Investigation Start!

Placing the jar on top of the drawer, I returned all the drawers to their original position. Then, I continued to clean the rest of the place. Maybe there were more hidden stashes around the room?

While wiping the bed, I checked underneath the pillows, underneath and behind the bed frame, and even knocked on the frame several times. Nothing here.

Moving in a clockwise direction from the drawer, I meticulously cleaned and searched the place. Nothing.

The only thing in this room was the jar.

Exiting the room, since I had taken my sweet time, everyone else had already finished their own cleaning. The three of them were all seated at the living room table, talking in small voices among themselves.

When I appeared with the jar, all their talking stopped and their eyes instantly turned to me. And then to the jar I was holding.

[Is that?]

"Yeah, I found this jar in my room, hidden away in the bedside drawer."

Putting down the jar on the table, Sazzy took it and peered closely at it.

[It's definitely the preservative. What is it doing here?]

"I thought the same thing."

Sazzy slid the jar towards Ava, and the moment Ava got it she disappeared from her seat. Probably to ask the system who was bound to the original owner of my house.

I pulled out a chair and sat down next to Oliver, who hugged my arm as soon as he could. He then quietly opened his personal terminal to entertain himself.

"Do you think Amanda survived and headed to Media Luna?"

Sazzy hummed and opened up her personal terminal to show the map Margret had given us.

[If Amanda did survive, she would have to travel a really long distance to reach Media Luna. Assuming she came from the AT center, because that would be the most likely method she entered the planet, she would have to travel quite far to arrive at Media Luna.]

Sliding her finger across the map, Sazzy drew an invisible line from the AT center to where we were.

"Judging from the picture, and what you had said on Vastum, she was probably being hunted by someone. Most likely the people were Colonizers or pro-Colonizers."

On Vastum, Sazzy had mentioned that Amanda was assassinated because she held forbidden knowledge pertaining to the Loser's War. And that knowledge was most like the recipe that she had left behind and the fact that the Colonizers were the ones responsible for sneaking poison into the food supplies of the Alliances. The proof was probably the jar that I had found. Maybe she had hid it in this house when she arrived?

"Do you think the chief knows about this?"

The face of that old woman appeared in my mind. There was no way that anyone who could hold a position of power, regardless of how small the community, would be so simple. She also had private pictures of Amanda, and seemed to be seriously testing us.

[To be fair, I don't trust what she says but I do think she doesn't know about this. After all, if she knew, I don't think that she would have sent us to this house. She seems like the type of person who would investigate everything she could about you before she would even consider trusting you.]

As Sazzy gave out a sigh, Ava appeared again with the bottle in her hands.

[Tom said that his host met Amanda at the AT center acting very suspicious. When he offered her his ear, she was very nervous and jittery and it took a while to calm her down. They hit off and she lived at his house, which is Alex's house now, for around a little more than a week before she disappeared.]

Ava opened her personal terminal to show a picture of a house very obviously ransacked, with a lot of blood splashes and a broken wall.

[Amanda had disappeared from the house in what was very obviously a break in. There was nothing stolen, so it was not a theft. But most likely it was an attempt at her life. There was a lot of blood so Tom and his host followed the blood trail, which disappeared into the forest. There they had found a skeleton, or a melted skeleton. And they assumed she was dead.]

Ava flicked her fingers and briefly showed many photos taken of the ransacked house and the blood trails. But there were no pictures of the melted skeleton.

[If the skeleton was from her assailant, Amanda could have technically escaped and stayed alive. But how she managed to go all the way from there to Media Luna seems like a stretch.]

The four of us sat there in silence, trying to rack our heads to think of a way how an injured person traveled more than 3 days worth, probably 5 days if by foot, while possibly running for her life.

After not too long, Sazzy obviously gave up thinking about something that we had no evidence of.

[Maybe the chief could give us more information when we bring this jar to her.]

Reaching out to grab the jar, Sazzy hopped off her chair and then put it in one of the living room drawers.

[In the meantime, we should probably not overthink too much. It will achieve nothing.]

And as if on cue, I heard a stomach rumble coming from beside me. Turning my head, I saw Oliver gripping his stomach to silence it as his face reddened in embarrassment.

"Fair point. Besides, we haven't eaten breakfast yet."

Standing up from my chair, Oliver and I headed over to the kitchen to start cooking.

[While you guys do that, I'm going back to Tom to ask more about his host. Maybe that could give us some clues.]

With a wave, Ava disappeared once more.

[If that's the case, I'll comb the house once more to see if I can find anything else.]

Sazzy said as she disappeared into a nearby room.

Oliver and I headed over to a bag on the kitchen table. It was the bag where we held all our cooking ingredients and equipment.

We took out several pots and pans, some bowls and the bag of ingredients.

"Big sister, what are we going to cook today?"

Grabbing a Lilac plant fruit, he made a face at its appearance and gently but disdainfully set it aside. He then took the rest of the ingredients into his arms and walked beside me to the counter.

"Today, we are going to cook some easy comfort food. I was thinking of making some sunshine bread. For this, we need sun dust, clam powder, and the noodle mix."

As I listed out the ingredients, Oliver helpfully dug them out from the bag and placed them next to my hands.

"Thank you. First we add the noodle mix and add about twice as much water as the noodle mix. Then we stir it before adding a spoonful of sun dust and a pinch of clam powder for taste."

Pouring around two servings worth of noodle mix, I flooded the mix with water and used a spoon to stir it. Midway through serving, I glanced at Oliver and saw his wide eyes screaming to help out. So I gave him the bowl and watched as he stirred the mixture until there were no longer any white noodle mixture to be seen and the whole thing was a nice golden brown color.

We then added the sun dust and clam powder before I filled a bot with water and set it to boil. But before it boiled, I made sure to put a little steaming platform that would allow us to place the bowl of mixture on the water without it drowning into the pot.

"We then steam the mixture for about half an hour. After half an hour, we will see the mixture rise and form a pretty bowl like bread that will taste like 'pieces of the sun'. Or that was what I read."

Placing a lid over the pot after we placed the bowl of mixture in, the both of us headed over to the table to make a side dish.

"Since we have a little more ingredients than I had originally planned left, should we make some cookies?"

Referring to the food I had made on stream yesterday, I saw Oliver's eyes widen as a smile slipped onto his face, Probably from remembering the taste of the food.

Following the exact same methods I had used yesterday, we made several cute looking cat shaped, star shaped, heart shaped and circle shaped cookies and let them solidify on the table.

Once we were done with the cookies, I checked back on the bread and took it out of the pot.

With a nice golden dome on the top, the bread was as if we had taken a slice of the sun and placed it in a bowl.

Taking a knife, I cut into the bread, which was incredibly soft, and scooped one slice onto Oliver's bowl. I also took one slice for myself.

Taking a bite, I could feel a layer of sweetness lit my tongue, as if I was biting into clouds. Then after the clouds was the sun, an incredibly almost sweetening taste then came as soon as it left.

Cutting out another slice for the both of us, we ate one bite of bread, and one bite of cookie, and enjoyed the way how the both of them complemented each other even though they were two entirely opposite food items.

When we were done with our food, and washed all the dishes, Sazzy was just nice, finished with searching every nook and cranny of the house and had just missed all the food.

[I couldn't find anything else. Not even in the guest rooms.]

Sitting down on the living room chair, exhausted, Sazzy laid her head on the table.

Shortly after, Ava also came back.

[Nothing much else Tom could tell me. I mean, he did talk a lot, but most of the things he told me weren't relevant.]

Rubbing her ears, Ava rested her head on her hand.

"So in the end we got nothing. Huh."

Sighing, the four of us gathered at the living room table again.

[I guess the only thing we can do is wait for more information from the people of this village.]

Groaning, Sazzy suddenly shot up from her chair.

[Alright! Let's go and get all this investigating and all done with so we can go home and eat tasty food!]