Fresh comes back from the drink shelf, setting a bottle of hot coughee down next to Veli for him to warm himself up against and to dry off a little, before they open. Basil and Shamrock are standing on the other end of the counter, decorating a slime-toy together with assorted flowers and berries. Jubilee is scribbling something in the ledger.

“Careful, it’s super hot,” she says to the shivering fairy who, with his good hand, rubs his hair dry with a scrap of fabric thrown at him by Jubilee, who had yelled at him for getting his work clothes wet. The rains have started to come in force. The fairies, given their tiny statures, are more than vulnerable to it. Not just from the impact of the drops as they fall or from the growing winds, but from the lost heat which the dampness steals from their bodies. The small creatures run naturally hot, given the amount of energy they burn every hour and any disturbance to that makes them very vulnerable.

This is of course made even worse by the fact that many of them are hungry or simply downright on the brink of starvation.

The autumn appears to be heading in a bitter direction, she’s going to have to speed up her plan while there are still any fairies left to save. Fresh had spoken to the magistrate about her idea and he was accepting of it, promising to forbid entrance to the small section of the forest. Now she just needs to get the fairies on board.

“Did you manage to do that thing I asked you about, Veli?” asks Fresh, her cheek resting on the counter as she lays her head sideways down on it, staring at the fairy who is warming his hands against the bottle. Veli lifts his head, about to answer.

“Thing?” asks Jubilee, cutting in, suspicious right from the start.

“Magical floating fairy house,” explains Fresh, not lifting her head.

Jubilee replies with a very disinterested - “Oh,” and returns to their work in the ledger. Fresh wonders what the others had come up with, during their ‘business plan’ meeting a few weeks ago. Oh well, one question at a time. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” starts Jubilee, getting her attention again. “Why the house? Why not just have them dig into the rock of the mountain?”

“Huh?”

“Why hang little houses in the trees, when you could just dig some into the side of the mountain? Where nobody else can go, except the fairies?” They rub the mask of their chin, thinking. “Wouldn’t that be more economical?”

“Jubilee~” sighs Fresh. “Would you rather live in a house or in a rock?” Jubilee stares at her quietly, before lifting their arms and gesturing to broadly everything all around them. Fresh blinks, realizing their point. “But how are they going to cut the stone out of the mountain?”

“Some of the little fucks should have an affinity for stone-magic, it shouldn’t be a problem for them with a little guidance.”

“Stone-magic?” asks Fresh, just to be sure.

Jubilee sighs. “It’s magic. For stones. It would do wonders for that rock-filled head of yours.”

“It’s an off-shoot of earth-magic,” says Basil from the side of the room.

Fresh scratches her cheek. “I saw one at the adventurers’ guild, she could use wood-magic. Do they all have nature-magic like that?” asks Fresh, staring down at Veli curiously. She gasps, realizing. “Wait! Jubilee!”

“What?”

“Is glass magic earth-magic too?” she asks. “You really are the fairy-queen!” says Fresh in a joking tone. Though she hasn’t discarded the possibility entirely yet out of her mind.

“Don’t push your luck, goo-brain,” sighs Jubilee, looking back to their ledger.

“We don’t like the underground,” says Veli, finally able to get a word in. “There are critters and bugs and things that want to eat us.” He shakes his head. “It’s safer in an attic than in a basement, at least there you can fly away, if something happens.” Fresh nods, understanding his point. Also, she’s happy that her idea hasn’t been invalidated. “Some of the others are interested, a lot of them aren’t.”

“How come?” asks Fresh, half-disappointed.

Veli shakes his wings out, turning his back to the bottle to warm it. “It’s too good. You’re being too nice. It’s suspicious.”

“Huh?!” asks Fresh, her head finally lifting off of the counter.

“We don’t trust nice people anymore,” explains Veli. “We saw what happened to the others.” He rings out the wet cloth, holding it against the exterior of the bottle to warm it up. “I vouched for you, but I was the only one until Tarja got back from work. When she showed her coin to the others after hearing us talk about you, a few more seemed convinced.”

“Tarja?”

“She works at the tailor’s,” explains Veli.

“Oooooh!” Fresh realizes that this discussion must have happened in the dead of night, right as she was heading to the magistrate’s office. She supposes that the fairies have a meeting point somewhere. “Stay there!” she tells Veli, before quickly running down the stairs to the basement and then back up a minute later with the rebuilt fairy-house in her hands.

It’s the same principle as before. A doll-house, essentially. But she’s now treated the wood and then carefully insulated it with crystal-drakonium. A weight-reducing iron-ring sits in the base of the foundation, together with an infused-crystal. In truth, this prototype is perhaps the most expensive item she has made, as it uses just about every idea that she has come up with in the west. The last thing she wants to figure out before considering it ‘market ready’ is a heating system.

“Careful!” she says, setting it down on the counter. A second later, it lifts up off of the flat surface, hovering a few inches. “Ta-da! Magical floating fairy house!” she beams with pride. Veli gets up, rolling his shoulder with the broken arm as he walks towards it, his wet boots still back by the bottle. “Try it out, please,” she asks. Veli nods, flying up to the little door that wasn’t there before and opening it before flying inside. “What do you think?”

“The door needs to be wider,” suggests Veli right away. “It’s like a human door. But we have wings, so it could be too tight in an emergency.” She gasps, realizing that this is likely true. She had still designed the house according to a human’s needs and standards. “I like the higher ceiling now though, it feels a lot more comfortable.” There is a small knocking. “It’s really quiet in here now too.”

For the next little while until the store opens, Fresh and Veli go through the last things that she should change about the building, in order to make it more ‘fairy conform’. She adds these things to her to-do list, together with the heating system. Asking Veli to tell the others that they can start gathering resources tomorrow already, if they need money for food, she grabs the house again and vanishes into the basement, leaving the store to the others today. People’s lives are counting on her, so she has to finish this project now, or at least get the ball rolling.

“Magical~ float-ing~ fairy~ house~” hums Fresh to herself over and over as she works, making all of the adjustments to the house. Bigger doors. Tiny shutters to block the glass windows to hide their sleeping figures from hungry birds and to let them peep out into the world. A ‘nest’ room with kobold-fluff carpeting and several tiny ropes that things could be hung from wall to wall, rather than a bed. Beds aren’t great to sleep in with wings, apparently.

As for the heating mechanism….

Fresh ponders, scratching her cheek. She knows how to make a cooling mechanism, having already done so with the cabinet upstairs. But… she would likely need a fire-monster drop to make anything with heat properties and those are far and few between up here on the mountain. As she wonders curiously about what she should do, her eyes fall onto the fireplace and she listens to its crackling.

Her thoughts seem to numb over for a while as she stares into the dancing flames, transfixed, listening to the popping voice of the fire. The idea comes to her as a foreign thing in her mind, but she accepts it nonetheless with a grateful nod to the fire. In return for its advice, she puts the biggest, fattest, heaviest and driest log from the wood-pile into the flames. Fair is fair.

Running over, she carefully scoops up some of the still glowing ash with the metal scoop there, meant for cleaning, and carries it back to her table. Grabbing a magic-crystal, she carves out a little marble shape, which she then wraps in a tiny band of crystal-drakonium.

(Fresh) uses: [Craftsman: Extract(Sphere)]

After that, she sets the marble down and puts on a pair of crystal-drakonium gloves to protect her hands. In truth, this isn’t a recipe that she is supposed to know. It isn’t one that the fountain has given her, it isn’t one that her damp-grimoire has given her. It is the one that the thing of the exact opposite of her destined nature has given her and while a somewhat unusual method, she trusts the fire’s reassurances that it will work.

Now, Fresh knows that it’s odd to get ideas from a fire, let alone to attribute any sort of awareness to it. But, she also knows that the water has done such things for her in the past, so why can’t fire?

She shrugs. It makes sense to her.

Fresh checks her gloves and then grabs a handful of the ash with the still glowing embers inside of it. She needs this, but she also needs something warm, something ethereally so. Her eyes scan the basement, looking for a source of inspiration, for a familiar feeling to power her spell. Her gaze lands on Basil’s planters, on the sixth one where they had stood before and hugged. She sees the first green sprouts starting to push their way out through the dirt, reaching, striving for life.

Smiling, she closes her eyes and unclenches her fist, opening her palm flat as she blows the glowing embers over the small marble.

Perhaps the magical scholars and engineers of this world would call all of this humbug and would have laughed her out of any academy or institution of casters. Perhaps any wizard worth their salt would be howling at her odd methodologies. But they all didn’t get it, not in her eyes that have seen another world. Sure, there’s a science to so-called ‘wet-crafting’. It’s a lot like cooking. But more important than just an exact following of steps in a recipe, is the spark of personal passion. Of love for the process, for the creation, for the receiver thereof.

Ash and glowing coals swirl around the small marble on the table, spinning and condensing around it as if bound into a ring by its gravity. She picks it up with both hands, cupping her fingers closed around it, as she holds her face to it and blows, as if nurturing a delicate, tiny ember in her hands, fostering it to grow into a proud flame.

[Flame-infused crystal]{Fire}(Excellent) Infused with a burning magical resonance, this tiny crystal fragment passively radiates a constant heat out in all directions. Quality Effect: Can be recharged in direct sunlight Weight: 0.3kg Value: ???