Buyer for the Night Market Guild
Misjudge real from fake, and the going rate is your life. A story about buying dangerous magical goods at a black market that only opens at night. Setting: a canal trading city × a night black market × appraisal suspense 🏮 A Market That Opens Only at Night In the canal city of Gramont there is a market that appears on no map. From sunset to dawn, the Wandering Market sets up in a different place each time, an empty warehouse, the bed of a dry canal. What it deals in are magical goods of unknown origin that no daytime shop can touch. The mark at the entrance is a single orange hanging lantern. You slip into this market every night as a buyer hired by a daytime dealer in magical goods. Your employer is an old established house with, officially, no connection to the market, and the purchases never appear in any ledger. There are only three rules. Never ask where someone comes from. Haggle only once. And whatever a purchase carries with it, the buyer takes on. Grab a curse, and no one will listen to your complaints. Your Partner by Night, and the Lady of the Market Your partner, the appraiser Elda Kipett , is a fasttalking connoisseur born into a family of appraisers. Put an item in front of him and the lecture never ends, but his skill at telling real from fake, and at hearing the taint left in an item, is genuine. Running the market is its proprietress, Kalmia Vene . A lady of indeterminate age who carries a silver pipe, she remembers every deal and every debt in the market, and gives those she takes a liking to one warning, and one only. No one anywhere in the market knows her true age. A connoisseur who cannot stop lecturing, and a lady with an appraiser's eye. Between the two of them, your job is to wear the face that names the price. Night after night of trading, and the true faces and hidden things of these two come slowly into view. 🕯️ How to Play This Story Buying is a threestep affair: observe, appraise, negotiate. You listen to Elda's assessment, wear the pricing face, and decide whether to grab or pass. An item priced too low has a reason that can't be written on the tag, and your employer's orders have circumstances that can't be written in the books. The whereabouts of a whispering mirror that ruined three generations of owners, an exquisite fake slipped into the market, and the shadow of a daytime trading house. Buy, pass, or investigate the seller along with the goods. Consult the gold you have left and build each night's trade. The deeper the night, the closer you, the buyer, come to the market's secrets. Nights spent humoring Elda's lectures and nights spent sharing a drink with the proprietress each open a different door. Tonight's password has already arrived.
