A New World 21: Preparations

[aldersprig]

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Previous: Drinks

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Kael let Mr. Vibius show her where “her quarters” was after the meal.  He gave her a key that she wouldn’t (she hoped) need, told her a bit about the area, and then left to close down the museum.

She looked around “her quarters.”  Someone had taken some effort to do what she presumed was modernizing on the rooms, including a bed that looked wider than she remembered and thus a little tight for the space, but it was - or it had been - Joaon’s sleeping quarters.

They had not been his first.  She had built the room for a woman named Glerine, but she had, after five years of serving Kael, run off with a fur-trader who presumably had a more interesting life than a woman cloistered high in a potions tower.

read on…

Comments

[kelkyag]

A credit card. That first translation potion went deep into intent. I wonder how deep This Gold Is Good goes into the local/modern/? financial system. Our world has some very old banks ... though the bit where the Kael's adopted homeland was conquered and its civilization denied means any holdings or credits she may have had have likely vanished. It could be linked to an account Joaon set up after waking. It could have created an account & backed it out of thin air, as it might have gold in Kael's original time? Or it might just look like modern media of exchange with nothing behind it, and will bite her later. Very curious!

As she notes, it probably isn't Joaon's bed from then, and depending on when it was replaced, he may never have slept in it. On the other hand, after sleeping a thousand years, going to bed anywhere any time soon is probably not appealing.

Why did Joaon not become her official apprentice? (On very few data points, I wonder if potion-making was not something men did in that era, but there are plenty of other possible reasons.) I hope this is answered eventually.

Now I wonder how the tower reappeared. When he woke, did Joaon have access to the potion room, to brew himself a translation potion and other useful things, or did he have to face a strange world empty-handed?

And you keep dropping new threads to follow up on, of course. :)
Relatedly, possibly a nit: there are two paragraphs about apprentices/employees between Glerine and Joaon. One says there were three people who each in time decided that "serving a potion-mistress was too"; the other says there were three apprentices, two of whom turned out tolerably and one of whom turned out amazingly. Are those the same three people, or two different sets of three people?

[aldersprig]

Welllll it depends on how the Hoija and other people of her time kept wealth, doesn’t it? And how many islands were sold for beads, etc.

I’ll make a note to answer that one.

I think I need a doc of questions to answer. Is that a thing?

I’ll have to dig into that nit…

[kelkyag]

depends on how the Hoija and other people of her time kept wealth
Yup! More things to learn about the world -- financial systems through the centuries. :)

I think I need a doc of questions to answer. Is that a thing?
Is now! Already was for many people, I'm sure. Notes and cheat sheets of who'd asked what and who needed to get which answers to whom were very useful to me in writing larp plot and briefing PCs and NPCs. :)

[sauergeek]

Now there's a doozy of an ability that she's worked into three different potions so far: "as appropriate to the local society". One for language, one for clothing, and one for money. That's some heavy magic right there, being able to pull cultural expectations out of, well, somewhere and use that for making stuff or speaking.

I'm really curious how the credit card is going to work. Will it draw on an existing account? If so, whose? Or will it work more like leprechaun gold and all record of what was bought with it vanish? (That'll be another far-reaching trick if so, given modern point-of-sale systems.)

While I understand the desire to stay awake after a thousand years unconsciousness, eventually Kael will have to sleep. She's already declined two different beds. Will she rig up a hammock in the potions room? Mr. Vibius will have Words with her about that if so.

That shopping list may be tricky out in society. She's put no obvious camouflage on it. This means anyone seeing it may well be confused, and she certainly can't show it to people helping her. But worse, what if someone who sees it can read it? I suspect Prof. Hightower probably would at least recognize it, and likely there are other academics, and their students, who can read at least some.

[aldersprig]

Her potions are something really intense, yes. :-) She was, after all, one of the most acclaimed potion-mistresses in an era of potions.

You and Kelkyag had the same questions ;-)

I like the idea of a hammock. ;-)