7.16 - The Sensation of Discovery
Theo was surprised the next morning when things were still calm. He sat, eating his breakfast and sipping his moss tea, all the while expecting something to go wrong, because things normally did. But nothing happened. He sat at the table, ate the sausage and eggs, and reviewed his administrative reports. There had been no movement on the dungeon problem. Whatever had been done to stabilize the other dungeons was working, for now. Even with all the new space elves and the infirmary releasing void energy.
Xol’sa had created a power sink that absorbed the energy. Theo didn’t want to investigate it closely, realizing that anything absorbing void energy would need to be disposed of. It wouldn’t hold it forever. Instead, he stuck his head in the sand and pretended these problems didn’t exist.
Tresk waited for Fenian and the others to arrive in town so they could delve into the dungeons. She hung around with Theo after getting Alex from the stable. The marshal joined them as they headed for the Newt and Demon. Of the many storage vessels in the building, quite a few were old stills used to brew potions. They now sat disused, but today they would be given new life.
“How much booze are we making?” Tresk asked, watching as Theo pulled a still from storage.
Theo tapped his chin, thinking about the early estimates for the number of people in attendance. They would need to create quite a lot if they were going to have one long, rolling party. He knew things would get rowdy with the local half-ogres. That was one reason why he had never undertaken a large-scale brewing project. Instead, he had invested every single unit of alcohol he made back into his alchemy. When the half-ogres had a few drinks, they became unmanageable.
“I don’t actually know,” Theo said. “Doing some mental math. Half a million units, maybe. I can’t really say.”
“That’s a lot of booze,” Tresk said.
Indeed, it was a ton of booze. Starting with 10 500-unit stills, they could produce 5,000 units of zee liquor a day. There was no shortage of corn in town, so that wasn’t a limiting factor. Instead, time was their enemy. The only thing they had going for them was the simplicity of the brewing process. It required absolutely no alchemy skills and could be done multiple times a day. Unlike the alchemy system, distilling alcohol in this world was far faster than it should have been.
“Do you remember the process,” Theo asked, leading the way to his giant metal cube. The metal cube was rather ominous, and most locals disliked it, but safe experiments were a necessity here.