All groups have among them sayings – words of wisdom, inside jokes, little fragments of culture isolated from the rest of the world.  Be they ‘brains before brawn’, ‘slow and steady wins the race’, ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down’, or ‘all your base are belong to us’, they are code phrases to the group, and mean so much more than the words alone.

The cat people of Arth, the adris, were no exception to this.  Essentially humanoid in shape, almost elfin in feature, their sayings reflected their world.  ‘Gold for good’, ‘like fish to the trawler’s net’, ‘with great wealth comes great virtue’ and ‘those who build sewers surely have waste’ were just a few of the vast selection their language carried.  They had a fondness for quoting the ironic and the harsh, but what they loved best were the old – and one of the oldest was ‘if you’re clever, you will never be broke’.  

Garcin Fopper begged to differ.  In his forty years of life, he’d shown himself to have one of the sharpest, slyest minds around – yet he remained living in an area fondly known as ‘the Gutter’ with barely a credit of currency to his name through nothing of his own fault.  He worked hard.  He saved his money.  And still, save for small moments of brief prosperity, he had little more than the clothes on his back; as poor as dirt or certain religiously inclined rodents.

The system was to blame. or so said some of the more rebellious residents of the Gutter, though Garcin would have none of that either.  He didn’t see anything wrong with having no real government to speak of on his planet; nothing amiss with the huge money-grabbing banks that forced fees on people just to own money in credit form, nothing amoral about the extreme class division between the grossly rich who ran the gig and the impossibly poor who fought over the diseased corpses of vermin in the street.  He was a merchant - he liked the possibilities it offered him, the independence.  It didn’t help his case, but it kept him free.

Free, in fact, for fortune to repeatedly hold him down and have its cruel way with him.  Every business venture – failed.  Every investment – failed.  Every relationship save one – failed; and that rare, beautiful, single one had met her fate in the wake of a vicious space eel attack, swallowed whole by the monster.  Garcin had been notified of her death long after it happened in a cold, emotionless message from her employer.  In his mind it may as well have read, “CONGRATULATIONS!  Your wife has experienced a violent and painful death!  You are now a widower living on your income alone.  Have a nice day!” with all the tact it carried.

After that small tragedy, he’d sunk down in his enterprise to dabble in a life of crime, organising little thefts from those who refused to give anything from their deep, deep pockets to the starving on the streets.  He was far from a Robin Hood, though; mercy didn’t work, and he spared even less than the upper classes for those who didn’t try to improve their place in the world.  For a while he’d been the lowest of the low, looting the corpses of the starved and then working his way up to robbery in broad daylight – until he was caught, that is.  Slammed in a prison suspended in empty space for a few years, kept even closer to death than he had ever been before with all his worldly goods seized by the greedy Space Corps.

All citizens of Arth were required to have an electronic chip implanted in their body that defined their identity in the eyes of the Space Corps, able to be read by prospective employers and anyone with the right equipment.  Garcin’s, implanted in his chest, was graced with a nasty black mark when he was released, labelling him as a criminal for as long as he lived.  It was his shame, a black card for life that kept him out of all normal jobs, and he protected it viciously.  He no longer had the time for such common crime as he’d previously engaged in, and wished only to banish the tarnish from his otherwise good reputation.  Fortune frowned on him again.  No more jobs for Garcin – he’d have to set up his own, he decided, giving fate his trademark sharp, toothy grin.

Since then, he’d tried a few different businesses, finally settling on being a middle-man for suppliers.  It gave him so many advantages, so many extra pockets to fish into for those few rare credits he needed to get by.  Currently he kept a small, humble shop near the edge of the Gutter, only recently having opened in a run-down building and still awaiting its first shipping from galactic traders.  He’d already got the orders from the customers, and now all he had to do was wait.