House Repair! (Job/Solo)

Grema looked. No stared. She was expecting...more. But instead of the grand mansion, she was hoping to repair it was just a little 2 story thing. 'How disappointing.' She thought while standing in front of said battered looking house. 'Not sure if it was worth the ride from Rose Town. But a job's a job, and I may get scrap metals as well.'

She then noticed a very worried looking man was staring at her from what she assumed was the living room window. Well, she did look rather suspicious in her ragged red cloak and mask. Or so it seemed based on the looks she constantly got. But Grema guessed that the man looking at her was the client of the job, a Mr. Josh Weathersteins. With that figured out, Grema walked up to the door and gave three precise knocks. In a moment the door opened with a creak and a slightly bald head peeked out from behind it.

“Um, yes? How may I help you?” The old man said with a slight quiver to his voice. He was about as tall as Grema, 5’3, hunched over and shriveled with old age.
The newbie mage decided some tact may be in order so the old guy doesn’t have a heart attack. “Mr. Weatherstiens I am Grema Fen. You sent out a job request for a mage to fix your house before the next local storm. I am here to fulfill that request.” She said to the old dude evenly and relaxed a bit as a sweet smile appeared on his face while opening his door wider.

“Oh, yes yes now I remember the kind mage who will help me! Come in, come in.” He ushered Grema inside of the house and sat her down on a flowery overstuffed armchair, and yes there were doilies on it. Weatherstien had left the room and returned with a tray of cookies. “Here, have some of my homemade cookies while I tell you what the job entails” He said to her, voice still quivering but now just from regular frailness.

From that long conversation, since the old fart kept going off to talk about how his various family members and neighbors weren’t doing anything to help until Grema got hi back on track, about how his house was damaged in the last storm. The shingles needed replacing, the gutters needed to be re-secured and the porch needed repairing. New materials were needed for these repairs and Weatherstein had already sent a note to the local store so Grema would just have to pick it up. Overall an easy job any moron could do. “I’ll be taking a nap while you do your work. Good luck and help yourself to anything in the kitchen!” The old man said as he grabbed his cane and hobbled up the stairs.

The reason, Grema was so disappointed was that she prepared very hard for this job. Well, read a few books on the train ride here, but still studied architecture. She was even an engineer/scientist/mechanic/biologist. She wanted an intellectual challenge. Not an easy job. Plus she was planning on building her own house one day, so the practice would help.

As she stood outside the old house Grema began to wonder… The wood around the roof of the house looked a bit old and might rot in a few years. And Mongolia town was near the ocean, so who knew what kind of disaster might come. Fairy Tail was also in this town and Grema heard that guild was disaster incarnate. Mr. Weatherstein would need better reinforcement to go up against those disasters… yes… Grema would just be helping an old man out, and she’d get the practice for her own house she wanted. Of course, her own house would have to be durable enough to stand MANY extreme conditions, explosions, dimensional warping’s and gaseous attacks, so maybe she would downplay it on this house a bit. She’ll try just sticking to the exterior.

Well, it was 10am and Grema was full of coffee and stale cookies. She could totally do this in one day. But where would she get the material…?

It turns out large junkyards near guild towns was not uncommon, according to the locals giving her directions. They also mentioned a castle crashing in another town that was still getting rid of its own scraps. ‘How does a castle crash?’ Grema wondered as she began to build a makeshift cart near the large piles of junk. The engineer wished she could have stayed and asked more questions, but she DID have a job to do. So here she was pounding and melting together scrap metal to make a Stone Age worthy cart that would probably be noisy as hell but would do the job. That job being dragging her scrap metal to the store to pick up the wood, then back to her clients home. Grema was very grateful for the fact half of her body had super strength or else this would be very hard. Actually, extra hard with Grema’s disabilities and hunchback. Yay for magic.

You knew this was a mage town when you barley got odd looks and no complaints for loudly wheeling a screeching pile of metal through the main roads in the morning. The store workers barely batted and eyelash at her, merely directing her to a pile of wood and shingles under Weatherstiens name. Grema used her magitech arm to precociously balance the new items atop her scrap pile and went on her way. Someone who she assumed to be a Fairy Tail mage stopped her and questioned her intentions, but quickly let her move on when she waved her job papers in his face. Little else happened on her way back, or if it did Grema didn’t notice, too distracted by her planning as she was. It wasn’t until she finally arrived at the old mans house that she broke out of her reverie and took a good look at the task before her. Because self-induced or not, it was indeed a task.

Grema was also thankful that she was a walking armory and mecanic ox or else this project would be a lot more troublesome. Thankfully with one Magi Shift Spell, she gained access to all the tools she needed, and with her Tech Fire Shot magic applied to it, she could do even more things. After all, melting metal together is more secure nail bending or screwing it together.

Th her the only downside was her skills was that the scientist was not very artsy so her designs came out as rather crude looking, if durable. The air rang with the screeching of bending metal, the bangs of steel against steel, the screeching of a blowtorch and occasionally the clank of wood. From the coners of her mask Grema could see the grumpy faces of Weatherstiens neighbors. "They don't have anything to complain about," Grema grumbled to herself while hauling more steel planks to the roof witha ladder she found in the nearby shed, "It's not like I woke them up, it has to be at least noon by now."

A problem occurred about a half an hour later. Grema had just finished a few things on the roof and was about to head down to build the foundation for the walls when she slipped on a loose sheet of metal and tumbled off the roof. But Grema was a freaking mage and refused to take damage from such a dumb and simplistic mistake so she simply swung herself over in mid-air and landed on her magitech leg. The good new is that Grema came out of the incident unharmed. The bad new is her landing not only caused a small localized earthquake, but also a sizable crater in Mr. Weatherstien's front yard. Worse news was that it seemed like she landed on an underground water pipe that broke with her plummet. It was now leaking a good stream of water from a crack in the crater.

Grema cast a worried glance at the sun. She had until tomorrow until the storm came around and she just gave herself, even more, work to do. Then a solution occurred to her.

"There, that should fix the problem," Grema said smugly, looking at her new creation. It was around 7pm and she had just finished fixing and even adding to the water leak, because now there was a fountain there. Sure, she could have easily fixed the leak and pipe itself, but then she would have had to deal with filling in the crater and finidn new grass to cover it. Instead, she gave it a quick fix, finished her project on the house and patio, had a quick meal, and converted the entire accident into a metal fountain. Like mentioned before she was no artist so it looked a bit on the shabby side, but the mage liked to think it was a more like the modern style of art known in Bosco rather than shabby, and the water features worked well enough.

'I just need to show the old man.' She thought to herself. 'Now that I think of it, was he napping this whole time? He sleeps like a rock.... Oooooh crap, I hope he's not dead.' With that last panicked thought, the holder mage rushed inside of the newly renovated house.

Thankfully her elderly client was not dead; he just napped like he was. Both of them were very pleased Grema finished the repairs and the old man seemed interested when she claimed to have made a few improvements as well, and followed him outside.

She then showed him the changes she made. The metal had been either welded together or nailed in a slightly round shape around his house, making it look like someone threw a silver patchwork quilt over it. She cut out areas around the windows and put strong shutters nearby to be closed during harsh weather or mage attacks, along with an extra sturdy doors. She did change the shigles and re-secure the gutters to the point he may never have a problem with them for years to come. The patio was repaired and had a crude metal windmill attached to it along with metal chairs and tables.

For the finale Grema showed Weatherstien the mod fountain and what she did to the front of the house. Inspire by it looking like a cute quilt Grema added cat ears, whiskers and made a cat-like face out of the doors and windows to make it extra cute.

The old man seemed so pleased he was at loss for words. When a very proud/smug sounding Grema asked how she did, he stuttered out a thank you and paid her for her services and sent a very pleased mage on her way.

"Well, these jobs things aren't so hard after all." Grema said to herself, stuffing the bag of jewels in her pocket then heading back to Rose Town feeling mighty pleased with herself.

[Job End]