chalk | Glowfic Constellation

"That sounds amazing."

or-the-broken

"It's better than it sounds."

"How? Oh - clothes, in here," she says, showing him into a shop.

or-the-broken

"The ways it's better are harder to explain. But one example is it doesn't just do visuals, it does audio. Whatever music or sound you want that somebody's put on the network, you can get."

"Linked-up music crystals, wow."

or-the-broken

"Yep."

Korulen conducts him around the store, makes general remarks about what sorts of things people wear with what sorts of other things, and otherwise hangs back and lets him make selections.

or-the-broken

He goes for things that are simple, minimally flashy, and afford reasonable freedom of movement.

Korulen has no complaints about his fashion sense. She pays for a few outfits in electrum coins and they move on. "The witch is this way."

or-the-broken

"What's a witch besides someone who sells shampoo?"

"Witches do potions in general. Cosmetics and medicines and so on."

or-the-broken

"Interesting. Do they tend to specialize in one or the other or whatever comes under 'and so on', or not?"

"Some of them specialize but witchcraft is all one skill as far as I know, so that's just a matter of using different recipes, I think. The one I'm thinking of has everything - well, everything you get for consumer use, anyway."

or-the-broken

"For consumer use as opposed to...?"

"Industry or whatever. Concentrated plant food and desalination potions and really heavily controlled painkillers."

or-the-broken

"Heh. Yeah, we've got heavily controlled painkillers too, just not usually made by the same people who make hair dye."

"Why not?"

or-the-broken

"Very different skill set. No magic involved, I think that's what makes the difference."

"Huh. Wouldn't it still be a matter of mixing things up even if you didn't do witchcraft to it?" she asks.

or-the-broken

"Yeah, but mixing up different things, using different procedures, with different safety standards and a different knowledge base required to figure out what things you should be mixing and how to mix them right."

"Huh. Okay."

Here is the witch shop. There are a lot of vials and jars on the shelves. It seems pretty much like Elcenia does not have plastic. The signage is pretty good. (Korulen grabs something from the medicine section for herself as long as they're there.)

or-the-broken

There is shampoo. Dr. Hall acquires some shampoo. He doesn't have exacting standards, so he goes for whatever seems cheap and like it'll last him a while.

There are also various other toiletries. There are baskets to put them in. If Dr. Hall touches a basket it will start floating in the air and following him around.

or-the-broken

... He chuckles.

The extremely helpful basket can get a complete, if somewhat minimal, set of various toiletries in whatever variety of each is cheap and plentiful and smells okay.