Martha awoke to the gentle creaking of feet sneaking across the stairs. She was sharp immediately, the luxury of falling back to sleep after waking too early a gift not afforded to bakers. She moved silently from the bed to the window as her husband snored rhythmically behind her, and through the second-story glass watched her son striding northward into the sunrise. A part of her wanted to make him stop, make him return to the ovens. Righteous anger burned in her chest as she remembered all of the fights and arguments she’d made about how important it was for him to stay home and take over the bakery from his father. She was right, of course. Right that this adventuring nonsense wasn’t what he thought it was, right that if he asked the pretty blond Thelia to stay with him and run the bakery, she would have, and right that his heart skill meant that no one would ever regard him as a proper mage, no matter what skills or spells he mastered.
Instead of rushing after and dragging him back, she sighed and let a few tears slide down her cheeks. Disappointed–Eld hadn’t given her one final hug before his departure. Her sadness quickly turned back to righteous anger as she stepped into the kitchen below her rooms and realized the fool boy forgot his promise to start the ovens a final time before leaving. Again, the urge to march after him into the morning warred with her desire to let her son live the life he “claimed” he wanted.
“Harold,” she called, and heard her husband rise as he always did to the sound of her voice.
Moments later, Harold stepped into the kitchen to the sight of Martha struggling with an iron poker, trying to revive some of the banked ashes from the night before. Confused, he bellowed to the empty house. “Eld, don’t make me come up there and toss you out of bed, get down here and light this fire.” When he turned back to his wife, she had a wry expression on her face.
“You’re going to have to yell a lot louder than that if you want him to hear you.” She smirked.
That was when the realization hit him. “Oh.”
“Oh,” she repeated as she grabbed his calloused hands in her own. “We’ll adapt. It will take time, but we will adapt, now help me get this oven started.”
Rhythm and synchrony. When stories talk about legendary parties of adventurers, and when tales of their fights are retold in taverns, rhythm and synchrony are always mentioned. Rhythm is a result of skill and familiarity. The best fighters move as if they are two parts of one excellent whole, reading each other and their opponent, and moving in a fight that looks choreographed. Had Harold and Martha been fighters, they would have been legends. Harold worked with a charcoal pencil to lay out the day’s cook order.
“Pre-orders Drop: 5 orders of Farmer’s Boule
15 Restaurant Boule’s
12 baguettes
40 Bagels
One order of Croissants for the mayor so make ’em special
& One order of a dozen doughnuts
”
As he spoke the orders Martha was already in motion, gathering the yeast, sugar, flour, and salt needed for each recipe.
“Recipe calls for 8 sacks,” She shouts, and her husband knows she means flour as she begins dumping buckets of water pulled from the well the day before into the mixing bowl, and he moves in the first sack already in hand before she said her first word.
[Premonition: Baked Goods] Harold activated his skill and called to Marha
“Looks like everybody has a taste for croissants today, and if we make that load of doughnuts a triple order, we’ll probably run out he called.
Second Drop: 100 Croissants
25 Baguettes
30 Boules
200 Bagels
2 orders of doughnuts.”
[Mix Ingredients]
As Martha began dumping water into the second large bucket used for mixing, the ingredients in the first began moving on their own to combine.
A 4th bucket sat empty as Harold finished pouring flour into the third.
As each bowl was filled, Martha triggered her skill again until all bowls were mixing simultaneously.
Rhythm, after 17 years of cooking together, they had it. But rhythm was just half of their story. As is true with great adventurers, they also had Synchrony. Without Aven Windcaller’s ability to feed fire to the flames of Arcus the Forestfire, he never could have earned his title at the battle of Weldon Woods. Famously, Guinn the Immortal was a woman with the power to heal from any wound, except that the power took days to heal her. Alone, Guinn would have been just as mortal as any of a thousand other fighters with the same common skill. But when paired with the abilities of Wendy the Time Witch to slow down the formation of wounds to a crawl, Guinn became unkillable on the field. Synchrony– a word for the way teams used combinations of skills to create an effect that was far in excess of what any single skill could do alone.
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As the first batch finished cooking, Martha began to shape the bread into the perfect boule. Like a swordsman rewarded for making the same cut ten thousand times, Martha had earned [Perfect Boule], and her hands shaped and cut the dough without a wasted motion. Her skill didn’t just affect shape, though; as she worked the dough, a little bit of humidity escaped the bread, leaving a light misting around the perfect loaf. Unable to activate the ability a second time, Martha moved on, seemingly leaving the rest of the job to her husband while she shaped a baguette. Behind her, Harold lifted and placed all the dough into one lump in the oven, and with a quick activation of his skill, it began to move.
[Dough Shaper: Copy] The entire batch formed an exact replica of the original boule Martha had made, the dough sorting itself into perfectly sized loaves that began to cook with an activation of his skill [Quick Rise], and suddenly the smell of bread filled the bakery as the bread began to cook faster than it ever could have naturally. Bread came out of the oven not a moment too soon as servants, shopkeepers, and farm foremen were arriving to pick up their pre-orders. The two worked together in concert, bringing batch after batch of bread out of the kitchen. While still working on the day’s orders.
[Make it Sweet] Harold pointed at three dozen bagels– transmuting them into doughnuts. [Keep it warm] Martha's skill next, and all the cooked bread in the shop slowly rose to the perfect temperature just as the first potential customers started walking by the door.
[Aromaweave] Harold cast his hand forward, and the scent in the room multiplied in intensity and rolled out of the shop in a wave and onto the street. Yedda was not a large town, but the dangers of the Yedda woods forced nearly everyone nearby inside the town’s palisades to sleep, creating a dense community that was perfect for Martha and Harold, even if they were closer to the walls than most.
The day was busy, and that busyness kept their minds off the loud absence of their son as they worked hard through the morning and lunch rushes. Until things slowed down, and a silence fell on the bakery as the pair worked together to clean the bakery. Much to their collective dismay, neither had ever developed cleaning skills. It was a task they both despised, and without Eld to share the load, neither was in a good mood as they closed up shop and started making dinner.
“Ya’know, my cousin’s son isn’t taking well to farm labour. And he’s only got the one class. If we wanted some extra help around here, we could see if he has what it takes to be a baker.” Harold asked, eager to find anyone else to help with the cleanup.
“Our son is gone for less than a day, and already you want to trade his inheritance to your cousin’s son?” Martha responded caustically.
“It's not a da,y Martha, that boy’s been gone much longer than that in his head, and you wouldn’t let me talk about it while he was here, why can’t we talk about it now that he’s gone?”
“When we’re sure he’s not coming back, and not a day earlier.” Martha snapped.
Harold grumbled, but he hadn’t won that fight for the last two years once it became apparent that Eld wasn’t planning to stick around and become a baker. He wasn’t going to win it on the day his son left.
The petty arguments continued through the night until it was time for bed. Martha sat beside her husband as the sun set– Angry that she didn’t have the same gift to fall asleep her husband did. She sat up, anxious about what she knew was coming. Other mothers with the [Caretaker] class prepared you for it. On the day your last child leaves the house, the [Caretaker] class completes itself, and you get your capstone level 15 skill. For Martha, it would be an even bigger upgrade. She already had her [Peasant] capstone [Favored Servant] that allowed her to make a request of her local liege lord, and her capstone Baker skill [Masterwork: Croissant], a skill she had earned 4 years prior after making a masterwork quality croissant. With tonight’s level-up, she would not only get her final base class capstone but she would also earn her ascended class. As she lay in bed, unable to sleep even with the lulling sound of her husband’s rhythmic snoring, she wondered how her ascension would form. [Peasant], [Baker], [Caretaker], what would they make when they combined? What skill would she get? Quietly, she prayed to Haygran, goddess of Hearth and Home, to protect her son and grant her some skill to make sure he was cared for on his journey. She waited, she prayed, and waited until finally sleep began to take her, and she shot up, suddenly aware of her new skills. She read through the options carefully before landing on a capstone that was exactly what she was looking for. After selecting it, another set of skill options was presented to her mind; the options were fewer, but Martha smiled, feeling the ascended class to be a fitting one.
[Level 15 Caretaker]
[Skill: Check-In Family]
[Ascended class obtained: Bread Mother - Level 1]
[Skill: Breakfast to-go]
She smiled and thanked the Hearth mother for the skill. She was briefly overjoyed. Intuitively, she knew that once per day, she would be able to send a gift of bread to her son wherever in the kingdom he might be. She wondered if the skill would work in dungeons. Most teleportation skills didn’t, but she hoped hers would.
Her capstone skill was an even greater relief. With Eld only a day outside of town, she knew the boy was likely fine, but she also knew what a relief it would be to go to sleep every night knowing something about her son. With relief that slowly shifted to horror, she activated the skill to see how much information she gained.
{Subject: Eld
Location: 1.3 Miles north of your current location along the Heather Creek path.
Health: Critical
Mana: Depleted
Stamina: Critical
Condition: Dehydrated, Exhausted, Maimed, Dismembered, Bleeding, Hobbled
Class: Survivor
Skills: [Level 1: Vigor of the Dying]
}
Martha ran; she didn’t waste time waking her husband, she didn’t spare a moment to put on shoes; she ran. Though her body had not moved with such swiftness for years, she ran.
It was the worst moment of Martha’s life. She arrived at Heather Creek path, exactly where the skill said her son would be, and there he was at the bottom of a hill, the darkness of the Yedda woods leering over him like a spectre.
I’m too late. She thought, and cursed herself for not being able to fall asleep earlier. His body was so still. When she’d activated her capstone skill, he had been alive, and if she’d been able to activate it even a half hour sooner, she knew she would have arrived on time. Still, she rushed to his body, praying he might still draw some breath.
[Mend Wound] She used an ability she’d earned when Eld was only 8 years old and had started coming home with bruises. It wouldn’t be enough, not for this, but she used it anyway as she dashed to his side. An agonizing second after she collapsed to the ground next to him, she heard him gasping faintly. “[Vigor of the Dying]” he seemed to be repeating over and over. Martha gasped. A fatal hole was carved into her son’s chest, but no blood pooled around him, even as she looked at the exposed vessels. Worse, his right leg was twisted most of the way off at the knee, with only a grisly tendon holding it onto his body, and only the blackened bone past his burned stump of an elbow remained of his left arm. Martha retched before picking up her son. She praised the day she had decided to marry and work as a baker, for it was those years of lifting sacks of flour that gave her the strength as she threw her son over her shoulder and ran with him on her back.
