Wood was actually harder to work with than most people naively thought. Trees usually had some nice rotational symmetry in the trunk, with the exception of the limbs coming off them, but when the trees got taken to the sawmills, or when they were cut by hand, it was very rare that any of that symmetry would be preserved, leaving wood grain that was asymmetrical. Worse, when wood warped or split, there was even less to work with, and nails got put in seemingly at random, and there were all kinds of other issues.
Of course, the miracles that Hannah had available to her were strong, and nothing was impossible, but it was the kind of work that she couldn’t do too much of in a day. Symmetricalizing the house would be the work of months, maybe even a whole year, if she was using her power for almost nothing else. Spot fixes were more doable, but she would have to prioritize heavily, at least when it came to wood.
The foundation of the house was stone, but it had been made with overlapping stone bricks, and would be difficult to symmetricalize too, if not quite as difficult as the wood. Thankfully there was nothing there that needed repair, just perhaps a reapplication of mortar. A single one of the stones had a hairline crack, but it didn’t go through the strongest point of bilateral symmetry and so was the work of simply laying hands on it and doing a basic reflection. The stones had been cut with precision, and while they weren’t cubes, which would have been ideal, they were regular in ways that were both helpful and pleasing to Hannah.
In a storage shed in the backyard, Hannah found a stack of tiles that seemed like they had come from the same batch used on the roof. Half of the tiles had suffered some kind of damage and cracked down the center, nearly forty of them damaged in the same way, but the others were in good shape, and that meant that there was work Hannah could do. She laid the good tiles out in a pattern on the flat ground, using three concentric rings of eight tiles, with the exception of a single space in the inner ring, where she placed a cracked one. With so many symmetries there, it was simple to make the repair, and she went through the stack, repeating the process and turning the bad tiles into good with a fair bit of time but very little effort. Just looking at the roof, she could see some damage that had never been fixed, and Hannah thought it likely that she was going to be repeating this process at some point in the summer when she got to the work of cleaning off the roof and making necessary repairs. Hopefully there hadn’t been any water damage from where broken tiles didn’t provide protection. Ideally, someone else would clean off the roof, but she had the feeling that it was going to fall to her or it would simply not get done.
Hannah was in the middle of this work when Alfric and Isra came walking down the road, ahead of schedule. Hannah stood up, dusted off, and was just in time to meet them inside, where Mizuki had already gotten started on making a ‘quick’ lunch, which involved a bubbling pot of something brown.
“We’re back,” Alfric smiled, once the five of them were assembled in the kitchen. “Still four days away from the channel, or we’d have announced we were coming.”
“And we’re rich, right?” asked Mizuki.
“I guess we need to get the bad news out of the way first. We earned less than I’d hoped.” Alfric had a sheepish smile. “There’s a chance we could have gotten more by going further afield, possibly to Liberfell, but that was five hexes away in the opposite direction, which is a considerable hike and probably would have meant three or four days’ travel in total, depending on the conditions. I also didn’t know if I had that kind of mandate, and we can talk about that later. Still, we managed to sell everything, and I think we got a good price. There are still some entads we haven’t off-loaded, but those come later. I made contact with three stores there and have standing offers for materials, if we decide to go forward with dungeons in the future.” He didn’t look directly at Verity or Mizuki as he said that.
“All right,” said Mizuki. “But we have a payout?”
Alfric nodded and set a bag on the counter, which clinked with the weight of metal. “Fifteen thousand,” he said. “That’s among the books, the ectad materials, and the entads I could sell. Three thousand apiece. Isra’s already got her cut.”
“I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful jerk, but only three thousand?” asked Mizuki. “I thought you said it was going to be like… ten each?”
“Overestimation on my part,” said Alfric. He winced. “My first mistake was saying anything at all. I should have said they were valuable without saying how valuable. I might have been more on the mark with how Dondrian prices things, but I’m not sure.”
“Ay. Better to be surprised and delighted with three than disappointed with ten,” nodded Hannah. It did sting, though she wasn’t particularly depending on the money. “Still, three thousand will last us for a good long while, I’d expect.”
“Probably a full year, if I did nothing else,” Mizuki nodded. “Though now that I have the money, I’m probably going to spend it on something lavish.” She looked around the kitchen. “More stuff for here, maybe an order of ingredients from one of the bigger cities, something like that.”
“You’re going to buy food?” asked Alfric. “Just… food?”
“Not just food,” Mizuki said, shrugging. “But yes, food. Food is great. We need it for living, I’ve heard.”
“That’s true,” said Hannah. “Myself, I was going to have some armor commissioned. It would do to have some adventurin’ gear for the lot of us. The blacksmith likes me.”
“I already bought arrows,” said Isra.
“We’re thinking of putting money right back into going into dungeons?” asked Verity. “Doesn’t that seem a bit backward?”
“Not all the money,” said Mizuki. “But a bit of it, yeah. You said that you don’t even own pants.”
“Fine,” said Verity. “I’ll spend some money on pants.”
“If you’re not interested in further dungeons, we’ll use one of the alternates,” said Hannah. “There are two that Alfric had marked as being suitable.” Alfric didn’t seem to like that tactic, or to see it as a tactic, because he wore a frown.
“I’m interested,” said Verity. “But I don’t want what Alfric wants, which is to hit two dungeons a day for the rest of our lives.”
“That’s not quite what I want,” said Alfric. “Besides, with six miles of walking to go between hexes and the amount of labor involved, and time to rest, we’d be quite lucky to be able to sustain one a day. Maybe with mounts or some other form of transport, but—”
“One every few days,” said Hannah. “For the first six, one day on, two days off, to give us time to recover from what I can’t heal, to not feel like our lives are on the line.”
“But that would mean we’d do the next one tomorrow?” Verity asked. She had her arms folded. “Six miles seems a lot to walk, and it’s not six miles, it’s twelve if we want to go there and back.”
“Not tomorrow, no,” said Alfric. “We had more of a hike than I was expecting with a fair amount on our backs. It was twelve miles each day, carrying more than fifty pounds of weight, with elevation changes. I’m aching. If I have to go another six miles, then go down into a dungeon tomorrow… well, I won’t say that I couldn’t, but I’d prefer at least a day of rest, and possibly some time to train or at least give you all a better picture of what it’s going to look like going forward. And if we’re waiting that long, better to wait until we have whatever gear we’re going to get and the party channel.”