Twenty-one Down, Four More To Go
by EstiRose
“Well, we’ve accomplished something!” Tamara told her cat, Miso. “Twenty-one this time, eh? Not bad!”
Miso gave her a bored “meow”, which was totally not surprising given that Tamara’s own tone had not been totally positive. Once again, she had failed to deliver twenty-five gold-quality vegetables to Pierre by the end of the season.
Once again, she wondered why she picked up the challenges from the board outside Lewis’ house. Sure, some of them were easy - between the hen, the duck, and the dinosaur Gus’ omelet thing was not that hard, the twelve leeks for Evelyn hadn’t been too bad, and a solid week inside the mines had taken care of Robin’s stone challenge, but some of them were ridiculous. The wizard wanted two different special ingredients from monsters that she’d never seen drop. In fact, she was sure she had never seen a prismatic slime before in the mines.
Apparently she was a glutton for punishment.
Well, she’d get the gold-quality vegetables back, at least. That wasn’t too bad. And maybe next year she’d have more sprinklers, more crops, more ways to finally get that request done the next time Pierre asked.
In the meantime, there was so much to do to prepare for winter. The cow, chicken, duck, and rabbits needed to be set up to winter in their coops and barns. She needed to make sure she had enough hay. At least she had her greenhouse and her fish ponds.
She had made a lot of progress, after all, even if she couldn’t make this one bit of progress.
And next year would be next year, and she’d try this again, and maybe this time she would even succeed.