💰 - Does your muse spend a lot of money on clothes and accessories?
Auntie looked over the coins she had neatly stacked upon the low table, counting each pile carefully and keeping track by tapping the edge of each gold piece with her pencil. Misaki watched the sparrows bathing in the birdbath in the garden that Auntie nearly always kept her office doors open to, hands folded in her lap. The older woman glanced up at the geisha and raised a brow before sliding over a sizable sum of the coins across the table to her.
“You did well this week, Misaki - this whole month. But then, I’ve never seen you have a bad month,” Auntie said with a smile. “Good girl. Go on and buy a couple more kimonos with your pay. You’ll need them. Rei drew up some designs to give to the tailor - bring them down to her.”
The amount of coin Misaki was carrying should have bought a normal girl five kimonos or more, but she - and the geisha house at large - demanded nothing less of the very best. The chirimen crepe had to be the finest, and the other silks and linens that touched her skin couldn’t be itchy for even a moment. The rest would be used on a new kanzashi. The pin in the one she had last had made was too dull, and she preferred them to be sharp at the end. All in all, the hefty salary she made from her clientele would go to a few clothing items, though it would have easily paid for the meals of a couple for a month or so.
Misaki was leaning over a trunk of the old healer’s clothes with a grimace upon her lips. The woman had been kind enough to give her some gil to buy a few new things with, but Misaki found the Eorzean equivalents of her homeland attire to be achingly inaccurate. The gil she had was spent on going to a tailor to get certain items hand-crafted as cheaply as possible, and the rest was spent on flimsy blouses and a long fuga she could toss over most things. She wasn’t used to having so few options.
Leaning back on her heels, she lifted an old, tattered skirt in pale blue from the trunk. The healer had told her she could take whatever she liked, that those clothes hadn’t been touched in summers upon summers. Misaki could believe it. Thankfully, there wasn’t much that had been eaten by moths, at least, even if they were covered in a layer of dust. The pleated skirt might be salvaged with some trimming and hemming. So, too, could a blouse in the same hue. She didn’t realize how busty it would be until she tried it on, and she didn’t realize just how mortified she’d be to think of her sweet old healer friend wearing the same garment thirty summers past.
Oh, how the fashionable mighty fall. I was the pinnacle of Doman fashion back home, she thought. Everything I wore was the envy of the girls who weren’t geisha… But we must make sacrifices. Like wearing clothes that currently smell like mothballs.
Fortunately, Misaki knew how to swallow her pride. She’d gotten a job at a small cafe as a waitress in Ul’dah, and she’d be starting to generate her own income soon. For now, she was grateful to have a generous hostess and enough to eat. The flowing silks would have to wait.
(( Thank you for the ask, friendo! @valleringiraffe ))
