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The formation of the town of Plumm had occurred early in the life of the city of Portruss, which had found itself cursed with an unpleasant underbelly of a population that consisted of thieves, liars, tricksters and embezzlers, whose sole purposes in life were to move money from other people’s pockets into their own. In doing so, they were ruining the economy for everyone except themselves, so the government decided to do something about that.
The tricksters were thus commissioned to leave the city on a huge mission to all of the surrounding settlements, in order to use their skills to acquire all of the money that these settlements had and bring it back to Portruss. That done, they could claim a fair percentage for themselves, and take up new positions in society as heroes of civilisation. For the more intelligent tricksters, this was a very good means of both making more money and making their machinations legitimate, so, as expected, they agreed to it, and departed Portruss almost to the man in search of new riches.
The expedition was, by and large, a huge success. A lot of the small towns in the area would cease to exist overnight for reasons unexplained, but that was alright because there was a huge city building itself on the coast where everyone could go and live, a city that was oddly becoming very rich, very fast. After a while, the tricksters judged their work to be complete, and returned to Portruss triumphant.. only to find that while they’d been away, the city had surrounded itself with a fifteen-foot stone wall, and that the gates were locked. When the head of the tricksters marched up to the south gate, banged on it and demanded to know what the meaning of this was, he was rewarded with a brief thank you from the people on the other side, and they posted through a nearby arrow slit a receipt for thousands of tonnes of building materials that had the trickster’s name on it.
The tricksters were stumped. They’d been thoroughly beaten at their own game, a game that they couldn’t turn back in their favour because there is very little one can do to manipulate a huge stone wall. And then, just to rub it in, Portruss dispatched a diplomat who suggested that maybe if they paid the city’s immigrant entry fee, they could come back in, and it’d be just like old times.
Some of them did it, and made Portruss even more money. Most of them couldn’t handle the sheer cheek of it, so stomped off in a huff. Eventually, said stomping bought them to the remains of one of the towns they’d robbed in the course of their adventures, and they decided to settle down and use what money they still had to build a new settlement. Unfortunately, in order to do so, they had to barter with the nearest major source of building materials, which was Portruss, a city that had really thought this through rather well.
“The result of all this is the wonderful city you see before you,” Kendra said, as they strolled down the main street of Plumm’s entertainment district.
