Stagnant Water

Armed with his rusty gardening tools, Paxos came back on the first floor of the brewery. He looked around for a few second for the way outside before finding an opening with bright light coming through.

As he walked closer, he could hear the protesting zombies growing louder.

"Whadda we want? RUM!"

"United we stagger!"

"Give us rum or give us death!"

Paxos laughed for a second with some of the phrases these zombies were chanting, but soon enough grew annoyed with it and just started ignoring them like everyone else in the brewery.

He stepped through the opening and down a set of stairs and started making his way to a couple fenced areas which seemed to be the farming patches. Paxos could clearly see the patches were all ruined. People, or well, zombies most likely, had stomped all over the patches, leaving only a single one at the far side untouched.

"By Saradomin, this patch might not have been ruined but someone should clean out some of these weeds from time to time." He thought as he placed down the watering can and the seed dibber before starting to clear out the weeds from the farming patch.

Close to an hour later, Paxos had finally finished raking the farming patch and removing all the weeds from it. He placed his rake on the ground next to him and dug a small hole with the seed dibber before placing the seed in the hole and filling it up again.

He had noticed while raking that this patch seemed to be special, for some reason this patch didn't need to be watered or fertilised and plants would grow at an incredibly fast pace. That was the reason the weeds on the patch before were so tall even though they had only started growing recently.

As he sat down to rest his arms for a moment, he could see the Blindweed grow with the naked eye.

It only took around a minute for the buried seed to slowly come peeping out above the dirt. After five minutes, the Blindweed had already grown to be a fully grown plant.

Paxos quickly started removing the grown Blindweed from the dirt in fear it might continue going at that pace and wither, making the plant unusable.

After he finished carefully harvesting the Blindweed plant from the farming patch, he quickly made his way back to the brewery, up the stairs, through the door and started talking with Cap'n Braindeath.

"Here, I have your Blindweed." He said while showing the Cap'n the plant he had just harvested.

"Splendid, lad! Go shove it in the intake hopper upstairs.We'll beat them zombies yet! Arr." The Cap'n said cheerfully.

Paxos nodded before turning around and running to the wooden ladder he had seen earlier when he was leaving the brewery to plant the seed.

He quickly climbed up the ladder and searched for a moment before spotting the intake hopper, throwing in the Blindweed before returning to the Cap'n.

"Well, that takes care of the Blindweed. What now?" Paxos asked. He had no idea how long it would take to make rum or how many ingredients it needed, and from the looks of it the run they were making right now seemed to be a special kind.

"Well, now ye've shoved the Blindweed into the mix, what we need is a bucket of stagnant water." The Cap'n replied, being awfully specific with his words in Paxos' opinion.

"Where can I find some of that?" He asked curiously.

"Ye won't have to go far, lad! We have a pool of the stuff here."

"Here in the brewery?" Paxos asked again, getting slightly annoyed by the Cap'n being way too vague with his answers.

"No, lad. That would be a strange thing to have in a brewery!" The Cap'n said as he chuckled slightly.

"It's up the mountain to the north" He continued, while pointing his finger through the window set on the northern side of his office room.

"Up a mountain?" Paxos asked once more.

"Well, 'tis technically a volcano, but ye get the general idea." The Cap'n said, throwing another unpleasant thing to do in Paxos' face, which had already started to shift slightly.

"And I assume the place is crawling with those zombies?" He stated more than asked.

"No lad! Not a zombie in sight" The Cap'n replied, making Paxos' face slowly start going back to his normal, rather cheerful expression.

However, Paxos' face quickly changed back to his slightly shifted expression when the Cap'n continued: "All ye have to do is get past the keep-eyed lookout that's been sending my men away when i send 'em. I'll tell ye that it won't be easy!"

Seeing the look on Paxos' face, Cap'n Braindeath quickly handed him a wooden bucket without saying another word.

*sigh* "When is it ever" Paxos mumbled before taking the bucket and turning around to go back outside.

As he stepped down the stairs a second time that day, he looked around before spotting a small, wooden bridge with a fence gate in front of it. A weird looking silhouette stood beside this fence gate.

"Probably that keen-eyed lookout the Cap'n mentioned." Paxos thought, as he turned to walk towards the bridge.