Peek: The Impossible (Patreon)

Lywin waves the last customer out of her shop for the day, the elven woman smiling as she locks the door and turns over the sign in the window. Shoes and other footwear have been seeing a lot more wear and tear these last few months, and she credits Thedeim and how popular delving has become.

Armorers may make sabatons and other combat footwear, but with so many civilians looking to run around and gain a bit of experience, their shoes have been having trouble keeping up, which means good business for her.

With the store closed, she takes the time to take stock of the store floor, walking the aisles with footwear for the different races. Most are fairly simple to deal with, as the basic details of a foot doesn't differ all that much from halflings to orcs. They'll want different widths and sizes, but at the end of the day, a foot is still a foot. But there are others with... unique feet.

The wide variety of beastkin shoe designs always keeps her on her metaphorical toes. The claws are the biggest challenge, which leaves sandals a major style for most of the beastkin. She's had moderate success with sheathes for the claws on her boots, but the wide variety in shape makes it almost impossible to make them general enough for a beastkin to simply grab one off the shelf. Much simpler to have an open toe design.

Hooves are rather easy to fit, and she's shod quite a few of the relevant kin. Cloven hooves are a bit more difficult, with most preferring slippers, though some like a specialized boot. But then there are the truly difficult ones.

Birdkin are notoriously difficult to design footwear for. Most of them hardly even bother with wraps! But she's confident with her new designs. The key is to not try to force the toes together, but allow them to spread out, without having so much excess leather. The traditional solution is more like a glove than a shoe, but she wants to provide them with something with an actual sole!

But even the birdkin pale in comparison to her current project. The one that can't be done. But after having done a few delves of Thedeim herself, she's been questioning if it's truly impossible, after all.

Snakekin.

"But they don't even have feet!" cry the skeptics, but that sounds like an excuse to her! She draws the curtains as she finishes her inventory, and heads to her workbench in the back to focus on her project.

The first idea was to try what amounts to a durable sock, but that doesn't give the snakekin any traction to actually move around. They need their belly scales to grip and pull, and having leather in the way simply has them gripping and pulling their way out of any attempted shoe.

Her next idea was to try something more akin to farrying, not that she could just nail shoes to a snakekin's belly. She tried glues and other adhesives, she even tried to carefully etch into the scales to create a more physical connection, but still no success.

But then she got an idea from listening to some of the stronger delvers. The armory bees have a special honey that will coat things in a thin layer of metal. She still doesn't know the details, but she does know how to set a quest at the guild, and it was finally fulfilled!

So now she carefully spreads out the shed skin from a snakekin, and gingerly opens the jar of metallic honey. She dips a cheap brush into it, unsure how quickly it'll become useless for what she needs, and carefully paints one of the long belly scales. Once done, she caps the jar and washes the brush, glad to see the honey seems happy to dissolve in warm water before it sets.

And after, it's as durable as iron, or possibly a weak steel. Scrubbing it with warm water doesn't remove it, but she sees one problem already: the scale is too smooth. It won't grip like that. The fix, at least, is simple enough: carve shallow grooves before painting.

The next scale looks like something that should work, and she has ideas already to try to improve it. Would roughly sanding the scale before painting give enough texture for grip? Would it be better to use a file on it after the honey sets?

She's going to need to try to get some volunteer snakekin, hopefully ones that are expecting to shed soon, in case it doesn't work out as well as she hopes.

And she does have hopes for this, high ones. Scale wear can be a significant concern for them. But if this works, she might be able to give them the confidence to slither wherever they will, just as anyone wearing a proper pair of boots! Sure, things like caltrops are designed to pierce even those, but who goes around stomping on caltrops?

And how many people have to walk cobbled roads that are starting to break up, with sharp edges? How many venture into unsure footing and have to trust in their shoes to keep thorns and worse at bay? And if she can keep snakekin bellies safe and make some extra coin at the same time, why shouldn't she?