Broken Lands

There were, as it turned out, three shops for enchanted items in the Vocational Registry. One was full of expensive enchanted trinkets. Sophia really wanted to spend some time in the wand section; there had to be some good things there. Based on the prices, it was probably a good thing Rensyn didn’t let them spend long in the shop; she didn’t have the cash to afford to buy anything there. A small item or two, maybe, but she’d have to plan to spend nearly all of the money she had on it to get even something small.

The second shop was different. It wasn’t full of enchanted items. The first thing Sophia noticed as she stepped through the doorway wasn’t a haze of slightly-clashing quiet magic; instead, it was the smell. A combination of flower perfume, earthy loam, and a hint of the astringent smell of disinfectant washed over her.

The magic was there, of course. It was far more harmonious than the previous room; there was a very strong hint of healing to much of it.

Sophia saw potions and salves, wraps, pills, aromatic oils, and even whole plants. There was a section clearly labeled as poisons. A section near the entrance had an odd label; Sophia wasn’t sure what “recreational supplies” were, but she rather wanted to find out. At the back, a young man stood behind a counter. His attention didn’t seem to be on them; instead, it was on the powder he was slowly adding to a glass beaker with a flared top.

There were no prices on anything.

“This is the apothecary area,” Rensyn stated. It seemed kind of redundant; this was obviously something like that. Sophia would probably have called it a pharmacy, but the two weren’t really all that different. These days, Earth pharmacies stocked magical remedies as well as mundane ones. “Halven takes payment in coin, Registry credit, or supplies he can use. He keeps the healing items cheap, but everything else is priced similarly to the outside market.”

“Everything except the things you can’t get elsewhere, which is a lot of it. You always leave that out,” Halven interrupted from the back corner. “I also take payment in alchemical recipes, and you’ll see requests from me when you see what jobs are out there. I mostly pay in stock. Don’t forget to pick up some healing supplies before you head out wherever you’re going; even something as simple as bandages can save your life. I sell basic supply kits if you don’t have your own. The Registry will pick up some or all of the cost if you’re headed out on a job, so there’s no reason not to have one.”

Rensyn gave them less than a minute to look around the alchemist’s before he started to shoo them towards the next area. “The last area we’ll see inside is the delivery area, but before that I want to show you the armory. The delivery area is exactly what it sounds like: it’s where you drop off large items, whether they’re to fill a request or to be butchered, so it’s just outside the butcher’s area we visited when we started.”

Sophia wondered why they hadn’t stopped there at the time. It seemed like it would have made sense.

Her confusion vanished moments later when they stepped into the armory. It was absolutely full of both weapons and armor, enough to outfit at least a hundred people. The variety was incredible, as well; Sophia wouldn’t be surprised if almost anyone could walk in and find their preferred weapon. Armor was always a little more difficult, but there was enough magic in the air that much of the armor probably had some sort of size-adjusting enchantment.

It was several times the size of Sophia’s father’s collection.

A second look made Sophia frown. It was completely missing several categories of weapons. She wasn’t surprised that there were no guns; it seemed like guns weren’t known here. The lack of crossbows was more surprising, since she knew they were known. Worse than that was the lack of any equipment that projected its damaging surface or the damage itself. There were no manablades, like her father’s and grandfather’s preferred weapon, and Sophia didn’t see any spellstaves either. Spellstaves might be in the expensive enchanted items store, maybe, but Sophia was pretty sure that manablades would fit better in the armory.

“Items in here can be loaned out for an individual mission or bought outright. Loans usually only happen when you’re on an assisted membership or while you’re waiting for replacement equipment to be made, but you can also use equipment from the armory in the training yard if necessary.”

Rensyn gave them quite a bit longer to look around the armory while he wasn’t talking than he had with most of their previous stops. When it occurred to Sophia to check on him, he had a small pleased smile, like the smile of a parent indulgently watching their children play.

There was nothing much to say about the delivery area when they got there, but the reason they went there last quickly became apparent when Rensyn led them out a wider than usual pair of doors and into a courtyard near the stables. From the exit, Sophia could tell that “stables” was a misnomer: there were stables, yes, but there was also a paddock and several areas that were clearly set up to house larger, odder mounts. Right now, in addition to a significant variety of horses, Sophia could see a pegasus, a griffin, a pair of matched red lizards, and a curled-up ball of brown fur that had to be Peaches, the giant draft sloth that pulled the wagon for the merchant they’d accompanied on the way to Casterville.

Rensyn gave them all time to take in the scene before he spoke. “If you’d like to take an apprenticeship here, Roy, we can talk to the stablemaster. It will likely lead to a beast-handling Profession of some sort, or give you a chance at a beast-related Vocation if you decide you want that when you’re a little older.”

“I’d like that,” Roy answered breathlessly. He couldn’t seem to decide where to look; every time one of the animals moved, his gaze snapped to it.

“The other four of you, please wait for a moment while I get Roy settled,” Rensyn told them. “Feel free to watch the animals while you wait, but don’t get too close to them; many of them bite. The pegasus is especially fierce.”

Sophia chuckled. The warning seemed to come from painful experience, and she could easily imagine someone walking up to a winged horse, treating it like a horse, and being painfully nipped for the indignity. She’d never seen a pegasus before, but she knew better than to assume that it was just a horse with wings; a horse with wings wouldn’t be able to fly. It had to have magic as well.

Despite that thought, the pegasus didn’t do anything that seemed unhorselike while Sophia watched. It simply paced around the paddock. It did seem to pay attention whenever anyone walked near it, but that was all she saw. A look at it while paying attention to her MageSight revealed that the pegasus’s body contained magic, but she couldn’t tell what type. It wasn’t one that she was good at, which meant that it could be anything from air to flight to gravity. Air magic of some sort seemed the most likely; many birds had air or wind magic.

Sophia’s attention had turned to the griffin before Rensyn came back out of the stables without Roy but with Dykken still following him. That made Sophia look around; Sylva was acting ostentatiously bored, but her eyes kept drifting to Peaches.

Sophia didn’t have to wonder where Dav was. He was next to her, with his arm around her shoulders, watching the magical animals.

“That’s the end of the tour,” Rensyn informed the four of them. “Anyone who isn’t intending to take up a Vocation soon can leave now; if you are thinking about it, please follow me.”

Sophia assumed that included her and Dav, even though they already had Vocations. Rensyn didn’t lead them far; there was a pair of benches set up under a tree a little farther away from the stables. Sophia’s guess was that this was close enough to watch the animals while also being far enough away to not interfere and probably far enough away to not smell the manure.

“Good, all four of you are still here. I’m going to take this in the other order, this time; Dav, you have a Calling. What is it, and how did you earn it?”

“Ah,” Dav temporized. He clearly hadn’t expected the question.

“You can say as much or as little as you like,” Rensyn prompted. “But most of the time, what people think are family secrets actually turn out to be pretty well known; it’s having the skill and practice that’s hard, not figuring out how to reach a basic Sphere.”

Sophia nodded at Dav to encourage him. As far as she could tell, the only thing they needed to keep quiet was the fact that they had Hallows rather than Vocations, and with the way the Registry people talked about Callings, she thought they had suspicions anyway. It was either that or they treated everyone as if they might have a Hallow; she wasn’t sure which she wanted to believe.

Dav nodded back at Sophia. “Ah, well, it’s … I’m an Eldritch Summoner. I think it’s because of the marks on my face; it’s that kind of magic. We were thrown through a place that was full of … well, full of eldritch energy, and it marked my face.”

“Not an easy thing to duplicate, especially not safely,” Rensyn agreed. “It does explain how you achieved a summoning Sphere surprisingly well; that’s normally a Specialized Sphere, but you meet an unusual requirement. Congratulations on that; Specialized Spheres can be hard to reach even when you know the requirements and gain the levels required to specialize. You have to know where you want to go, and that’s difficult. How about you, Sophia?”

Sophia wasn’t about to say she’d just picked the Hallow from a list; fortunately, she probably could have gotten Spellblade even if there were other requirements she had to reach. “Spellblade. I’ve been training with weapons and magic since I was a child; I prefer magic, but my parents made sure I know how to fight, too.”

She paused and huffed softly. “It sure came in useful in that tunnel, when all I had was my knife. The first Spellblade ability I got was a weapon enhancement; if I didn’t know how to fight, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”

“You also wouldn’t have gotten the Sphere,” Rensyn noted. “Spellblade is a merged Sphere; I’ve seen it quite a few times, but every single Spellblade is different because they choose different abilities. It’s one of the best examples of divergence in a single Sphere. Merged Spheres are the opposite of Specialized Spheres; there are far more options, which can be either good or bad. You’ll probably want to talk to a Sphere Planner some time soon, to make sure you’re headed in a direction you want to go.”

It was good to hear that there were people who knew more about Spheres. Sophia definitely wanted to talk to one. She’d talked to experts about her Paths; she should do the same thing now that she had to specifically choose each Ability.

Rensyn turned away from Sophia. “Miss Sylva, what Calling are you interested in?”

“Magic,” Sylva answered quickly. “I don’t know any, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up quickly and I heard that you can get a Vocation that will teach magic if you pick carefully, then Merge and Specialize until you get a mage Vocation.”

“It’s possible,” Rensyn temporized. “It’s a slow route, though, so you should pick something you actually want to do when you choose a Sphere, not just whatever you think will lead to magic.”

Sophia didn’t think Sylva was listening.

Rensyn looked a little saddened as he turned to the last person. “How about you, Dykken?”

Dykken shrugged. “I’m not really sure. I’m fast and agile, so I figure something that takes advantage of that. The only training I have is with blow darts, so I’m probably going to learn whatever weapon I end up using from nothing.”

“Maybe not,” Rensyn said. He seemed a lot happier with Dykken’s answer than he was with Sylva’s, even though Sylva knew what she wanted and Dykken didn’t. “You will want to learn something else, but blow darts can be quite effective. You’ll need to pick up some poison resistance Abilities and make good friends with Halven, but if you get the right Vocation, that can work.”