6 Uktar

For some reason, I thought that a lot of the expenses for the workshop would be actually buying the workshop itself. I didn’t think about how much it would cost just to get the required furniture to outfit the place.

This isn’t like Bet, where there are convenient terrarium setups or easy materials I could use. No, instead it would require specially ordered shelves, lots of them, and all of them would obviously need to be handcrafted. Simple small wooden boxes, but they would be needed in mass. Thinking back on it, I’m not actually sure how expensive all those drawers I was using were.

I had the lizardfolk get their proxy to help place the order with exact specifications. A six-foot tall, three-foot wide shelf, that has as many drawers as possible sized to being three inches wide and tall, going about a foot deep. I’ll be able to put more partitions on the inside to divide the space between spiders. Rough math has that coming out to around six hundred slots I can put the spiders into. They charged ten Dragons for the order, I want to default to thinking they are price gouging me on it, but I’m not actually sure what the more reasonable price would have been for the order.

I’ll need more, but at least it’s something to start with, and the design can maybe get refined as I inevitably need to order more. A lot more probably, enough to cover most of the walls. I’ll need to figure some stuff out with winter coming, it’s already late fall, and the first snowfall is already overdue.

12 Uktar

The Carpenter’s Guild finally finished the first shelf order. We had them drop it off in front of the workshop so the Lizardfolk could help move it indoors. They actually did the smart thing and left all the drawers separated from the shelf in two crates, which we might be able to use for some other purposes.

It took what felt like ages to actually insert all the drawers though, given there were over a hundred. It was probably not actually that bad, but there were three of us slotting them in. I took the lower shelves, while one of the taller lizardfolk handled the taller half, the third handing them out of the crates to us.

Now that winter has really started, these two are my temporary assistants. The larger one, Durah, was one of the regulars that I’d see around with their trade group as one that typically came with them. The smaller one (though still nearly six feet tall), Laraek, is apparently meant to act as muscle and security for the workshop. I imagine he’ll be quite bored a lot of the time, but there’s enough spare room on the main floor that he can use it as a practice space or something.

The real reason that Laraek is here is to learn more about the “smoothskins” and how to speak common. Not that I would actually say that Durah’s is all that great, but Laraek is basically impossible to understand barring a few phrases. Something about their throat structure probably makes it hard to make the right noises. When I get a chance to actually show up in person on my off days I’ll likely be spending time trying to teach the two of them while working on my weaving or milking.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

While I’m not here though, they get two jobs. The first is to go out into the city to find spoiled food and the like so I can feed and breed a bunch of feeder insects like flies and worms. The second, and perhaps more important, is to maintain the temperature in the building. Waterdeep can get cold, so cold most of my insects would probably die if left without a source of heat for too long. We kept the old furnace thing they had down in the basement for melting vats of candle wax, so we can use it to heat the building.

20 Uktar

Thankfully I didn’t screw up as badly when giving my gifts this year. I did perhaps raise an eyebrow or two in a way that was quickly defused.

I decided to give Virla that glass bird I bought two months ago at the glassblowers. It wasn’t exactly a great time of year to show it off, but it reflected sunlight in a lot of pretty colours and would be nice to hang in a window when we could open them again next spring.

I didn’t say how much it cost, and thankfully nobody asked. I would have lied about it if they did, but I don’t actually think any of them had any idea what something like that would cost anyway.

In other news, Yeena’s mother went into labour when we went over to visit for dinner. No word back yet on how that’s gone, but while my family was leaving Tulgor rushed off to go find the midwife or healer or someone who I assume was practiced in assisting with childbirth.

7 Nightal

I may have underestimated the value of poison in the city. The last few tenday we’ve been doing our best to collect up as many insects as we could before they all died during the winter. This consisted mostly of me and my lizardfolk going around town removing a lot of the pest insects that had been trying to hide in people’s homes for the winter. They helped carry the crates that I would stream the insects into, hopefully fast enough that they didn’t all die in the cold.

We basically just put them in some sealed barrels afterward at the workshop, and it was a lot of walking back and forth. With the food supply somewhat set up, I had moved on to silk production and venom harvesting, initially focusing more on the former. I only had collected enough for a few vials by today, but we figured it was enough for the lizardfolk to take to an apothecary for bartering. A cover story of their clan harvesting some and figuring it might be worth more gold to simply sell it.

We made over two hundred dragons today.

Two hundred!

I really underestimated how much poison would be worth, but thinking about how difficult it would actually be to do so on scale makes it make some sense. It’s still only really worth gold to us compared to the value of silk woven fabrics for protection, but that’s a lot of money we can be making. Enough to help supply Persvek Casein with proper winter attire, given how they had complained in the past to me of how many issues they had wintering in the area.

It would also mean that my debts to them would probably be paid off faster than any of us were actually expecting. I figured the poison-milking thing would be a minor side hustle to make use of the larger spiders in the collection that didn’t have great web composition. Now I’m reevaluating what sort of mix between the two we should keep.