Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty - Balancing the Budget

Once we were docked, I let Amaryllis deal with the port authority. The Shady Lady had to be untied just before we came in for a landing, and it was now being moored into place right next to the Beaver. We were actually sharing a docking spot since the Lady was so much smaller than a normal ship. It only made sense to cram her in between the Beaver and the pier.

A longer gangway was brought out and hooked onto the Beaver’s side, just a bit away from the crunched-up section of railings to our side. Once we were properly locked into place, a grenoil in a dockmaster’s uniform came up the ramp and greeted Amaryllis.

I left them to it, vaguely aware of their relative positions at the back of my mind. First, I had to check out a few things. I pulled out a clipboard from the captain’s office and went to the kitchen to make note of what was left in the pantry. That didn’t take long, because we were running low on just about everything.

It was impressive how much a few people could eat. It wasn’t like we could pop over to a corner store mid-flight to pick up some snacks or anything, and we were all pretty active. Between shipboard duties and training and that big fight with the pirates... well, we were all burning whatever calories we were taking in.

I made a note to make sure everyone ate well while in port. The restaurants and such here would have much better food than what we could prepare on the Beaver.

“We need a cook,” I muttered to myself as I checked the washroom. There were a few things we’d need for there too, toiletries and such that we’d used up.

After that it was over and across to the engineering section of the ship, where I found Awen idly tinkering with something. “Broccoli?” she asked as I came in. I didn’t spend all that much time down here. The room smelled like Awen; oil and grease and lubricants. She'd secured a glass jar to the low ceiling and imprisoned a lightball in it, and there were small portholes in the compartments' walls, but it simply wasn't enough -- the room was dim, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

“Hi!” I said. “I’m going around and checking on our supplies. We’ll probably be in Port Royal for a while, so we should stock up while we can.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said. “I’m missing a lot of little things.”

I bobbed my head. “I figured as much. What sort of stuff?” I raised my clipboard to take notes.

Then Awen bombarded me with a list that I was pretty sure wouldn’t fit on my page. Screws of four different sizes, nuts, bolts, some cloth for the sails, a different kind for the balloon, a few parts for different places on the ship. We had emptied out a lot of our patching supplies and needed glue and leather strips, and ropes. My head was almost starting to spin before I raised a hand to slow Awen down.

“My hand is cramping,” I said.

“Ah,” she replied. “Is it too much?”

“Not at all. If we need this stuff, then we need it, no getting around it.” The individual things probably didn’t cost much. How much were screws? A few copper for a handful? All together it probably added up, but we had a budget for maintenance and it only made sense that we’d need extra after everything that happened. “How about we take a day this week to go out parts shopping?” I asked.

“That would be nice,” Awen said. “I’ll need a few things sooner rather than later, though.”

“Mhm, that makes sense. We can always head out and buy a few things from the docks, I think.”

“They’ll charge extra,” Awen warned.

“Ah, then just the things we really need in the short term, then. We have a while to fix the Beaver up. He’s gone through a lot.”

Awen nodded. “Oh, I’ll need paint, too.”

“Paint? I think there’s a bucket or two somewhere.” My ears twitched, and I kind of just knew that we had some buckets over in a cupboard in the crew quarters. The same paint I’d used to give the hull a fresh coat of sunshine yellow.

“Awa, we need to mark our kills.”

I blinked. “Huh?”

“The sylph do it,” Awen said. “On the front of their warships. They have a tally. We won against three pirates, right? I think the pirates had those kinds of markings too.”

I puffed my cheeks out, that sounded... well, I wasn’t sure if it was bad or not. I certainly hadn’t noticed those kinds of markings on the pirate ships, but I also hadn’t been looking. Maybe if we had a few notches the pirates would have thought better than to pick a fight with us. “Well, I can’t say it doesn’t sound cool,” I said.

Awen grinned. “Red paint?”

“Can’t we make them nice, cute marks?” I asked. “Flowers, maybe?”

“No Broccoli, I think kill notches need to be a bit intimidating.”

“Flowers can be,” I argued.

Awen giggled, then flushed at her own giggling. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“Hmph, well, fine. I need to get back up. There’s still work to do!” I gave Awen a hug, because I felt like it, and hugs were the best way to give temporary good-byes, then I headed back onto the deck where I ran into Clive who was chatting with the rest of the crew. “Clive! I’m making a list of things we need. Can you think of anything?”

Clive narrowed his eyes and thought about it very seriously for a few good seconds. “Yes, yes, there’s somethin’,” he finally said.

“What’s that?”

“I need some tobacco for my pipe,” he said.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I blinked. “Uh... okay.” I added it to the list.

“We should get some beer too,” Joe added.

“Rum!”

“Grog!”

I shook my head. I didn’t mind that we had that kind of stuff on the Beaver. It was fine to have it, and I wasn’t going to belittle someone for liking that kind of stuff, but I wasn’t going to put it above food on the list. “I’ll see what we can do,” I said.

With my list created, I headed over to the gangway where Amaryllis was just saying goodbye to the docking official.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Not bad,” she said while looking at a sheet he’d given her. “Rates here are a little higher than elsewhere. Not too badly so, but there’s a dragon tax that almost doubles the cost for a berth.”

“A dragon tax, huh?” I leaned over, trying to see the page. There was a docking fee, then a few other fees, and at the bottom a “Draconic Protection Fee.” “The total’s not that bad,” I said. If I remembered correctly, it was about the same as what we paid in the Snowlands.

“He mentioned that they lowered their fees as much as they could. The dragon tax is a flat doubling of the cost, and if they kept the rates at what they used to be, no one would use the port.”

“That must be tough,” I said. Some of the fees were there to make the port some profit, but at a well-managed port a lot of those fees would be used up paying for workers and maintenance and buying new equipment to keep the port up to date.

Amaryllis shrugged. “I think they’re managing.”

I’d noticed that well over half the berths in the port were filled when we came in, and there was plenty of traffic in the air, so the port couldn’t be doing that poorly. “Well, I guess there’s not too much we can do about it.”

“It’s something,” Amaryllis said. “I don’t think it’s a big concern yet, but we should be careful about it anyway. So, what’s the plan for the rest of the day?”

It wasn’t too late in the day, the sun was overhead, though there was a layer of greyish clouds forming above. Deepmarsh was a humid, rainy place, so that wasn’t all that surprising. “I have a heap of things I want to get done. Do you think we should do some sort of guard rotation on the Beaver?”

“This is probably one of the safest ports outside of the Harpy Mountains,” Amaryllis said.

“Really?”

“Broccoli, there’s a Dragon tax. No one is going to try to steal from a dragon. And if our ship is stolen or damaged, that’ll cut into the dragon’s margins. You saw what Cholondee did to those pirates. I bet we could leave the Beaver entirely unattended and it would be fine. Not that I’d actually chance it.”

“Oh, okay then,” I said. “Well, in that case, I think we should split up into friend groups!”

“Friend groups?” Amaryllis asked.

“Like teams, but friends.”

She rolled her eyes, but her huff told me that she knew what I meant, even if she found it a teensy bit silly.

“You can be in my friend group, if you want!” I said. “I want to go visit Booksie’s shop, to see if she’s there. And I have this long list of stuff to buy for the Beaver too.”

Amaryllis reached for my clipboard and I handed it over. She scanned through the list, nodding along until she came to the end. “These are snacks for the crew,” she said.

“Yes?”

“And you think these are necessary? We’re working on a budget, you know.”

“I think it’s important. We need to keep morale up, and snacks work for me.” She looked up, clearly wanting some clarification on that. “When I’m sad, I like eating comfy food.”

She shook her head. “Right, I suppose it’s not a terrible idea. And it can’t be all that expensive. But Broccoli, you are aware that we haven’t made a copper penny in weeks, right?”

“Huh?”

“We’ve been spending money left and right and hardly made any. The gold we earned in Sylphfree was impressive, certainly, more than I expected us to earn in a long time, but we are spending more than we’re earning now.”

“So you’re saying the Beaver needs to work?”

“The repairs will set us back a little.” she shook the clipboard. “These things won’t be free. Then there’s paying the crew, fuel, docking fees. We started with a decent amount of gold for the trip, then we earned a lot more in Sylphfree, enough to keep us aloft for another couple of years, but only if we’re careful about our spending.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe a visit to the Exploration Guild, then? We can check it for quests that we can do.”

“That’s not a bad idea. Once we know our next destination, we might want to look into carrying some cargo. Just enough to negate the cost of the trip.”

I gasped. “We could have passengers!”

“The ship... is equipped for that. But we’re using most of most of the rooms that passengers would take for ourselves. We have room for a couple of people, I suppose.”

I grinned. “We’ll make friends, and coins, and get to where we need to go. It’s kind of perfect!”

“I’ll see who wants to stay and who wants shore leave. We don’t know how long we’ll be here for, so do we want to make a simple all-day rotation, or should we do half days?”

“Ah, I think alternating half-days might be best? One group gets the morning off, then they stay with the Beaver that night. The next day we can switch it around.” That way everyone would get some evenings and mornings off, alternating every day. That’d give everyone a chance to have fun in Port Royal. “Oh, and we need to see about paying everyone.”

“Right, let’s get that sorted,” Amaryllis agreed.

***