“Hocus pocus!” yells Fresh at the crude, stuffed doll she had made, holding her fingers out towards it as ‘witchily’ as she can. “Ghost-goo!”

Nothing happens.

“Shamalama- lama- lam!”

Nothing happens.

“BUBB -”

“- WILL YOU SHUT UP?!” yells Jubilee from the kitchen. “You’ve been babbling like an idiot for…” Jubilee stops, holding their hand to their chin. “Well, actually for a few months now.”

“Hey!”

They swipe their hand through the air. “But you’ve been doing this all morning!”

“But Jubileeee~!” argues Fresh, clenching her fists. “I have to find out what that one ability is that I took.”

Jubilee tilts their head. “What?”

Fresh picks up the doll, lifting its hand to make gestures for her as she explains. “Remember, back when we left the north? I leveled up and everyone saw?”

Jubilee sighs. “Yeah? That’s literally why we had to leave.”

Fresh nods. “Mm! Well, the thing is, I picked some ability then real fast to get rid of my menu and I still don’t know what it was,” she explains.

Her friend stares at her for a while, taking a long, noisy sip from the mug of coughee in their hands. “Can’t be important then, can it?” they ask. “If you haven’t missed it so far.”

“But maybe I’ll need it now!” she explains. “This could be dangerous, Jubilee,” says Fresh. “Are you sure we should open the store today?”

“You and I both know that we don’t have a choice in the matter,” says Jubilee, looking at the mug in their hands. Staring at it for a second, they sigh, and pour all of the contents out into the basin. “Besides, we’ll need the money eventually for something.”

“What if someone from the north is there?” asks Fresh. “Someone who recognizes me?”

Jubilee nods. “That is a reasonable question,” they say, wiping their hands off on their sides as they walk towards her. Fresh’s face lights up. This counts as praise, right? Eagerly, she awaits Jubilee’s answer to her worries.

Fresh blinks, watching Jubilee walk right past her without saying another word.

“Hey!” yells Fresh after them, having hoped for more.

“Try ‘abracadabra’,” jokes Jubilee. “I heard that’s a good one.”

Fresh purses her lips, puffing out a cheek in agitation as she looks back to the doll in her hands. Setting it down, she points at it. “Abracadabra!”

The doll flops over onto its side. Nothing happens.

Deciding to let it rest for now, Fresh takes the doll and sets it into Jubilee’s room, next to the teddy-bear that looks up her way. “Try to get along, okay?” she asks, heading back out of the room.

Still having a little time left, she makes her way up to the roof where Basil had retreated to earlier as well, her patience not having lasted as long as Jubilee’s, surprisingly enough. Quietly looking out of the hatch, Fresh peeks around.

“Like this?” asks Basil.

Shamrock shakes his head. “Harder,” he explains, holding his palms out facing forward. “Try again.”

Basil tilts her head, but then sighs. “Okay.” She clears her throat. “But let me do it, you’re too rough.”

“Okay,” agrees Shamrock.

“Pat-a-cake! Pat-a-cake! -”

Fresh gasps, quietly ducking down back into the workshop. Shamrock and Basil, up on the roof, playing pat-a-cake in secret? How scandalous. Heading downstairs, she knocks on the door to the shower, hearing the water running. “Jubilee! Will you play pat-a-cake with me?”

“Fuck off!” yells Jubilee from inside of the shower.

Fresh sighs, going into the store.

“- And you better not eat anything from the shelves!”

Now she grumbles, closing the door behind herself. She had gone through a lot of trouble modifying the shower, at first just with the heating elements. But then, she had to make some further adjustments so that Jubilee could actually even use it. Being of a smaller build, they had difficulties reaching the shower-head. However, this has given birth to a new problem. That being that Basil and Jubilee are often spending far too long in the shower. Shamrock hasn’t taken to it. She supposes that he doesn’t care for the salt-water, which she understands. She really should work on some kind of filter for that. But…

“What would we do with all the salt?” she mutters to herself, looking around. Sure. Salt is always good. But, it feels like it would be a lot of salt and they can only use so much, even for their products. And they can’t sell it. It would cause too many questions to arise about their sourcing of the product. Her eyes rise up towards the window.

“That’s it!” she gasps. The solution would be to of course simply pump the excess salt back down through the pipes, back into the ocean. Is that great for the environment? Probably not, honestly. But she feels like the crabs can take a little extra salt from one household. It’s so obvious.

Fresh bonks herself on the head with her hand as she walks to the window behind the counter, to carefully peek out through the shutters. The beach is slowly starting to fill up with people. It looks like it’s going to be a busy day today. Though, she doesn’t see anyone who appears to be a soldier of any kind. She supposes that they have little interest in the crab-beach. They’re probably all located in the direction of the harbor.

The harbor…

…The harbor?

Fresh blinks. Harbors are on the water. Water… Water, like in her inventory?

…Her inventory? Her grimoire!

“AH!” yells Fresh in surprised delight, having successfully followed the trail of her own thoughts to their final conclusion. Opening her inventory, she reaches inside and pulls out her grimoire, dropping the wet book onto the counter and flipping through the pages.

“You know what ability I got, right?” she asks it, her hands already moving through the pages towards one near the middle.

Hair of the dog II - The oracle’s gamble Curses can draw their {SOURCE-POWER} from party-members, thereby bestowing effects that are of other natures than {DARK} Beware. We can never go b- - a beast with nineteen faces. His arms fell into - - I had a really nice time, actually Fresh lets out a long, defeated sigh and she shuts the book again. Of course it was something like this. It’s no wonder she never missed it. She would have never used it anyways. Jubilee would drag her into the shower by her hair and drown her if she even asked for permission to use her curses. Not that she needs her friend’s permission to do anything, but their opinion on the matter does feel like an important thing to take into consideration.

Then again, maybe that would be her opportunity to solve the whole Jubilee’s gender question? She blinks. What an odd thought. Though, should she just ask Basil? Would that be weird? Basil probably knows for sure.

No… no… it feels wrong. She decides to just leave it be. Don’t touch a running machine, right?

Shaking her head, she heads back upstairs, wondering why she has Mr. Mushroom on her brain all of a sudden and why she even bothered to go downstairs to begin with. She’s probably just bored. “Nyaaah~”

Not much later after that, they open up the store as usual. Nobody seems to really have any complaints about their having been closed yesterday, which is an excellent opportunity for Fresh to hammer in to her friends the need to take at least one day off a week, so that they can rest, like they had agreed to do in the other cities as well. Even if they never quite seemed to have managed.

“Big news,” says the familiar ‘milk-shake dark-elf’, as Fresh has dubbed the man. “You guys hear that horn too?” he asks.

“Who fucking didn’t?” barks Jubilee from behind Fresh, who is taking great pains to shake the man’s milkshake properly. She really should invent some kind of… shaky machine to shake these for her. Thankfully, they aren’t so popular yet as he is the only one who really wants them. But she can see more and more people looking his way each time he orders one. It’s only a matter of time.

“How’s the crab-hunting going?” asks Fresh.

“Kind of weird, honestly,” he says, taking the bottle as Fresh hands it to him.

“Huh? How come?”

He shrugs. “The crabs have been really aggressive lately,” he says. “It’s not like them.”

“They’re literally giant killer-crabs,” says Jubilee. “It’s exactly like them.”

Hearing the next customer in line clear their throat, the man looks over his shoulder at them and then waves goodbye. “Ah, sorry. See you tomorrow!”

How odd. Fresh looks around the beach. Honestly, from here, it looks like business as usual. But then again, maybe she just can’t tell from here. She makes a note to get someone to take her crab-hunting later.

Fresh can’t help but feel like she might have something to do with this. Though, after serving ice-cream for another few hours, she doesn’t really worry about that as much anymore as she does about her own cramping fingers and sore back.