Aelyria Prime's Mercantile District

So, a challenge is posited to folks who are looking at AGM'ing in Aelyria Prime: fill in some gaps. Particularly some of those gaps in the Mercantile District. The place is full of locations that are sad and lonely and white on the list, without benefit of a clickthrough URL.

Some people would just launch right ahead and start hitting such historical places as The Exchange with a pile of description, alongside the pet shops and weapons shops and all of that. The Mercantile District is just where people go to buy stuff after all, right?

Uh, sorta.

The Mercantile District of Aelyria Prime is unique in that it is situated in the ancient capital of the entire Kingdom. So what? you're inclined to say at reading that.

Well, the point is, likely 90% of the commerce that goes on in Aelyria Prime has about zilch to do with Aelyria Prime.

Yes, you heard me right. 90% of the commerce that goes on in Aelyria Prime doesn't actually involve transactions for the city itself.

Now before you go off and tell me I'm a Looney Toon and totally completely utterly off my rocker, just hold off a moment and listen to what I have to say. Let's go back, for a moment, to a time long, long ago in our universe. Let's go back to the Second Empire. More specifically, let's look at the life and the reign of the High Queen Melody du Lauryl et Lylles, consort and partner in Empire to Constantine.

The Lylles of Lauryl were situated pretty nicely. Life in Lauryl was pretty easy, and the Lylles had lots of connections across the continent and even beyond. This helped Queen Melody (who often moonlighted as her alter ego, the Archduchess Aubi de Lylles) build a mercantile empire that would forever change the face of the Kingdom.

The Lauryl Company, or LaurylCo as the Lylles conglomerate was known colloquially, enacted a strategy of growth both vertically across lines of production and horizontally across the marketspace. At the time, most producers produced for subsistence rather than en masse for profit. LaurylCo, bringing together its core business of Kingdom-wide freight and logistics and powering it with the full might of the Lylles treasury, began to purchase land, resources, and skilled labor in an unprecedented move to provide the entire Kingdom with goods and services where they were needed, when they were needed. LaurylCo became Aelyria's first and only zaibatsu -- a vertically and horizontally integrated organization backed by the extreme wealth of the Lylles family and later the sanction of the Crown itself that held an almost perfect monopoly on commerce between the feudal territories of the period. The LaurylCo monopolies would hold through the reign of Melody, ending only after her supposed death.

Forces arose to oppose the Lylles monopoly. The first opposition to arise came from other would-be monopolizers, the Noble Houses. Noble Houses, such as Houses Arium et Evile-Nexus and the House of Nod, built conglomerates of their own. But without the trade connections of the Lylles, these newer conglomerates never acheived the sheer scope and domination of LaurylCo, although they did take Kingdom-wide marketshare from the Lylles and broke their absolute monopoly.

Now, when Melody became High Queen upon her marriage to Constantine, she was obliged to take up residence on Insula Coronae, in the Palace of the Crown. This meant that the closest base of operations for LaurylCo's nation-wide efforts could only be built in Aelyria Prime, where Melody not-so-coincidentally was spearheading efforts to move the Bank of Aelyria from the former temple know as The Exchange to its own facilities. As the other Noble Houses built up their own businesses, it was natural for them to have an office in Aelyria Prime itself, regardless of whatever other holdings they may have. This gave them the capability to competitively bid for contracts against LaurylCo, and also provided them with eyes and ears near the seat of government power.

With every conglomerate worth mentioning having an office in Aelyria Prime, it was only a matter of time until they all were conducting a bulk of the transactional side of business with each other in the economically central locale of the capital. Decision-makers and policy-setters were assigned to Aelyria Prime to negotiate contracts involving the flow of goods and services throughout the nation, and a great deal of these contracts dealt with goods that never reached within 100 miles of Aelyria Prime. Prime was now the economic as well as political and military capital of the Empire.

The Alyssan Civitate changed the pillars on which the Imperial Economy leaned, but didn't really affect change as to where the transactions occured. Stripped of their uncontested control over large swathes of the Empire, the Noble Houses had to fall back on their private holdings and their networks of connections in order to continue doing business. With the Noble Houses largely divested of their vast holdings, the barrier to entry in participating in the economics of the Empire at large decreased sharply. Producers and Merchants formed Guilds unaffiliated with any nobility and struck out on their own for business, finding strength in numbers. In the darker underbelly of the Empire, criminals found the opportunity to become lords over crime that also dealt in legitimate business on the side and as a cover for their less savory operations. And a middle-class arose of entrepreneurs whose alliances wavered with he passing of the winds of trade, holding allegiance to neither nobles nor guilds nor the criminal masterminds of the Empire. And watching it all, of course, was the Crown.

And so we have our five pillars of society in the Mercantile District, mostly actually dealing with transactions and movements far beyond the confines of Aelyria Prime's walls.

Doesn't that sound a lot more fun then just that place you go to buy a sword? =)