Chapter Fifty- Nine - On-y Off-y

Oh nooooo, another character. Golly gee, I'm going to have to commission more art. Shucks! No choice about it. How sad.

Also... passed the 100K words mark! <3 

***

Hailey didn’t particularly like tea.

The fact almost made her laugh, especially when the waiter at the teahouse placed a still-steaming kettle in the middle of the table. Then they set down a few small plates with scones and pastries and small curried eggs as well as some cuts of cheese.

“Thanks,” Lucky said.

Hailey glanced to the side, which happened to line up the sensor on her accursed glasses with the girl. At some point she’d given up and had put her glasses back on. She was tired of squinting to see just a few feet ahead of her.

The gems flickered in sequence. Red, blue, red, blue, red, red. She did the math in her mind without any fuss. 43. Lucky was younger looking. If she was a human Hailey would place her around the late teens or early twenties. For that age her level was respectable enough. Actually, she might be ahead of the curve? It was hard for her to tell, especially since Lucky had those ears and that unmistakably swishy tail. What was she? A horse person? Dog? She was certainly a half-human of some sort. A beastkin, though Hailey recalled that the term wasn’t for polite company and...

She refocused, especially when the other person around the table reached out and casually poured tea from the kettle into all three of their cups with both grace and poise. The elven woman’s age was even more of a mystery. She seemed young enough, but elves aged gracefully, and her level...

Hailey’s glasses flicked again, the sensor now aimed on Rosario Thorn.

Red, blue, red, blue, blue, red, blue, red, red, blue. More flicks than she had ever seen, or had ever expected to see. It was actually a little tricky to do the math, she didn’t practice three-figured numbers too often since... well, it didn’t come up very often. She hadn’t yet run into any Titled yet. Eventually she had it. 662.

That wasn’t possible. Right?

“I’m curious,” Rosario said. “What’s it like, being an engineer? I did notice that Forgingburg was a rather technologically advanced city, all things considered.”

Hailey jumped a little at being addressed, but she quickly calmed herself. She was never this jumpy, not usually. She prided herself on being somewhat capable in most things, including socializing.

But it wasn’t often that she was dealing with someone like this.

“Being an engineer? Um, well, I suppose it really depends. The guild is quite powerful now, and well respected, though it is still closed to women, so I don’t know entirely what that’s like. If you’re talking more about my personal experiences... well, that’s a little trickier. I love it, of course, but my true passion is invention! I love discovering a problem that has no solutions yet, then creating one. I can’t always create a solution to those problems, but I can certainly try.”

Rosario nodded along. “Passionate.”

“Oh, yes, I suppose,” Hailey said. She cursed herself and her mouth. Whenever she got a little too excited she maybe rambled a little. 

“Following your passions is nice, I think,” Lucky said. “Swordmaster Thorn here is helping me follow mine.” She nodded seriously.

“That’s... nice,” Hailey replied. She reached over and picked up her teacup. It rattled against her cup, and Rosario’s smile changed to something softer. 

“You don’t need to be nervous,” Rosario said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Hurt her?” Lucky asked.

Rosario hummed and picked up her own teacup. She blew across the top, sending a curl of steam fluttering away. “I did say that I wouldn’t,” she said. “Hmm, here, let’s change jobs real fast, maybe that’ll put you at ease?”

Hailey reluctantly [Inspected] the woman.

Rosario Thorn

[Generalist Enchanter] - Level [Hidden]

Right, of course. “You’re an enchanter?” she asked.

“I dabble,” the woman said. “I’m very curious about your glasses. Where did you find those?”

“My glasses?” She reached up, touching the frame. “I made them. They’re a project I’ve been working on for the last few months. Have you ever interacted with the enchanted gems that guards use in the entrance of cities?”

“I have.”

“Well, the principle is somewhat the same, only using magical resonance theory. I discovered that... well, it doesn’t matter, but I did figure out how to project some spells further than you’d expect, but it makes the results a little harder to parse. Still, if you simplify it all, you can then have the spellwork interact with any simple spell-system. This is a passive one, so it’s quite weak, but weak is more than enough to, say, empower a weak [Light] enchantment. The issues is that the original model would merely turn on a light when pointing at someone. I’m sure there’s a use for that, but it wasn’t what I wanted. But at most I could power two lights. The trick was inventing a circuit with on-off switches to interpret the result in a readable way. Now... well, there’s two lights.”

“And they flicker in binary,” Rosario said.

“Bi...nary?” Hailey asked.

“Ones and twos?” Rosario asked. “Ons and offs? Isn’t that how it works? The lights flash on and off, and bases on the sequence you can decode any numeral as a base two.”

Hailey swallowed. “Yes, I didn’t know that name for it. I’ve been calling it on-y-off-y.”

“I think binary might be a better name,” Rosario said politely. 

Hailey cleared her throat. “Yes, well, to each their own?” She had never heard of this ‘binary’ thing. Though she supposed the name made some amount of sense.

“I suppose. I’m impressed. Why did you make something like that?”

Hailey puffed her cheeks out. “Well, it’s simple, isn’t it? I see two potential customers for my invention. The guard and the Adventurer’s Guild. The guard because it would speed up identification and processing at the gates of any city by quite a bit. And the Adventurer’s Guild because I suspect that they work on monsters. If so, then simply having a pair on a team could save adventurers precious time in mid-combat.”

“Couldn’t they just inspect the monster?” Lucky asked.

“Yes, well, certainly, but that requires that you stop and think to do so.”

“But don’t your fancy magic glasses make you do some sorta math?” Lucky asked. “At least, that’s what I understood? Hard to do that just before a fight. I’m not gifted with figures, but I can do a bit of math. I sure couldn’t do anything just before a fight.” She ripped a scone apart the way she ripped Hailey’s dreams. 

“There may yet be some practical issues with my system,” Hailey said. “But I’ve invested far too much to have it fail.”

A thought struck her like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.

Rosario Thorn was rich.

Of course she was. She was an ancient elf with over six hundred levels. Some of those were as a [Seamstress] and [Enchanter]. That combination was already enough to earn a good living, but what about the other hundreds of levels? It didn’t matter what jobs they were in, the number of skills she must have... It would be impossible for her not to find a way to make lots of gold.

A fact which her liberal spending proved. She had dropped a year’s wage on books, and this teahouse was hardly inexpensive. Those gold coins were spent with ease...

Hailey felt something dark and twisted in her gut. Naked greed. “Say, Miss Thorn, someone as educated as you... you wouldn’t happen to be familiar with the concept of an angel investor?”

“I’m familiar,” Rosario said.

“Fantastic! Now, obvious, in testing my invention on you, I crossed some boundaries, but I can make it up to you. You must visit my workshop. I have several inventions that you ought to see. I have magimatic doors, and a magical book copying device!”

“What does that device do?” Rosario asked.

“It uses a modified version of the [Copy Item] spell and a... proprietary mechanism to create a copy of a book,” Hailey said proudly.

Rosario tilted her head, then pulled out the book that Hailey was planning on buying from her inventory. “Were you going to copy this?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Hailey said.

“Were you going to return it to the shop right after to recoup the cost?” Rosario asked.

Hailey froze on the spot. She felt sweat clinging to her armpits and lower back. “No? Perhaps? I’m afraid that splurging on books isn’t something I can afford to do so casually. Not that I’m in that much debt, of course.” That was a lie, she was in so much debt. She didn’t need the nice, exceptionally wealthy elf to know that, however. It was just that materials were expensive. 

Rosario smiled slyly, then she set the book down on the table. “There, you can keep that one. I don’t think I took a receipt for it. As for your invitation... well, I do have the day off. And I suppose I could be interested in snooping around. I was quite impressed with the trains and trams in this city. It feels like the world leapt ahead technologically while I was... preoccupied.”

Hailey nodded rapidly. Was her shop in a state to receive guests? No. Was she going to squander the opportunity? Also no. “Please, come with me!” she said as she bounced to her feet.

Neither Rosario nor Lucky moved.

“We haven’t finished tea yet,” Rosario said.

“Oh... yes, of course.”

***