Liv laughs while I swear.

I eventually run out of imprecations against the universe and transfer my ire to Liv, staring at her in a way that I hope demands answers.

She gleefully obliges. “System wallets!”

“Wallets like money storage wallets?” I angrily consider the concept. “I think I see where this is going,” I say grouchily, “and I already hate it.”

She giggles. “Some Systems manage your money for you,” she reveals, “the same way they might manage equip load. Others can directly create currency by scrapping equipment, breaking down monsters, or selling various fungible materials.”

“But they have opinions on what currency is,” I say, unhappily hazarding a guess.

“Sometimes, yep,” Liv confirms. “Heather’s System just spits out whatever currency you put in. But the Saga can convert beast corpses directly into money and it only makes Teeth. There’s another one called The Scroll that has various denominations of coin that we just call Scrolls.”

“And so on and so forth,” I say. “And you can’t even ban them or require a single legal tender because accidents happen, or I can imagine some Gifts that do it automatically. It wouldn’t really be fair to restrict the whole Gift.”

“Right!” Liv laughs. “Especially when it’s a really useful Gift. So we have this insane morass of six major currencies and several more minor ones. It’s hilarious.”

“It’s disgusting,” I complain. “How do the Systems handle exchange rates? How do they decide what the exchange rate is? What happens if nobody involved in a transaction has a Gift that can do currency exchanges? This just seems…”

“Unmanageable?” Liv smiles. “We deal with it, same way we deal with everything else the Gifts give us.” She turns and starts walking again, headed for the cloth stalls. “The other big reason is the Scroll, which is one of the Big Five almost entirely because it has a built-in global currency exchange.”

I boggle momentarily. “Global? Real-time? What’s transaction overhead like? Does it have transaction limits?”

“No delay, zero overhead, as many trades as you want,” Liv says.

“Cripes, it must’ve been revolutionary,” I say. “That was the one that Heather said the economists love, right? It must’ve been.”

“Yep. They vaguely tried to control things before that, but when Scroll arrived everyone just gave up and let currencies go nuts.” Liv spins around and starts walking backwards through the crowd, apparently just for fun, still avoiding collisions as easily as breathing. “The Gift of Light is a relatively common Soft Magical Gift, lets people do magic with light.”

“It’s an example of another Gift with its own currency, I’m guessing? Some kind of condensed magic light?”

“Yup. Automatically makes change, even. Light-bits also subdivide into sixtieths, so instead of one bit being worth sixty of the next smaller size, as soon as you have a whole bit it gets turned into a sixtieth of the next bigger size and combined with any sixtieths of that size that you already have.”

“Sexagesimal currency,” I breathe. “That’s incredible. Certainly convenient, you’d only have fifty-nine sixtieths of anything at most,” I say. “I’m imagining, like, little balls of gooey colored light.”

“Close enough! You’ll know them when you see them,” Liv assures me. “It’s actually the Gift our enchanter friend back there had. Did you notice that both of his middle offers were in light-bits?”

“I did, actually! The colors. Though,” I grumble, “It’s more that I noticed two bids with the same theme and was trying to estimate just how many different currencies were in common use.” I realize something else. “Oh, and you finished on Saga Teeth because you could get those easily.”

“Good catch! You really are Hard Wizard material. Anyway!”

Liv spins back around and points dramatically toward the sky above our destination, which turns out to be the cluster of fashion and fashion-adjacent stalls. They’re watching me again, just like they were when I walked past earlier.

I feel like I want to hide behind Liv.

“Sartorially gifted ladies and gentlemen of this fine market-day,” she calls to them, “I require your services!”

They all stop chattering and give us their full attention.

“This,” Liv indicates me, “is Whitney, and she just joined us here in the Republic of Eld.” Liv leans forward and mock-whispers conspiratorially. “These are her only clothes.”

I’m a nerd.

I’ve never been good at fashion.

Liv has betrayed me.

The clothiers descend on me like a pack of ravening hyenas.

“Oh you poor dear,” says one woman in an impressively cut dress, “you must have just Visited us with nothing but the clothes on your back!”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll get you fixed right up,” says another from underneath a huge floppy bonnet.

Liv delivers some rapid-fire instruction to the one clothier that’s still paying attention to her instead of me. “Working wear and business dress for a Hard Magical utility spellcaster, ten bears, hard deadline tomorrow noon but up to double if you can get it to me before dinner.” Then she winks and leaves me to the rabid fashionistas, presumably to buy some more stuff for me.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” promises a man wearing a fancy jacket with puffy sleeves above a pair of teal pants that look like they’ve been painted on.

Ten minutes later I feel like I’ve been measured in every way that’s possible and a few that shouldn’t be. For example, in addition to various physical dimensions along my arms and legs and around my torso, I now know that I have a natural extra half-star in my “friendly” rating and a natural minus half-star in my “scary” rating, my complexion is earth-affinity, and I should avoid wearing clothing that covers my crown meridians.

I have no idea how to use any of this information. Thankfully, I don’t have to know how to use it! Once the measurements are done, the clothes crafters ask me to pick between five or ten different pieces of cloth, one lady takes me aside to ask if I need anything special for my underwear, and then they’re off to fashion-land.

I do make sure to keep their attention long enough to tell them that I’d strongly prefer pants. I don’t expect that to be problematic, given that Liv and Heather both have them and Agnes is sort of wearing heavy armor.

Liv returns shortly thereafter carrying a jumble of random supplies. She immediately drags me to a stall belonging to some kind of miscellaneous leather-and-wood crafter. The crafter shows himself immediately, grizzled and chewing on a stick.

“Backpack for her,” Liv orders. “Wood frame, extra durable.”

“That’ll cost ya,” the crafter warns in a gravelly voice. “Extra durable ain’t cheap an’ I only make those to order.”

“That’s why I came to you,” Liv says.

“Pfah,” the crafter says, “yer’ just buttering me up. Well, if yer’ good for it, I won’t say no. Four long-guilder an’ no hagglin’.”

“How long will it take?”

“I’ll do it right now,” he grinds out.

Liv holds out her hand and the crafter grabs it and shakes.

The crafter turns to his stall, picks up a piece of wood, and whacks it with a saw, causing it to collapse into sawdust and a gently curved piece plank. He does this several more times, dumps all the resulting planks into a pile, stacks a spool of cord on top of it, whacks the whole stack with a small hammer, and presents me with a backpack frame.

Somehow I’m not even surprised. It does make me wonder how the carver I saw is still in business, though. Maybe this crafter can’t do fancy shapes or art?

Then he does the same with a sheet of leather, punching out shaped chunks by holding it up and hitting it with a knife, holding the shapes up with a jar of glue and a spool of heavy thread and poking it with a needle to sew it into straps. He grabs the frame back from me and slaps the straps against it, then jabs them with the needle again to attach them.

Then he repeats the procedure with some heavy cloth and my backpack is suddenly complete. It’s not a bad backpack, though I almost fumble it when he tosses it at me and I feel how heavy it is. I guess even magical materials can’t measure up to aluminum, titanium, and modern polymers, though I guess the crafter here is using relatively low-end materials.

Liv drops her pile of stuff into my arms with a quick “hold this” and pays the man, pulling some coins apparently out of thin air. Sleight of hand, no doubt.

Then Liv and I promptly pile everything into the backpack. I take the opportunity to take an inventory.

The biggest items are a large chunk of leather, presumably a tent, and a quilt.

I’m really going to have to get in shape to carry this. Hopefully I learn some buffs soon. Or figure out how to just levitate the whole thing.

The tent stakes are made out of some surprisingly light metal, almost like aluminum. “What’re these made of?” I ask Liv.

“Aluminum,” she answers, grinning at me.

“Oh,” I say sheepishly. “I really shouldn’t have assumed that the fantasy-land with every fantasy metal didn’t have normal metals too.”

“Normal metal nothing,” Liv says. “Most people get aluminum by killing bauxite golems, it’s great stuff. Weak but super light.”

“…I’m just going to try to stop making assumptions about this place,” I say.

I have my own waterskin now, which is nice. Another small cloth bag turns out to have a roll of clean white cloth, soap, a few pills, a pair of tweezers, a bundle of pins, some padded vials, and a tiny instruction manual; I take it to be a fantasy-setting first-aid kit and repack it nicely before throwing it into the bag. A compass and small mirror round out the wilderness survival kit. I also now have a comb, a toothbrush, a cube of soap, a handkerchief, and a couple similar items.

Liv also quickly makes sure I know what the collection of quilted cotton pads is for. I’m more relieved than ever that the Republic is so organized with Visitors; I’d have absolutely forgotten to figure out a solution for that problem until it was too late.

That said, I’m not looking forward to cleaning these.

Note to self: Research cleaning and sanitization. Magical solution strongly preferred. High priority. Hard deadline, two weeks.

Finally, as I go over my vague memory of the Ten Essentials, I realize that I’m about to get to do The Isekai Fantasy Setting Thing.

See, the only thing I’m missing is a knife.

I don’t see any knives on display in the stalls here.

No, knives are probably handled by the same people that do everything else sharp.

The blacksmiths.

I’m going to get to go to a fantasy weapon shop! And buy a fantasy weapon!

This is almost as good as being able to cast magical spells by waving my fingers in the air.

Liv’s going to have to stop me from finding a way to buy something ludicrous, isn’t she.