Ruby let her gaze wander as she spun her pen around her thumb, catching it, readjusting it, and spinning it around her thumb again. It was something that she always found herself doing when she was bored, often realizing that she was doing it unconsciously only after she messed up and dropped whatever she was spinning. Thankfully, she managed to catch herself before that happened. It would’ve been stupid to drop her wand and break it a few hours after she got it.
But with no customers, no chores, no school work, and the utter disappointment that she probably wouldn’t be using magic today, what else was there to do but sit around, doing absolutely nothing? She set her pen wand down on the desk in front of her, and slumped over, setting her head down to join it. She considered toying with it, rolling it over to analyze it, but it wasn’t she hadn’t already memorized every single detail of it.
She rolled the pen over anyways. It was a beautiful thing, a fountain pen that looked like it was made of some type of sky blue wood that didn’t seem to ever have been touched by paint, or molested by human tools, like it was a tree on its own, grown and bred for the purpose of being some girl’s pen.
But it actually wasn’t, which was why Max had gotten it for free. Though the courier fees hadn’t been, they were rather cheap and her gracious boss has covered for that anyways.
“Hello there, Antonio,” Ruby muttered under her breath.
That wasn’t its name. Nor was it hers, which would’ve been the case if she had ordered one to be made for herself. The only reason she had “Antonio’s” pen was because Max’s wand-maker friend had mistakenly misread an order, thinking that Thelonius Antonio was actually Antonio Thelonius. Poor Thelonius had expected his name embossed into the pen, but had instead received a pen with his a name that he associated more with his family, one that had apparently tried to kill him on multiple occasions. The fact that it was embossed with a shining gold that almost looked like it was liquid, didn’t help. It was really just a beautiful middle finger to him.
The wand-maker redid the order, of course, but that left him with a fully functional, albeit mislabelled, wand that eventually ended up in Ruby’s hands.
It bothered her a bit more than she expected it to, to know that it technically wasn’t “her wand,” but she found it easy file her complaints away when she learned how much it would have cost her if she had actually ordered her own.
There was nothing that quelled her complaints about how she couldn’t use it yet.
To think that Max had forgotten that pen wands like this one needed magical ink.
“Aaaaaah.” Ruby finally let the pained groan slip out from between her lips, where it had been bubbling for the past few hours.
“This a bad time?”
It took every shred of her willpower not to scream. Unfortunately, when she jerked her head up without warning, the man in front of her let out a low grunt of surprise and flinched backwards.
They stared at each other for a few seconds before Ruby let out a deep sigh.
“I’m so sorry about that, sir.”
The man let out a sigh of his own. “Near scared me half ta death there, Lady.”
It was difficult not to stare at him. With sandy hair that peeked out from underneath a straw hat and almost poked at a pair of young boyish eyes, a set of worn down trousers that were noticeably much darker around his knees, and a long piece of straw sticking out from the corner of his mouth, it was like a young farmer had walked out of an old-time children’s cartoon and into the shop. It was the most absurd thing she’d seen since she started working for Magic Shop, and she’d seen Max refer to a large goose as one of his best customers.
But she was being paid not to be rude to people, so she held back her comments.
“I’m so sorry, sir. That was really rude of me. You caught me dozing, I guess.”
The farmer smiled, though she did notice that it did seem noticeably guarded, like a polite smile that he hadn’t had the opportunity to practice enough. If his choice of clothing wasn’t some sort of contrarian fashion statement, there were probably more animals than people anyways, and whoever he interacted with received either his true smiles or frowns.
“Don’t you mind, don’t you mind,” he said. “Can’t say I haven’t been caught doin’ the same on occasion, ‘cept I can’t exactly sleep well if the sun’s up.”
Ruby laughed once, her polite smile obviously much more practiced than his. “I can’t say I have that problem, sir. If anything, I almost find it easier to sleep during the day.”
Immediately, the young man’s polite smile turned even more obviously polite. “W-why’s that?” he asked. Ruby noticed that curiously, his hands started to twitch, one hand reaching up to play with the edge of his hat and one hand fidgeting with something in his hand.
“Probably all the coffee I drink,” Ruby replied casually. “Either that or I’m secretly a vampire- no, I’m not actually a vampire, sir,” she quickly added as soon as she saw the look of abject horror on his face.
“Huh?” he said dumbly, sweat starting to drip down his brow.
“Look, sir. I’m really sorry. I just make bad jokes sometimes. Can we just, you know. Restart?”
The farmer nodded, but it was easy to assume that he would have probably agreed to anything that Ruby said, bar from her asking to suck his blood.
“Welcome to Magic Shop. How may I help you today?” It was then that she noticed the rock in his hand. While she wouldn’t have called herself an expert in magic by any means, she knew that a rock usually didn’t pulse in different hues of blue and purple like that. “Are you looking to sell? Enchant? Undo a curse?”
The farmer nodded woodenly. “Sell, please,” he said.
Ruby nodded back. That was something she could actually do. If he had chosen either of the other two options, she would have had to take his name down for when Max came back again.
“Just a moment, sir,” she said, reaching down underneath the counter, groping around blindly until she felt a metal bar simply appear in her hands. Drawing it out, she pulled out a large brass scale that looked much too big to fit underneath such a narrow counter and much too heavy for her to carry in one hand. From the heavy sounding thud that it made when she placed it down, it sounded like it too.
“Could you please hand me what you wish to sell?”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
From the way that the farmer hesitated, she wished she had told him to place the rock on the counter instead. It took a while for the farmer to actually work up the courage to step close enough to drop the stone into her hand from a respectable height where he wouldn’t be able to grab her. When she caught the stone, she was surprised to find that it was warm to the touch. Though she knew that it would probably be better to just toss the stone onto the scales, curiosity got the better of her and she found herself turning it over in her hands.
“It’s beautiful,” she commented, admiring the way that the colour of the stone always seemed to be shifting. With each shift of colour, the stone pulsed against her hands in rhythm. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, hoping for any clues. As an amateur, she could only guess that it was a heart, an egg, or something that she had never heard of. Usually it was the last.
“Don’t know a thing, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s jus’ a lil’ thing, great-uncle Mitch left me when he died. I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know nothin’ else, truly.”
Ruby sighed. “I’m really not a vampire. I promise I’m just a normal girl.”
“Of course, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Ruby sighed again and gently placed the rock onto one of the scales and pulled the sides of it upwards, extending a hidden set of bars that closed over the scale like a circular birdcage. After repeating the same thing to the other side, enclosing the empty space with another birdcage, she tapped the top of it twice and stepped back. The farmer stepped back twice.
When the arms of the scale started to rotate, generating a low machine-like whir, Ruby closed her eyes. She always enjoyed using the scale, she liked the sound it always made when the coins started apparating into the empty scale, falling into place, trying to balance the monetary weight of the object on the other end. It had a very satisfying sound, like a combination of being inside a small shed during a hailstorm and an old popcorn machine.
But after two little drops of metallic hail, or two popped kernels, the whirring slowed down and stopped.
Ruby opened her eyes, meeting the farmer’s for a brief moment before he turned away. He looked disappointed, no doubt realizing that the two coins probably meant his colourful rock hadn’t been worth much.
Ruby shrugged and stepped forward to retract the cage over the coins when she noticed it.
“Hmm,” she mused out loud. While the coins that sat there were usually made of a solid gold, she didn’t recognize the coins that sat in the scale, neither in their material or design. She held one up to her eyes. It was made of some silvery white metal, with an embossment of a coiling dragon on one side. She flipped it over to see a design of an ornate sword, with tiny jewels imprinted in the coin itself to decorate the hilt.
“Two quarters?”
Ruby looked back at the farmer, who immediately shied away from her gaze. He looked shocked at himself for having even spoken up.
“These aren’t quarters, sir. They’re probably worth quite a lot actually. Would you like me to convert the price to a different currency?”
The farmer raised an eyebrow. “You do that?”
“Of course, sir,” Ruby replied. “Magic Shop prides itself in being able to cater to a multinational, multidimensional customer-base. Would you like to take advantage of our currency conversion services?”
To his credit, even though he seemed more confused than ever, the farmer didn’t hesitate to nod. “Yes please. American dollars, please.”
“To clarify, do you mean the US Dollar, from Earth?” she asked.
“Yes, I mean US Dollars. Why would I mean anything…” he trailed off. “Ain’t we in Manhattan right now?”
Ruby raised an eyebrow, not at the nature of the question but at the location that he thought they were in. Out of all places she guessed such a stereotypical farmer was from, Manhattan would not have been on her list of top guesses.
“We’re in Magic Shop,” Ruby said. Before the farmer could rush towards the door, she continued. “I have no doubt that if you stepped outside that door again, you would find that you’ve exited in the exact same place that you’ve entered, sir. We appear anywhere and everywhere, sir. It’s just the nature of Magic Shop.”
The farmer stared at her for a few seconds. She waited for a few more seconds, but when he didn’t say anything or try to run away again, she simply reached under the counter again – she pretended like she hadn’t noticed him flinch away - for what looked like a large mug made of clear crystal. Unlike the scale, it was just as heavy as it looked and Ruby couldn’t help but grunt as she heaved it onto the counter in front of her. Also unlike the scale-
“Is that a fuckin’ USB cord?”
Ruby didn’t bother to answer the question verbally and silently plugged in what looked like – and what was, in fact – a USB cord into Max’s laptop.
“This will just take a few minutes, sir.”
“What the fuck?” Ruby looked at him, locking eyes with him. For the first time, he didn’t look away, his expression making it clear that his level of confusion and curiosity had finally overtaken his fear. “Ye use a laptop?”
She couldn’t help but laugh a little, just at the absolute shock on the man’s face. As if this had been the most surprising thing he’d seen. “Yeah we use laptops. Who doesn’t these days?”
“B-but yer a magic shop!” he protested, apparently forgetting his fear of her supposed vampirism. “Yer supposed to be all mystical and shit, not usin’ a fuckin’ laptop!”
Ruby shrugged, unable to wipe the wide grin off her face and not caring enough to try. “I don’t know what you want me to say, man. It’s the twenty-first century. Who doesn’t use computers nowadays?”
Though the slack-jawed expression on the farmer’s face suggested that he couldn’t form any other words, the laptop’s beeping interrupted him before he could even try.
Ruby looked down at the screen to see a large angry X. She frowned. “Looks like we’ve got some sort of error here,” she mumbled. She’d never had an error when trying to sell anything before, and with Max still out of the shop, it would be annoying to try to troubleshoot this on her own. “Amount of currency exceeds physical size of container,” she read out loud. “Please choose a different currency, or method of payment.” Raising an eyebrow, she looked up at the bottom of the page, window, where the total conversion sum was. She whistled.
“Holy shit,” she heard herself say.
“Why, what’s wrong?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen, but she could hear the fear slowly retuning into the farmer’s voice. Even without checking, she could guess that he probably had backed away closer to the door again.
“So apparently those coins are platinum drachs,” from some dimension that she didn’t want to try to pronounce the name of. She double-checked the number at the bottom of the screen before she continued, making sure that she wasn’t just imagining the amount of zeroes. “According to this, two platinum drachs are worth about two hundred and thirty thousand US Dollars.”
She looked up to see the farmer staring at her with bulging eyes that threatened to pop out of his head. She smiled at him, waiting for his reaction.
It was only when his cheeks started to turn purple that she started to get concerned.
“Sir?”
He drew back a gasping breath, and immediately started to cough. Ruby smiled for a few more seconds until she realized that he hadn’t stopped coughing. He slowly sank to kneel on one knee.
“Sir?” Ruby stepped out from behind the counter. “Are you alright?”
She patted him on the back, a bit lost on what to do in such a situation. She pretended not to see the tears dripping from the man’s eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered. She wasn’t sure whether he was thanking her, or thanking whatever God he believed in. Probably Jesus, if she were to trust her streotypes. “Thank you, so much,” he sobbed out through another cough.
Ruby sighed and patted him on the back once more. She didn’t know what sort of money problems he’d been going through to get such a strong reaction, but while she couldn’t help but feel happy for the man, she didn’t enjoy the awkwardness of watching a grown man cry so openly.
“Bad time?”
Ruby looked up to see Max wiping wet mud from his boots onto the doormat. Behind him, just as he was closing the door, Ruby managed to catch a small glimpse of the world behind it, not the streets of Toronto where she’d come from, and though she’d never been to Manhattan before, she doubted that the rainforest-like jungle she saw came from the same place that the farmer had walked in through.
“Hi Max,” she said, still patting the farmer’s back. “Can you write up a cheque?”