What would it take for someone to sell you three “magic beans” for $10 at a farmer’s market?
Specifically, what kind of person would you buy magic beans from? You have no way of knowing if the beans are actually magical – they probably aren’t. But just how colorful a character would a magic bean salesman have to be before you willingly spent $10 for the experience of buying magic beans from an eccentric stranger?
I wouldn’t buy $10 magic beans from a young man with an undercut and suspenders with sailor tattooes on his forearms. He might be a nice guy – maybe I’d be friends with him. But I would not spend $10 for the experience of purchasing magic beans from him, unless they were actual real magic beans and he could prove that.
I might buy $10 magic beans from a small child in a wizard costume. It depends. Maybe if they’re really committed to the role – then I’m purchasing the privilege of interacting with them.
I might but $10 magic beans from an incredibly sexy, mysterious lady with long opera gloves and glittering eyes, but probably not – I might give her money just for smiling at me but I don’t think she’d really have the right vibe for selling magic beans. Potions, yes. Not beans.
I’d probably buy magic beans from a wild-haired, cheerful witch in overalls and mud boots, but that wouldn’t really be about the beans, it’d be about finding excuses to talk to her.
I’d absolutely buy magic beans from a toothless old person dressed entirely in hot pink or chartreuse who answered my questions with rambling non-sequiturs and told me long, scandalous, scientifically impossible stories about how things used to be.
I would buy three magic beans from the white haired woman who sits on the back of her pickup with dozens of jars of jelly laid out on a table in the abandoned fair ground. She doesn’t sell jelly; she sells potted plants. If you compliment her on her wooden sandals though, she will give you a jar of jelly. She asks if my children are twins every week, and is disappointed they aren’t twins every week. I would buy three magic beans for $10 from her.
On another note, I have traded a crocheted snowflake for ten acorns with a small, barefoot, blonde child in a white dress I encountered in the woods. Two of the acorns sprouted on the way home and I now have them growing in pots.
dude at some point the signs for the goblin market and the farmer’s market in your town got switched but your fae are too polite to say anything when you keep coming back