Author's Note: Holy beans am I a goober. I JUST NOW realized that copy/pasting a story into the doc manager turns my poor fics into a weird mess. I am sorry to those who have tried to read this fic, and I'm sorry for just now seeing this problem today. Mental note, never copy/paste a fic in again. Use the file upload. Now onto the story!
"Wow Rach, that old coot really is doing a good job of teaching you, huh?" Locke's feet swung back and forth as he sat on the stool at the counter. With his face in his hands, he watched Rachel go about separating the roots and herbs for the apothecary and chopping up what needed chopping. He didn't mind hanging around the shop all day despite the strong as heck aromas coming from all those plants shoved into one small building.
"What do you mean? Hope you're not making fun of me again." Rachel glanced up from her work with a raised eyebrow.
"Now why would I do that when you're holding a big ass knife, hm?" Locke gave her a broad, almost teasing smile. "Anyways, I'm being serious! You look like my old Gran the way you chop those ginseng. Like a true professional."
Rachel couldn't help but smile at that, though she shook her head all the same. "Nah, I'm still learning, Locke. Thank you, but I have a long ways to go before I get to her level. I mean, she was the one who taught Mister Wicker." She gave a soft sigh and kept chopping up the roots and put them all carefully into the glass jars on the shelf. The shop always ran out of ginseng first. People in town used it for tea, cold cures, rheumatism medicine, everything.
"Oh guess what, Rach?!" he bounced on his stool, "I got a letter from Arcell this morning! He's already made it to South Figaro. Can you believe it?"
"Really? That was fast. He only left last week, right?" She glanced over again and saw Locke stealing a bit of peppermint from a jar and chewing quickly. He had a habit of nicking peppermint leaves while he visited her at the apothecary lately.
"Yep, says he met this funny older guy who's apparently smarter than the king of Figaro or something. Like seriously, most of his letter was him going on and on about this weird new group cropping up in South Figaro and how they wanna stop the Empire or something. I couldn't understand half of it though." Locke reached into a different jar without looking and pulled out something that was definitely not peppermint.
"I think Arcell was drunk or something when he wrote that thing. His writing was all shaky and slanty and stuff."
Rachel was not listening to Locke. She kept looking from the jar on the counter and his face again and again with wide eyes.
Locke noticed how she wasn't responding and then as if seeing the look on her face made him realize it, he finally noticed the weird taste in his mouth. The peppermint taste was gone completely.
"Oh god, what the hell is this stuff?" he coughed hard even though he had already swallowed a bit of what he had been chewing. Rachel ran around to Locke's side and started hitting him on the back to help with his coughing.
"You need to get that back up! It was a mushroom you really shouldn't have swallowed!" she cried, still slamming her hands onto his back as hard as she could. Locke kept coughing and some of the mushroom came out of his mouth and dribbled on the hardwood floor, but he really needed to vomit it up quickly.
"I've got an idea!" Rachel hurried back behind the counter and crouched down to see the lower shelves better. Locke was too busy coughing and trying to gag as hard as he could and pounding the counter with his hand to notice Rachel coming back with a handful of weird looking leaves.
"Eat this! It'll make the mushroom come up in no time!" She shoved the crumpled up purplish things in his face while his mouth was open from his last cough.
Locke's face had turned a splotchy red and tears started rolling down his cheeks as he tried to swallow down the new, very bad tasting, leaves. Rachel got him a cup of water from the bucket behind the counter and made him sip some of it to help him get all of the herbs down.
"Hurrghhh," he moaned and held onto the counter, feeling as if he'd spent all night at the pub with his buddies again.
"Okay, you should be feeling like vomiting in a moment!" Rachel said almost cheerfully, patting Locke's back.
"What?" and then his stomach seemed to have listened to Rachel's statement. She helped Locke stand and pulled him to the back door so he could let loose in the compost heap. Boy was she right about those leaves making the mushroom come back up. They made just about everything he'd eaten in the last week come up too.
In between gags, Locke muttered, "Never eating a damn mushroom ever again, ugh!"