01: video

[tactical_lalafel]

[The camera cuts in on a close-up - a round face, piercing blue eyes with no clear pupils behind rimless glasses perched atop a snub nose, broad pointed ears sticking out chin-length black hair, fills the field of view, scrunched up in a look of the sort of concentration you'd expect from someone disarming a bomb.] What does that light- broadcasting? Oh, seven hells...

[The face scrambles back, revealing a person standing maybe three feet tall, dressed in a wizardly-looking sort of robe. They wave to the camera, smiling nervously.] Ah, hello! Sorry about that - devices like this aren't common where I come from, and the ones there are tend to be... hazardous, in one way or another. [If Allagan technology isn't malfunctioning from millenia without maintenance, it's functioning perfectly and trying to kill you.]

Anyhow! Malms Vovokosi, battle thaumaturge and adventurer, at your service. [He bows to the camera.] Now, since the Grand Company that brought us here has been so kind as to arrange employment already, I find I have a favor to ask. Does anyone play Illusion: The Gathering? I feel I should have some idea as to what the wares I'm to be selling are.

Comments

[tactical_lalafel]

It is, thankfully, since I don't have many other skills likely to be of much use in a place like this. There's not much call for cleaning a dodo or gleaning a field that I can see.

[glitterateur]

Ohh man! You've seen a dodo? You guys have dodos!? That's so cool! Have you ever made them kiss?

[tactical_lalafel]

Make them kiss? How would I do that? Even with their poison sacs removed, they stand a good seven feet tall!

[glitterateur]

...the dodos where you're from are way more intense than the ones back where I'm from... It must be the magic!

[tactical_lalafel]

Perhaps - I'm no expert on that sort of thing, most of my knowledge about aether is very... applied, let's say.

[glitterateur]

Riiight, right, you set stuff on fire and ice stuff over! Which is way cooler so whatever.

[tactical_lalafel]

I don't know about that - I have friends who practice other disciplines, and their talents are nothing to scoff at. Not every problem can be solved by breaking things, after all.

[glitterateur]

Well yeah sometimes you gotta improve stuff! You have to add things, craft stuff, scrapbook.

[tactical_lalafel]

[The non-sequiturs from talking to this kid aren't the worst Malms has dealt with (he's been through the absurdity singularity that is life around Hildebrand Manderville and his family) but still. This is an odd one, he can tell.

But as someone who grew up to be three feet tall in heels in a family where the short one of his adoptive parents' biological children stood over six feet tall, he's got a soft spot for odd kids. He blinks, then laughs.] True, very true. Unfortunately, I'd never had the time or inclination to take advantage of the Crafting Guilds' training programs for adventurers. It always seemed easier to just pay for what I needed made, or at least to trade for the materials and ask one of my friends to do the work.

[glitterateur]

Whoa, whoa, there's a whole guild for adventurers who like crafts? [That sounds like the complete ideal. What a perfect world he comes from, that there are dodos and community colleges (that's what a guild basically is, right? right) devoted to adventures and crafting.] Awesome.

--anyway, my name's Mabel! It's nice to meet you, Malms.

[tactical_lalafel]

[Malms smiles at the girl's enthusiasm.]

It's a pleasure to meet you as well, Mabel. There are eight main Crafting Guilds in Eorzea, each one focused around a different discipline - leatherworking, weaving, alchemy and so on. All of them offer training and guidance for adventurers seeking to learn their craft.

It's a wise move on their part - after all, it takes an adventurer to bring in some of the rarer materials they work with. No one but the Allagans has been mad enough to try raising their chimeras in captivity, no matter how supple the leather you can make from their hides, for one example.