Aftermath

[Kuvarakh]

3rd of Spring, 513

Kuvarakh didn't know why it was taking so much longer to get "acquainted" with this new body than usual. It had been a good three weeks and his arm and leg were still giving him trouble. It was true, he had had to rely on his boss Wanda, and his friend and guild-mate, Alea, to apply the transferal glyphs for his jump. But Wanda was a skilled glypher (glyphist? glyphizer? glypherator?) and he couldn't imagine that she would have been lax in the particulars.

Then again, she had been panicked and tearful. With Kuvarakh's old body chewed to grizzly pieces, leaking rot and ichor all over the floor, time had truly been of the essence. Perhaps the tears and desperation had clouded her accuracy.

At any rate, he had a new body, but the arm and leg were slow to respond to his brain's signals. They had been chewed off of the old body by the mutated bugs that had attacked him. It was either that the glyphs had been applied incorrectly, or that there was some way in which the fact that the two extremities had been absent from his old body had inhibited the 'connection' between those areas during the transference.

It was coming around though, as were the repairs to Alchemmia Alchae, the alchemy shop he worked at with his boss, Wanda. The floors had been re-smoothed, the bored tunnels melted back into the basic structure of stone. The outer walls were fully restored and a pair of reimancers were currently engaged in redoing the inner walls.

Wanda was all business again, Kuvarakh was glad to see. She had been a shadow of herself ever since the attack. Depressed and anxious of ever recovering. Kuvarakh was proud of how the reimancer trainees at the Guild house had come to her aid. Of course, the fact that it was one of these self same trainees that had triggered the attack, and the fact of the guilt Kuvarakh himself bore for inadvertently creating the little monsters in the first place, figured largely in this sense of obligation.

But it was good work for the trainees. And it was ultimately good public relations because Kuvarakh had sent a squad of representatives around to neighboring buildings to ask if they had sustained any damage. Some of the requisitions for repairs seemed unlikely to have resulted from the insects, but Kuvarakh instructed the agents to turn nothing down.

So a number of holes in walls were being repaired by reimancers that appeared to have been caused more by objects thrown in drunken rages than by internal swarms of stone-chewing insects. And broken items, supposedly fallen from shelves that were still stable and intact were accepted despite the obviously doubtful liability of Alchemmia Alchae.

But such were the ways of building good business relationships.

[Kuvarakh]

There were dozens of requests. It was going to set them back weeks. Wanda was doing what she could to arrange coordinated transmutations. Situations where items could be grouped together to benefit from the same founts and/or filters, set in the center of the ring together. Not touching, for the most part. All too often, these "customers" were determined to have subtle differences imbued, claiming that restitution entitled them to it. What could have been accomplished in a dozen transmutations was shaping up to require several dozen.

Kuvarakh was finding a great deal of use in the employment of hypnosis to encourage people to accept compromises. Ladies of nearby homes listing the loss of draperies and decorative cloths and coverings among their claims were all at odds for the replacement patterns. While they did bring samples to use, none were identical. It often appeared that the only reason some patterns differed was because one was older and more faded than the other.

And it was not only the women that were of such discriminating insistence. Men likewise harbored attitudes of stubborn refusal should their like-crafted plate not be subtle degrees different in sheen and burnish. Wood crafted furniture dyed and varnished in degrees differing by shades an artist could scarcely perceive.

Equally odd was the fact that none were concerned about that which was most drastically affected. The stone of their walkways, pillars, gardens and forges were dismissed as unimportant so long as they were sound. And while Kuvarakh agreed with this last sentiment, he felt it should apply more to the items these people were grasping at free replacements for.

He found occasion to get several women together to view a sample of a pattern and felt no shame in opening up a bubble of hypnotic djed to enfold the perceptions of them, impressing upon them the notion that their neighbors 'wished they had drapes of such color' or 'clothes of such patterns'. Or upon the men that the professional soldiers 'eyed with envy the grain of burnish this item possessed' or how the Temple itself 'wanted for wood of such dark stain to offset the brass fittings of the candelabras'.

Soon enough, many a time-saving consensus was reached, resulting in only a half-dozen transmutations being necessary as opposed to fifteen or twenty. And while Wanda was at first reluctant to look the other way while Kuvarakh imposed suggestions on the claimants, she came soon to feel the same resentment in the way they were being taken for granted by fellow citizens trying to exploit their misfortune.

[Kuvarakh]

Of course, all these compromises had the down side of bringing about the need for coordination of patterns, shades and colors on the undamaged items that were parts of sets. If the draperies over one window were now going to be a little darker and bluer, it stood to reason that the rest of them must be transformed to match as well.

Kuvarakh trod wearily into the back room, expecting to find Wanda snappish and depressed. "Bunch of god-cursed vultures. Taking us to the petching cleaners with all this fashion-matching crap." he growled. He was surprised to find her energized and upbeat. This was not to say that she was happy about all the transmutations yet to be done, but it had brought about a decision that it turned out she had been delaying for some time.

"We're going to get a bigger ring for our activation chamber!" She announced with genuine eagerness. "This little ten-footer has been a hindrance for long enough. I've had my eyes on a twenty-footer for some time now. It will allow us to group much more of this 'fashion-matching crap' in each activation." she said brightly, making little quotation marks with her fingers.

"What are you going to do with the old one?" he started looking around, guessing floor plan divisions for the possibility of employing both rings. "I mean you have all those djed-residue pads for the ten-footer, as well as the threaded holes set into the floor to accommodate it." Her hand was waving dismissively before he was finished. He would have bet mizas on the upcoming responses.

"We'll get new ones. It'll give us something to do while things are slow. They'll cost more, but I bet we can consolidate them more efficiently. We can still use the small ones for the small ring, which we can still use for small volume activations." She was downright animated. And Kuvarakh would have collected on his bet.

"Well I hate to be Dira's advocate, but have you thought about how heavy they'll be? I know you liked to rib me about hiring some little girl to help with with them," they made matching faces at each other, "but these will be four times as big. Do you need to hire a little girl to help you with the math?"

She stuck her tongue out. "We'll get them lightened, we can do it ourselves right here. After we make them flexible."

Kuvarakh cocked an eyebrow. "I think the thing to do would be to get all the lead lightened while still in ingot form. Then everything we need to do with it will be much easier. We'll make it the first thing we do in the new ring. We could do two tons at once." he found himself warning quickly to the idea. 'A twenty foot ring! Even the University at Zeltiva only had twelve-footers. At least for the students.' His thoughts began to race in time with his imagination.

Wanda came up and grabbed his hand excitedly. "There you go. You see? We're solving problems already! And I didn't have to hire any little girls to do it!" She released his hand and reached up to pat his face with an air of sarcasm. "But I'd hate to take you away from all the 'fashion-matching' you've been looking forward to. There's about twenty or thirty sets of crockery that need to be finished. Have fun." her voice was sing-song with good-natured mockery.

Kuvarakh's shoulders sagged, "Are you sure I couldn't talk you into being a kill joy?"

[Kuvarakh]

It took several weeks to restore everything that the locals were bringing in under the pretense of being claims against Alchemmia Alchae. The shop was brimming with personnel the whole time. Additional customers NOT bringing claims for compensation, reimancer trainees and masons refurbishing the stonework, architects redesigning small aspects of the floor plan, wood crafters planing shelves and cutting scroll work for new sills and shelves.

There were a few alchemy trainees helping with the workload. Kuvarakh regularly went among them, thanking them, and letting them know it would reflect on their records back at the facility. It was not in the spirit of a bribe, but was simple recognition of an unexpectedly altered curriculum.

Measurements were being made in preparations for the installment of the new, larger ring. But with the pads being sized for the smaller one, and with so much work to do, they couldn't remove it yet, so the installation plans were on hold, as least as far as the floor was concerned.

The ceiling was another matter altogether. New tracks were being secured over the location for the twenty-foot ring. Holes drilled through the ceiling to allow heavy iron pegs with wide thick flanges to be pushed through from above. The protruding ends being attached to the new tracks. These were laid in a more elaborate pattern to allow new pads to be "rolled" from storage to be positioned and lowered into the fitted inset that would accommodate the new ring. Transmuted for lightness or not, these would still be forty-square-foot pads with lead cores, and they were heavy. They were used to both give protection from, and make use of, the lingering residual djed from alchemical activations.

Until they were all made and placed in the access storage rack, which included perpendicular racks as well to allow pads in the back to be maneuvered around the rest and brought forward for easier access, they would use the small ten-by-ten-foot ones. Four of them, would be equal to one twenty-by-twenty.

Kuvarakh helped in every way he could. After expending himself fully in alchemy tasks, he would assist in any way possible. Often this was nothing more than being on hand to keep others out of an area while workers took measurements or compared samples. Or mundane efforts such as holding something in place while something else was attached or detached.

His lack of need for food or sleep kept him on site around the clock, while shifts of workers rotated on and off. It was gratifying to see Wanda's face show appreciation every morning as she arrived. He didn't really perceive the amount of gain being made day by day, being there all the time, but she obviously did.

[Kuvarakh]

Now that the extra liability-based tasks were complete, the chaos quickly settled into order. The only added distractions and disruptions to the routine of scheduling activations for actual jobs now, were the comings and goings of the workers doing the repairs and improvements to the shop. There was more floorspace, due to better arrangements of walls and shelving, the storeroom was reshaped to better accommodate the items stored in it and everything looked cleaner and newer.

Wanda was all smiles. Although she made an effort to retain the image of stern taskmaster, Kuvarakh found it easy to drop a comment here, a comeback there, that brought her to giggling glee. He often found her simply standing, slowly turning in the main activation chamber with a satisfied sigh.

Kuvarakh came up quietly behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders. "It was a very near thing, wasn't it?"

She turned to face him, her expression becoming entirely serious. "Yes it was, Ku. Don't ever scare me like that again. I don't think I could go through that without cracking up. By the way, are your...limbs...responding better now? They seem to be."

Kuvarakh smiled apologetically. "I had to do something. I knew I'd recover with your help, but I hadn't expected it to be such grisly work for you and Alea. I hope neither of you have nightmares. if you do, I can probably help."

She shook her head and started to say something, but he made a halting gesture and continued. "Actually, though, I wasn't even talking about me. I meant you must have come close to losing the shop. When I think of the money involved in all these...neighbors'...claims..." he said the word with a distinct lack of generosity. "...it makes me glad that the guild was available to help, I don't see how I could have made up for it without them. If you'd gone belly up, I...I...don't know what-...""

Wanda now interrupted him, "You have nothing to make up for. Such things are a hazard of the trade. We take the natural condition of things and alter them for profit and discovery. It's bound to go wrong...horribly wrong...now and then."

Kuvarakh winced at the words and Wanda laughed at his reaction. "Besides, if it makes you feel better, I had the mizas, I was saving them to give you a bonus for the last year, but now I'll have to start saving again. Consider THAT your 'punishment." She patted his cheek with mock sympathy and pouty lips.

"Fair enough." he said, surprised to find that it DID make him feel better.

[Fallacy]

XP Award! Name:Kuvarakh XP Award: Leadership- 1 Organization- 1 Hypnotism- 1 Persuasion- 1 Lore: Being Pissed Off at the Neighbors Hypnotism- Better Than Arguing Helping Revamp the Shop Wanda's Punishment Notes: Fun Fact- Rings bigger than 30ft would be hard to find outside Sahova 20ft is quite a score! Its nice to see that the store helped replace all the damages it caused or perhaps, Ku caused. Any questions or concerns about the rewards gained please send a PM