NEVRASWe had a boat from earlier, so it was merely a matter of anchoring the thing and finding a good spot. First, we tried the desert island near Goji and Seikai, looking to do some saltwater fishing. Ambrosia cast without bait, and waited. After about an hour, she randomly caught an especially stupid flounder. It was undersized, so we threw it back. About thirty minutes later, we caught what looked like the same flounder. “Fuck it,” said Ambrosia, “let''s use this fish as bait.” And so, she hooked the flounder so it wouldn''t get away. The fish was still alive and swimming, so she was constantly unsure whether we had got something or not, because the line kept moving.

    Suddenly, it became very clear that she had caught something. It was a much stronger pull than before, but Ambrosia did have that ability to lift stuff like boulders so she managed. Barely. I held her steady by the waist, as she tugged this way and that. At last she pulled it to the ship and... holy carp, it was a great white! The shark let go the fish that it had been munching on, and flopped about, trying to bite us. As everyone knows from the six-part documentary series Sharknado, sharks can survive not only on land but even in the airless void of space. So rather than gasping for air, it actively chased after all of us, hungering for flesh. The current fishing laws proposed by the Council did not require any fishing licenses but they did have regulations. You couldn''t catch a fish that appeared to be spawning, you couldn''t catch immature fish except to use for bait, and you generally couldn''t keep sharks except for research. Of course, many people claimed they were doing research for the latter, but their “research” tended to end up being done in a restaurant. We cut the whole animal up, setting aside the fins. That night, we had shark fin soup, and made plans to instead go freshwater fishing. Most sharks are exclusively saltwater critters except for the bull shark and Bizant River shark, so we would have less troubles with the law. We left the area, having stored the animal on ice for meat.

    We cooked our meal as we sailed away from the area. It really isn''t like one might think. You boil the fins, and scrape off the skin and meat, which leaves behind protein fiber that gets shredded and put in the soup. Shark fin is not naturally soft, it has to be cooked for almost a full day. People used to ban the thing, but that just made more sharks get cut up for their fins, or worse, to just toss them in the trash and just use the meat. Although people were supposed to only catch them for research, the Council realized they couldn''t enforce this, so they just had this as a guideline, to keep people from catching shark after shark and only using them for their fin. The actual dish, however, was underwhelming. It had virtually no taste aside from the broth, it was just texture. But I knew this, having been born into royalty. But I still much preferred the actual meat of the shark to its fin. It was mainly a matter of not wasting anything. We salted the meat and put it in barrels to ferment and gain flavor. We might have some of that later.

    Parking our boat near Galaxia, we set out for a small pond. Bass fishing was out, so we dug around the ground until we found what we needed. That would be nightcrawlers, loads and loads of them. We packed these wriggly things into a small jar and walked to the nearest pond. It was winter, so the lake was frozen. Zoe decided to work some more on Silent Spells, so she cast Fire on the lake, numerous times, turning the water from frozen to boiling. We caught plenty of fish then. They ummm kinda floated to the surface. Wisely, I decided our experiment with fishing was over.

    The worms turned out to be a wasted investment, as we never got to use them, so we stored the assorted fish away for later. There was some catfish, which we processed with Cajun spices. The rest was assorted trout, perch, pike, and walleye. We did manage to catch one largemouth bass, weighing about 35 lb. That was about 13 lb more than any known record, but well, we did manage to empty out the lake. We cut the bass up into chunks, putting some in salt for later like the shark had been, and some we cooked up with the catfish for tonight''s dinner. We were going to divide the rest into fish chowder or fish sauce. It wasn''t the Vietnamese variety, however, it was a homemade variety. In order to mix together to make this we needed six cloves of garlic, 3 tablespoons of salt, 6 bay leaves, 3 tablespoons of peppercorns, 1 ? lb of fish, about 2 cups of fresh water, and 2 tablespoons of brine from some other fermented thing like sauerkraut. Of course, we had hundreds of times that amount of fish. We''d have to measure fish by the gallon! And I wasn''t even sure how to process this much in proportion to all that. S~ea??h the Novёl?ire.n(e)t website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    Having leftover food from earlier to store on our ship, including some boar meat and deer meat that Ambrosia couldn''t really explain, we were going to salt all of this, but then Elias latched upon an idea. “Hey, my Preserve spell would work, but I''m not sure I have enough mystic power to use on all this! Let''s head to Phoenix,” he said. And so we did.

    ELIAS

    I think now is as good a time as any to explain units of measurement. Temperature, as you know, as using Double Celsius. This was decided as a method of accurately gauging temperature, since starting the freezing temperature at anything besides 0 degrees made no sense for any practical use (ruling out Fahrenheit), while Celsius was too inaccurate for any real science since temperatures were too far apart. Now 38oC was converted to 76o?. Weight used a hybrid of several systems ranging from ounces, to pounds, to stone (ten stone in this case was exactly 150 lb), then hundredweight, then ton. Length went from nanometers and millimeters to centimeters, then inches, feet, cubits, yards, li, and miles. A li was an ancient Chinese measurement equal to roughly ? a kilometer. Kilometers were only used in reference to li, the Council had mostly managed to abolish the influence of the French and their damned metric system which imposed such evil on the world. Dirty communists! Time was pretty much unchanged, from seconds to days to months and years, to decades, centuries, and millennia. Then you got into cooking measurements, which went from teaspoons, to tablespoons, to cups, pints, quarts, and gallons. But it didn''t end there, 8 gallons was a bushel, 16 gallons was an octave, 32 gallons was an aum, and a stuck was measurement (mainly for wine) of about 260 or so gallons. The 1 ? lb of fish in the recipe was equal by weight to about 3 cups, but all the fish chunks together made at least a stuck, far too much to handle.

    Logistically, there was a problem. We hadn''t enough salt to preserve this, or the other meat we had mysteriously come across. We had enough in our barrel for a week''s batch of chowder, but much of this meat would go bad inside the ship, even with barrels and barrels. We were at risk of starving, despite having plenty of food.

    And no, I couldn''t just use magic on the problem. It was like playing Oregon Trail and hunting loads and loads of bison, only to have it all rot and everyone die of dysentery or something. We normally scrounged for food, now we needed to figure out how to manage it. Refrigeration was not something runes could solve. We needed a miracle.