Chapter 125: Squirrels and Bunnies and Barrows, oh my!
Noise shattered the silence of the fading night as the rooster greeted the morning. Ozzy got up early as usual. Not as early as Suzette though, who had to be up to make sure breakfast was ready for the hungry workers. He waved to her as she ran back and forth to the kitchen, bringing out trays of food for the workers starting their day, and those grabbing a meal after the night shift. Baron Billy was keeping the quarries running night and day. Ozzy even got called in now and then when they had to deliver a particularly heavy piece to the building site. He'd ignored Jorges hints about how useful he could be. He was a butcher. He cut meat, not stone. After a good breakfast he headed to work.
As usual, Jenny managed to stop him on his way. He dodged her invitation to stop in for a quick bite to eat, but promised to bring her by some nice pork chops and a couple of conies for roasting. Some young adventurers had helped him out yesterday by hunting rabbits so he headed straight to his shop.
Inside, everything was ready to go. The meat was downstairs in the magical cooler that his friend Delbert had ensorcelled for him. It was great to have an Ice Wizard for a friend. He grabbed a side of pork and some frozen rabbits from the cooler and started to get to work. He just had to sharpen his ginzu knives and...
"What the hell?! When did I get a butcher shop?" Ozzy scratched his head and looked around the familiar/not-familiar building he was in. He retraced his steps mentally. He'd eaten breakfast, walked to work, and talked to Jenny. Things seemed pretty normal, except that he had never been in this butcher shop before.
There were a lot of new buildings in town. Did the little builders add this one? The foreman had said he needed to use the old blue prints, which accounted for the differences in the town. But did adding a butcher shop attract a butcher? Or did the shop get built because the town had a butcher but no shop?
He walked out the front door with its jingling little bell. The shop was the lower part of a small three-story building that fronted on the main square. The hanging sign had a painted picture of a ham and some sausages on both sides. The small front window had red lettering on it that said "Ozzy's". He shrugged and went back inside. He'd have to think on this later, but for right now he'd finish Jenny's order and not worry about gifts of questionable butcher shops.
He cut the chops and got the conies ready for roasting, wrapped them in some coarse cloth and tied the bundle with string. Jenny would be by to pick them up as normal. The thought made him pause.
Who was Jenny? And when had she moved into town? He didn't remember her living here before the war...
The bell jingled and three women came into the shop. They were a little worse for wear and each was packing half a dozen fat rabbits. One also had a large squirrel. "Hey Mr. Butcher, we finished the quest you gave us. Here are your rabbits and a bonus squirrel!"
Ozzie looked at the squirrel one of them was holding up by the tail. "Wow. He's a beauty. I'll be careful when I skin him and give you the pelt. I'm thinking one of the leather workers might make you something nice out of that hide. And he'll make some great jerky. I'll make sure you get some of that too!"
As Ozzy was about to hand them their rewards for the rabbits, Rolly came rushing into the room. "Ozzy, I can't find Squirmie! I think he fell down the well!"
Libby, Charlene, and Dot had been playing online games together since they were in their teens. Each of them was now over 40 with at least one kid each, all of them packed off to college or married off. With plenty of free time, they had started gaming together more and more.
Libby had done the accounting for her husband's firm for 20 years, until he decided he preferred his younger secretary to her. They'd never quite had the cash on hand to cover her overtime and accumulated days of vacation. She wrote herself a paycheck for nearly 7 years of back wages, changed all the passwords to the accounting software, and called a divorce lawyer. The settlement was quite favorable to her.
Charlene had been a chemical engineer working for Alchemax. She was pushed out of her job and into early retirement when the company decided to quit making cancer drugs and move into chemical enhancements for the military. She quietly took her meager retirement pay as a lump sum and cleaned out her desk. She also activated a program that sent all of her department’s research to a broker who sold the info off to other corporations. The money from that deal was still accumulating in a Swiss bank account and would keep growing until someone found the program.
Dot was working on her 137th novel. This one was about a lonely female lawyer who gets stranded in Montana by a snowstorm and a car accident. She gets nursed back to health by the three ranch hands who find her and take her back to their rustic bunk house. The idea came for this one came from Charlene. 'Rustic Rustler Romance' would get sent off to her editor next week.
The novel before that had been from Libby's imagination. A successful female lawyer with no time for a life loses a bet and has to take a job as a high-steel worker riveting girders on a downtown skyscraper. After having affairs with four different co-workers, she quits her law firm for good and gets married on top of the unfinished building, 112 stories in the air. 'High Steel Hijinx' had brought in a nice check that she used to purchase three new Mark7 gaming pods.
Dot could write one of her stories in a week. The money was good, and her friends had an endless supply of ideas for her to turn into romance novels a dozen times a year. Three had been turned into video series and seven more had been optioned.
Getting together for a night of online gaming had always been something they didn't let jobs or family get in the way of. When all three became semi-wealthy with free time on their hands, they started gaming together every weekend.
When Genesis Engine started up, they made plans to shift their playtime to the new game. Unfortunately, they had to wait for their new pods to arrive. The game was only playable using the new Mark7 pods. They spent the wait helping Dot knock out three more novels.
Their first weekend had been fun, but also ended with a complete wipeout when they joined with another group to take out a camp of orcs. The orcs had proved much smarter, and more powerful, than they had expected. The adventurers died in three rounds and the orcs went back to drinking beer. Eventually they made it to level 2 and acquired some gear, so it wasn't a total loss for the first few days.
The next weekend they started over at Rowan Keep. After a bit of flirting paid off, a tip from one of the gate guards sent them up the road to a little village called Sedgewick.
It had been worth the trip. The town had a sort of creepy-gothic vibe to the buildings, but the villagers were friendly. There was also some big construction quest going on, and tons of well-muscled workers running around. They'd made level 3 while doing all the little quests around town.
Things got really interesting after a quest took them to see the butcher. All three had been quite impressed with him. He might have stepped right off of the cover of one of Dot's books. Smooth skin with a dark, smoky tan rippled as he flexed the lean muscles underneath. His bare arms and powerful hands moved with a gracefulness you usually didn't see in larger men.
When they entered, he'd been chopping at a side of pork with powerful, precise blows, turning it into a pile of cutlets. He had blood all over him, not bothered in the least and obviously enjoying his work. Dot just stared, several ideas for a new book running through her mind. Libby started to back towards the door. And Charlie just stood still, mesmerized as the sharp cleavers did their work.
Then he'd noticed them, put down the cleavers, and smiled. It was a good smile, non-aggressive and friendly. He looked down at the mess of blood and bits of meat all over him, and did a spell that instantly cleaned himself and his clothes. Charlie recognized it as a Light cantrip. They relaxed after that.
He gave them a quest for fat rabbits, which they easily did. They ran around a sunny meadow bopping the silly things in the head and killing them with only a couple of blows. The only trouble they had was when Dot shot an arrow at a squirrel in a nearby tree. The furious nut hoarder dove out of the tree at them, spitting and charging. It turned out to be an Angry Dire Squirrel and nearly wiped them out. They each got some EP and a core skill point from killing it, which was the highlight of the day.
Or so they thought, until the village Shepherd came running into the butcher shop shouting about his lost pet. The poor guy was so worried! It turned out there was a crack in the well that led to the local dungeon. He was certain his poor pet was lost down there.
After they agreed to help, they all got the quest to enter The Bunny Barrow and find the poor critter. Charlie was beside herself. She had an additional quest to actually gain a pet if they were successful. They waved goodbye to the anxious Shepherd and his friend the Butcher, and ran off to find the tavern. Someone named Suzette could take them to the dungeon entrance.
"Um, wait a sec. Did either of you look hard at the dungeon name? A burrow is where bunnies live. A barrow is spooky undead shit," Libby really hated undead.
"Oh, good, I was worried we'd have to kill a lot of bunnies. Those fat ones made sad sounds when we bopped their heads in. Undead I don't mind crunching," Charlene smacked her heavy cudgel into her hand for emphasis. She had a variant fighter class called Woodland Warrior and preferred staves and clubs.
Dot was okay killing anything. It was all just a game. "Good. Undead will be more EP than a bunch of sad little rabbits. First dungeon in a new game. Let's clear it out and scoop the loot."
"Yeah, how tough can a level one dungeon be?" Later, they argued about who had said this.
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