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Castle Brush
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>>107137
The setting includes both alchemists who can do actual lead-into-gold elemental transmutation (although, economics being what it is, this ultimately does more to raise the cost of lead and other process inputs than to lower the price of gold), and monstrous bees the size of sheep. Some exotic type of bee that produces, and can digest, honey based on levorotatory sugars wouldn't be a stretch at all. In fact, they'd probably be necessary for the long-term survival of the fruit trees in question.
Sorbet is just sugar and water ice flavored with fruit juice and sometimes honey. Water isn't chiral, of course, so I think you're covered.
By "normal food" I was mostly thinking of stuff with lots of fat and protein and interesting spices, the sort of thing you'd want to see in trail rations or served at a noble's banquet. Every time a reasonably diverse load of levoprotein hits her guts, it wakes up dormant bacterial spores (some mix of normal intestinal flora, the stuff you'd find on a festering wound, and who knows what else) into frenzied scavenging and rot, like a microcosm of the mess when a fifty-ton whale carcass washes up on the beach. For the next few hours or days, Davina's small intestine becomes a befouled shipping canal run by insane alien bandits.
Quintessence-bread can be any color, and shaped in a variety of ways for presentation purposes, but it's always got a consistent texture somewhere between marzipan and hard cheese. Moderately sweet, slightly spicy aftertaste, indefinite shelf life regardless of temperature if kept away from vermin, scentless when dry, but when bitten and held in the mouth a moment it becomes the most delicious and filling thing most people have ever tasted. Sixty pounds costs 4.5 gold ($1800) and would be adequate-bordering-on-generous rations for three men, or a rider and his horse or griffon, for a month of hard labor or combat. (Equivalent supply of conventional food, for comparison, weighs at least three times as much, but would be less than half the price - maybe less than a tenth for local produce appropriated during harvest season, or substandard almost-spoiled stuff)
That's a reasonable lower-bound pay rate for mercenaries, if supplemented by plunder rights proportionate to the risk. They'll likely end up trading most of it for cheaper rations, various camp-follower services, or coins with higher value density, but q-bread has the key tactical advantages that 1) debased alloy coins may be tricky to recognize, but any fool can tell if the Elemental Food has lumps in it or tastes wrong, and 2) during a siege or a famine, all the merchants suddenly remember that silver is no good to eat, and adjust their prices accordingly. A salary denominated in q-bread thus rises in value to match the severity of any such crisis.
Riders at that pay grade will just be couriers, dragoons who dismount to fight on foot, scouts, or skirmishers, though. Horseback archers might get by on that much if you also provide them with ammo, but you're not going to attract the best by cutting corners, and long-term training is a huge factor in archery. Serious sword-and-lance cavalry needs at least half again that much pay, mostly for equipment maintenance and repair. Armor for a horse has lots of fiddly buckles, and a horse can't exactly strip down after a battle, wash the sweat off before rivets start to rust, hammer the dents out, and so on, all by itself.
>>107140
Strictly speaking, they reached the surface at the end of thread 1, and thread 2 involved making their way overland back to town. The latter problem will be considerably simplified with Davina's ability to open portals from one hilltop to the next. In clear weather, sixty miles an hour would be an almost leisurely stroll, a hundred-yard step per three seconds, completely ignoring typical terrain-based movement penalties. Reaching the surface at all might not be as easy this time, though.
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