you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own

[serjeant]

Who: Seoraj and YOU.
What: The smithy is open for business, which means taking orders and working up basics for sale.
Where: Seoraj's Forge in Stoneshell.
When: Weekdays, business hours. Specify if it matters.
Notes: This is generally here for anyone to whom blacksmiths are relevant!
Warnings: Archaic sexism.

Business may not be booming, but nevertheless it is well underway within a short time of Seoraj's acquisition. Most of his work to start with comes in through the farming communities, and the occupation is familiar in a way that lays out most starkly how familiar so much of this place is not. Steel works under his hands as it ever has, and the world outside the smithy marches on in its own, new way. Immersing himself in that is his way, though he's never had an opportunity like this before; he insinuates himself into life here as if it were an old cloak and not so crisply new as it is.

People begin to talk to him. That will be good, he thinks, though he doesn't yet know what for.

Comments

[serjeant]

"At the bottom." Both literally and figuratively. Seoraj makes a gesture, casual, at where his tools are put up. "You learn the care of the tools first. You learn how to work in here, how not to set yourself and my building on fire." Dry. "There is a lot of hard, dull work you do before you pick up a tool to use it. I need to teach your muscles to know quicker than your mind, for some things."

[wandandsickle]

It's not an unfamiliar speech, at least in tone; it would be an understatement to say that mages tend to be concerned with seniority. She knew she wouldn't get to make anything on her first day, although a part of her is still a little disappointed. Her fingers itch a little bit. But she's no stranger to hard, boring work, and knows the importance of well-maintained tools.

"All right," she says, nodding. "That's fine." If he thinks that's going to scare her away, he's going to have to try harder. "Show me what to do, Master Stoneshell."

[serjeant]

It's not a matter of scaring her away, or trying to knock her down a peg; it's the way he was taught, with care and patience, to make sure that at the end of it he would know how to do it right with all the entailed responsibilities of this work, and it's the way he'll teach anyone who comes to him. If it had been enough to make her pout, he'd have dismissed her as someone wasting his time for a lark.

That she's not is a good thing. A girl, he supposes, has more to prove; she might work harder, be better at the end, and he wouldn't mind being proud of that.

"Here," he says, leading her to where she can sit with him and he'll show her what he wants her to do. "I'm working a set of lockpicks tomorrow, you'll want to see how I do that."

[wandandsickle]

"Ooooooh..." She can't stop herself from voicing excitement. Jones herself owns a set of lockpicks (and knows how to use them, and no one will ever know where she learned), and to see how they're made sounds fascinating. (That, and help considerably considering the rate at which she seems to be getting extradimensionally relocated.) She sits. "All right. Well, what do I do?"