Chapter 194: An Eye for Art
Simon had no shortage of other offers after that, but what he was really frustrated by were his material. The nobles that wanted him to paint murals to their greatness offered him significant sums, but even with money, he wasn’t really sure where he could get better materials to work with.
On Earth he could have just ordered paint in any color online, or gone down to the local hardware store, but here, things were harder. So, while he took a couple of straightforward jobs to finance his research in that regard, the next few months were spent mostly on trying to expand beyond those limitations in Thebian. It was there that he discovered from another local artist of significant repute that some colors like deep, vibrant blue could only be created by crushing literal precious gems, which seemed insane to Simon.
“I do not have time to invent chemistry from scratch,” he told himself. Sometimes, though, it felt like he should. It was a special sort of torment to know that a tool like bright blue paint or broad spectrum antibiotics existed, but to have absolutely no way to use it himself.
“It took millions of humans thousands of years to invent all of that stuff,” he lectured himself while he painted his current patron at the height of two stories tall on a watchtower overlooking the grand market. “So don’t beat yourself up too much. You’re doing pretty good, for one guy.”
While Simon couldn’t deny that, he was hardly thrilled by it. Good enough had once been his mantra, but now it was like a stone in his shoe. Even projects that he personally didn’t care about at all, like a mural of the man who was hoping to win a seat on the city council in the coming election, had to be just right.
Of course, he wasn’t all work. He had his distractions. In a city as large as Thebian there were a dozen ways to party on any given night. Even beyond drinking, drugs, and whores, which he stayed away from, there had been a couple noblewomen interested in some private portraiture that threatened to become something more after only a few minutes of being alone with them.
Simon drew them, of course, often in much less than he’d originally intended to, but he didn’t sleep with them. As beautiful as one or two of the women had been, and as single as he very much was, he simply wasn’t interested in random flings with women he didn’t know. If I do that, I might spend the rest of my lives just wandering around the world and spending the night with anyone that catches my eye, he thought sullenly. What a waste that would be.
The cynical part of his brain pointed out that he’d actually already done precisely that with Freya, but he batted that thought away immediately. “That’s different,” he told himself. “We were in a life or death situation, then. Things got weird.”
Beating himself up about getting together with her too easily was a lot better than the things he used to think about when she came to mind, so he let that go easy enough. Still, thoughts of Freya made him wonder if he might be holding himself too far away from the wider world. He was still considering whether he should take the chance to get to know more women, when the news suddenly spread through town.