Star woke with the sun in her eyes and body aching with sore muscles. She groaned as she sat up, stretching her arms above her head. Like every morning since she’d first gotten to this strange little island in the sky, the first thing she did was stretch. She stretched her back and legs and arms. To complete her little morning routine she brushed her teeth with a make shift toothbrush and bounced to the kitchen, where Salem sat with a wooden cup of water and a few fruits.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

Star took a seat at the table picking up an apple. “Any plans for the day?”

Salem thought for a few moments before shaking her head.

“Great! Then you get to help me out with my garden.” Star cheered with a smug smile, taking a bite out her apple.

Salem sighed, long and hard. “Fine.” She lamented.

“Great! Meet me outside in a bit then, we’ve gotta plow the ground a bit before I can start planting.”

“Do you even have anything you need to plant at the moment?”

“Yes, of course, I still have a few clippings of thyme and ginger that need to be planted. You do want spices don’t you?”

Salem relented, “Alright, fine, but only because I’m dying out here with just salt and pepper.”

The two left the house quickly after that, headed out to the garden in order to prepare the garden by making it suitable for the new herbs Star would be planting. The duo toiled for hours to get the ground prepped, but once it was Star had Salem were able to begin digging little holes, well Salem did while Star ditched her to go get the herbs.

Star walked into her alchemy study and headed straight to the shelf on the left, quickly spotting her herbs on the middle shelf. She gave them a quick scan to insure they were ready to be planted.

Ginger cutting

A piece of ginger ready to be planted. Grows in temperatures higher than 32 F or 0 C

+10 flavor

+2 health

Thyme cutting

A piece of Thyme ready to be planted. Grows best in dry sunny conditions

Medicinal

+8 Purification

+ 9 health

+11 Flavor

Star smiled at the notification. Thyme had been apart of her single C rank draw and out of all the plants she’d gotten up to this point, the best in terms of alchemy use. She picked up both cuttings placing them into her basket before grabbing her fertilizer and placing it in as well. She practically skipped to Salem with her plants.

“I’m back.” She sang, placing her plants down.

“Why do you only have two plants? I’ve dug like, 10 holes Star!” Salem deadpanned at the plants.

“Whoopsie, guess I forgot to tell you I only got two.” Star smiled, not at all apologetically.

Salem’s eye twitched.

“Anywho, I’ll finished up here, your free to go.”

Salem stood, brushing to dirt off her pants. “I’ll be practicing in the forest then, see you in a bit.”

“By~” Star got back to planting. She quickly placed both little sprouts safely in the ground, covering them with a bit of dirt followed by a little bit of fertilizer was placed around them. She returned to her other garden, picking out weeds as they continued creeping into the little garden of hers. Once she’d finished with that there was still a few hours till sundown leaving her with plenty of time to mess with her alchemy, but before that…

Exchange

• F tier: 5

• D tier: 10

• C tier: 30

• B tier: 120

• A tier: 600

• S tier: 3600

Current points: 14

[Accept]

Star stared long and hard at her gacha screen. One one hand she could draw another D tier and hope she levels the skill up to ten. On the other hand she could wait a few days and get a C tier as well as a D tier in one full swoop. What to do, what to do. Star sighed, dismissing the screen. She turned her gaze to her available plants for alchemy use. Their wasn’t much, most of what she’d gotten in the past month had gone into the garden so she could get more, the rest had been incoportated into experiments.

Star bent down pulling out her basket of experiments, the ones that weren’t health related that was those went into a dedicated medicine cabinet. She picked a little bottle turning it to look at the name. Sticky slime glue. A relatively useful item.

Star sighed, gazing up to the ceiling. There wasn’t much to do today.

The days passed slowly for sometime. With no pressing matters to attend to at the moment the two girls simply relaxed for a bit. Salem tamed a bird discovering there was an upkeep cost on her summoning contracts. The bird proved to be useless in finding new land, in fact it start up desummoned itself one day when it had been sent out on a voyage. Salem couldn’t summon it again for a few days. It had been a very unhappy bird. Since then every time they send it on a mission it more or less refused to be helpful.

Star continued exploring her alchemy ability, discovering new aspects with each coming day. Life remained calm for a long while. The days stretched on and the nights became shorter, then the days became shorter and the nights, longer. The duo realized winter was coming soon.

Star sat inside her and Salem’s little home, a piece of paper before her and a feather pen in hand. She sat besides Salem as they come up with a list of this that needed to be done before winter come full swing.

“We’ll need a storage room for food, I don’t think are cabinets are going to cut it.”

“We’ll also need to pickle a few vegetables to keep them edible. We can still eat meat though, since you can just summon animals to use.” Star and Salem had gotten very accustom to butchering animals.

“There’s also the problem of the chickens we’ve been getting eggs from, will they make the winter?”

“I think we leave that up to chance, not much we can do for them now.”

“There's also the problem of heating.”

“We have furs we can ware, but the insulation isn’t the best...”

“We also don’t know how cold its going to get…” Salem trailed off worry in her voice.

“Maybe alchemy has a solution? If I can make some kind of magic based space heater we could be set.” Star resounded, biting her lip.

“We have some time still, if you can’t figure it out before the first freezing night we’ll come up with a backup plan.”

Star nodded, unconsciously looking to her skill screen.

Current skills:

• Deconstruct [45]

• Gacha gathering system [33]

• Lucky [53]

• Scan [49]

• Synthesis [40]

Her skills have leveled massively since she first arrived four months ago. With her synthesis level she should be able to get some kind of space heater, with synthesis of this level being able to use ingredients of up to B level. Very useful considering B tier is the first tier with magical ingredients, it should work out.

Star still have time though, she could still level up more before she needed a heating device. She fiddled with her thumbs before bringing her next point to Salem, “I’ll also need a place for all my plants that won’t grow again next season.”

“But we don’t have any room inside…”

“Unless we can figure out how to expand on your space magic a little more?”

Salem stayed silent.

“If you could make a bag expand and freeze time within that bag it would save my plants wouldn’t it?”

“If I could do that we’d also be able to store more food without the fear of it going bad.” Salem thought aloud.

“Oh yeah, that to.”

“I’ll try it, and you try to make those space heaters, if we can’t figure it about before the first freezing night we’ll come back to the discussion table ok?”

“Got it!”

The days passed and the two experimented and theorized and tried everything in their power to make their goal a reality. Star, despite her high levels of luck and synthesis skill, experienced more failed synthesis in the past few weeks then she had in the entire four months before. Salem pocked and prodded at space, twisted and turned time, and yet she found something was still missing. She couldn’t quite get it right.

The experiments seemed hopeless, until one day. Late into the night, when Star really should have been sleeping, an accident involving two separate experiments resulted in a resounding success.

Star stood in wonder and sleep deprivation at the glowing jack-o-lantern. It glowed a dim yellow hue and gave off a significant amount of heat. Star blinked slowly at the creation. That wasn’t quite what she thought would happen.

Jack-O-Lantern of heat

A jack-o-lantern that gives off a distinct warmth

Warming II

The scan showed off the single trait the pumpkin had, it was the most beautiful thing Star’s sleep deprive mind had ever seen.

Salem found Star the next morning snoring, face down on her desk by her new, glorious creation, glorious.

Salem’s success came not long after Star’s, with significantly less chance and more skill. She did this by completing a week long project she’d been making slow, but steady, progress on. First she’d taken a bag replicated the space with in it, it’d taken a few tries to get that part right. Salem had to first figure out how to pin space in place instead of it simple dispersing.

Once the first step was complete she’d meticulous tied the strings of space on top of one another, doubling the space within the bag. She’d repeat that process once more to quadruple the amount of space the bad could initially hold. That completing the bag of holding part. The next problem was getting time to freeze within the back.

Salem solved this problem by intertwining time magic in with the space magic. This also meant she had to start the entire process over. It was a rough few days. However with her new bag she’d found a way to save plants and food.

The coming winter passed with relative ease between Star’s space heater pumpkins and Salem’s bags.