Nia was late.
Generally, most of the lifestyle workers would start their day either in workrooms or near village square. If they were not dedicated lifestyle members, they would be in the maps.
Guild members were lucky. They did not have to waste time in village square trying to buy raw materials or waiting to sell their finished products to get coins to buy new resource materials.
Guilds would use low level workers or sales team for such work. In the village level though, guilds had to work with what they had. They would not be so lucky to have a sales team member or lifestyle skill member in each and every village. Thus, guilds employed the approach of 'wait and see' in most cases. The contracts offered would be time bound or level bound or place bound.
Simply put, it would mean so-and-so named person would be part of such and such guild till...few weeks or till player stays in such a place or till player reach so and so level (in XP or in life style skills), after which both of them would sit and discuss another contract or both of them go in different ways.
So Poaching would become more and more common in later levels. Conversely, the contracts binding them would also become more and more restrictive but more and more lucrative.
In village levels, everything was much more relaxed. Anyone and everyone would try their hand in lifestyle skills. How else can you confirm you are not the next upcoming great blacksmith/alchemist/tailor/rune master etc.
This exact mentality helped Nia to net few temporary contracts. But her deal was not time bound or place bound or level bound. Her financial manager had haggled much and made deals with multiple guilds at a single time. Hers was product bound.
Give Nia the raw materials and get the potions. The payment was different with each guild though. Few were asked to pay in raw materials, few in potions and few were directly asked to pay in coins. If new recipe was provided, the payment would be slightly different as the price of the recipe would be included too.
To ensure confidentiality, Maaya and Nia turned till brains till they found a way. This would be the first time it would be implemented though.
If alchemist came in late to workshop, there would be chance of finding it full and had to spend some time waiting for room to be free. Thankfully, Nia had sent Grandma Esla's granddaughter to book a room under her name, thus she still had a room.
So Nia paid for her room and a bit extra to ensure she would not be evicted as soon her time lapsed. This sort of 'understanding' can only happen if the affinity between player and NPC is very good and NPC considers player as trustworthy. NPC has to believe that when the player comes out of the room, he or she would pay for the extra time spent inside. This, being just third day, not many had such affinity with NPCs.
After entering the room, she informed her 'contacts' in the guilds she had made deal with. They, in turn, sent the players waiting outside the workrooms to the said numbered room to 'deposit' the raw materials.
Obviously, the first called ones were the guilds which had pre-ordered potions from her previous day or the guild which had asked for maximum number of basic potions. The inventory bags of Nia, which had been fairly empty suddenly turned full and she had to pause the raw material delivery for some time.
Then she spent boring time. Her alchemy skill points did not increase at all, even after making few stacks of same potions. This just showed the difficulty of increasing the levels in lifestyle skills. As though they had talked among them, all the guilds had sent requests and raw materials for basic red and blue pots. Nia spent time making same sort of potions in batches, lamenting lack of better cauldron. If she had a better cauldron, she could have made more potions per batch. At least she could have saved some time.
This was just third day of the game. But she had spent less than half a day in the hunting grounds aka maps. As she was working mechanically, she wondered how many people like her in this game. How many people did not care about seeing different vistas? How many did not have choice of enjoying such places? How many voluntarily bound themselves and grounded themselves inside workrooms, blacksmith places etc?
Then her musings took another turn. Is there a way to alleviate boredom while working inside? How did all those alchemists and blacksmiths worked that they were ready to toil so many years doing the same thing? [Nia, why are you forgetting that you are inside a game and all those blacksmiths, tailors, alchemists etc are not real people but just NPCs, few coded programs.]
Just like that, another thing added to the list labelled -things to do today. Point eleven- visit Alchemist Al.
It took nearly four hours for Nia to finish off all the orders. She came out of the rooms and paid for extra stay and chatted a bit. Who know, she might get a deal with the worker some day. Why miss a chance?
Nia did not sit to calculate the amount of profit she made. She checked which merchant deals could be dealt with the amount of resources she had and she started completing that list. In between, she still helped old people or lonely people with just talk or some meager help. Though it was out of way, she still decided to talk to Alchemist Al.
Nia decided she did not have patience to keep on clicking same old thing mechanically. If she could talk with Alchemist Al, he just might give some good tips.