TL:DR - Selling your soul through a fatelocked opp card and regaining through the Fisher Kings may be a viable grind, more numbers to follow.
Early in Martzel’s career he lost his soul to a Quiet Deviless, and recovered it via the Fisher Kings. After playing through a fate locked story, he found a new card in his deck that gave him the opportunity to sell his now much more important (PoSI) soul for the price of a 312.5 Echo Fabulous Diamond. After some thought and consideration, Martzel lost his soul, and regained it less than 2 days later through his urchin friends. Unfortunately, playing FL half asleep the next day he accidentally chose to shatter the diamond into 25 lesser diamonds. After further consideration, Martzel decided to see how many times he could get the devils to pay him a fabulous diamond for the same soul, recovering it through his adventures in the Flit. Another 3 days of fishing, and he looked at all the other items he had managed to fish up and began to wonder if this would be an effective Echo grind. And so, the number crunching began.
First, the methodology. I drained my Urchin contacts to 0 before selling my soul this last time, and used "Talk Softly" under the same storylet as fishing to raise my connected Urchins quality. I flipped cards while doing this, but only played the ones that would raise urchin connections or lower suspicion. I also made sure my suspicion was at zero before starting. I wore no suspicion reducing clothes, mainly because I didn’t think about it, and I used Instant Ablution to get rid of suspicion because I wanted to test the profitability of this method as a grind, trying to get resouled as quickly as possible, and thus not having to wait for social events to lower menaces. The trade off was a lower PPA, but not by too much. I drained urchin connections for the same reason: if you’re doing this as a grind, then at some point that quality will hit 0 and need to be raised, which will increase your actions need to grind, decreasing the PPA. As a side note, Warm Amber is missing because I wrote down the wrong starting numbers for it, voiding the end result. It’s hard to directly convert to cash anyway, so small loss.
Obviously this only works for PoSI who have not stained their souls. Sorry, Seekers!
If anyone sees blind spots or holes in my methodology, please let me know. I realize these numbers are not statistically significant, but I believe by the time i get my first overgoat they should give a relatively clear picture of the profitability of this grind. 2 diamonds down, 36 to go!
Round 1 Final Numbers
Actions:147
Urchin Connections:1
Suspicion Ablutions:5 ******** -4.50E
Suspicion:4
Echoes:33.84
Items Change
Silk Scrap:1 ******** 0.01E
Rat On A String:1 ******** 0.01E
Foxfire Candle Stubs:1 ******** 0.01E
Ragged Clothing:1 ******** 0.01E
Warm Amber:?
Prisoner’s Honey:90 ******** 1.80E
Primordial Shrieks:556 ******** 11.12E
Proscribed Materiels:52 ******** 2.08E
Lamplighter Beeswax:1093 ******** 10.93E
Surface Silk scrap:122 ******** 12.20E
Starveling Cat:0
Appalling Secret:0
Tales of Terror:0
Devilbone Dice:1 ******** 0.90E
Compromising Documents:98 ******** 49E
Total Echoes Gain w/out price of Diamond: ******** 83.57E
PPA: (83.57/146) = 57.24ppa, or 0.5724 Echoes per action
Total Echoes Gain with 312.5E Diamond: ******** 396.07E
PPA: (396.07/147) = 269.4ppa, or 2.694 Echoes per action