ALEX

Alex didn’t have a place of his own. Todd was always willing to let him sleep on the floor of his apartment and stash his stuff there. Occasionally he would get a room in the inn. Mostly he shared rooms with a friend. Since Companion joined the team, Alex had woken up too many times on the selkie’s rock bed.

On the Speedwell they all slept in the same apartment unit. Ellen and Sarah shared one bedroom, Todd and Alex another with the last bedroom reserved for Grandmother. When Companion joined them they set up his box of rocks in the end of the common space, right outside Grandmother’s door. It was where Companion slept on the floor the first night they were onboard. No one ever talked about changing this arrangement, even though there were hundreds of near identical apartments on the Speedwell, all of them empty. Instead of all that empty space inviting them to spread out, it instead caused them to cling together.

Grandmother’s furniture store fascinated him, although he tried hard not to show it. He was amazed at the variety and beauty of the different pieces. The bed was far larger than his bunk on the Speedwell. It also offered far more comfort than the bed in the default inn room. He was fascinated by the simplified form of the glass and copper shelving unit. How could metal and glass hold that much beauty?

He was not a crafter. Even with magic, crafting took long hours of repetitive small actions in solitude. He knew crafters often worked together in the same room, but it wasn’t the same as actually working together.

The queen’s suite, as Harry called it, was another revelation. The entire group went up to tour the room after lunch. As everyone named the animals they knew in the tapestry, Alex looked at the furniture.

He could see how the different pieces of furniture worked together. The carpet softened the floor under the feet and quieted their footsteps. The elaborate tapestry was almost like looking out another window. The sitting area was a deluxe version of a section of the gallery, only more private and intimate. There was a storage chest at the foot of the bed and a set of shelves in the sanitary facilities. A weapon rack was positioned near the door, and a small table by the side of the bed. A small wooden stool was pushed against the wall by the prize altar.

All together it made the room something more. The high arched ceilings and wall of windows gave it a regal air, but the carpet, tapestry and stuffed furniture made it warm and welcoming. Grandmother cringed at the touches of purple that seemed to be everywhere, but Alex could see how that color theme tied the whole space together.

Alex was waiting for Grandmother to come down for breakfast. Companion and Todd were off working on teaching Companion the tier three heal spell along with how to cast a heal on yourself. Ellen was closeted in her apartment/work room trying to reproduce the Londontown leatherworkers vellum spell. Since Ellen wasn’t much of a leatherworker, it was going to take her a while. Sarah was working on the world map.

Normally when there were no group commitments the next day, Alex would spend the night in the inn’s dining room sharing music, stories and drinks with his friends. He wouldn’t get out of bed until noon. Sitting on the edge of the queen’s bed he came to a decision. He would start a furniture shop.

Finally Grandmother came down the stairs stifling a yawn. She saw Alex waiting for her and crossed the room to join him.

“Good morning,” she said to him. “I don’t usually see you at breakfast.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” Alex said. He felt unusually tongue tied. He realized this was important to him, and he didn’t want to mess it up. One of the inn servers brought over two tankards of tea. Alex told them to bring him whatever Grandmother ordered when she arrived.

“What do you want to ask?” Grandmother said, prompting him.

“I want to start a shop,” he said, surprising Grandmother. “A furniture shop, like yours in Londontown. Is that alright? I am not a crafter like Ellen or Sarah, but it seems like bringing the beautiful things we find in the ruins back here could be my contribution to the community.”

“I think that is a great idea,” Grandmother said. “You can count on my help to get you started.”

“I was hoping you could teach me how you did it,” Alex responded. The server arrived with their breakfast. Alex ate his food without even looking at it.

“Well first thing you need to do is sweep the surrounding rooms and find all the unique pieces that are within carrying distance. It would be nice if we could find the makings of a cart,” Grandmother said. She chewed her food thoughtfully. “Have you rented a shop yet?”

“No,” Alex said. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t planning on starting a store.”

“Good. Let's see if we can get you a space near the back door. I always wished my store in Londontown was closer. I don’t have any firm commitments for this morning so after you get the shop we can go out to the local area. I can show you how the modular stuff works,” Grandmother offered.

“Should I get some of the others to help clear the rooms?” Alex asked.

“The two of us will be fine,” Grandmother said, “This area is tier two space as long as we don’t go down past the grand stairway. As a tier three you can probably clear the rooms alone, if you're really careful. I wouldn’t recommend it. I was tier four when I did it. Talk a teammate or two into going with you. If none of the rest of us are available, get yourself three or four of the trainees to go out. I’ve seen people charge youngsters for the privilege, but I alway thought getting them to help haul back my inventory was payment enough. I usually let them keep most of the meat and skins, but of course that is up to you. ” Grandmother ate more of her breakfast before continuing her comments.

“I wouldn’t mind setting up a sweep schedule for the area below the staircase. I don’t know if the numbers I gave hold for tier three space and it would be interesting to see how the furniture and items differ there.” She observed. “We should probably take the full team for the first sweep. Just to be safe.”

Grandmother spent the rest of the meal talking about pricing and how important it was. She explained how furniture lasted three to four years inside rented property. She priced her pieces expecting that they would fall apart a year or less and that was too low.

“You want a business that is self-supporting. That way you will have a money stream to pay a shop attendant or two when you are out of town. If you do it all out of the kindness of your heart, you will be tied to the shop the rest of your life. Or like me, you’ll be forced to shut it down after a while,” Grandmother explained.

About a quarter of the shop space in the square was available. The area around the entrance to the training yards was completely sold out. The second most occupied section was behind the market stalls. They found a spot close to the hallway to the back door that wasn’t rented. Grandmother stood by as Alex touched the sealed shop door. A pile of shadow coins appeared on the door. This amount represented thirty six days of rent. It was a considerable amount, ten silver, far more than the rent on an apartment in the halls above the square. Alex put a finger on the payment to hold it into place and pulled money from his inventory twice, paying two months rent. The four green Grandmother gave the leatherworker inn Londontown would pay the rent on this shop for over a year.

The door to the shop popped open. Alex went inside, holding the door open for Grandmother. She insisted he close the door before she entered, so he would be the clear single owner of the shop. Once that was done, he let her in to survey the space. The shop was split into a front section for display and a back workshop. Grandmother’s shop was a T shape with the narrow section at the front, giving her little window space but a large back area. This space was L shaped with the wider section at the front. A wall divided the front wide rectangle from the narrow long rectangle at the rear. A door to a small restroom was located in the back rectangle close to the inside bend of the L. A shop counter was set in front of the door to the back area. The wall was equipped with built-in shelves for displaying items for sale on each side of the backroom door.

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“This is nice,” Grandmother commented. “The windowspace is perfect for displaying your goods. It is easy to make them transparent in the interface. It has a small backroom, but since you aren’t crafting anything it will be great for storage. You can use the interface to change the appearance, define inventory, set prices, key workers so they can enter without you being present and of course open or close the store to the public. I can go over how to do all that or we can go out and get some stuff. What do you think?”

Alex looked around the open space. He was excited and nervous at the same time. The pale stone walls, opaque windows and pure white floor looked barren to him. Plus a little action might calm his nerves.

“Let's go get some stuff,” Alex responded.

“Great! I’ll go get my gear. Don’t bother with food, we’ll come back for lunch,” she said as she pushed the door open. “I’ll meet you at the back door in ten minutes,” she called as she exited. Alex took one last look around the space, before running out to pick up his own gear. He emptied out his pack of anything he carried with him for overnight use. It was light on his back, since it contained little more than his door wedges, vent pins and gathering bags. He belted on his sword. He filled his water flask before tying it to his belt. The flask was enchanted by Sarah, so it would continue to fill on its own. He filled it now only because he liked his water cold.

He made sure the rent was paid on the inn room for the next couple nights. He felt odd leaving all his belongings laying loose on the bed.

He found Grandmother already at the back door gate. She was talking to the hunters on watch. There were two women and a man. They were all younger than Sarah and probably didn’t remember a time before Grandmother’s arrival. Alex eavesdropped on them as he approached. Grandmother was asking questions about where the scavengers usually went, saying she didn’t want to search an already picked over area. The hunters didn’t know the final destinations, but they reported that everyone usually headed straight down the main corridor away from the gate.

“Ready?” Alex asked when he arrived.

“Yep,” Grandmother replied. “Lets go right, Ted here warns me the crafters use one of the first rooms to the left as a waste disposal.” Alex gave the young man a second look and confirmed that this was Teddy, one of Sarah’s childhood friends. He should be about the same age as Sarah, but somehow he seemed younger.

They went down the right corridor. There were no doors on the right side of the corridor. That blank wall was actually the back wall of the square's shops. Grandmother stopped at the first room. They were still within sight of the hunters on watch.

“Let’s start here,” Grandmother announced. “No one ever checks these close in rooms. Everyone always assumes someone else already has.”

Alex took the lead, he pulled his sword and prepared himself mentally. He made entry into the room, pushing and holding the door open as he scanned for any sign of movement. The room was clear. Grandmother propped the door open with a door wedge. She walked around the room giving everything a close inspection. “Aha!” she exclaimed. She pulled a small cross cut saw out of a pile. “I told you no one ever checks,” she slipped the saw into her pack, and made a mark on her map. “But that is not why we are here,” she mumbled with a quick glance at Alex. “Stay on task,” She reminded herself. She pulled on a set of gloves and started digging through the piles.

Alex circled the room behind Grandmother. He picked up all the scrap, but saw nothing useful in what was left. There were plenty of items that were converted to scrap with the help of a prize altar. This would be the debris part of Grandmother’s item types.

Grandmother pulled a thin sheet of dark iron, about three feet long and a foot wide and a handful of small complicated pieces. She also picked up two tangles of steel tubing. The tubing was stuck together into an odd pattern along with sections with obviously broken ends.

Alex used chunks like these to build barriers before by piling them up. The rough broken ends helped tangle the sections together. Grandmother pulled, twisted and lifted and the pieces fell apart. She threw aside anything that looked damaged. She gave each one a sharp tap against the floor before selecting it. Alex was familiar with the practice. Occasionally something that looked like it would build a solid barrier turned out to be made of a weak brittle material that shattered at the first impact. She was left with four lengths of square tubing that were made out of steel.

“Here, put these outside,” She said, handing them to Alex. Alex carried them out and stacked them neatly against the wall. The tubing had holes and slits at different points along its length, while the ends were cut in a complicated pattern, with spots of extra thickness. The tubes were all different lengths. Although the ends looked similar across the pieces, he didn’t think they were identical.

He stepped back in the room, to find Grandmother waving a stick of wood behind her back as she dug through a pile. Alex took it from her and added it to his pile. When he turned to reenter the room he found Grandmother pulling the wedge out from the door.

“That’s about it for this room,” she reported, waving him on to the next one.

“Should we take this stuff with us?” he asked.

“No, it's closer to the gate here. We’ll pick it up on the way back. I can’t see anyone taking it while we are away,” Grandmother observed. They continued this way. About one in four rooms were occupied by animals of some kind. Mostly badgers, but there were some rats and cats as well. Grandmother gutted the first six badgers and left their carcass in the hallway along their piles of ‘stuff’. She left the guts in the room. After that she ignored the animals, mumbling something about not wanting to flood the market.

Grandmother picked out items in wood, iron, steel and oxidized bronze. She told Alex to record where the bronze pieces came from. Alex buried them under the less eye-catching iron. As they moved on to new rooms Alex started making his own selection of tangles. Grandmother showed him how to unhook the different kinds of joints. There were square tubes, round tubes, sheets and solid pieces. Grandmother picked up any whole wood planks they found.

Alex found an intact wooden chair in a pile of wooden debris, in about the twentieth room. There were some heavy gouges across the back and strangely there were some burn marks on the legs. It was strange because there were no other signs of fire in the room. He pulled it out of the pile and set it on its legs.

“That’s a unique item,” Grandmother said from where she was searching across the room. “Most of the contents of my shop were unique items. That was the result of months of collecting. They are hard to find. You need to mark your map and come back to this room every six days to get the copy.” She dusted off her gloves and crossed the room to where he stood. She reached out and tapped out a clean spell on the chair. The finish on the chair glowed. The gauges shrank and smoothed out, while the burn marks became a dark black stain that added character to the piece. Alex suddenly loved it. He wondered if he could part with it.

“That’s really nice,” Grandmother commented. Alex was certain it would not have cleaned up nearly as well if he cast the spell. He made a note to himself to try to get Grandmother to clean everything he could. It was better looking than the chair in his room at the inn.

“Why don’t we just take the chairs from the inn’s rooms? It really wouldn’t be stealing, since they would just just respawn,” Alex asked.

“Didn’t I say?” It was the same words a lot of Grandmother's long lectures started with. Alex settled himself into a relaxed stance. Grandmother started poking through the rest of the wood debris in the pile as she talked. “You can’t take things from the inn’s rooms. You must be an extremely honest man to have never tried. If the door to the room is open, you will find all the furniture is fixed to the floor. If you pick it up with the door closed, you will find the door will not open until you set it down again. Any protected place with a door is like that. If there isn’t a door, like in a rest, any complete furniture is attached to the floor permanently. In a really low tier rest you can move the debris, I think this is so you can spend an easy night. Anything you remove literally turns to dust in six days, even if you wear it as a necklace. The debris piles in the rest will reform from the dust in the same amount of time.”

Grandmother picked up two wooden triangles from the debris and set them on the chair seat. “We’ll want to leave that chair just inside the room. That is something someone might pick up if they see it in the hall.” Alex marked the room on his map. He moved the chair so it was against the outer wall, just the side of the door, where they wouldn’t damage it accidentally if they needed to clear the room again when they got back.

“Now that you moved it, even though it is still in its original room, it will start to decay,” Grandmother commented. Alex realized Grandmother was still in lecture mode. “If you come back in five days, it will fall apart at a touch. If you come back in six, there will be no sign of it here by the door, but a new chair will be upside down in that wood debris pile.”