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I had a consultation with my cartographer recently regarding Glim trading routes. He helped me piece together the partial maps that I had acquired into a rather a set of whole maps of a puzzling nature. But this time he took me aside and told me that everything, everything he had told me since I began consulting with him was an outright fabrication. So that talk of the North being a land of milk and honey, his experience with the half shark half sheep zee-beast and the concept of a Glim-pyre, all false! The true home of the foxes as a mountain of ash and glass, another falsehood spun by this deciver! Not to mention the tales of the Clay Man Pirate-King. Indeed this even throws into doubt the details of the Glim trade, if it were not for my own experiences of Glimfall with the urchins at the very pinnacle of the Flit. I see now why they call him the Salty Fabulist. His latest ‘tall tale’, as I suppose they all are now, talks of the Masters of the Bazaar not being Masters at all, but Pets of the Bazaar itself! I would doubt every word of it, only the reason he told me that everything else was a lie was to reinforce his message that this, his grandest and tallest of fables was gospel. So now I don’t know what to believe. Was everything else false and I should accept this earth shattering revelation of the nature of the Bazaar? Or is this yet another cruel trick of his, as he tries to make me believe more and more outlandish stories? Or should I burn every map he has ever given me on the belief that nothing trustworthy could ever come from the Salty Fabulist? Either way, this Enigma is going to stick with me for some time…
TL/DR? OOC (not that I have an established character per se) Summary?
In pursuit of my economy quest I have the rare success for trading partial maps to puzzling maps. It is a Searing Enigma, and an interesting tidbit of info. See my profile for the echoed statements, under “Truth at last?”
My economy quest is to achieve a rare success in all trades and document the results. I have yet to see rare success for Foxfire Candle Stubs, Abominable Salts, Glim, Lamplighter Beeswax and Uncovered Identities. I saw the text for Mourning Candles but the reward was missing, so that will have to be achieved again. So, only 6 to go!
This Name thing really has it out for you doesn’t it? To be there when you find the Name to be some sort of pithy psuedo-spiritual nonsense such as “The Name was inside you all along, just the power of self belief writ into correspondence” would be an overdose of schadenfreude I fear.
(Not that I think that will be the outcome; otherwise why would I be a Name seeker myself? I have far more faith in the Failbetter Writers)
I actually believe this latest tidbit. It’s something I’ve believed for some time, notice how the Masters act. They acquire cities for the bazaar, acquire love stories because the bazaar loves them… indeed, usually whenever they mention any motives they have, they mention in terms of what the bazaar wants.
Granted, it’s a good idea to distrust zee-captains in general. One told me a while back that I could render neath-snow into white glim…
Finally, the name of that odd looking gentleman whom I have seen striding around the docks is revealed to me. I have heard rumours of course of his identity, and it would have been remiss of me not to follow them up considering my standing amongst those in Doubt Street. To be fair though, most of those rumours concerned a faintly sinister organisation called the ‘orphanage’ and connections to Mr Fires. My paper tends to focus on stories of a more… intimate nature and while there was apparently a tenuous link between this person and a giant gemstone it was far too shallow and exhausting to flesh out. Besides, as an institution we have had to keep our noses clean of late: some judge was asked by the government to review the ethics of Doubt Street publishers after it was discovered that Bat-interception had become a significant source of delicate and scandalous information. Many a reputation has been made or broken thanks to scoops obtained through this method, not that my own newspaper would stoop to such underhand tactics. But I digress: it seems that my Consulting Cartographer knows this Poor Edward fellow, so it is nice to have that Identity Uncovered. Though the rest of his information is surely another tall tale designed to test my gullibility. The idea that ‘Poor Edward’ is not a man per se but two rubbery men glued together using some fiendish contraption is one of the more outlandish tales to come from the Salty Fabulist. I suppose it is what I get after voicing my distrust of Zee-Captains and refusing to trade information with my Cartographer and only indulging him with a small trickle of Glim every now and then.
OOC Summary: This has been a good day for the quest! This is the Glim rare result, and again it can be found echoed under “Of course he is”. The prize was an Identity Uncovered.
Out of curiosity, have you been able to determine whether rare successes are equally unlikely for all items? Or do certain conversions seem more likely to yield the rare result?
I had my suspicions at the time of the Affair of the Box - and probably earlier - that the Masters were Masters in the same sense that my wife’s Hungover Terrier, Master George, is Master of our household. If he had any genuine executive power, he’d get more than one digestive biscuit a day.
(That said, that tidbit about Poor Edward is… well, probably not to say accurate exactly, but hints of a knowledge of secret affairs few other Londoners share. The Beauty, the Devils, but not common knowledge, certainly…)
No, I have done zero analysis of the percentages behind rare successes, as all I have done is earned a rare success and moved on. Given that methodology any results are about as trustworthy as a Name Seeker’s assurances of sanity. It’s a project that I might consider if it wasn’t for the fact that to get useful results I would need 25000 of the 2.50 echo items to run 1000 trials. In terms of scale that would be a small Overgoat herd; or a third of a bottle of Hesperidean Cider.