>>5925340>>5925392>>5925635>>5925699>>5925884>>5925890>>5926050>>5926514“How fast can the caravan move?”
“The speed a donkey walks while pulling a cart? They’re sturdy animals but they’re not going to win a race. If you sprinted nonstop straight to Takefu you’d be there in just under 24 hours. If you walked in a straight line, it’d be more like a week. Since we’ll be taking roads that aren’t straight, sleeping, stopping for food, resting, and trading, it’ll be just over three weeks to get there. Roughly a week between each actual stop. There will be smaller towns and villages along the way though.”
“Well, what if we need to outrun something?”
“If we need to outrun something we’re fucked.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’re fucked’, doesn’t that kind of thing happen?”
“No, it doesn’t.” He says, tapping his manifest impatiently. “Bandits are rare, especially in these parts. You haven’t seen much of the world, I know, but as a rule the forests aren’t full of ravening cutthroats. They know that if they make a nuisance of themselves too blatantly they’ll be wiped out, so most crime activity is done by extortionists in towns, gangs who can maintain plausible deniability and grease the right palms. Bandits only attack caravans in shithole countries, or if they’re being backed by missing-nin, or are nomadic enough to be long gone before a response happens.”
“Well, man!” You say, throwing up your hands in exasperation. “What did you even hire us for!”
“Because these types are the type to rob us! We don’t normally need to hire protection, in this case we absolutely do. When we enter their sphere of influence, they’ll do something. When you do this for long enough, you can hear the rumors and taste it on the wind. They’ve essentially conquered the village we’re heading to, so if we don’t have protection they’ll probably tell us that at least half of our goods are being confiscated to fund their revolution as a ‘tax’. And then they’ll tell us to fuck off. Our margins are too tight to withstand that. In this business you have to spend money to make money. The more money you spend, the more money you make, and when you make excess money you spend it all so you can expand operations. We’re not liquid, and we’re not a major venture, so taking a major blow to pay off extortion will set us back years.”
“So, rather than protecting you from getting ambushed by highwaymen, we’re going to be your muscle that will prevent the people who have conquered the village from subverting your deal.”
“If you want to put it like that. Yes. But groups like this aren’t always unified, they always have more standard robbers swimming behind them. It’s just a questionable region, something out of the ordinary could happen.”
“I understand. Do you have any procedures if you get attacked? And are there goods you want protected more than others?”
