“Oh, Fikali. I would kiss you if your face wasn’t made such a mess!”
“Huo?” The dweller added with characteristic confusion.
“Doesn’t matter,” Aloe explained. “What I need to do now is do some tests with this ink. I can’t get ahead of myself just yet.” She straightened her hair. “If dealing with the Cure Grass and vitality has taught me anything is to not take anything for granted. Nothing confirms that the sap of Aloe Veritas is identical to squid ink, I have to make sure of it first.”
Aloe left the oasis, leaving Fikali to munch on the leftovers of the leaf. It had lost too much ink to be useful for her. She picked up the first bowl she found at the house, in this case, the one she had used to store the Cure Grass paste and had left on the desk.
“Damn, I forgot to clean this one. Also the mortar, ugh.” She took the bowl nonetheless and went to the greenhouse.
The Aloe Veritas was still bleeding ink, but the dripping was slow, almost already closed. It wasn’t like it would give more ink so Aloe just cut another leaf to fill the bowl with. One thing she had noticed between the Aloe Veritas and the common, unevolved version was that the evolved one bled a lot more. It was smaller but it had way more sap inside.
She let the ink-like sap slowly drip into the bowl as she held it, but her heart skipped a beat as the parchment of the Aloe Veritas started shifting.
“What?” Aloe gasped as the ink spots of the cut leaf shifted to reveal the description of Cure Grass. “Oh. There were still traces of paste in the bowl.” She quickly realized. “That’s... creepy. The leaf never touched the grass, and the ink that did touch the paste was no longer in contact with the leaf. Just... how?”
It was hard to reconcile with such arcane and nonsensical acts even if Aloe knew that she was dealing with a magical plant.
“Somehow the ink has communicated at a distance with the leaf to tell it which plant has been touching and then the parchment on the leaf has written it.” Aloe described what she just saw, and she couldn’t even believe her own words. “This plant will never stop surprising me. Just wow…”
After the bowl was full, Aloe carried it and the leaf outside. She left the leaf with Fikali as she had seemed to enjoy the previous one and took the bowl home. As soon as she entered though, her stomach grumbled.
“Ugh, as much as I want to experiment, I should eat.” She left the bowl on the desk. “And a real meal at that, not the absolute garbage I did on the second day.”
She no longer had more of that ‘stew’. It had run out yesterday, or more accurately, Aloe had thrown it out in a tantrum.
“I took around a month of rations, so I guess I could be a bit lavish,” Aloe suggested. “Not only that trash lasted for four days, but if the accelerated growth gifted by the Infusion works, I may have potatoes before the month ends. Though I still do not know what the growth factor of the infusion is.”
Said rations were mostly composed of vegetables and dried meat. She wasn’t worried about the meat or the legumes, as they would last for a long time. As for fruits, Aloe already had consumed all that she had brought. So her main problem was the potatoes. They wouldn’t spoil in a month, but if not stored correctly they could go bad enough that consuming them would present a problem. Mainly in taste.
And the heavens knew Aloe wasn’t storing anything correctly.
“A potato soup sounds really good right now,” Aloe said as she carried the hearth cauldron to the oasis, also taking this time to make the first round of water boiling of the day. “Potatoes are incredible. You can boil them, roast them, smash them. They just work!”
This was but Aloe’s own way to convince herself that she couldn’t mess them up as she did with the stew. Even a steamed potato would be a feast in her current state.
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As she waited for the water on the hearth to boil, Aloe’s attention was directed once again to the aloe ink.
“Right.” She placed her hands on her hips. “So how do I do this?”
It was obvious to her that she needed to check the quality of the ink, but she had no idea how to do so.
“Damn, Mom would know what to do.” Aloe sighed. “She’s a scribe, it’s literally her job to know about inks and such.” Alas, Shahrazad was in Sadina and she was in the middle of nowhere. “Bah, I’ll just improvise something. That tends to magically work.”
One of the multiple items Aloe had packed in her luggage was a small pot of ink and parchment. And, of course, a quill. Neither of those items were in copious quantities, she had just brought them ‘just in case’, and her clothes and rations already took most of the available space.
“You have brought most things just in case, Aloe.” She mumbled to herself as she picked up the small ink flask and two pieces of parchment from her multiple bags.
She didn’t intend to write many things during her stay, mostly a list of items and problems with the greenhouse. She wasn’t being snobbish, just keeping inventory. And a good inventory wasn’t just a list of items of properties, but also of lacking ones.
“In Karaim’s words, ‘Oh boy, do this place lacks a lot of things’.” Aloe started writing a short list of items that would improve her life. “Let’s see, there aren’t many things… A bathtub, a smaller bathtub for washing, a composter, a corral of some sort for Fikali, maybe an actual boiling station, an irrigation system for the greenhouse would be nice but I doubt it’s feasible… Did I leave something out?”
Aloe didn’t outright write all of this; it was too coarse and nonsensical. She refined her aloud thoughts into more refined prose.
The quill and the squid ink flowed without problems in the parchment. She was used to writing, maybe too much. Whilst not a scribe like her mother, coming from an upstanding school meant that she actually had to write, unlike simpler public schools whose families couldn’t afford to have a member of the household not working, let alone buy parchment for them. And her training as a banker – whilst now left a sour taste in her mouth after discovering the truth of her lack of promotion – had made her write for day and night.
“Alright, this is enough. Let’s now test the aloe-based ink.” She put the piece of parchment to the side.
It vaguely hurt her having to use expensive parchment for tests, but at the same time, she hadn’t paid for those. They had come from her apprenticeship.
“Unpaid internship is only unpaid if you didn’t steal enough workplace equipment.”
The results were near instantaneous. Not even before writing, Aloe found a problem with the aloe ink. Namely, the viscosity and dryness.
The sap-ink was too viscous, presenting problems to write on the parchment. It was subtle, but it would lead to the quill slightly deviating from its course. Whilst not life-shattering, such a repeated annoyance could lead to the customers being dissatisfied with it. The major problem was the dryness.
Or maybe trait.
Aloe Veritas ink dried too quickly, probably a coagulant agent of some kind as the plant itself had stopped bleeding fast. Now, that was both good and bad. Good because some inks took even up to an hour to dry, making it difficult to reuse pages of parchment. But bad because her bowl of ink was mostly dried already. It was a viscous mess, too clumped up to work as a writable substitute.
“Hmm… That’s a problem… Fast-drying ink will certainly have a market, even ignoring the writing difficulties that presents its viscosity. But this is just too fast. Will it last longer if I seal it on flasks? Even if I do so, will it even be worth it? I cannot put ink on clay pots, and glass isn’t that inexpensive… I need to crunch too many numbers… Ugh.”
The option of not using glass bottles was not even on the table. Humans were visual creatures, especially the vain ones who were capable of purchasing ink. If you didn’t have your ink in a tidy little flask, no one would buy it.
Aloe had hoped to escape a bit away from the arithmetics of the economy by enclosing herself like a hermit, but it would seem the banker’s life wouldn’t just leave her alone.
“A small pot of ink is one fajati, but that’s good ink. If I were to sell this, it should be as a cheaper type of ink with shorter shelf life, let’s just say one drupnari less, so four drupnari per bottle. But a glass flask would be a drupnari by itself. One less drupnari then. Three drupnari currently, but that’s without taking into account expenses like taxes, transportation, or merchant cuts. Let’s just say fifty of that, so a drupnari in a half, so that comes out to fifteen drupnars profit per bottle.”
The numbers were crude, and whilst the profit was on the higher side – a commoner didn’t even make fifteen drupnars per day of work – there were a lot of unaccounted factors.
“The logistics aren’t there, nor the starting inversion. Going into red numbers is common for businesses, especially new ones, that’s why they take loans. I need to polish this a lot more, even if I get a loan, I need to be able to repay it fast enough so the interest doesn’t catch up for a downward spiral to kick in. Hmm…”
Truth was, if she wanted the ink business to work, she would need a lot of opinions and market observation.
Aloe groaned and freed her mind from numbers as she centered her attention on her cooking. She wouldn’t allow herself to make garbage for food yet again.