>>5852596Mhmh. And you can <span class="mu-i">barely</span> taste the sawdust in your bare barley.
>>5852585Oh, your spendthrift discipline is due to grand plans not a lack of desire. Worthy of respect, softsoul, you're not in some retreat from the worlds many interesting perils and puzzles, you're a future <span class="mu-i">speculative investor</span>, simply gathering liquid assets !
>>5852582But the artist needs must know: what does the carving or symbol look like? It's rather hard to depict it if one does specify it. But, much joy - this is exactly the kind of thing a Carving can do.
>>5852573but what about micro-fluctuations in the price of Reikan lumber that influences the local availability and demand of common goods which results in a supply cascade that alters the price landscape?! You must bargain now or you face bargaining later at <span class="mu-i">mildly altered prices</span>! The calamity!
Well, whether it's half a coin or six-tenths of one is hardly material or germane. Perhaps it won't be so bad.
>>5852561The <span class="mu-s">Luperni</span>?
To call them a family is to understate their size and to call them a mere mercantile operation is to misdescribe their reach. The House Luperni is part of the <span class="mu-i">Noble Cartels</span>, those grand almost-nations enclaves that cluster around our fair city.
Perhaps in a distant place, you'd describe them as a corporation, but we're not so crass and they're not so craven. They have social obligations. They have charitable works. They offer scholarships. The product of Luperni factories fill our stores, their masons carve our streets and their clerks man our distant supply stations, trained and true. If you buy a cup and it breaks and the marker's mark is Luperni, well, you know where to go and who to direct your complaints at. They're metalwrights and miner lords, artificers and researchers and producers of things.
The Noble Cartels are not nobility. Cestipherion holds sway over seaways and supply lines, and half the agricultural products someone eats is from one of their fields. Luperni produces unparalleled amounts of the mundane cruft and stuff of life. High and mighty Fideleion has had eight out of ten government infrastructure projects in their portfolio for the last thirty years.
They're not a mere guild, nor a single clan, or something so curiously Reikan as a singular bloodline declaring their nobility by virtue of an intertwined family tree, no siree, the Noble Cartels of Pyther are that very best institution in all the whole wide world:
They're enterprises anyone can enter, of a hundred hundred hands coming together to make light work of all the world.
Yes, admittedly, they sometimes compete and yes admittedly perhaps the Luperni have an egregious amount of standing swords and willing strikers, but their business interests are so vast and reach so far they need the manpower for securing their sites, surely so, yes?
As for the Games, in all their grandiose expenditure, they're how the Cartels keep score in their little private games.