The World At Your Feet (IC)

[Nettlekid]

As though the Material Plane is a ballooning pit at the heart of a plum the sky mellows from what was first a vivid and forceful red into the calm yellow-pink of twilight that settles into a deep and rich violet dusk. The tall stone walls of fortified Amaranth stand cold against the sky casting shadows onto the poorer residential districts tucked into the west, who were hit with the earliest rays from the east. At this distance no building however tall and broad diminishes the advance of the morning light, not the Magistrate's manor on the northeastern hill by the start of the Market Mile which cuts from the main gate at the southeast of the city and dwindles off somewhere in the northwest, nor the rising spire of the haphazard castle that is Paracelsus Academy across the Market Mile on the south side of the city surrounded by ornate metal fencing laced with mysterious runes. A furnace runs somewhere, a line of wispy black smoke stretching into the sky to meet the solid white clouds overhead.

The sounds of the city never stop, not entirely. To the attuned ear the sound of a guard's metal sabatons clinking against the cobblestones speaks volumes to just how many steps the lazy man took before leaning against a building, failing to look busy and engaged. In the distance the sound of the Market Mile closing up shop echoes through the alleys in the lines of buildings. Permanent structures and establishments are locking their doors while impermanent stalls clatter as wooden braces are taken down, cloth ceilings folded, and the whole ramshackle operation along with unsold merchandise is loaded into a wagon and taken away for safekeeping through the night. On a better-traveled road a guard walks by poles of black iron, pulling on a firm metal cable at each to unwind a shutter exposing a heatless yellow flame burning eternally in a dusty glass sphere and illuminating the streets with a flickering torchlight. Tallow candles burn in only a few windows, save for the brighter lights of wall-mounted sconces shining out from the various taverns which are boisterous and bustling at any time of the day, even in the more run-down residential area in spite of (or perhaps due to) the lower wealth of the patrons occupying it.

Those that do not turn to drink in times of need turn to prayer, and many of the smaller churches to less venerated gods make their home in this region of the city. Atop a temple of Ehlonna a twisted and lacquered wooden spire evocative of the horn of a unicorn points skyward from its roof. The building is not made of planks and nails or brick and mortar, but instead of distinctly Elvish influence in that the seeds of the building were planted in the very unpaved earth and influenced with judicious applications of the Plant Growth spell to weave into a tiered dome. The inside is furnished with carpets of moss and wicker furniture of thin sticks grown out from the body of the tree for parishioners to sit at while they discus or receive a preaching, and hammocks of woven leaves and vines form ergonomic bedding for the temple's visitors further up in the dome. The temple stands out from Amaranth's urban aesthetic quite drastically, and most who are not among Ehlonna's flock consider it unnecessarily bohemian. It's a cost-saver, considering that the church doesn't get too much by way of modern currency in tithes, but the impact on the surrounding community is undeniable. In the outskirts and farming towns of rural Magnalia the church of Ehlonna is widely praised for ensuring a good harvest which much of the urbanites take for granted, and it's rare that some member of the rural community isn't in the temple paying thanks for efforts of the priests or issuing a request for a blessing.

It is in this very temple that an unlikely crew from various walks all find themselves settling after a day of work to rest. It is a trying time and tiring work. The arcanists Lorxa and Roam find themselves stymied by red tape - after a few seemingly promising discussions and an inordinate amount of paperwork the inscrutable bureaucracy of Paracelsus Academy has tacitly informed you that it's not altogether eager to blithely allow you access to its repository of knowledge, not without something of equal value to donate to the university in trade. And seeing as how you don't know precisely the value of the information you seek you have not been able to sufficiently offer anything that the university would consider. The naturalists Geoffrey and Meira have taken an effort to proselytize the word of Ehlonna and the benefits of adopting a lifestyle closer to the natural world, but to little avail. Many who live in the city, Human and Elf and Dwarf alike, have never known a different life and wave off the notion that anything but a system where a community of those with different skills rely upon each other and pay each other proportionately to the worth of those skills is sustainable.
"Nature and the wild," they say, "is chaos where beasts fight for themselves and their own. We're civilized here."
Even some of the more recent immigrants into Magnalia share these sentiments, oftentimes Elves and Dwarves who did face the harsh reality of living in a world that doesn't belong to them and paid a price for it.
"We respected Nature because we feared her. The Humans grabbed Nature by the throat and choked the life out of her. And it worked out pretty well for them. Would that we had done it first."

The smuggler Liag is also finding frustration, but it's more of a concern that's growing. His operation by the canals at the southern gate had been going well enough, keeping him in better luxury than most of his kind who made their home in this district. As long as it remained profitable for himself and for the city it was allowed to continue. But business was drying up. Less and less he received word by letter or Animal Messenger that a delivery was on its way, fewer and fewer merchants entered the city through his gates. Maybe word's getting out that life in the city isn't all that great even for a skilled artisan and there's less desire to travel, maybe the guards are starting to come down harder on people outside of the system, maybe a new and cheaper smuggling route has opened up somewhere in the city that Liag doesn't know about, or maybe conditions in the other continents or on the roads are limiting travel. Between the cut to the Thieves' Guild and the odd bribe, Liag is finding it hard to so much as break even. The boss of the Thieves' Guild himself with whom Liag had originally made the arrangement of his business, a Human named Mardel Dint with sharp features, slick black hair, and dark leather armor appeared before Liag three days ago. Mardel let Liag know in no uncertain terms that if Liag was going to have trouble keeping himself afloat figuratively then he was going to have trouble keeping himself afloat literally, and the Guild was going to have to recoup its losses by setting the guards loose to confiscate all smuggled goods from the people that Liag had helped enter the city, wiping them off the map financially. Mardel is hotheaded and spiteful, and Liag isn't in a great position to argue that he can't control unknown environmental factors.

It is in this dejected state that the group finds themselves preparing for the evening, as it has been for the past week or so. Without a plan all five of them are going to end up penniless at best. The plight of the surrounding city feels uncomfortably real at this moment.

Player	Character	Race and Class	Color
Gloryblaze	Geoffrey Oathorn	Human Ranger/Cleric	Turquoise
Space Lawyer	Liag Herresson	Half-Elf Rogue/Fighter	Purple
Fishybugs	Meira Sarmaer	Wood Elf Druid	Blue
UristMcRandom	Roam	Tiefling Druid/Warlock	Plum
Tieren	Lorxa Calseussi	Firbolg Artificer	Dark Orange

OoC