-I want some Drowish furnishings. This is a stupid idea, we have no place to put them, and I should be disregarded in this matter.
One word: Mable. We may just buy that girl's hearth. After that, making her undergo demon modification would be trivial.
Hum. I wonder if she'd even like some Drow furnishings.
Speaking of which, we
really need to see our new holdings.
I was thinking on buying many servants and teach them potion brewing for the cartel. And not have them as slaves, but as workers. Mable will like that too. Maybe later we can get them to be soul cleaners too so that they help the family business.
Um. Come to think of it, if they only cost 1 soul, and they
have one soul... I mean, we still need to get the souls in the first place, and...
recouping groups of people isn't the best thing to get into the habit of, but technically there's no loss unless they bail out on us.
And as you say, more potioners and possible soul cleaners sounds nice. We should definitely reserve... however many we're going to want. How many are we going to want?
-Oh man mystery boxes, crap, nothing is more enticing than mystery boxes. If we're going to get one we should get the discount on three.
I'm almost tempted to buy 9 for 6 souls. But I guess that we should at least try with 3. But I don't want to kill anybody. Yet.
Yeah. This is hard.
We do have plenty of money; maybe we could find some slaves for sale or people willing to let us eat their souls in exchange for showering their families in wealth? Dunno how much use orcs have for coin, but they might be especially prone to thinking that's a good trade.
I find it unlikely that we will get someone to help us with it. And I'm not too interested. But I don't know how much time do dragons take to mature anyway. That legendary dragon Mystario was badass, though.
Sadly, it probably isn't viable right now.
Yes to all of this, but I would point out that buying in bulk most likely means he doesn't value them a ton, so selling monoplized potions to him probably won't be an efficient source of souls. Then again, if we want to avoid executing pickpockets and litterers maybe it'd be worth it.
10 sets of dwarven crafted armor with maul included are sold for 1 soul. Souls are quite valuable. I doubt that we will get good deals for physical goods. So we may have to take what we can. I don't want to go around executing scum either.
True. Maybe we should ask if there's any material goods in particular he's interested in. We do have a city, orcish warband, at least one alchemist, a bunch of hunters, and all manner of other weirdos at our disposal.
Ayup. Maybe we can hex him to calm him down or something, but unless we want to make a project out of it that sounds like a "save Redding's friend from alcoholism and despair" plan, not a "resolve the trial" plan. Temper + Temper does not end well.
I support any kind of Hexing to help us negotiate. But I think that saving Redding's friend is far from an achievable goal without serious mind fuckery.
Or time to cool off, or the cartel softening, or a better understanding of the vampire connection, or... yeah, something.
Business with Pog
I think we need to tell her. If her goon was attacked by Tetha's goons, their goal may have been to assassinate him to break Fortune's eyesight. Pog needs to know the extent to which her connection to us is in direct opposition to Tetha, both because it might become relevant again in the future and because knowing more details might give her the context to clue us in on more details.
For that matter, we should ask Mason and Spittle if they have any insight here. If Spittle has any way to commune with Tetha directly, in fact, that'd be awesome.
Hmm, I don't think that we should tell her yet. Maybe later, when we know if we can protect her. Because if this goes wrong, Fortune will become blind again. And that would be terrible.
Yeah, but if Tetha's in danger of hitting Pog's lackeys again, she's in danger of going blind regardless.
Plus the whole reason we're in contact with her is because she knows Tetha's business. Sooner or later she's going to figure out what we've been up to, and she'll no doubt be none too pleased if we neglected to tell her about it.
Time is money and any material we have around doing nothing is going to be wasted.
True. Then again, we have a habit of amassing oddball allies; who knows when we might pick up somebody who can put soul-glass to good use?
...though speaking of fishing, we might also be able to pull something fun out of the multiverse. In any case, why wait to become a binder? Just get some orcish muscle down there to assist with light eaters. Or Dean to let them duel pokemon style.
My argument: I totally want to have Axebeach, so we can become a binder any time. So, we can wait just a little bit. I just want to make sure that we will have a means of communication in which it is highly unlikely that we will get discovered. We will have to keep our identity hidden even from the goblins themselves.
Good point.
Right now, if we are not using her, she is a waste of resources. But just as you have a desire to get Drow stuff, I want to make her a really spoiled child. Anyway, I have an idea:
That's adorable.
On another note, her special ability is basically impossible to use right; it works best on the careless, reachable, and good-hearted, and the more somebody is any of those things the less likely we need them dealt with or impersonated. So I don't think her gimmick is very useful.
It's very fortunate, then, that she's got a bunch of social and performance skills. My plan was to use her as a high society skill monkey, which I assume will mesh fairly well with your plans to spoil her rotten.
For a lesson on the different kinds of demons, go with Lilly, and make her pass as a servant. And then make she do her number and take control of someone (without the soul-munching part, of course, that is strictly prohibited unless we allow it). Then make the unfortunate student do a funny dance or something as we have a good time laughing and explain what is a Sorrow's Daughter.
And hammering home to our orcish pupils why you NEVER, EVER NEGOTIATE WITH DEMONS ON YOUR OWN, THIS WILL BE YOU.
Needless to say, I'll reiterate letting Fortune attend as well. Ain't a real classroom until you've got a pair of creepy demonic little girls in it!
She is going to be disruptive in the potion class, where she already knows a lot. And she doens't want to become a dark mage, and already declined our offer.
So I don't know what to do.
She probably won't be
that disruptive. I mean, yeah, it's a giant snake, giant snakes are cool, giant snakes sometimes do giant snake things. But unless it starts actively eating the ingredients (or students) or knocking over delicate lab equipment (possibly including Palm), any disruption should only last until the novelty wears off. I mean, they all
want to learn potions, right? It's hard to be
too badly disrupted if you're studying something you actually want to learn.
The other issue would be irking the students because Fortune is better than them even though she should be dead, but she's a blind prophet with a giant snake and everyone's boss and teacher for a mother. I assume they'll let it slide.
Unrelated: How would The Girl Foretold have survived being born to an orcish clan anyway? Would a wandering priest have scooped her up?
That guy seems to hate the Bonedust family. Maybe if we discovered some dark secret like he was working for the prince and was going to betray all the mercenaries to try and kill our children?
By discover I of course mean fabricate evidence. Edit: Maybe with the mind controlling demon girl? We just need to control one of his followers to provide evidence. And the vampire merc and Redding and some notes of some kind.
That'd make Redding sad, though.
Besides, we might get some more insight out of vampire lady.
We should get a dragon egg and give it as a gift to the head of Clan Ape when she arrives. She is a powerful mage in her own right and no doubt has a fire elementalist who could raise the dragon, plus it might be a storm dragon, and she is all storm magicky. It might smooth over the fact we allied clan Ivy (none of the major clans are likely on good terms).
Ooh. Interesting.
I think all the mighty clans were allied with the Kinkaids, so they're probably kind of friendly with each other.
My insane thought on the goblin gang clan and the brain demon. Let's buy the demon and accept the position as ruler of the goblin gang. Put the demon in charge as our representative with the succubus as his advisor and second (he cant be mind controlled). We can communicate with and manage the goblin gang without being present and use our great grandfather to keep the demons protected/in line. It is a position of power and authority we can bind the brain demon to a voluntary agreement for now (particularly if we know our own hex name) with the promise of freeing him later or granting him other boons if he performs well.
He's "an ornery bastard," though, which probably doesn't make for the best leader. Well... not the best human leader, anyway, maybe goblins take better to it. I'd probably rather just work through whoever the boss selects as our middlegoblin, though I'll admit I really like the idea of communicating through demons directly.
If nothing else, I'd definitely want to talk to him first to get a read on him. We might also need more than a month to get his 30 soul price together, especially if we're buying other stuff, so our goblin friend will need an answer (which is looking more and more like yes) and an interim Overboss to start running things before we have him ready.
Won't becoming Head of Axebeach, put up a possible tripping hazard in our "Cannon Quest"?
I'd double check that we won't need the support of this "City-State of Lagoona on Titan Rock", that our potential goblin-vassals are enfeuded with. Or, at least, how strong this faction actually is. Just a precaution - I'd most likely be for Axebeach either way.
The enchanted Glass, is dead capital right now. Let's not keep it that way.
I'm completely fine to sell it to Ovinsial, and go on a soul-fueled shopping spree, as I would be with possibly buying a dark elven crafter to make stuff out of it. Sounding out our contacts on any such crafters, obviously also a fine idea.
Elven Shopping
Getting some elven slaves for our cartel, is a tad overkill - or rather, their price. Some of the useful members of that household, sure. But if it is just plain work-force, I'd argue we could drum those up in other, less costly ways.
I'd have a mind to ask for an elf with which we could do soul-cleaning. Could become quite the boon. While we already "have" her, and Mable is a nice kid, she's also only a half, and our possible future antics with her, are restricted by her father.
Lagoona- Good catch. I doubt all the cannon-makers are in one city, and this is supposed to be kept hush-hush regardless, but I hadn't noticed that.
Glass- Now that you mention it, selling the glass might be the easiest way to get the souls we need for the time-sensitive offers. Depending on the rates, crates of random divine goods might also be more valuable than what we could turn the glass into, or vice versa.
Elves- Maybe, well, definitely, but remember that the ability to hold souls is an almost uniquely drowish trait; mortal soul cleaners basically don't exist outside the drow. That said, I have no idea how hard it is for common drow servants to learn soul cleaning; we should look into that. I'm also forced to reluctantly admit that as wealthy and powerful as we are, finding loyal servants or slaves probably shouldn't be that difficult for anything else.
Some thoughts on Fortune's prohpecy. I am a bit unsure in which way her husband would work, especially since she could always (be made to) remarry.
Will her future husband be drawn by the prophecies fate to become a king? Or will the girl be drawn by the prophecy to become the wife of the "actual" king?
It just as easily could go somewhat into both ways, but if it is the former, our faction becomes even more of a "mover and shaker" of the kingdom, than it already is.
Actually, the prophecy says "crowned sovereign". It doesn't say which kingdom, nor that the title actually needs to be "King". The implications of this, might be quite interesting.
What I want to know is the divine aspect. Somehow, this leads to Fortune dying and Tetha performing a truly mighty miracle. That can't be connected to the crown in a mundane way, can it? But I'm not sure what mystical significance it'd have either.
The specific nuance of the prophecy is definitely worth noting. "A ruler who wears a crown and pays tribute to no other lord" is distinctly different from "the king of human lands."
Also worth noting: Denzel might be aware of the specific wording of this prophecy. If he is, we have entirely new ways to freak him out!
But also: This would imply that Denzel can't marry Fortune and then become king from that; he'd need Tetha's help to make it happen in order to set up the prophecy properly. That in itself is invaluable to know.