Seriously, it doesn’t take much to qualify for the job
Colorists: Koof, Oniontrain, Raptie
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Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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Might be fun to be a service animal for such a gentle, reptilian giant.
I keep thinking if I lived in this setting I would really want to make a Baxxid friend…
(…or boyfriend. <3 )
Given the low entry requirements, and the low employment rate among yinglets, I can easily imagine some of them marking their clothes – or fur, for the really poverty-stricken ones – with the hand. Nothing lost by trying, and maybe they’ll get a couple of coins in tips. Easy money for just opening boxes, counting out coins and turning pages.
Given how the Baxxid love to gossip, any yinglet who does a good job might even get a reputation that could lead to more stable employment. With their lower cost of living they could work for much less than a human, so even Baxxid of less financial resource could hire a retainer. Perhaps even invest in some training to improve the service their employee can provide – a yinglet with basic literacy to take dictation would be immensely more valuable.
I keep thinking Lopin would be very useful for this, and I can’t help but imagine a yinglet riding on a baxxid. They probably wouldn’t let a human do that, because that would be beast of burden type stuff, but yinglets are small and cute in a way that humans might just carry them around themselves, like having a bird or monkey on your shoulder.
Now I’d like to see that actually happen in the comic.
Lopin is taken, but how many other yinglets are in the position he ones occupied – scaving and begging to survive? All they need do is dye a crude hand into their clothing or fur and hope that a baxxid will ask for a little help adjusting their hat and offer a generous tip.
I think an enterprising Baxxid could make a business out of this. I can see a plan already:
1. Find Yinglets who are… not entirely incompetent as assistants. Word of mouth mostly, or simple paying the many poverty-stricken yinglets of the city to assist in a few tasks and noting which ones show the most stable personality.
2. Got some with potential? Time to make them an offer. Specifically, a position as indentured servant. They get a place at your ‘yinglet school’ – classes short but frequent. You’re making an investment here, because you’ve got to rent a building and hire a teacher.
3. The school is not a comprehensive education. It covers basic literacy, basic numeracy, basic finance, and a bit of practical instruction via a work placement program in Baxxid-heavy businesses.
4. Success! You now have yinglets who are ready to be competent, trained assistants. And they owe you: They are indentured. That means they’re going to be paying you half of their earnings until they pay their debt off. But that’s fine for them, because now they have a graduation certificate which is practically a guarantee of employment. Even if you overcharge them heavily, it’s still a good deal.
Everyone is happy. Yinglets get education and secure employment. Baxxid see the price of keeping assistants on retainer plummet. The Enclave gets a ready supply of educated yinglets who can further educate those less engaged with city life. And you get filthy, filthy rich. This business proposal is actually so beneficial, I wonder if House Ivenmoth might be willing to loan capital to establish… hmm. I’ve got a meeting to book.
I can’t imagine the matriarch would let -too- many Yinglets get too smart. It could cause… trouble.
Reptilian? I’ve always thought of them as maybe closer to insectoid or whatever.
Seeing zhat even Humani need money, I’m glad de Baxxid get someone to help. I do wonder where de money to pay zhose people comes from zhough. Somehow I don’t see de Trademaster having a corps of Humani to help Yinglets, even if his city is populated wizh ’em.
The Trademaster is rich, but his resources are not limitless. He can only provide assistants for those Baxxid in house employ – the rest will have to pay their own. Fortunately it seems Baxxid are quite well-off financially, with their intellectual talents and long lifespans to accumulate wealth.
The Yinglets collectively do need income, which is a big problem for them – the enclave is running subsistence farming, and they have neither strength nor education. All the more reason to work with the Baxxid: Low cost ying-labor in return for coin and the prospect of training. Though I imagine it might upset the human population after a while, due to competition for jobs. A yinglet needs a fraction of the food and living space of a human, so could easily survive off a corresponding fraction of the wages: A few years and there will be cries of “Scavs stole our jobs!” Things could get ugly and violent.
I have said it before, it costs LESS to feed a Humani 3 times de mass of a Yinget zhan to feed a Yinglet, zhanks to us not being omnivores. For any of us to survive on what a Human can, we’d starve. We and de Baxxid are competing for a limited amount of meat available to Valsalia. It is frustrating for us, zhat Humani can bozh work more, and for less zhan we can on a individual basis zhanks to de palegrain trade.
For us needing more advanced techniques to raise our expensive food (and maybe share some wizh de Baxxid too) feel free to volunteer, I’m sure Vislet would be happy to hear of ways to feed more wizh less people. But until we can find somezhing to eat zhat is as cheap to grow, collect, and distribute as palegrains, any hiring of us will be at a loss even if we could do de work of a human.
Yinglets may lean to a meat-heavy diet, but you have a very loose definition of ‘meat.’ And you can still digest some plants – you like a bit of lettuce for a wormy-wrap, I recall? I imagine this may be a situation Ran can help with, given time, had he not more urgent things demanding his attention – how might slug farming be extended to an industrial scale? A shame that innovative genius is such a rare thing.
Mayybe compared to Humani wish of a Tiplod in every Humani pot, our liking of slugs, bugs, and clams looks like it’d be cheaper and lesser, but de cost of harvesting, preserving, and transporting is much higher zhan Humani Palegrains.
For eating some plants, yeah, but it’s like Parsley is for Humani, it’s zhere, but it isn’t healzhy, minus for roughage purposes.
Let’s take a moment to work this out. Yinglets are around half the height of humans, but markedly thinner (proportionally) – call them 1/3 scale, or around 1/27th the body weight of a human. 1/27th body weight means roughly 1/27th the weight of each meal – but they’d need to eat 3x as often, for an end result of needing 1/9th as much food. Are the things Yinglets can eat – meat, fish, bugs, slugs, shellfish, fruits (note the first meal Kass was able to keep down after being Wabbajack’d was a pendelfruit), etc – more than 9x as expensive as comparable calories from wheat products and the like? Particularly keeping in mind that Yinglets’ resistance to toxins and disease probably makes them capable of eating meat that has, from a human perspective, gone bad, I suspect they’d be able to keep their food costs lower than a human (particularly a human with a more balanced diet than merely eating bread alone – I believe Kass noted previously that a Yinglet could eat nothing but slugs and be perfectly healthy). Probably not as low as the 1/9th implied by the difference in caloric requirements – as you note, humans can eat rather cheap – but almost certainly lower than a human. They also take up less space and have less reliance on clothing (both in that their fur lets them get away with wearing less and in that you need markedly less cloth to make a shirt for a Yinglet), keeping those parts of cost of living down as well.
The primary drawbacks of a Baxxid using Yinglets is that they tend to be clumsy – sometimes outright careless – and are rather distractible. There’s also the issue that they’d probably need some time to get used to being in close proximity to an apex predator with freaking spikes for hands and a maw large enough to potentially swallow a Yinglet whole, which would undoubtedly be stressful for their instincts for panic and flight.
*Nods* Very wise, yes a Human on a less restricted diet can be more expensive zhan a Yinglet to feed, but it remians zhat we always need zhat higher cost just to stay alive, and zhat we for better or worse are competing in de same food chain as zhe Baxxid.
For spoiled food, we do purchase zhat when we can, even palegrains, but let bugs infest it, zhen eat de bugs. We can do de scavenger zhing if we have to, but it really, really is a zhing of last resort.
Also, Humans do zhis crazy sleep zhing for 1/3 to 1/4th of every day. Us Yinglets spend much more time awake, burning calories. We are active more, but when humans are starving, they tend to sleep more. We generally tend to panic when food runs out, making zhe problem worse, faster.
For us being clumsy? No. A Three year old Yinglet is a master of acrobatics compared to a 3 year old Humani, or Baxxid for zhat matter. By zhe age of 10 or so, Humani catch up to us, but it is mostly due to zhier long lives zhat dey remain so, as old age starts to take it’s toll by zhe time we hit fifteen.
It’s jarring that this comic might be the only one that frequently gives me essays to read, and I actually feel somewhat inclined to read them.