God of Trash

Rhys traveled from one end of the merchants’ district to the other, making a series of large purchases. He knew what would happen if he made these purchases; the prices would go up on everything he needed. The wise thing would be to purchase the materials slowly over a long time period, investing the bare minimum until he was making enough money to start making serious long term investments in mercantile companies, maybe even negotiate a long-term contract with one of the stabler merchants, which he would be able to recognize by then, thanks to his long contact with them.

However, he understood what he was doing. He was going to generate a fad, a flash in the pan. He needed all the potatoes and all the oil RIGHT NOW, and after this, probably not for a long time—or, at least, the fad would die down to the extent that he could handle it through smaller purchases, if he even wanted to bother with the stable sustain period after the initial get-rich-quick maneuver. Plus, with the tournament—the event at hand, where he could expose thousands of mages to his new product all at once in one mass market and sell everything he had in one fell swoop—just around the corner, he had no time to take it slow and do the wise thing.

So instead, he flashed the money he’d gotten selling herbs to Sorden like a trashy young master and bought up everything he needed in large quantities all at once, in the hopes that, at the very least, the merchants wouldn’t have time to raise their prices in the time it took him to move from one end of the plaza to the other side. Bast tailed him, hopping from tree to tree. At some point, perhaps called back to her post by his erratic behavior, Mouse reappeared, a development that Rhys silently mourned, but she did nothing to get in his way or prevent him from going through with his plan. She simply watched, her brows furrowed in silent confusion.

His storage ring was full, so the first thing he bought was another storage ring, this one specialized at holding a few types of bulk goods. It essentially had a few large bins inside of it, each of which he could fill up with a large amount of a single kind of good. As he wandered the plaza, he then filled those bins with his few simple ingredients: potatoes, cooking oil, and salt, plus a few herbs that he either wanted for potions, or wanted for refining his recipes. He also purchased a set of cooking knives and a whetstone for sharpening them, a cutting block, a sturdy table, and a very simple, large cauldron with no finery on it, nor feet, nor decorations around the rim. The rest he could make up with trash.

When he was done, he returned to the trash heap. The heap didn’t smell nearly as bad as it had before, largely due to his efforts at cleaning the air. Mouse looked downright startled at the development. She turned slowly, sniffing the air, her eyes widening as she discovered mostly clean air. It made her look even more mouselike than she usually did, not that Rhys was going to point it out.

“Hey, Mouse. How’d things go with the library?” Rhys asked, as he started setting up his cauldrons.

“Er—er, the, the Schoolmaster uhm, told me not to waste his time, and that he knew what was going on, and had no complaints,” she replied, clearly still baffled by the outcome.

“Oh, okay,” Rhys said, unworried. He’d never been particularly worried about Az, since Az was far stronger than him and usually seemed to know what he was doing, but he was particularly unworried about the man now. He nodded at her. “Are you okay with that?”

Mouse trembled at the question, and Rhys knew he’d hit the nail on the head. She was clearly bothered by it, deeply perturbed. He would be too, if someone had just shown up at his library, vanished Az, and then Aquari had waved her hand and said it was all fine. If he didn’t know Az, he probably would have been bothered in Mouse’s behalf, even knowing nothing about her library. As it was, he wasn’t that worried, since Az was too lazy to seriously harm anyone who hadn’t specifically pissed him off, but given that Mouse didn’t know Az, he understood her being worried.

Setting down the cauldron he’d been manipulating, he sighed and stood, dusting his hands off. “Listen, Mouse. You don’t have to stand around and watch me set this up. It’s fine. I’m going to be here this whole time, doing nothing but working on my cauldrons. You can sit around and watch a fellow student make some boring potions, or you can go investigate the library and figure out what happened with your librarians.”

She stepped toward the exit, then hesitated. “You won’t leave?”

“No, no. I’m busy. Look at this.” He gestured at the cauldrons, the piles of potatoes, the cooking oil, and the trash. “I’ve got my hands full getting all this in working order before the trash taints it. You go do what you have to do, and I’ll be right here, busy on my setup.”