"That's a good way to stack wood for a campfire," Jebawon told him gently, "but not the best way to make a cooking fire. Can I show you?"
Garath was surprised, but nodded encouragingly. "Yes please," he said. "I didn't know you could cook?"
"I wouldn't say that," Jebawon said seriously. He bent and started tossing some of the kindling Garath had arranged into a separate pile. "But I am an eagle scout. We go over these things."
After tossing out the sticks he deemed to be 'not dry enough', Jebawon started looking for a good spot to set up the cooking fire. "There," he said, pointing to a large egg-shaped rock sticking out of the ground a few feet away. "That would make a perfect chimney rock. Let's see if we can find some round rocks, about the size of a dinner-plate, to make up the formation."
And so they did. Together, Jebawon and Garath wandered around to gather the rocks. When the Tamer was satisfied, they returned to the 'chimney rock' and placed the smaller rocks nearby to create an upside-down U shape with the chimney rock at the top. After that, Jebawon lined the earth between the rocks with the smallest and driest sticks he could find in Bill's ever-growing pile of firewood, borrowing Warrion's dagger briefly to shred the branches into proper tinder.
At Jebawon's insistence, Daisy did not Blast! the carefully prepared cooking fire. Instead, she used the fire spell on a dry branch that Jebawon placed in the sand about twenty feet away. He then used the make-shift torch to light the tinder and began adding similarly sized chunks of hardwood to the fire in an even line across the U-shaped cooking area. Within a few minutes the fire was blazing in earnest.
"The idea is for all the wood to burn itself into charcoal around the same time. That'll make the heat as even as possible anywhere on your cooking grate," Jebawon told Garath.
"My what?" Garath asked, blinking rapidly.
Jebawon's shoulders slumped. "You don't have a cooking grate, do you?"
"I do not," Garath confirmed, chagrined. "Wait! I may have something that would do the trick." He then switched from verbal communication to projecting his thoughts over the Raid com. *Auto, where you at? We need to go on a little field trip.*
“The fire should be ready for cooking soon,” Jebawon told Garath. “So don’t take too long or we’ll have to shovel it out and start over.”
Garath nodded his acknowledgement before leaving with Auto toward the shore. He received a prompt informing him that Bill and Handsome had been automatically returned to their confines within his mind due to the distance between them as he crossed the threshold. Garath didn’t mind. He was sure that Bill had already collected plenty of firewood and Handsome hadn’t been adding much to the pile anyway.
Nearly half an hour later, the Necrologist and the Chimerist returned from the calm dark waters of the ocean within The Tower. Jebawon raised an eyebrow in amused confusion when he saw Garath, sopping wet and approaching the Party, holding what looked almost like a cooking grate in one hand. Having been among the Party members that had let Garath and Auto dive to the bottom of the islands to activate them for the fish weir, Jebawon probably had no idea how the Necrologist managed to bring exactly what he needed from some strange ocean inside of a Dungeon, but he laughed and shrugged as he continued poking at the coals. The timing was perfect. The fire was finally ready to cook.
There was much more ‘winging it’ in Garath’s preparation of the meal than any person with his lack of experience in cooking had any business attempting. As luck would have it though, the strange combination of canned ingredients and plain white rice he’d thrown into the pot smelled amazing and drew the attention of several Raid Group members as it neared readiness. Thanks to a handful of Sharon’s subtle and well-timed comments about the order in which Garath was adding ingredients, everything turned out better than anyone was hoping for.
The group of adventurers sat around a second fire on large rocks and logs arranged to accommodate them, delightedly ingesting what Garath dubbed the ‘Thishrak stir fry’.
“Hey Atlas,” Garath said. “Since you make your own gear, what have you been getting from the chests?”
Atlas looked up from his plate at hearing his name. “Oh,” he said, swallowing. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve been getting gear enhancements. It’s kind of like an enchantment on top of the stats my stuff already has. I didn’t know this was even a possibility until today. At the easy dungeons we did, I kept getting weird Reagents that I don’t even know what to do with.”
Garath nodded. He’d like to learn more about the enhancements Atlas had been getting, but his tired mind couldn’t come up with anything specific to ask. The Mage Smith himself didn’t wait for more questions either, and immediately shoveled more stir fry into his mouth.
“Alice,” Auto said between mouthfuls of his fried rice, “the other group you came here with…” he stopped, chewing his food and swallowing a too-large bite. “How many different areas or chests did they do before everyone died?”
Alice looked up from her meal and turned to Auto. “The first group started in Natsilane’s Realm, where we are now. They never made it to a second zone. That bear spirit, Si-am’, proved to be too much for them. The second group was in The Tower for nearly a week, but it was different then.”
“Different how?” Obawon asked.
“There were chests, like the ones we experienced today. And Spirit Guardians, like the ones we experienced today,” Alice said. She set down her fork. “But The Tower did not give them these requests before facing the Guardians. At least
