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]

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.