Calling the Kettle Black Magic [Crafting]
Sept 13, 2015 4:07:05 GMT
Capsule and Franny Stein like this
Post by Franny Stein on Sept 13, 2015 4:07:05 GMT
Set to: listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=PtEwjilDAfE#Counting_Crows-_Hangin__Around
Walking down the more commerce-heavy corridors of Londonium it occurred to Franny that she had been neglecting something.
“Well, many things…”
But one principle object of neglect now occupied her displeasure, a very real lack of funds. It was not so serious an issue thanks to the very natural nature of the economy having made the more tasteless game-styled foods incredibly cheap. Frugal Franny never truly wanted for hunger, drink, or shelter. Shelter was always more than possible at the Cathedral on the worst of nights.
“Still, there’s a very definitive feeling of lack of forward progress, one’s supposed to gain things over time, or at least, it feels that way.” Franny thought of her experience bar. That was one such example, commercial buying power should be another.
Nodding solemnly to her lack of proper attention to variance, Franny reobserved her skills and found blacksmithing, something picked on an innocent whim, as a disappointingly low level 1. So that was it then. Franny would work on blacksmithing, though the dirtiness of the enterprise brought a kind of distaste to her heart. She had enjoyed watching her father work on cars in her youth as was his hobby. She remembered excitedly handing him tools. Franny caught her hair and laid it across her open hand, how ugly it would look all sooty. Franny wasn’t above vanity.
“Oh well…”
Tossing the locks of hair over her shoulder, she continued her investigation of the market district. On the third pass, she entered a shop out of a false interest. Nodding to the manager, she picked up a random club and swung it a few times with an investigative nod. Next was a sword, an axe. She ran her fingers down chain mail and carefully knocked on a helmet. Her face was all analysis and false understanding. Nodding to the store manager, she exited.
“Thank you!” she waved over her shoulder. “Now how the hell would I make something that nice?”
Franny mused with her fingers lightly touching her lips as if waiting to see if she could yet hook an idea out of her mouth like a fish. There were no bites just yet. Like this Franny investigated every other store. All of the store’s offerings played up the obviously important idea that they contained the best offerings, even the crap in a store full of crap was offered like the crafter’s best attempt at gold.
“That might be my angle.” Franny mused. “If everyone wants to be the best, I should just go ahead and seize what I’ve got, I’ll be the worst.”
“It’ll be a long road” the tiny smithomancer mused walking down the streets a fourth time. For the best products in some of these established shops, the rest hardly needed to sell, Franny would be making crumbs at a strong effort with her method, but she simply didn’t see any other way to enter the market.
“I’ll just have to barely meet demand for a cheap price, like one of those crappy discount Halloween costume shops…Cheap material, disposable, satisfies a certain quickly passing aesthetic, then you’re on to the next one.”
“Yeah.” Franny nodded. “That’s what I can do.”
She summoned the one minion she was allotted in town to carry her stuff. She needed to visit the gatherer’s corner to barter for the worst iron. The hooded shadow shambled after her smoothly without even eliciting a single glance. Franny loved adventurer cities.
*
Walking the various back alleys, Franny stepped toward one of the dirtier parts of the city. It wasn’t so bad an area, but raw materials tended to be a little messy and the people who resorted to gathering them a little poorer. Pulling up her hood to protect her hair, she allowed her skeleton to carry her on its shoulders. It was much easier to see this way. She was looking for the less crowded stalls of this flea market, those who might be struggling for one reason or another. The reasons to her were obvious:
1) Less people allowed more time for bartering.
2) Less demand allowed for more bartering.
3) She wasn’t the least bit concerned with quality,
the lower the costs the easier the profits on a cheap sale…
Scanning over the heads of the masses, Franny was glad for the game’s consideration in giving her a basic means to already start blacksmithing, she had a trusty hammer in her inventory alongside an anvil that was apparently enough at this level to accomplish whatever the heck it was she wanted to make. In time she spotted the more desperate stalls. “Not even quite stalls so much as litters of buckets actually.” This is what Franny was looking for, people on the hard edge, there was a twinge of social justice in sending money their way. Many were actually landers Franny realized. She wondered if desperation would be enough to deal with her haunted retinue. Franny held up a single hand like an upper class lady, and saw if it caught any eyes. To her mildly confused surprise, the gesture actually did. Maybe it was a remnant from a game designer’s own understanding of the world, a cultural carryover transplanted without any real intention.
Franny never disembarked the skeleton, but rather had it kneel like an elephant so she could more closely examine the lander’s stock. He leaned back a bit from the hooded figure, but with the skeleton well covered, it was a more manageable thing to be around. Ominous but not outright terrifying. Franny smiled kindly.
“Oye, wherefrom Monsieur?”
*
Negotiations complete, Franny made off with the majority of the lander’s ore. It was far from good ore, but Franny assumed it would work. At the very least, the man could feed his family for a while, she imagined. The continuously reeling effect of the death of the celtic tiger was still something Franny felt in her bones. Franny proceeded seeing any other eyes she could catch. The first lander being an example, the others were now quite ready to cater to her and beside themselves to have the best price per substandard quality earned through undercompensated effort.
Every time Franny motioned to make a buy, a undercut could be heard almost immediately lending credence to her own planned future tactic. At the same time, however, was the process wounding her heart at the inhumanity of the situation. These men were destroying themselves apart from the others in a bubble as the more established groups went on without issue. The tiny necromancer grimaced without quite meaning it, this served to only up the anxiety of the sellers as they scrambled to pawn off their stock. Screaming desperation, wild eyes, noise, sweat, stinging tears, the mob was becoming unruly. Franny glared bringing on silence. She made a purchase from each and promised more tomorrow night should they make the deliveries themselves. It was a loose form of contract and with a wave the crowd dispersed not daring to potentially illicit the wrath of her conveyor. Franny had purchased more than she had obviously intended but that only meant that she had more material to experiment with.
“Hardly a purchase in actual fact,” Franny grimaced, “And more like alms for the desperate poor.”
On its heels, her humanoid mount turned round and headed back down the alleys the way it came. There were more than a couple community forges in the crafting neighborhoods, but everyone knew the big bucks were in going private. For Franny, community would do, glancing at the various outdoor forges, Franny chose the dowdiest and most spare of them so she could have a little space. It really was a rather janky forge though, like the worst public restroom in the park. With a grimace, Franny got to work trying to get a feel for crafting things out of the menu. The automatic process was relatively simple and in a short time she had in her possession a sharpened metal sword with all the cutting power of rusty scissors. Franny frowned.
“This is essentially the weaponized version of what I eat every day to stay cheap…”
Sweat was pouring out of Franny and she was already quite ready for a bath. Still she endured…
Food had raised an interesting question in Franny’s mind and now she understood the other smith’s claim on higher payment. It was no different from the infusion of flavor then, these people were putting in actual work and as such they wanted equally high compensation regardless of quality. Franny suddenly realized that she really knew nothing of blacksmithing and in frustration she threw her hammer over her shoulder. Expecting to hear a thonk as it bounced down the alley which in retrospect meant she would have to retrieve it, Franny was surprised to hear a relatively continuous silence instead. Franny turned behind her in confusion. The hammer was suspended in air, following it down with her eyes she saw it was in fact being held like an Olympic torch by a begloved hand above the hand of…
As her eyes widened Franny was about to yell “stop thief!”, but she choked. Squinting her eyes, the tiny necromancer dawned on the revelation.
“Oh?”
Franny grinned. Endless possibilities had just opened up before her.
“Hang onto that will ya?” Franny rose from the forge with the single crud sword in tow. Fumbling with the menu, the girl quickly added it to her inventory to be forgotten. Not even the most desperate adventurer would buy that hack thing. Franny was off to the library for research.
*
“What a mess…”
Franny was something of a research expert within the space of a library, but not post-apocalyptic ones. She was no Indiana Jones. Even so, Franny was managing through the stores that the overworked fairies or whatever else managed this labyrinth of texts had managed to cobble together throughout the long halls and many floors. Franny organized things as she went just for the sake of paying it forward, and out of respect to a space of sacred learning. “Blacksmithing for Dummies.” Franny held up the somewhat fat book in her hands.
“So the developers have a sense of humor.”
Thumping the book on a table, she quickly flipped through the pages.
“Should work.”
Doubling back, Franny descended the winding steps of the second floor while turning up dust like fresh snow. It was a start, Franny just had to make the best of it.
At the front counter, Franny scrabbled her signature checking out the book, there was a rather generous check out period of three days which would do just fine. If she needed it further, there was always a novice scribe somewhere to transcribe the thing. Probably on the cheap. Franny paraded down the streets, her ghastly companion still wielding the hammer on her heels.
“Transmoral slave labor is probably the best thing ever.”
Franny was in a rare state of high spirits as she walked the back alleys humming “Whiskey in The Jar”
*
Back at the poop forge of jankyness Franny decided to put her skeleton to work this time around. Her clothes were already sticking to her back, which, at this point, felt disgusting, but, Franny figured if she was already so besotten with gross she might as well push through to the end before taking one nice long soak somewhere. She turned the pages quickly skimming the various sections before jumping toward the back which happened to be an index. Metallurgy seemed interesting so she started there….
“Well alls I’ve got is yonder fire forge, probably save that for the future…”
Folding steel seemed interesting, but her materials likely didn’t have the constitution for that. Franny was leaning more toward a mass production style of crafting at the moment anyhow.
“Well the steel doesn’t –have- to be folded to be a Japanese sword…”
Franny thought of a banana as a guide and directed the rattling hammer drone.
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
“Terrible!”
The ‘sword’ if you could even call that looked like a crooked smile or a badly accordian’d banana. Franny wasn’t even sure how this had happened, it was a mistaken product harder to produce than the original end goal. She named the thing Zeus figuring she could pawn it off as some exotic sword. Tapping her foot impatiently, she began her directions again…
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
“hey…” Franny mouthed at the cloaked figure of the skeleton. It was on its knees, its hammer had stopped falling and was suspended by its arm in the air like how a toaster might spit out bread.
“Are you messing with me?”
Franny observed the finished product. It was vaguely a wobbly question mark, like an alien banana from the moon.
Franny put her face in hand and sighed like a tragically Greek statue. Maybe it could be a shotel. Maybe. Franny hoped there was a market for blind swordsmen, preferable without a sense of touch.
“Again.”
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
The Skeleton at Franny’s urging was dropping its arm like the bolt of a ballista or the piston of some hellish engine. Over and over again. Flipping through the borrowed text, Franny was becoming more and more precise in her commands. Like a shepherd she ordered the barking hands of her minion to chase the steel into a somewhat more desirable shape. It was almost the beloved katana that would sell in the manner of seconds; the curve was loosely a moon if not for the abrupt wall that was a sudden L jerk in the opposite direction creating a kind of hammering nail.
Franny’s mouth twisted in a frown almost the exact facsimile of the piercing…hammer…sword….
“….”
Franny began frantically turning the page of the book once more. If this was blacksmithing for dummies and she couldn’t understand it…
“Then just what the hell is this book implying I am?”
Franny’s eyes narrowed at the skeleton.
“Don’t answer that. In fact, you miserable excuse for a smith, don’t say anything at all. Yeah, that’s what I thought, stupid.”
Franny was trying to reassure herself with the comedy of a one man show. This really was only half working and half selling something sounded like a failure to acquire future funds. Looking at the pile of her reject products, she imagined that her sale front would soon look like The Isle of Misfit Toys.
“Maybe I’ll have to pretend an exoticism, Doubt anything comes even close to looking like my heap.”
Franny sighed.
“Again.”
As the hammer fell, Franny closed her eyes picturing the finished project in her mind, she barked orders incessantly toward all the minutest of details and opening them was left with a rather quite perfect scythe…
Franny grinned wickedly, this would be an easy pawn, without a doubt. She briefly wondered why the scythe had happened for her so easily, but dismissed the thought while failing to notice the theme of objects that barely qualified as weapons. Franny decided she merely needed the correct spin to pass on her product. She was an English major after all…
Finding her subpar stride, Franny continued the procedure ad nasuem creating all kinds of relics of the highest fantastical impracticality. There was a mace with a sword poking out the tip rather randomly, the result of too much focus on a good point of thrusting and a very importantly correctable habit of letting the iron full cool before it was ready to be finished, a pair of round maces linked by an oversized chain that took Franny the better part of a few hours guiding her minion with annoyed yells to craft to completion, A pinwheel of swords that took way more material than it was worth, one more pseudo-shotel in the attempt toward another plain sword, a rather fascinating iron thatch almost in the form of a thin sword and fully capable as a baton, and finally, further inspired, a rest of the day long endeavor on an oversized butcher sword. As the various questionable items began to fill up the alleyway next to the abandoned community forge, Franny finally decided to halt production. The only light hardly left at this point was the fire of the forge which threw long shadows of Franny and her minion down the path of their exit. Lost to a kind of madness, Franny had forgotten all about how disgusting she felt until this very moment.
*
Perhaps because it was roughly three in the morning the bathhouse was more or less empty. Franny wondered somewhat about the rather tellingly Japanese aesthetic of the establishment when there were other cultures to draw from such as those of the Greeks. Even so, if it had hot water, Franny was to be rather pleased. As the tiny necromancer sat in the vacant women’s area, her technically non-sexed skeleton worked a brush down her back. Franny nearly purred in relaxation, she had splurged tonight and more typically would have tried her luck tossing herself into Avon River. Such denial had made this slight extravagance all the more with it.
Plopping into the bath proper, Franny let her legs float up for fun. Interestingly, there was a moon roof which allowed her to see the stars. She began to hunt for the constellations her mother had taught her as a child but remembering her setting, she quickly realized that such constellations could no longer exist within the same capacities or in the same ways that they did back home in Ireland. Franny traced a pair of interconnected new ones for herself, The Madonna, and The Mustachioed Smith, whose hands met with intertwined fingers in the middle of an approximation of The North Star. Franny nodded calling the combination ‘Family’. Satisfied her gaze ran downward before locking on her suspended porcelain toes. Franny wondered what it would be like to stay off her feet for a while and perhaps open her own shop.
“Surely I’d get bored!” Franny laughed, "but maybe, just part of the time, it might be okay. Like some hidden little secret."
Rising to dry off, her skeleton awaited her with a towel. She mused on how far her practice had come in controlling these ghastly figures. Like breathing, commands were becoming more and more subconscious and all the better to flatter herself with. She liked that the thing had subjugated itself in this instance almost like a butler. Enveloping her small body in a towelly embrace, Franny’s small form was dry in nearly an instant. Smelling that her clothes had been freshly laundered, Franny was ultimately pleased. She resolved to have the means to return here whenever she wished. With a wave at the prioress on her exit, Franny exited unto the cool and still streets of Londonium.
Gazing upward she thought of her means and progress so far. “Walpurgis Mart!” Franny laughed, that would be the name of her operation, it did, after all, run on slave labor. The next morning, Franny decided, she would self-commission a rod-ironed sign just like the French had done in their arcades around the time of World War 1. She went to take her bed in the generous archways of The Abbey, all the while humming "The Foggey Dew".
As of the next morning, in the same exact spot, Franny remained cool while watching and directing her skeleton’s work. She was becoming comfortable at not rushing things, and the text from the library was slowly starting to reveal more of its good sense to her. Tongs and other tools suddenly had a use, and in the construction of the Walpurgis Mart sign, the painstakingly self-imposed challenge of the earlier oversized chain had suddenly found its purpose. It took the better part of 24 hours of hammering, tonging, and twisting the glowing low classed metal like glass. Franny wanted to be sure the sign’s design could stand on its own and so shot for inspiration from The Art Nouveau movement aiming specifically for something in the like of Alphonse Mucha, an artistic love of hers. It was only a pale imitation, a childish scrabbling in comparison, but it was full of her personality. Franny was pleased. There were spaces to add glass like a mosaic in the future, and the tiny necromancer dreamed of the day when she could afford an artisan to implement it. Those days were probably long and far away, but she liked to pretend on the idea.
Seeking a rest from being on her feet all day, Franny did not seek the bathhouse this time, but rather, a dowdy but homey tavern. Listening the to the commotion pass her by at ease, Franny sipped her cider in the lap of her chair-seated skeleton, and with its arms wrapped around her to secure her in place, she dreamed.
The next morning, half a cup of last night’s cider was awaiting her. Downing it, Franny was assured that she had already paid. Rising with a stretch, she exited into the chirping air of morning accompanied by only the additional sound of the earliest of rising adventurers’ boots slapping pavement. She breathed deep the morning air of Londonium that had not yet been dirtied by the kicked up dust of the hustle and bustle of the masses. For the first time in a very long while, Franny was contented.
Walking down the more commerce-heavy corridors of Londonium it occurred to Franny that she had been neglecting something.
“Well, many things…”
But one principle object of neglect now occupied her displeasure, a very real lack of funds. It was not so serious an issue thanks to the very natural nature of the economy having made the more tasteless game-styled foods incredibly cheap. Frugal Franny never truly wanted for hunger, drink, or shelter. Shelter was always more than possible at the Cathedral on the worst of nights.
“Still, there’s a very definitive feeling of lack of forward progress, one’s supposed to gain things over time, or at least, it feels that way.” Franny thought of her experience bar. That was one such example, commercial buying power should be another.
Nodding solemnly to her lack of proper attention to variance, Franny reobserved her skills and found blacksmithing, something picked on an innocent whim, as a disappointingly low level 1. So that was it then. Franny would work on blacksmithing, though the dirtiness of the enterprise brought a kind of distaste to her heart. She had enjoyed watching her father work on cars in her youth as was his hobby. She remembered excitedly handing him tools. Franny caught her hair and laid it across her open hand, how ugly it would look all sooty. Franny wasn’t above vanity.
“Oh well…”
Tossing the locks of hair over her shoulder, she continued her investigation of the market district. On the third pass, she entered a shop out of a false interest. Nodding to the manager, she picked up a random club and swung it a few times with an investigative nod. Next was a sword, an axe. She ran her fingers down chain mail and carefully knocked on a helmet. Her face was all analysis and false understanding. Nodding to the store manager, she exited.
“Thank you!” she waved over her shoulder. “Now how the hell would I make something that nice?”
Franny mused with her fingers lightly touching her lips as if waiting to see if she could yet hook an idea out of her mouth like a fish. There were no bites just yet. Like this Franny investigated every other store. All of the store’s offerings played up the obviously important idea that they contained the best offerings, even the crap in a store full of crap was offered like the crafter’s best attempt at gold.
“That might be my angle.” Franny mused. “If everyone wants to be the best, I should just go ahead and seize what I’ve got, I’ll be the worst.”
“It’ll be a long road” the tiny smithomancer mused walking down the streets a fourth time. For the best products in some of these established shops, the rest hardly needed to sell, Franny would be making crumbs at a strong effort with her method, but she simply didn’t see any other way to enter the market.
“I’ll just have to barely meet demand for a cheap price, like one of those crappy discount Halloween costume shops…Cheap material, disposable, satisfies a certain quickly passing aesthetic, then you’re on to the next one.”
“Yeah.” Franny nodded. “That’s what I can do.”
She summoned the one minion she was allotted in town to carry her stuff. She needed to visit the gatherer’s corner to barter for the worst iron. The hooded shadow shambled after her smoothly without even eliciting a single glance. Franny loved adventurer cities.
*
Walking the various back alleys, Franny stepped toward one of the dirtier parts of the city. It wasn’t so bad an area, but raw materials tended to be a little messy and the people who resorted to gathering them a little poorer. Pulling up her hood to protect her hair, she allowed her skeleton to carry her on its shoulders. It was much easier to see this way. She was looking for the less crowded stalls of this flea market, those who might be struggling for one reason or another. The reasons to her were obvious:
1) Less people allowed more time for bartering.
2) Less demand allowed for more bartering.
3) She wasn’t the least bit concerned with quality,
the lower the costs the easier the profits on a cheap sale…
Scanning over the heads of the masses, Franny was glad for the game’s consideration in giving her a basic means to already start blacksmithing, she had a trusty hammer in her inventory alongside an anvil that was apparently enough at this level to accomplish whatever the heck it was she wanted to make. In time she spotted the more desperate stalls. “Not even quite stalls so much as litters of buckets actually.” This is what Franny was looking for, people on the hard edge, there was a twinge of social justice in sending money their way. Many were actually landers Franny realized. She wondered if desperation would be enough to deal with her haunted retinue. Franny held up a single hand like an upper class lady, and saw if it caught any eyes. To her mildly confused surprise, the gesture actually did. Maybe it was a remnant from a game designer’s own understanding of the world, a cultural carryover transplanted without any real intention.
Franny never disembarked the skeleton, but rather had it kneel like an elephant so she could more closely examine the lander’s stock. He leaned back a bit from the hooded figure, but with the skeleton well covered, it was a more manageable thing to be around. Ominous but not outright terrifying. Franny smiled kindly.
“Oye, wherefrom Monsieur?”
*
Negotiations complete, Franny made off with the majority of the lander’s ore. It was far from good ore, but Franny assumed it would work. At the very least, the man could feed his family for a while, she imagined. The continuously reeling effect of the death of the celtic tiger was still something Franny felt in her bones. Franny proceeded seeing any other eyes she could catch. The first lander being an example, the others were now quite ready to cater to her and beside themselves to have the best price per substandard quality earned through undercompensated effort.
Every time Franny motioned to make a buy, a undercut could be heard almost immediately lending credence to her own planned future tactic. At the same time, however, was the process wounding her heart at the inhumanity of the situation. These men were destroying themselves apart from the others in a bubble as the more established groups went on without issue. The tiny necromancer grimaced without quite meaning it, this served to only up the anxiety of the sellers as they scrambled to pawn off their stock. Screaming desperation, wild eyes, noise, sweat, stinging tears, the mob was becoming unruly. Franny glared bringing on silence. She made a purchase from each and promised more tomorrow night should they make the deliveries themselves. It was a loose form of contract and with a wave the crowd dispersed not daring to potentially illicit the wrath of her conveyor. Franny had purchased more than she had obviously intended but that only meant that she had more material to experiment with.
“Hardly a purchase in actual fact,” Franny grimaced, “And more like alms for the desperate poor.”
On its heels, her humanoid mount turned round and headed back down the alleys the way it came. There were more than a couple community forges in the crafting neighborhoods, but everyone knew the big bucks were in going private. For Franny, community would do, glancing at the various outdoor forges, Franny chose the dowdiest and most spare of them so she could have a little space. It really was a rather janky forge though, like the worst public restroom in the park. With a grimace, Franny got to work trying to get a feel for crafting things out of the menu. The automatic process was relatively simple and in a short time she had in her possession a sharpened metal sword with all the cutting power of rusty scissors. Franny frowned.
“This is essentially the weaponized version of what I eat every day to stay cheap…”
Sweat was pouring out of Franny and she was already quite ready for a bath. Still she endured…
Food had raised an interesting question in Franny’s mind and now she understood the other smith’s claim on higher payment. It was no different from the infusion of flavor then, these people were putting in actual work and as such they wanted equally high compensation regardless of quality. Franny suddenly realized that she really knew nothing of blacksmithing and in frustration she threw her hammer over her shoulder. Expecting to hear a thonk as it bounced down the alley which in retrospect meant she would have to retrieve it, Franny was surprised to hear a relatively continuous silence instead. Franny turned behind her in confusion. The hammer was suspended in air, following it down with her eyes she saw it was in fact being held like an Olympic torch by a begloved hand above the hand of…
As her eyes widened Franny was about to yell “stop thief!”, but she choked. Squinting her eyes, the tiny necromancer dawned on the revelation.
“Oh?”
Franny grinned. Endless possibilities had just opened up before her.
“Hang onto that will ya?” Franny rose from the forge with the single crud sword in tow. Fumbling with the menu, the girl quickly added it to her inventory to be forgotten. Not even the most desperate adventurer would buy that hack thing. Franny was off to the library for research.
*
“What a mess…”
Franny was something of a research expert within the space of a library, but not post-apocalyptic ones. She was no Indiana Jones. Even so, Franny was managing through the stores that the overworked fairies or whatever else managed this labyrinth of texts had managed to cobble together throughout the long halls and many floors. Franny organized things as she went just for the sake of paying it forward, and out of respect to a space of sacred learning. “Blacksmithing for Dummies.” Franny held up the somewhat fat book in her hands.
“So the developers have a sense of humor.”
Thumping the book on a table, she quickly flipped through the pages.
“Should work.”
Doubling back, Franny descended the winding steps of the second floor while turning up dust like fresh snow. It was a start, Franny just had to make the best of it.
At the front counter, Franny scrabbled her signature checking out the book, there was a rather generous check out period of three days which would do just fine. If she needed it further, there was always a novice scribe somewhere to transcribe the thing. Probably on the cheap. Franny paraded down the streets, her ghastly companion still wielding the hammer on her heels.
“Transmoral slave labor is probably the best thing ever.”
Franny was in a rare state of high spirits as she walked the back alleys humming “Whiskey in The Jar”
*
Back at the poop forge of jankyness Franny decided to put her skeleton to work this time around. Her clothes were already sticking to her back, which, at this point, felt disgusting, but, Franny figured if she was already so besotten with gross she might as well push through to the end before taking one nice long soak somewhere. She turned the pages quickly skimming the various sections before jumping toward the back which happened to be an index. Metallurgy seemed interesting so she started there….
“Well alls I’ve got is yonder fire forge, probably save that for the future…”
Folding steel seemed interesting, but her materials likely didn’t have the constitution for that. Franny was leaning more toward a mass production style of crafting at the moment anyhow.
“Well the steel doesn’t –have- to be folded to be a Japanese sword…”
Franny thought of a banana as a guide and directed the rattling hammer drone.
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
“Terrible!”
The ‘sword’ if you could even call that looked like a crooked smile or a badly accordian’d banana. Franny wasn’t even sure how this had happened, it was a mistaken product harder to produce than the original end goal. She named the thing Zeus figuring she could pawn it off as some exotic sword. Tapping her foot impatiently, she began her directions again…
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
“hey…” Franny mouthed at the cloaked figure of the skeleton. It was on its knees, its hammer had stopped falling and was suspended by its arm in the air like how a toaster might spit out bread.
“Are you messing with me?”
Franny observed the finished product. It was vaguely a wobbly question mark, like an alien banana from the moon.
Franny put her face in hand and sighed like a tragically Greek statue. Maybe it could be a shotel. Maybe. Franny hoped there was a market for blind swordsmen, preferable without a sense of touch.
“Again.”
Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. Turn a Page. Whack. So on. Etc.
The Skeleton at Franny’s urging was dropping its arm like the bolt of a ballista or the piston of some hellish engine. Over and over again. Flipping through the borrowed text, Franny was becoming more and more precise in her commands. Like a shepherd she ordered the barking hands of her minion to chase the steel into a somewhat more desirable shape. It was almost the beloved katana that would sell in the manner of seconds; the curve was loosely a moon if not for the abrupt wall that was a sudden L jerk in the opposite direction creating a kind of hammering nail.
Franny’s mouth twisted in a frown almost the exact facsimile of the piercing…hammer…sword….
“….”
Franny began frantically turning the page of the book once more. If this was blacksmithing for dummies and she couldn’t understand it…
“Then just what the hell is this book implying I am?”
Franny’s eyes narrowed at the skeleton.
“Don’t answer that. In fact, you miserable excuse for a smith, don’t say anything at all. Yeah, that’s what I thought, stupid.”
Franny was trying to reassure herself with the comedy of a one man show. This really was only half working and half selling something sounded like a failure to acquire future funds. Looking at the pile of her reject products, she imagined that her sale front would soon look like The Isle of Misfit Toys.
“Maybe I’ll have to pretend an exoticism, Doubt anything comes even close to looking like my heap.”
Franny sighed.
“Again.”
As the hammer fell, Franny closed her eyes picturing the finished project in her mind, she barked orders incessantly toward all the minutest of details and opening them was left with a rather quite perfect scythe…
Franny grinned wickedly, this would be an easy pawn, without a doubt. She briefly wondered why the scythe had happened for her so easily, but dismissed the thought while failing to notice the theme of objects that barely qualified as weapons. Franny decided she merely needed the correct spin to pass on her product. She was an English major after all…
Finding her subpar stride, Franny continued the procedure ad nasuem creating all kinds of relics of the highest fantastical impracticality. There was a mace with a sword poking out the tip rather randomly, the result of too much focus on a good point of thrusting and a very importantly correctable habit of letting the iron full cool before it was ready to be finished, a pair of round maces linked by an oversized chain that took Franny the better part of a few hours guiding her minion with annoyed yells to craft to completion, A pinwheel of swords that took way more material than it was worth, one more pseudo-shotel in the attempt toward another plain sword, a rather fascinating iron thatch almost in the form of a thin sword and fully capable as a baton, and finally, further inspired, a rest of the day long endeavor on an oversized butcher sword. As the various questionable items began to fill up the alleyway next to the abandoned community forge, Franny finally decided to halt production. The only light hardly left at this point was the fire of the forge which threw long shadows of Franny and her minion down the path of their exit. Lost to a kind of madness, Franny had forgotten all about how disgusting she felt until this very moment.
*
Perhaps because it was roughly three in the morning the bathhouse was more or less empty. Franny wondered somewhat about the rather tellingly Japanese aesthetic of the establishment when there were other cultures to draw from such as those of the Greeks. Even so, if it had hot water, Franny was to be rather pleased. As the tiny necromancer sat in the vacant women’s area, her technically non-sexed skeleton worked a brush down her back. Franny nearly purred in relaxation, she had splurged tonight and more typically would have tried her luck tossing herself into Avon River. Such denial had made this slight extravagance all the more with it.
Plopping into the bath proper, Franny let her legs float up for fun. Interestingly, there was a moon roof which allowed her to see the stars. She began to hunt for the constellations her mother had taught her as a child but remembering her setting, she quickly realized that such constellations could no longer exist within the same capacities or in the same ways that they did back home in Ireland. Franny traced a pair of interconnected new ones for herself, The Madonna, and The Mustachioed Smith, whose hands met with intertwined fingers in the middle of an approximation of The North Star. Franny nodded calling the combination ‘Family’. Satisfied her gaze ran downward before locking on her suspended porcelain toes. Franny wondered what it would be like to stay off her feet for a while and perhaps open her own shop.
“Surely I’d get bored!” Franny laughed, "but maybe, just part of the time, it might be okay. Like some hidden little secret."
Rising to dry off, her skeleton awaited her with a towel. She mused on how far her practice had come in controlling these ghastly figures. Like breathing, commands were becoming more and more subconscious and all the better to flatter herself with. She liked that the thing had subjugated itself in this instance almost like a butler. Enveloping her small body in a towelly embrace, Franny’s small form was dry in nearly an instant. Smelling that her clothes had been freshly laundered, Franny was ultimately pleased. She resolved to have the means to return here whenever she wished. With a wave at the prioress on her exit, Franny exited unto the cool and still streets of Londonium.
Gazing upward she thought of her means and progress so far. “Walpurgis Mart!” Franny laughed, that would be the name of her operation, it did, after all, run on slave labor. The next morning, Franny decided, she would self-commission a rod-ironed sign just like the French had done in their arcades around the time of World War 1. She went to take her bed in the generous archways of The Abbey, all the while humming "The Foggey Dew".
As of the next morning, in the same exact spot, Franny remained cool while watching and directing her skeleton’s work. She was becoming comfortable at not rushing things, and the text from the library was slowly starting to reveal more of its good sense to her. Tongs and other tools suddenly had a use, and in the construction of the Walpurgis Mart sign, the painstakingly self-imposed challenge of the earlier oversized chain had suddenly found its purpose. It took the better part of 24 hours of hammering, tonging, and twisting the glowing low classed metal like glass. Franny wanted to be sure the sign’s design could stand on its own and so shot for inspiration from The Art Nouveau movement aiming specifically for something in the like of Alphonse Mucha, an artistic love of hers. It was only a pale imitation, a childish scrabbling in comparison, but it was full of her personality. Franny was pleased. There were spaces to add glass like a mosaic in the future, and the tiny necromancer dreamed of the day when she could afford an artisan to implement it. Those days were probably long and far away, but she liked to pretend on the idea.
Seeking a rest from being on her feet all day, Franny did not seek the bathhouse this time, but rather, a dowdy but homey tavern. Listening the to the commotion pass her by at ease, Franny sipped her cider in the lap of her chair-seated skeleton, and with its arms wrapped around her to secure her in place, she dreamed.
The next morning, half a cup of last night’s cider was awaiting her. Downing it, Franny was assured that she had already paid. Rising with a stretch, she exited into the chirping air of morning accompanied by only the additional sound of the earliest of rising adventurers’ boots slapping pavement. She breathed deep the morning air of Londonium that had not yet been dirtied by the kicked up dust of the hustle and bustle of the masses. For the first time in a very long while, Franny was contented.
NOTES- Crafting Summary: 11 Metal Equipment + 1 Metal Sheet +1 Iron Chain = 145 Gold Material Fees.
WORDS- 3565 = roughly 14 posts (Also Qualifies for 10% WC Bonus event)
TAGS-
