Though Elde and I were beggars on the street, the lowest of the low, the leftovers of society, it didn’t matter.
We had each other, we had food, we had water, and now, we had the best thing of all…
We had a get rich quick scheme.
It didn’t take long for Elde to get into the swing of things, into the grifter lifestyle. When we counted up the amount of money we made that first day and compared it to what Elde remembered making before, it took little to no persuading for him to get over his initial discomfort.
We were making some bank.
From the first couple of weeks of trying out the act we made almost 20 Bits a day, or 1 Obit.
That’s another thing I picked up from Elde, currency.
It seems that despite the numerous factions, clans and kingdoms that are scattered all across the homeland and the ones now emerging in the new continent, they all use the same universal currency for all transactions in this world. How Elde explained it went like this:
The lowest is the Bit. A reddy brown coin that makes up all the coins that are thrown at us.
The next is an Obit, equal to 20 bits and is a pale steel colour.
After that are Cobits, equal to 5 obits or 100 bits. They have bright blue colour apparently though I have yet to see.
Then comes Malids that add up to 20 Cobits or 100 Obits or 2000 Bits, (Evidently Elde tells me, the average household here lives on 4-5 Malids a year, with the households in Millawen probably making a bit more due to the stronger economy that comes from being situated on a busy trade route.) each made of a shiny black metal and are a size bigger than the three coins that come before it.
Next to last are Kells, which equate to 50 Malids or 1000 Cobits or 5000 Obits or 100,000 Bits and are a size bigger again. Elde told me he had seen but never even held one of these coins before.
But I had. I was well familiar with them. Due to a certain mentally deranged someone.
The Wizard! Bloody Hell! He had given me thirty of the exact greenish gold coins Elde described to me when he threw me out of his tower. That means, he gave me 1500 Malids worth of coins or, in a more terrifying comparison, he gave me the amount of money equal to 300 times the average household yearly income in a small coin purse to just carry around, all by myself!
Fuck me.
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Seriously? How am I still alive?
Thank God I had the forethought to not take out one of the coins he gave me. If I hadn’t pulled myself together and thought it through carefully when I first arrived I would have been killed by one of the gangs around here before the Sun set on my first day.
Another ‘Thank God’ too, for the man (or woman) upstairs, for the isekai genre that prepared me for my, as it so happened, ‘transported to another world’ event.
But anyway. After overcoming my momentary bout of terror I quickly pulled myself back to hear Elde explain to me the last piece of currency here. The currency outside of the common man’s reach, the money used by those who have the talent to rise above us lowly ones who lack the talent to rise higher.
Shings. Or crystals, as a matter of fact.
A pale shining crystal that is only usable to the wizards or the warriors of Calzyn of which the most measly can equal around approximately 1000 Kells. On top of this, it is only used by the lower tier individuals as transactions of higher value can only be done through trading.
At least, from what I have gathered from what Elde has told me.
So with a very basic idea of the monetary system here which Elde provided, I was able to have a better grasp on where we stood financially, which was considerably better than the rest of the beggars and even better than some of the poorest workers here who themselves were making maybe 1 Obit a day and still had to support a family. So all in all, me and Elde aren’t doing too bad. And it was from this very detail, that Elde’s idea came into being.
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“It’s very simple, as all great plans should be.”
“Okay” I responded doubtfully
“We're both stuck here but we don’t have to be now. With the amount of money we are going to start making from our “act” we could probably rent out a small room that we could share together. But, no one is going to take in anyone who is in the state that we are in now. So, I say, we save up enough money to pay for us to live and eat, at least better than we do now, for about a year or so. Once we have enough money we’ll clean ourselves up, buy some better clothes and then get a place.” Elde starts rattling off.
“When we do that we can then start looking for work. You can be a labourer on the docks for a while and I can inquire about getting a scribe position of some kind. When your language and writing are even better, we can work on you getting a better job alongside me and then from there we can move ourselves up to a better, more comfortable, standard of living. A good plan, right?”
I was still figuring out what he said exactly but I got the gist of it. With no other plans or better alternatives available elsewhere I quickly nodded to him my agreement.
“Excellent. I reckon we will need about 3 Malids for it to work so with what we make minus our meager food expenses and taking into account a bit of fluctuation in income it should take us perhaps a year to save up enough coin. What do you reckon?
With a plan and some hope for the future, Elde was clearly excited, and I was too. I had been through a lot of shit living in this world resulting in me hitting rock bottom, but I have some company now and a way for us both to climb out of it. There was only one thing I could say.
“Le...eet’s do it.”
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And that was our plan.
From that point on our act really started taking off. We kept it the same, in the same spot too for a while but under my suggestion we moved to different spots along the docks where different people would pass through. This way, those who hadn’t seen us before would now be able to, and would let go of some more coin for Elde and I as their initial sympathy opened up their wallets and purses a bit wider than usual.
We changed the act up a bit too occasionally.
Sometimes Elde would appeal to passersby as I pretended to be blind or not right in the head. Sometimes I would carry Elde on my back and I would walk out amongst the crowds and try to garner some of their sympathy with my noble plight. A couple times we tried faking each other's deaths in front of a crowd but that didn’t work out real well. Even if either of us managed to deliver an oscar worthy performance it would instead freak most people out as they determined for themselves that we must have died from some sort of infectious disease and our act would end up driving them away instead.
Either way, we managed to expand and work our performance well as we got into the habit of it all, all the while Elde also kept teaching me the Cali language and text alongside some other things about this world.
Yeah. It started off hard and tragic but with Elde by my side, things are actually starting to look up.