LJIdol 3 Strikes - Week 5 - Kuchisabishii
There is an art to running a city constructed in the shadow of an evil mountain. Your city must feel safe enough that people will want to live there, but you must also preserve enough of the mountain's aura of menace to draw in the wandering heroes and enterprising adventurers who bring in the majority of your income. Because, make no mistake, you are essentially a tourist destination for people who want to kill your monsters.
Every tourist destination has expensive inns, but where other cities sell souvenirs and charge admission to admire their culture, you are selling adventuring supplies and then giving the people who survive their adventures places to celebrate, gamble away their treasure, and probably obtain medical assistance. Possibly in that order.
You must never forget, however, that your enterprise is attempting to extract wealth from people who are violent and heavily armed, and so it must be done carefully. Become too greedy and too ostentatious with your prosperity, and all of a sudden people start to think you have enough money to just pay people to come deal with your monsters, and then your house of gold-trimmed cards collapses around your ears and something from the haunted swamp drags you off and eats you.
Governor Jocasta had turned the city of Respite into a prosperous, thriving community in spite of, or, as we have established, perhaps because it bordered a haunted swamp, a cursed forest, and of course the looming horror of the Blightspire itself. Over the years, she had developed an excellent sense of how much peril and doom was profitable, how much was manageable, and how much was problematic.
The dragon was becoming problematic.
In theory, a dragon could be the crown jewel of your afflicted city's collection of perils, and the Blightspire's dragon had attracted several lucrative - er, noteworthy heroes over the years. It was very prestigious to have a dragon menacing your city, but actually put you at very little risk. For the most part, a dragon is no more interested in eating people than a shark is - which is to say that if you're stupid enough to bother one in its home then it might take a bite out of you, but you don't have the right collection of nutrients to be a desirable meal. The dragon would much rather eat deer, elk, bog shamblers, dire binturongs, or giant scorpions. And mostly it did, until recently. Now the dragon was chewing on just about anything it could find, which unfortunately included people. It didn't seem to be actually eating most of the things it was mauling, though, so this wasn't simply a matter of it being unable to find enough food.
Jocasta had ordered a few very carefully executed and even more carefully concealed studies to find out what the problem might be, and the findings seemed to indicate that some overly enthusiastic hero had killed such a large percentage of the mountain's population of giant scorpions that they were now severely endangered, and the dragon was having trouble finding extra crunchy things to gnaw upon. It seemed likely that the dragon was looking for a satisfying replacement for the scorpions. Up until this point, the local ecosystem of horrendous monsters had proven remarkably resilient to interference by people with magical swords, but apparently there were limits.
Several solutions were proposed, ranging from the outright ludicrous (e.g., import a new population of giant scorpions from some other blighted location) to the merely unacceptable (e.g., organize a coordinated effort to actually kill the dragon). In the end, the solution Jocasta decided upon still sounded fairly ludicrous, but seemed like it had the best chance of success.
And so Jocasta commissioned the design and manufacture of the most exotic and expensive chew toy ever constructed.
This too needed to be done covertly, and oaths of secrecy were sworn by all involved. Jocasta thought this was probably the only chew toy ever constructed to require oaths of secrecy, but then realized that if the oaths were being upheld then of course she wouldn't have heard of a precedent.
Regardless, the device was to be a full-sized replica of a giant scorpion. Since it needed to survive being chewed on by a dragon, it would be made from the sorts of things ordinarily reserved for the armor of heroes out of legend. Unlike the armor for the heroes out of legend, the artificial scorpion would be filled with self-winding clockwork devices that would mimic a giant scorpion's ominous clicking noises. Also, it would squeak, because a chew toy that doesn’t squeak is just sad.
The device was constructed, tested, and then delivered as close to the dragon's lair as the team hired by Jocasta dared to go. The dragon found it and chewed on it with evident enthusiasm. At first the dragon looked annoyed that the scorpion didn't turn out to be edible, but the squeaking noises seemed to be an acceptable tradeoff. Eventually, the dragon dragged the toy back to its lair with every sign of being delighted. Success!
And so it was that Jocasta was able to cancel her backup plan before it advanced beyond its initial stages, and they didn’t introduce giant crabs into the haunted swamp after all.
Every tourist destination has expensive inns, but where other cities sell souvenirs and charge admission to admire their culture, you are selling adventuring supplies and then giving the people who survive their adventures places to celebrate, gamble away their treasure, and probably obtain medical assistance. Possibly in that order.
You must never forget, however, that your enterprise is attempting to extract wealth from people who are violent and heavily armed, and so it must be done carefully. Become too greedy and too ostentatious with your prosperity, and all of a sudden people start to think you have enough money to just pay people to come deal with your monsters, and then your house of gold-trimmed cards collapses around your ears and something from the haunted swamp drags you off and eats you.
Governor Jocasta had turned the city of Respite into a prosperous, thriving community in spite of, or, as we have established, perhaps because it bordered a haunted swamp, a cursed forest, and of course the looming horror of the Blightspire itself. Over the years, she had developed an excellent sense of how much peril and doom was profitable, how much was manageable, and how much was problematic.
The dragon was becoming problematic.
In theory, a dragon could be the crown jewel of your afflicted city's collection of perils, and the Blightspire's dragon had attracted several lucrative - er, noteworthy heroes over the years. It was very prestigious to have a dragon menacing your city, but actually put you at very little risk. For the most part, a dragon is no more interested in eating people than a shark is - which is to say that if you're stupid enough to bother one in its home then it might take a bite out of you, but you don't have the right collection of nutrients to be a desirable meal. The dragon would much rather eat deer, elk, bog shamblers, dire binturongs, or giant scorpions. And mostly it did, until recently. Now the dragon was chewing on just about anything it could find, which unfortunately included people. It didn't seem to be actually eating most of the things it was mauling, though, so this wasn't simply a matter of it being unable to find enough food.
Jocasta had ordered a few very carefully executed and even more carefully concealed studies to find out what the problem might be, and the findings seemed to indicate that some overly enthusiastic hero had killed such a large percentage of the mountain's population of giant scorpions that they were now severely endangered, and the dragon was having trouble finding extra crunchy things to gnaw upon. It seemed likely that the dragon was looking for a satisfying replacement for the scorpions. Up until this point, the local ecosystem of horrendous monsters had proven remarkably resilient to interference by people with magical swords, but apparently there were limits.
Several solutions were proposed, ranging from the outright ludicrous (e.g., import a new population of giant scorpions from some other blighted location) to the merely unacceptable (e.g., organize a coordinated effort to actually kill the dragon). In the end, the solution Jocasta decided upon still sounded fairly ludicrous, but seemed like it had the best chance of success.
And so Jocasta commissioned the design and manufacture of the most exotic and expensive chew toy ever constructed.
This too needed to be done covertly, and oaths of secrecy were sworn by all involved. Jocasta thought this was probably the only chew toy ever constructed to require oaths of secrecy, but then realized that if the oaths were being upheld then of course she wouldn't have heard of a precedent.
Regardless, the device was to be a full-sized replica of a giant scorpion. Since it needed to survive being chewed on by a dragon, it would be made from the sorts of things ordinarily reserved for the armor of heroes out of legend. Unlike the armor for the heroes out of legend, the artificial scorpion would be filled with self-winding clockwork devices that would mimic a giant scorpion's ominous clicking noises. Also, it would squeak, because a chew toy that doesn’t squeak is just sad.
The device was constructed, tested, and then delivered as close to the dragon's lair as the team hired by Jocasta dared to go. The dragon found it and chewed on it with evident enthusiasm. At first the dragon looked annoyed that the scorpion didn't turn out to be edible, but the squeaking noises seemed to be an acceptable tradeoff. Eventually, the dragon dragged the toy back to its lair with every sign of being delighted. Success!
And so it was that Jocasta was able to cancel her backup plan before it advanced beyond its initial stages, and they didn’t introduce giant crabs into the haunted swamp after all.