"I mean, I wish we had something nicer than that, like an apple, but let's try the hay. How many do you have?"

"3, after the hay I left in the Mayor's refrigerator.  You were the one wielding the scythe this afternoon, so the day's harvest of hay ought to be in your own possession, unless it's not which would be a very important fact."

"Oh yeah, I do have some too! Okay, let's give them some hay. Put your three down and I'll add my twelve."

"...should we possibly try 1 hay first?  Or, like, half rather than all."

"Also I've got a leek on me, come to think, if raw ingredients count."

"Oooh, I think a leek is much nicer than hay. Can we give them your leek?"

Emily is vibrating with excitement.

"Sure.  It'll be an adventure."  He is PROBABLY not letting an important quest item get eaten, here, you can almost certainly buy a leek at Pierre's.

He puts it down.

A wild Junimo appears!

It is waving its tiny little arms and cheeping!

It picks up the leek and skitters down the hall toward the room with the glowing scroll.

Having anything possibly work at all is actually kind of cheering!  Oliver will race off after.

As Emily and Oliver round the corner into the room, they're in time to see the Junimo toss the leek at the golden scroll. The leek is no longer immediately apparent: it is not in the Junimo's hands, and it is not on the floor, and it is not sitting on top of the scroll.

"Huh!  Well, that's a start on the thesis that things will work out so long as we yolo blindly into adventure.  Do you think we need to... feed the scroll until it wakes up?"

"I don't know! Maybe! Should we give it some hay?"

"I'll definitely try 1 Hay..."  He drops 1 Hay on the golden scroll.

The hay is not... absorbed... or whatever... into the scroll. It just sits there.

The junimo chitters brightly and waves its tiny arms.

He picks up the Hay.  Doesn't offer it to the junimo, in case that offends it.

The junimo chitters cheerfully one more time and then skitters around Emily and Oliver and turns down the hall in the direction of the hut.

"Well, we've got a thread to pull on, which is sorta better than I was expecting!  But I'm feeling increasingly like I want to buy some seeds from Pierre, see if we can sow more things today before today ends, build a crate to hold the salad so I don't lose it on an adventure..."  Actually does Oliver know how to build a crate?  He should have thought of that while at Robin's.

Oliver knows how to build a crate, or rather, a chest! It takes 50 wood and it's pretty obvious how to do it.

"Sounds good to me! We have a project!" Emily beams at Oliver.

This is the best day ever, and that's not really an exaggeration at all.

Oliver's brain has already been trained out of the painful act of asking how his current day compares to his best one!  Unlearning this habit might take a while!  But it's in fact not a terrible day.  It's even nice that he knows how to make a crate!  Previous Oliver didn't know how to make a crate!

"To Pierre's, then?"

Emily has started to make it a habit to grab Oliver's hand whenever they're going somewhere, and he hasn't objected, so she does that again. She takes a minute to turn up the sensations coming from her body and notices that she feels warm and tingly in her chest, and like her rib cage is barely big enough to hold her heart and lungs. It feels good, but so distracting she's going to have trouble walking and feeling all that at the same time, so she turns down the sensations again.

She smiles at Oliver and leads the way to Pierre's.

He'll take her hand and follow.  He still feels weird about how she looks so much younger than him, and is actually in some important sense 1 day old, but it's not like any other woman in town is going to be older.

And they're at Pierre's! They go through the front door of the shop.

"Hi, Pierre! Hi, Leah!"

Leah narrows her eyes at Emily, but then smiles.

"Oh, hi, Emily. Surprising to see you here this time of day! Second time today, actually!"

...Oliver is suddenly worried about just how little it might take to wake somebody up.  Or, for that matter, if they're all already awake in some sense, just waiting for the inertia of false-remembered habit to wear off them, pieces of it exploding away every time something unexpected happens and forces them to think a new thought.

He looks to Pierre.  "Any advice about what sort of seeds quickly turn into profitable plants?"

"Well, let's see. Parsnips grow the fastest - they only take four days. Beans take a lot longer at ten days, but they keep producing the rest of the season after that. And good news, today is Spring 1, so it's a great day to plant something that's going to produce all season long! As far as most profitable in one go, that's probably cauliflower. It takes twelve days to grow, but it fetches a good price when you sell it!"