When viewed from a distance, two weeks seems like it’s a long time. There are at least sixteen hours every day to get things done, provided you get the doctor recommended eight hours of sleep every night. Setting aside three hours a day to deal with necessities, waking up, getting dressed, eating, keeping clean, leaves thirteen hours a day. Certainly, a lot can be accomplished in a long series of thirteen hour days, right?
Wrong. I felt like I was running myself ragged during my two weeks in Westfield. For one thing, I didn’t know where anything was located, so asking directions took quite a bit of my time. I was able to acquire a beautiful hand-drawn map of the city, replete with swirly calligraphy and gold accents, but there was one problem. There were no street signs. Apparently, clearly labeling streets wasn’t a thing here. And don’t get me started about the streets. Besides a few major thoroughfares, nothing ran in a straight line. The city had obviously grown organically, building by building, and there was little rhyme or reason to where the buildings were placed. The streets and lanes twisted about haphazardly, weaving around wherever someone had decided to plop down a building. Sometimes, they looped back upon themselves. Moving from one section of the city to another, street names changed without notice. Getting anywhere was a struggle.
I know what you are thinking. Why didn’t you just hire a guide? That would have made a lot of sense, but honestly I didn’t even think about it at the time. After all, I had just spent far too much money on an overly ornate map and I was bound and determined to make good on my investment. Sunk cost fallacy, anyone?
I heard someone once say that the fun in tourism was getting lost and encountering new and unexpected things. I was lost quite often, but I didn’t really see the beauty in it. After all, I had places to go, things to do, and people were relying on me, even if they didn’t quite know it yet.
Those two weeks passed in a blur, yet somehow I was able to get most of the things done that I needed to. Most, but not all.
My first order of business was, once again, improving my wardrobe. My mom used to bitch all the time about how hard my brothers and I were on the clothing that she and my father had spent hard earned money on to provide for us. Mom, you have no idea what being hard on clothing means. One of the difficult things about this world was trade specialization. Crafters tended to do one or two things very well, and they stuck to those things. There were no department stores, stocking a wide range of goods to meet every need. This pigeon holing held true for tailors just like any other crafting profession. The person who sold robes didn’t sell clothing for the wilderness. Hell, the person who sold robes may only concentrate on one type of robe. A different tailor made sturdy clothes for work or the wilderness. And don’t get me started on the haughty bunch that made dressier clothing in all the newest fashions. They wouldn’t even give me the time of day until they saw the color of my gold. Then, if you wanted shoes or boots you had to go to another half a dozen places to locate what you wanted.
Westfield did have a market, but it was mainly a fresh market. Fruits, vegetables, the newly slaughtered carcasses of one animal or another, other foodstuffs, these were the majority of things being sold. There were other things of course, but buying several bolts of cloth to make my own clothes wasn’t an option. I didn’t know how to sew.
Slowly, over the course of many days, I was able to reassemble a passable wardrobe. Getting a basic robe was pretty easy as fit is pretty simple to fake with a long sheath of fabric. Everything else took a lot of finding, measuring, poking, prodding, ordering and returning. By the end of the first week, though, I had two sets of travel clothes that fit, a new set of boots, and a set of dressier clothes completed with the feathered crimson beret that seemed to be the height of fashion this season.
Finding jewelers to sell to was an easier task. As I wandered through the city, I made note of the richer parts of town. I followed the money. Rich people must really like their fancy baubles because there were a lot more jewelers than I expected. Of course, before I could go in and sell anything, I had to wait for my dressier set of clothes to be completed. That meant most of the jewelry sales had to wait until the second week, when those clothes were finished. I felt the pressure of time slipping away, especially when I was stuck in negotiating the sales an hour at a time, piece by piece. It didn’t help that I still had no idea what things were worth, but if I was going to make a serious attempt to save as many of my people as I could, I needed to maximize my profits. Although I got frustrated many times, I think I did alright. By the time I was done with everything, I had profited to the tune of another 20,000 pieces of gold, or at least the equivalent in gems.
Each day, when I headed back to my lodging with my pockets full of valuables, I was alert to the possibility of being mugged or pickpocketed. Thankfully, though, I escaped unscathed. There were a lot of guards and justice here appeared to be swift and unmerciful. On more than one occasion, walking through a public square, I saw corpses hanging from gibbets with wooden signs hanging from their necks extolling their list of crimes. A couple of times, the sign merely read “thief”.
I was able to locate the slave market and verify that there was a lot of island-caught five fingered humans going up for bid near the end of the two week period. There were other sales in the interim as well. For obvious reasons, though, my sympathies were with those who were adrift in this world like I was. People from other worlds who had gone to bed one night only to awaken in a new, unfamiliar place where they knew nobody and weren’t equipped to survive. I know that it was more than a little hypocritical of me to discount the plight of people like me who had been born into this world, but I couldn’t save everyone and, like most people, I felt more kinship to those whose situations were most similar to my own.
I did attend one auction to observe the process. Watching the wealthy smirking and laughing at each other as they drank expensive wine and nibbled on exquisite delicacies, all the while attempting to outbid each other to purchase the lives of other people made my stomach grind. Equally upsetting, though, was the prices that they were paying. The elderly, infirm and feeble went for a pittance, but anyone with a skill or apparent strength sold for a premium. By that I mean a thousand or more gold. I wouldn’t be able to rescue as many people as I originally planned, at least not if I was going to provide them with a safe place to live. I had to put down a hundred gold non-refundable deposit to even get through the door. I made sure that I ate my fill, though, so I didn’t have to buy lunch that day.
Cleaning my pistol was a completely different ordeal. It was easy enough to find a stick and some cloth to clean out the barrel, but when it came to lubrication things got pretty dicey. Mineral oil, which requires distillation, didn’t seem to exist here. Most lamp oil in this part of the world was rendered from whales or other animals. Other oils, mostly for cooking, were squeezed out of olives and other plants and flowers. I bought small amounts of as many different oils as I could readily find, except for some obvious nonstarters like lard. Day after day, I tried them all, only to find that they universally started gumming up the action of the pistol after a short time. Painstakingly, with a brush that I had purchased for the purpose, I cleaned that pistol over and over. After the abuse that I had put it through, it was not in particularly good shape. I noticed a couple of spots where important parts had already started to corrode. I was surprised that it had worked as well as it did when I used it in the canyon. Oh, the wonders of German engineering. Still, I didn’t think I could put too many more rounds through it without risking a serious malfunction.
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Speaking of ammunition, sometime during my headlong flight away from the orcs in the canyon I had obviously dropped a spare magazine. I wonder what the orcs made of it if they found it? I was down to two magazines, one with a full fifteen rounds and the other with a measly ten. That was more than a little disheartening, let me tell you. Although I was becoming increasingly proficient in defending myself in the conventional ways of this world, I still liked to have the pistol as a trump card. If I was forced to use it again, that card would be played out all too quickly. It was a race to see what would give out first, the pistol or my ammunition.
One day I was wandering the streets and noticed an alchemist’s shop occupying a prominent location on a busy street corner. Their main business seemed to be peddling love potions and cures for various ailments, but when I went in and described my need for an oil to lubricate metal parts rubbing against each other without gumming up, they were able to provide me with the base that they used for one of their tinctures. The clerk said it would gum up, but much more slowly, so I purchased it thinking it was probably as good as I would be able to find. I would just need to make sure that I inspected and cleaned the pistol regularly to ensure it remained operational.
The final drain on my time was the magic lessons. Master Mage Climmep was a good teacher but I was not her best student. She regularly became frustrated when she had to teach me remedial lessons about things that most children in this world already had a decent grasp of. She often wondered aloud where I had grown up to know so little. I told her that I had grown up on a ranch out towards Sleetfield and that all of my education had been provided informally at home. She cursed my parents for their lack of attention to basic concepts, which were not basic at all to me.
I settled into a routine of hiring her for a lesson every other day. We always met at midday. I got the idea that she chose that time because she was not an early riser. As much as she detested the way I strained her patience over the most basic concepts, she might have stuck with me because of my determination and willingness to learn. Honestly, I don’t think that was the case at all. I think it had more to do with the quantity of gold she was receiving for her services. Mages have bills as well, people. On the days that I didn’t have lessons, I set aside time to practice what I had learned the previous day.
And I learned quite a bit. I quickly realized that there must be some sort of universal laws that apply to the application of magic. Her explanations adhered closely to the one given by the older woman in my essence crystal fueled vision. She talked about how magic is nothing more than tapping into another plane, a plane of what she called the absolutes. Different terminology, same concept. I was taught a variety of techniques to try to bridge that gap, to harness the absolutes that I had an affinity with.
Meditation was one of the primary techniques. Climmep lecture endlessly on needing to look inward before one could reach outward. Apparently, the first step in harnessing magic was to reach a mental state where the power of the absolute manifested around you. When I described what had happened when I was saved by magic in my life and death struggle with the, uh, bear, she recognized that I had touched the appropriate state of mind on that singular occasion. Since I had done it once, she said, I should be able to do it again. This time I hoped it would be without the threat of imminent death and evisceration.
After my first few attempts at meditation failed, she turned to more extreme techniques. She began making me drink a foul concoction before I began my meditation. It tasted of licorice and rotten fish, and I had to fight to keep it down every single time, and of course I had to pay for it to the tune of ten gold per dose. The potion was dual action. First it relaxed me, just over the right side of the border from catatonia. Second, it was a mild hallucinogen that made my mind easily bounce from one though to another, never really engaging or grasping what I was thinking about. The best thing about it was that it wore off fairly quickly. The worst thing about it was the spoiled fish burps.
Over the course of several lessons, Climmep’s voice guiding me in my drug-fueled haze, I started to find my way back to the state of mind I had been in during that fight. First, there was the darkness, and the almost imperceptible pool of warm light around me. Then, within a couple of more sessions, I was able to perceive the light around me. I was told to exert myself, to reach for it, to use every bit of mental fortitude that I possesses to grasp it and make it my own.
Without the motivation of being slowly and painfully devoured, though, progress was slow. I could feel myself getting closer and closer to the light, but no matter how hard I pushed it remained elusive, just out of my grasp. If my glazed mind had been capable of feeling frustration, I am sure it would have been my predominant emotion. I could hear Climmep’s voice, talking about reconciling the competing concepts of wresting control over the power and surrendering to it. I still don’t know what she meant.
Finally, as the day of the auction drew near, I was engaged in another fruitless session of guided meditation. This session, I strained harder than I had ever done before. I felt like my brain was starting to melt, that soon blood would be spurting out of my eye sockets or something. As I reached outward, a thin finger of the light dipped inward and we met. A strange energy thrummed through me, and Climmep’s voice took on an excited tone. I couldn’t hold on to the feeling for very long and felt myself spiraling up towards consciousness. I woke up and bolted into a seated position.
“You did it!” Climmep said excitedly. “I knew I could teach anybody!”
After being damned by that faint praise, I didn’t know what to expect. Looking down at my body, I noticed the last wisps of a warm glow fading from my hands.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did I manifest the light again? Did it damage anything? Was it powerful like the first time.”
“No, you didn’t damage anything,” Climmep replied. “Your hand began to glow with a steady warm light, but as you reached consciousness it soon dissipated.”
Great, I thought. I spent all that money so I could unconsciously serve as a nightlight.
“Don’t be disheartened,” Climmep said, sensing my mood. “Exercising your mind is like exercising a muscle. Each of us is limited by the amount of muscle our bodies are able to carry, and I don’t know what your potential is. Over time, you should be able to recreate that effect even when you are awake.”
Alright, so maybe I’m not a magical nightlight. I’m an amazing magical flashlight. Strike up the band.