God of Trash

In one day, potato chips went from a total unknown to the talk of the town. Everyone wanted them, or knew someone who’d tried them, or had seen them somewhere, improbably peeking out from between the foil-lined pages of an old book. Purple Dawn’s students swore up and down that they’d had them for weeks, long before the new students showed up, while at the same time desperately clamoring to get their hands on a packet. The line at the stall wrapped around the whole plaza, and when Rhys finally had to admit he was out of stock, when there were no more potatoes to fry without risking his entire farm, and close up shop, the packets started changing hands at double speed, the price racking up several times over as they repeatedly changed hands.

Rhys, freed of his disguise, busily built more bags, while Bast cooked more chips. He absorbed the impurities from the trash fire lit to cook the chips at a distance, practicing absorbing impurities from further than ever before, but at the same time, he thought. The potato chips were working for now. Imbued with just enough mana to trick the mages into loving them, delicious enough that everyone had to try them. The problem was that he wasn’t sure he’d nailed the addictive angle. If the mages figured out the mana thing, it would all be over. Hell, he risked it all ending in a week or two, when the trend died and everyone had had enough potato chips. Mages were fickle beasts, and the fact that they didn’t need to eat made it inherently harder to trick them into getting addicted to food. He needed something more. Something to keep it fresh. Not for right now, but for when the trend began to fade.

Back in his world, companies would sometimes rest on their laurels and fail to innovate until after the trend died, then miss out on sales while they scrambled for a new thing to catch the customer’s eye. Some trendy brands even died completely or got bought out during this dip in their sales. He wasn’t going to wait for that moment. He was going to get ahead of it, and figure out his next innovation now, before the trend faded.

There were two obvious directions to go; three, but one was mage specific. For potatoes, he could either swap up the form-factor and try tornado potatoes or potato fries, or swap up the flavor and add herbs and spices to make different flavors of chips. Between the two, he leaned innovating on the form factor over the spicing. Everyone accepted a plain chip; no one could agree on their favorite chip flavor after that. He’d have to do serious market research, figure out what flavors were acceptable and favored in this region, find out what people liked with salty foods… or he could simply innovate the next form of potato and improve sales by diversifying his form-factor into another universally beloved form of potato, rather than try to determine if people of this world would like salt and vinegar, barbecue, cheese, or ketchup flavored chips better.

Ketchup… It was unfortunate, but he hadn’t seen any tomatoes in this world. He’d have to go without for now. That was fine, though. Mayonnaise and vinegar were also popular on fries in certain parts of the world. If this region didn’t have tomatoes, then they wouldn’t be used to tomato flavor, and they’d probably be happy with mayo or vinegar. He’d have to stick with a basic fry for now, too, without any of the specialized coatings, but once he had the fry nailed down, he could figure out the coating step relatively easily. Better to start with simple potato chips, then move to simple potato fries, then move to complex potato fries. Hell, he could toss a tornado-potato in there (or, in other words, a single potato twisted into a long thin line, then pierced on a skewer, to essentially make potato chips on a stick) as a neat trick to draw the eye in his stall’s front display.

Innovating the form factor was one thing. That would buy him days, not weeks, months, or even forever. What he really had to do to buy himself the staying power of a true staple rather than the flash in the pan of a trendy food, was innovate the magical content. Mana was enough for now, to give the potatoes that addictive kick that they couldn’t quite place, but before long, the more perceptive mages would see through that. He needed that next stage of magical additive to tickle the mages’ pleasure centers in a way they couldn’t see through as easily as mana. Plus, he already knew how to make fries or even potato tornadoes, but he didn’t know how to imbue anything but mana into the foods he made. His first step, then, was to start trying to attach a new magical additive to the chips… but what?

Mana. Techniques. Enlightenment. Rhys pinched his chin. Enlightenment was unironically easier for him to figure out how to attach than the sensation of gaining a skill or technique. He’d realized it right from the start. His path was trash, potato chips were trash, he simply had to apply a trace of his path to the chips, and voila, it was done. Of course, if it were so easy to attach enlightenment to objects, he would have already done it. Still, he’d experienced objects with a sense of enlightenment to them before. He knew it was possible. He just had to figure out how.

I wonder if Az has any books on that…? Then again, it was such a specific, strange thing to attempt, that he doubted any book would have more than a footnote on it. For most mages, imbuing the sensation of a path into an object was a happy side effect of a job well done, not something they’d go out of their way to attempt for the purpose of selling more potato chips. It was the kind of thing that no one would have written a book about, because no one would have wanted to accomplish it badly enough to write books on it. It was like when he was doing a research project on some tiny, esoteric detail of a historical event, and had to scramble to find any sources, because whatever that esoteric detail he was interested in was simply hadn’t been important enough for a large number of people to document it.

He finished putting together the last of tonight’s bags and rolled his sleeves up, going to check on the chips Bast had cooked. It was time to get down to business, and see if he could enlighten these chips.

Bast glanced over. “Don’t eat too many. We’ve gotta sell those.”