How to Succeed In Business in a New World

Groundwork Laid

    We didn’t have any plans to go into town and pick up another quest today even though it would probably be a good idea considering how quickly we blew through our cash yesterday but I wanted to get working on my master plan. I got my hands on some paper and something to write with and got to work drafting up a list of everything I’d need and some schematics for what I wanted it all to look like in the end. Since I would be sinking a good chunk of time and money into this I wanted it to be exactly as I imagined it, and I was willing to spend more time than money on making sure of that. That didn’t mean I was going to skimp out on any part of it but as it was I might need to get another bit of a cash infusion from another quest depending on how much materials would cost. Frankly this was my first time carrying out a project of this caliber from formulation to design to procurement and actually building it so I was going to do it right and take as much time as I needed on each step. Especially considering that I would need to be learning a few skills along the way, though if I was focusing on something I’m sure it wouldn’t take me all that long to pick it up. I was always too easily distracted by everything else that I had in front of me to complete something past the very basics. But here there was nothing to distract me.

“Hey! What gives?” Other than certain girls acting indignant at me.

“What do you mean?”

“You aren’t wearing the clothes I got you yesterday!” I had noticed that she was wearing a new outfit but I didn’t even know that any part of her purchase yesterday was for me. 

“Well where are they?”

“Come on…” She walked back into her room and I supposed she wanted me to follow her. She was rooting around in the bag when I came in, which means she expected me to have known that she got me something yesterday, which probably wasn’t too tall an order frankly, and to come into her room and poke around in her stuff until I saw what was meant for me. She thrust the bundle of clothes at me with a heaping spoonful of attitude too. “Go on, get changed! I want to see how they look on you!” She smiled cutely as if she didn’t just ask me to change in front of her. 

“Couldn’t you leave the room first?” I don’t think I had ever changed in front of a girl and this seemed like an awfully awkward time to be my first.

“Oh come one! It’s not a big deal or anything!”

“If it’s not a big deal then why don’t you just leave the room for half a minute?!”

“Fine…” She retreated with a scornful pout as I looked over what I would actually be wearing. It seemed she picked something that I wouldn’t actually mind wearing as far as the colors were concerned, I almost always stuck to darker colors, I guess what would be called earth tones and this seemed to check that box with the greens and browns I was seeing. The fabric felt decently soft in my hands, I had mostly stuck to synthetic-cotton blends when I had the choice so they didn’t feel nearly as comfortable as that but they weren’t at all scratchy or stiff like most of the clothing I had seen. As I actually unfolded the garments I was able to make out that it was the pants that were brown and the shirt that was predominantly off white with a few grey and green accent lines I suppose they’d be called. Of everything in that store this would probably rank pretty high on my list if I were shopping for myself, not that I got a very good look at everything else. Not to mention that it was far from my typical wardrobe back home, had shorts not been invented yet? I wasn’t going to tell her any of this, both not to sound ungracious but also to protect my identity as a world hopper, of course there was the small fact fact that she had found me nearly naked so bitching about how this isn’t like what I used to wear to her would probably have the exact wrong meaning to it. I put on the new clothes and left my old ones in a heap on the floor, they were hand me downs when I got them and they were more tattered and worn than they’d ever been now so I wasn’t quite sure what was to be done with them. I poked my head through the door and saw that Marie was quizzically examining the plans I had writing before but when she noticed my presence her neck practically snapped into place to put me in her line of sight and she came bounding over, putting her body against the door I was trying to open. “Well… How are they?”

“They’re okay I guess.” I thought really were fine, they fit pretty well and I couldn’t complain about the material all things considered, but I was mostly just hesitant to give a glowing review because of how close she was pressing her body against the door to get our faces as close as they could be.

“Lemme see! Lemme see!”

“As soon as you stop blocking the door.” I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she didn’t realize what she was doing for now, and with the way she embarrassedly stepped away while nervously chuckling, I was willing to accept that theory. I stepped out cautiously. She began an orbit around me to look over every square inch of fabric on my body. In some bizarre way I felt like I was about to be sold at a butcher or something. 

“Looks great!” She gave an exaggerated smile and thumbs up when she was done with her inspection. I wasn’t really sure how to take the compliment seeing as she picked out the clothes and someone else all together made them, they just happened to be on me at the moment. But it seems she was satisfied for now and I could get back to my work. By the time I figured out where I left off I was interrupted again by Marie who it seemed wanted to have a whole fashion show in order to flaunt all of her new outfits. I only really paid half attention, as little as I could so I could still get work done but enough that she wouldn’t get mad at me for not paying attention. It wasn’t very long considering she only got three or four outfits but she certainly did her best to stretch out the affair. Layering various things on top of other things then the second things on top of the first things, and pitching hypotheticals like if she could have this top with those bottoms or something else that didn’t quite make sense to me. I was really trying not to get distracted by the prattle of high fashion so I could finish the planning phase, maybe by this afternoon, but I may be able to put the mind and hands of someone who knows about clothes to work. I shifted gears a bit and began sketching out some designs of a different type. I didn’t really have that great of an eye for this kind of stuff but I feel I did a pretty good job after the nineteenth revision or so. Once everything looked right to me I called Marie in and showed her what I had sketched up.

“Do you think you could make these if we got the fabric?” She looked them up and down thoroughly and made some thoughtful sounding hums before settling on her final response.

“What are they?”

“Can’t you tell? They’re puppets!” Surely they had to have puppets here.

“Really? That’s what they're supposed to be?” Either she had never heard of them and was just trying to save face or maybe my drawings really were that bad. 

“Well do you think you could make them or not?” I knew she probably had some skill with sewing considering I’d seen patches sewn in things around here but I don’t know how deep that interest ran. Either way she had a better jumping off point than me and with a little micromanagement I could probably get exactly what I wanted.

“I guess so… Just what’s all this stuff here and that over there.” She ran her finger around the majority of the page asking for identification and clarification.

“That’s their costumes!” I suppose I could be a little sensitive about my creations but come on it seemed like it would be obvious to anyone with eyes that the puppets were wearing costumes. Maybe it did look a bit like I just couldn’t keep the pen straight and ended up jittering my lines all around but as long as you had higher expectations than you’d have for a six year old then you should be able to pick it up based on context clues. Either way there was no point getting upset about it, as long as they puppets came out recognizable then everything would be fine. Though it really only mattered to me since these would be entirely new characters to everyone else whereas I was intimately familiar with them and their story enough to be able to plagiarize it more or less wholesale. There were a few changes I would be making deliberately but otherwise I wasn’t going to make any major mistakes in my retelling, afterall the point was that if this was popular with my people then it should be a hit here too. At least that was my major hope, even if this was a flop I had plenty more plots to steal from. It’s not like I needed huge budgets for production either, just enough to make some more puppet costumes or maybe just enough cleverness to alter the ones I had. With such a low investment it would be hard to not at least break even with this stuff eventually, all that mattered was that I could keep the stories flowing and once one of them strikes a chord I can just keep playing that chord and raking in the rewards. Sure I might not be able to make DVD sales but repeat performances were almost less work, especially since with a single one you can get a few hundred or thousand heads in the crowd. Once I start getting called to do private shows at royal shindigs and the like then I can really just take it easy and go back to living my NEET life coming out every once in a while to release a new hit. It’d be easy enough to get a network of performers that would actually be executing what I wrote in cities all over the place. It’d be just like being a real playwright, maybe I’d even graduate from puppets and get actual actors. The main reason I was starting out small with hand puppets is mostly just the smaller scale, less money on costumes, less trouble getting a stage and performing area, not to mention I’d be able to play multiple roles myself even at the same time, which was good because I knew about three people well enough to ask them to be in my cast, and that was including myself. Getting willing participants, at least ones that will work for free, together might be one of the harder parts if I wanted to do more complex scenes and stories, for now I could write around it but it would really open up my options of what to plagiarize next. 

Once I was down with a plot layout and plans for the actual puppet theater it was onto the actual writing of dialog, there were only a few scenes that I could remember absolutely word for word so I’d start with those and then just make sure everything else fulfilled the same roles with respect to the plot as it did in the original and write all the characters as in character as I could. It would probably be the most time consuming part of the process so I figured I should probably get some other tasks going on in parallel. I told Marie that we would be going into town for a few errands and after she got changed one final time we were on our way. Getting her some fabric was the main mission for now so she could start making the puppets and costumes while I did my writing, I was going to be abridging it slightly but it was still a lot of raw hours to write it all out for my fellow performers. Getting started on constructing the theater was my next mission but there wasn’t much point in getting the materials for it now, especially considering how broke we were these days. The other errands we were running should address that one way or another. I wanted to take one day off and we were already strapped for cash again, it did somewhat shatter my delusion that I could someday get enough riches to resume my jobless, worry free lifestyle where I had left off. 

I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting a fabric store to be like, I had been in them a few times in my past life and it was mostly just aisles of big long spools of fabric, and this wasn’t all too different. The selection they had obviously wasn’t as extensive and some of the colors had much smaller spools but it looked like it would serve us just fine. I had no idea how much fabric would be needed to make a puppet but it seems like that was my fault as Marie easily estimated how much of each we would need based just on my measurements. While she was getting a little bit of everything I wrestled with the giant ream of red feltish material that I would need for the curtain. The way it would always flop to one side or the other or keep rolling out material after you had stopped made it surprisingly difficult for me to get the actual length I desired. By the time Marie was done and had come to check on me I just decided to get the extra it doled out to me and figured we’d need it for costumes or something anyway. When we brought everything over to the clerk she tabulated the price of every item, drawing it out along the measured notches on the counter and multiplying by the unit prices she must have had memorized. The process gave me plenty of time to dread how much this was going to cost us, when all was said and done we were given our bill and it wasn’t quite as high as I had feared but certainly higher than I had hoped. 

I really wasn’t quite comfortable with how light our wallet was getting so I suggested we take our haul over to the guild and see if there are any money makers we could do. We probably wouldn’t want to do it today unless it was blisteringly short enough to finish before the hall closed because there was no way I was coming back tomorrow just to turn it in, after all tomorrow would mark one full week since I had first joined, and there was no way I wasting another day waiting in that line. So something that we could turn in the day after would be the main criteria, obviously whichever gives out the biggest stack of cash would get the highest precedent and it goes without saying that I’d like it to be easy but we were nearly Level 5s, most things should be easy for us. We weren’t really all that close to leveling up again, but it sounded better that way. At this point we were past the days of jumping up multiple levels with a single beast slain, it could take us weeks to get enough experience points or longer if we weren’t doing decent xp quests pretty much every day. I didn’t really care all that much other than from a pride perspective, if I was really hurting for levels then I would have assigned my skill points from the ones I had already gotten. I still couldn’t really single out any one thing that I wanted, I think I just needed to study the problem from every angle for a while and do some research before I made my decision. Besides there was still the matter of me being a Generalist, the Jack of all Trades, Master of None. I should really figure out what class I wanted to shoot for before I allocated anything more, but again I wanted more time to examine my options. On the topic of options the quest board had a fair amount of variety to it, after considering our criteria however the bounty of options was severely reduced. Most of the easier ones were labeled to be done as soon as possible, which didn’t exactly say we couldn’t hand them in a few days from now but there was some intensely moral creature inside of me that discouraged me from picking them when someone fully intending to do them as soon as possible could walk in as soon as we leave. There were only a few with delayed starts and among those candidates there weren’t too many that had even modest payouts there was a bounty quest talking about some great migration that would be coming close to town, next week. But anything migrating in huge numbers had to be pretty easy to take down, all you really needed was a scalable method to do so. As lucrative as it might prove being, it was for another time. There was one quest marked ASAP that was staring me in the face the whole time, obviously when it said as soon as possible they were very understanding of how long it might actually take, and considering it had been at least a week now they’d be grateful if anyone could do it regardless of how long it would take them. I couldn’t help but speculate at this point how long this sea monster quest had been up here for, if they were raising the rewards like this then they must be getting desperate and maybe even be hoping for out of towners to come in and take care of it when they saw the prize that would be waiting for them. I was pretty much from as far out of town as you could get so I felt compelled to take it, but I knew I still wasn’t ready for it. Besides, the bounty may climb yet higher. But for now I wanted something for a quick burst of capital. After looking intently at the viable candidates for a few minutes and subsequently lowering my standards before repeating I was left with a request to flush some vermin out of an ongoing construction project, even though it could very possibly just be more giant rats I figured that it was the best we were gonna get considering it didn’t have us starting until the day after tomorrow. I was hesitant to say that the money was good considering the vermin had still not been identified so we very easily could be going up against something out of league as much as the suggested level told us differently. 

Our final errand for the day was a trip over to the library, I figured the librarian would like to hear about our exploits with the old man and his egg but my real motive was to ask something of a favor from her, though it could also be looked at as a favor to her. More of a proposition than anything really. When we came in she was actually up and alert and doing some reshelving, something told me that these were books that she herself had just finished reading or rereading, it was probably the fact that she had divulged to me the great pain that was caused to her by the near zero traffic the library received.

“I’ll be with you in a minute!” She was very chipper in her greeting, hopefully not just because she thought we might be actual potential patrons of the library. Either way we waited patiently for her to complete her task before saying anything. “Oh! It’s you!” She seemed shocked but pleased to see us. 

“Yep, just us.” I began to relate to her the grand adventure we had with the egg, though she seemed much more interested in the old man and the egg than our grand adventure of carrying it across town. 

“I had no idea that there was anyone like that in this town! That’s so amazing!” Once she was done gushing about the fact that this town wasn’t an intellectual wasteland like her higher ups seemed to think she quickly changed topics to how amazing it was that we really got to see a Northern Ice Fowl, which despite my earlier aggrandizing I felt the need to clarify that we in fact did not get to actually see it per se, but we were in presence of it, and we did get to see the egg. She was still just as impressed even with my clarification. “Being an adventurer must be the greatest, you really got to see a Northern Ice Fowl egg! Sometimes I wish I could be an adventurer like that but I guess I was called to do this.” She gestured sweepingly to the library at once both melancholy and humbled. Now would either be the best time or the worst time to present my proposition to her, either way it would sure be memorable. 

“I was wondering…”As I realized that I didn’t have any sort of idea of how to phrase this I was reminded of my pitiful charisma score. “What would you think about having a puppet show here in the library to get more visitors, also would you want to be in the show?” As unfocused and rambling as that question sounded she seemed to get the twin points I was trying to convey as she mulled it over. 

“That sounds like fun, but I’ll have to clear it by my supervisor first.” It sounded like a yes despite the asterisk.

“Good to hear, let us know what he says.” I had also wanted to ask for a bit of financial assistance from the benefactor but considering she didn’t even have full authority to put it on in the first place then there wasn’t much chance I would be getting any funds without someone’s stamp of approval. Happy with our encounter completed we bid the librarian farewell.

With our last real errand of the day completed we started the return trip to the farm under the midafternoon sun. Even with our pressing financial straits I figured it would only be polite of me to treat Marie to lunch considering she had agreed to make my puppets, not to mention that she had thought to get me clothes even though by all rights I had agreed to let her spend the money how she wanted. The meal was overall enjoyable even if I still wasn’t fully acclimated to the food here yet and I don’t think I would be for a while. It was hard to foresee anything overtaking that plate of curry as the best thing I’d eaten any time soon, but maybe that would all change once I had enough financial freedom to really explore the culinary world here. The conversation we had over the meal wasn’t overly lively but it was certainly enjoyable, at first she had questions about some of the designs I had drawn up and I was happy to answer them, going into rigorous detail about how each of the characters existed in their world and how they’re all pulled together by the main catalyst. I didn’t want to give too many specifics because I was being careful to make it look like the whole thing isn’t finished already but I probably got a tad overzealous in my enthusiasm. I changed the subject by asking her about various sewing things she would need to do and found myself genuinely interested in how she described the process, that doesn’t mean I really retained anything but I enjoyed hearing about it nonetheless.

End of Day Report

Start:       ¤ 55.00

                -¤30.00 Fabric

                 -¤15.00 Lunch

Change:  -¤45.00

End:         ¤ 10.00