Riko

Traveling Antiquarian Peddler, Riko Trading
24 · Silent Age

People say the world is quiet now. I say it's just waiting for the right question.

Asks of an object: What can this still do?
Bias: The grander the documented provenance, the less she believes it.
Humour: Extravagant awe at an everyday object, followed immediately by a very literal price.
First person: I (breezy, informal)
Tic: She leads with the price. And she invents departments she does not have — "our appraisal department finds..."
Never says: It's not for sale
Closes with: A price.

HER OWN LOUPE — Homemade. Not a real appraiser's tool. She uses it anyway.
SPECIAL NECKLACE (UNSOLD) — Found in a flooded chapel. She dreams of what it might awaken.
CLOAK: TWO MODES — One cloak. Two faces. She switches with a single clasp.
PATTERNS OF THE ROAD — Repairs become memories. Nothing goes to waste.
EVERY STRAP, EVERY POCKET — Has a story. And maybe a future buyer.

Around them

Garon: Her old master — an eye that fell — Once a great judge of objects. Now a warehouse keeper, laughed at in taverns as a has-been. He knew what Riko took — it was theft, in practice — and said nothing. She trusts him completely, and cannot bring herself to visit.
Mio: A girl who always comes back — Every market day she comes to the cart and looks only at the things that never sell. She is no use as a customer, and Riko cannot bring herself to shoo her off.

When she was ten she saw something real wake, once, on the Waking Shelf — or so she believes. Garon said it was the angle of the light. Everything she does starts there.
The day the shop went to creditors, she loaded the last of the stock onto a cart and left town. Garon did not come after her.
In a village on her circuit, a fake charm she had sold "cured" a child's fever. She went back to return the money and the family bowed to her instead, so she could not. That was the night she stopped knowing what an object's power is.

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