Chapter 19: Citadels before the… shopping day?

I was thoroughly grumpy when I woke up. We'd stayed out until the wee hours of the morning, then woken up what (my internal CPU clock told me) was no more than three hours later. In fact, it was two hours and sixteen minutes, twelve seconds. If I wanted to go into my full range of timekeeping, I'd need nanoseconds. We didn't have time for me to complain about my subpar amount of sleep, because my two companions had immediately rushed us all off to get food and drink at the inn's breakfast portion of bed and breakfast.

As for what we'd be doing later? Gear. Gear, gear, and more gear. Our group would apparently need a decent amount of upgrades, a few teachings from some specialized magic tutors, and we'd probably want to bring on one or two players or other party members as support. Plus, uh... well, I didn't have any armor? Or anything that didn't accentuate my, er, curves. A lot. The stares I'd gotten yesterday just because I was wearing a bodysuit were getting annoying, and I didn't want to have to toga it up for another day — my scarf was good as it was, and I liked it. Which meant clothes shopping. For girls.

At least we wouldn't have to worry a ton about money. The adventurer's guild here bought map information and any happenings for a decent price, and we were able to get a really good amount for simply the fact we'd found an abandoned bandit's camp. I figured the guild would probably extend feelers and possibly craft some quests or something, and from an external perspective it probably made it possible for more diverse playstyles to exist within the playerbase.

For some reason, the idea of clothes shopping and gear shopping and such kept making my chest feel all warm and bubbly. I felt downright goddamn cheerful. Which, you know! Weird! Considering how I'd previously been stressed and such, how we were ostensibly under siege... all of that should have been weighing on my mind. But nope, it was just about whether I'd be able to wear a dress.

Like... no, not reasonably. Realistically speaking I was a melee-magic caster, which meant high mobility suits like my current one would be key. Perhaps some armor would be helpful, but anything more restrictive than your average gambeson would probably be a no-go for my absurd acrobatics shit and on-the-fly magical retooling. But I was drawn to the idea of flowing around in a skirt and maybe some slim jeans, if they had any, slicing monster heads while wearing some kind of cropped shirt.

What, may I ask, was the fuck wrong with me? I had no idea, but it was a constant image in my mind, so I kind of just... set it aside and asked it to play nicely with the other metaphorical kids. Besides, we were looking for gear first. So I'd probably be getting another sword or dagger or something, and a... well, actually, that was a lot of it. We'd be looking out for magical items, but they were apparently not SUPER common yet, only having been just produced by the early players and not being very common from lower-level drops.

But, uh, there were a lot of high-level monsters at our doorsteps. So there would be an influx of enchanted weapons and rings and such as soon as the onslaught let up. We'd probably stay a bit to see if we could catch that, or at least help.

Oh! Flurry wanted to get some materials for both me and her to tinker around with. I'd be seeing if I could amplify my magic in any way, and she'd wanted to work on a few ideas we had cooked up together. If all went well, there could be airburst-missiles full of brimstone and fire ready in maybe a week or so to use on the battlefield just outside the city, and a few prototype railguns in the same timeframe.

(I mean it wouldn't go well. Like, objectively speaking this was a pipe dream; railguns needed way higher quality material than steel, and the magical missiles would need a lot of rocketry knowhow and engineering knowledge for all the manufacturers involved. However... it did feel like we were on the cusp of something really important. As if a branch of magic was at our fingertips.)

We'd be getting some iron and such first, as it was a lot cheaper. Not cheap, cheap, but most people just bought everything pre-made already. So it was fairly cheap. Nora wanted some wood, for some reason? And then we'd need to swing by some potion shops for health potions. Just in case, they said.

I was honestly unsure the potions would work on me, but everything else so far had. Better to get and not need. They'd also mentioned some other interesting things... stuff I hadn't expected in a videogame. Like potions to make you cook better, and shit like that. Weird to think about. But I guess since players had no special Cooking Skill That Lets You Cook Innately and you'd need to do it by hand anyways, it'd be useful?

Maybe... maybe there were foods that had perks like skill buffs? What about equipment, did that have like, +1 modifiers and such?

I'd need to do some research. Maybe I could find, like, a glossary or something...

Nora shook me (physically) out of my consideration, jerking her head over to the exit and trying to get me to rise from my dozing. Ah, I'd mostly missed breakfast in my thoughts. Shit.

Stumbling to the exit on two very, very sore legs (why did androids get programmed to feel soreness in this world? Pain I could see. Soreness?), I was greeted with a wall of noise from every direction. Not an overwhelming one, really, but a sort of... clashing of cityscape with medieval-era sound effects. A few horses clopped past on the roads, as did some people with cloven feet; there were non-human humanoids everywhere, hawking and scurrying and the like. This place felt lived in.

But I had things to do, so I hurried towards where I thought Nora had brought me to. We met up relatively quickly, and after a bit of griping the two of us made our way towards the market district of the city. Mostly, it was a lot of standard supplies for the people living in the city; convenience stuff, like food and water and a couple knickknack shops. We'd be looking towards the far end of the plaza to find any hero-geared shops.

The plaza in question was definitely a district, but simultaneously open enough to have people walking all around horses and wheelbarrows and a few street performers. Wide, cobbled-stone roads connected buildings squished in next to each other like a crowded subway. As for the aesthetics, there were a few smaller fountains and some stone bits and bobs around the place — but I felt most of the beauty came from the liveliness of the place. Come here at night, when most people were asleep, and it'd be a wholly different feeling. Probably.

The midpoint of the financial district — uh, was that what it was? — was a gigantic stone fountain, made in the shape of a clover and with arches connecting the four corners. The lip of the basin was more than wide enough to lie down on, and the arches made a beautiful cross-shaped waterfall.

Coincidentally, I noted that the cross pointed in the cardinal directions. There was also a tickling at the back of my mind when I glanced down into the basin — something at the bottom sparked my attention, but it was hidden by all the coins.

And, uh, I didn't want to stick my hands into a fucking fountain sifting coins apart? It'd be bad form. Plus, we were just passing by, and Nora flipped a coin in there... yeah, I'd probably look pretty deranged. So I just moved on, and started jogging over to where Nora was appraising some pieces of armor — uh, clothing, actually.

I nodded over to the clothes. "Thought we were getting armor?"

"You need clothes. Also, this is armor. It's just low-key armor."

Okay, well. It did just look like a loose uh... poet shirt, I think? "Do you mean low-key as in 'wouldn't stop a light punch', because you want to punch me when I'm being stupid?"

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Nora snorts, chuckling a little. "No! I, no, this is an outfit that has some sigils embroidered on the inside. They'll focus magic into invisible armor, which'll let you have decent amounts of physical resistance!"

"Okay," I said. "So, uh, what's the catch? Exorbitant price?"

"Meh... not really? It's moreso just that this is emergency gear. It won't absorb like, more than maybe five sword swings before it needs recharging. And arrows are out of the question. Still. Better than plate armor for your kind of fighting, and it's pretty affordable since all it needs is regular clothes and enchantments."

I shrugged. At least it wouldn't be that revealing, and I could probably wear my suit underneath it for added modesty. "How much does that cut into our bills?"

"Hmm, if you want to get it fitted..? Probably around ten gild?"

We'd been paid in marks, which were literally just silver pieces. They were apparently called marks because the government marked them with special hallmarks to ensure their status as official, and were implemented prior to the government slapping itself on the head and enchanting their gold pieces to prevent piracy. Those gold pieces, due to their markings and fact that they were actually gold gilded on top of a magical metal, were named "gilds". The conversion rate was 15 marks to 1 gild, about, which meant that we'd be a decent 150 marks in the hole.

We'd gotten a fucking thousand, so... no big issue. Again, bandit camp information paid well. Considering this was around a tenth of our earnings, I imagined any seriously good armor would probably cut into it a lot. All in all... this shirt looked good, but it was probably just a regular shirt with a budget enchantment marked up by a thousand percent.

However. That was exactly what our plan was. Even if this wasn't a particularly good piece of armor, we just wanted something — and then that something could be retooled into something way better by me and Flurry, the crackpot team of magitech scientists. With a little help from some enchanters we'd try to chat up around the area.

Flurry was off on her own doing research into spell sigils in relation to enchantments, so it was me and Nora getting our supplies. She'd joked again about it being a date. It was not. But I nodded to her and started bargaining with the armorsmith's clerk. 

"So," I said, inspecting the piece of clothing inside and out. "Uh... got a guarantee on this? Looks a little flimsy to me, even including the magic armor shenanigans."

The clerk leaned in jovially. "Wellll, no guarantees, but between you and me? John couldn't break the armor, no matter how hard he tried. And he's a big ol' blacksmith, with arms and legs to boot, using a claymore that had to have been about my size! Magical stuff, eh?" The game, colloquially, was afoot from this point forward. We'd be testing our gauges on what this was worth.

Thankfully, I hailed from the land of capitalism; the place where I'd lived in was only exempt barely from the throes of monetary spending by the fact that I was literally a fucking robot and had no money.

"Yeah, yeah," I waved, "and your magical stuff, I assume, jacks the price of this shirt to maybe thirteen-hundred percent above standard rates?"

The clerk scoffed. "Thirteen-hundred? You've got to be kidding, this is a bargain! Most shirts are really close to this price, if you're getting a good one. And this is a good one! It's honestly a steal!"

"Okay. Run the numbers. A shirt like this more than likely takes around twelve hours, accounting for division of labor. Pay the tailor four marks an hour, enough to get a decent meal in only thirty minutes. You're a blacksmithing shop, so you're likely paying at a reduced price because of bulk orders. Twelve hours, four marks; that makes 48 marks. Then, enchantments. I assume those are done in-house? We'll go with another twelve hours at double rate. That makes 144. Which means that if this shirt took twenty-four hours to make, and if you paid everyone involved an exorbitant amount of money, it'd still be not worth 150 marks."

Bewildered, the poor lad I'd just ranted my mouth off at stood still behind the table. In all honesty, it was all horseshit. But I made enough generalizations that statistically I probably hit home on a few of them — the bulk orders, using division of labor. Since you could buy bread for... copper coins (no cool name, literally just "coppers" for short), which were themselves around 40 to a mark, paying someone in four marks meant giving them a very decent dinner and probably another few days at an inn. We'd not even travelled with money because of this reason: while I didn't know it at the time, Flurry and Nora had known we'd probably be getting paid more than enough to survive.

Scalpers were rampant with the higher-quality gear, but since they held all the cards players were incentivised to simply deal with the exorbitant prices. In any case, players would be getting exorbitant amounts of money anyways. They'd be funding wars, governments, assassins — and it was a brilliant method of finding data on what faction got what.

Ahem. Back to the haggling at hand, I'd somewhat lost the clerk. You know what? Throw them a bone. They didn't need to worry about this sort of thing — the brown-haired guy in front of me couldn't have been more than 18 years old. "Y'know actually this is a huge drag. Wanna just go for like, 100? I'm pretty sure I've seen some shirts of this make for like, pennies. Uh, coppers. I really don't mind the markup, but 150 is... a bit much. So?"

Suddenly realizing that a proposal had been offered to him, the clerk straightened up and coughed. "Ah! Well... I can do 125. For the set, actually. This has been... informative." I nodded, and Nora handed over the 125 marks.

On our way out, we passed another blacksmithing shop selling the exact same kind of shirt for seventy gild. Which was... 1,050 marks. Heh. A huge ripoff, for sure, but we'd dodged a bullet by getting this... somewhat feminine white shirt and black, high-waisted quasi-leggings. God, these would almost be worse than my suit to wear — but they'd be armored, and also at least not massively show off my chest. My, uh, everywhere else and sensitive areas would have a worse fate by the perfectly-fit leggings, yet it'd still be better than normal. Assuming I needed better than normal. In the wilderness I felt it to be not the biggest deal.

As I was considering the fate of my fashion choices, and why it suddenly mattered, Nora pointed out a couple getting scarfed for well over three-thousand marks just to buy a shirt that looked barely bigger than mine and looked to be practically identical enchantment wise. On our way to the next place, we had a good snicker about that; even as the sun came to a high-noon position, our joviality from the beginning of the day had successfully carried over to now. Go team!