Marcy, Malak, Jean, Daria, Camillo, Julian, Luna, Naima, Lucy, Teresa, Connie, Annisa, Briar, Boston Kevin, Della
Next Post »
« Previous Post
+ Show First Post
Total: 56
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

Whoa shit okay that guy has Vibes.  Which even more raises the question of what he's doing?  Looking for someone particularly tasty?  No way he'd be that obvious about it- does he want to make it look like that's what he's doing?  Is he just trying to find someone he saw one time in the sea of bald frosh?

 

"Let's hit some cabinets while he's over there,"  Connie murmurs, and scoops her mostly-empty bag off the floor.

Permalink

...the people with signs seem kind of terrifyingly mercenary. He probably shouldn't be terrified by indies who are just desperately trying to survive, but here he is, terrified of them. Such is life.

Also there's a creepy older boy! That's also terrifying!! He was expecting to be terrified by molten metal and a cold and uncaring universe this morning, the rest of this terror is SURPRISING and UNANTICIPATED!!

Fine. He stakes out his OWN table. People can join him if they want. (He is going to end up sitting alone, like a loser, and everyone is going to shun him, and then he's going to die.)

Permalink

Niccolo definitely has vibes and he knows it, so he parses the two girls as probably-running-away. They're clean, though, so he lets it pass, heads for the door, and nods to New York.

"Room's clean. No one with any aura but my cousin, and she's stable and not an idiot. Also, accounted for during some of the deaths."

Permalink

Ohhhhh, so that's what that guy was doing. 

Permalink

His cousin, on the other hand, notices Lucy and her sign, as she retreats from the supply cabinets. (She has fairly slim pickings, screw New York, but there was some shale that has some value, and she found about two people's worth of copper and tin.)

"Wow, you two are all kinds of resourceful. Or lucky, but they say good luck is a personality trait."

Permalink

"Resourcefulness is an important survival trait." She's not going to air her ire about the riskiness to an enclaver. That would just be a bad idea. "I'm just glad the first part of the semester is relatively safe so nothing ate him while he was carrying a pile of fabric higher than he could see over back to his room before I could scold him for it." 

Permalink

"Many skills are useful for survival, and stay rare anyway... Though 'restraining your greed' is clearly one he needs to work on, ouch. You really need someone to walk with before you do that. Possibly by bribing them with the large pile of value you just acquired."

Permalink

"It was a dumb move! It won't be repeated. He did stick relatively close to the heels of the New York contingent, which apparently has a real mal-hunting wunderkind, but that's not good enough and he has been made aware that really clever rationalizations aren't."

Permalink

"Oh good, it would be a shame if you two didn't make it. And not just because I definitely want one of your spiders."

Permalink

"We are definitely not going to die before we can get you those spiders."

Permalink

"I would be shocked if you did, for... the same reason, really. Actually, that reminds me-" she looks to the door to check Niccolo's gone - "I slightly misled my cousins about how willing you were to sell females, implied you were going to charge extortionate prices for a year or two to keep your monopoly. I'd appreciate it if you didn't tip them off until we've paid up, so I can keep the bragging rights."

Permalink

"Appreciate how much?"

Permalink

"I'd owe you a favor, but probably not a big one. Though also, why aren't you keeping a monopoly? I would be happy to form a cartel to keep the price up, at least until end of our senior year."

Permalink

"The short version is that if someone with resources wants to get around a monopoly, we could keep it until junior year, probably, when the freshmen coming in will have their weight allocation choices informed by the people who graduate a year from now. Having a monopoly until then would be valuable, but--we have ways to protect the spiders from cheating; we don't have foolproof ways to protect them from mals or sabotage. In the absolute worst case scenario that leaves us still alive, we want there to be a way to resume having spiders. Ideally a way with whom we have already established ourselves as reliable and valuable trading partners."

Permalink

"That makes some sense, since it's a lot more critical to your strategy than your customer's. But I'd suggest you think of a target degree of spread, and make deals to keep it from getting too far beyond that; with the number of children spiders have, you could get a race to the bottom really fast. It benefits you to be able to trade for replacements, yes, but it also benefits you to have a useful scarce resource to charge for, and to have protective gear better than other people's. That's the nasty thing about advantages in here, right, they're mostly relative."

Permalink

"Excellent point. Fortunately nobody else has jumped at the chance yet."

Permalink

"Their loss, I guess. Anything Wilbur picked up that you're particularly looking to trade away?"

Permalink

"Most of what he picked up was fiber stuff that he'll want to use, but he definitely got more than he's going to be able to use in a week, so if you have a use for...I actually don't know all the exact kinds of fiber he picked up, there were a couple absurdly specific kinds of wool...or sheets of clear acrylic, he was thinking he could maybe use those in constructing a loom but it's looking like no."

Permalink

"Nothing comes to mind, but if I hear anyone's got uses for specific fibers or acrylic I'll send them your way. I have fun connecting interesting people to each other, even when it isn't useful."

Permalink

"Good to know! Hm, who've I met who's interesting--there's the Chicago mundies who mostly aren't the relevant kind of interesting, there's Masozi who just got cleared of murder, there's El who looks like a maleficer but isn't..." 

Permalink

"Looks like a maleficer but isn't? Why would someone... do that?" Present company excepted.

Permalink

"Not, like, on purpose, her affinity is doom."

Permalink

"Wow, and I thought Marino's was bad - That's the other freshman from Pisa, his affinity is blood."

Permalink

"That sounds...uh...maybe he could talk the nurse into asking the void for stuff thrown out by blood banks? And do alchemy with it? It's not great though, you're right."

Permalink

"He can use animal blood and we have plenty of dead frogs to take it from, otherwise I'd be much more concerned. But yeah, it's still not great. Thanks for the tip, though, I'll keep an eye out for El."

Total: 56
Posts Per Page: