Having trouble getting a variable to work

I've got a noticeboard where players can accept various quests, but I'm having trouble making quests where the player needs to give more than one of the same item to an NPC. For example, a bartender wants five shards of ice, which are dropped by monsters. I set up a variable that should keep track of how many ice shards I have but it doesn't acknowledge that they're in my inventory.

Interestingly, the game acknowledges that I have the ice shards only if they're already in my inventory when I accept the quest. So I must be doing something backwards but I dunno what.

Here's the noticeboard event:


And the bartender:

control variable loads the value of something at that specific time.
To update this number, the command needs to be repeated.
your bartender event never repeats the control variable command, so it can never get the current number.

Oh jeez, it was really that simple?
It finally worked, thank you!!

Shameless plug, but I wrote a simple script that keeps variables in sync with the item count of any item. Makes these kind of "collect" quests easier to manage :)

What I have always done is run a Parallell Process commen Event that would Control Variable x to equal the quanitity of an item in my inventory, then have the Hand-In run a conditional branch to check that vatiable.