The woman instructed us on how to get to the weapons shop, and she even left the store to properly show us where we should be going even though we were not even her customers. How polite of her.
So according to her words, the nearest weapons shop should be located just past the Knights guardhouse, so that is where we shall be heading next.
Thank you for telling us all this. We will be sure to come back here later to buy something.
Certainly. I will be eagerly awaiting your return.
After thanking the kind shopkeeper lady, we left the hardware store. One detail I forgot to mention about that lady before: apparently her name was Honesta, and it really showed, because she was a truly sincere person to some random passers-by whom she met for the first time in her life like us. (TL Note: kinda weird that a Japanese person would know what the meaning of the word honest is in English considering that them being notoriously bad at english is basically a meme now, but oh well)
She mentioned buying a house earlier. You think she is a landlady or a real-estate agent (TL Note: or afreereal estate?) or something?
I think she might have been, actually.
If it was to be from such an honest and sincere person, then maybe renting a room somewhere in this city might not have been such a bad idea. While we walked towards the weapons shop, I talked about it with Roxanne.
So far we have been staying at the room in an inn, but would it actually be cheaper to rent a room in a normal house?
Lets see although I have no idea what the proper market price in Quratar actually is, renting a room usually costs between 10,000 and 30,000 Nar for a contract that lasts for a full year. Also, I have heard that 50,000 Nars should be enough to rent a nice house in the suburbs.
Is that how it is?
I dont know whether that is expensive or cheap, but that is most definitely cheaper than staying in an inn in the long-term, because the math is pretty clear about this: a year of renting a room would be between 10,000 and 30,000 Nasr, a year of renting a house costs 50,000 Nars, and if we assume that the accommodation in an inn costs 300 Nars per day, than a full year of living in such a way would easily end up costing more then 100,000 Nars, but if I wanted to increase the number of my Party members even further in the future, then the cost of accommodation would also go up accordingly.
If we were in a village or some other remote region in the boonies, this might have been tough because locals are always wary of strangers suddenly coming into their closed little communities, but since this is a city we should then we should be fine.
I have heard that many Explorers live both here in Quratar and in the Imperial City, but personally I think that thanks to masters magic abilities we could live pretty much anywhere we wanted to.
By magic she probably meant Warp, and there was some truth to her words, because as long as I have that Bonus Spell, then it wont really matter where we will live as long as we could use it to travel wherever we needed to go. However:
But we also musnt forget about remaining careful. We have to choose a place where it would be normal for an Explorer to live without raising too much suspicions. The last thing we would want is for everyone around us and their mothers to learn that I can use magic.
In that case, buying a house here should be perfectly fine.
Yes, Roxanne was absolutely right. If this city really is so densely populated by Explorers, then one more of them taking residence here would not probably pick up anyones attention due to how common of an occurance it was around these parts.
Having decided on such a course of action, we navigated the roads between the entrance to the Labyrinth and the Knights guardhouse, making our way towards the weapons shop.
When we got to the place described to us by the owner of that hardware shop, we noticed that it had not just one, but a few weapons shops at the both sides of the street, each one of them apparently specializing in different kinds of weapons, as was evident by the articles of war placed at the displays next to the shops entrances. I have to admit, at first I was truly taken aback by how wide the selection was, reminding me of the gun shops of America that are supposedly in each and every one of its cities around pretty much every corner.
We entered the nearest weapons store, walking past many customers who were continuously coming in and going out after either browsing through the wares it had to offer and buying them or simply window shopping. The store itself was fairly large, with several people at once filling every one of its many isles, and they all looked deadly serious about making their selections, to no ones surprise, since choosing a perfect weapon for yourself to use could very well be a potentially life-saving decision.
Now lets see where wound wands and staffs be?
Looking for wands and staffs we went towards the back of the shop, where we noticed the staff-type weapons being kept, and there were not that many of them. Could it be that they are somewhat unique, even in this world where the existence of magic is commonly known? Maybe because the number of Mages and Wizards is significantly smaller when compared to all the other Jobs?
We looked at all the wands, staffs and canes the store had to offer one by one. The way they were lined up, it made me think that maybe they were lined up in order from the cheapest to the most expensive, with the former being placed in the front and the latter in the back. When I used Identify on them, I immediately learned why they have been arranged like that: Wands were the cheapest because they had only one empty Skill Slots, Canes had two empty Skill Slots and Rods, the most expensive of the bunch, had up to three empty Skill Slots.
Thinking about it in such categories, it makes sense that the weapon with the most Skill Slots would be the most costly, but at the same time it should be the most efficient in battle, while the cheapest ones will have the least amount of Skill Slots, and therefore you shouldnt be expecting too much from them battle-wise.