Morning came soon enough. At 0339 hours, Captain (ret.) Harmon Rabb Jr. woke up and muttered to himself, “Why am I up so early?” Probably because you went to bed at 1945 hrs and you really only need between seven to eight hours of sleep.
“Guess I might as well conjure something and hope to heck that I can manage to get a few more hours of sleep.
The next person to wake up was LCol Sarah “Mac” Mackenzie who seemed pretty happy to be up at 0428hrs.
She decided to head for the hills when LCDR Phil “Metalman” Burrows woke up not more than 6 minutes after her. The Watcher guesses that she went off to search for mushrooms and wild plants; not just to avoid Metalman's inane topics of conversation.
Metalman on the other hand decided that he was going to actively pursue his talents at cooking and decided to be the one to make breakfast this morning. He chose to spend §11.00 and make waffles for breakfast. Hopefully everyone is up for waffles this morning. If not, there’s always autumn salad – “yeeeech!”
After taking a shower and using the head (navy-speak for toilet), he headed off in search of eggs and raccoons – gotta get those masked bandits and get some steak out of it. Goodness knows if you cook’em properly you can get rid of the yucky viruses n’stuff and them’s good eatins.
By this time Mac was already at the “community garden” and was actually working at harvesting all the plants and fruit trees.
Early morning sunrises are the best, when the hues of the morning sky lighten from the blackness of night, to purple hues morphing into blue, then lighten into the orange-red phase all the way to yellow as the sun starts to peak over the horizon. The quiet is broken...and the birdsong that arises into the air as the rising sun awakens the feathered and furry denizens of the forest. And the quiet of the night gives way to the cacophony of daylight activity.
Monday through Thursday consisted of more of the same routine as Sunday of getting up; either going fishing, conjuring or taking advantage of the community garden that was popping out vegetables, mushrooms and fruits like nobody’s business or picking flowers, a tiny red flower with a yellow stamen called a cosmos being the most profitable. After all, turning in the majority of the lower quality fruits allowed them to amass near §11,000 by the close of Tuesday which allowed them to get a potion table and a alchemy station. Now most pilots were superstitious so Kimber got on that alchemy table right away and Meg being more of a scientific mind got on the potion table mixing chemicals.
After a few rough starts that blew up in her face, Meg did start discovering potions. The failures meant showering off and starting all over again. The successes comprised of a new potion in their arsenal. Some of those potions like the stink potion or instant bladder had no apparent use other than to gross the living heck out of someone. But there were others that could be extremely useful.
Phil’s first attempt at the potion table blew up on him just as everyone was called to dinner for a mac n’cheese repast. Scalded and reeking of chemicals and charred skin, he sat down with a satisfied grin on his face and started chowing down on his meal. However his strategic placement of himself right next to Kimber earned Phil an extremely disgusted look regarding his rather pungent odor.
“Did you even consider taking a shower before coming to eat?” Kimber’s disgust was palpable.
“Naw, I’m good.” Phil grinned.
“Augh!” Kimber rolled her eyes and turned back to her meal.
“Ugh…” Meg grimaced. “What’s the smell?”
“Ammonium Acetate and Sulphur Dioxide”.
“You were tryin’ to make a stink potion, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Meg looked at him, “I’m sure you’ll succeed the next time.”
“How’s that?”
“The smell’s bad enough to gag a skunk.”
Animal, henceforth, decided that he was sticking with gardening.
About mid-day Tuesday, it started raining. Luckily one of Animal’s tiberium went large spire so he took it to Aleister’s and consigned the large-spire. Harm and Phil stood out in the downpour wondering what else to do next while Kimber and Meg worked at the alchemy station and the potion table respectively.
By the time Animal got back to the lot after consigning his original large spire another one had gone large-spire, so he was ecstatic and headed right back to Aleister’s. While he was there, none of the other gemstone dust nor the small spires showed any signs of transforming into a large spire, so he probably wouldn’t have to make a third trip out to the elixir consignment shop.
At least Gilbert McCurdy, the elixir consignment shop owner didn’t make any comment on how many times Animal had been out there that morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment