“How may we help, sir?”
Joe glanced back up at him before looking down and keeping an eye on the man picking up his cores, “I’m only looking to convert my cores into some steel. I would like about a hundred steel. I believe that a good exchange for level one cores is approximately five hundred iron for a core, yes?”
The man had originally prepared an easy answer but then froze at Joe’s last comment before he failed to hid his greed, “That is… certainly acceptable. Please, show us the cores…”
Joe grimaced and pointed at the cores on the ground, “When these are picked up, please feel free to take the cores you need.”
The man nodded and snapped a hand at several of the workers who came up and began helping pick up the cores, “We will bring the hundred steel immediately, sir. Is there anything else we could help you with?”
“Just bring me the steel,” Joe replied without taking his eyes off the man pulling in his cores. When the man had finished refilling the core pouch, Joe took it back, his politeness a bit brittle but returned. Joe stepped around the man, Kilniara fluttering around behind him as he walked into the middle of the room and waited. The room watched on in utter silence as everyone simply stood quietly, waiting. After a few moments, the manager returned to the room in a rush and bowed as he entered.
“Sir, the coin is being gathered as we speak.”
Joe nodded before pulling out two hundred cores, counting them ten at a time. When the manager saw this, he snapped his finger at a nearby teller who rushed out from behind the counter with a tray in her hands. She stepped up beside the manager and held it out in front of her for Joe to place his cores on.
“Ah, thank you,” Joe muttered politely when he saw the tray available, and dropped the thirty cores he had counted on the tray, then separated them in piles of ten. He then began once again bringing out ten cores, piling them up in two rows of five, ten in each pile. After he had a hundred, he turned to the bank manager and nodded to the manager.
“One hundred, correct?”
The manager blinked in surprise, looking down at the cores before looking back up at Joe and he snapped his finger at another clerk who came scrambling out around from behind his counter and took a single glance at the tray before nodding.
“Yes, sir. One hundred cores.”
“Excellent. Please sweep them aside or remove them.”
The lady holding the tray trembled a bit, glancing at Joe and the manager in uncertainty until Joe offered some direction.
“Just move them to the corner towards you. I will have more than enough room in this corner of the tray.”
She cautiously moved the cores into a pile to one corner close to her and Joe immediately began pulling out ten more sets of ten cores, piling them up once again in two rows of five. As he was doing so, the clerk that had come to count the cores began to become ever more fascinated, seemingly surprised by Joe’s counting. The man watched in growing excitement until Joe finished his hundred cores and the man exclaimed in surprise.
“Exactly a hundred! Two rows of five. Ten piles of ten! How did you know it would be one hundred?”
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Joe blinked in surprise before he looked up at the man in bemusement, “Ten times ten is a hundred. Two times five is ten.”
The man stared at Joe for some moments before becoming even more excited but the middle manager snapped at the man, shutting him down, “Watch your tone with the customers. Do not interrogate them. What is the final count.”
“Ah… uh. I am sorry, sir. It seems I have forgotten myself,” the man bowed deeply in apology to Joe before turning to the middle manager but Joe interrupted his report to the manager.
“Relax. It doesn’t bother me. Bring another tray and I will show you, although please verify the count, if you don’t mind.”
The clerk’s eyes shone brightly in excitement but offered his report to the manager, “It is two hundred cores, exactly, sir.”
The manager nodded but Joe ignored him and continued his conversation with the clerk, “Go get another tray.”
The clerk looked at the manager, looking for permission, and the manager nodded curtly, withholding his obvious anger. The clerk ran off to grab another tray while the teller took the tray laden with cores to the back for safe keeping. The manager turned back to Joe.
“I’m grateful for your willingness to entertain the help, but you have no need to.”
“Actually, I enjoy it. Learning is one of the most important things any person or society can do.”
By then, the clerk had returned and Joe turned from the manager and ignored him. There was time since his coin hadn’t been brought out, and entertaining himself while teaching basic mathematics actually sounded fun. He plopped his core pouch back down on the tray and pulled out a couple dozen cores.
“Right. What you saw was basic multiplication. Sets of any numbers, as long as they are all the same, can be used to find the total much faster than counting or adding them all up together.”
Joe took the cores and laid them out in a two rows of five, “Here are two rows of five, or five rows of two. This means there must be ten total cores. Thus, two times five or five times two is ten. To make it more clear,” Joe paused to scatter the cores and then set out three rows of three in a square before continuing, “here we can see three rows of three. In total, that is nine cores. Three times three equals nine.”
Joe lost himself in the moment as he continued showing various sets to give examples, then showed how they were always true and simply memorizing the information would allow for very easy counting and managing of large numbers. By then, several of the other clerks were now busy surrounding the tray, excitedly watching the explanation when one of them asked for practical uses. Joe then began giving simple word problems and the bored manager at the side soon became quite interested as each of the examples became much more pertinent for banking and business. When he’d gone through several examples of this, the manager looked at Joe shrewdly before glancing back behind the line of workers and into office workers in the back and nodded to one of them. Joe didn’t notice at first, but then glanced up to see one of the man stand and walk into the back of the bank. Joe glanced between the manager and the office worker a few times shrewdly before returning to his math presentation. He’d begun his fourth example when one of the clerks suddenly jumped in surprise and shouted.
“I grew! I grew!”
Several of the other clerks congratulated him while others seemed a bit miffed but Joe was confused. Grew? What does… did he just level?
“Did your job grow more?”
The man nodded in excitement before bowing to Joe, “Yes! Thanks to your excellent teaching!”
Joe blinked in a bit of surprise before continuing, “Oh… uh… could you … would you be willing to tell me what your job is?”
“Ah! I’m a merchant, sir.”
“Oh. And learning math gives you experience?”
The man quickly nodded, “Merchants grow with numbers, sir.”
Joe blinked with a bit of surprise before humming to himself quietly before continuing on with the impromptu math lesson with a bit more distraction, becoming aware of the other workers in the room and keeping an eye on the door through which the one office worker had disappeared. He had moved on from multiplication to division, offering another two examples which all the clerks quickly grasped when the office worker returned with a tray and a rather ornate, if flat, pouch on it.
Huh… so they didn’t need time to get the money. They were buying time. Why would they… Joe trailed off and glanced around the room when he noticed that one of the door guards was missing and he sighed with some frustration. He glanced at the manager with a sour expression but kept his politeness for the clerks and offered them one more explanation on the power of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It took a bit more time, so the tray of coin reached him and waited his pleasure for about a minute before Joe ended his training.