[Evaly] Apparently, unemployment is not a real problem at Ista.
RL Date: 6/3/10
IC Date: 12/5/22
West Cavern Workroom, Ista Weyr(#287RJ)
Though busy in their own right, the west cavern and workrooms tend to be quieter than the lively living caverns. A wide thoroughfare meanders through the room and is kept clear despite the worktables and benches of all shapes and sizes that keep the Weyrfolk occupied. Here is where much of the Weyr's work is completed, from pottery and weaving to strap-work and sorting almost everything imaginable. A companionable hubbub and murmur rises and falls with the passing of the hours. The easternmost section has been partitioned off as a quiet gathering area with chairs, sofas, and a notice board used for passing along messages both official and not. Other tunnels stretch off in all directions, though the most commonly used are to the cardinal points.
Industrious, that's Evaly. Having given up trying to do this out in the debatably nice weather, she's holed up in this particular space today with her hidework spread around her. At the moment, she's taking up two chairs at one of the tables, her feet propped up one and her butt parked in the other, frowning over what looks like a missive that she must have read a dozen times, based on its creased and drooping state. --Okay, yes. Industrious may not have been the best word for it, but whatever; she's keeping herself occupied.
Loe, largely recovered from her bought with the plague that's going around Ista, is back to her usual vivacious self, striding quickly across the cavern while also making notes on her ever-present clipboard and stopping here and there to exchange friendly updates with this person here and that person there. And then she comes to Evaly's table and stops. There's a ready smile on her face as she glances over the girl. "We don't see much of you down here," she remarks, a little narrowing of her gaze meant to be playfuly suspicious.
With a quick glance up to make sure she knows who she's talking to before she returns her eyes to the paper in front of her, as if glaring at it will change it, Evaly answers amiably, "I generally try not to darken the doorsteps of the lower caverns. I find working outside to be considerably more pleasant." There's a secondary peek over the top of her paper, which she lifts just slightly to cover more of her face; "Also, I heard there's a deathflu circulating, and I'm not sure I care to be infected."
"Me too," Loe says of working outdoors. "I like the fresh air." But that said, she considers the girl a little more closely. "So, if you like to be outside and you don't want to get infected with the deathflu, why tuck yourself down here among crowds of possibly infected people?" Since she's stopped for a moment, she pulls out one of the chairs, not used by Evaly's butt or her feet, and takes a seat, laying her clipboard against the table's edge. "I already had it. I should be safe," she assures.
"Well," Evaly begins like she was fully prepared for just such a question, go figure. "I had been working outside, only I find myself with a dearth of paper weights. It was really interrupting my work flow to be chasing down scraps all afternoon. So I finally gave up, packed it all up, and relocated. I thought about setting up a deathflu barricade, but it seems a little anti-social, don't you think?" The twinge at the end of that question invites Loe to disagree, to permit her just such a barricade if she's being generous. "Ahh, not a carrier then? I wonder how long before a person is really /clean/ again."
There's a silent 'ah', one that says Loe is familiar with the troubles of paperwork versus wind. "Maybe just a touch anti-social," the headwoman admits. "Though perhaps, even if it's a bit late, we should have set up quarantine work areas for people who are certain they've had no contact with anyone showing symptoms. But that all could have backfired anyway," she sighs, relaxing back into her chair. "The healers said that once you're on the mend, you aren't contagious anymore? I know nothing about it. I think they said the worse time is when you are just starting to show symptoms to when you're full-blown knocked-on-your-ass. I'm just hoping that I can't actually catch it again." For that, she sticks out her tongue. But nevermind all that infectious disease discussion. "What are you working on?" If could be prying, but instead there's just idle curiosity in her posture, the glance of her eyes toward Evaly's pages.
Evaly nods quickly, resolved, saying, "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. Not that I'm not saying I'm not anti-social--" There's a brief pause, a twitch of her forehead while she ponders the grammar behind that statement. Moving on. "--but I don't want to /appear/ that way, regardless. So. Here I sit, daring the infection to find me." She sighs like some tragic, storybook heroine, fanning her face with a page for added drama. "An attempt to make a little money. A new venture. A consistent source of headache. All of these things and so much more!" The last added with all the brightness of a salesperson mid-pitch, peachy smile'n all.
There's an immediate light on Loe's face when she hears one of her favorite phrases. "New venture?" she repeats, perking up, lifting from the back of her chair to lean closer, drawn to those pages now that she knows what they hold. "How exciting." Perhaps it's the sales-style delivery or maybe she just can't help herself, but: "Tell me more? What does this venture entail? Perhaps I can help." Illness, anti-social barracades and double-negative grammar can't hold a candle to the delights of making money.
While Loe leans closer, Evaly leans away, ducking once more behind her barricade-pages. Just in case that whole thing about not being contagious isn't true. Ahem. "It's sort of in its infancy still, to tell you the truth," she begins, dissembling to some extent. "That is, I haven't actually got the money together to make it work yet, but I'm scraping together investors gradually, and I hope to be off the ground and running in..." She waves her fingers, some vague indicator of a nebulous future. The pages, taken individually, don't give away a whole lot: supplies along the lines of seeds and bulbs, glass bottles, "heavy equipment" lumped all under a few running sums, and so on and so forth.
"All great ideas start with a half-baked notion," Loe assure, grinning quite giddily. But that expression doesn't mean that the wheels aren't already turning behind her eager eyes. "So, you need investors... for..." The pages answer those questions, the goods to be acquired. "But what's the plan? What's all this stuff for? Are you just looking to trade in things besides bottled perfumes?" That would be Loe's first guess.
"Mmmmn, something half-baked sounds good," Evaly says abruptly, her hand dropping to her stomach which gives a tell-tale rumble right at that moment. "Is it past lunch time? I think it must be." She pulls her hand away at that point, taking a breath and letting it out at the mention of the bottled perfumes. "That's a complicated question. To begin at the beginning, I'm not exactly in that business at the moment. Standing for that Clutch sort of... put a kibosh on the perfume trade."
"A bit, yeah," Loe returns, smirking at Evaly's touch to her hungry stomach. The smirk fades when talk turns to falling out of the perfume trade. "What happened? Your contacts found other vendors? You had to unload your products and now you don't have the marks to get more?" Just let her keep going; she'll come up with her own answers in the form of endless questions. "So all of this..." A finger gestures toward the pages of supplies, but she lets that last query trail off into a nebulous all-encompasing sort of interest.
What happened? "My dad got mad and said he'd find someone more reliable." Not the most interesting answer out there, but truthful, and Evaly can only shrug helplessly at the way it's all worked out. "So all of this... is a way to get something going again. Despite the number of times it's been offered, I don't care for waiting tables as a career, so I thought I better get the ball rolling for something more suitable before I'm completely markless. Research." Lots of it.
Loe makes a face. Ok, so she's not exactly fond of dragons stealing, say, her assistant, but getting ditched by one's own family is still worth a sympathetic frown. It lingers even as her gaze drifts page to the pages and the machinery of her brain starts whirring again. "So, you're looking for a new career? Because..." She sits up a little straighter, both hands lifting in a vague gestures toward, well, everything. "I know traders don't like to give up their air of independence, but I can pretty much offer any job you'd be interested in. And it comes with a bed, all the food you can eat, convient baths, latrines, healers, library, stipend and... room to sell stuff on the side." Sales pitch.
Tapping her finger on the pages in front of her, Evaly points out, "I'm working on a new career. See--" She takes a breath, exhales it slowly, resolutely. "This is how it gets started, isn't it? Something temporary, something to hold you over, something to do while you continue working on what you really want to do... Only, then you wind up either too tired or too complacent to really go back to what you meant to be doing all along. Which is, I believe, how people wind up doing things like 'career waitress.'" It's a real sticking point, that job. She smiles with timid apology, like she knows it's probably a nice offer, buuuuuut--
Loe doesn't miss the repetition of 'career waitress'. She grins, certainly hearing Evaly's sore points. "Okay, first, let's take waitressing off the table," she says with an amused little smirk. "Second, tell me what it is you want to do. Because either way, whether you want to do it all on your own or whether I can give you a job with the Weyr or we come up with something else entirely... I might be able to help. You see, there are very few instances where someone's personal success doesn't benefit the Weyr in one fashion or another." That is, Evaly shouldn't worry about other ulterior motives. Or... probably shouldn't, if she believes Loe, who does seem at the moment to be largely genuine.
"But, then, doesn't that make the Weyr entitled to some portion of the profit? I won't argue that room and board are at a premium, but I can be quite comfortable living in a pup tent, at least for the foreseeable future." Evaly squints dubiously at the Headwoman, natural suspicion heightened by the fact that she is unusually destitute these days. "That said, I intend to continue peddling perfume, only I'm going to start making it and bottling it myself. I already understand the hardest part-- getting people to buy it-- so the rest should be the easy stuff, right?"
Loe is really quite patient as she waits for Evaly's understandable gut-reaction of suspicion to come and hopefully ease up. "So you want to make perfume." She pauses there because now that she has this information, she has to filter it through the flowchart of possiblities she has in her mind. Meanwhile, her fingers fiddle on the edge of the table until eventually her wrist lift high and she's ready to make her suggestion. "Okay, so, here's something I can offer. Which you can just think about for a while if you want to, or consider it a standing offer, whichever. We have herbalists. And I could hire you to train under them. I know you deal in perfume, but this could be an opportunity to learn ways to make that and also any number of other products. Granted, a lot of what they produce for the Weyr, and what you would be producing, are boring things in comparison. Soaps, detergents, salves for healers, sachets to keep bugs out of the linens, things like that. But they also take commissions for more specific things." With one eyebrow raised, she pauses. "Shall I go on?"
Freedom is a diverse concept. For some traders, it's all about the freedom of the open road. For others-- "And I would report to... you? The Weyr? The herbalists?" It's not that one sounds any worse than the other to Evaly, just that they all sound like an immediate supervisor, and, judging by her dubious tone, she's not so keen on that. "I'll think on it? I have these books--" Famous last words. "--about actually making perfume, and I've always been good at growing things. It's really just a matter of putting it all together, isn't it?" She laces her fingers, all together, and shrugs like it'll be just that simple. Yeah.
"Yes, but where would you grow them? The Weyr has a lot of supplies at her fingertips and what you do know of trade could be a valuable asset for getting harder-to-find things. As for those commissions, they keep the profit on those after they pay the Weyr back for any supplies they've used. Which... does keep the cost down." Loe hasn't quite been turned away just yet, but she does relax back again, her chin to the side as she smiles over at the would-be perfume-maker. "It could be a way to study, get some hands-on experience without any risk, still explore selling and buying, making contacts all the while saving up for when you are ready to take your act on the road full time." There, that's her speech. Now that it's all out, she gives an easy shrug. "You'd report to the herbalist you'd be studying under, to me. But I really have very little dealing with them other than to go over orders."
Prompt, Evaly answers, "I've thought of that. Ah, it's here somewhere." The scattered pages in front of her are given a frown while she looks for the one addressing the 'where would she grow them' factor. Ruffling, she searches for that one in particular, explaining, "I thought I might lease just a bit of land from this farmer who lives not so far from the Weyr..." Only, she can't find her notes at the moment, so she gives up with her head cocked, eyeing Loe with blatant amusement. "I never met people who were so keen to hire a person as you lot of weyrfolk, I must say."
There's another silent 'ah' as Evaly goes hunting through her papers for the one of that nearby farmer. "Well, if you have it all sorted out... just consider this a standing option. I'd offer you garden land myself but unless we start clearing more jungle..." She obviously considers it for a second, too. "We only have the space for the Weyr's needs." And as for that look the trader gives her, Loe lets out a laugh, a rather self-satisfied one. "Well, it's my job. Figure out what people want to do, what they're good at doing, and have them do that." Then the brow raises again. "You have to admit, it's not a bad offer."
"No. No, there's nothing bad about the offer at all. It's just..." Evaly exhales her breath in a puff, cheeks inflating and deflating, ballooned just briefly. "I'm not dismissing it outright, I promise. I'm sure, down the line, I'm likely to kick myself for not just taking it right here and now, but how many chances does a person have in life to re-map the course of their future, right? It seems like I'd be a fool not to run with it as much as I can on my own."
"All right," Loe says with a grin and a nod, conceding the point to Evaly. "So, you have a farmer nearby who might let you grow some stuff on his land. And you have some contacts for getting other supplies, I'm sure. Where are you going to set up your workshop? Your contract for the market stall, was that yours or your fathers? Or..." And this gives her pause. Regretful, perhaps? "Are we looking at losing your business entirely?"
Workshop? "Considering I haven't actually grown anything yet, I thought the matter of where I might turn the as-yet unproduced necessities into the final product was quite a ways down the line. Between now and then, even if I had some space in mind, it might not be available." Evaly shrugs conclusively to that, though she does pause long enough to scribble down a quick side-note to that end. While writing, distracted by that, she answers, "Ah, my father's. I'm fairly sure they're carrying on with business as usual, though I don't think the new shopkeeper is quite so worried about the aesthetic placement of bottles as I was. Still." Another shrug and she looks up from her notes, smiling quickly, carelessly. "Not my concern any more, happily."
With a lift of her brow and a purse of her lips, Loe's expression says the workshop might be something to consider, even if she doesn't actually vocalize that concern. "It's true. Who knows what could be available down the line." But there's still a frown pulling her lips, one more detail to be addressed. She attempts to ask the question delicately, which probably speaks to the respect she has for Evaly and her venture. "So, where are you living now? I mean, the Weyr can house you for a few weeks while you decide what you want to do but... If you're not working for us..."
One can hope that Evaly's not being serious: "Under rocks, generally speaking. Is it a problem? I mean, I suppose you could make the argument that the rocks probably belong to someone..." The 'dot dot dot' is almost audible in there, the way she trails it off pointedly. The slight narrow of her eyes that follows is evidently meant to mask the humor behind them. "If worse really does come to worst, which I think will only happen when the very bad weather gets here, then I can always go home. Perhaps surprisingly, I did actually live somewhere before I turned up at the Weyr." Shocking, she knows.
"Yes," Loe answers that narrowed look with a heartfelt sigh. Yes, even the rocks are owned. But her own humor shines through with the quick smirk that follows, the playful flash of her eyes. "But we aren't using them for anything else at the moment, so it shouldn't be a problem for now." Then she's straightening against, her feet flattening to the floor, ready to take her weight when she stands. She checks her clipboard again, already starting to make a few notes as she gets up. And then she turns her wide, sunny smile back to Evaly. "Well, good luck. And if you do need anything, or if you just want to throw around ideas or something... you know where to find me."
"Thank you," says Evaly lightly enough. "I'll be sure to look for you among those quarantined in the 'clean' areas instead of the infected masses." Food for thought is what Evaly's left with. That and a big damn mess of hides she ought to try to sort through.
IC Date: 12/5/22
West Cavern Workroom, Ista Weyr(#287RJ)
Though busy in their own right, the west cavern and workrooms tend to be quieter than the lively living caverns. A wide thoroughfare meanders through the room and is kept clear despite the worktables and benches of all shapes and sizes that keep the Weyrfolk occupied. Here is where much of the Weyr's work is completed, from pottery and weaving to strap-work and sorting almost everything imaginable. A companionable hubbub and murmur rises and falls with the passing of the hours. The easternmost section has been partitioned off as a quiet gathering area with chairs, sofas, and a notice board used for passing along messages both official and not. Other tunnels stretch off in all directions, though the most commonly used are to the cardinal points.
Industrious, that's Evaly. Having given up trying to do this out in the debatably nice weather, she's holed up in this particular space today with her hidework spread around her. At the moment, she's taking up two chairs at one of the tables, her feet propped up one and her butt parked in the other, frowning over what looks like a missive that she must have read a dozen times, based on its creased and drooping state. --Okay, yes. Industrious may not have been the best word for it, but whatever; she's keeping herself occupied.
Loe, largely recovered from her bought with the plague that's going around Ista, is back to her usual vivacious self, striding quickly across the cavern while also making notes on her ever-present clipboard and stopping here and there to exchange friendly updates with this person here and that person there. And then she comes to Evaly's table and stops. There's a ready smile on her face as she glances over the girl. "We don't see much of you down here," she remarks, a little narrowing of her gaze meant to be playfuly suspicious.
With a quick glance up to make sure she knows who she's talking to before she returns her eyes to the paper in front of her, as if glaring at it will change it, Evaly answers amiably, "I generally try not to darken the doorsteps of the lower caverns. I find working outside to be considerably more pleasant." There's a secondary peek over the top of her paper, which she lifts just slightly to cover more of her face; "Also, I heard there's a deathflu circulating, and I'm not sure I care to be infected."
"Me too," Loe says of working outdoors. "I like the fresh air." But that said, she considers the girl a little more closely. "So, if you like to be outside and you don't want to get infected with the deathflu, why tuck yourself down here among crowds of possibly infected people?" Since she's stopped for a moment, she pulls out one of the chairs, not used by Evaly's butt or her feet, and takes a seat, laying her clipboard against the table's edge. "I already had it. I should be safe," she assures.
"Well," Evaly begins like she was fully prepared for just such a question, go figure. "I had been working outside, only I find myself with a dearth of paper weights. It was really interrupting my work flow to be chasing down scraps all afternoon. So I finally gave up, packed it all up, and relocated. I thought about setting up a deathflu barricade, but it seems a little anti-social, don't you think?" The twinge at the end of that question invites Loe to disagree, to permit her just such a barricade if she's being generous. "Ahh, not a carrier then? I wonder how long before a person is really /clean/ again."
There's a silent 'ah', one that says Loe is familiar with the troubles of paperwork versus wind. "Maybe just a touch anti-social," the headwoman admits. "Though perhaps, even if it's a bit late, we should have set up quarantine work areas for people who are certain they've had no contact with anyone showing symptoms. But that all could have backfired anyway," she sighs, relaxing back into her chair. "The healers said that once you're on the mend, you aren't contagious anymore? I know nothing about it. I think they said the worse time is when you are just starting to show symptoms to when you're full-blown knocked-on-your-ass. I'm just hoping that I can't actually catch it again." For that, she sticks out her tongue. But nevermind all that infectious disease discussion. "What are you working on?" If could be prying, but instead there's just idle curiosity in her posture, the glance of her eyes toward Evaly's pages.
Evaly nods quickly, resolved, saying, "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. Not that I'm not saying I'm not anti-social--" There's a brief pause, a twitch of her forehead while she ponders the grammar behind that statement. Moving on. "--but I don't want to /appear/ that way, regardless. So. Here I sit, daring the infection to find me." She sighs like some tragic, storybook heroine, fanning her face with a page for added drama. "An attempt to make a little money. A new venture. A consistent source of headache. All of these things and so much more!" The last added with all the brightness of a salesperson mid-pitch, peachy smile'n all.
There's an immediate light on Loe's face when she hears one of her favorite phrases. "New venture?" she repeats, perking up, lifting from the back of her chair to lean closer, drawn to those pages now that she knows what they hold. "How exciting." Perhaps it's the sales-style delivery or maybe she just can't help herself, but: "Tell me more? What does this venture entail? Perhaps I can help." Illness, anti-social barracades and double-negative grammar can't hold a candle to the delights of making money.
While Loe leans closer, Evaly leans away, ducking once more behind her barricade-pages. Just in case that whole thing about not being contagious isn't true. Ahem. "It's sort of in its infancy still, to tell you the truth," she begins, dissembling to some extent. "That is, I haven't actually got the money together to make it work yet, but I'm scraping together investors gradually, and I hope to be off the ground and running in..." She waves her fingers, some vague indicator of a nebulous future. The pages, taken individually, don't give away a whole lot: supplies along the lines of seeds and bulbs, glass bottles, "heavy equipment" lumped all under a few running sums, and so on and so forth.
"All great ideas start with a half-baked notion," Loe assure, grinning quite giddily. But that expression doesn't mean that the wheels aren't already turning behind her eager eyes. "So, you need investors... for..." The pages answer those questions, the goods to be acquired. "But what's the plan? What's all this stuff for? Are you just looking to trade in things besides bottled perfumes?" That would be Loe's first guess.
"Mmmmn, something half-baked sounds good," Evaly says abruptly, her hand dropping to her stomach which gives a tell-tale rumble right at that moment. "Is it past lunch time? I think it must be." She pulls her hand away at that point, taking a breath and letting it out at the mention of the bottled perfumes. "That's a complicated question. To begin at the beginning, I'm not exactly in that business at the moment. Standing for that Clutch sort of... put a kibosh on the perfume trade."
"A bit, yeah," Loe returns, smirking at Evaly's touch to her hungry stomach. The smirk fades when talk turns to falling out of the perfume trade. "What happened? Your contacts found other vendors? You had to unload your products and now you don't have the marks to get more?" Just let her keep going; she'll come up with her own answers in the form of endless questions. "So all of this..." A finger gestures toward the pages of supplies, but she lets that last query trail off into a nebulous all-encompasing sort of interest.
What happened? "My dad got mad and said he'd find someone more reliable." Not the most interesting answer out there, but truthful, and Evaly can only shrug helplessly at the way it's all worked out. "So all of this... is a way to get something going again. Despite the number of times it's been offered, I don't care for waiting tables as a career, so I thought I better get the ball rolling for something more suitable before I'm completely markless. Research." Lots of it.
Loe makes a face. Ok, so she's not exactly fond of dragons stealing, say, her assistant, but getting ditched by one's own family is still worth a sympathetic frown. It lingers even as her gaze drifts page to the pages and the machinery of her brain starts whirring again. "So, you're looking for a new career? Because..." She sits up a little straighter, both hands lifting in a vague gestures toward, well, everything. "I know traders don't like to give up their air of independence, but I can pretty much offer any job you'd be interested in. And it comes with a bed, all the food you can eat, convient baths, latrines, healers, library, stipend and... room to sell stuff on the side." Sales pitch.
Tapping her finger on the pages in front of her, Evaly points out, "I'm working on a new career. See--" She takes a breath, exhales it slowly, resolutely. "This is how it gets started, isn't it? Something temporary, something to hold you over, something to do while you continue working on what you really want to do... Only, then you wind up either too tired or too complacent to really go back to what you meant to be doing all along. Which is, I believe, how people wind up doing things like 'career waitress.'" It's a real sticking point, that job. She smiles with timid apology, like she knows it's probably a nice offer, buuuuuut--
Loe doesn't miss the repetition of 'career waitress'. She grins, certainly hearing Evaly's sore points. "Okay, first, let's take waitressing off the table," she says with an amused little smirk. "Second, tell me what it is you want to do. Because either way, whether you want to do it all on your own or whether I can give you a job with the Weyr or we come up with something else entirely... I might be able to help. You see, there are very few instances where someone's personal success doesn't benefit the Weyr in one fashion or another." That is, Evaly shouldn't worry about other ulterior motives. Or... probably shouldn't, if she believes Loe, who does seem at the moment to be largely genuine.
"But, then, doesn't that make the Weyr entitled to some portion of the profit? I won't argue that room and board are at a premium, but I can be quite comfortable living in a pup tent, at least for the foreseeable future." Evaly squints dubiously at the Headwoman, natural suspicion heightened by the fact that she is unusually destitute these days. "That said, I intend to continue peddling perfume, only I'm going to start making it and bottling it myself. I already understand the hardest part-- getting people to buy it-- so the rest should be the easy stuff, right?"
Loe is really quite patient as she waits for Evaly's understandable gut-reaction of suspicion to come and hopefully ease up. "So you want to make perfume." She pauses there because now that she has this information, she has to filter it through the flowchart of possiblities she has in her mind. Meanwhile, her fingers fiddle on the edge of the table until eventually her wrist lift high and she's ready to make her suggestion. "Okay, so, here's something I can offer. Which you can just think about for a while if you want to, or consider it a standing offer, whichever. We have herbalists. And I could hire you to train under them. I know you deal in perfume, but this could be an opportunity to learn ways to make that and also any number of other products. Granted, a lot of what they produce for the Weyr, and what you would be producing, are boring things in comparison. Soaps, detergents, salves for healers, sachets to keep bugs out of the linens, things like that. But they also take commissions for more specific things." With one eyebrow raised, she pauses. "Shall I go on?"
Freedom is a diverse concept. For some traders, it's all about the freedom of the open road. For others-- "And I would report to... you? The Weyr? The herbalists?" It's not that one sounds any worse than the other to Evaly, just that they all sound like an immediate supervisor, and, judging by her dubious tone, she's not so keen on that. "I'll think on it? I have these books--" Famous last words. "--about actually making perfume, and I've always been good at growing things. It's really just a matter of putting it all together, isn't it?" She laces her fingers, all together, and shrugs like it'll be just that simple. Yeah.
"Yes, but where would you grow them? The Weyr has a lot of supplies at her fingertips and what you do know of trade could be a valuable asset for getting harder-to-find things. As for those commissions, they keep the profit on those after they pay the Weyr back for any supplies they've used. Which... does keep the cost down." Loe hasn't quite been turned away just yet, but she does relax back again, her chin to the side as she smiles over at the would-be perfume-maker. "It could be a way to study, get some hands-on experience without any risk, still explore selling and buying, making contacts all the while saving up for when you are ready to take your act on the road full time." There, that's her speech. Now that it's all out, she gives an easy shrug. "You'd report to the herbalist you'd be studying under, to me. But I really have very little dealing with them other than to go over orders."
Prompt, Evaly answers, "I've thought of that. Ah, it's here somewhere." The scattered pages in front of her are given a frown while she looks for the one addressing the 'where would she grow them' factor. Ruffling, she searches for that one in particular, explaining, "I thought I might lease just a bit of land from this farmer who lives not so far from the Weyr..." Only, she can't find her notes at the moment, so she gives up with her head cocked, eyeing Loe with blatant amusement. "I never met people who were so keen to hire a person as you lot of weyrfolk, I must say."
There's another silent 'ah' as Evaly goes hunting through her papers for the one of that nearby farmer. "Well, if you have it all sorted out... just consider this a standing option. I'd offer you garden land myself but unless we start clearing more jungle..." She obviously considers it for a second, too. "We only have the space for the Weyr's needs." And as for that look the trader gives her, Loe lets out a laugh, a rather self-satisfied one. "Well, it's my job. Figure out what people want to do, what they're good at doing, and have them do that." Then the brow raises again. "You have to admit, it's not a bad offer."
"No. No, there's nothing bad about the offer at all. It's just..." Evaly exhales her breath in a puff, cheeks inflating and deflating, ballooned just briefly. "I'm not dismissing it outright, I promise. I'm sure, down the line, I'm likely to kick myself for not just taking it right here and now, but how many chances does a person have in life to re-map the course of their future, right? It seems like I'd be a fool not to run with it as much as I can on my own."
"All right," Loe says with a grin and a nod, conceding the point to Evaly. "So, you have a farmer nearby who might let you grow some stuff on his land. And you have some contacts for getting other supplies, I'm sure. Where are you going to set up your workshop? Your contract for the market stall, was that yours or your fathers? Or..." And this gives her pause. Regretful, perhaps? "Are we looking at losing your business entirely?"
Workshop? "Considering I haven't actually grown anything yet, I thought the matter of where I might turn the as-yet unproduced necessities into the final product was quite a ways down the line. Between now and then, even if I had some space in mind, it might not be available." Evaly shrugs conclusively to that, though she does pause long enough to scribble down a quick side-note to that end. While writing, distracted by that, she answers, "Ah, my father's. I'm fairly sure they're carrying on with business as usual, though I don't think the new shopkeeper is quite so worried about the aesthetic placement of bottles as I was. Still." Another shrug and she looks up from her notes, smiling quickly, carelessly. "Not my concern any more, happily."
With a lift of her brow and a purse of her lips, Loe's expression says the workshop might be something to consider, even if she doesn't actually vocalize that concern. "It's true. Who knows what could be available down the line." But there's still a frown pulling her lips, one more detail to be addressed. She attempts to ask the question delicately, which probably speaks to the respect she has for Evaly and her venture. "So, where are you living now? I mean, the Weyr can house you for a few weeks while you decide what you want to do but... If you're not working for us..."
One can hope that Evaly's not being serious: "Under rocks, generally speaking. Is it a problem? I mean, I suppose you could make the argument that the rocks probably belong to someone..." The 'dot dot dot' is almost audible in there, the way she trails it off pointedly. The slight narrow of her eyes that follows is evidently meant to mask the humor behind them. "If worse really does come to worst, which I think will only happen when the very bad weather gets here, then I can always go home. Perhaps surprisingly, I did actually live somewhere before I turned up at the Weyr." Shocking, she knows.
"Yes," Loe answers that narrowed look with a heartfelt sigh. Yes, even the rocks are owned. But her own humor shines through with the quick smirk that follows, the playful flash of her eyes. "But we aren't using them for anything else at the moment, so it shouldn't be a problem for now." Then she's straightening against, her feet flattening to the floor, ready to take her weight when she stands. She checks her clipboard again, already starting to make a few notes as she gets up. And then she turns her wide, sunny smile back to Evaly. "Well, good luck. And if you do need anything, or if you just want to throw around ideas or something... you know where to find me."
"Thank you," says Evaly lightly enough. "I'll be sure to look for you among those quarantined in the 'clean' areas instead of the infected masses." Food for thought is what Evaly's left with. That and a big damn mess of hides she ought to try to sort through.