B5 C25: The Perfect Kitchen

Haphazardly strewn about, dozens of wooden boards dotted the cabin’s common room, covering all the tables, a few chairs, and even the ground below. It was, without a doubt, a mess, and I could only be thankful for Verin’s looser relationship with order and etiquette, as she doubtlessly would have yelled at me otherwise.

“So? Is this the one?” Burnt into each of the wooden slabs were thick lines which joined together to make various floor plans and layouts, and the board on the table before me was no exception. I hunched over it, scanning it one more time as I cast a glance towards Verin who sat at my side.

“I believe it is. A tad ambitious, and I maintain that you need not do this at all, but this is the best so far.” Though her voice held firm, Verin drooped in her chair, and her eyelids did the same. 

With the new frost converters I’d enchanted, Verin was free to stay in the common room as long as she wanted without any additional pain. That did not, however, remove her heightened need for sleep, as evidenced by her current state. For hours now, we’d been going back and forth on different floor plans, and it was clear that the noble didn’t have much more in her.

With a yawn, Verin repeated the same refrain I’d heard dozens of times today: “Are you truly certain you wish to build us a new house?” At this point, it was less of a genuine question and more of a way to politely offer me a way out in case I’d changed my mind.

Which I hadn’t, naturally. Quite the opposite. For the first time in a while, I was feeling truly energized!

For a while now, I’d been planning on upsizing our humble abode, but originally, my dreams had been too tiny. Maybe I’d just add a door to the cabin and tack on a kitchen. It would be fast, easy, and practical, and then we’d have an actual indoor space for Verin to cook with me.

But why stop there?

I always felt bad that Verin couldn’t reach me whenever I was smithing. Even short trips outside the cabin were enough to wrack her body with pain, and I hadn’t placed my forge too close. What if I built an actual smithy, connected to the house? If I threw a few frost converters inside, she’d be able to visit whenever she wanted.

Plus, the forge wasn’t the only object of interest that lay outside. Only a few months into our stay, I’d built us an outdoor bath, which was now completely inaccessible to Verin. The same was true for the garden, too.

And while I was at it, everything in the cabin felt a little cramped, right? If it was just a place to sleep and then leave, then that was one thing, but if we really wanted to live in it, then we could do much better. For example, with how much time Verin spent in her room these days, she deserved something a bit nicer, I thought.

As all of these renovations and additions began to pile up, I eventually realized that it didn’t make sense to tack them onto our existing cabin. For one, the existing placement of our bedrooms made most layouts awkward, and on top of that, I felt that I could do much better than piling up a few logs this time.

The final nail in the coffin was when I considered how long it would take to build everything. What had first begun as a week of worth quickly ballooned into a multi-month endeavor, all of which threatened to be rather loud. With how much Verin slept these days, I had little desire to be hammering in nails 24/7 with nothing but a wall or two separating us.

And thus, a new house. I’d build it just far enough north that the sounds wouldn’t carry.

Verin thought it was a horrible waste of my time, and she pointed out it was entirely possible that Cal would return before I was finished, rendering most of my efforts useless in any case. Failing Cal’s speedy return, if I used all the time I spent building to practice Spatial Magic, then perhaps I’d be able to teleport us home before the new living arrangements became relevant.

Both were fair points, but neither dissuaded me. From my calculations, hitting level 40 in Spatial Magic was likely to take a solid year at this rate, if not more, and at the very least, we weren’t going another year without a kitchen, or half the other upgrades I was interested in. If Cal suddenly appeared tomorrow with a frost treasure for Verin, then that would be wonderful, but I wasn’t going to plan my life around that either.

And besides, in light of the limitations of my Soul Forging, it was becoming clear that Architecture and Construction would be two of my most important skills. Even if this project went nowhere, long-term, it was still probably better for me than grabbing a bit more experience or leveling up my other skills.

Having re-convinced myself, I nodded, half to Verin, half to myself. 

“We’re doing it! Now, before you go to bed, this is the order it’s all going to happen in…”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Construction has reached level 16!

Sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor, I took in the bones of the burgeoning structure around me. Four walls surrounded me, while a flat wooden roof blocked my view of the patchwork sky above.

It was a little shocking how quickly things were going, but, as I constantly had to remind myself, I had a lot of advantages that the average builder didn’t. Not even counting my skills, we were building in a region with no bugs, a constant temperate climate, and no rain. Moisture issues were essentially nonexistent, and the lack of precipitation meant a flat roof was perfectly acceptable.

The foundation, which had taken forever to dig out for our cabin, was a labor of a single hour courtesy of Move Earth and Arcane Storage. As soon as each clump of dirt was disconnected from ground below, it became a valid target to store away, saving me from the slow process of digging everything up.

On top of that, without the need for any electrical or plumbing, I was free to build my walls out of solid wood rather than going with complex frames or anything like that. In fact, the bulk of my time had just been cutting down trees and transforming them into more shapely, notched rectangular prisms so we wouldn’t end up with the same rustic log feel that the cabin had. 

Thankfully, Arbor had assured me that he didn’t mind me chopping down his forest, as there was no humanly way I could ever make a real dent in it. The trees grew back faster here, and with the spatial shenanigans we’d experienced on our first trip, the forest was much larger than it initially appeared.

Arcane Storage was also a godsend for more than just storing dirt. From its humble origins, it had evolved along with my Wisdom and Spatial Magic skill. No longer a tiny closet, it was now more akin to a shipping container, and the amount of processed lumber I could store in it was prodigious. By the time I actually started building the walls, it was mostly a matter of summoning each piece of wood directly atop the last, minus a few cube-shaped holes I’d created to shove frost converters into.

As a final time saver, it helped that I wasn’t trying to build the entire house all at once. While it was a bit atypical, I was building our new home room by room, starting with the kitchen.

Not that anyone would be able to tell yet. The room was entirely bare and barren, as I had three more tasks to accomplish before I started properly furnishing it: covering the walls in more aesthetically pleasing wood panels; installing wood flooring; and, last but not least, putting in windows.

It was this last piece that I was focused on now. A few charcoal squares along the walls outlined where I was planning on making the window cutouts, but to do that, I needed glass.

And glass I had.

To one side sat a large selection of prototype window panes, while to my other, a mess of wooden boards outlined my plans for the rest of the kitchen. This time, the boards were a proper schematic, even if they were pretty pitiful.

Prairie Kitchen

+1 to Cooking while inside

Weeks of practice had slowly built up both my Drawing and Architecture skills, but this was still the very best I’d been able to do. Part of that was my lacking materials -- which I had a plan to fix soon -- but for now, all I wanted was a working kitchen.

“You seem rather pensive. Do you require assistance with something?” Breaking me from my musings, Verin called out from the corner of the room, where she similarly sat on the ground, her back to the wall. I’d mostly forgotten she was there, but she liked to come visit sometimes, simply watching me work. 

Even before I’d started on the kitchen, I’d built a shoddy tunnel, no more than a bunch of stacked logs with some frost converters, to connect the cabin to our worksite. I’d tear it down once the house was complete, but for now, it let Verin visit whenever she wanted.

Actually, this is probably a perfect thing to let Verin handle. Holding up the nearest pane of glass -- a slightly foggy greenish blue piece -- I waved it her way.

“Which kind of glass should we use for the windows?”

Making glass had started off incredibly painful. For one, it turned out that the desert sand wasn’t well-suited to the task, and it wasn’t until I collected some from the water region’s beach that I’d started making headway. Worse yet, I discovered that the melting point of sand was ridiculously high, forcing me to craft a mithril crucible and pump tons of mana into the forge heart just to melt it. After that, it tended to crack and break whenever I tried to cool it down.

“Mmm. An interesting selection of colors. I’m impressed you managed to create so much glass in the first place, to be honest. Did you discover a deposit of limestone in the mines? And which plants are you using for the soda ash?” Verin waltzed over before picking up a slightly pinkish pane and running her finger along it.

For my part, I could only hit her with a baffled expression. “Sorry. Limestone? Soda ash?”

Quickly reflecting my expression back at me, she placed her glass back on the ground. “Yes? One generally requires a flux to create glass from sand. It’s one of the reasons my family manages a number of vassal settlements that mine limestone. 

“At higher levels, glass-related classes can forgo the need for fluxes entirely, but to train glass-based artisans, it is a necessity. Or, at least that was what I was told during the few months I trained as a glassblower before I settled on drawing and painting as my main artistic pursuits.”

I could only slowly blink as I processed her words. Note to self. Ask Verin for advice next time you’re stuck. Rather than mining limestone and making whatever the hell “soda ash” was, I’d cheated instead. After enough awful attempts, I’d finally earned the first level of Glassmaking, grabbing a new variant of Gloves of the Arcanist along with it.

Flux Fingers

+5 to Glassmaking

While heating glass, protects your hands and arms from all heat and burns.

Stabilizes and lowers the melting point of produced glass.

Passively remove unwanted impurities while heating your glass.

To be entirely honest, I hadn’t even known what a “flux” was until Verin explained it.

As an extra plus, I’d made some progress on my trial quest, too. 

Discover at least 10 different variants of Gloves of the Arcanist - 6/10

The gloves didn’t solve all my issues, as the cooling glass was still prone to cracking on me, and it didn’t get rid of air bubbles, but it still made a huge difference. I also found that I was able to instinctively prevent the skill from removing the impurities it mentioned, which was how I ended up with my first piece of colored glass. After that, I’d spent a day throwing in random metal dust and ground up plants to see what would happen.

“Hm. I am quite partial to the green glass, although perhaps I can assist you in making a few clearer pieces. There is not much point to a window if we can not see out of it, yes?”

Ouch. Fair, but ouch. 

In actuality, though, I welcomed the assistance. If anything, it made me realize that I was underutilizing our resident artist. I doubted she’d be much use with anything too physical, but what other tasks could I throw her way?

After picking Verin’s brain for some glassmaking tips, I decided I’d taken long enough of a break, lifting myself from the ground to get back to work. Walls and roof aside, I still had an entire kitchen to build.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Woodworking has reached level 16!

Stonemasonry has reached level 7!

Glassmaking has reached level 3!

Mining has reached level 17!

Only a month later, I sat atop a giant slab of marble with a goofy grin as I took in what I’d managed to build with my own two hands.

The flooring and wall paneling had taken forever, with the first being a rich dark wood, while the second being much lighter. There was some hope to eventually paint the walls if we ever figured out how to make decent paint, but even plain, it looked quite nice, I thought.

From there, we had the cabinetry and countertops. 

The latter had sparked a multi-hour debate between me and Verin after I revealed just how many options we had to choose from. The stone quarry in the mountain’s resource room was surprisingly exhaustive in both the type and colors of stone it had. While I got the sense that this wasn’t normal or natural, I was originally glad for the unexpected blessing.

Unfortunately, the sheer breadth of our options made settling on a stone a painful process, and even after we narrowed it down to granite and marble, we still went back and forth for another hour.

Green marble eventually won the day, pairing nicely with the slightly green-tinted window glass we’d settled on. It took me a while to extract large enough pieces of it without breaking them, but a long, flat-headed, mana-charged spear proved to do the job nicely. With a bit of cutting and polishing, the end result was a set of countertops that wouldn’t look out of place in a noble’s mansion.

They sat atop dark wood of a similar shade to the flooring, most of which was just solid. Here and there, I’d made some actual cabinets, finally removing most of my silverware and cookware from my storage to house them within.

All of that was secondary to the actual cooking area, though.

To the left, I’d laid down a slab of slate, carved out to perfectly hold my Noxious Gastro-chemist’s Cookware. Directly to the right sat a large clay oven, complete with metal oven racks and baking trays inside. To the right was an old-school fire-powered stone stove, a few pots and pans sitting atop it. In case of any smoke while cooking, I’d cut out a small hole into the ceiling with the hopes of using Gust to direct the smoke outside. The hole meant we needed a bunch more frost converters to keep all the frost mana from escaping outside, but that was perfectly fine.

That would have originally been the end of things, at least for now. I had a few stretch goals for the future -- for example, if I used Sett’s passive enchantment, could I constantly power a Chill enchantment to make a fridge? With how many other rooms I had to build, though, it didn’t feel necessary for now.

It was Verin who’d added one more piece to the puzzle. Why not add some tilework? At least behind the stove and the oven, it might add a nice flair to the otherwise wooden walls. We had plenty of stone to go through, and on top of that, we had a good number of gemstones, too. After throwing a bunch of my materials over to Verin, I’d kept working on the kitchen as she carefully cut them all into the desired shapes. We didn’t have any grout or cement, but my glue worked well enough, and now she was placing the finishing touches onto the shining, gem-laden tilework.

Taking it all in, I couldn’t help but laugh. The sound caused Verin to pause her work, swiveling her head back to raise an inquisitive brow.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m just realizing that this is the biggest kitchen I’ll have ever had.” Gods only knew this was leagues bigger than the rinky-dink galley kitchen in my last apartment. It was even larger than the one Suds had back in Sylum.

Hell, forget the kitchen. I was about to be a homeowner. At 28! There wasn’t even a mortgage to pay off, either.

Really living the dream here, Tess. The location left something to be desired, but that was real estate for you.

Considering Verin probably had an entire team of chefs working in her family’s mansion, she wisely chose to remain silent, returning to her tilework. As I basked in my home-owning glory, she placed the final pieces, stepping aside to reveal a stunning mosaic of vibrant greens and glistening blues. 

Despite the purely geometric tilework, the entire piece evoked the imagery of the lake we’d visited in our first serious forray into the forest, thankfully sans the infuriating water nymph. It was a perfectly serene view, and almost as importantly, it was the very last thing we had to do.

Signaling my intent to the system, I let it know that the kitchen was done at last, and it obliged me with the much-awaited completion notifications.

You have built a Prairie Kitchen!

A fair number of vertical bonuses followed from all the wood I’d chopped and stone I’d quarried, amongst other things. My relatively low Initiate-rank Construction skill didn’t do me any favors, but when all was said and done, our work fared fairly well.

The quality of your building is: Good (Upgraded from Standard)

Grants +1 to Cooking while inside.

Based on your building quality, your Prestige, and the method of construction, a bonus effect has been applied.

Even as I read those words, mana began to swell within Verin’s mosaic, the tiles now glowing with a subtle mixture of life and water magic. Far from detracting from the piece, the mana added a second, complementary dimension, truly making me feel like I could dive into it and find myself in the lake.

+1 to Cooking when preparing any meals primarily composed of water and vegetables.

It was a weak effect, to be sure, and even past that, it was restrictive, but not much more could be expected from such a low-level schematic. It was a wonder that we’d earned a bonus in the first place, honestly.

I cheered, running over to Verin to throw her into a hug and force her to cheer with me. As she still lacked 25 Perception and couldn’t visualize mana anymore, the noble was slightly salty that she couldn’t see the change to her mosaic, but her disappointment was short-lived when faced with my infectious mood.

“Sous-chef Verin! What do you say we christen our new kitchen? All that work has me hungry.” Sure, I had a bunch of hot food tucked away in my storage, but where was the fun in that? 

In a matter of seconds, I had the stove filled with wood, and with a brief dash of spellwork, it caught alight.

A good day, I reflected. A good and peaceful day.

Promising us a warm and cozy meal soon to follow, a few lazy trails of smoke wafted into the sky.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Several regions away, one roguish warrior let loose a dry, hacking cough, releasing a billowing cloud of black smoke into the air.

Not gonna lie. Today… today really sucks.

As if to further cement the point, a thick bolt of lightning slammed into her chest, sending Cal flying. Her muscles spasmed as she slammed into the soft, cloud-like ground, and she would have cursed if not for the sole notification that made it all worthwhile.

Lightning Resistance has reached level 18!

Shakily pulling herself back up, she donned a savage grin.

Just two more levels, and then I’m clearing this gods-forsaken region.