Chronos noticed that she had better cooking gear than before and more spices. Both of which seemed to come from the crucible knights.
"Fine, here try cooking this first." He took out a sphere that had a leg of a waste buffalo in it.
Pop!
"Oh, I can make a nice brisket from this." She said as she took out several sauces and began working with the leg. "But brisket takes several hours to a day to cook. Pass me a flank cut, I can make some nice steaks for dinner from that."
Taking out another sphere, a flank appeared in his hands after another pop.
"You know we don't have a slow cooker on board, right? If you want to cook the brisket that way, we'll need to wait till we land."
"I'm sure they have something I can use around here." Lyla grumbled.
"Probably but I doubt they'll let you use it. They don't seem to like us at all." Sariah chimed in.
Lyla frowned realizing that the researchers wouldn't be willing to help them regardless of how good the food was. Well, they weren't too far from the edge of Dracon Fen. Once they left the swamp they were planning on stopping at a village to restock food.
The apprentice archivists hadn't brought much food with them, instead choosing to fill the spare storage rooms with research equipment for this first flight.
"Hah, alright. Chronos put the brisket in storage until tomorrow. We should be stopping at a village tomorrow evening for a resupply." Lyla sighed.
"I refuse."
She glared at him. Lyla would tolerate many things, but she viewed messing with her cooking on the same level as committing heresy.
Chronos raised his hands in surrender. "I have a reason for refusing."
She nodded at him waiting for his answer.
"My storage slows down time, meaning that the braise you just put on the brisket won't have time to settle in before we cook it. Now if you want to eat the brisket next week, I could store it for you but if it's for tomorrow night, we need to keep it out. And unfortunately, while the [Pocket Sphere]'s don't have the same level of time dilation they do still slow down time." Chronos explained.
"I see. Then I'll just hang it in your room."
"Only if I get to sleep in your room. That delicious scent is going to drive me insane if it's kept here."
Chronos's room was larger than hers and they could easily fit a second bed in the room; on the other hand, her room was only around two-thirds this size.
"No, you have more space in your room, so I'll put the brisket in my room and sleep here."
"Suit yourself." Chronos turned back to his journal as she went to leave the brisket in her room.
"Are you two planning to spend the entire journey in the same room?" Gregory asked.
"It's safer that way and I've got the space for it." Chronos absentmindedly responded.
Gregory glanced at Sariah wondering if he could use similar logic to sleep together but Sariah already had her own plans.
"Then I'll stay with Gregory and use my room for researching curses." She happily hopped up to start moving her things into Gregory's room.
"You know she isn't planning to bring a bed, right?" Chronos chuckled as he watched her skip out of the room.
"I figured." Gregory said while turning red. "Leave me alone!" He snapped as Chronos continued to smirk at him.
"Haha, at least wait until we're at my family's mansion in the capital before doing anything crazy." Chronos teased him.
Gregory turned as red as a tomato.
"I make no promises." He muttered.
That was surprising. In the past he would have at least tried to deny it, if he was accepting her already then Chronos would have to prepare a marriage gift soon.
That was assuming they didn't have a baby shower first.
As Gregory left to help Sariah, Lyla came back carrying a mattress.
"Alright, I've set up my room for food preparation and cold storage. I'll be sleeping on the floor from now on." She set the mattress up against the wall before returning to cooking the steaks.
As Chronos wrote it wasn't long before the sound of sizzling started to distract him. He still had some time before the steaks were finished but he couldn't stop himself from glancing behind him every few minutes.
Nearly an hour later Gregory and Sariah returned for the meal.
"Already finished moving? Thank you." Chronos asked as he accepted a plate from Lyla.
"Yes."
"Hey Lyla! Gregory scolded me." Sariah complained.
"She had multiple cursed notebooks with incomplete spells in them in her room." Gregory retorted.
"It wasn't that bad. I kept them in my item bag for safety."
"Item bags are not defensive equipment. While they might slow down the spread of a curse, they won't stop it or whatever mutation it goes through while in contact with other curses." Chronos interrupted.
"Exactly, you need to place sealing spells or use sealing type magic items to keep them contained. We'll be sorting through the rest of the stuff in your room after dinner. I don't want any surprises half-way through our trip." Gregory said.
She scowled at him, "Fine but you can't check my private bag."
There were some things that she didn't want him seeing. Like her diary detailing how much she loved him.
"Also, we'll need to be a little more careful when cooking, some of the men on the other decks were able to smell Lyla's cooking through the window and are looking for it." He reported.
"If they want some, they'll need to let me use their kitchen." Lyla said.
"Oh really?" Micheal was standing in the door with his arms crossed looking very angry.
"Micheal, come join us, we have a spare steak." Chronos called out.
"I see, a spare steak? I really must wonder where you got this steak from because I don't remember having steak in our food stores." Micheal crossly said.
"I brought it with me along with most of a waste buffalo." Chronos stated.
"How did you store a full buffalo in your stuff? I don't remember you bringing anything that large onboard." His anger gave way to curiosity over how they had managed to smuggle that much meat past him.
"Were you not informed? The Beklaedning clan can use spatial magic and have developed a method of creating bags with more space inside than how it appears. I can create an item bag with 3 meters of space inside of it." Chronos said.
"Uh... really? No wait I can't get distracted, that's not the problem here. You are cooking in the guest rooms. Having an open flame in the guest rooms is very dangerous. What were you thinking?" Micheal stopped himself before he was too distracted.
"We aren't allowed on deck, have nothing to do below deck, and most of our training can only be done in a designated room. Which your group turned into an alchemist's lab." Chronos stated. "Besides I gave her an [Isolate] barrier to protect the ship while she cooks."
"A barrier?" He glanced at the cooking fire that had a half-sphere barrier around it.
"Yeah, we have too many other things to carry with us, so simple things like a cooking pot or a table I usually make with a barrier. My barriers are strong enough that a cooking flame can't damage them."
"That... is incredibly useful." Micheal was fully distracted now.
Most barriers were formed from an element making them difficult to use for mundane purposes like cooking.
If they used a fire barrier for cooking it wouldn't just cook the food but everything around the cooking site while a water barrier would snuff out any flame used to cook, there were similar issues with all elemental barriers.
This prevented most barriers from being used as anything other than a barrier. Having a barrier that lacked an element would open up a lot of other uses for them.
But maybe they could use arcane barriers to substitute for elemental barriers, he would have to take some time to think about this.
While he was lost in thought Lyla guided him to a seat and gave him the last steak. He ate while thinking about everything.
As they ate, they discussed the possible applications of barrier magic for daily life but sometimes they had to have Micheal reword what he was saying as it was too high level for regular people to understand.
"At any rate if you're going to be cooking in your room make sure to create a specialized magic item for it. And don't cook anything too extreme, I don't want to find out you burned down your rooms one morning." Micheal scolded them.
Making a magic item for cooking sounded very helpful, especially since Chronos had come to love Lyla's cooking.
"Got it." Lyla gave him a thumbs up.