Chapter 27

Cooper

“Thank you for coming along to help me,” Thrush said, leading the way along the wide path he paved through snow and earth.

Much of the path had become slush and mud due to the warm spell. Experience told me that this would be the last warm spell of the season. Traveling through the wet path was still better than wading through deep snow, and my boots were well insulated. Had them for years, and hoped to keep them for many more years to come. So I blamed it on giving my boots a break when I couldn’t walk any longer without respite.

“We’ll sleep when we return,” Thrush said.

“Well, I do need to sleep, but I’ve got to make sure my boots don’t get too worn out walking so much at once. Besides, we’ve been walking for a day and a half and I’m exhausted, hungry, and tired.”

“I don’t believe you,” Thrush said. “Your boots are fine.”

To that I just laughed. I could endure, but I could not keep up with Thrush. Thrush didn’t have any qualms about stopping for a nap and some food. In fact I thought he was looking quite forward to a simple cold meal. I thought Thrush would have been hungrier than he seemed to be, so I over packed with potatoes and salted fish.

“I’m still amazed,” I said. “A little dubious if I’m honest.”

“About the ship?” Thrush said.

“You’re about half my size. It’s just incredible how powerful you are.”

“I would have dragged the whole ship through the woods, but it was falling apart. Plus, there’s a lot there that I don’t want.”

The sight of Thrush leaping out of the forest with cheeks full of barrels made me laugh and shake my head. He’d gone on for a while about his inventory system, and it didn’t seem like he had one at all. It was something that seemed to bother him. Everytime I brought it up, he was the most intrigued I’d ever seen him.

“A fable stone might help,” I said after minutes of eating in companionable silence.

“With getting an inventory like yours?” Thrush said.

“I was thinking that if you had a fable stone, you might be able to assign a god to a quest path. Then maybe you could get skills, abilities, and an inventory system.”

“Fable stone,” Thrush said as though he’d just caught a rare and shiny fish.

We didn’t talk much for the rest of the trek to Thrush’s ship. I could tell that the beast was deep in his thoughts, even veering off the trail until I called after him. I heard him mutter about the fable stone a few times. If I had an extra one, I’d gladly have given it to him.

I was simply awed when we finally reached the ship. The first thing I noticed was the stink of decay. The stench bittered my visage.

“The smell is coming from them,” Thrush said, pointing to one of the neat piles beside the structure. There was a heap of dead goblins, and Thrush stuffed one into his mouth without hesitation. Then he turned to me and I saw his fur waver and perceptibly shorten. His ears pointed out just a tad, and his eyes flooded with veins of green colors. His endlessly beating eyeballs throbbed out of sync and he smiled a maw of fangs.

“Tasty,” I said.

“So here are the barrels, and here are the metals I want,” Thrush said, pointing out each pile. “Can you put these in your inventory?”

“I can, but the weight is going to add up and I won’t be able to go very fast. I’m guessing I’d barely be able to take a step forward. That’s a lot of material.”

“What if I carry you?” Thrush said.

I chuckled until I realized that Thrush was serious. I agreed to think about it while Thrush gave me a tour of the ship.

He’d done an excellent job on pulling out the most important things. Important to him, at least. I was excited about some of the dishes and cutlery in the kitchen, so I decided to take what I needed. The rest of the ship had some interesting surprises. Most of all was what we found in the captain’s quarters. We found a chest in those quarters, buried beneath fallen shelves. It was heavily locked, and when Thrush easily pulled it apart with his bare hands, two tins fell out.

“Is this a fable stone?” Thrush said. “It looks like a tiny metal barrel.”

“It is not a fable stone. Pierce one and see what’s inside,” I said.

Thrush instead threw an entire tin into his mouth. He chewed through the can, and the sound of metal scraping on teeth raised the hair on the back of my neck.

After swallowing, Thrush licked his lips with his toad-ish tongue. His eyes pulsed and he paused.

“Coffee,” he said. “My composition tells me that this is coffee from islands in the south.”

“You just ate an entire can of coffee,” I said. “Have you ever had coffee before?”

“No, but it reminds me of some of the roasted teas you’ve brewed. I like it.”

“I’m curious to see how coffee will affect you. In the meantime, I’ve decided I’m ok with you carrying me. It’ll save us a bunch of trips.”

Within the hour, I had added as much scrap metal and all the barrels in my inventory. Although the weight was heavily fractioned once it entered my inventory, there was still so much weight that I couldn’t even stand up. By then, Thrush’s eyes had taken on a goatish slit, and they were coffee brown. There was a wildness in his eyes. A prehistoric savagery.

The next thing I knew, I was on Thrush’s shoulders, hunched over the short beast and doing my best to hold on for dear life. He sprinted down the path back home so fast, that the trees were simply long blurs.

“I REALLY LIKE THIS COFFEE,” Thrush said.

At our speed, I couldn’t get a word in. Everytime I opened my mouth, I choked on the sheer force of the wind. There were moments where I was certain I couldn’t hold on to Thrush any longer, but he shifted to help me. Exactly two days later, after non-stop riding, I was dumped in the clearing surrounding my cabin.

After emptying my inventory, I ate nearly six bowls of soup. Thrush had another six, before asking about the smoker.

“Now that we have metal,” he said, “how do we make a bigger one?”

“Ideally, we would forge and weld a new one,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll have to… I don’t know. Bend what we can together? Fit it together somehow?”

I helped Thrush pick out the biggest sheets of metal and directed him on shaping the smoker. When we needed to weld two pieces together, Thrush simply shoved one metal into the other. Sometimes it worked like a charm, while other times it caused problems. Thrush learned that piercing the metal with a claw helped prevent the metal from splitting wide open when impaled by another piece.

Eventually, we were on the last piece. The offset fire chamber. When that was secure, Thrush had his smoker. It was massive, nearly the size of my bed. The inside was big enough that we could comfortably take shelter inside if we needed to.

The main part of it was a giant cylinder with a lid, composed out of the harpoon turret. The harpoon itself had been bent at each end and shoved through the lid to form a handle. Two sheets of different metals were joined together and perforated to form a rudimentary rack. The offset chamber was half the size of the main part and the whole thing stood on a variety of metal legs.

“There’s a lot of holes where all the parts go together,” Thrush said, examining his handiwork.

“Without the ability to forge, or weld, that’s actually impressive,” I said.

“Are the holes going to be a problem?”

“Yea. Maybe. If you can fill the holes and gaps with pieces of metal, then that should do it.”

Thrush suffered numerous cuts and gashes from having handled the metal. He worked in a constant state of purring, healing himself almost instantaneously whenever he received damage. His powers were unlike anything I had ever seen before, much less fathomed.

I’d been pretty much useless while Thrush had done most of the work. Now that the smoker was nearly complete, Thrush was finishing the project by filling the gaps and holes with leftover metals. He was able to peen over pieces with but a pinch of a thumb and finger.

“We’ve got a lot of leftover pieces,” Thrush said, indicating the shrinking pile of metals beside the fire pit.

When I went over to take a closer look at those metals, a system notification popped up.

[New Quest Objective: Cooper Four Barrels.]

[You’ve come into enough metal to cooper a few barrels. Use your lumber skills to cooper four barrels.]

[Reward: Twenty uncommon brewer’s loot chests. Four rare brewer’s loot chests.]

[Accept quest objective: Y/N?]