ICE ICE BABY [Q/O]

At the sound of her name, the pink-haired women turned around at a speed so quick it took her a second to re-adjust her vision. “Yes, that’s me!” she replied with a grin. She hadn’t expected her help to come from outside, but she was also just happy anyone offered to assist her at all. “Partying up sounds like a great idea,” she agreed as she opened up her menu. Delighted, August sent Bunyan a request and pointed her scraper towards the door, “away we go!”

She didn’t really have a plan on how they were going to tackle this project. A lot of sleet and ice had fallen last night and the two of them really had their work cut out for them. Fortunately, it appeared as if the sun was starting to poke through the clouds; the extra heat was going to hopefully melt some of the ice and make their job much easier.

August placed a finger on her chin and looked up at the windows. The inn wasn’t an enormously large building, but it still contained two levels. She couldn’t reach the windows on the top story, not even with her elongated scraper. “Maybe you might have more luck?” she asked Bunyan as she settled herself to scraping the ice off of the first floor windows, “if not, I could always attempt to climb a tree or something else and try to scrape them by hanging off of the roof.” August couldn’t see anything that she could climb to get up there, but maybe there was something on the other side of the inn that she couldn’t see from where she was standing.

The ice had really frozen on there during the night. Just applying a little pressure managed to push all of the powdery snow off, but a thin layer of ice remained on the glass until August really started scraping at it. As she finished a window, August moved onto the next one with just as much determination in her expression. “Moving my arms is definitely keeping me a little bit warmer,” she noted.

August’s eyes lit up when Bunyan mentioned being strong enough to lift her up. She had missed the cue in a previous quest about sitting on her quest partner’s shoulder to clear the objective. She felt proud of herself that she didn’t miss the cue this time. “What a weird coincidence,” she chuckled as she continued chipping away at the ice, “I’ve already had to sit on someone’s shoulders a few days ago. I promise nothing went wrong.”

Bunyan was already providing to be a treasure trove of information. She had no idea that her own body sweat would betray her. She slowed down her pace when considering what he had just told her. August made a note to be more mindful when she was outside in the cold from now on. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m going to have to decline.” She didn’t have anything against Bunyan and she was sure he was more than capable of making her clothes, but she was looking for armor that would protect her from heavy hits.

“I was actually thinking about being a tank, or someone who protects their party members,” she admitted as she reached her free hand over her and scratched the back of her head, “so I’d need plate or chainmail armor rather than the leather cloth.” She quickly went back to work when she noticed how many windows Bunyan had already cleared. She wanted to keep up so she wasn’t the one causing this quest to take up more time than it needed to.

August really didn’t want to think about how long they’d all been in SAO. The thought of how much her family could have been struggling without her there to help them run the bakery now that her parents were getting old made her sad, but she put on a smile and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I was hoping he’d have a change of heart too. But I guess we have to do what he said and clear all the floors. Progress is sort of slow, isn’t it?” she asked. August didn’t know how long it was supposed to take for them to clear all one hundred floors, but at this rate they were going to be stuck in here for years.