Otto’s Counseling Room
I couldn’t think up a good answer by the next day. I was sitting at the table, sewing and still thinking about it, when Dad called out to me.
“Myne, if you’re feeling up to it, want to go to the gate? The snowing stopped last night.”
I looked up with an enthusiastic “Yes!” and immediately started getting ready to go. I put my slate and stone pencil into the tote bag and put on a bunch of layers to ward off the cold.
Otto was at the gate today. I could count on him giving me a harsh reality check if need be given his experience as a merchant and status as a third party. I wanted to ask him if I would survive an apprenticeship with Benno.
Naturally, there was a bunch of snow piled up outside. I spent most of the winter stuck inside and rarely left. The sight of snow piled up higher than I was tall made my jaw drop. The snow in the narrow alleyway leading to the main street had been mostly pushed aside, but the walls looked like they could collapse at any time and that was terrifying.
“Here you go, Myne.” Dad knelt down and held out his arms, so I went ahead and let him pick me up with my arms around his neck. He wouldn’t make it to work in time if I had to walk through this snow.
My head got above the snow once I was in Dad’s arms. When a gust of cold wind went by, I saw a field of glittering white rising and falling in front of me. I thought that with this much snow there wouldn’t be many people walking along the main road, but there was a surprising amount of them hurrying along to their destination.
“There’s a lot more people out in this snow than I thought there would be.”
“Not often the snow stops like this, yeah? There’s a lot less people when it’s snowing,” said Dad, speeding up because a bit of snow had started falling here and there while we talked. “Here it comes again. Hold on tight, Myne. We’re gonna run!”
“Gyaaaah! I’m gonna fall!”
We reached the gate in no time. After brushing the snow off ourselves, we went straight to the night watch room. Dad opened it with a light knock, and inside we saw Otto at the desk near the furnace working on a huge pile of paperwork.
“Otto, I’ve brought the helper you wanted. Move away from the furnace.”
“Thank you, Captain! It’s good to see you, Myne.” He cleared some space on the desk and moved to the side so that I could work alongside him. Judging by the overjoyed smile on his face, I could imagine that he had a lot of work stacked up. I took my slate and pen from my tote bag and climbed up onto the chair.
“Okay, Myne. Could you check to see if the calculations in this section are correct for me?”
I wouldn’t be able to ask him for advice with this much work piled up. I looked at the mountain of paperwork and readied my slate pen. For a while, we worked in silence with only the sounds of Otto flicking the calculator and my slate pen accompanying us.
A rough knock sounded on the door and a young soldier came inside. “Excuse me. I have a question for you, Otto.”
“Hear that, Myne? He’s got a question.” Otto pointed at me without looking up from his work.
“What? Me? Um, hold on a second. At least let me finish this problem...” I finished the math and stamped the seal of confirmation on it before raising my head. The young soldier looked between me and Otto, who was blasting through his work at a furious pace, and sighed. He then took out a piece of parchment.
“What is this? Oooh, a letter of introduction from a noble. Is the commander here?”
“No, I think he’s on night shift today.”
“In that case, get his seal and direct him to the inner wall as soon as possible. It’s likely that even a normally good-spirited noble would be in a bad mood right now due to journeying through the snow, so go as fast as you can. If he has to wait, bring him to a waiting room with a fireplace as soon as possible and give him a cup of warm tea if you can.”
“Understood.” The young soldier saluted and rushed out of the room. I returned the salute and got back to work.
“You’ve gotten pretty good at that,” said Otto without stopping his work.
“It’s mostly the same thing each time, so...” I replied while moving my slate pen too. Work at the gate was basically bureaucracy in a nutshell. Once you memorized the manual, you could deal with just about anything, barring extreme exceptions.
I got a little tired after doing math for a while. I gathered up the sheets I had completed and stretched my back. Otto must have reached a stopping point as well since he did the same.
“Yeah, that’s enough work to get tired. Want to take a break for a bit?”
Otto brought me warm tea from the cafeteria. I sipped it and began telling Otto about my work troubles.
“...And then Mom said this to Lutz: ‘But you’ll try to keep looking after Myne even once you’ve become apprentices, right? Apprenticeships aren’t so easy that you can survive like that. You’ll be so distracted by her that your work will suffer,’” I said, to which Otto nodded as if it was obvious.
“I mean, yeah. An apprentice that’s already half as competent as an adult trying to help another apprentice will just end up hurting themselves. If Lutz actually wants to become a merchant, I can’t see him helping you much at all.”
“...I knew it.” As it stood, we weren’t apprentices and we weren’t working in the store. We were just bringing in products to sell, and that gave Lutz more than enough leeway to stick around me and keep an eye on my health. But once we became apprentices and had work to do, he wouldn’t have that kind of leeway. I didn’t want to put more weight on his back and potentially break him.
I started to worry about what to do and Otto looked at me with quiet eyes. “Hey, Myne. Do you actually intend to become a merchant?”
“That’s the plan right now. I know a lot of things that could be good products to sell, so...” One had to belong to the Merchant’s Guild to sell things, so I was pretty much locked into the merchant life to some degree.
“That’s fine, but you should probably not join the Gilberta Company.”
“Why not?” Benno had more or less confirmed that he would take me as his apprentice. I was feeling uneasy about working there, but didn’t know why Otto would warn me off it entirely.
“That store’s growing fast. Everyone’s working hard each and every day. I don’t think you have the stamina to keep up with their pace,” explained Otto with a shrug. His reasoning lined up exactly with what Benno had implied earlier, which was the source of all my unease in the first place.
“...Benno actually said something like that to me earlier. He asked if I was healthy enough to do any work at all.”
“There are some jobs that just involve sitting around and doing math or checking paperwork, but a merchant’s work is always on a tight time limit. It’d be hard to trust a kid who collapses at the drop of a hat with important jobs like those.”
I knew that Benno was focused on earning as much profit as possible from my ideas and didn’t want to let another store get their hands on me. But when it came to actually working in his store, my stamina and strength were just fatally lacking. I don’t think he would want to hire an employee so unhealthy they would be constantly missing work at random intervals. If I were in Benno’s shoes, I wouldn’t want an employee like that either.
“I have some thoughts that would normally be too harsh to tell a kid, but I can say them anyway if you want me to.” Otto eyed me calmly, waiting for my reaction. I consulted with Otto specifically because I wanted a harsh, objective viewpoint that my closer friends and family would be unable to give me.
I clenched my fist beneath the table to ready myself for whatever he might say and slowly nodded. “Please do.”
“The main reason I think you shouldn’t enter the store is the effect you’d have on the other workers. It wouldn’t take long for the delicate balance of human relationships to fall completely apart. Think about it. A new apprentice that just joined the store is constantly taking days off, getting all the easy work, and basically having an easier time than anyone else.”
Despite my health problems, others wouldn’t be amused by the favoritism shown to me, and within weeks there would be problems boiling beneath the surface. I had been so focused on securing Lutz’s employment that I hadn’t considered what would happen after I became an apprentice myself.
“Not to mention... Don’t you think that there will be problems with your pay, too?”
“Bwuh? My pay?” I had never thought about my pay at all, so I let out a goofy “bwuh” in surprise after he brought it up. Otto sighed as he saw me tilt my head in confusion.
“You’re bringing such enormous profit to the store that Benno could never hire you with the same pay as a normal apprentice.”
“I would think that my pay and my percentage of the profits would be separate.”
We had contractually agreed to not receive percentage-based profits on the paper to secure our future jobs, but I fully intended to take a cut from products I introduced in the future. Far be it from me to hand over all my information for free.
“Even if he paid you separately for that, I can easily see your pay as a new apprentice shooting over that of a veteran employee with decades of loyal service. Honestly, that’s just not going to end up well.”
“Gaaaaah...” Few things could twist human relationships as easily as money. Otto was completely correct. And if things started breaking down there, the store itself would, like, cease to function. Ultimately all employees were important to the store’s continued operation.
“You’re right. No matter how I think about it, things would just be better if I didn’t work in the store.” Everything Otto said was right and left me with no room for argument. I now felt that joining Benno’s store as an apprentice would just breed more problems than it solved by far.
“And y’know, there’s something else I’m worried about here.” At this point he had dunked on me so hard I was ready for anything. I nodded at him to continue. He leaned forward, lowered his voice, and slowly continued. “So it turns out you’re sick with the Devouring after all, right?”
“You knew, Mr. Otto?” I widened my eyes in surprise and Otto shook his head.
“Nah, I didn’t know, but Benno brought it up as a possibility. I only confirmed it when Corinna asked me if I knew a disease called the Devouring.”
“Mrs. Corinna?”
“She was talking about how she saw Benno acting pretty panicked, which is rare for him. Apparently someone with the Devouring collapsed in his store and nearly died. For days after that the captain was barely thinking about work, it was hard to look at him. Put two and two together and I can guess you’re the one who collapsed from the Devouring.”
It seemed that Otto’s information network was larger than I had imagined. Though a lot of people had probably seen me passing out in Benno’s store and getting carried to the guildmaster’s house.
“The captain seems to think you’re all better now, but according to Benno the Devouring is incurable, yeah?”
The guildmaster had sold me a magic tool to drain some of the Devouring heat from me, but the heat would be building back up. Freida said that I had a year left at best before it overflowed again. I silently nodded.
“Did you tell your father it’s incurable?”
“No, not yet. It’d be hard to tell my family when they’re so happy that I’m better now...”
Right now I really, really didn’t want to talk about the price of magic tools and the time limit on my life. I was avoiding talking about the Devouring every time the conversation moved in that direction. Though it was also true that it was hard to go into too much detail when I only really knew that the heat inside of me was growing on its own and that I would die when there was too much of it for me to contain.
Otto shook his head slowly with a firm expression on his face. “You should tell him. The captain thinks you’re cured and that you’ll be fine working when you’re old enough. You should get everyone on the same page and have a serious conversation about your future. If you just wing it, you’ll be making things harder on a lot of people in a lot of different ways.”
I had indeed been winging everything I did and making life harder for everyone around me, so I had no choice but to take Otto’s advice seriously.
“The fact of the matter is, you need magic tools to survive. You should go work for the guildmaster if you want to negotiate with nobles for better terms. The Gilberta Company is large, but still relatively new. No matter how hard Benno works, history and tradition hold weight. He won’t be able to change the status quo so easily.”
“That’s true, but...” I faltered and Otto raised an eyebrow.
“Is there some reason you have to work at Benno’s?”
“No, it’s just that... I don’t really like the guildmaster too much. It’s hard for me to deal with how forceful he is.” Being forceful was definitely an important trait for a merchant, but I couldn’t bring myself to like someone who lied about the price of the magic tools my life was riding on in an attempt to force me onto his side. I appreciated what he did for me, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
“Isn’t Benno the same way?”
“Mmm, Benno’s forceful too, and he’s greedy, and he also tricks people, but I can tell that he’s just noticing my flaws and trying to help me grow as a person.”
“Oh?” Otto grinned a nasty smile and I gulped. It would be safe to assume that everything I said here would be leaked straight to Benno.
“Also, I still haven’t decided if I want to live the rest of my life as a noble’s slave.”
I had finally come to consider my family here as true family. I was finally used to living life in this world and I was looking forward to spending a lifetime with everyone here. It was hard for me to even consider signing my life away to a noble who could very well treat me poorly. If I had to choose between wasting away with my family or slaving away for a noble, well, at the moment I would rather choose the former.
“Well, in that case, you’ve gotta decide on your future before you can do anything else. If you don’t want to join the Gilberta Company for their connections to nobles, you should think about joining another store. To be honest, if you think of products and Lutz makes them, you might not even need to join a store if you keep your rights and cuts of the profit straight,” said Otto.
I gave him a big nod. Up until now I had been focusing on joining a store with Lutz and working with him, but as Otto said, I didn’t have to join a store considering what I was capable of doing.
I gave another nod, smaller this time, and Otto smiled so warmly that he actually ended up looking suspicious. “I have an idea. Why don’t you act as a professional writer of sorts, writing letters and dealing with paperwork on others’ behalf while keeping your business contributions to just thinking up new products? You can sell things to Benno and help out here when you’re feeling up to it just like you have been. I think that’ll be best for your health.”
Otto was right in that living life as I have been would be best for maintaining my health, but... his smile was so suspicious I wanted to disagree.
“Well, in either case, talk about this with your family. For now we’ve rested enough. Let’s get back to work.” Otto cleaned up our cups and I took out my slate to get back to checking the math on the paperwork.
...Talk with my family, hm? I feel like Dad will go crazy if he learns I only have a year left to live.
“Let’s go home, Myne.”
“Well, there he is. Thanks for your help today. I owe you my life, Myne.” By the time Dad’s shift ended and he came to get me, I had done so much math that I felt dizzy. Numbers appeared in my head when I shut my eyes. But Otto looked fine despite using the calculator constantly, so maybe it was just impossible for me to do a job that involved so much constant math.
“Dad, won’t you be cold?” Dad was carrying me home along the somewhat snowy road with his coat over me. I was warm thanks to the coat, but he was opening it up so much that I could imagine how cold he was.
But he just shook his head with a grin. “I’m not cold with you this close to me. Never felt this warm in my life.”
Dad loved his family to a fault. We were his everything. How would he react when I told him about my Devouring? His smile made my heart freeze up. I was scared, but I couldn’t avoid the topic any longer.
“Something wrong, Myne? You’re looking down. Did Otto yell at you?”
“...No, he didn’t. I have something to talk to you about, Dad. It’s about my sickness,” I said, and that alone made him freeze in place. His smile hardened into a thin line and he looked at me with the most serious expression I had ever seen on him.
He lowered his eyes for a moment, then sped up his pace as if running from something. “Let’s talk about it once we get home. Don’t want to leave out Tuuli and your mother.” Dad hugged me tighter, protectively, as if he had a bad feeling about this and wanted to keep me safe.
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