The first couple days of work were essentially unremarkable. Since there were no kipears--that's what the fruit was called, by the way; I'd figured from the song, but I found out for sure when I walked by and asked--none ready to be harvested this season, and since I figured the potter wouldn't be happy when I came around, I ended up starting the stonecutter's. Nim showed me his methods, which were straightforward--he only had a hammer and some spikes that had been hardened by some kind of magic, and he drove the spikes into the stone in order to create a split, which was apparently a common method. The early part of the spikes was narrow, so you could set them in place, and the last half or so got much thicker quickly. There were also a set of chisels--no surprise--but they weren't hardened, so they had to get repaired frequently as they deformed. That, I thought wryly as I considered a warped iron chisel that I'd picked up, was the very definition of being caught between a rock and a hard place.

I felt bad, but more than that, I felt a little disgusted at how hard I had to work to pretend that I couldn't just do whatever I wanted, but I really wanted to feel the place out before I revealed myself as some kind of super powerful mage. I did repair some old spikes, re-harden an old hammer, and repair, harden, and sharpen the chisels, but again held back the vast majority of what I could do.

We ended up doing a decent job cutting a bunch of bricks by the time early afternoon came around, and by then I was exhausted. He didn't mind that I didn't stick around the whole day, though he only paid me a little bit for my troubles (no doubt exactly because he didn't get a ton of money for cutting stones in the first place--nothing much here was paved or decorated or anything).

Since I passed by, generally, I stopped over at the potter's, and I found Miun on her wheel, turning a bowl. She only glanced up at me, and I let her finish. The bowl went onto a plate with several others and was placed into a small oven in the back, all this without comment from her.

When she did finally turn her attention fully towards me, I detected a note of simmering resentment in her eyes. I had kind of expected it, between the elders asking me to clean up her mistakes, and me not showing up there first today, but what came out of her mouth was a bit of a surprise.

"You're a liar," she said, not immediately explaining what she meant.

I considered her in silence for a long moment, then moved to lean against a nearby wall and gestured for her to continue.

"I have seen a mage repair things before," Miun said. "The motions that you made yesterday were all wrong, and you were only pretending to be tired. The elders here may be idiots, but I'm not."

Oh, well, if that's all it was. I just nodded at her. "Yes," I said. "I could do a lot more, but I didn't want to go around making everyone feel useless. If I told the elder that I could fix every broken pipe you made in a day--"

"It's more than that," she hissed. "Mages who fix things return them to an older state, but the pipes were never whole. The cracked before they finished hardening." She moved closer to me, and lowered her voice. "I'm not stupid. You don't want my job, that's fine. But don't lie to me."

I looked her in the eyes, not sure what to say. If I said I wasn't going to lie, I'd be lying, because I wasn't planning on telling her I was a summoned hero from another world. "I don't want your job," I said, "and I can do a lot more. But I am not sure I want anyone here knowing everything I can do, not even you."

Miun just eyed me for a few minutes, I think trying to read my face. I didn't put up much of a fight, here; if she were a mind-reader, I was pretty sure I'd know, so I let her look for answers in my face all she wanted. All she would find there, even if she were excellent at reading faces, was that I didn't want to talk about my past.

"If you can do more than repair things," she said suddenly, "then you can help me with the kiln."

I raised my eyebrows. "I can try," I said.

The problem with the larger of Miun's two kilns was obvious when you really stopped to take a look at it. What she called a kiln--really, what the person she'd hired to make it called a kiln--was a essentially a bunch of stacked rocks that were poorly mortared together to make a multi-level stone box. It was a big installation--it had to be, to make the large clay pipes--and it was absolute garbage. The rocks were too oddly shaped and the mortar too cheap to make the thing even halfway decent at holding in a whole lot of hot air, which was the whole point of a kiln.

I could tell immediately why she hadn't tried to press me on fixing that with magic--she'd cleared away the mortar that had fallen out and tried to replace it, failing each time. It was clear in several places that "repairing" wasn't needed--there were gaps in the roof of it too large to mortar together, for instance. Miun explained as she cataloged the problems she'd discovered that the elder in charge of the pipe project had heard some bullshit that people like Miun--she didn't explicitly explain that it was racism--could simply do some things. When Miun turned out to be good at pottery, the elder had expected her to be able to just do pottery, and gotten a nephew to build the kiln on the cheap. Even now, he and the nephew both refused to believe or accept that the shitty kiln was the reason why the larger works were failing to fire correctly.

When she had laid everything out, including what the kiln was supposed to look and work like, I was able to picture it in my head well enough that I could have just waved a hand and been done with it. Instead, I turned to look at her, assessing her tattle-tale potential. I hadn't seen Miun the night before at the bar, and she didn't seem like the sort to go there and gossip. From what she'd said so far, she might not even have many allies here, but if she had stayed for several years I doubted it was really none. So I just studied her for a minute and then shrugged.

"If I do this," I said, "you have to keep my secret."

"Done," Miun said without giving it a moment's thought.

So I knelt in front of it, rolled my sleeves up off of the bracers to where she could see them, and then focused on the mental image. I didn't want to leave the kiln in such a state where it was obvious what I'd done, so I focused on the Fabricate to only change the internals. I ended up just taking the stone rocks it was made of, plus more of the same from nearby, and making a perfectly flat, even slab of it across the roof and sides of the kiln, then making more of the stones and mortar and filling in all the places on the outside where you might have looked in and seen the work I'd done, but leaving that rougher looking to match what was there.

From the outside, it was not entirely clear what I'd done, but as soon as Miun looked inside, I could see her go stock still. It wasn't just how much I'd done, I was sure--it was how easily. After studying the stone there, she almost immediately turned to look at the bracers that I'd just shown off, and only after staring at them a moment looked back to me.

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"I may require adjustments," she said. "But yes, this is more than adequate."

I nodded, covering up the bracers again. "Like I said," I replied, "I'm don't want people to think I am going to take your job, or anyone else's. In a place like this, I'm not sure what the others would think. I'd be interested to know your opinion of what they would say--"

"They won't like it." Miun stood up and placed a cover over the entrance to the kiln. "They will be afraid. Of you, and of the people who will come here looking for you. Whatever those are," she gestured, "they are important, or am I wrong?"

I just smirked and said nothing.

"These are small people, and they wish to remain small. I have seen cities and I have seen towns, and when people have power, others seek to be the one closest to them. That will destroy the peace of the town, whether the ones seeking are from here or from far away. Threats from outside are obvious, but jealousy and greed will take the peace that they have known and tear it down."

I just nodded. The look the elders gave me when I wanted to stay--at all--had kind of implied something like that. "Mostly," I said, "if I can make enough money by being a mage, I'll make a place for myself somewhere outside of town and keep to myself. But it's too early to even start that now, I think."

Miun looked at me, and I could tell that she was thinking hard. "You could just make money," she said, and I could tell there was something in her voice. Whether caution or greed, I wasn't sure. "Out of dirt."

"That would turn the town against me, though," I said. "Wouldn't it?"

She studied me for a long minute, before giving a kind of mild, thoughtful head-nod. "Yes. Or against itself."

"So I'll do some work for the town. Maybe if I sell my services to outside traders, more money will appear than should. But for now..." I shrugged. "I can handle taking it slowly."

At least, I hoped I could.

Miun paid me what she considered a fair price for "fixing" the kiln, but admitted that she owed me a greater favor than she could pay off now. I was downright friendly about that, though I'd never been one to trade favors; we talked for a little while about the town in general, things like where I could get another mattress and how I should go about getting permission to take land nearby. The latter, she suggested, was obvious and simple: just do it, and to hell with anyone who says otherwise. Even if all I did with the property was erect a small cottage, if I did it with my own power, nobody deserved to be able to argue. In theory, the town would tax me once I was a land-owner, but in practice that was all politics, and if I was useful enough I could expect that to be delayed a few years.

Unfortunately, her suggestion for getting another mattress was essentially the same, and there we disagreed.

"If you have this power," she suggested quietly, "why not just use it?"

It was difficult to explain why that sounded like a terrible idea without being, or at least sounding, incredibly paranoid. "It's about... image," I tried. "A foreigner who wants to work and expects to spend money on things the others make is one type of person. Someone who seems entirely self-reliant and doesn't interact with people at all is another. I don't want to be too far apart from the town, not really."

"You want them to be your friends?" Miun was in the process of making another big clay half-pipe to test out the kiln, though I knew it wouldn't really be fired today, and maybe not tomorrow, just based on how much fuel a burn would cost and how she didn't seem to have enough clay on hand. "Most people won't even consider whether your mattress is new or old. At most, getting a new straw mattress will make one farmer happy."

"But it will seem normal," was about the only thing I could really argue.

Miun snorted, filling more of the pipe mold with clay. "They do not think I am normal," she said. "But they accept me. They will accept you, as long as you don't endanger the town."

I looked at the asian-looking woman in front of me, thinking--and not for the first time--that she was probably the most attractive of the people I'd met around here. That wasn't immediately relevant, except maybe that it shut down my thinking a little bit. "I think you're normal."

For some reason, that pissed her off, and she gave me a nasty glare. "You know nothing about me."

"Except that you are clever, willing to keep secrets, and not eager to get into irritating small-town politics."

Her glare softened a little, but only a little, before she turned back to the mold. "And what is normal about those things?"

"I suppose cleverness is something I want to be normal, instead of saying that it is," I admitted, looking away. "I guess what I mostly mean is that I'm not the sort of person who views... anything I've seen about you, so far, as being a reason to dislike you, hate you, or fear you."

"How very banal," Miun replied, without looking at me. "I am so glad that my life as a humble potter is not somehow infuriating to you."

I shut my mouth, feeling humiliated, but not so much that it made me angry. It did make me want to snap off a retort, but I held it in for a long moment. "That's small towns though, isn't it?" I said after a long moment of successfully holding in defensive, acerbic comments. "You said that they don't think you're normal. Does that really not matter?"

"The reasons matter," she said, still without looking. "I am not one of their people. I do not join in their drinking and singing. I do not want their filthy alcohol and I do not like their disgusting food. They offer me things they hope I will like, and I do not. They know how to handle people who are like them, and they do not know how to handle me."

When she put it that way, I was pretty sure that the townspeople were not going to think I was normal, either, once they got to know me. "And what do you like?"

She turned to look at me. "Clean things," she said. "Art. Tea. Doing good work and being recognized for it. And watching storms on the horizon, drenching the lands with water as they go past. Especially when they go past and do not come close. The storms are violent here, and I cannot use my kiln in the rain."

I smiled at her, but she didn't really smile back. I guess she was lost inside somewhere, thinking about the weather, or maybe something else.

"Those are good things," I said quietly, after a moment.

She just rolled her eyes and went back to her work. "If you're only here to flirt," she said after a moment, "just stop. I am not interested."

I laughed, only feeling maybe half-bad for being caught at it. "Okay," I said. "I'll come by again to see how the kiln is holding up, and maybe fix the other pipes you've made."

Miun nodded wordlessly, and I went back to my own place.

In the evening, I went back to the tavern, but I found again that the atmosphere there--while it was nice in many ways--didn't really suit me. People were packed together too close, and the food and drink were... not really great. I met Heglid, who was also obviously not from around here, though I didn't ask exactly where he was from. He worked the sundries store, and we talked a little bit about what I could possibly do to help him.

There was another rousing and bawdy song that got sung part-way through the meal, but I had been in the middle of talking and was so annoyed I didn't listen to most of it. It had something to do with a merry maid and milking, and by the way everyone roared laughter, it was definitely more about sex than food. If I were in a better mood, I might have found that a little funny too, but I didn't like having my entire train of thought derailed because someone else wanted to think about boobs.

In fact, on my way out of the tavern, I found myself thinking more about the melody of the song than the words of it, since I hadn't really been listening to the content. Yesterday's song about being a failure had hit the same rhythm on every line and repeated roughly the same four-line stanza pattern in each verse, or five if you counted the audience echoing the last line again. While I didn't catch the whole of the music tonight, it definitely wasn't the same simple pattern.

Irrelevant, but nice, I supposed. If I ended up hearing a dozen songs all with the same vocal pattern, I'd rip my ears off before coming back to the tavern again. If they were going to be different, well, that would help. Eventually, once I had a place of my own, I'd probably not come back very often, but for now I felt like a hot meal once a day was worth being in a situation that wasn't really... me.