Psilocybin Fourteen
It was funny how things could sometimes just line themselves up so easily.
The day after I returned from my first scouting mission around the Wendell-Smith Dungeon I started to put our feelers. It wasn’t that difficult to find out which companies did the materials extraction from the dungeon itself. There were three major companies.
One of them was the Smith Corporation of City Nineteen. Unsurprisingly owned by the Smith noble family. They had been working on material extraction for four decades now, and were considered the gold-standard within the dungeon. Learning about them was relatively easy. A few questions at the local Delver’s guild and I had a list of materials they frequently extracted.
That did require that I pose myself as the little cousin of someone working at one of the nearby factories who was sent to secretly undermine a rival middle-manager, but picking out a suitable outfit for that role and acting the part wasn’t hard, and it turned out that no one really cared enough to poke at the false identity.
So, I now had a small booklet with a list of frequently extracted materials. The Smith Corporation of City Nineteen was well-organized and professional. They had a headquarters not far from the dungeon itself and when I asked around, they had a pretty alright reputation.
The company had had a big economic downturn about ten, maybe twelve years ago, and the director at the time was canned and replaced by some old noble cousin from another city. He had come in, increased the pay for the average worker and then poached a few experts from elsewhere. It had caused a kerfuffle, but the company was now considered a nice place to work. Getting a job there was tough, especially now that Ditz was out of business and a lot of the contractors from Ditz were on the job market.
The other two companies were the Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors and Brasslight Ventures, Limited.
Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors were a company from City Sixteen, which had a dungeon or two which were similar to the one they were diving now. They’d come in with their own experts, bought a headquarters nearby, then staffed it with locals. They were on the cheaper side for a few years, but now were priced pretty competitively with the Smith Corporation.
Basically, foreign investors coming in and trying to grab a bite of the local market. Apparently they were pretty much the only game in town in their own city. Whitmore was a Ducal family, and Hale a barony. They had cash to spend and were trying to expand.