The Happy Days of Being a Factory Owner in London – Chapter 9
by MonoCollapse
A player never admits defeat!
By the time Arna reached the supplier’s shop, the streets of the East End were already bustling.
The air, as usual, was thick with the rhythmic cries of vendors and so polluted by factory exhaust that the sky was a blanket of smog.
The advertisement she’d placed in The Times would likely take a day or two to circulate, but the Baker Street Irregulars would spread the news through the alleys and tenements of Whitechapel much faster.
Ten apprentices, four shillings a week, lodging included. Such pay was a small fortune, especially for poor families whose children had to earn half a shilling sweeping chimneys or rummaging through rubbish heaps.
But since this was a targeted recruitment, she had added special requirements to the initial notice, such as nimble fingers and the need for an interview, and set the hiring day for the weekend.
She left a five-day buffer mainly because she planned to repaint and renovate the factory before the children arrived, then use a special deodorizer to eliminate any potentially toxic fumes.
Ugh, this era is so backward. So many cleaning supplies that are common in my time are impossible to find here.
Although she still couldn’t exploit a bug to unlock the factory’s basic production formulas ahead of schedule, after a great deal of painstaking fiddling with the interface, the game panel did drop a simple deodorizing formula for her.
“Limewater, brushes, coal tar, and soda powder?” the supplier said doubtfully, holding the list Arna had provided. “And the quantity is… ‘a large amount’?”
He scratched his thinning hair, feeling that this young man had no concept of quantity. “How much is ‘a large amount’? All of it? Are you declaring war on a stain? You know, with this many raw materials, you could make enough paint stripper to repaint an entire factory. And as for the other things you want, I can’t see what use they could possibly be when combined.”
Arna said, “…That’s right, I’m repainting a factory. Since I’m buying so much, how about a discount?”
“I see, all right,” the supplier said with a touch of humor. “It seems this factory hasn’t had a proper cleaning since Victoria was a little girl.”
He shrugged and began to assemble the order. “It’ll be an extra charge if you need me to have my people deliver this to the factory. I can recommend some reliable decorators for you. By the way, if it’s a factory, after all this time, I’m afraid the rats’ nests will be thicker than the hedges in your garden.”
He lowered his voice. “My advice is to get a cat. There’s a lad down by the docks who loves those furry little things. Give him a pint of ale and two pence, and you can borrow one. The kind that can catch the slyest rats in all of London.”
There it is, the inevitable pet-acquisition stage of base-building!
Arna nodded solemnly and added the task to her to-do list for the day.
“No need, just give the things to me,” she said, shaking her head shrewdly at his earlier suggestion, avoiding the unnecessary payment trap. “I don’t need you to deliver it.”
The supplier grunted but said nothing more.
A moment later, he wiped the sweat from his brow and pointed to the large sacks he’d gathered on the floor. “That’s everything.”
He was dying to see how this arrogant kid would manage to haul all this to the factory on foot.
He’d noticed, after all, that the fellow hadn’t even hired a carriage in advance.
The supplier’s eyes were glued to Arna as the young man reached out, grabbed the bags… three, two, one, time for him to fall—
He watched, dumbfounded, as Arna easily slung the sacks over his shoulder and simply carried the enormous load out the door.
The sacks were so large that he banged them hard against the doorframe just to squeeze through.
But the sight of that figure walking away as if flying left the supplier in a state of profound shock.
—Just where did this ridiculously strong country bumpkin come from?
Back at the factory, Arna dropped the parcel on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and began to mix the limewater.
All right, you scrubs, it’s time I showed you what a full-throttle exploding liver1 looks like!
She stopped wandering around and exploring new maps, dedicating all her time to fishing for money and renovating the factory. She left home at six in the morning and walked back from the factory at one-thirty at night, not forgetting to rummage through trash cans for valuables along the way.
Occasionally, there were unexpected windfalls, like running into a mugger or two and earning a bit of extra cash.
The results were remarkable. In less than three days, Arna had repainted the entire three-story factory and sprayed it with her homemade air freshener to dissolve the toxic gases in the air.
However, getting too absorbed in work wasn’t always a good thing. It was easy to get carried away.
For instance, after she finished spraying the last section of the factory, although the map showed that all the red dots indicating toxic gas had disappeared, the clock had also quietly ticked over to one-fifty in the morning.
Arna jolted, dropped the sprayer, and bolted for the door, hoping against hope that the game developers weren’t that cruel.
“Didn’t you say there was all-new gameplay?” she yelled. “Passing out at two a.m. is so… cliché…2“
Before she could finish the word, she lost consciousness and collapsed onto the factory’s cold concrete floor.
When Arna opened her eyes again, she was staring at the smooth, clean ceiling of her room at Baker Street.
She gazed at it blankly for a moment before a calloused hand blocked her view, gently touching her forehead with its back.
“No heat. It’s not a fever. It must be a collapse from hunger,” Watson said, withdrawing his hand and placing a cool, damp towel on her forehead. He spoke sternly. “What were you thinking, Aisas, collapsing from hunger in a factory with the doors wide open at two in the morning?”
If he hadn’t happened to be making a house call nearby that night, and if he hadn’t remembered that Aisas hadn’t returned to Baker Street and specifically asked his coachman to make a detour past the factory, the people who found Aisas the next morning would have found a corpse that was already cold!
Discovering that her money hadn’t been deducted, Arna squirmed in bed and grabbed the doctor’s sleeve.
“…I was wrong,” she said, her eyes wide and pleading. “Since we’re friends, can I get a discount on the consultation fee?”
Please don’t charge me the full amount! A thousand pence is a price I can’t afford!
Hearing that his patient’s first words upon waking were a request to haggle, Watson’s mustache trembled, and he could barely contain his fury.
But before he could speak, another person did.
“A discount?” Holmes, dressed in his morning gown, leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. “Doctor, make him pay double the fee, just for that idiotic remark.”
He strode forward, seized Arna’s wrist, and turned it over to reveal her palm, covered in cuts and blisters. “Look at his hands,” he said dramatically. “He has clearly been performing manual labor for at least sixteen hours straight! If he had managed his time properly, rested well, and varied his posture, these blisters would never have appeared at all.”
Watson’s anger immediately shifted toward Holmes. “Christ, Holmes!” he roared. “He’s a patient suffering from severe malnutrition! This is not the time for such talk. Let go of him at once!”
He turned back to Arna, demanding, “When was the last time you ate a proper meal? And don’t give me any nonsense about eating a biscuit counting as a meal.”
Arna scratched her cheek and glanced at the fine network of cuts on her palm.
The game’s attention to detail is pretty good. If Holmes hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have even noticed there was a special glove skin.
“These wounds will heal quickly. As for eating… it was last night,” Arna said honestly. “I really did eat. It wasn’t a biscuit.”
“Evidently,” Holmes said coolly, forced to let go after being yelled at. “It was a biscuit sandwiched between two slices of bread. One from several days ago, I should think—a sibling to those sandwiches sold to you on the train.”
Arna clearly saw two small flames ignite in Dr. Watson’s eyes, and they were burning brighter by the second.
“Good heavens, Aisas, a week-old sandwich?” he said, as if desperately trying to suppress his temper. “The rotten food will kill you long before you starve to death from malnutrition!”
Arna thought, …Damn you, Holmes!
She muttered sullenly, “It wasn’t spoiled, Dr. Watson, really. I was careful to keep it fresh…”
She had put the sandwiches in a bag that could briefly restore freshness to prevent them from rotting.
Seeing Watson grow angrier, Arna swallowed the rest of her sentence. She just stared at her depleted stamina bar and looked around pitifully.
Before she could say anything else to infuriate him, Watson picked up a bowl from the side table and held the steaming beef soup under her nose.
“Drink up,” he said gruffly, standing. “You need plenty of rest. You are not to go out again until this afternoon at the earliest, do you hear me?”
“But the wood I ordered is arriving today, and I was planning to…” Arna had still been planning to build the beds for the children.
She had exchanged three pence with the system for the Blueprint for a Double Bed and another five pence for the necessary raw materials. She intended to craft five double beds by hand and place them in the newly painted room on the second floor as living quarters.
But the rest of her sentence vanished.
Mrs. Hudson was standing just outside the doorway, her face pale, her lips pressed into a trembling line.
“You foolish, reckless child,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
Her tone made Watson instinctively take a step back. Holmes, ever perceptive, firmly grasped his friend’s arm and silently led him from the room, leaving the bedroom to the aunt and her nephew.
“You,” Mrs. Hudson said, her voice hoarse as she placed a tray on the bedside table, “will finish this soup and eat these pies. Then you will sleep. After that, my dear, we will discuss whether your career ought to be affecting your health.”
Arna capitulated at once.
Over the next half-day, she promised to return on time for meals, to hire a carriage for her commute, and to place another newspaper ad the very next day to hire a teacher for the children instead of shouldering all the work herself.
Although her expenses were higher than anticipated, by Friday afternoon, Arna had completed all her tasks on schedule.
She locked the door to the second-floor room, straightened up, and descended the stairs with a light step, the iron framework humming softly with her footfalls.
The sun was setting, and the factory’s pale walls reflected the fading light. The coachman should be nearby.
Arna stretched, calculating how many children she would have to receive tomorrow morning.
Just then, someone knocked politely on the iron gate before pushing it open.
Arna instinctively looked toward the entrance.
It was a young woman with rosy cheeks. Her thick hair was tied back with a ribbon, though a few defiant strands still curled upward.
“I saw your notice in the paper,” she said, holding up the newspaper clipping. “And I didn’t miss the last issue of The Times. You’re looking for someone to manage those little troublemakers?”
“I am,” Arna replied. “And I’m afraid there isn’t much of a salary. Just as the paper says, six shillings a week, with meals.”
At this, the young woman smiled, her bearing easy and graceful.
“I figured as much,” she said, looking around the freshly painted factory. “Did you do all this by yourself? It’s impressive.”
Arna grunted in affirmation. “I did.”
After surveying the premises, the young woman said, “I’ve had a bit of schooling. I can write a little, I know basic arithmetic, and I know how to keep a litter of brats who’ve crawled out of the sewer from tearing each other apart during work hours.”
She naturally extended a hand toward Arna. “I’m Nancy3. No last name.”
Not expecting to actually find a suitable teacher for less than the market rate, Arna, feeling she’d struck a great bargain, shook her hand without hesitation.
“Well then,” she said with all seriousness, “a pleasure doing business with you?”
Nancy let out a small laugh. “Yes, a pleasure, Mr. Aisas.”
The author has something to say:
Our Nancy makes her grand entrance!
- A mixture of limewater, coal tar, concentrated ammonia, and soda powder can be used to make a type of paint stripper. Concentrated ammonia was also invented in the 19th century.
- The “fainting at 2 a.m.” and the 1,000 gold clinic fee are references to Stardew Valley.
- Nancy is the good girl from Oliver Twist who helps Oliver. A very good young lady…
Footnotes
- 'Bào gān,' literally 'exploding liver,' is Chinese gaming slang for playing excessively or 'grinding' for long, unhealthy hours.
- A reference to farming simulation games like Stardew Valley, where the player character automatically collapses from exhaustion at 2 a.m., often waking up back home with a penalty, such as a fee deducted for medical services.
- Nancy is a major character in Charles Dickens's 1838 novel, Oliver Twist. She is a member of Fagin's gang but ultimately shows great compassion for Oliver.
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