BECMI Chapter 177 – Crystallized Ambitions

Senior Manager Jyon M. Colbins sighed, the sums he was going to be dealing with dancing in his head. The manpower he would have to recruit… they would have to build a new branch for the Royal Bank simply to house the manpower to run the properties he could buy with such funds available!It promised to be an exciting and busy time!

“And you, Miss Dani?” he asked reasonably of the only human investor, who oddly enough seemed to have a green tint to the edge of her otherwise fair complexion.

“A similar amount of diamonds to Lady Feiahan, Life-Energized and suitable as material components to Clerical spells,” the woman stated firmly, her fluid accent also unique and somewhat strange.

The various temples would snatch them up like hotcakes, and if not, every noble and merchant house in the nation that wanted some assurance of being returned from the dead if faced with an untimely death. He could probably hold and auction and sell them all tomorrow!, he considered.

“And the funds so generated?” he asked.

“I will be making investments in lands, factories, and personnel, including residential areas to house them,” she indicated calmly. “I will be needing educated men and women, nimble of thought and hands, to begin some higher-order manufacturing enterprises. We have a number of products designed that should begin generating favorable amounts of revenue shortly, and I need to set up proper smelteries for my dwarven associates, too.”

A human setting up smelting operations for dwarves?

And yet, the dwarves didn’t even blink at the words...

Manager Colbin steepled his hands, shaking his head slightly. “Well, I can see that I’m going to be very busy shortly. When can we expect delivery of the funds?” he asked professionally.

“We have them with us, if the accounts could be set up and we could deposit them now.”

Manager Colbin froze in shock, blinking at them. “Ah, some sort of dimensional storage devices? They will not operate within the bank,” he reminded them of the security options they’d covered earlier. Newest update provıded by ????????????????????•????????????????•????????????

“Shrunken and transformed, Manager Colbin,” Ketcher Kociba informed him urbanely. “Miss Saliaveli?” he gestured.

The strangely-tinted human woman withdrew a folded scroll from a fold of her skirt somehow, reached out to the low table between them, and tore it apart.

A square container of polished metal materialized on the table between them. Manager Colbin looked at it in resignation of magic bypassing their precautions, and asked calmly, “May I?”, raising his hand perfunctorily.

“Of course. I am aware that you will have to do a proper assessment, if you don’t have the magic at hand to do so,” the woman replied smoothly.

The Royal Bank had many very skilled assessors on hand, as merchants and nobles often had the most exotic and strangest items come to them in trade or by inheritance. Manager Colbin leaned forward, pulled off the lid of the box, and lifted it away.

The glow of the Infused diamonds within shone softly upwards, a light he identified as authentic immediately. Every single stone he was looking at seemed to be the size of a robin’s egg, which was about how large they needed to be, too.

A cubic foot of them, an unimaginable fortune in one place, carried around as a slip of paper.

These clients were going to be very different to work with.

“I confess to not trusting the safety of our own vaults when faced with such sums,” he admitted candidly. “Given how I have never heard of yourselves or your company, I believe that the best thing for now would be for you to retain possession of your valuables, and for us merely to assess that you have them. Do you trust one another with interchangeability of operating funds?”

“Due to the nature of our differing demands, we would prefer the funds be in separate accounts, but for purposes of selling off the assets, a pooled account is acceptable, and the funds can be divided afterwards,” the lawyer Alamos agreed without even looking at the others.

“Excellent. If we can assess what you possess, can you return it to the paper form you take them from?” Manager Colbin asked swiftly.

“Yes,” Alamos stated firmly.

“Then we shall proceed in this order,” Master Colbin began.

“The cubic meter of gold can be ensconced in the vaults and used as collateral for any purchases you deem to make. We can have an auction set up in three days to sell off the Life Diamonds, and I am utterly confident that every single one of them will be sold. During that time, if you could please tender your initial purchases to us, we will affect the pass-through swap of funds and trade metal and gemstones for your initial buys.

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“This interval will first establish your financial ability, and give us time to set up further buys with your other assets. Our assessors are the very best, and they will be implicitly trusted with their evaluations of what you have come to trade.

“Is that acceptable to everyone concerned?” he asked carefully.

“Bin the floor here capable ov taking the weight ov a cubic pace o’ gold or platinum, Mr. Colbin?” the darker-skinned Regent Himmel asked pointedly.

Manager Colbin looked at the fine wooden floor, considered the stone below it, then considered the implications of sixteen tons of gold and ten tons of platinum sitting upon it.

He had no faith in the supports at all. “No,” he replied firmly.

“And you’ll no bin wanting to hand lug sixteen tons ov metal to your vaults.” He turned his eye to the pale elfin with hair like coal black embers trying to ignite.

She made a languid gesture, and behind her a shimmering blue , ten feet across, shimmered into place. “Bring your assessors in. Dani, your diamonds.” The coffer lifted from the green-tinted woman’s hands, over to the , and upended. Manager Colbin barely managed not to shout, picturing the fortune within bouncing all over the place like pebbles, but instead they poured out onto the unmoving surface and arranged themselves neatly into five by five stone squares, countable at a glance.

One hundred and fifty of them. Three-quarters of a million gold, laid out like checkers or something.

Another Scroll was drawn from the elfin’s sleeve and tossed casually behind her head. It spun around, wafted about, flipped back and forth in the air, and landed on the opposite side of the force from the diamonds.

There was a shimmer, and the Scroll first grew sideways, then lengthways, changing color to metallic gold, and then erupted upwards, solidifying from an image to all-too-solid reality.

It really was a cubic meter of gold. Manager Colbin had to tear away his eyes from staring at it, having never seen such a block of metal in his life. He had seen stacked ingots before, but not all in gold, and not like this.

, he had to wonder to himself.

“Bradley, go to the Assessors Wing and fetch Masters Omas and Thond, and all of their assistants. Tell them to drop everything on my authority and come here immediately,” he ordered, rising from his chair.

The man in a neat uniform waiting by the door bowed slightly, and hurried out the door immediately.

Manager Coblin stepped over to the side with the gold, the clients all rising to follow him. “If I may?” he asked the elfin in red, gesturing to the perfectly-stacked cube of gold.

The nearest corner lifted smoothly out of the cube and drifted down into his hands.

It… actually wasn’t that large. Significantly smaller than most bulk ingots, actually.

It was also numbered , and stamped with a very complex feathery seal.

“My apologies, but might I ask why you chose this size for the bars you are using?” he asked, hefting it. “This… seems to be about a quarter the size of a standard bar of gold held as bullion?”

“That is because it is not designed to be held as bullion. It is designed to be spent,” the cool Transvyian accent caressed his ears like icy whispers. “You hold in your hand exactly one goldweight, no more and no less.”

He glanced at her in interest and curiosity. “I admit to never having heard the term before, Lady Edge,” he admitted candidly, another new thing for the day.

Her head inclined slightly, and the Catcher stepped forward.

“A goldweight represents exactly one half of a day of infusion or sacrifice of gold or other precious metals consumed when plying item Enchantments or other Artifice. In mercantile terms, that represents roughly one thousand gold coins if using Investing, and five hundred gold coins if using Infusing,” the Catcher related in a professional teaching voice, mellifluous and attention-getting. He was a professor, after all.

“Five hundred gold coins is approximately five pounds, or more given other baser metals mixed into the alloy. You hold in your hand one goldweight, accurate to one-ten thousandth of one percent, judged by the standard of Infusing Artifice.

“You are probably unaware that the standard size of a gold coin and division of value among precious metals is based upon their viability in magical construction. Silver sacrificed to empower Enchanted items is worth one-tenth of gold, and copper one-tenth of that, while platinum is five times as valuable as gold.

“Thus, while any economist will tell you supply and demand should cause the prices of precious metals to fluctuate wildly relative to one another… they do not, because their absolute value to one another remains fixed.

“When one metal proliferates too much, it is simply fed into the magical system and sacrificed to create magic, rapidly correcting any deviations in value from the standard of Artificing.”

He cleared his throat, considering the astounded bank manager. “Magical items are thus valued according to the goldweight of their investment if they were to be sacrificed. Gems and other items have an intrinsic value that does not deviate, and which ignores vagaries such as rarity, collector status, and the like, and so are valued relative to goldweight. A gem worth one goldweight, regardless of cut, clarity, rarity, type, color, or anything, is worth one goldweight to a wizard sacrificing it to empower his latest magical gee-gaw. It might be a huge hunk of jade, a tiny glittering diamond, a fiery topaz crystal, or any other matter.

“They all are worth goldweight, and judged accordingly.”

Mr. Colbin had never heard this explanation, and was rather stunned to find it answered so many of his questions about why the value of gold, silver, copper, and platinum didn’t fluctuate much more than it did. The value of other goods might go up and down against gold, but the four metals stayed almost impossibly consistent in value to one another… and even the greatest of gold strikes never seemed to imbalance the economy for very long at all. The gold just… vanished…

Sacrificed to make things of magic!

“You may wish to retain several of the ingots for perpetuity as a basis for your own goldweight standard. The quantity of gold that can be Infused in eight hours into any object is a known quantity that cannot be exceeded without very specific means and methods available only to senior Artificers, and it has not changed in thousands of years, despite the rise and fall of magical methodologies over that time period.”

“But… what of special metals? Gold with special properties?” Manager Colbin spoke up, astounded.

“Such things are known as Alchemical Isotopes, or Energized Materials. They have been permeated with a magical essence of one form of profound energy or another, and that energy increases their value relative to working with specific kinds of magic or magical effects.”

The Catcher turned his head deliberately, looking to the Lady Edge who was definitely the leader of all present. She just flicked a finger absently, allowing him to go on.