milliways_bar | (no subject)

Current Location: At the bar

Entry tags:

amascut,
autor

(no subject)

A red-haired, sun-kissed woman enters via the bar room's back door carrying two heavy looking burlap bags over her shoulders and wearing a purple sun dress.

When she gets to the actual bar, she places the bags on the countertop along with several small greyish round stones. "There is your share with something extra for you."

The bags and stones vanish and the woman speaks again. "I'll take my usual order of provisions and a Slayer's Respite while I wait," she seems to say to the bar. Bar answers back with a glass mug full of a greenish tinted ale.

"Ah, there you go," says the woman before sitting on a barstool and getting started on quaffing the beer.

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Autor hasn't seen Sarah in a while, but it seems like she changed her hair. Wasn't she a blonde? Or was her hair black? Either way, she seems to have messed with it. She wasn't a redhead, he knows that for certain.

"Hello, Sarah," he says as he approaches, and leans on the bar. "Enjoying a break?"

She smells of raw cocoa, sweat, and smoke. Sorry, she hasn't even thought of hopping into a shower or bath or anything like that yet.

It takes her a very brief moment to remember. "Autor, hello! Yes, just for a bit before I set sail back home. I keep telling people I will settle down somewhere and stop making these trips. But I can't seem to stop completely. The money is too good."

It's not a bad smell, all told. Autor's often sweaty, so he's used to that smell at least. And the smoke and the cocoa are pleasant to him, if not other people in the bar.

"What trips would those be? Is that... Chocolate?"

"I suppose that I shouldn't keep this secret anymore... a while back I planted a bunch of cacao trees in the forest near the beach because I thought the chocolate here tasted funny. They grew enough to start fruiting faster than I was expecting because," she shrugs her shoulders, "magic?"

She knows exactly why the trees matured so fast. But magic is at least mostly true.

"I found a way to sail a ship here from my world too, so I have been harvesting and roasting the beans here and selling them there," she says with a self-satisfied grin.

Autor blinks at her, and then eases into a smile. "That's brilliant. And you can charge whatever you want in your world. Is the venture worthwhile? Are you making a profit?"

"Well, it was worthwhile, its hard to tell if it was profitable. The whole trip involved lots of bartering and moving cargo from port to port. Milliways was just one stop in the whole trip. I tended to price my beans lower than the people who were in control of the chocolate trade just out of spite, though," she says with a chuckle before taking another drink of her beer. "But these days I don't do it so often; I have shop to run, after all. But I still do it occasionally for fun. Or spite, hard to tell sometimes."

"Something's odd about this whole chocolate business, though. I had been doing this for maybe 7 or 8 years before I settled down in Pollnivneach, and that was before I started coming here." She furrows her brow. "When did I discover a sea-route here, then?"

"You haven't met a younger version of myself in here, have you? Or maybe I am the young one..."

She lets out a hushed, feline-sounding growl "Fucking Milliways."

Time to see if people here will buy mixed up timeline shenanigans.

"Oh, a younger version? You were blonde at one point, I think, and ran a shop without a chocolate business," Autor says, tilting his head. "You used a staff."

She thinks, brow furrowed "well... I did have blonder hair when I was younger, but that was from before I..." she searches for the right turn of phrase.

"Before I ran away from home. But that was when I was really young. I had a shop already?"

"Ugh, this place!" she exclaims, exasperated. "How many versions of me have shown up here?"

"How very odd," Autor says, shaking his head. "Well, it's a pleasure to be meeting you all over again. What do you sell in your shop this time around?"

"But we already met..." She sounds disappointed, but couldn't be happier. She might not need to keep her story straight here. She can just blame the front door's timey wimeyness!

It especially good news if the door ever catches her using a completely different alias than Keli Raven the Pirate Queen or Sumona the completely ordinary merchant.

But Autor remembers an alias which she doesn't remember using... it could be trouble.

"I sell odds and ends, things people forget they need, leftover things from my previous overseas excursions too.

"What's your best seller? The chocolate?" Autor says, tilting his head.

She knows they have had this conversation before. Not this exact conversation, but saying it's deja vu would be an understatement.

She just rolls with it. Wacky Milliways timeline hijinks, right?

"No, the chocolate is usually all traded away before I get back home. Nose pegs, rock hammers, and iceboxes are my best sellers, actually."

"What's a nose peg?" Autor says, wrinkling his own.

She reaches into a pocket in her dress and takes out what looks like a clothes peg meant for holding clothes up to dry on a clothesline. She the places it on her nose, causing her nostrils to be held shut.

"There is a dye maker in town that sometimes uses ingredients that are very ... odiferous?" She says, sounding nasally. "Her parents were saltpeter makers so I think maybe she's unaware of how bad her dye making smells. I've seen some people use these while swimming, too."

She takes the nose peg off. "Pollnivneach is too far away from any beaches and the river is too full of crocodiles for swimming, though."

Edited 2018-08-23 17:20 (UTC)

The nose peg and its uses just make Autor smile, even though he's mostly baffled. "I see. Doesn't it hurt to use?"

"That depends on who makes them, but then I don't like being in pain myself so I try to get them from people who show a bit of moderation, at least," she says. "But then again, anything can be painful to someone with a low enough tolerance for pain," she says with a smirk. "Such people are really rare, though."

"Its just a bit of discomfort, at most."

"So how about you? What have you been doing these past years? Or days, maybe. Because Milliways is playing tricks with my timeline, apparently."

"Huh. Well, if you say so," Autor says, blinking at the nose peg. He straightens his shoulders at her question. "I've been working in someone else's world as a dog cook. He paid me a great deal to run his household, answer the mail, that sort of thing. Fortunately for me, his world is in my future, so his 2018 American dollars are worth much more than my 1915 German Marks."

It takes her a while to parse, but her best guess causes her to raise an eyebrow. "Those are years you mentioned, right? That's a century's worth of future."

And it's been two millenia since the people of this world restarted counting the years? Isn't it time for some global disaster, or civilization ending war, or momentous discovery to take place?

No, it's not her responsibility; she has her own world to worry.

"Are American dollars and German Marks types of coin?"

"Yes, so I'm dealing with a century's worth of inflation," Autor says, smiling a little. He's rather pleased with how working in Wilford's world turned out. "Dollars and Marks are both paper bills of different denominations, though Marks can also be coins. I'm sure Bar has some availabile if you're curious."

Sure, Amascut knows about inflation, but does Sarah? "How does money inflate? Especially if it's made of paper?"

But more ridiculous to Amascut than paper money is the idea that inflation can go on for that long without deflation. Earth is a very silly place.

Curious, she places two gold coins on Bar and requests that one be exchanged for 2018 American dollars and the other for 1915 German Marks.

She receives 351.53 American dollars and 23.45 Deutsche Marks. All she does is blink in confusion at the money and say, "So these are bank notes, right?"

"Yes, those are bank notes," Autor says, curious about the coins she placed on the bar. "And inflation is when things cost more over time. Paper bills don't literally inflate."

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