Engineered Magic

Ellen

When Ellen got back to her apartment she found Sarah lying on the floor. She was working on her world map. The large piece of vellum was spread out with a variety of stones holding the edges down. The stones were the results of Ellen’s experiments with stone sculpting. It was a ‘new’ craft the team discovered recently. Companion’s people knew all about stone sculpting, but Companion wasn’t a crafter. His knowledge on the subject was very basic.

Ellen carried her food purchases into the kitchen area of their apartment and set them down on the built in counter. There was a set of shelves built into the short wall that ran ninety degrees back from the counter. As she looked around the space she thought a set of Alex’s shelves would be useful and separate the kitchen from where Ellen and Sarah slept.

Ellen stepped back into the doorway to the room she considered her workshop. Sarah was occupying most of the free floor space with her map making. Tools, materials, finished and half finished products cluttered the rest of the space. Most of them were laying directly on the floor. Ellen considered where she wanted her new workbench placed. She needed to clear a spot out before Alex got here.

She was still shocked that Alex rented a shop. Having a shop was a dream of Ellen’s ever since they’d lost their father’s shop on his death. There always seemed to be one more thing she needed to do before she was ready. She needed a rent fund, master a new skill or build up an inventory.

She was certain Alex never considered opening a shop before today. He somehow got up this morning and just did it. He set his shop up to pay his clerk a sixth of the sales amount. The first ten silver made each month would be used to pay the rent three months out. He’d told Ellen with pride that he paid two months’ rent up front as a buffer. Ellen saved enough coin for four or five years of rent and she still wasn’t certain that was enough since she didn’t have money for salaries. It made her realize that the loss of their father’s shop affected her in more ways than just giving her the desire for a new one. In her fear of losing another shop, it made her overcautious.

“Alex has opened a shop,” Ellen told her sister. Sarah stopped drawing and looked up at her sister.

“Alex?” she questioned.

“Yes, he is selling found furniture, like Grandmother’s shop in Londontown,” Ellen explained.

“Oh, that’s too bad. I was trying to talk Grandmother into going into a shop with me selling furniture,” Sarah replied. “Now there is no way she would do it. She would never compete with Alex.”

“No, she wouldn’t. She is helping Alex get started. He already has an impressive number of pieces for sale. I bought one from him,” Ellen explained.

“You did? What is it?” Sarah asked.

“He called it a workbench. It is a workbench of a kind, but it has a ceramic top. It reminded me more of a chemistry bench,” Ellen commented. She wanted to buy almost everything in his shop, but at the same time she wanted to build his confidence that he could sell to more than just friends. When he offered her the workbench as a gift, she was very tempted to accept it, but instead she gave him the advice her father gave her. Alex was more than just a friend. He was as much family as her sister was.

“What is a chemistry bench?” Sarah asked.

“Didn’t you take any chemistry laboratory classes on the Speedwell?” Ellen asked. When Sarah admitted she didn’t, Ellen gave a brief description of the subject. “Chemistry is about identifying substances, purifying them, learning their properties and mixing them to produce new substances.”

“That sounds contradictory,” Sarah observed.

“It is how you make dyes with science. That is why I took the class. With magic we can only make six colors and not everyone wants to run around in those bold shades,” Ellen commented.

“Yeah,” Sarah agreed, “Just look at Grandmother and her love of purple.”

“I thought maybe if I understood the science behind dyes I would have a better chance of modifying the color of integrated cloth,” Ellen explained. “I never made any progress with the magic, but since I saw Alex’s workbench I am wondering if we missed another school of crafting, something that represents chemistry.”

“You should ask Companion,” Sarah commented.

“I will,” Ellen responded, “but I think chemistry is going to be a hard concept to explain to him.”

“Just ask him if his people have a way to make different colors,” Sarah explained.

“I doubt if he would know that,” Ellen countered. “You’re the one who told me the swimmers in the ocean square mostly wore orange with just a few in yellow and green. So even if they know how to make different colors they aren’t using that knowledge.”

“I can see the problem,” Sarah responded. “As a non-crafter Companion wouldn’t know about something that wasn’t sold. What other things are made with chemistry?”

“Tons,” Ellen replied. “Everything from the fuel that powered the Speedwell through interstellar space to the hormones in the implants that control our fertility.”

“Well those are obviously things we don’t have in the structure. You need to think of something we have seen,” Sarah countered. Ellen thought for a minute or two.

“Well,” she said, “one thing comes to mind. Most of the chemicals that were used in the laboratory were dangerous if they touched your skin or you ate them. They were all poisons.”

“Like the strong beer in Londontown?” Sarah asked.

“Sort of, although I think that was just made with simple brewing, which is a cooking skill,” Ellen said. She thought about that for a moment before saying, “Actually, cooking is a type of chemistry. The cook adds different ingredients together and creates something new.”

“Sounds like maybe you need to talk to Todd too,” Sarah commented. Todd was the best cook among them.

“Maybe,” Ellen replied. She looked around the room again. Even with her new observations of her behavior she couldn’t just jump into having a shop. She needed a plan to keep herself sane. Instead of dithering she would make that plan today. First step, Ellen thought to herself, inventory what I have on hand.

“Can you help me clean up in here?” She asked her sister. “We need to make space for the workbench and I want to get an inventory of what finished products I have on hand. Alex promised delivery before dinner.”

“Sure,” Sarah said. She rolled up her map and tucked her stylus into a pocket. Together the two sisters started straightening their belongings. They were still working on it when Alex knocked on the door.

Alex rolled the workbench in on his cart. He seemed very proud of himself. Ellen wondered how he got the cart up the stairs. He unloaded the workbench with a couple quick moves and positioned it against the wall where Ellen indicated.

Sarah was already spreading her map out on the ceramic top when Ellen returned from saying goodbye to Alex.

“Oh no,” Ellen said to her sister. “That is mine.”

“But it is so smooth,” Sarah commented, running her hand over the ceramic surface, “it is perfect for writing on.”

“There is another one in Alex’s shop. Only 7 silver 10 iron, plus the delivery fee,” Ellen responded.

“Why didn’t you buy it?” Sarah demanded.

“I want other customers to see it,” Ellen responded. “Honestly I wanted most of his stock, but I don’t want to sabotage the opening of his shop either.”

“Yeah, if we strip him of all his best pieces before he opens, people won’t bother coming back,” Sarah said with a sigh.

“I couldn’t resist the workbench. I think a lot of crafters will like it,” Ellen commented. As she watched, Sarah started to pick the vellum back up. “You can use it for now,” Ellen relented. “I want to finish my inventory.”

Sarah gave her sister a spectacular smile and promised to move whenever Ellen wanted. Ellen felt like she wasn’t going to get to use her new purchase much.

Ellen worked on reorganizing the room. She set aside all her duplicate tools. She needed to find a dedicated place to store them. She was a little surprised at how many there were. Her pile of completed items was rather impressive in its size, but the content was a little lacking. Her pile of unfinished projects was just embarrassing. She made a promise to herself that she would not start any new project until she finished two in the unfinished pile.

There were also a lot of accumulated vellum and structure notebooks. Ellen sorted through them. She set blank sheets and books in one pile and anything written on in another. She was about to hand the written on sheets to Sarah to deal with, when she realized the top sheet was in her handwriting.

Sorting the pile again, she found two thirds of the pile was hers. Her sheets were notes on different crafting methods. There were loose sheets and notebooks all on the same subject. She organized everything by craft, slipping the loose sheets into a notebook where most of its content was on the same subject. When it was all sorted out, she was reminded of the discussion with Grandmother in Londontown about selling magic.

There was more about crafting in these writings than most tier four crafters knew. How much farther would her father have gotten if he had access to it as a young man? He died at tier four protecting the square he founded and his family from a migration wave. Only Grandmother’s arrival saved them from the next wave.

Ellen went over to sort out the finished stock. It was mostly containers. There were cloth gathering bags, leather water flasks, backpacks made of cloth and a more advanced type made of cloth and leather. There were also lengths of rope, weapon harnesses, belts, sheaths and even one sword scabbard. There was one set of hunter’s greens. Looking over at her unfinished pile she could see more sets of cloth armor and a couple sets of wizard silks.

She thought of herself as a tailor, not a leatherworker. The leather water flasks were an exception. She constructed them for Sarah when her sister was working on learning how to enchant them to autofill. She made the belt and weapon harnesses because she once jury rigged one up for Companion. When they got back to the square she decided she wanted to know how to make one for real.

There were also piles of cloth and thread over in a corner. There were cloth bolts in every magic color, including several in orange. It took her three months to figure out how to produce the color without a sixth finger. Her method was hard and tedious. It used both taps and sounds. Companion paid her to color everything he owned orange and to make him a new set of silks. Ellen did the work happily. She refused to take more from the selkie than it would have cost him to have it done in green from the local tailor shop. He was a teammate.

Ellen looked at her collection of finished goods and realized something. She wasn’t the same kind of crafter her father was. When he died he hadn’t made a gathering bag or a backpack for years, decades maybe. He spent most of his career crafting wizard silks and hunter's greens. His small amount of metal working to make metal buttons evolved to making the metal scales that went into his famous brigandine armor. He only completed four sets of the armor before his death. Todd still wore the last set which she scrupulously repaired, in order to lengthen its lifespan.

Ellen did a lot of repair work. She kept her teammates' equipment in top condition while they were in the wilds. She repaired items no one usually bothered with; gathering bags, door wedges, socks. The jury rigged weapon harness wasn’t the first item she crafted in the wilds at the spur of the moment.

Her father was a master tailor and he knew a little metalworking. He was less than a journeyman blacksmith. She was only a craftsman tailor, but she was at least a journeyman blacksmith, leatherworker and woodworker and an apprentice stone sculptor. She was a generalist. She wasn’t the type of crafter to have a shop.

If she came to this conclusion days ago it would have crushed her. She still didn’t want to give up her dream of having a shop. Luckily Grandmother and now Alex proved to her that you didn’t have to be a crafter to have one. She needed to think about what she was, not what she wasn’t.

She was a generalist crafter and also a wizard, a warrior and a neophyte enchanter. Her crafting strength wasn’t large complex pieces like armor. It was small items and repairs. She was confident of her ability to walk the halls and collect her own materials. Most crafters clung to the safety of their squares. This is what traveling with Grandmother turned her into. She couldn’t blame Grandmother for this transformation. Alex, Todd and Ellen practically forced themselves into Grandmother’s company. She didn’t know why Alex and Todd wanted to go, but Ellen did it to gain knowledge.

She turned away from her crafting goods and went back to the pile of notebooks and loose sheets of vellum. This was the knowledge she sought. Grandmother handed it out unrestrainedly. She even helped Ellen gather more when she ran out of her own knowledge. This latest idea of Grandmother’s to travel to all the squares and gather magic knowledge produced many more crafting skills than warrior or wizard spells.

Ellen thought about why she wanted this information. It wasn’t to sit in a pile in a corner of a room. The conversation with Grandmother about spell books was fresh in her mind. Ellen thought she could write crafting skill books. She knew she could write the starter books. She pulled out a stylus and started making a list. She started with cleaning fiber and spinning thread, because that was where her father started her. She stopped at how to sew a gathering bag, since that was the simplest finished product. She thought for a moment and added how to change the color of a finished product.

She started a new list. Only this one began with cleaning hides and finished with sewing a water flask. She repeated the task for woodworking, stopping at making arrows, and metalworking with door wedges as the final product. She skipped stone sculpting for the moment. All the things she knew how to make in stone sculpting were parts used in bigger projects.

She went back over her lists and added which tool was used at each step. Then she added the spells that were used with the tool at that point. This was not an exhaustive list of all the spells that could be cast with each tool. That was way too much for a beginner. Maybe she would write tool specialty books later.

Thinking of beginners, Ellen could see that her list was too long. She would break each list into multiple instruction booklets. The beginning tailoring list could be broken into making thread, making cloth and finally cutting and sewing the bag. It was nice that thread and cloth were both materials that could be sold on if the crafter didn’t yet have the tools for the next step. The money made selling thread and cloth could be used to buy those higher end tools.

She remembered a conversation with Todd about the recipe/pattern tree. A new crafter would get their first glimpse of it at the cloth cutting stage. Ellen made a note to discuss how the patterns were revealed there.

Ellen wasn’t certain she owned enough blank notebooks. She thought about working on mastering the vellum spells and making her own. She caught sight of her pile of unfinished work and refused to consider the idea. She would check and see if Sarah could spare any. If she couldn’t, she would go out with Alex when he was gathering stock and see if she could find any. She could offer him a finder’s fee for any he found when she wasn’t with him. If all that failed she would ask Grandmother.

She picked up a blank notebook and started working on her introduction to the magic of crafting which would include how to read the spell ribbons. When she was done with that she would get Sarah to show her the copy spell.