Venus Rouge

Serendipity Or Zemblanity

Well damn…

He got punched in the face…

He’ll admit that it probably wasn’t his most charming first impression, but he also didn’t think that it was so bad that he was entirely deserving of the resulting bloody nose.

On an unrelated point, for such a frail looking boy-- as he’d been tartly informed-- that gorgeous redhead certainly had a mean left hook!

Still, getting punched for proposing to a boy that he mistook for a devastatingly beautiful girl was just one of the many strange things that befell one Aaron Alexander on this particular day.

The oddities, if he dares to understate, started when the monster subjugation requests came en masse from the Verne Duchy all of a sudden. Aaron, of course, jumped on the chance to finally clap eyes on the rather sharp tongued Kaoru Onyx.

Never before had he heard of such an elusive noble. Those born among the aristocracy usually delighted in being seen by others and created all manner of events so they could parade before the world in all kinds of finery. The young lord of the Onyx household, however, was proving quite the contrary; No one had seen hide nor hair of him since he withdrew from his tutoring with the young princes. Yet another layer to the mystery.

His interest in meeting the elusive “child prodigy” had further skyrocketed with the sudden introduction of “sugar”.

The brown crystalline powder rather quickly and suddenly became something people were wildly throwing around money to get their hands on. It was far easier to procure in larger amounts than honey. It had become a substitute in tea, sweets, and all kinds of recipes. Sugar became an overnight miracle that was produced in only one place: Verne Fief.

All eyes in the kingdom were now turned to this previously unassuming fief with its very reclusive Ducal household. No one from the Verne household had attended any sort of function since the death of Duke Verne with claims of “mourning”, and it had been silent on their end, right up until this bombshell.

Among the mercantile portion of Gestalt kingdom, it was like a bucket of blood was upended in shark infested waters. Merchants were scrambling over each other to find an in on this suddenly explosive and lucrative business, but the only one who seemed to have all their fingers in this enticing pie was the Mercer trading company that wasn't very popular before now, much like Verne fief.

It didn’t stop the other merchants from flocking to Verne fief to try and negotiate themselves into the seemingly airtight door to the rapidly growing sugar industry.

It wasn't much of a surprise to see those subjugation request from this very same fief posted in the adventurers guild hall. A request hadn’t come from Verne fief in years; the monster population there was probably way out of control right now. The person in charge obviously wasn't gripping his purse strings as tight as the past Duke, and it wouldn’t do to have the sudden and much overdue influx of visitors attacked by monsters during their stay. The pay offered was more than decent; it was very generous, in fact.

Aaron’s party was one of those that took the request and headed off to Verne fief ……… only to be left speechless by the scenery that greeted them.

He’d passed through this particular fief with his party on a few rare occasions in the past, and he remembered it being much more… desolate. It was obvious that with the booming sugar business and the paid labourers that things must be going well for Verne fief now, but they still had the image of the past Verne fief in their memory, so to see the difference with their own eyes was… shocking, to put it simply.

They remembered seeing sparse fields of sickly looking crops tended by equally sickly looking people. The few livestock and people alike were emaciated with dead eyes. They remembered the streets of the main town lined with derelict shops where stick thin children clothed in rags would emerge from the alleyways with hands outstretched begging for coin and bread from passers-by. Any land that wasn’t being worked by struggling farmers was nothing but wild and often infertile land.