“Are you really telling me that there is literally nothing of value in all 100 containers here?”
Retvik was clearly pissed off. He had been hunched over, helping his team sort through a warehouse of abandoned crates for a good couple of days now. They were finally down to the last remaining six containers, and Retvik was certain that they’d have the same contents that the other ninety four containers had.
“Well, there’s something of value to me!” Tenuk beamed, not feeling at all weary. Then again, Tenuk had eaten a lot of candy, stupidly calling it “testing for poison” when they all knew that Tenuk really liked sugar. Even if it was in the form of containers with sweets both inside and outside. It was also rather obvious that Tenuk was buzzing with energy too.
Elksi and Phovos though had a mood similar to Retvik. They weren’t annoyed, just disappointed. The candy had been enjoyable at first, but Phovos had ended up with a sugar headache and Elksi was grunting with pain from eating too much.
“I’ll admit the truth…” Elksi frowned. “I have eaten too much. Not supposed to have too much sugar.”
“Agreed…” Phovos leaned against one of the last containers, rubbing her head.
Annoyed at his teammates, Retvik went back to work, opening the last few containers. He was not at all surprised to see that one was completely filled with honey, while the one after it was filled with candyfloss, nicely tied up into little bags for easy transport. Crates number 96 and 97 contained a demonic mixture of candy skittles and chocolate smarties, container #98 was stuffed to the brim with weird jellies shaped like babies. Oddly though, container #99 was completely empty, aside from a small pile of wrappers and a hole nibbled in the corner of the container itself.
“So, which of you three idiots want to open the last container?” Retvik growled. “I genuinely cannot believe that all we have done here is open boxes of sweets.”
Phovos wobbled her way over to Retvik’s side, then tugged on the strawberry liquorice rope that was holding the container shut. “I’ll do it. Don’t want you to be even more disappointed.”
Slowly, both Phovos and Retvik tugged on the door, pulling it backwards to open it. However, this time round, nothing immediately dripped or spilled onto the floor. The container was filled with smaller chests, all of them brimming with piles of coins. For a brief moment, both Retvik and Phovos smiled.
“I bet you ten quid that some or all of those are chocolate!” Tenuk immediately blurted out. “No way is this actual gold!”
Retvik’s little smile instantly vanished, and the fire god shoved his now flaming fist into the door of the container. “Gagh! Literally nothing of value!”
Phovos however was still smiling a little. She picked up a coin at random, then bit into it. Or, rather, she tried to bite the coin, but snapped the end of her fangs off, leaving her other teeth to smash into the solid metal coin.
“Ow…” Phovos’s eyes watered a bit, but she hid her pain well. Elksi picked up the bit of broken tooth that Phovos had dropped and handed it back to her.
“So they’re real?”
“That one definitely was…” Phovos hissed, realizing that she was going to have to grow new fangs to replace the ones she just broke. “Can’t say about the others. Seems like whoever these belonged to, they went a long, long way to just to hide one container of coins.”
Elksi shrugged, then picked up a coin and bit into it. This time though, the gold easily crumpled up and revealed a chocolate inside the gold wrapping.
“You’re always unlucky!” she beamed, quickly eating the chocolate portion of the coin. “Too much work to sort through them though. Too, too long.”
“We HAVE found something of actual value though,” Retvik sighed. “We just need to load this onto our ship.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Simple. We just pull out this one container, take it outside and winch it into the back of the ship,” Retvik explained. “Should be simple enough. If not, we can just tow it back to base.”
“So what about the giant serpent?” Phovos asked.
Retvik paused for a moment. “Oh. I forgot about that…”