Hisaya Amagishi

ou need to understand what these clothes are for. Think of them as a letter of introduction. When you meet with new business partners and clients as chairwoman of your company, you need to inspire trust. The right clothes are important for creating a good first impression.”

Society didn’t have much regard for the magical toolmaking craft. She’d been told that the likes of her were nothing compared to mages and alchemists. She couldn’t slay monsters with impressive blasts of fire or ice. She couldn’t heal people’s wounds. She couldn’t brew potions or conjure up precious metals like an alchemist. Even when she made something she was proud of, people would often question what the point of it was. Sometimes people wouldn’t read the instructions properly and dismissed her tools as useless or too much hassle. She’d been called tight-fisted over the prices of her magical tools and the arrangements in her contracts. Developing new tools felt like fumbling in the dark at times; her experiments were far more likely to fail than succeed. Sometimes, when looking at a pile of useless prototypes, she almost lost the will to go on. However carefully she performed her enchantments, she was constantly at risk of wasting her expensive materials, and she often did.
In spite of all this, there were many times in Dahlia’s life when she felt immensely glad to be a magical toolmaker. She was so happy each time someone smiled at her and told her how useful one of her tools had been to them. There was no better feeling than knowing a tool she’d created had made someone happier, even if only a little bit. On days like those, she was reminded why she could never give up this craft. Today was one of those days.

Yes, she was afraid. She was uneasy. She was unsure. But until she walked on her own two feet down a path of her own choosing, she couldn’t call herself a grown woman.

While Dahlia would feel the sunlight, she would also be exposed to the wind and rain.

present, the Rossetti Trading Company consisted only of Dahlia and Ivano. They didn’t deal with their clients directly, instead conducting all their business through the Merchants’ Guild. Their products were stored not on their premises—for they had none—but at the Merchants’ Guild, or they could be delivered directly to the castle by the Tailors’ Guild. Dahlia was thankful for such convenient arrangements. When Dahlia imagined all the clients and products they would have to manage in the future, she couldn’t help feeling a bit apprehensive.

They say men get over relationships like sliding down a staircase, but women jump out through a third-story window.

The consumer was a creature who demanded. The technician was a creature who pushed the bounds of what was possible. The craftsperson was a creature who tried to make feasible ideas into a reality. Most good products were found at the intersection of all three perspectives. Trading opinions, making prototypes, putting them into action, making improvements—those were joyous, meaningful parts of creating something. At the end, however, criticism was also unavoidable.