Magic without a magic | Glowfic Constellation

"Then I'll go ask at the bank. And haul in some lumber and paint while I'm at it. And here's a new shopping list, nothing so difficult as fresh blackberries this time. I want more than one medicine. I think I can make an allergy suppressant, a cough soother, some ketamine, multivitamins, disinfectant cream for wounds, that'll save a few lives if anyone actually uses it. Rash cream. I could make saccharine, which is a fake sugar that tastes ridiculously sweet, but that's not very useful compared to medicine. And I'm not forgetting about Aelare, I'm just waiting for a consenting test subject for version two."

namesthesky

Aya takes the new shopping list. "I can get all this today, most likely. And I saw a street sweeper who I think might be manumitted but I couldn't catch up to him to talk to him."

"As long as you find someone eventually. No need to cook lunch for me by the way, but feel free to take an hour and get lunch for yourself. I'm off to the bank."

And then she goes to the nearest bank and explains that she was magicked and lost all knowledge of the proper tax procedures for personal property and shopkeepers, and would like them explained if it's not too much trouble.

The teller explains the procedures, which are not too onerous and were definitely invented over the course of more than two minutes' thought by someone with background in taxation schemes.

Steel asks intelligent questions, takes plenty of notes, and thanks the teller before leaving for a lumberyard on the outskirts of the city in search of clean wood, and paint.

These things are available! She can buy them. With money.

Presuming the price is at least slightly reasonable, she buys a fair amount of wood and half a dozen medium-size wax-sealed pots of paint in various colors, which go in her backpack. The weight is enough to slow her gait to a walk, but not quite enough to require a wagon.

namesthesky

Passersby look curiously at her but nobody asks. Maybe they look at her and assume she doesn't speak the language.

Aya is back at the store around dinnertime with all the items on the shopping list.

Steel has fashioned some of the wood and paint into colorful, illustrated, well laid out signs by now. One proclaims the convenience and safety of pills relative to herbal mixtures. A second lists the already-common herbal mixtures she plans to condense and repackage in a more convenient way, with blank spots for prices.

A third lists her new, foreign medicines, with a smallish note at the bottom reporting Made with knowledge gained by embroidery - the embroidery has been nothing but helpful so these are believed to be safe - I use them myself and have suffered no ill effects.

Finally, a very loud sign declaring Opening special! A dose of your remedy of choice 100% FREE for our first three days! Limit two pills per person.

"Excellent, now I can actually make my stock. I'll be using magic to do it, but would you like to watch anyway?"

namesthesky

"I'd love to."

The first thing she does is prepare a nice roomy workspace with all the various bowls and tools laid out. "At first I'm mostly going to be making more ingredients out of these ingredients."

She does some things to various herbs and chemicals and powders, occasionally looking at various notes. The stuff floats around and mixes and separates and changes colors and fizzes and produces strange smells, mostly not bothering to explain what she's doing unless questioned. Kerosene and lye and sugar feature prominently, but almost everything from the list is used at least once. The results are separated into glass jars and sealed and labelled with strange names like propyl ester.

"Now those will help me make my new medicines. But I'll do that later - for now, I can figure out what part of these herbal remedies actually helps the body, and then I can pull it out and concentrate it. Some of them I already know, they're the ones I asked you to get. The rest, I'll have to experiment on a rat or something to figure them out."

She starts processing an herb called feverfew. Eventually all that's left of the plant is a white powder. This white powder gets carefully measured into half of what looks like a miniature hard candy. These candy halves are sealed up and dipped in a coloring - presumably to help tell what's in them. The process repeats with other herbs.

All this takes a while, but Steel doesn't seem to get tired or bored of it.

namesthesky

Aya mostly watches raptly, but eventually she goes and fixes dinner back at the boardinghouse.

Steel goes to the boardinghouse to have a bath and change clothes, but sleeps in the back room of the shop.

The next morning she puts out her colorful, artful signs and opens up shop. They're not ridiculously gaudy, but they're bright and distinctive enough that she won't be completely lost between the other stores, and the word FREE is displayed very prominently.

Upon seeing Aya, "I'll be here all day. I don't know what to send you shopping for until I see what sells well, so could you please spend the day trying to track down someone who'd like their tattoo removed?"

namesthesky

"All right." Aya goes out.

There are then a few curious visitors, a few people with desperately sick relatives who are willing to try dangerous mixtures by an embroidered pharmacist, and one fellow with a headache and a remarkably high risk tolerance.

She comes back in the early afternoon with a man a little older than herself who looks twitchy.

Steel solicits details about the desperately sick relatives' symptoms and writes down detailed instructions for which medicines to give them and how often, and other suggestions for how to properly care for them. Their desperately sick relatives will still probably die, but they'll have a significantly less terrible chance at recovering, and they'll suffer a lot less along the way.

She also pushes a jar of antiseptic on each of them, claiming that rinsing their hands and any wounds they might have after touching a sick person will help prevent the disease from spreading. She actually loses money, but hopefully it'll save some lives and she'll start getting a reputation. The fellow with a headache gets some aspirin and a warning not to take more than four of them within eight hours, and to stop taking them immediately if they give him a stomachache (which is possible but very unlikely, she insists).

And when Aya comes back, Steel invites the twitchy man inside and carefully explains to him how she will remove his tattoo, the same way she did for Aya. "Do you want me to do this?"

namesthesky

"I, uh, yes?" says the twitchy guy. "Here, I have my papers -" He pulls them out of his jacket pocket; he has been manumitted for a year and a bit.

"Alright. Wait just a minute." She does it as fast as possible - make the right form from nothingness, just barely there enough to work, pull the ink to the surface. Twenty seconds later, "Try rubbing it. If even a little ink flakes off now, the rest will come off with some soap and scrubbing."

The ink does flake off if he rubs it.

namesthesky

He rubs at it, frowning, then smiles tentatively.

"Congratulations. I'd like to ask you to keep covering your ankle and tell no one of this, at least for now. Aelare's blessing would be revoked if anybody important realizes this is possible. But if you know anyone else who is manumitted and would like the same done for them, you can tell them to come to my shop and ask for a white pill. I'll know what they mean."

namesthesky

"Is no one else going to want white pills?" wonders Aya.

"I won't sell any pills that are white. Unmarked pills are dangerous, if I don't color them I could potentially lose track of what they are."

namesthesky

"All right," says Aya, and the twitchy guy nods and puts his shoe back on and scurries.

"You know," she remarks, "The average person's fear of an unfamiliar embroidered pharmacist is worse than I expected. I hope that once I save a few lives things pick up and I can save more peoples' lives."

namesthesky

"I'd expect so, yes. Once people know it works they won't have any reason to expect it to stop."