Goals: 1. Use your resources to shore up support for your Governor's Myriadic Council activities. 2. Fund a project to glorify [[Hala the Peaceful]] and spread his faith. 3. Find a way to profit from the opening of the temple. You are Merchant Ebdani, the "Invisible Hand." By the standards of Merchants in the galaxy, you're uncommonly politically active, and unprecedentedly successful at it. For the sixteen or so millennia of your life, you've used your fabulous wealth and control of various Halian industries to pursue two, simultaneous goals. First, the well-being of your Holding and destruction of its enemies. Second, the spread of the Halian faith and its tenets; resilience, faith in the face of inevitability, and bringing light to darkness. You've poured funds into those pursuits at a pace to beggar the imagination (and a mid-sized economy), and you've never regretted the expenditure. There is more to you, though, than a values investor on a grand scale. You're a Merchant, rather than some other, more culturally focused office, for a reason. That reason is that you love nothing more than a challenge. Spending a Governor's tax revenue to improve a Holding and spread the faith? That's about as boring a job as you can imagine. Funding an interstellar religion using nothing more than the profits from your success in business? That's a delicious layer cake of impossibility, your favorite flavor. Every time you spend a nation's GDP to push an art movement, it's proof that you have a nation's GDP to burn. You can't imagine a more satisfying flex. You've come to the [[Council of Chains]] because you heard that Hala, the Wend your people worship as a divinity, send word to the Governor. Whatever strange, ancient device is hidden within this temple, Hala claims it strikes fear in the heart of the [[Celestial Empress]]. Your faith regards Her as the source of all evil in the galaxy, largely due to the fact She killed your sun and used Hala's body as fuel for the replacement. As a Wend, he survived, but that's no reason to forgo vengeance. ## Asset: [[Went to Market]] You begin play with a number of resources. These resources are represented by cards marked "Raw Resource", "Refined Resource", or "Fuel". These resources may be expended to fulfill other characters' Liens, spent in service of [[Endeavor|Endeavors]], or traded in [[Negotiation|Negotiations]]. You can't lead Endeavors or Negotiations without a Governor's express, case-by-case permission, but you can participate in them and lend your resources as you see fit. ## Lien: [[Blood Money]] The galaxy is not an innocent place, and commerce cannot be innocently conducted within it. The kind of resources necessary to be a player on the galactic stage simply cannot be sourced from a single planet, or even a few hundred planets, without brutality and oppression baked in somewhere. In order for you to lead a [[Negotiation]], in addition to permission from your Governor, you must be accompanied by at least one Martial officer (from any Holding).