Tim's POV
Sister Edna had aged in the years since I had last seen her properly, not dramatically, The grey in her hair had finished what it started. She sat behind the same desk in the same small office, and she looked at me across it with the same careful attention.*did I get my caution form her..?*
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Tim...?," she said.
"hello again, anyways" I said, as I inhaled a large breath.
"I want to run this orphanage with you," I said. "I'll pay for everything. Instruction, food, building improvements, staff. You keep doing what you normal do, the management, the relationships with the children. I'll handle resources stuff."
She was quiet for a long time.
"what.?" she asked.
"You see, I can heal people, and that makes alot of money" I said. "For that money. And I have plans for how to make an institution self-sustaining over time." I paused as I looked at her.
She looked at me for another long moment. Then she folded her hands on the desk.
"I have no idea, what you are saying," she said.
The street children of E-Rantel were not difficult to find. They were simply bloody everywhere, occupying in the alleys, the refuse areas, the spaces under market stalls after closing. I had lived here for years and had spent years after that moving through it on my morning rounds, and I knew where every cluster was, which corners were inhabited by which children.
I spent three days walking the city systematically, starting in the lower ward and working outward.
My pitch was simple and I delivered it the same way each time, crouching to eye level or standing depending on the child's preference, speaking plainly with warmth that street children most likely never had.
Join my orphanage. It had food, beds, and everything you need. It was not going to ask anything of them that they couldn't give. They could leave if they wanted to.
Most of them came.
Not all, some had poor families, or sick parents.
But most came, and the orphanage filled rapidly, and the building that had housed forty children comfortably now held something closer to three hundred, which required immediate investment in space and supplies that ate through my reserves faster than I had planned and started my healing job right away.
Half a gold coin for tier one healing. The church price was one gold. I was undercutting the cartel, which was what I had intended to do, and the cartel's response was what any cartel's response to undercutting was violence.
The guards they sent to kill me arrived on a Tuesday, which I remembered because it was a teaching day and I had been in the middle of demonstrating bread dough technique to a group of twelve-year-olds when the commotion at the front of the building drew me out.
Eight men. Church insignia on their surcoats, weapons drawn.
I looked at them.
They looked at me, a teenager [17 years old] in a flour-dusted apron.
"Give us a moment," I said to the children behind me.
The fight was brief and conducted in the street with the minimum force necessary to communicate the point clearly. I targeted joints and pressure points rather than anything vital, the medical knowledge overlapping usefully with the combat application, and eight men laid in the street in various states of incapacitation within thirty seconds.
"Go home guys, I have a class to teach," I said to the least injured of them, "and tell whoever sent you that the price is half a gold coin and that's what it's going to stay."
The church's next step was to target the people who came to me for healing, following them afterward, harassing them, in two cases arresting them on fabricated pretexts. This was the move I had hoped they wouldn't make because it required a response I had hoped to avoid.
But that doesn't mean, I wouldn't cumb stomp them.
when a man I had healed three days prior was dragged from his home by church guards and his family came to the orphanage in the night, the wife and three children standing in the doorway with terror their eyes.
I got them settled, arranged food, confirmed the man's location, and sat with the decision for the night, as I tried to think of a peacefull solution.
By morning I made up my mind.
There were four elemental churches with established presences in E-Rantel. Each had a head priest who had sanctioned or directly ordered the harassment campaign. I spent the following two days identifying each one with certainty, confirming their locations, their schedules.
Then I went to each church.
I want to be precise about what I did, as I didn't want kill alot of people. I did not destroy the buildings or harm the lay staff or the junior clergy who had no decision-making authority over the harassment campaign. I walked in, found the person at the top of the local hierarchy, and made the conversation very clear.
Some of them sent guards first, which I dealt with efficiently, and then we had the conversation anyway.
The conversations were short. The harassment of my patients stops. The price I charge for My healing is My damn business. The enforcement of the cartel agreement ends here, at least as it pertains to me. If they wanted to pursue this further, they were welcome to discover what I will do to them, if they refused.
The head of the Fire Church's E-Rantel branch attempted to cast a spell at me during our conversation.
I broke his wrist. Healed it immediately after, and broke it again, healed it again, than broke it again for good measure.
He did not attempt a second spell.
The churches soon left me alone after that.
The teachers arrived over the following weeks, hired through a direct approach.
The gardener was a woman named Petra who had spent twenty years on a noble estate and had left under circumstances she described only as *irreconcilable differences with the noble* which I didn't investigate because her credentials her reasons were her own, and I don't really care. The farmer was an older man who had retired from active land work due to a knee injury and whose knowledge of crop cycles and soil management was extensive and precisely articulated. The craftsman was a former guild journeyman who had stopped short of master rank for reasons that were complicated and personal.
*I think he's gay, as he keeps checking me out*
The blacksmith was retired, heavyset, with hands as black as coal. His name was Aldous, not Brother Aldous from the church, a different Aldous, which caused me off for a moment on first introduction. He came to the orphanage on the first morning, looked at the existing forge setup *there wasn't one, and spent the rest of the week designing what would become one of the better-equipped small forges in the lower ward, which he communicated to me as a list of required materials.
I sadly agreed to everything on the list.
He looked at me with the suspicion of a man who had expected a loooong negotiation.
"Good materials produce good work," I said. "And I want your best work."
I taught the cooking classes myself. it was practical. I was the best cook in this city by a large margin, and cooking was the fastest level generator I had identified for people starting from zero. The children who sat across the preparation tables from me were, without knowing it, accumulating their first job class levels.
"Weclome to Hell's Kitchen"
My healing practice ran morning to evening, with little breaks that were long enough to eat and not much else.
The gold came in steadily and went out faster, the orphanage's operating costs at three hundred children and twelve staff being what they were. I kept a running calculation in my notebook and I was bearly cutting it even.
This was not a sustainable architecture.
I needed another revenue source. Something that generated income without requiring my continuous personal presence, because the healing alone was taking everything I had.
"I'm not going back to being a wage slave".
Tim's stats.
LeveL: [44]