Death Cap - Twenty-Four - A System Built by the Lowest Bidder, for the Lowest Bidder

I didn’t bring Bet back to my farm, mostly because I wasn’t an idiot.

It’s not that I didn’t trust her. It’s more that I had a healthy sense of paranoia when it came to people who weren’t me. I was in the business of basically toppling society, or at least killing off some of the more problematic elements of it while being tied to a goddess who was, for the most part, unpopular.

The chances that Bet was religious enough to care about that were slim, but not nonexistent. The more she knew about me, the more of a threat she was.

What kind of awful world was this where I couldn’t trust a ten-year old because a slip of the tongue might lead me to an untimely death?

The problem was that I wanted to trust Bet. She’d been something of a friend, once, and I desperately needed more of those. Right now I could count the people I trusted on one hand with digits left over. One of those was a semi-rabid badger and another a hobgoblin that may or may not be an assassin.

So I brought Bet to an abandoned building not too far from my farm. It was a location I was considering using if I expanded my farm. A place where I could grow nothing but food mushrooms.

“Okay,” I said as I pulled out a long, thin vial filled with [Green Burn Lichen]. I shook the vial while pushing some mana into it, creating a vibrant green light which I set atop an old table. “This should do for talking, yeah?”

Bet looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. The room had a few broken bits of furniture--including some stools that I picked through to find two that were intact--but little else. “What is this place?” she asked.

“It’s nowhere. Which is why I thought it’d be a nice place to chat!”

“Oh,” she said before accepting the stool I offered her. “It’s not in the best part of the Clearford district.”

“No part of the district is the best part,” I said. There was only terrible and worse, but it was home all the same. “Okay, so first things first.” I fished through my purse and pulled out the money I owed Bet for a day’s work. “Here. For today.”

Bet took the coins, stared at them, then nodded. “Thank you.”

So, she didn’t pry open a gift horse’s mouth. That was probably good. “Now... as I said, I need someone to work for me setting up and selling mushrooms. I might be able to help you a few times, but I also need information.”

“Do you work for the union?” she asked, somewhat suspicious.

“No. I just pay my dues and keep on their good side because that’s smart business. I also bribe the bullies whenever they come poking around. I’ll go over that with you before you sell skewers on your own. It’s just good sense to give the bullies a couple of free samples without making it look like you’re paying them for anything. It keeps them off your back and if something goes wrong... well, they’ll look more favourably over someone who gave them free stuff, you know?”

Bet nodded. I was probably wasting my time, explaining bribery to someone from the same slums as me. “What kind of information did you need?”

“The dungeon,” I said while concocting a lie. “My business is all about mushrooms. I can grow them fairly easily. I know there are a few kinds of mushrooms in the dungeon that are rare and valuable, for alchemy and stuff like that. They’re potion ingredients. I want samples of them so that I can grow my own.”

It was a decent lie, I thought. It neatly explained why I had to go down into the dungeon without making my delving seem malicious.

Bet frowned, and I could see the gears turning. “Can you sell them for more than the amount they cost when taken from the dungeon?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I’ll need to undercut the... well, whoever sells what’s collected in the dungeon.”

“But they get the mushrooms for free. Or nearly. They need to pay people like us to go get them, but that’s it.”

I nodded. “Mostly, I’m thinking about providing some... light competition for them. If they get... say, a thousand mushrooms from the dungeon a day, and it takes me a month to grow a thousand, then I’m not going to outsell them. But, I can still make money with that thousand mushrooms.”

Bet nodded. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. But why do you want the mushrooms from the dungeon?”

“What do you mean?”

“They sell them, right? To potion-makers. Can’t you buy a few from them?”

That wasn’t incorrect. “I’m planning on doing just that, yes. But I... well, I want to keep things discreet, so I need to sell mushrooms that could conceivably have been taken from the dungeon. I don’t want people thinking that I’m growing them in secret.”

“Oh, okay,” Bet said.

I held back a sigh. That excuse was so full of holes. Though, it did remind me that I had to try to buy some better mushrooms. It felt a little cheap to just walk into a store and walk out with valuable mushrooms, but maybe I could abuse this world’s capitalist system a little for my own benefit.

“I’m also,” I continued, “thinking of maybe funding my own gathering and delving team one day. Maybe. I don’t know exactly what kinds of permits you need, but that’s a problem for later. I need information about the dungeon long before I can plan something like that. Which is where you come in.”

Bet nodded slowly. “I’ve been in the dungeon, but never too far.”

“How deep?” I asked.

“Only down to the third floor.” She reached over to her arm and touched her bicep. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there were a few marks sewn into the fabric. Three yellow lines, arranged horizontally, then a small G next to them.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s the way you know how far in someone can go. Or how far they were trained to go. Um, it’s rare, but sometimes the foremen will ask you to go deeper than that, but then they need to pay you an extra halfpenny for every floor. It’s more dangerous the deeper you go, so no one wants to volunteer.”

“I see,” I said. “Can you tell me about the dungeon then?”

“I’m not a delver, so I don’t fight the monsters or anything. I just help collect the stuff, and I’ve only been doing it for a few months. It’s... dangerous, even if it’s the least dangerous thing to do.” She looked a little haunted, saying that. “I saw a boy once, the delvers missed one of the spider rats, and it cocooned him. He was still alive but he couldn’t move. The spider rat bit him in the back of the neck, in the spine, and all he could do was breathe while he was eaten.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

What kind of depraved asshole sent kids down into a place like that?

What kind of idiot was I that I wanted to sneak in as a child myself?

I shook my head. Needs must. “What do you pick up down there?” I asked. Half to change the subject.

Bet started to list things off, and I soon realised that I wouldn’t remember a tenth of it. I found some scraps of paper in my bags and something to write with and gave it to her. She thanked me and started to list things in an orderly fashion.

“Your handwriting’s pretty,” I said as I watched her go.

She paused mid-scratch. “Thank you. I wanted to be a librarian, before.”

I didn’t know before what, but I imagined that it wasn’t pleasant.

Soon she handed over a list, ordered by dungeon floors. “I put things that they find on that floor that we don’t take. Um, stuff like trees and minerals and stuff like that. Those are different companies. I think, but I’m not sure, that gathering different resources is based on contracts. Whomever can gather them cheapest gets to do the gathering, and the people who take those contracts pay out the delvers to clear the rooms.”

“So... the chain goes something like... a factory needs wood, so it sets a bid for providers, the lowest-cost provider gets the contract. They in turn set a bid for a gathering company, who in turn set a bid for delvers. In the end the factory gets what it wants for the cheapest cost possible?”

“I think that’s how it works, yes,” Bet said. “Companies will, uh, pay each other not to have to go gather things on the lower floors. But some things only show up on those floors, so the people who gather trees from the bottom, for example, their company is splitting the cost for delvers with another company.”

I cursed in the back of my mind. It was the lowest bidders all the way down.

***