The house-spriggan stands upright, tilting its upper body and its raised arms to the left. Fresh, her arms also in the air, mimics its movements. The spriggan sways to the right and then so does she. The spriggan lifts a leg and then hops around in a circle and then Fresh does the same, before coming to a stop and bouncing on the soles of her feet, just like it.

That’s how it goes.

Left, right, leg, circle, bounce.

The spriggan does it again and then so does she.

Left, right, leg, circle, bounce.

“Pakew!”

“Pakew!” shouts Fresh, clearly drawn into whatever this is.

A sigh comes from the table. “Do I ask? Or is it your turn today?” asks Jubilee, staring at Basil. There’s a bowl of dried fruit jerky on the table that they’re snacking on while reading.

The priestess rubs her chin, making a show out of thinking. She turns her head to the side. “Shamrock?” asks Basil. “I think you’re up.”

The man lifts his head from his work, staring at them before turning to Fresh. “What?” is all that he asks.

“Thanks, Shamrock,” says Basil, sipping her tea.

“Always,” replies the man, turning back down to his work.

Fresh frowns and does it again. Left, right, leg, circle, bounce. “Pakew!”

“Pakew!” replies the spriggan.

Fresh nods, satisfied and the spriggan does the same, before wobbling off down the staircase to go to the library. “I was learning the spriggan dance, guys,” she says, standing in front of her friends and repeating the motions, wobbling towards them as she moves like a spriggan. Fresh lowers her gaze, towards Jubilee and more importantly, towards their snack.

“Get the fuck away from me,” snaps Jubilee, dryly.

“As long as you’ve found a way to relax, I suppose,” remarks Basil, flipping through the book on cheap recipes that Fresh had found the other day.

Fresh blinks. “Relaxing?” she asks, not sure if she understands. “This is work stuff, guys,” she argues.

Jubilee shakes their head, returning their focus back to their book. “I told you we should cut her pay by half,” says Jubilee.

“We’ll look into the numbers tomorrow,” nods Basil, turning a page.

“Hey!” Fresh frowns, puffing out her cheek. “The spriggan dance is super important! It’s how they get the rare-wood trees to give them rare-wood!”

Making a point of it, she stands in front of Jubilee and does it again. Left, right, leg, circle, bounce. “Pakew!”

“I will give you this if you fuck off,” says Jubilee, sliding the bowl her way.

Fresh smiles a devious smile. That’s the exact premise that the rare-wood trees work off of. The spriggans and the trees have an unspoken deal of sorts. The spriggans provoke the trees, without harming them, through their dancing and the tree, in order to be left alone, gives them one of its fresh branches. In exchange, the spriggans tend to the soil and the roots of the trees.

Fresh grabs one of Jubilee’s fruit bars for herself, her dance having been a success. She makes a note to try it on the others later too.

Though… perhaps this weapon is too powerful to use against her own friends?

Fresh bites into the fruit jerky as she thinks about the morality of spriggan-dancing her friends into submission. It’s a tricky subject. Maybe it’s best to leave this one as an emergency tool?

She nods, heading downstairs. This is a good compromise.

“Blub,” says Fresh, leaning over the natural hot-spring in their basement and staring into the water. The water doesn't respond.

She wants to use the water for her crafting. It’s powerful and rare.

But it’s also their bathwater. So it’s weird.

Sure, nobody would ever know. But she would know. Every time someone buys one of their potions or drinks, she would know that they bathed in it and it would be weird. That’s already apart from any hygiene issues. Hygienic standards are certainly more lax in this world. But that’s just what the nature of adventuring life is.

Fresh frowns, watching her reflection do the same back up towards her as she examines the pool. There are crevices in the rock where fresh water comes in and crevices where it seeps back out again, so it’s always ‘new’ water. But still…

She tilts her head. What if she makes a small indent in the rock for water to flow into? Water that they haven’t bathed in yet. She can just make a small channel or a pipe from one of the sources and then route that over to a separate hole that she’ll dig and then from there, it can flow back into the bath and drain out. That way, things won’t be weirder than they need to be.

Fresh nods, setting exactly to that task.

On the far side of the bath, on the opposite side of the room, she sets up a metal pipe and fastens it into the rock of the pool. It’s a bit of a tricky process, since she has to get undressed and get into the water to do it and the seal isn’t perfect, but that’s fine. Just enough water has to get into the pipe with enough pressure that it pushes through to the other end.

Rising back up, she looks at the end of the new pipe, at the water that splashes out of it like a little fountain.

She smiles. It looks pretty. She should make something like this for the bath too, just as a decorative feature, or maybe to sit under so that it can run over one’s head.

One thing at a time though. First, she gets out, dries off and gets dressed again, setting to work on digging a hole behind the bath. Just small enough so that there’s enough water in it to work with. Then, with a new segment of pipe, she carves out a groove into the rock and leads it back to the bath. Now, all she does is connect one final piece of pipe to the initial fountain.

The pipe shakes. Water starts moving through it and drips out into the basin. Once it becomes full enough, the overflow pushes out through the other pipe, back into the pool. Fresh smiles, nodding to herself, before then burying as much of the pipe construction as she can in order to keep the ‘natural beauty’ of their washroom as intact as possible.

She beams as she looks at her reflection in the large, red crystal across from herself. Despite the fact that she’s kneeling down on the ground, working with her hands in the dirt, the girl in her reflection is standing there and doing the spriggan dance.

Left, right, leg, circle, bounce.

Feeling her watching, the reflection stares at her somewhat awkwardly for a second and then drops to its knees and sticks its hands into the dirt, pretending that nothing ever happened and Fresh blinks, tilting her head, not sure if it ever really did.

[World-tree Mineral Water](Unique) A unique blend of water from an underground current, filled with rich minerals and nutrients from the well nourished ground beneath the world-tree. It has highly beneficial properties when used in magic-crafting and medicine.

Fresh stares at the bottle of water in her hands, swirling it around. It’s crystal-clear, but there are a couple sand-grain sized pieces of rock and sediment floating around in it. Lifting it to her lips, she tries it and nods.

“Yup. That’s water.”

It’s good water, objectively speaking. But perhaps its health benefits are more of a long-term issue. Drinking high-quality water in comparison to ‘normal’ good water certainly has an impact over the course of one’s life. But perhaps not right off from the first sip. But there’s definitely something here. It says as much in the item’s own window.

Fresh gets poked.

She blinks, looking down. It’s the healer spriggan, the one with the staff. “What’s up, little guy?” she asks.

“Pakew!” it says.

She blinks, looking at it and then the bottle. “You want this?” she asks. The spriggan nods. Fresh shrugs and obliges, pouring a little splash of it onto its head.

The spriggan’s sprout moves, growing outward with unusual speed, together with its stubby legs and arms.

[Spriggan {Stage 2}]

“Huh…” says Fresh, looking at the spriggan that seems to be admiring its own new body. It’s a little bigger than before and a little slimmer. The sprout is more pronounced and grown, having several leaves now. “You okay?”

“Pakew!” affirms the spriggan. Its voice is much less ‘childish’ now, for a lack of a better word.

These second stages of spriggans tended to be down by the harpies in the dungeon. They’re a little more competent than the usual kind and even have a small bit of magic. Maybe they can sell ‘upgrades’ for peoples’ summoned pet spriggans?

“Mm…” Fresh looks at the bottle of water in her hands and then at a rack of Basil’s medicine. “Hmm…”