The Butcher of Gadobhra

While most of the crew were chopping trees, hauling logs, and building the barn and storehouse, Suzette was baking muffins and making groatmeal. Each morning, she played milkmaid and gathered the eggs, then worked for a few hours in the Tavern's bakery, making the groatmeal muffins that were served for most meals. The workers had a regular discussion of whether the muffins or chicken were worse in the morning. Serving the evening meal and washing all the pots and dishes by hand took up the evening hours.

Groats were a hardy variety of grain similar to oats. They were grown in every farming community in the Empire—mostly for feeding animals like pigs, but poor communities used them as human foodstuffs. They were nutritious but tasteless. Growing groats had advantages over growing tastier grains like oats, buckeyes, rye, or wheat. The hardy plants barely needed any rain and could be planted year-round.

Boiled groats made groatmeal. It wasn't bad with berries, honey, and cream and was served in many taverns for breakfast. Groatmeal actually tasted better the longer it stayed in the pot, so what didn’t get eaten one morning would be reheated the next day with new grain added. However, ACME corporation was not paying for berries, honey, and cream for their workers. If they wanted things to taste better, they had 'Tastes like Chicken.'

Groats could fill in for other grains if you didn’t mind the taste. Groats could be ground into a heavy flour that made a thick, lumpy batter that could be baked into a lumpy sort of muffin - or groat cakes, groat pone, and groat biscuits. All of which would benefit from salt, milk, honey, eggs, and fruit being added. When asked about better food, Billy replied, "Guess what days off are for? You get 1 day off a week. Use it to find a beehive or milk a cow or something. ACME will supply you with the basics. Think of this as your chance to show off all of those skills I was told you people have.” It was noticed that Billy didn’t touch the muffins.

Since Suzette had plans for her day off, and they didn’t include getting kicked by a cow or getting stung by bees, she volunteered for a job that took her out into the forest where she could gather apples, blackberries, and some herbal remedies the cook needed. There was just enough time in the afternoon between baking muffins and getting ready for dinner.

Granya, the cook at the tavern, was a large woman in her mid-40s with muscular arms from kneading bread and a smile on her face as long as you were being useful. She had talked to Suzette and Betty the first day. "I can't abide a slacker in my kitchen? If you do your work, we’ll get along fine, and if any idiot bothers you when serving food in the tavern, you let me know immediately. I can’t abide rude customers with wandering hands." Suzette had heard some of those stories already. Granya hired many of the local girls and boys to help her in the kitchen and serving in the tavern. It was a popular place to work. The teens learned their way around a kitchen, and their parents knew it was a safe place to work. Patrons who pinched a girl or boy as they were serving or made lewd advances found themselves tossed into the pigsty by Granya with a set of bruises to help them remember their manners.

Smiling back with an earnest expression on her face, 'Little Suzy' assured her she was a hard worker. And she was. Suzette could grind in games and be as good as her male friends, killing goblins 20 hours a day for a month if that's what it took. She was finding the work in GENESIS was actually more enjoyable than she had expected. Finishing her morning chores and cleaning up after herself got her a smile of approval and another job, but one that would take her outside and let her wander through the countryside for several hours on a sunny afternoon. Besides doing the work for the tavern, she wanted to scout out resources that the gang could gather on their day off or an easy place to begin grinding experience.

The place she was headed to was close to the village, and Granya gave her good directions. "Cross over the river, go right at the end of the bridge, and look for an old oak a hundred paces up and just off the river. There's a plant there with reddish leaves called Sunstar - little 2" leaves with five points. It's good for keeping wounds from going bad and can be used in simple healing potions. Bring me back a few dozen leaves, but keep them separate from the fruit so they aren’t crushed. I’ll want a half bushel of apples and any berries that you can find. Take time to look over the area; you’ll be going out to the apple trees often. Be careful in the woods across the river - it's a bit wilder than it looks. Some of the squirrels can be mean, so don’t taunt them.

Gathering what the cook needed was easy, so she set down the heavy basket of fruit and went looking for the Sunstar herb. The area did look different from the woods nearer the village. More overgrown, with darker foliage on the trees. She kept close to the river as she walked up to the gigantic oak tree she could easily see from the bridge. Its shadow covered everything in the immediate area, lending a twilight feel to the ground underneath it, some of the lichens and plants even glowing in the shadows.

One area caught her attention. The ground was lower, forming a small hollow in the shadows. The plants in it were rotting and smelled horrible - all that was left of them were blackened stems. In the center was a large cocoon, nearly 18" long, filled with soft silk threads. She carefully moved it towards her using a stick. It was odd enough that she wanted to ask Granya about it. The silk was very fine and looked like it could be woven into thread. She wondered what had come out of this. Some sort of large butterfly?

She found the Sunstar plant near the oak tree, a vine winding its way up the tree. She picked a couple of dozen leaves for Granya and then gathered more for herself. Mindful of the time, she hurried back to the river and then the bridge.

There were two things that she failed to notice.

The first was that the area of rotted plants near the oak's base was where the vine had rooted. The first foot of the vine looked diseased, and the lower leaves were blackened or missing. Much further up where she had picked them, the leaves were still bright red, but someone familiar with the herb would have noticed the veins on the underside starting to darken on the lower leaves.

The other thing she missed was a Very Hungry Caterpillar. It had hatched that morning after its husk had lain in the forest for many years, covered in mulch and leaves. Besides needing a lot of food, it also needed a certain type of magic to grow and thrive. There hadn't been enough of what it needed for years, but that had changed lately. Dark magic was slowly oozing from somewhere near and the large bug had reached out and pulled the tainted strands of mana to it until enough was pooled in the area for it to safely hatch from its cocoon. After that, it had gone hunting. A nest of eggs in the oak tree had been a good start. Mama Bird landed to find out she was next on the menu, and Papa Bird shortly after that. Seven eggs and two large robins had filled up the Very Hungry Caterpillar's belly nicely, as it really wasn't that big yet. It needed to eat more, grow more, and then find a host for its next stage.

It had just finished the second bird when the large thing on two legs had come along. It wanted desperately to eat the two-legs, but was so full it couldn’t move! Unseen in the nest, directly above the large two-legged thing, it would have been easy to strike and paralyze it. It finally decided that it should paralyze the food-thing, then take a nap to digest the birds, and then snack on the two-legger. But by the time it made up its mind, the food-thing had run off. No manners, these two-legs. Now it was angry at losing so much food and hungry again! Luckily, there was more food nearby. It moved slowly and silently to where a squirrel was chewing the last of an acorn and thinking about having another.

Some instinct made the squirrel turn its head, and then it started to flee. It had seen death coming for it, but it was fleet and would race away! Or maybe not, as the VHC raised its head and spat a sticky mass of webbing that hit the squirrel in the face. Immediately paralyzed, the poor rodent could only sit on the branch as the VHC moved slowly towards it, opening its mouth wide and slowly swallowing the squirrel whole. Sated for now, the VHC curled into a ball. It would grow, then hunt more tomorrow, getting bigger and bigger. It was so very happy to finally be awake.

The instincts of the VHC to grow larger and larger and eat more and more would have made it a growing star in the ACME corporation. Eating its competition in the workforce would have been seen as a good attitude for a low-level manager on their way up. While it slept, it dreamed of the tasty two-legged meal that had got away.