Dungeon Item Shop - Chapter 36: Open for business

Fresh stirs as the loud thudding comes from the other side of the door. Sleepily, the girl opens her eyes, feeling the morning light shine in through the dusty window. Looking up at it from the pile of blankets, she realizes that she still hasn’t taken the time to properly clean it yet. All of her work had been concentrated on the downstairs area and when Jubilee had cleaned upstairs, they didn’t do inside of this room. The girl wonders if they actually even did any of the other rooms, perhaps apart from the pantry and the washroom. Given that there was still dust on all of the handles. Jubilee had forbidden her from entering any of the doors though.

The sharp knock comes again, louder now and clearly more agitated. “Hey! Get up! We have to get ready!” yells Jubilee from the other side of the door.

Fresh shoots upright in a jolt, her eyes shooting wide. Today was their big day. She almost forgot. Jumping up to her feet, she only barely manages to find her balance on her wobbly, sleep addled legs. “Okay!” shouts Fresh, holding her head which feels a little dizzy from her sudden ascent. The girl stretches, rising up onto her feet as she reaches for the ceiling and then bends forward, making another attempt to touch her toes. Her back pops and she winces. Maybe Jubilee could take her to level a little more some time, hopes Fresh.

She slips on her new robe with some pride and then meanders over to the door, pulling it open to look at Jubilee, who is standing back against the wall with crossed arms.

“About time you woke up,” snaps Jubilee, tossing her a small, paper-wrapped bundle. Fresh looks at its contents. It’s a still hot, flaky biscuit with some kind of thick sausage inside.

“Good morning! Thank you!” says the girl, rubbing her eyes before opening them further in wide-eyed delight, as she stares at her latest bounty.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jubilee waves her off and turns to go downstairs. “You’re eating me out of house and home, so eat that and then clean yourself up because we open in half an hour.”

Fresh chokes on the bite that she was just starting to swallow and hits against her chest with her fist. Half an hour?! She looks around in a panic, grabbing her grimoire and then quickly pulls the door shut, eating her breakfast as fast as she can, while she sprints to get ready for the day.

Voices can be heard outside, signaling that the plaza is slowly starting to fill with the usual bustling crowd. The constant sunshine of the evergreen spring having returned once again. Fresh wonders if spring is just always really nice here, or if she’s just been lucky so far. Though now that she has a roof over her head and a book that she wants to read, she wouldn’t mind there being a rainy day once in a while.

Twenty minutes later, once she has finished washing up, Fresh stands in the middle of the downstairs space. Jubilee is straightening out the last few details and they stop to stare at one of the glass chickens that is standing on a shelf next to a dozen others and take a moment to adjust it an inch to the right, so that the light reflects just a little better off of its matte surface.

Satisfied, they nod to it and turn around to look as Fresh walks towards the window to look outside, walking with closed eyes and humming. It’s a little embarrassing, but she’s in such a good mood that she doesn’t even care if Jubilee hears.

Feeling the sun on her face, she opens her eyes and reels back a step. “IAH!” Fresh stares at the face pressed against the glass, watching her curiously. One of the casters. Though they seemed oddly familiar, taking a deep breath the girl calms herself and smiles an uneasy smile as she waves to the figure.

“They’re very excited…” she says to Jubilee, uneasily.

“Well, casters are usually… mm… well, it’s complicated. Let’s just say that hefting a heavy sword and armor around all day, covered in blood and guts, grounds you a little character-wise.”

Fresh turns her head to look back at Jubilee. “Casters just kind of… you know, use magic for everything.” They adjust the chicken again, looking at it curiously with their hand on their chin. “So they get a little… airy in the head, you know?” They rotate the chicken back like it just was a second ago. “Sometimes you just need a good punch in the face to help you become a more sensible person.” They turn the chicken one last time and step back a few steps, seemingly satisfied now.

They look back to her and point. “Maybe a few knocks to the head would do you some good too.”

Fresh laughs meekly, scratching her cheek and changing the subject. “So what’s the plan?”

Jubilee walks across the room. “The plan is, we open the doors, people come in and take stuff and then give us money for it.”

Fresh nods, following after them to the counter. “What if someone wants to sell us something?”

“What?” asks Jubilee.

“What if someone wants to sell us… you know… dungeon stuff?” asks the girl curiously. 

Jubilee’s eyes twitch as they look up to her. “We only buy things that we can use. Mushroom caps. Teeth. If you get offered anything else that you think you can make into something valuable, then let me know. Otherwise tell them to go down the street.”

Fresh thinks, tapping her chin. “What if someone tries to steal something?”

“What…?”

She looks to Jubilee, raising a finger. “You know, like a thief?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Huh?” asks Fresh.

“Look. The merchant’s guild has a reputation, you know what that reputation is?”

“A bad one…?” guesses the girl.

Jubilee crosses their arms and shakes their head. “No, dumb-ass. The people love the merchant’s guild.”

“Huh?!”

Jubilee looks to the side. “They don’t know what you and I know. We’re in deep and I knew a lot before this all happened, but most people don’t. But you know who knows what the merchant’s guild does with thieves?”

Fresh thinks for a minute, but doesn’t come up with an answer.

Jubilee sighs. “The Thieves’ guild.”

“There sure are a lot of guilds…” remarks Fresh.

“Look, just don’t worry about it. They have an… understanding between themselves and we can leave it at that.” Jubilee looks to the door. “Are you ready?”

Fresh perks up, clenching her fists. “You’re gonna stay here today, right?” asks the girl, somewhat worried about messing things up on her own.

Jubilee waves her off and walks back around towards the door. “Yeah, you think I’d leave you here alone?”

Wet wells in Fresh’s eyes at her friend’s statement. “I can always count on you, Ju-!“

“I bet you’d do something dumb if I left, like starting to giving away our stuff for free. Or burn down the house.”

The girl lowers her hands in resignation and rubs her arm, looking away. “You could have just not been mean that time,” she says, with a pouting expression.

Jubilee stares back at her, a hand on the door.

The room is quiet. But the buzzing of many voices outside gives the tension a very strange atmosphere.

“Sorry,” says a tense voice from the door. Fresh looks back up to them. They seem to be straining themselves to speak as they look away, back towards the door. “Let’s… both do our best, okay?”

Fresh’s eyes widen and she places her palms onto the counter. “Okay!”

Taking a final breath, Jubilee opens the door.

The world erupts into a burst of sunlight, colors and noise as the door opens wide. Fresh stares wide-eyed, as the crowd of colorfully clad adventurers bustle and fight against each other. Some kind of red-wearing wizard girl and a particularly large man fight each other to be the first one inside and they wedge themselves into the doorframe, the rest of the crowd pushing in from behind them.

“Get out of the way!” strains the wizard, doing pretty well considering her disadvantage in size against him.

“You get out of the way, pipsqueak!” growls the man

“Both of you get out of the way!” barks an older man in a white robe behind them and barrels in between both of them. All three of them fall to the floor, just as Jubilee steps to the side to get out of the way. Fresh looks at the three of them, fairly certain she’s seen them around town before. Or maybe in the adventurer’s guild? She isn’t sure anymore.

“Good morning, welcome!” calls Fresh out to the crowd, not sure what else to do honestly. She’ll leave any rough stuff to Jubilee if she can, she thinks, as she watches the tussle.

The others behind them enter, thankfully not stampeding over the first three who rise up back to their feet and brush themselves off. The first of the crowd already make a clear beeline for the potions, though some stop on their way to look at the other odds and ends that they had managed to procure for today.

“Ah! They’re so cute!” says a giant of a woman, wearing leather and carrying a sword that is so massive, that Fresh is sure that she herself could never be able to lift it, even if she got to level one-hundred. The giant, that Fresh would at first glance call an orc, is leaned over forward, gushing over the glass chickens. While their companion is doing the same over the potions, sparing a moment to glance over to them.

“They’re just chickens,” they say.

“They’re just potions,” snaps the orc back at them in a sassy tone.

A man stands near the door, looking at the daggers. “How did they make this out of bones? It looks like one long piece? I’ve never seen a dagger like this.”

“Maybe it’s dry-crafted from a single giant bone?” asks a whispering voice next to him.

“That seems like a lot of work,” says the man as he looks at one of the bone daggers.

The woman next to him points out, looking at the menu of the item. “Look! It does dark damage!”

“Huh? How did they… It's not even enchanted.” The man inspects it closely. “…This could be really useful for floor thirteen…”

Fresh can barely keep up with all the people walking around, looking at the assorted items. A girl walks up to the counter, the first of many, holding an armful of the blue, glowing flasks. “Hello!”

Fresh turns her attention to her, recognizing her as the wizard she gave the free potion to a week before. “Ah! Hello! So you liked the potion?” she asks, as the wizard sets down the five that she has onto the counter.

The wizard nods excitedly, clenching her fists and leaning in. “Yeah! With a day’s worth of soul regeneration, I got really far down into the dungeon! I even beat the boss on floor eight by myself!”

Fresh leans in forward herself, her own fists clenched in the same shared excitement. “Really? That’s great!” She looks down to the five potions and thinks for a second. Nineteen each. Uh… her gaze softens.

“That’ll be ninety-Five Obols,” says a voice next to her, as she feels an elbow jab into her side. Fresh laughs meekly, straightening her posture out and looking back to Jubilee.

With a nod the wizard slaps a single large coin onto the counter. Fresh stares at it curiously, but Jubilee takes it and slides five small ones back over in turn.

“Thank you!” says Fresh, waving to them happily, as they grab the five potions and beam brightly and turn to leave the store. Not two seconds later, the old man in white comes with his own handful of potions and some goblin teeth. The line seems to be growing longer quickly as everyone gets their things. Coins clink in the bowl beneath the counter as the two of them work and it’s growing fuller by the minute, filling with more coins than Fresh has ever seen in her new life and people were still coming in and out of the store non-stop.

The potions are the real bread and butter of the operation. Sometimes an antidote will come across the counter as well, and sometimes a bone-dagger. Fresh beams with a particular pride as the giantess comes with a glass chicken under her arm and they gush about it together, until Jubilee nudges the girl again.

[Mercantile: 2] {Give and take}