“I see,” Lauren said. She seemed somewhat pleased that I was not a native to the country - which might have sounded strange, but I thought I understood why this was.

There was definitely some friction between the humans and the lizardmen in Arconia which I had discovered in my time there. I wasn’t sure of the full details, but things were not as cordial between the two factions as I’d initially thought. In truth, they seemed to just tolerate each other’s presence more often than not. Case in point, the way that lizardman had said ‘human’ with disdain earlier. Maybe there had been a war between the two? I couldn’t be sure, but I did note that many lizardmen treated me better once they realized I wasn’t from this country - as if they were reassured that while I was human, I wasn’t ‘one of those humans.’

It was the opposite for the humans though, who, once they saw that I wasn’t from here, usually became suspicious with few exceptions. And they understood that I wasn’t from here once they got a closer look at my facial features - it was a bit disappointing when initially, from a distance, they’d see me and be relaxed only to tense up as I got closer and they realized that I didn’t look right somehow.

As for the lizardmen, I guessed they had as much trouble differentiating human faces as I did lizardmen faces, so they probably didn’t even notice I wasn’t from around here until I mentioned it.

“Well then,” she continued. “I have no problem with you joining us. Ah, first let us discuss the terms of your contract.”

Although she said that, the lizardmen behind me stepped forward and started talking about things like working hours, how much I would be paid, etc. He threw around a lot of figures, and though I roughly had an idea of how much a denarius was worth in this world, I really couldn’t get a handle on what these figures actually translated to.

A day’s manual labor would pay between six and eight denarii, and the cost of staying at a very low-class inn for a night was four denarii. You could feed yourself, so long as you weren’t too picky, for three denarii a day.

As such, the pay of sixteen denarii a day and a ten percent cut of the profits of anything I managed to sell sounded much better than what I was doing before, but was it a ‘fair’ wage for what I was doing? Or was I being scammed? I had no reference to go off on, and so I ended up just nodding along, saying it was all good.

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“Then, let’s get you started immediately,” Lauren said.

I was taken outside the office by the other lizardmen, who introduced himself as, “Mar-hiss-bump-tr.” I decided to call him ‘Mark’ in my head.

He started giving me some more details on how the shop ran. Lauren was the shop’s actual owner, but being a Rank Three Liberomancer she was extremely busy with other things, and so it was Mark, a Rank Two Liberomancer, who actually oversaw the day-to-day operations of the shop.

I didn’t know at the time what the ranks of Liberomancy meant, but from what he was saying, it appeared that the higher the number, the more important you were.

He led me to the room which was used for writing grimoires - where I had seen the half-dozen lizardmen before.

Now though, I got a better look at them. They were all focused on what they were doing, and what drew my attention was that one of them was writing using his tail. I had known that the lizardmen had prehensile tails to some extent, but I didn’t know that they were good enough to write with. The other five all wrote with their hands, however, and all of them were right handed.

Mark cleared his throat and they all turned their heads to look at him, and with some startled looks, noticed my presence. “This is Stefan, he will be joining us as a scribe from today onward,” Mark said.

There was some awkward silence. “Pull the other one,” a voice answered. Even I could hear the disbelief in his voice.

“Yes, I know that having a human among us is somewhat unorthodox, but, rest assured, this is no joke, he will be working as one of you all, and I pray that you all can get along with him,” Mark said.

They didn’t seem to have fully accepted those words, but at the same time, they didn’t seem to object to them either and after a few moments of hesitation, they all decided to go back to work.

Mark helped me set up a place to work. I was handed a slender brush, and as I moved to write, I suddenly became self-conscious of one thing.

I was left handed. That wasn’t much of an issue back on Earth, but I remembered stories of what my mother and grandmother, who were both also left handed, had told me. My grandmother had been made to do everything with her right hand, as it was ‘wrong’ to use your left hand for things - she would get a rap on the knuckles if she were to ever use her left hand for anything. She was a bit more lenient with my mother, but even she had been trained to use her ‘correct’ hand at a young age. All the lizardmen used their right hands - aside from the one writing with his tail, that was. Would it be too conspicuous for me to use my left hand? Would they find it weird?

After some internal deliberating, I decided that I was greatly overthinking this and just started writing. I made another copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 95. I didn’t read it myself though, as that would likely not fly if I was using company resources for my own purposes.