Aaron tried to take in the sights of the Goblin Market without staring. It wasn’t just polite, it was prudent. After all, some of the non-human people at the bustling bazaar could come from a culture where duels to the death were the answer to any perceived slight. Getting shanked by Don Quixote de Qo’noS on his first public trip was less than ideal; thankfully Aaron was well-practiced at watching his surroundings without staring.
“So what do you think?” Griffin asked, leaning in.
“It’s pretty cool, but, uh… no candy shops or racing brooms?”
Kiara rolled her eyes. “There’s an entire section of shops dedicated to kitschy crap, but the world of real eidolons isn’t driven by teenagers with families that have more psychological disorders than members.”
Albert cleared his throat significantly and Kiara sighed.
“It isn’t entirely driven by teenagers with families that have more psychological disorders than members,” she admitted.
“You can find just about anything here; it’s one of the largest magic bazaars in the world,” Griffin said.
“We’re going to get you some basic supplies. An EDS, some emergency potions, maybe a holdout wand,” Kiara said.
“What about magic armor or talking swords?”
Albert, Griffin, and Kiara shared a small laugh at that. They quietly informed Aaron that there was very little in the way of enchanted armaments that would be as effective as what Aaron’s body was capable of, especially with some training to get the most out of it. Learning a bit of magic would be a significant improvement, as well. Kiara lowered her voice further and Aaron noted that she was fiddling with the small stone cube she’d used to ensure their privacy back at the diner.
“When it comes to artifacts and relics, this stuff is like costume jewelry compared to what we have access to,” she said. “But they probably won’t kit you out until you’ve been confirmed.”
Aaron held his hands up. “What are we doing here, then? Window shopping? I’m cool with that, but I feel like I’ll lose my mind if I can’t pick up some kinda magic gizmo I can screw around with later.”
“Day-to-day stuff for a little extra protection and utility, more out of convenience than because we can’t get the stuff in-house,” Griffin said.
“I know a couple guys we can talk to down here; good merch and they won’t screw us on prices,” Albert said.
“It kinda skeeves me out, all the ‘guys’ you know,” Kiara said.
“Have I ever steered you wrong?” Albert responded, with a leering smile that suggested that question should absolutely end with a ‘yet.’
With much rolling of eyes, they followed Albert to see the first of his ‘guys.’
Their destination was a wooden storefront not far from the stairway. A simple sign hung above the door that read Kweeble’s Storage Solutions. When they entered, a small bell hung over the door rang softly.
The chime of the bell was strange, the seemingly quiet tone reverberating through the small space with a sound that was almost palpable. It rolled away from the door, filling the space, then flowed back over them at the entrance. Aaron would have thought it was impossible in the small shop, but when he stepped through the door behind Albert he found a room that was far bigger than it should have been.
Beside the door, standing at an elevated lectern, was a very small man, no more than four feet tall and quite thin. Aaron had known a couple of little people in his life and was pretty sure this man did not have dwarfism. His limbs were completely proportionate — which wasn’t unheard of among little people — but his ears were slightly pointed and his fingers were just a little too long. He almost could have passed for a child, except for the clearly adult facial features, which included a rather dashing mustache.
Aaron couldn’t even guess at what the small man might be, taxonomically speaking. A gnome? A halfling? Perhaps a literal dwarf, in the fantasy sense of the word? He’d learned recently that almost every dragon wasn’t really a dragon at all, so he was completely in the dark.
“Kweeble!” Albert called, waving to the small man.
“Ah, Albert,” Kweeble said, sounding less than thrilled at their arrival. “And you brought friends. I hope you’re not here to try pawning more old pouches off on me? That last batch had enchantments so faded I hardly turned a profit after restoring them.”
Albert gestured at Aaron. “My friend here is considering getting into delving, so he’s going to need some kind of basic storage for supplies and gear.”
“Delvers,” Kweeble said, blowing out his mustache. “My people are largely chthonic and plenty of us go gallivanting about the underworld, but I never saw the allure, personally.”
Albert smirked. “It’s like Dr. Jones said — fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory. Besides, it’s not like you’re an exemplar of gnomish society; most of you are wilder than Amish teens on Rumspringa and you’re practically dwarven in nature.”
“I’d take offense to that if dwarves weren’t such damned good architects and enchanters,” the gnome replied. Then, “And tall… the rat bastards.”
“Tall being relative, in this case,” Griffin stage whispered to Aaron.
Albert and Kiara gave the big man the stink eye. The gnome was probably sick of short jokes in general, but both drakus were on the short side, as well. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.
“Sorry, Mr. Kweeble, I was teasing my compatriots out of habit and didn’t mean to be disrespectful to you,” he said.
“I don’t mind the japes and jabs of the awkward, gangly, and unwieldy, as long as you don’t call me a fucking munchkin,” Kweeble said. “That’s a good way to volunteer yourself as a test subject on whether my void bags work.”
“Don’t mind Griff; his brain is starved for oxygen at that altitude,” Albert said.
“It’s the only reasonable explanation,” Kiara agreed. “If his parents had dropped him on his head as a baby, the height would’ve surely killed him.”
After a pause, Griffin said, “Nice one.” He offered a round of high fives, but no one other than Aaron could reach that high.
“So what kind of storage does your friend need?”
“Something simple and durable; a hundred pounds should be more than enough,” Kiara said.
Kweeble gestured to the wall behind them. “That section in the corner has my basic stuff. Let me know if you have any questions.”
The shop was filled with containers of all sorts — bags, chests, satchels, crates, chests, and more — and included a section at the rear that looked almost like an electronics store. Individual tablets were set out, each displaying a kind of slideshow or presentation on some product or other. But the corner Kweeble had directed them to was fairly simple, containing mostly bags and pouches that were plain in appearance.
“I’m guessing we aren’t here for a Louis Vuitton,” Aaron said. “So what kind of storage are we talking about?”
“Kweeble can do designer bags if you really want one, but most of his stuff is custom-made; high quality but easy to overlook,” Albert replied.
There was zero chance the small containers and bags in the display could hold a hundred pounds of anything — except an incredibly dense metal like tungsten or platinum, maybe, and even that probably wouldn’t be feasible for most of them — yet many of their tags advertised a capacity as much as five times that. Aaron suspected he knew what he was looking at, but he was in uncharted waters with all this magic-in-the-real-world stuff and wanted to avoid making assumptions.
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“I’m obviously missing something about these bags,” he said, leaving the question implied.
“They’re extra-dimensional storage, or EDSes,” Griffin said. “Kind of like a bag of holding from D&D.”
Kiara smacked Griffin in the arm. “An EDS is a lot more impressive than some stupid burlap sack that just condenses stuff.”
“You’re thinking of a handy haversack; those are usually made of canvas and are basically just gunnysacks,” Albert said.
Kiara snorted dismissively. “No I’m not and you’re an ignoramus for thinking so. A handy haversack is a backpack; it even has extra pouches on it. A bag of holding is four feet deep with a two foot opening. It’s basically a sack of potatoes without the potatoes.”
“I think she’s right,” Griffin said, rubbing his chin. “A sack of potatoes with sixty four cubic feet of potatoes in it is still pretty impressive.”
Kiara snorted. “Do you know how much sixty four cubic feet of potatoes weighs? More than a ton! It’s like twenty five hundred pounds or something. You can only get like twelve cubic feet of potatoes in a bag of holding before hitting the weight limit, which is why D&D bags are dumb as hell.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Albert asked.
Kiara flicked her hair with one hand. “I’m Irish; we know potatoes.”
“Bullshit,” Albert said, waving a finger at her. “I call bullshit on that.”
“Second,” Griffin said.
Aaron didn’t want to take a side in this argument — he didn’t know D&D that well and, more importantly, he didn’t want Kiara all riled up at him — but all three of them pressed him to weigh in on whether Kiara’s claim was, in fact, bullshit. They pretty much backed him into a corner.
“I can’t really get behind the idea of inheriting knowledge from ethnicity alone,” he said, aiming for diplomacy. “I don’t think there’s an element of biological determinism when it comes to the Irish and knowledge of potatoes.”
Kiara gave him a scathing look while Albert and Griffin patted him on the back and hooted about a successful ‘bullshit referendum,’ something they apparently did among themselves somewhat frequently.
“Ugh, fine,” Kiara said. “I did the math for a campaign I played in high school and it stuck in my brain. Are you happy?”
Based on the continued gloating and smugness from the other two guardians, Albert and Griffin were, in fact, quite happy. Aaron opted not to join in their celebratory gloating; he still didn’t know Kiara well enough to have established a relationship like the one the trio shared.
“If I’m understanding right, these are like bags of holding in premise, but they’re better in practice,” Aaron mused, dragging their attention back to the task at hand. “Any advice on which ones are best?”
A lively discussion ensued about respective benefits of the various forms of storage. Waist packs had great accessibility but weren’t very discreet to access, while most satchels, bags, and pouches were easy to overlook but could be a pain to get into. Boxes of any sort almost never had either benefit to speak for them but had the advantage that they could have a significantly higher capacity because their external dimensions were static. At some point, Kweeble had abandoned his perch at the lectern and come to stand behind them.
“Perhaps you’d be interested in my latest design,” the gnome said. “They’re a bit pricier, but worth the investment.”
“Storage rings?” Aaron asked.
The gnome cocked an eyebrow at him. “Rings? Like you’d wear on your finger? Why would you want something like that?”
“Because you could wave your hand and put things in or take them out?”
“Well, no, that would take predictive magic so advanced it would have to either be sentient or tied right into your consciousness, neither of which are practical to accomplish or advisable in the least,” Kweeble said. “Besides, the degree of dimensional compression you’d need on the band of a ring would have the potential to cause all kinds of catastrophes.”
“Like what?” Albert asked.
Kweeble hummed in thought. “Well… let’s say you’ve been out imbibing some happy beverages with friends and you’ve gone to the restroom to relieve yourself. In your state, you let your thoughts wander and remind yourself you need to pick up your credit card before you leave for the night.” The gnome eyed them to make sure they were following. “Now, this fantastical ring — which is on your finger, remember — registers your desire to pick something up, so it tries to open the storage. Only it’s not in contact with your credit card, it’s in contact with what you’re currently holding.”
It took a moment for the male drakus to get the picture Kweeble was painting, but then there were three simultaneous sharp intakes of breath, each of the men wincing as their imagination filled in the blanks. Kiara rolled her eyes and Kweeble chuckled as he finished making his way to a display case at the rear of the store.
The display was made of handsome wood and had a hinged glass top that could be lifted up. An assortment of simple cloth packets lay under the glass, lined up in neat columns and partially overlapping each other.
“They look like those cheap dice bags you can get at a gaming store,” Griffin observed. “All they’re missing is the corded drawstring.”
“I don’t know why anyone would need an entire bag just for dice, but I don’t really go much for gambling,” Kweeble replied. Then his tone turned boastful. “I call these Pocket Dimensions. You slide them into any regular pocket, the enchantment secures them in place, and then you have an EDS right there in your pants, jacket, or vest.”
“So they can’t be closed? Doesn’t that pretty much ruin the security of your storage and give any pickpocket access to all your shit?” Albert asked.
“For the enchantment to work properly, you have to be attuned to the Pocket, so no one else will be their grubby little mitts in there,” Kweeble bragged.
What that meant might have been obvious to everyone else, but Aaron had no idea.
“What do you mean you have to be ‘attuned’ to it?” he asked.
“It’s a lesser version of bonding, not very commonly used,” Kiara explained.
Albert wheezed a laugh. “Diet bonding, very casual; you don’t even have to go on FetLife.”
A joke popped into Aaron’s head completely unbidden. How can you tell if someone is vegan, does CrossFit, or uses FetLife? They’ll fucking tell you.
Kweeble opened the case and removed one of the small sleeves, giving them a brief demonstration. The pockets had very good weight capacities for their size, ranging from one to five hundred pounds, but the real selling point was as the gnome had said — you could slide it into any pocket and you had an EDS that was both highly accessible and extremely inconspicuous.
Unless you go around pulling giant swords and mallets out of it, at least, Aaron thought.
From the quick glances they exchanged, Aaron suspected his companions were more than a little impressed with Kweeble’s new storage innovation. They tried not to let it show for reasons that became quickly apparent as they launched into fierce negotiations with Kweeble over pricing.
The gnome was a shrewd — and often vulgar — negotiator, so it took nearly half an hour of bickering and dickering for the two parties to settle on a final price. It ended up being a thousand lumens for five of the slim pouches. Aaron initially thought they came out ahead when they talked Kweeble into throwing in the fifth pocket free of charge but when they finally came to terms he changed his mind.
I think Kweeble got the better of us, he realized. I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual price is two hundred per pocket and we only managed to get the real price before he drops the novelty mark up.
“You got that kinda lux on you? Or do you need to use a Q-card?” Kweeble asked.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Griffin said, fishing around in a waist pouch hidden under his sweatshirt.
The most basic unit of lux — aether-infused metals used for money by the community of mythics, eidolons, and magi — was a single copper coin, called a lumen. Since each coin, except electrum, was worth one-ninth of the next, the lumens quickly added up. An aethril — the most valuable coin, which was made of pure aether and alloyed with no other metals — was worth more than two thousand lumens. A platinum, the next most valuable coin, was worth quite a bit less than a thousand.
Aaron had done the math earlier at the diner on his phone and watching Griffin fiddle with coins was threatening to give him the headache all that arithmetic had threatened earlier. Griffin didn’t seem to have the same problem.
After just a few seconds, he produced four different coins — one that looked like silver polished to a high shine, one that was clearly gold, one a paler golden yellow that Aaron guessed was electrum, and one that was unmistakably copper.
Kweeble examined each coin briefly, giving Aaron a chance to see that all but one of them had a single line engraved in them. The gold coin was marked differently — an X with a line running vertically through the center that reminded him of the Dead Kennedys logo.
Kweeble jingled the coins for a moment, then tossed the copper back to Griffin.
“Friends and family discount,” he said with a cackle.
Kweeble pulled five slim boxes out of a cupboard under the pocket display case. He opened each to show them they matched the colors and materials they had selected for the pockets, then handed them over.
Since the pockets needed to be attuned to be used, they couldn’t use them right out of the store so Albert slipped them into his own waist pack. They exchanged thanks and farewells with Kweeble and left the store.
Back out in the mall, Kiara began fiddling with her small stone cube again.
“Next, we need to visit an alchemist,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Albert said. “I know a guy.”