makes her bed so that she can’t fall back into it with a clear conscience. Then, she walks past Basil’s bed, pulling her blanket back over her to cover her and the sheep, which she spares a moment to nod to, thanking it for its hard work. She does the same for Shamrock, covering him with her old blanket that he had wordlessly accepted as a new treasure in his life.

Heading down to the basement, Fresh grabs a hot coughee from the shelf and then washes up, before heading to her work-bench. She doesn’t think much about the thing she had hidden in the bath. That was for another day, for another feeling. That was for something that isn’t present in her now.

Innocence? No…

The word goes through her mind again, as she stands there in the gloomy firelight, down in the dark basement where they had found a body. Her fingers tap the table over and over as she racks her brain for an idea. Not for an idea that the distant trickling of water might give her, no, for an idea that is hers. An idea that she wants to fulfill. Something that could take the edge off of not just her friends, but of every adventurer who had become hard and cold, who had lost that childish innocence along the way to the horizon.

Looking up, she sees some of Basil’s dried herbs hanging above herself. They should be about ready to be processed now. Basil had said that she could take some if she needed them. Fresh looks back to the planter-boxes. Five of the six are doing well, but the one still hasn’t grown a single sprout. She hopes Basil can figure out what the problem is, she’d offer to help, but Basil seems to want to do it herself.

Fresh continues to look up and as she stares towards the ceiling, seeing the glistening of the dim fire-light above her head, Fresh gets her idea.

Running around the basement, she grabs all of the materials that she thinks she needs. Magic crystals. Moonglass. Iron. Jubilee had bought some other metals as well that sit in a box in the corner, Fresh hasn’t really looked at them yet. But now as she inspects them, they seem to look like bronze or tin, if she had to guess?

[Copper Ingot](Normal) A lightweight metal. Highly malleable.

“Oh,” says Fresh, glad nobody else is around right now. Throwing the copper onto the table, she sets to work, deciding to use it. In theory, she could use iron for this too. But iron is heavy and she needs something light. She only needs a little bit.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Metalworking {Cylinder}]

The copper cylinder falls down to the table. She sits it upright and holds her hands out again.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Metalworking: Hollow]

The inside of the cylinder vanishes, the material disappearing as the magic eats it away, leaving only a long, hollow, copper pipe that gets thinner near the bottom.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Saw] x2

The pipe falls into three pieces that she sets to the side for now. Reaching over and grabbing the moonglass, she cuts out a chunk and then refines that down into a small disk.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Glassworker {Cut}]

She polishes it.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Glassworker {Polish(Lustrous)}]

Holding it up to the fire, Fresh looks through it. But realizes that it isn’t what she’s after. The flat disk in her hand doesn’t do what she wanted it to do. It just looks like a small pane of glass. Not something that can magnify, like an eye.

‘Like an eye…’ she repeats the phrase in her mind. Fresh tosses the useless disk down to the side and makes a new one, but this time, she doesn’t cut it flat. Rather, she makes it so that it has a slight curvature, a bulge, like the rounding of an eye.

[Enchanted Lens]{Holy}(Excellent) A magnifying lens made out of magical glass.

Fresh beams, looking through the new lens and examining the dry herbs above herself. Though she does make the mistake of looking into the fire with it, causing her eye to sting for a moment.

Grabbing the widest piece of the copper tube, she sets the lens into the top of it, gluing it into place with some normal glue. Then, she carves a small, upside-down ‘L’ shaped groove into the bottom of the first two tubes and then slides one over the other turning it to lock it into place.

She makes another lens and sets it inside of this segment. Then she attaches the smallest piece to the lowest segment of the cylinder, locking it into place along the ‘L’ rail. Grabbing the ‘useless’ piece of glass from before, she cuts it smaller and fits it into the bottom of the tube, simply to seal it.

[Stargazer Telescope]{Holy}(Excellent)

This telescope allows you to clearly see impossibly far distances with incredibly vivid colors.

Effect: The holy energy flowing through the glass restores 1 SOUL for every minute spent watching the stars.

Quality Effect: Weights 65% less

Weight: 2.15kg

Value: ???

Fresh beams, looking at her newest creation. Grabbing it in excitement, she runs upstairs, heading for the balcony so that she can test it out.