Grigory woke up early the next morning, still giddy with excitement. He had so much work to do! So many plans to put into action and no time to waste. The sun was only a blush on the horizon when he had a cup of tea and started planning. First he took stock of his current assets:
A small cottage he didn’t own,
A half dozen crates of books and manuscripts,
His demonologist’s tools and some normal tools,
About four days worth of food, mostly oats,
A few copper and bronze coins, totaling a pitiful thirty seven glindi.
No connections with anyone powerful anywhere, nor any friends in the village he’d been getting his supplies from. Clearly he needed a base of operations, some men at arms and heaps of ebony for totems. The first impulse was to sell the miraculous demon totems, but that’s just a way to take a short walk to the headsman’s axe.
Yesterday’s discovery that the imps are themselves competent enchanters, was a good starting point to get the ball rolling. Grigory had sold his horse and cart to pay for living expenses a few months ago. His remaining funds weren’t close to enough to buy them back, let alone the supplies and protected cart to live in for a journey to the Glass Coast, the centre of commerce and trade. Where the capital was, which was his real destination. No one can become rich, powerful in the wilds.
He walked back down into his cellar lab. Without anything to sell or trade for supplies there really isn’t much of a point to leaving yet. All eleven imps were patiently waiting on the desk. Eyes alert and unblinking, sitting cross legged. Digging out a stack of blank paper and the small wooden box with his quills and a jar of iron gall ink, he thought about what kind of Scrolls of Effect a farmer would be interested in trading for. Then he remembered a elv spell he’d read about.
“Create a scroll of rampant plant growth,” he commanded the imps.
“Merp!”
The imp closest to the supplies quickly started jotting down line after line in Demonic. Once it was done, it put away the stylus and sat back down. Grigory looked over the scroll; he didn’t understand all the terms and spell structure but he still was able to read all the syllables.
The mage walked to his small garden. To supplement his diet he’d planted some vegetables in a patch of rich soil a short walk from his cottage. It wasn’t doing great, as all too often he’d forget to water it, or an animal would come and eat some of the greens. Still he was proud of it, and did enjoy the occasional harvest of fresh food. The time he spent in the garden were also a relaxing ritual he’d come to enjoy.
Grigory held the scroll at arms length, facing his wilted garden, and recited it line by line. The scroll remained intact and the garden unchanged. Remembering how the mostly mute demons activated them yesterday, he cast a gesture of flame and lit the paper on fire. The paper burned the warm yellow-orange of a normal fire until it got within a finger breadth of the writing and promptly went out. Sighing with exasperation, Grigory summoned a spark of pure hellflame on his fingertip and tried yet again. Immediately the scroll burned blindingly brightly, even in the morning sun. All the plants within a dozen paces, including the trees across the path and the moss on the roof, writhed and moaned like they were in pain. Then the plants wriggled and squirmed; growing nightmarishly fast for a few seconds. Finally the effect ended and the plants were still and silent again. The affected vegetation had grown to maturity, and the trees were noticeably taller and thicker. Concerningly, the heavy ripe vegetables were twisted and spiked, and the oak tree's rounded leaves became jagged and sharp. The whole garden smelled of sulphur and hot iron. Combined with the requirements of hellflame to activate, this might not be the scroll to make him rich.
Grigory walked back into the cottage, put on some water to boil, and settled down to rethink his critical next steps over a cup of tea. His normal source of income was to do scribe work or simple magic for commoners as he travelled, but that was too slow, too low yield. Scaling it up with his Perfectly Safe Demons wasn’t an option either. Even in a remote village in the wilds, inquisitors, witch hunters and paladins would converge on reports of that sort of thing. What would make money without being obviously related to demons? As he stirred in a bit of honey to his tea he felt a slight stab of regret. Gah, he should have got an imp to make his tea, they are literally just sitting there.
The broke demonologist stared at his tea in the worn chipped mug he’d had for years. The last of a set of very affordable thin red clay cups, and worried it was in fact a metaphor for his worn and eroded wealth. He fondly remembered having an entire matching set before he set off on his quest to create his magnum opus. Grigory idly dreamed of being able to afford a new matched set of mugs once he got some money. The kind with a slightly impractical shape and thick sides and a handle. Realisation dawned on him as he made the same error in thinking in as many minutes, why not have a demon do it? Demons can probably make fantastic mugs!
Stolen story; please report.
A few quick commands later and the tiny imps sprinted off in every direction, looking for clay deposits nearby. Finding one a short walk away, near a curve in the brook he’d been getting water from was ideal! Next he ordered them to build a simple kiln. He described the exact mug he wanted, and an imp would craft a single mug exactly as requested, but the first few weren’t quite right. Minor changes in thickness, design, shape and style at last resulted in a truly perfect mug. It had the right weight, a detailed nature scene on the side, and was easy to clean. Honestly this was the best mug he’d ever held.
A pleasant and unexpected side effect was the imps didn’t use wood or coal in the kiln; instead they cured them with summoned hellfire, finishing dark grey mugs with a smooth glossy iridescence that he’d never seen on ceramics before. The sulphur smell faded quickly, and the hot iron smell didn’t seem out of place on pottery. Everything about this was an ideal trade good to get the momentum started on his grander dreams. Finally he had the imps build him a way to safely transport the mugs, and some nice boxes to sell them in sets.
He spent the day giving tasks and clarifying specifics for work order after work order as the imps toiled tirelessly. By the time the sun was low in the west he headed home pulling a freshly built wooden hand cart stacked with dozens of carved wooden boxes full of sets of possibly the finest mugs in the Hiruxian Empire.
The solid wooden wheels were no bigger than his hand, and it was more like a loading dolly than anything else. It had shelves for the boxes and its front closed with a latch, so nothing got muddy as he dragged it through the sparse woods and to his dilapidated cottage.
Once the cottage was in sight, he gave instructions on exactly how he wanted the imps to make him dinner in his now spotlessly clean cottage, full of newfound confidence in impish requests. If he was going to stay here longer, he had all sorts of ideas how the imps could fix up the place.
Grigory started planning tomorrow's trip to Fjallfeil once he plopped down onto his uneven kitchen stool. It was a tiny village about a half day walk to the east. His thoughts were interrupted by a distressed imp standing on the edge of the open meat box.
“Nurrrrrp!” the sad imp cried. It was gesturing to the clay chest with an enchanted fridge stone in the bottom.
Looking inside, Grigory immediately identified the issue. No meat. That meant it might be just a few spongy potatoes for dinner.This would have been a problem last week, but now he had more options!
“Hunt two rabbits, skin them and tan their hides, then roast the meat with herbs.”
“Nurp!”
“Hunt one rabbit and bring it to me.”
“Nurp!”
“Set five rabbit traps and bring me what they catch.”
“Nurp!”
The perfectly safe demons were being perfectly safe. Grigory was both pleased and frustrated. Complex multi step harm avoidance was always the plan, but on the other hand that didn’t fill his belly. He was a demonologist of the highest skill and could summon a Venom Tyrant or Barbed Rage Pummeler, but that might not result in a good meal either, no matter how many woodland animals died nightmare deaths. Plus the rituals took longer than he was willing to wait for dinner. His ambition was to improve the lot of everyone, making the whole idea of unleashing demons to make dinner slightly off putting.
“Harvest all ripe vegetables in the garden and make a stew.”
“Merp!”
Several demons darted out the door to set to work. It felt a bit like defeat, but at the same time if the imps refused to even harm a woodland creature indirectly, that seemed like ironclad evidence of his success in creating his dream. The masterpiece of his career! A perfectly safe demon that had required no prices to be paid. Well, other than the materials in the totem, but that’s not too expensive. Besides, that's not paid to any demonic forces, so that doesn’t technically count.
He watched with joy as the tiny imps moved the twisted vegetables that weighed as much as them with impressive speed and grace. They sliced them evenly and quickly added them into the pot of boiling water. One imp stood on the pot’s rim stirring with a long handled wooden spoon, entirely immune to the hot metal. Another imp ran deep into the forest and returned with some mushrooms and wild herbs. Even with all his academic understanding of what he was seeing, it was still deeply gratifying to see his hard work all function in the real world. To see his creations move and plan doing useful chores without needing any intervention.
The vegetables they harvested were from the patch he’d tested that scroll on in the morning. The produce was thorny and twisted and misshapen. Unfortunately that meant the stew itself was inedibly sulphuric. His bowl was filled with barbed carrot thorns, sharp bell pepper bones and a few stinging tomatoes. Grigory sighed and thought it was just as well he gave up on demonic rampant plant growth scrolls. This would have absolutely gotten the wrong attention had he sold a few hundred to farmers. His shallow metal bowl had several spots of fresh corrosion by the time he gave up on dinner.
He poured some water into one of his new mugs, cast a gesture of frost to chill it, and marvelled at the weight and the craftsmanship. The cold water chased the terrible taste out of his mouth and made his hunger less urgent. The mug just felt right. So much better than the thin clay one he had been using. At least one part of his life has already improved.
He went to bed on a mostly empty stomach, still grinning with the excitement of his plans and being so close to such massive and lasting success. He knew these setbacks were small and temporary, and he’d overcome a thousand bigger hurdles to get this far!