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Rumples was an asset of the small but wealthy Hades Familia.

That was not his name by birth, of course. Rumples was a name that he had taken on on the day that he had left his family of farmers behind in the Pallum lands alongside the purse that he had been given in exchange for selling himself into slavery.

It was a gamble that he would not normally have made, but the circumstances had forced his hand with a series of misfortunes. First, a blight had hit the countryside, reducing the volume of crops that could be expected come harvest time. Second, the forces of Ares had passed through the area in pursuit of... He didn't even know. Whatever they had been doing, however, fires had been left in their passing that engulfed a significant portion of his family's fields, as well as that of many others. An impactful stroke of misfortune made all the worse by it coming in the wake of a blight, meaning that the remaining fields were not in a good position to cover for their absence.

Third, Amazons had ventured out from their own country to kidnap men that suited their preferences.

Once again, his own family was not the only one to suffer in the wake of these misfortunes. They were of a broader scope than that. Everyone had been left in a bad position, reeling from one thing after another and looking pensively toward the approaching winter months as they tried to plan out a way for their own family to survive... a majority, if not in their entirety.

Rumples was not the only one who had elected to take drastic measures. With that said, however, the purse was more than enough coin to stockpile provisions to weather the winter and recover after... And, perhaps, to provide a dowry for one of his sisters, if it came to making a quiet alliance with another farming family to band together in order to stick it out.

He had left behind a promise that he would return, if he could. They had all known that it was probably a hopeful lie, but at the very least, he would be leaving something behind as he disappeared from their lives. And then he had been taken away and sold.

There were so many ways that things could have gone wrong for him. Depending on the kingdom, depending on the authority, depending on many factors...

Few legal codes allowed for slaves to be purchased and worked to death like animals, but they existed. The chance had existed, as well... Well, he was a Pallum. Small, slim, light and fair of features... there was most certainly a market for that in the brothels and the pleasure districts across the world, and so it wasn't impossible that he could have found himself brought to a set of bed and bathing chambers that he would never leave for the rest of his. The odds were lower than if it were one of his sisters selling herself, but far, far from zero.

Another of the bad results would have been if he had been purchased by a Familia that immediately put him to battle, either in an arena for entertainment or as a slave Adventurer set to either earn his freedom in glory or die miserably.

Rumples was a farmer. He knew his odds on that front. He would almost certainly have been long dead and buried... or had his bones cracked open between monster teeth to slurp out the marrow... if things had gone that route.

The best case scenario would have been coming into the care of an agriculturally-focused Familia. In large part, it would simply be doing all the same things he already knew how to, but alongside different people. Of course, he hadn't been quite that lucky.

Still, the Hades Familia wasn't a bad result. Not the most ideal, but far from the worst.

The Hades Familia was, primarily, a group of money-makers. Financiers. Lenders. Investors. People that knew that they would probably never be covered in the sort of glory and awe that followed mighty figures from the Zeus and Hera Familias, as well as other similarly notable names, and thus chose to wipe away their sorrowful tears with the finest of exotic silks while sipping the most expensive of hundred year old wines and brandies in their lavish townhouses, attended to by numerous servants.

This could, of course, have been very bad for Rumples but while his situation was treated as an investment, it was a very fair one that more closely resembled laboring to pay off a debt than the chattel slavery it technically was.

He was a member of the Hades Familia, as things stood, and given his status would tithe half of his earnings to the Familia. The rest was his, to do as he wished with, to feed and clothe himself and accumulate funds toward paying the sum that would result in his manumission. Until then, he could do anything he wished in Orario except leave the Familia. As long as, of course, he was making a reasonable effort to bring in money. There was, naturally, always the option to sell his contract along to someone else if he became a bad investment.

It could certainly be much worse. Rumples simply wore a hand-sized brass plate dangling from a relatively comfortable collar necklace to designate his status and some information... The name he used, his affiliations, and the sum he would be obliged to pay to become a free Pallum again. And, if nothing else, nobody with a brain would be willing to cheat a part of the Hades Familia, whether it was a full member or an asset such as himself.

That made being a Supporter much more viable than it usually was for independents. Rumples always logged who he was going into the dungeon with, and what the agreed upon rate for his services was, meaning that there wasn't much opportunity for the usual games of 'Actually we don't feel like paying so much for someone to just hold the bags', because that would lead directly to the Hades Familia causing them issues in all of the ways that wealthy and petty people could.

If someone wanted to cheat him, then they would essentially have to escalate directly to murder in the Dungeon's bowels, which would lead to its own curious inquiries. Not that that would help Rumples after the fact, but it was some certainty at least. Between that and a decent grasp of how to pick out the sort of Adventurer that would be short-sighted and short-tempered enough to pull a stunt like that, Rumples made the best profit that he could in Orario without fully committing to becoming a full-on Adventurer.

If he took that step, after all, then the last chance of going back home to see what had become of his family in his absence disappeared. A Supporter could retire and leave Orario without too much trouble. It was much, much more difficult for an Adventurer, even one that wasn't high profile, to leave. For all that the places outside of Orario could very much appreciate powerful Adventurers willing to turn Ares' forces aside, fight the monsters that lived on the surface and had yet to be exterminated, or repel raiding parties of man-hunting Amazons... the stronger an Adventurer became, the more tightly they were bound to Orario.

A monopoly of force, it was called... one supporting a more literal monopoly of magic stones. Everyone who used the devices that ran off the power contained in those stones always needed more of them, and Orario was the only reliable source of them, so they could sell at any price they cared to name and everyone else in the world would simply have to grit their teeth and dig into their pockets.

What were they going to do? March armies of ordinary people against Orario to try to force their terms to change? Ares' regular efforts to siege and conquer the city with legions of low ranking Adventurers never bore fruit, so how could the efforts of unblessed mortals? Try to find other sources? The monsters of the surface were entrenched deep in their nests and produced poorer quality stones regardless. There were other entrances to the Dungeon, admittedly, but they were guarded by such slumbering horrors as the Leviathan and Behemoth. Any serious efforts to delve into the dungeon from there would be stymied by the fact that only small groups of people too weak to draw notice from those horrific guardians could enter at all... and only after diving to the bottom of the ocean, in one case.

Harvesting those stones was a good and well paid business, even though it risked trapping Rumples here forever. But, well, he sure wasn't paying his manumission cost any time soon by mopping floors or waiting tables. Supporter work was the best paid option that Rumples could get, with the assurance that he would be paid for the work, which meant that there was a chance for him to go home some day.

... It was just that the Adventurers that were safe to work with were often so bafflingly strange.

Today was no different.

Kushinada Mikumo and her daughter, Chikage, were essentially the most potentially-profitable arrangement that Rumples had made in some time... Depending on how it turned out, at least.

Madame Mikumo had noted that they were not here for the money and then left the negotiations entirely in her daughter's hands. Chikage, in turn, had briefly mused on the options before proposing and settling an equal split of the take.

That was extremely good terms for an independent Supporter! The usual rate was somewhere in the area of five to ten percent. However, that depended on the volume of stones being pulled in. If it was half of nothing, from a wealthy eccentric and her daughter just wanting to see the inside of the infamous Dungeon, then it wasn't worth taking.

Still, Rumples didn't have anything else on his schedule for the day, and the rate itself was tempting enough to be worth a gamble. One that, admittedly, he had thought at first that he might have failed.

He was proven wrong when, at the first encounter with a Goblin, Madame Mikumo had gently pushed a hand outward at its approach and seemed to only just tap its leaping chest.

The Goblin was propelled backward with great force from the point of impact, crashing into a stone wall and... rupturing, essentially. It was a gruesome sight, and that was from someone who routinely cut open monster carcasses for a living.

The little girl, Chikage, hadn't even blinked.

It was with that, and with a more careful examination of the next monster, a Kobold... testing how quickly it could move and how durable it was, the force it took to break one of its bones or twist its head around to face backward on its body, that Rumples understood the situation properly.

It was a little relieving, honestly. Rather than a wealthy woman and daughter that were woefully unprepared for touring the Dungeon, having not even hired Adventurers to defend themselves, the woman herself was a high level adventurer, and was training her daughter and protege.

The girl was a little young, but there were much worse ways for a young trainee to be introduced to the life of an Adventurer, Rumples knew. She at least had some instruction, and wasn't just being given a weapon and maybe piece of armor and told to have at it.

That being said, the affairs of other Familia weren't really any of his business... Though, as little Chikage calmly and methodically slaughtered her way through everything the first floor of the Dungeon had to offer with very little prompting on her mother's part, Rumples couldn't help but shudder slightly.

It was going to be a reasonably profitable day for him, at least. It did beg a question, though.

"So, you never did mention, but which Familia did you say you were from?" Rumples asked the very tall and cold-eyed woman, Mikumo. "Somewhere in the Far East, I'd guess?"

"That remains to be seen." she replied, crisply, as her daughter broke the skull of a Goblin with her little fist. "The negotiations with Jaguar are underway."

"With Lord Jaguar, huh..." Rumples said.

It wasn't a God that he was familiar with, but that wasn't entirely unsurprising. There were plenty of divinities that just didn't play much of a role in peoples' lives, so they wouldn't know about them.

... He let it be, since it was fairly clear that the woman didn't have much interest in elaborating on the situation, and got back to cutting out the magic stones of monsters as they went. It really wasn't any of his business, at the end of the day, and he wasn't obligated to snoop in the affairs of other Familias on the job.

Better to keep to himself unless they wanted to talk. After all, if they wound up making regular dives like this...

... Well, it might not be terribly long before he could leave the life of Rumples behind him, and go back home as Stilteske Arde once again.