Diary entry 13

So we visited Ephron today. His shop is a front yard business attached to a house on the edge of town. The house itself is pretty big by the standards of this world. Most of the houses I've seen could maybe fit one bedroom, a storage room, and a kitchen, but his looked to be about the size of an American home.

He was a bit put off to see Tex and Yuki escorting me. That look of "I thought we were pals" was on his face though his sour mood quickly faded when he saw Tex's gun. It's a pearl handle six-shooter revolver, something right out of a western movie. It's a lot bigger than most sitting at just under a foot by my estimate. The man was enamored by it but Tex was reluctant to give a demonstration.

After he calmed down, Ephron put on a serious face and got to business. I won't go over the entirety of the agreement but in short, we would hand over the recipe for gun power, and the basics of how guns worked. In exchange, he offered 100 gold, any information we ask for about the city or country, and set up a meeting with a higher up in the traders guild. We showed him the designs for the hand pump and managed to get him to sweeten the pot. He will give us unlimited access to his workshop for one week as we build a prototype for the pump.

I can't really get a read on this man's character. He's easily excitable and has a bit of a scatterbrain, but at the same time, he's totally serious and very sharp. I don't mean to speak ill of our patron but I think he's hiding something.

The contract was magical in nature. According to him, there is a goddess who is worshiped in this country named Ruxphy, The goddess of good faith, promises, and contracts. Whenever a promise or contract is made the goddess ensures that the agreeing parties fulfill their end of the bargain. From what he said the goddess cares more about the spirit of the agreement than the letter of it so there's no grammar lawyering your way out of it or around your part.

He actually mentioned a hilarious fact. Apparently, a huge amount of marriages are formed due to Ruxphy enforcing promises made during childhood. Because of this, there are no laws restricting marriage between different genders, or multiple people.

Now that I think back, he didn't specify how the goddess ensures the contract is fulfilled. We may have been a bit hasty in agreeing to this.

We reconvened with the others. Their research into this world's magic was a bit scattered but from what they can tell magic is split between divine, arcane, and free magic. To learn Divine magic you must dedicate yourself to an oath or god. For arcane it is purely academic, like a science. Free magic is a bit nuanced. It is based on intuition and intent and is typically hard to tame, but can be found everywhere if you look. With this in mind, I think that contract magic is technically part of free magic even though it comes from a divine source? I don't know, just speculating.

This city doesn't have a magic school but it does have a lot of churches that may be able to teach us how to forge an oath. There are a few arcane spellcasters in the city but they tend to be anti-social.

Unfortunately, there was no word on the owner of the warehouse but talking to people without speech bubbles is still a difficulty so our sources of information are limited.