Magic without a magic

[sturdycoldsteel]

Steel wakes up. This is not where she went to sleep. She has a peek at the stream -

- And lets out a surprised yelp at the nonsensical cacophony.

"What in the blue hells is this place?" No answer is immediately apparent, so she climbs to the top of the ravine, carefully avoiding the various inexplicable things in the area. The snake-goat hybrid was particularly grotesque.

The top of the ravine has a road. She tries to fly, but can't. Again, very strange. This is a pretty nice road, physically, but magically it's completely undeveloped. She walks towards the city, peeking at the stream once in a while only to see fog, and seeking an explanation.

Comments

[alicornucopia]

"Most people want 'em. If they want too many I remind 'em they were made by a weird embroidered person and then they don't want too many anymore. Fellow with the gash yesterday wanted more but I talked him down to the soothers and he hasn't been back to complain about how much less they work."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Yeah, it's not a good idea to use them forever. If you're hooked and keep taking it, it just makes them work less and makes it the withdrawal when you eventually stop worse. At any rate, have a nice day, and you have my address for when you run out."

Back to her store. Time for more transmutation lessons with Aya whenever there's no customers!

[namesthesky]

Hooray!

[sturdycoldsteel]

And a few practical demonstrations. She mixes salt and some sort of acid in a sealed jar, and uses magic to capture the yellow gas that comes out. This is chlorine, which is part of salt, and is poisonous on its own but safe when combined with the right things, such as sodium, the other part of salt.

While ingredient-shopping the next morning, Steel listens for rumors about slaves.

[alicornucopia]

Well, there's a bawling brothel madam crying on the front step of her establishment.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Steel can't suppress a vicious little smirk. Hopefully nobody sees, or they just think she has a vendetta against brothels if they do.

And she starts wondering how long she can keep trying to remove any heel tattoo she sees before someone connects the dots.

(Would contraceptives be popular? Probably. Too bad she doesn't know how to make them.)

Ingredients shopping. Medicine-mixing. Research and lessons.

[namesthesky]

Aya, in her spare time and while walking to and from the boarding house to cook and bring Steel food, finds and presents an ex-brothel-asset along with two other candidates for work in the shop. She's already given them preliminary tests of memory to see if they'll be able to handle the work.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Steel asks each of them a series of questions about hypothetical customers, presents them with a couple of moral dilemmas (would you push one person into a magic to stop a runaway wagon full of five people from falling in), and asks why they want to work here, to get an idea of each one's personality.

[alicornucopia]

By and large they want to work here because if they do she will pay them. They are divided on the wagon question but are mostly capable of repeating what Aya briefed them about with regards to customer hypotheticals.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Okay. I will hire all three of you for now, but only for a couple of hours a day. After a week, I'll decide which of you to hire permanently. Maybe none, maybe one, maybe all three. You'll be keeping shop mostly, but there will be some cleaning and carrying stock around. Pay is one fifth of a seo per hour. Sound good?"

[alicornucopia]

None of them have such stellar alternative prospects that they have the luxury of turning her down.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Over the course of that week, Steel spends a fair amount of time watching them go about running the shop. Preferably when they don't realize she's watching. At the end of the week, she gives them a surprise quiz on the various medicines, with a few tricky questions that require some actual thought and not just memorized facts.

[alicornucopia]

At which, being several people and not just one, their performance varies, but Aya did a reasonable job of filtering them.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She looks over sales records. Is the shop's patronage still growing quickly enough that she'll probably need four employees sooner or later?

[alicornucopia]

She's definitely snowballing in popularity, and the surgeon has apparently had a steady enough supply of customers that he anticipates wanting a resupply soon. She could run the place with Aya alone if she wanted to work Aya really hard, but she can certainly find things for all these people to do.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She hires all three of them. The cleverest one gets seven hours a day, five days a week. The other two just get six hours a day, four days a week. She increases their pay to one quarter seo per hour, and tells them that there will be more work soon.

It may be time to look into getting a second storefront. Or at least a bigger workroom. Is the place next to the herbseller she originally disregarded still open?

[alicornucopia]

Nope. There's a potter there now.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She takes half a day to walk around the city again, incidentally visits the slave market and unbinds tattoos, and looks for someplace with a nice big workroom, preferably cheap.

[alicornucopia]

She can get a large, unfurnished empty space on the third floor of a building a few blocks away from her storefront for fairly modest rent.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She asks the building owners if they'd mind her putting in a larger, openable window in. She plans to use her embroidery to lift heavy, bulky things in and out of the workspace. And she offers to increase her deposit a sufficient amount to undo it once she leaves.

[alicornucopia]

They don't mind a bit as long as it doesn't introduce structural weakness to the structure.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Money is exchanged.

When she installs the window, she's very careful not to touch any of the structural beams. The strongest of her new employees is assigned to spend a whole two days hauling tools, jars, and so on over to the new place. Furniture, she buys and transports herself. The storefront near the central market gets converted completely over to just selling things.

She keeps up Aya's lessons. By now she knows enough that she can do most of the not-inherently-magical parts of medicine making, like making empty pill shells and preparing mixtures for magical processes. This (along with trying to think up more efficient ways to make things, or ways to use byproducts) becomes most of her work.

Taxes come due, which eats through a significant chunck of her savings. But she's doing a brisk business and expects it to just get brisker, so she's not really worried that all this expense knocks her stored money down to 400 seo.

[namesthesky]

The employees have to pay taxes too - Aya already knows how to handle it, since she did her former mistress's accounting, and helps the others. Aya moves to a different boarding house - she'd already switched to a different room after Steel made the extra space redundant and stopped paying for it, but now, feeling stable in her ongoing income, she's closer to the workspaces with a better kitchen and a room to herself.