Well, maybe she'll run into more of that species later, might as well skim a book on their genetics.

It's endearing when Griffie's focused. She has interacted with people of six different species before Milliways and Griffie is a literal plant, she believes what they say over whether they're emoting visibly.

She asks the person who is interested in one or more of a personal genetics report and sex to wait a second and then asks her minion to explain in more detail.

Ibrahim notices her confusion. "He made an English-language pun about your profession to ask for sex, it may not have translated well. So, normally women only do sex work when they'd have trouble surviving otherwise. Maybe that's different with free medical care and cheap contraceptives, I wouldn't know. But when a woman is doing sex work, people call her a" the word he says just sounds like 'sex worker' in a contemptuous and disgusted tone "and disrespect her because they think she's desperate and it makes her a less respectable person to be having so much sex especially for pay, and then if they assume she's desperate, that implies that if she has other work going on it isn't going well, and if someone's selling genetics services but that isn't going well, probably they aren't that good genetics services. And some people want to demonstrate that they don't buy services from sex workers, and that might extend to not interacting with your non-sex business."

...

"...Okay. Bar, what've you got about - taboos on people who do inheritance magic or similar things also doing other types of work, or boycotts of all of the products of people who sell specific things I might plausibly want to sell?"

Bar decides to tailor this to her usual customer range and note that she's saying so. Long story short: A fair number of people will get upset if she performs abortions or sells complicated financial instruments or makes pathogens more dangerous (which there are a lot of ways to do indirectly as well as directly, for example altering their surface proteins counts because some anti-pathogen measures target known surface proteins). The sex-work stigma also extends to a lesser extent to massages and other intimate services. The economic-desperation stigma also extends to janitorial work, hand-washing laundry, and various other types of unpleasant unskilled labor. Some people from the planet of weirdly colorful people will dislike it if she does work that involves touching garbage, sewage, or corpses. Some people will get upset about mentions of 'curing' any of this list of conditions, the more polite language is 'removing' or 'preventing', to imply that sometimes people want to be, say, deaf, and it's not automatically bad. She should appear to conspicuously be in good physical health, anything that interferes with that may make her look like a worse mage even if it's stupid, she could break her arm for regular reasons as well as heritable bone problem reasons but a broken arm is nonzero evidence of the latter. Also, she also doesn't want to accumulate negative business reviews, people otherwise hanging around being angry at her, people acting scared of her, et cetera, but she probably knows that.

Most of that is very stupid.

"I'm glad you tipped me off to this," she tells her minion.

She finds the person who wanted sex and/or a report on their genome, and explains that since it might cause stupid people to think she was an incompetent mage and she wants to be able to stay here for a while, she'd need to charge enough to cover for the possibility of losing other income sources, so how does 746496 imperial rings sound?

He sets down his beer to listen to her. After getting a currency conversion, he replies that she's an arrogant non-affectionate-and-not-sexually-responsive female-animal who isn't as pretty as she thinks she is, and goes back to his beer.

...Okay then. Well, she is female and not very affectionate or sexually responsive, so sure. She goes back to her books and her sign.

If a prospective client holds the door can she or her assistant go fetch his goats? He heard in Bar about other people making goats synthesize spider silk proteins in their milk and he wants that for his, it sounds neat.

Well, can they? Where are the goats relative to the door?

His door is actually in a neighbor's shed, the goats are about a mile away. Also he should write them a signed note saying he asked them to move the goats, and the goats are a bit finicky, you just need to…

As he rambles, it becomes clear that getting the goats to actually cooperate with coming to the door is going to be rather difficult for someone with no prior experience with livestock.

"What if you wrote that note and we gave it to the neighbor whose shed this is, and then your neighbor moved the goats?"

That's a good idea! He should … he shouldn't pay his neighbor, that'd be too transactional, but he can buy his neighbor a small bottle of some good liquor, which seems appropriate. He describes his neighbor's alcohol tastes to Bar, buys a bottle, and writes a note and ties it around the bottle, and goes to hold the door. Saira's minion goes to find the neighbor and gives em the bottle and the note and quickly heads back in before talking. (He instinctively flinches when he overhears a foreign language.)

While her minion is doing that she asks what "too transactional" means.

The neighbor is a neighbor not a merchant and it'd be cold and impersonal to offer to pay him? It'd imply that what's going on is him hiring the neighbor, as opposed to a balance of friends doing favors for each other? He can't explain very well, sorry.

Ibrahim comes back with the requested goats and hands them off to Saira's client. The goats are now being held still. Mostly. Their scent may not be Saira's favorite.

She'll live.

She can copy some other world's state of the art goat milk protein edits. It's all on this guy if he ends up regretting the silkmilk.

Yeah, he may not have thought this through. Or have equipment to isolate the silk. His problem, though.

A short and muscular bearded person from upstairs who looks almost human but not quite would like a sample of E. coli to be modified to synthesize what ey says is a pigment! The bar won't sell that? Fine, ey'll take yeast. Ey would like a sample of yeast to be modified to synthesize what ey says is a pigment. Ey puts together a detailed proposal on a device that looks similar to Saira's new computer and Griffie's tablet, but smaller.

Yeah, totally. She looks at the proposal and also asks Bar for extra background material to go over later.

The proposal does not look particularly suspicious.

She's not really looking for suspicious, she's looking for cool things to sell to people who don't have illusion mages in their worlds, and at any rate will do things to yeast once she's clear on what genes she's inserting where.

The proposal is pretty clear on what genes and where, this person is clearly referencing existing biotech documents. If Saira asks, ey'll comment that Saira's cheaper than the current state of the art in doing this nonmagically.

Not really surprising. Can she get the existing documents being referenced from Bar?

Some of them are trade secrets but she can get this one about indigo!

Neat. Indigo's a good color. She'd totally consider using indigo if she had no access to illusion magic.

...Such as whenever she next needs to dye her hair. Hmmm. She inquires about nonmagical hair dyes.

Bar can sell nonmagical hair dyes in basically any color, and also with some interesting properties Saira may not have considered, like glowing under UV light. The manufacturers of many of them suggest they be used with dye-related shampoos and conditioners to make the dye last longer. She can also get clip-in colorful hair extensions, apply chalk to her hair for a very temporary experience, et cetera.

Griffie heads down from upstairs, sits down at Bar, pokes at eir tablet, and acquires a cup of glowing blue liquid with an umbrella, a curly straw, and a few thin slices of some type of fruit in it. Ey takes a sip and smiles. "How's business going?" ey asks Saira.