Building a Business

Building a Business

Everyone gets hands on

Chapter 1 by Lake_Nine Lake_Nine

Dying sucks, it hurts, but let me tell you losing everything you have built over years and years hurts a lot fucking more. Let me back up for a moment, my name is Leo and I used to run the best potion shop in the human sphere. If you wanted a love potion, a hangover removal potion, a hair color change potion, a potion of wine removal from clothes, and a portion of health or mana guaranteed to save your life I was the only place you could get them all. I had the best, rarest, and most useful potions around for two reasons. First I had been doing this for a long time, I was the most established buyer of crafting materials at a good price and the most experienced crafter of potions. Second and more importantly I had come up with a lot of my best selling potions myself, you couldn't get them from anywhere but my shop because I was the only one who made them. I never grew up with much and my potion business even before it was a stall and before it was a shop had allowed me to get through school paying the cost even without any parents. I had just graduated and been accepted into the college of my dreams but although I had some money saved up it was never going to be enough to get me through, and I couldn't afford loans.

For weeks I had been dealing with an increasing set of demands from the human government. All the crafters in the capital had, they wanted more of our stock for less than ever before. So when I was told to sell my products at a loss or hand over some of my potion recipes I said no. The problem was there had been waiting for someone to say no, they wanted to make an example of someone. They didn't just rough me up, they stripped me naked, lashed me and then hung me outside my shop. Not enough to kill me mind you, they kept healing me as people watched as I hung naked, bloodied, and humiliated. They made me watch as they took everything from me, and then as dusk fell then burned my shop and home down destroying everything. No one came to save me, no one even dared to cut me down or kill me.

I hung well into the night as I considered killing myself before she came. When I felt the rope stiffen I thought that had come for me and in a way it had. I heard a sharp cutting sound and I fell hard onto my numb legs falling prone onto the ground too weak to do anything. I weakly looked up and in the dim light, I saw her, a dark elf. She had visited my shop on occasion selling me materials and buying basic potions. It had been like that since I had lived in the slums, and after the government outlawed trading with the dark races we kept on trading. There was no way anyone was going to catch her, I never even knew when she was coming, she just appeared often when I was working alone in my workshop above my shop.

I saw a sadness in her eyes as she reached down held a healing potion to my lips, as I drank slowly I sadly realized it was one of my own. Slowly I sat up my bag against the pole they hung me from and managed to quietly ask her "Why". She seemed to hesitate before saying "You deserve a second chance". I smiled and shook my head slowly laughing quietly "I'm afraid the government here isn't interested in me getting one of those".

What's next?

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