"If now works for you, now works for me! How long do you have and do you happen to know your modifications' point score?"

"As long as I can fly back before, like, nine... Points?"

"There's a point system - it's used for gauging risk of turning cryptid. It's kind of cheesy but there's some real research behind it and while we do carry cryptid insurance it's better not to have to pay out, yanno? I can do a point tally when you're here though."

"Okay... I just did wings and fancy eyes. I thought about a tail but the idea of cryptids are creepy, so... Anyway, should I fly over now then?"

"Yup, come on down!"

She flies on down! Back in the fancy boots and gauntlets, and the leggings/undershirt/skirt that's quickly becoming her casual-slash-flight wear. (She adds the pattern that's normally on her cape to the front of the undershirt, hoping it helps a bit).

Just a bit, but every bit counts once you've managed "not looking schlubby" and "wearing a skirt"!

The business is among some warehouses. Yasmin is apparently the only employee in at the moment. "Hey there!" she chirps. "Welcome to Parker's Ivory! You're Laura?"

Flying is so great, even when you're doing it in a sort of industrial park. "Yeah. Hi! Yas... Min?"

"Yasmin! That's me! So you don't look like you're more than two hundred points all told there unless you used to be a Filipina midget or something, didja?"

"Nah. I mean, I did, uh, figure up a little bit," (vague gesture and slight blush), "but nothing very big on that level?"

"Anything a human could look like and you wouldn't go 'wait a second' is under fifty points easy," says Yasmin, consulting a chart on her phone, "unless you started out kinda 'wait a second' all by yourself. Okay, I think you've got more than enough safety margin. Today is narwhal horns! Assorted sizes, big ones to hang on walls and little ones to sell to kids at Renfaires, that kind of thing. If you fill all the boxes I have prepped for narwhal horns in assorted sizes and you wanna stick around, I have another box you can fill with coral beads. You ever take anything off before?"

"Huh, narwhals... No, but it can't be that bad, right? Also I want to know how much you're gonna pay me before I do anything."

"It depends on your speed how many I can sell - I don't pay by the hour - and also on the quality for pieces that get sold individually like narwhal horns. I've never had a problem with quality, understand, but if they turn out messy or uneven or something they're not gonna fetch as much. But if you get the boxes full of horns, you can walk away with two thou minimum, then a cut of whatever they go for. Now, the way you wanna get them off is you get them real thin at the base and then snap them. I can still take broken horns but it's gonna cut into the profits so you don't want to break them anywhere but the base. It's okay if the end is messy, I have a grinder. You don't wanna be near me without safety gear while I'm smoothing out the ends of the horns, very dangerous. More questions?"

Her eyes widen at 'two thou'.

"Right, right, nah, no questions. Thin base, power tools not toys, uh huh. Okay-"

She looks at the boxes to get an idea of the size Yasmin is going for and - acquires a twisted narwhal horn (from her forehead, because that's obviously where horns go).

...Weird. Kind of heavy and uncomfortable. But not as strange-feeling as she expected it to be. Maybe something like this permanently could look cool, but she'll think about that later.

"-So, sized about like so for that box?"

"Yeah, do one box like that and this smaller box here do 'em between yea big and yea big," she says, gesturing between six and twelve inches, "minis for kids who like unicorns, you know?"

"Makes sense."

She makes the base perilously thin, grabs the protrusion, hesitates, then screws her eyes shut and - snap. It stings where the force of it pulled on her skull. She goggles at the snapped-off horn - horn! - a bit, stuck between fascination and discomfort.

She sets it in the box. "...Okay. Kind of weird, but I think I got the hang of it. Want me to do some in different colors or speckles or whatever, and vary the length a bit, or nah?"

"I've actually got a color grade chart," she says, producing one. "Do mostly white, for the big ones, and some of these variations, mostly for price discrimination. For the little ones you can do some in kinda pale gold or silver or sparkly pink, since, little kids who like unicorns."

"You've got this all figured out, huh? Okay, here goes nothing."

She'll do this for a couple hours or until she fills the boxes, following the color chart and doing her best to make them pretty (without slowing down too much). It's still kind of weird, she definitely wouldn't do this for fun, but it's not bad as a job.

The boxes aren't exactly bigger than they look, but narwhal horns are thin, and when Yasmin is done grinding the snapped end off each one she packs them very efficiently, wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap but laid pointing in alternating directions for maximum tiling. It's gonna take a lot of horns to fill up.

It's still not bad as a job.

About how many seconds does it take to starscape, grow a horn, un-starscape, and snap it off once she gets into a flow for it? How full is the box after a bit more than three hours of this?

Once she has the hang of it it's less than ten seconds per. Yasmin is not that fast at grinding, but she knows how many horns will fill the box; in about an hour and a half the box for long horns is all filled up.

The short horns are not much faster per and take a lot longer to fill a box with.

Well, after about three hours even as the other box is not yet full, she smooths out the last nub of bone after the latest snap-off and says, "I should probably quit for now, but I can definitely come back tomorrow."

"Happy to have you!" says Yasmin. She weighs the second box and writes Laura a check for one thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.

Yeah, not bad at all as a job.

She salutes Yasmin jauntily and tears off into the air. She hands the check to her dad and laughs at his spluttering reaction, and has to spend half an hour reassuring him that Yasmin wasn't acting creepy at her or anything, and that it didn't hurt that much, and that she can zap people if someone tries to kidnap her.

And then he promises to cash it for her and lets her borrow a credit card and she can try to buy a stardarter and some ammo! In red-white-yellow, if possible! Rush shipping!

She can get overnighted stardarters in her preferred colors!