Big (for pseudo-mideval)

The city itself is busy and crowded. Here, we see thin folks with very pointy ears (elves), short and stocky people with thick beards (dwarves), slightly rotund adults the size of children (gnomes), thin adults the size of children (halflings), cat people (catfolk), fox people (kitsune), and more… and unlike in the capital, most of them do NOT have **** crests. There's no shortage of slaves, but it doesn't seem to be racist: There's as many humans wearing those evil things as there are members of the other races. Slavery sucks, but does mean something useful for me:

Someone here knows how to make the tattoos, and thus everything about how they work… which I want to know.

I use my new Limited Telepathy Graft to talk to my party, ‘I want to research these **** tattoos. Please sell the loot and purchase magical crafting supplies; we can figure out what to make, exactly, back on the ship.’

‘Sure thing,’ Alice pipes back, ‘Sundown, maybe?’

‘Works for me,’ I smile, not that anyone can see, and break away from the group.

I pick a spot where I'm unlikely to be disturbed (five feet over the roof of the nearest building), and cast a spell: Ears of the City. The spell does the job: I'm instantly assailed by scraps of seemingly random noise and conversations. Focusing on my topic of choice, I start listening for answers.

Why is slavery so common?

“Ugh, Kendel couldn't cover his gambling debts… now he's a **** for the lienholder."

“Sharian got caught stealing… I had to buy my own daughter to keep her safe… I figure I'll free her when she's learned her lesson. Until then, it's a lot easier to keep her out of trouble.”

Ah, so a money and law thing. Hmm. How much do the actual tattoos cost?

“Standard crest is two hundred crowns.”

That's quite cheap… like, hiring a casting of a low level spell. Ten crowns for a first level spell, sixty for a second, a hundred fifty for a third… spell level times the caster level times ten. It does add the components in, though. Hmm… I dive down to street level and take a moment to examine one of the **** crests in detail; the difficulty to identify a spell that's in place and in effect is trivial for me at this point, and with those prices, it isn't a magic item.

The voice in my head confirms it: ‘Pain Crest’. I talk back to the voice, and get more details: It's a third level spell, has some expensive inks, and a Permanent duration. Technically a magic trap. No, it doesn't automatically have any clauses about royalty, but the spell can have as complex of triggering logic as desired, and this one does have it… as well as a blood ritual for transferring ownership… but it is logic decided at casting and not inherent to the spell itself. Of particular interest is that while the spells logic is decided when it is cast, the actual detection relies on the victim's perceptions and understanding. Hmm… I can work with that.

Going back up and out of the way, I focus on Ears of the City again. Who's higher than the King?

“Looking forward to when the Queen gets back from negotiations… her husband's a douchebag, but he's the highest ranking royal in the land while she's away.”

And….that's basically all I wanted to know for now, so I leave off querying the spell. I can get back to it later as needed.

That leaves me with a lot of time on my hands. I give myself a few feats to help with crafting later: First, Additional Traits for the Exemplar trait Curator of Mystic Secrets. Of itself it doesn't do much of use to me: It makes it so that spontaneous metamagic doesn't slow down casting times twice a day. But what I really get out of it is the ability to take the Additional Traits feat multiple times, and get multiple Magic traits… and feats are free for me. So I then pick up Additional Traits again for Hedge Magician (five percent off of magic item creation costs) and Spark of Creation (same as the last, but also a minor boost to craft checks). A ten percent discount isn't much, admittedly… but it's free, so I may as well grab the boost to something I'm planning to do anyway… which also settles which ‘Improved Pet’ choice I want from the Beastmastery Sphere of Spheres of Might: A Valet archetype Familiar to speed up crafting. Going with Fey Touched (to give her an optional Humanoid form). Base… eh, a Thrush, I guess, so it can always speak.

I explore the city. It's about a mile across, roughly a circle, and has several walls: One around a castle in the middle, then three more in rough concentric circles, the ‘inner’ sections, by and large, being better off financially than the outer sections… with individual exceptions. Occasionally there's a manner that's poorly maintained in ‘hightown’, and a building that's obviously well off in ‘lowtown’. There's a river going through the center of the city, which runs adjacent to the castle itself.

Tempting to rob the place blind, but no… better idea…

I hustle over to the surrounding forest, and collect a large number of quarterstaves and clubs (basically decent quality branches… there's a reason they’re costless in the weapon tables). Then I use Inspired Spell to duplicate Masterwork Transformation on them, upgrading them to the more expensive, polished, masterwork versions of the items. Then I make a proxy via the Conjuration sphere to sell them for me: Seed money.

Of course, I just buy more crafting supplies…