Marcus and his men spent an entire week working in the warehouse.
They replaced the broken roof tiles with new ones, patched the cracks at the foot of the walls with processed clouds brought from Sky Island, and partitioned off an inner room for storing valuable goods.
They lined the inner room's walls with glaze cloud panels. Beside the waterway outside the warehouse, they built a simple little dock from old ship planks shipped over from Hachinosu.
The mud splashed up as they drove the dock's wooden piles into the water clouded the clear surface nearby for quite some time. Once the mud settled, the water around the dock returned to its former clarity, leaving only a few muddy streaks around the bases of the piles.
Dragon held no ceremony on the day the trading station opened.
He simply had Marcus set a few Breath Dials and Heat Dials on an old wooden table outside the warehouse.
The table was covered with a piece of processed cloud cloth brought from Sky Island. Its white color stood out almost painfully against Water 7's dingy old warehouse district.
As shipowners and sailors passed the entrance, some stopped for a look, while others never even slowed down. One crouched and picked up a Heat Dial, turning it over and over before asking, "How much is this?" The price Marcus quoted scared him into putting the Dial back on the table and walking away.
There was almost no business during the first few days.
Marcus squatted outside the warehouse with his two Square-Headed Hammers at his feet, holding a piece of dried Sky Fish brought from Sky Island. He chewed
very slowly, watching the little boats that occasionally passed along the waterway outside. The sailors aboard watched him too. They sized each other up