After Cariad gave me a bit of time to get my brain to reboot and let me do the math, I was able to calm down again.
Fifty grand wasn’t going to change my life, or even let me move out of the apartment I was in, but it definitely gave me a lot more breathing room to work with.
“I appreciate this, quite a bit, Cari,” I thanked my case worker for a fourth time while I stared down at the check.
I’d never had this kind of money before, however I knew that it was going to be more like about thirty grand once the government got their bite out of it, and that took some of the wind out of my sails. It reminded me of what happened to my parents’ estate when they passed.
“Everything okay there, Liam? You looked suddenly sad.” Cariad set her mug down and leaned over the table to peer up at me through her lashes.
“Oh, just thinking about taxes. Even with money earned as a dimension-hopping bodyguard-slash-investigator, the local government is going to want their cut.” I explained, setting the check gently onto my chipped kitchen table.
Cariad’s face twisted into a frown, and she nodded with a sigh.
“Unfortunately, it’s one of the constants of the universe. They even have taxes where I’m from,” she replied.
“Yeah. Still haven’t gotten the Dimensional Pocket ability either. It’d be so much easier if I could just bring gold back from the other world. Even then, I’d need to find someone to sell it to. Pulling money out of thin air tends to make the government quite suspicious.”
“Yes. Resources such as precious metals always need to be accounted for. You remember why Earth and humanity were on the ‘no-contact’ list before your accident, right?” Cariad carefully swirled the literal half-cup of coffee she had left, using a bit of the handle still attached.
“The witch-trials and all that, wasn’t it?”
“Amongst other things. In many of the cultures that have Travelers as part of their ecosystem, their governments tax and control a lot of what the Travelers produce. A few hundred pounds of a precious metal can cause a fluctuation in the market, either up or down depending on where it comes from and where it goes.” Cariad shrugged before continuing. “The fact that a Traveler with the right powers can demand payment in just about anything can damage a world. If an unscrupulous one over-leverages resources from one world, it can cause a serious depletion in said resources. Sure, there are some worlds that have vast amounts of gold in the place of, say, iron. But it can topple a government or lead to destruction of a culture unless it’s controlled on both sides.”
“What about other resources?” I took a sip from my own mug, still staring down at the check in front of me.
My mind was still chasing itself in a small loop over it. Fifty grand wasn’t a ton. After taxes, it would cover my costs for about a year, then it’d be gone. But it still represented an opportunity, but what to use it on?
“Like what?” Cariad leaned back in her chair, her arms crossing over her middle and compressing her generous chest while she rested her chin in the fingers of one hand.
“I don’t know. I was thinking about things I could create via Shape-Shifting and sell. Natural resources like wool or silk. Industrial farming in this world makes it impractical, though. Sure, I could shift my body hair into wool and sell that, but I couldn’t produce more than a sheep or two worth, and that’s not enough to live on. Also, I have no idea what happens to the body part after it’s removed. It might turn back into human hair after an hour or two.”
Cariad stared at me thoughtfully for a long moment before she started to giggle suddenly. Hiking an eyebrow at her, I did my best to give her an unimpressed look. Apparently, that was even more amusing to her because the laughter got worse.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped after nearly a solid minute of laughing. “I’m so sorry, Liam. I didn’t mean to laugh at you, but I had this mental image of you turning into a sheep, getting sheared, then turning back to find out you lost your eyebrows again!”
“At least they wouldn’t have been burned off,” I countered, smiling along with her now that I knew what the laughter was for.
“True, very true on that,” Cariad had to choke off one last giggle before she could be serious again. “But Liam, why not go for something a bit more exotic?”
“What, like venom?” My brain immediately leaped on to the idea and I mulled it over for a moment. “I have no idea how I’d go about selling it, and I’m sure that it would require all sorts of licenses and examinations to ensure the animals are healthy. I doubt they’d accept me as the healthy animal subject.”
Cariad snorted another giggle, to which I rolled my eyes, but made a ‘get on with it’ gesture as she schooled herself.
“Liam, you can change your body and assume the form of many other creatures,” Cariad said slowly, the smile from her giggling bout not leaving her face yet. “And I remember you mentioning a while back during training that your girls finally got you thinking about shifting into creatures from their world.”
The idea struck me immediately, and my back stiffened while I stared at her, mind whirling.
I thought back to talking with the girls about various exports and valuable items they had in their world, from textiles to precious metals. Like on Earth, many of the most valuable materials gathered from animals required the animal’s death to harvest them. But not all of them.
I knew that things like blaze-ox fur weren’t going to be worth anything on Earth, as no one believed in magic and the last thing I needed was a governmental scientist to dissect me if they found out where I got it. But there had to be a few things that were produced by animals in that world that were also valuable here. Things that I could potentially sell.
Cariad waited patiently while my fingers flew to the bond-mark for my clever little snake, a clever little snake that had recently reminded me she was a skilled merchant.
I got a reply only minutes later. The first part of it was in response to my apology for not answering the girls, but the second had what I needed.
It only took four messages and less than ten minutes of back and forth before I thought I had an answer finally.
“Pearls,” I said with a small smile, still staring at the table in front of me.
Cariad’s eyebrow went up, and she made a questioning noise.
I just grinned at her.
<><><>
Cariad wasn’t able to hang around to see the results of my experiments, but had to get back to what she was doing once she had finished the paperwork she’d brought concerning the ruins.
She made me promise to tell her about the results of the experiments later on when I met up with Cerebaton for my regular training session that night, as she normally came to sit in on it. Cariad had initially made the excuse that it was to ensure her boss wasn’t bullying me, but I think she enjoyed watching us both work out.
Doing some research on my phone while my ice-cold coffee sat forgotten, I discovered several things that would weigh in on the entire thing.
Pearls were made up primarily of calcium carbonate, specifically the aragonite final version, but it was the same chemical composition. The rest of it was a mixture of other natural compounds, like protein. Calcium carbonate was also the primary ingredient in many antacids and could be bought by the pound online for cheap.
Another important thing I discovered was that the licensing for selling pearls was basically non-existent.
I would likely have to set up an LLC and maybe get a dealer’s license, but that was something that a CPA could do for me.
If I got this going, it might be worth getting the training needed to grade and certify the pearls myself as well, as that would also dictate the price.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
I also had a feeling that knowing this would allow me to ensure the pearls were only top-quality. For now, though, I needed to find a CPA that wouldn’t ask too many questions and just help me with the paperwork.
The last, and initially largest, issue was the time that it took for pearls to form. The websites I found said that pearls took between six months and several years to form depending on the type of shellfish used. Since I wasn’t using something like an oyster, or even anything from Earth, that was the real question. Thankfully, my sweet Kassandra had an answer to it.
“There is a type of shellfish normally farmed along the coastline of the southern seas that might work. They are called shimmer-nest conches. My parents traded in their products quite a bit when getting started, as the pearls created by the shimmer-nest conches have a great deal of variety in color and shape. Apparently, they are predatory by nature and form the pearls to both attract prey to where they lie on the seabed, then fire them at fish that swim too close to stun them and let the conch capture them. They make dozens of them at a time and don’t take very long to do so.
The excitement was obvious in Kassandra’s mental voice. She went on to promise she’d get in touch with her parents to get as much information on the pearls as possible while I continued my research locally.
I wanted to make sure I had as much information ready ahead of time. That way, if and when I got a chance to implement it, I could just get started.
I had a bit of a nausea moment when I realized that I was considering implanting something in my body to then form into a pearl before extracting it. I was able to chase the issue away by reminding myself that it wasn’t as if I was going to be cutting my arm open and sticking sand in there. The shimmer-nest conches that Kassandra described had specific organs that they used to create the pearls quickly.
I just needed to confirm I could do it too.
Beginning with my left hand, I was able to shift it into a pinctada maxima shell, considered a ‘standard’ for pearl oysters.
The sensation was bizarre, to say the least, as the general sensation of touch from my hand was now gone. I could open the shell up easily enough with the same sort of gesture that would open my hand. I was able to open the shell nearly to ninety degrees before my ‘hand’ began to ache and protest. The interior of my new ‘hand’ was soft to the touch and was about as sensitive as my palm normally was.
Nodding, I shifted my hand back to normal and studied it. There was no damage that I could find and not even stiffness from opening up the shell as far as I had. I was ready to try the next thing.
Focusing on what Kassandra had been able to tell me of the shimmer-nest conch, I tried to shift left hand into one based on her description alone.
I’d been able to shift parts of my body into things I’d never seen before without an issue. After all, I’d never seen a scorpion up close before, or a mantis shrimp for that matter. I just knew the general idea of how it worked, and the magic did the rest.
What happened next was wickedly cool. My left arm swelled a bit in size and my hand turned into a large, cone-shaped shell that was about the size of one of those personal watermelons you could buy at the store. It felt like I was wearing a hard-shelled glove that was severely restricting the movement of my hand. I started to experiment to figure out how the whole thing worked.
After about an hour of futzing about, I discovered several things about the shimmer-nest conch.
With the right muscular gesture, I could extend a tube that I learned was the method that the shimmer-nest conch used to launch its weaponized pearls. This came from the narrow end of the shell, which sat at where my fingertips would be.
Another gesture would extend feelers that ended in hooked prongs from the curved opening in the side of the shell. These, I figured, were for picking up the sand or other detritus I might need to make pearls, or for capturing prey if this was a real shimmer-nest conch.
Figuring out how to actually fire a pearl out took up most of the rest of the hour. I knew that the rigid tube was how I did it. Every time I tried, though, it just made a quiet squeaking noise, like a little fart.
It wasn’t until I got the idea of dunking my hand into a pitcher of water that I figured it out. Apparently, the shimmer-nest conch used water pressure to launch its pearl missiles at its prey.
I had a bit of fun squirting a high-pressure stream of water into the sink before I finally committed to testing how long it would take to actually make a pearl with my shifted hand.
Using my earth magic, I carefully scooped out a tiny bit of my ball of accumulated dust from the earlier experiments, as tiny as about half the size of a BB, perfectly round and tightly compacted. I then used the little feelers to scoop the dirt BB up into the conch shell.
The same kind of innate knowledge that tells you how to roll your tongue guided me to push the little sphere into a spot that would have been my wrist, then told me to wait.
It felt strange and vaguely annoying, kind of like having a bit of food stuck between your teeth, but I was able to ignore it. However, in the process I got a clue as to what the pearls would look like while I studied the shape my hand took.
According to my research, the best ‘clue’ as to what sort of pearl a shellfish might create is the color of the nacre on the lip of the shell, as that was the same material that makes up the pearl itself.
A bit of research told me that conch’s did make pearls on Earth, but they normally made pink pearls and were very rare. The shimmer-nest conch, though, had a glittering, oil-spill color to its nacre that reminded me of Tahitian pearls, which were one of the more valuable ones I’d found while digging for information.
While I waited, I went back to cleaning the apartment, doing things I could do one handed.
I discovered that with the Manipulate Element ability, I could just pull dirt and grime out of a lot of things. Soap scum just broke up and rinsed down the drain while stains in the grout were harder to remove, but still doable. Hard water accumulations were even easier, as it was made up of minerals outright and I could simply tug them free like I had the dust earlier.
It was doing that bit of cleaning that got me on another idea.
While looking at the shiny, clean head of the shower nozzle, it got me wondering if I could just remove tarnish and the like from other metals.
The idea wouldn’t go away, so I’d gone through the box of old things that I’d inherited from my parent’s estate when they passed away until I found their wedding rings.
The little wooden box that held all my mother’s jewelry sat tucked away in a plastic tote in the back of my cramped closet. It didn’t have a lot in it, since my parents didn’t really have a lot of money for things like jewelry, but their wedding bands were something I’d hung onto along with a few sets of earrings and her favorite rosette necklace..
Both were simple, golden bands with my mother’s bearing a trio of small diamonds. Time had left the bright gold of the rings dull and tarnished. I carried them with me back into the living room.
Settling down at the table once more, I focused on the rings and reached out with Manipulate Element.
At first, I struggled a bit in finding them amongst the other bits of metal and earth around me. The ball of compacted dust stood out on the table and proved distracting as it readily responded to my mana, but I was able to push that to one side after a bit of focus.
I found the rings after that: a calm, glimmering sensation in my mind, clouded over with a faint fog that I knew to be the tarnish that had formed on the surface of the rings.
While the tarnish itself wasn’t something I could get hold of with my Manipulate Elements ability, as it was mostly oxygen, I was able to encourage the alloyed material in the rings to release their grip on the oxygen molecules.
This wasn’t an easy process and actually devoured a good half of my available mana pool for the two rings. It left them shimmering brightly in my hand a moment later. Underneath the two circles was a faint grit of black from the other compounds that had made up the tarnish.
“Neat,” I muttered, still feeling the shimmering sensation of the rings in my palm while I studied them.
The rings were old, still the originals that my parents had used in their wedding almost thirty years ago. I could see the faint scratches in my dad’s ring from where it’d gotten a bit beaten up over the years while he was wearing it.
On a whim, I pulled at the metal that made up my father’s ring and watched as the scratch slowly smoothed out, the ridges flowing down flat once more to fill in the damage until it was pristine once more.
“Huh,” I muttered, staring down at the rings. Shaping the gold had taken another three points of mana from my reserve. While it was recovering slowly, it was still a fair bit of mana. “If I can shape gold… Can I find it?”
The thought occupied my daydreams for a short while, imagining going out and ‘panning’ for gold while calling the flakes nearby to my pan instead. I put the idea on my mental list of ‘things to try’.
During my research on pearls earlier, I’d delved a bit into gold to fill out my knowledge. I had confirmed that while you could pan for gold, the government limited it to very specific areas and didn’t allow you to keep nuggets in most of them.
But if I can take the gold sand and flakes and compact them into nuggets? I thought with a grin, no one would know where the nuggets come from, and I can just say that I found them while panning in one of the areas that does let you keep nuggets. Too bad this isn’t the wild west anymore. Prospectors could just claim whole areas and keep their mine’s products. Heck, traveling back in time or to an alternate universe would let anyone with a passing knowledge of geology claim vast riches, since they’d know about where a lot of major mines would be located. Anyone lucky enough to have that happen had better have that knowledge.
The sensation of something caught between my teeth had slowly been shifting as I worked, pondered, and wandered my apartment. When that sensation changed suddenly, it immediately got my attention. The feeling was much like that thing between your teeth suddenly coming loose and feeling the relief of it being free.
I could still ‘feel’ it in my mouth though and acted before thinking, and ‘spat’ out the item.
A sharp ping of something hard striking the table made me jump. The rattling of something rolling across the table followed the ping, and I saw a flash of color before it fell off the table to clack on the floor.
Diving under the table, I cast around for a minute to find the culprit that I knew to be my first pearl. I found it after about a minute and crawled out to inspect my prize in the brighter light of the kitchen.
In my hand was a pearl, perfectly round as far as I could tell, and a glittering, iridescent shade of blue-black that shimmered with a half-dozen other colors as the light played over it. No cracks marred its surface, only a bit of dirt from rolling over the floor earlier.
I couldn’t help the smile that formed on my face now, knowing that this might just be the beginning of my answer to how to cover the costs of my life back home.