milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Varric had meant to enter the Hanged Man this evening, but if the odd magic bar decided to appear instead, who is he to argue? Although the note that appeared when he went to see about getting a pint was pretty well unexpected, he reads it and solemnly nods. "Far be it from me to cause trouble when there's magic involved," he says. "But I'm going to need a stepstool."

He gets one.

Specials Tonight:

Antivan Brandy
Ale
Wine

After some thought he adds:

Drink a pint of Orzammar dwarven brew without making a face, and your next drink is half off

He's a surfacer. He can get away with that.

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"Oh. So he likes all that tradition stuff. Well, I guess it's good to be proud of your cultural heritage. Which kind of makes me wonder, what caste was your family from?"

"Nobles, originally," says Varric. "From what I understand, pretty well ranked, too. Not royalty or anything, but good enough to hold our own in the Assembly. Then there was a fuss over a Proving, and it turned into a fuss over a lot of Provings, and next thing you know the entirety of House Tethras was expelled from Orzammar. I can't say whether the accusations were true or not, of course. I was born after my family took up residence on the surface."

"I don't know what a Proving is, but it must have been serious business if it got a noble family run out of town," YT says. "Either that or they pissed off someone in a serious way."

"Another ancient dwarven tradition," Varric says. "This one's at least entertaining to watch. There's courts for questions of law, and duels for questions of honor, but when you absolutely, positively have to settle a dispute in front of as many people as possible and have the Paragons and ancestors on your side, you go into a Proving against your opponent, and the two of you beat the stuffing out of each other in the arena. In front of everybody who's anybody in Orzammar."

"Ouch," YT says. "I don't mean about the beating the stuffing out of each other, although yeah, that's ouch. I mean that it's the highest court in the land. Well, under-land." It's a bit more serious than fixing a boxing match.

"They're not all honor Provings," says Varric. "Sometimes, you just want to see two dwarves smack each other around until they can't get up any more. They do that too."

"But even messing with a prize fight is...well, not kosher," YT says. "Not that I'm into that kind of thing, but I can understand why it upsets people."

Varric nods. "Politics is one thing. A good fight's something entirely different. Keep the corruption where it belongs."

"It's not corruption where I come from," YT says. "Not if it's in politics anyway. It's just business." She shrugs. "Although we don't really have a government anymore, so I don't know if there's any distinction."

"Not even local leadership, like a figurehead leader in charge of a local city?" says Varric. "That's interesting. Someone throw a revolution and forget to plan the follow-through?"

"The economy took a nosedive and the government collapsed," YT explains. "Corporations were practically running everything anyway - I mean, they bought and sold the mayors and congressmen and stuff - so they kind of picked up the slack. I mean, there's still some bits of the U.S. Government left, but they're just like another corporation now.

"There's some places in America that still have real governments, like the city-state of San Francisco. But a lot of places are just governed by the company that owns them."

"Huh," says Varric thoughtfully. "So the big merchant families took over, eh? Now there's an army I'd like to see. Just for reference's sake."

"Well...they're not exactly families. Not most of them. They're more like guilds," YT says. "Really, really big guilds. And so's the Army, by the way. A lot of old government agencies went private after the collapse."

"You know, if the Merchants' Guild were planning something like that, it'd explain an awful lot about Kirkwall," Varric muses. "So it's mostly mercenaries now?"

"Everyone's a mercenary," YT says philosophically. "It's not just a free-for-all, though. Nobody wants that. And if anyone breaks the rules, everyone else gangs up on them."

"Sounds messy," says Varric, "but at least it seems to be working for your people. I take it the priests washed their hands of the whole thing?"

Because really, when you deal with politics among humans, sooner or later the Chantry enters into it.

YT chuckles. "Oh, no. Organized religions are corporations too. They're right in it. Although of course they pretend they aren't."

"More than one," Varric notes. "If they're all in the same country I'm surprised they haven't gone to war with each other, frankly. I'm sorry, 'exalted marches', or whatever the term of the moment is."

"Crusades," YT says. "That doesn't happen anymore, at least not in my part of the world. I mean, they're businesses. You don't increase your slice of the pie by killing people you could convert to your brand, you know? Only crazy fringe cults do that." Pause. "Well, there was Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, but he wasn't working alone and it was a really weird exception."

"You know, you'd think that someone would've pointed that out to the Chantry, but if they did it doesn't seem to have sunk in," says Varric. "Not that there's been a March in a while, but the threats come up every so often. Despite it being pretty clear that that kind of thing almost never ends well."

"That's the other reason religions don't fight with each other anymore. It's messy and if someone doesn't draw the line somewhere, it goes on forever," YT says. "It took a while, but they figured out it just isn't worth the trouble."

"From what I've seen of things? That must've only taken a few thousand years," says Varric. "The Chantry in most of Thedas is about at the point where they just pretend the Imperial Chantry in Tevinter doesn't exist, and while they make noises about the Qunari every so often, they haven't exactly gone out of their way lately to give them trouble over the Qun. Not that they wouldn't if they had the opportunity, but at least they're not suicidal about it."

"But if someone tried to start up a splinter religious group in their land, they'd come down on the 'heretics'" - yes, YT air-quotes it - "like a ton of bricks, wouldn't they? The big, established religions don't do that kind of thing anymore. Even most of their followers wouldn't stand for it."

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