"I can give you 25,000 sails for the stone in this ring," indicates it, "and 6,000 sails for all the rest of this combined."

"Uh, I think I might want a second opinion."

"The diamond is probably worth more than one copper pinch," Marcus volunteers.

"It's not that I think this is bullshit, but more that twenty five thousand anything is a lot and you do diligence about it."

Okay, fair enough. The bank can find more Abadarans and solicit opinions from them. 

(The idea that you might want to do diligence by consulting non-Abadarans doesn't occur to them.)

And Marcus thinks Abadarans are mostly trustworthy? Like the Flying Bird's priests? Hm.

She prays. Briefly. No answer, of course, but it points her thoughts in the right direction: What are the risks here? What can she do to mitigate them? Is it worth taking said steps?

How about she adds a buyback clause, she sells it for 24,950 or whatever and can buy it back for 25,000 for a month if it turns out this isn't a usual price?

That works for them!

Okay. Deal?

She's kind of discombobulated now.

The solution: Pie, and nomfing said pie.

And if Marcus is still around, asking him what kinds of nasties tend to be around and telling the story of the Wendigo, who grew stronger from eating bodies and needed a special ritual to put down for good instead of a month.

The Wendigo reminds him of a barghest, although fortunately barghests die for good when killed.

Did the Wendigo heal from positive energy or from negative?

"Uh... The sun burned it, so it moved at night? Megi did not try healing it. She was in mortal danger just being in the same county."

"If the sun burned it, the smart money says it would have healed from negative."

The nasties which "tend to be around" according to Marcus Endrin if "limited to things which have killed someone, seriously hurt them, or have eaten someone's animals since the turn of century," "in no particular order" include "wolves, wargs, ankhegs, brown bears, black bears, owlbears, bugbears - those aren't really bears, just big hairy people -, goblins, squid goblins, aforementioned barghests, allips, will o' wisps, humans, stirges, goblin skeeters, dog-eating camel spiders - those ones are new, here's to hoping that they don't go endemic -, otyughs, blackboil gators, imps, hellhounds, derro, dire rats, boggards, shingle spiders, forest spiders - forest spiders are worse than foxes - in that they eat chickens, I don't mean to cause offense -, shrew flies, chokers, shingle fishers, mimics, pigtails - the centipedes, I mean, not the thing that sticks off of a pig. Dream spiders, shocker lizards, behirs, zombies and skeletons, jellies and oozes - ochre jellies and gray oozes, I mean -, black pudding, yellow musk creepers, violet fungus, assassin vines, evil trees of every stripe, dragonleaf plants - aka cowbiters aka giant flytraps -, shambling mounds, reefclaws, bunyips, jellyfish, giant snappers, swamp barracuda, ogres, ettins, hill giants, swamp giants, stone giants, snakes, basilisks, cockatrices, phase spiders, manticores, chimeras, wyverns, forest wyverns, fireball wyverns, river drakes, mist drakes, hydras, harpies, hags, witchwolves, wererats, demons and devils - this year was a bad one for devils, ask me about that later -, demonspawn and hellspawn, mad constructs, feral hippogriff, porcupines - porcupines aren't very aggressive but people lose their minds when they see a big one -, kobolds, gremlins, ghouls, wights, gray renders, red dragons, cats, skunks and weasels... and half-again as many beasties which are presently slipping my mind."

But he doesn't want Weiss to get the false impression that if she's ready for everything which tends to be around, she's ready for anything. Every week there's a new monster which had never been a problem before, or at least in a long while, or which no one knew even lived in Varisia or existed. So far just this year he's seen giant acid-spitting beetles, a tooth-pulling fairy, this one minotaur escapee from a Varisian bigtop, satyrs, this fey who was going around buying people's shadows off them to turn into magic items - she went robber when business dried up -, a morgh, a zelekhut - that's a long stupid story -, a Belkzen warcat, an Antarean red bogg, an electric mouse, this one evil wig that'd control whoever wore it, and the wig must have been alive because it healed from positive -, skulks, skum, a doppleganger, soul eaters, invisible stalkers, a skeleton baby that stole both breaths and voices, this revenant who hid in the bay by day and emerged at night with a rusty hook and a list of names, a skeleton thing crawled out of some Shoanti crypt and could teleport people against their will and without touching them, this whole nest of rust monsters, a matched set of masked murderers who turned out to be a medusa and eighty thousand graveworms in a long coat respectively, some tougher souped-up strain of wight that you could only see out of the corner of your eye - but without the deadly touch, thank the gods, it had to use its claws to spread the plague -, and there was this plant-based pod-person a mad botanist was growing in his basement, and a breeding pair of smuggled dracolisks, and a - he forgets what Cressida called it but it looked like a human being if humans kept their eyes in their hands instead of their heads and liked to slurp people's liquefied bones out of their living bodies -, this one troll and its troggles, a gargoyle, elementals, this purple worm, Numerian kasatha, a landshark, and this whole mess of floating zombie heads - one and only one of those could breathe fire, and Marcus will be damned if he has the slightest idea why.

Mind you, this isn't a complete list of gribblies as have menaced Korvosa and its territories in 4707; Marcus is given to understand that there were a great many things in this general class of inexplicableness which he didn't happen to be present for and which were never escalated to him - it's his job to deal with people, more than it is to handle monsters - "and humans are the nastiest gribblies on the whole list of woe, with wolves a distant second."

"I mean, I eat chickens," she murmurs at one point.

...That is.

A lot.

Hrm.

"...I'm going to go on assuming that whatever I face might have completely unprecedented horrible unpleasant powers. It's true of Cryptids- There's four broad categories of monsters where I'm from, undead, magic beasts, curses, and Cryptids, Cryptids are all intelligent and terrifying and powerful. Rule of thumb is that each has at least two obvious powers, at least two subtle ones, and at least two aces up their sleeve. The Wendigo was one. So was the corpse puppeteer and the giant centipede. It sounds like you have a lot more cases of things trying to kill people than we do? A big city like this would be... Worn down to nothing at that kind of pace of threats, back home, unless there was something obscenely valuable in the area. And the big cities in the imperial cores are, uh, mostly safe if you don't count maybe getting drafted or mugged or poisoned in court intrigue."

Well, if you go by the random encounter tables in the back of The Guide to Korvosa, any given person wandering the city has ~3% chance to encounter something hostile with a CR on any given day even if they stick to the safe streets. Venturing into Korvosa's slums carries a 45% chance of the same, and in the Shingles it's 64%. Assume a simplistic model where all humans are CR 1/3rd, anyone who encounters something with a CR higher than they have dies of it, and there's a 10% chance of random encounter per person per day: if no one is born or immigrates in, 90% of the city will have died on you by the evening of the twenty-second day.

This version of Korvosa is less lethal than all that - encounters with monsters are rarer than the encounter tables report, and less likely to end in a death than in the simplistic model above; there's a reason that Marcus complained about giant spiders from the forest eating people's chickens - easier prey than humans exist, which is why he doesn't know anyone to have been killed by a Varisian forest spider in over a decade. (Shingle spiders kill people more often, because they share an environment with the most defenseless humans Korvosa has to offer - even so, they'd prefer to eat your cat.)

That said, yes, Golarion is a death world. Don't wander alone in the shingles, you'll be eaten by a grue. 

"Assuming that whatever you face might have completely unprecedented horrible unpleasant powers is absolutely a good assumption, especially while you're new to the plane. You do eventually get some feel for the general rhythm of things - and you aren't starting from nothing, we have undead and curses and magic beasts - but it'd make sense to team with experienced hunters, and lean on them while you're learning the local ropes."

"I guess you or Captain Croft would probably be able to point me in the right direction? Sheesh... I probably should get to work pretty quick if things are that bad. And optimize my power recovery. After confirming that, you know, the monsters really are unrelentingly evil. I don't want to be someone's unwitting butcher."

Mm. Marcus Endrin is the wrong person to ask, if she wants that confirmation.

The defining characteristic of a monster, in his eyes, is that it interacts destructively with humanoid society. Pseudodragons do no one any harm, so they aren't monsters even if they're shaped a bit like some things which are. Some things which are monsters by this definition, Marcus would prefer humanoid society learn to get along with or tolerate - there was a little house spider living above his bed for a week, but it didn't become a monster until his wife noticed and humanoid society interacted with the monster destructively - but for the most part Marcus doesn't think it makes sense to assign blame either to the monsters or to the people. Oil isn't in the wrong, and neither is water.

The flourishing of wolves is pretty much diametrically opposed to the flourishing of sapient beings. Wolves eat sheep and cattle, and they're dangerous, and they're much smarter than they're often given credit for, and they're very pretty and love their cubs and if he were the world's only human he'd get along fine with the wolves. 

In a world with only Marcus Endrin in it, there wouldn't be many monsters at all.

That has her pensive and thoughtful. She munches restaurant pie.

"So- I do assign higher moral importance to more intelligent individuals. To an extent. This stuff about society is why I never went to nobles or kings in the past. I more meant that, curses and undead and cryptids especially, not so much magic beasts, are all fundamentally - cruel, and destructive, and selfish. I like hunting those. It's unambiguous. They're trying to ruin everything, no matter how many times I tried talking instead, and I'm trying to kill them. If a fire-infused badger is minding its own badgery business, more power to it, yeah. So I really meant more that a specific monster has no redeeming value. It's not that I'll refuse to fight beings that are a current, active danger- It's that I'd strongly prefer not to proactively track and hunt ones that aren't, just, made of malice."

Monsters can be divided into slavering beasts like wolves, antisocial sapients which are often "made of malice," like demons and undead and chromatic dragons, and sociable sapients who are nonetheless doing evil - think goblins and human pirates and Shoanti raiders.

...In truth, Marcus has more sympathy for the slavering beasts than he does for human pirates. Beasts of the forest don't understand that they're doing anything wrong and can't be any other way than how they are. And he doesn't feel remotely conflicted about killing evil priests and wizards, who are rarely hurting for options to do other than they did. But if Weiss doesn't want to get involved in fights between people he doesn't think that's wrong of her; there's no shortage of slavering beasts and antisocial sapients.

And if she does go after the more ambiguous targets she should be careful to get both sides of the story and not to murder anyone. Probably Weiss of all people doesn't need to hear this, but he'd rather say it to too many people than to too few: a policy of siding automatically with humans or humanoids against non-humans or non-humanoids is both chaotic and evil. If it can talk, discourse is the first recourse.

If Korvosan adventurers killed a river drake, and the drake's friend or relation approached the city on foot and sued for wrongful death, the drake would see its day in court. That's never happened in Korvosa - and he doesn't know how a river drake would ever learn that they have the option, they aren't like goblins who live in the city('s sewers, for the most part) or might know people who are, and who have a long tradition of being hired for dirty and violent jobs[1], even if river drakes were the sort to keep track of friends and relations. (Which he doesn't think they are; wyverns mostly aren't, and river drakes are a race of wyvern.) But it theoretically could happen and that's important.

Korvosa is a human state in the sense that it was founded by humans, is majority human, and only humans of Chellish descent can hold certain offices. But the laws of Korvosa do not distinguish between sapients, except in the case of specific priveleged or penalized races. Korvosa is a place where the captain of the guard[2] must be confirmed by an Abadaran Archbanker; you can and will be prosecuted for murdering the wrong imp, hellhound, or boggard. Those aren't hypothetical examples, either; there's a boggard who works for the Korvosan Guard and there are any number of imps and hellhounds who live and work in the city - and devils are made of malice, they're native to Hell. (Which is why they eg can't work in law enforcement unless it's through the Hellknights, who aren't public servants.)

If the Lamashtu Herself took up residence in Korvosa, the law would wait for Her to break it before moving against Her.

-

1. Goblins served as mercenaries in the Cousin's War, according to the Guide to Korvosa pg. 50.

2. lit. "Field Marshall."

...Honestly, today has been too much. Too complicated, too many new things, too much stress. She might try to go home through the Spirit World, even, but it seems a shame to do that before even getting to know the place.

Cities. Legalities. Bleh. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

"Say..." She says quietly, changing the subject. "I have noticed that you're absolutely covered in magic stuff. I have some items of my own, but they must be different styles because they're not the sort of thing you just wear constantly, more the sort you pull out when you need."

Perhaps they don't refine spellsilver where she's from? Oh, this will be fun.

With a big grin on his face he takes his bag and, plunging his arm in up to his shoulder, says, "The bag's bigger on the inside than the outside."

...And then he realizes that her tail already does that and maybe she won't be so impressed.

"Nice! My tail of holding is pretty rare even among my kind of kitsune."

"Most of what I'm carrying doesn't do anything so interesting or demonstrable as the Handy Haversack, but it's just as useful. This cloak might not look like much, but after Endrin Manor it's the most expensive thing I own: it wards me against everything but cuts and punctures. The magic armor is for cuts and punctures. These gloves let me see through walls, this ring of mine can counterspell the spell cast into it, this ring does mind-shielding - I can't have my mind read while I'm wearing it, and you also can't use magic to tell whether I'm a good or bad person. It's illegal for someone with my security clearance to be out and about without a Ring of Mind-Shielding, which is definitely so we can't have our minds read and I'd never ever imply that the secret purpose of the rule is to price anyone out of high office or allow those who detect as evil to inconspicuously hide it. The Hand of Glory on a chain around my neck is so I can wear a third ring - you can't wear more than two ordinarily, they interfere - and it's wearing another Ring of Counterspells - under my jacket because mummified hands aren't really my aesthetic. This is a lesser Headband of Alluring Charisma, and this is a Circlet of Persuasion - they help me not put my foot in my mouth, and I need all the help I can get. This belt does grace and endurance - though neither as good as the actual spells -, the boots mean that I'm not badly hurt by long falls and that I always land on my feet - there's a ring that's the same thing but better, but I have to wear mind-shielding instead... although in practice I'd probably wear another Ring of Counterspells. In my pockets... this horseshoe is lucky, and this is a Bead of Newt Prevention - it keeps me from being polymorphed against my will -, this doorknocker makes doors where none exist, and this is a healing wand I forgot to put back in the Handy Haversack. Oh, and speaking of wands!"

He digs in the Handy Haversack and grabs something near the top. "I've been learning wandmaking. This is a first-circle wand of Resist Fire, which I made myself." He seems very proud of this. "It's better than a wizard could do," he adds, so that she knows why.

Weiss can tell that there are more magic items than he's mentioned (and whenever the haversack is open, many more), but other than the crossbow (which he wouldn't say he's wearing per se) he's mentioned the most powerful ones.

Her eyes may flicker around to unmentioned magic items.

"If I could have one of any of those it would be the cloak. I think I could wear it as a fox too, and I fight much better on four legs. Maybe counterspell instead. Or something for mind-whammies particularly, those are the worst sort of Cryptids to fight, the ones who try to make you wonder where you even are or blind you or incapacitate you with psychic pain or make you unable to recognize friend from foe or make you wonder why you're trying to hurt such a beautiful harmless friend you should give him your blood. I have a bunch of wands stored away, never could pick up the trick of making them. And potions. And a few scrolls, but those are trickier to use."

She's pretty sure she could throw off a polymorph because Kitsune bodies are only half real to begin with but it might be a good idea to, like, check, at some point. Later.