He nods and gets to work.

The sun sets. The electric lights are really quite poor compared to natural light.

Akien, fortunately, does not need much light to be able to do his work.

It takes him about an hour more to get much done in the way of progress, but then there is a visible gold tip to the stick! It is about an inch long and Akien can then detach it from the rest of the wood quite neatly.

"I thought you were doing iron?"

"When I do it in bulk, yeah, but I can't set up a proper processing area here? You said gold would net money, I thought it'd be smart to go for that first and start iron later."

"Gold will net money, yes. Rather a lot. But if you had a few kilos of it then it would depress the local market rather quickly." He looks suddenly grumpy. As if he should have asked for a percentage of the results in exchange for workspace.

"This is…" He pauses, picks it up and tries to get a feel for it. "Probably less than 200 grams? So hopefully it won't have so much of an impact. I can always split it into pieces if it's much of a problem."

"I'd guess 75 grams tops. I have a balance if you want to see for sure."

He looks at it. "I would've guessed a bit more – still pretty confident it's less than 200, but sure." Shrug.

"Small objects are small. I find many people don't have a good intution for it. I didn't ask this in advance so no fee on this one, but if you use my workspace and materials again aside from the lights you've agreed to make I want a 10% cut of the results, or a flat fee if you prefer..."

He brings out the scales.

The piece of gold weighs 86 grams.

"Do you have any idea how much this'll get? I assume it varies by location, but, a range?"

"One gold to a hundred copper is a good bet. And a meal in a decent restaurant costs five or six copper."

"How much is 'a gold' in copper?"

"I meant weight for weight. One gram gold to a hundred grams copper. I should just go ahead and make a list of common currency materials."

Pause. "I mean I knew I could plausibly live quite a lavish life back home, relatively, if I chose to, but I hadn't really realized it."

"I don't know that it's that valuable back 'home'? And a six copper meal is pretty modest and a great deal, come to think, that's mostly what I pay in ingredients when I cook. Sorry for the confusion."

He starts writing down currency conversions. 

Common currency materials

Silver. 1g silver = ~2-3g gold

Gold. 1g gold = ~80-100g copper = ~16-20g silvered brass.

Silvered brass. 1g S.brass = ~5g copper

Copper, steel, and starglass. 1g copper = ~1-1.5g steel = ~3-5g starglass

Various plastics. 1g copper = 10-30g plastic, depends on type.

Wooden tokens. Depends on town.

Rates variable - rough guide only

"I haven't looked up gold rates back home! But they're reasonably high, I think, people want fancy things and gold seems to count."

He looks over the list. "So plastic is reasonably common, then?"

"Yeah. Grows in vats from leftover Earth engineered bacteria if you feed it right, most kinds."

"… Huh, okay."

Evara also looks at the list.

"How's iron, for price?"

"Sell it to a forger who'll make it into steel. Not sure how much you'll get - probably around sixty to eighty percent?"

Peer. "Hmmkay. I haven't actually done much metal manipulation, or like any, so I'm not sure how the better structure will impact it…"

"More permanent workshop? Should speed it up quite a lot, especially if there's room somewhere for me to try doing – experimental things. Which there might not be."

"How long does it take to learn this stuff, when you have chi? A few months? Years?"

"It depends what you want to do with it, and – a lot of things build on top of each other, practice with one thing helps with another. Learning to make something glow – while you're actively feeding it, at first – would be, uh, something like a week or two of concentrated effort?"

"So kind of like engineering, I suppose. You need a little knowledge to learn the next thing, and there are so many individual parts and specializations."

Magic. A rare or possibly unique talent. Supply and demand could be handy there but it also sounds like a massive pain to learn even if he could...