The Flying Emporium

Severin, not any less tired and exhausted than his new neighbor, stumbled into his modest room and onto his bed, hoping he wouldn’t come to regret today's decisions.

Not a minute later he had already slipped into a dreamless slumber that, even though it didn’t feel like it, lasted for close to ten hours.

This meant, despite going to bed way earlier than normal, he woke up only shortly before his usual time.

He immediately sat up, more out of habit than anything else, and was about to get ready for another day of waiting for something to happen, when he stopped in mid-motion.

‘Maybe I could just stay in bed for a little longer. Just this once. Not like there are any paying customers waiting for me, anyway.’

It didn’t take much for him to convince himself.

He turned his pillow until he found a cool spot, lay down again, and wrapped himself up snuggly in his blanked. He closed his eyes and was content.

For a moment.

Suddenly, he opened his eyes again.

“Shit. I forgot all about that.” That was his delayed reaction to the orange spot in the corner of his eyes.

“Well. It matters not.” He closed his eyes once again and demonstratively he rolled over.

…

“What’s going on there?!”

Despite him trying to, Severin couldn’t lie idle any longer. His curiosity took the better of him.

Why was there a single dot located at the far end of the orange-colored area?

And why didn’t it move?

By now Severin was wide awake and decided he had no other choice but to head out and check out the situation in person.

“What the…? Already?” The fact that the minimap also revealed a person’s name should’ve already prepared him, but he was somewhat surprised, nonetheless.

A good hundred or so meters away from him, the sight of a fully constructed building, that he knew to be ten times fifteen meters in size, greeted him.

Despite lacking any other discernable decorations, he could make out from this distance, just the three huge windows with green-colored glasses on the wide side of the building, and the enormous double door on the narrow side, were more than enough to impress Severin.

“Is that another door within the door?” Severin thought he could make out another, more human-sized, door embedded into its right wing. He considered approaching the building to take an even closer look, but then decided to postpone that until later, when the dot would start moving. Maybe then the woman would give him some sort of tour and explain to him why they needed such a large building in the first place. It would be one thing if they maybe offered temporary accommodations or food, and while some branches apparently offered exactly these services, Severin had fought hard to ensure this wouldn’t be the case at this branch; at least not during his first year of development.

After taking his time to admire the building and to let his imagination run free, Severin’s eyes finally fell onto the location where not even a whole day ago a green flying artifact had docked. Now the spot was empty again.

“So they really did completely finish their work, huh? Even on the inside. Impressive.”

This reminded him of something else; so far it had always been the other way round, and he was the one to surprise others with the sudden appearance of new or upgraded buildings.

But even then, Magda wasn’t the only one to have placed a construction order. No sooner had he spoken the words did Severin swirl around and craned his neck upwards.

After a moment of initial hesitation and incomprehension, he backed further away and took another look to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

Then he opened the System menu and checked again.

The two newly purchased rooms were there, alright. But.

“That’s ridiculous,” Severin complained to no one specific.

The two small rooms on the same level as the main store’s pitched roof, made for a curious, almost silly, view that certainly wouldn’t inspire any potentially new customer’s confidence into him or his wares. But that in itself wasn’t exactly the main problem.

“What is this?! How the fuck is anyone gonna get up there?!” In his urge to showoff, he had never considered how to access the new buildings when he had purchased them. Now two or three meters or so above the door to his own room, there was another one; one that ended in midair and with no way to reach it other than using one of the flying ships. Or maybe someone more athletic than Severin could actually climb there.

Either way, this was like he had envisioned things to turn out. And right next door, above Emily’s door, the same sight could also be seen.

“Maybe I should just get back into bed, after all,” Severin said to himself with a resigned voice; of course, he knew better. He couldn’t just leave it as is. Especially not with the appearance of the new impressive building in his front yard. The contrast in quality was simply too stark; the humiliation, if someone were to see this too big.

“Fuck! And knowing the System, I have to act fast. If it’s not already too late, then it will be once anyone approaches the store, I fear. In that case, any changes might just get delayed until night again.”

His initial thought was to simply move the two rooms to the ground level, but that wouldn’t do. For the same reasons he had positioned them up there in the first place.

The second idea, the maybe even more obvious one, was to place a staircase in front of each of the buildings and simply be done with it. But that option wasn’t to his satisfaction, either.

‘Too tacky’, was his main reasoning.

Instead, he quickly came to the conclusion that he would have to fork out a couple of thousand gold coins to combine the rooms into something more akin to a multistorey apartment building.

Acting upon this impulse, he added a new, small, empty room to each of the thus created ‘apartments’ while taking care not to change the already established rooms themselves; he didn’t want to possibly wake up Emily. That was if the System would even allow him to perform those changes with another person than himself currently being inside it.

Though it should at the very least work as long as the other person was an [Employee] of his, he figured now was not the time to determine the System’s underlying mechanisms.

Feeling strapped for time, instead, Severin signed off the purchase the moment the System’s editor confirmed the feasibility of his rushed design.

Luckily, his quick action was rewarded. Or at least not immediately punished.

From one moment to the other, the previously separated rooms that were arranged almost like playing blocks suddenly grew in size and merged into one coherent looking new building.

[43750/50000 gold spend.]

Though annoyed that something so trivial had cost him unnecessary time, money, and nerves, overall, he was pretty pleased with himself and his ‘quick wit’.

“Great! With this, I can easily add other floors on top of this and don’t have to worry about anything else. Good job me, I guess.”

Almost as if he had already forgotten that it was his desire to show-off that had navigated him into this situation, Severin debated whether he should just stay outside for a while longer so that he could witness Magda’s or Emily’s or whoever-else’s reaction when they would see his creation, firsthand.

“Or might as well start preparing breakfast.”

In the end, he made the more sensible decision and headed for his kitchen. If he made haste, he might still be able to get a few loaves of bread into the oven before Emily would get up.

Though on this day, even a few loaves might still be too many.

With the majority of his usual customers absent, so were their orders. In the morning, he would produce a maximum of a dozen or so and that was only for when Samuel and his mentees planned to head out for the entire day; as had been the case the day before. That meant no orders from these three either. With so little for him to do these days, if they suddenly came knocking, he would probably still give in to their request and heat up the oven again, but for the moment, there was no need for him to go out of his way.

‘Lemme check, but I don’t think Krey had placed any… Oh. Right. I guess there was just a single dot in there.’ That probably meant the man had left together with the missing flying artifact.

This only left one other person he might consider.

‘Might as well try to be friendly with her. Keeping one’s enemies close, and all that.’

Three loaves-one of every variety- disappeared into the oven.

As for Mylana, though he had no clue about her comings and goings and where she spent her nights, especially not since the time Samuel’s oversized ship had been unsummoned, he knew she didn’t care too much for his bread, anyway.