“Sometimes you don’t even need to disguise yourself to infiltrate another place well. It doesn’t always work, but at times, just being yourself can have a better effect than any clever disguise you can think of.” - Sandra Niv Ceroli, retired intelligence agent and spy for the Clangeddin Empire, circa 423 VA.

“I already thought it would be bad based on what we learned from Antemeia back then, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad,” noted Áine with a shake of her head. The five of them were inside a small town in eastern Vitalica, the seat of power of the local lord. They managed to gain entry easy enough by pretending to be travelers, and even if people got greedy at the sight of some potentially rich travelers, they were left alone due to the fact that the siblings were elves.

While the elven tribes have adopted more peaceful and cooperative postures in the past couple of centuries, some traditions still remain from their olden days. They still possess a vengeful streak to them, and if some of their kin were slain abroad, it wouldn’t be odd to see a band of elven warriors pay a visit to where the deed was done to hunt down and slaughter the perpetrator – or perpetrators, as some unfortunate bandits found out – to the last.

Because of those incidents, criminals and other no-good types usually left elven travelers alone, out of fear of the potential retaliation their tribe might visit upon them. Even in Vitalica with its xenophobic tendencies, this bit of common sense was prevalent, which made the group’s journey easier by a good bit, to say the least.

Not that bandits of any sort would have posed much trouble for them, but it was better not to attract too much attention to themselves.

“I didn’t think the situation here would deteriorate this far in just a mere three centuries either,” admitted Aideen with a shake of her head. She naturally referred to the way most of the people in Vitalica lived in serfdom, their lives and deaths at the whims of those who call themselves their betters. “When my father was still alive they were rebuilding this land. Things weren’t quite prosperous back then, but it was clearly headed that way, perhaps within a few more decades… To think that they’d revert to such conditions…”

Compared to the serfs who lived in the villages and worked hard all their lives for minimal repayment, those who lived in the towns in Vitalica, the so-called middle class, were better off. They were mostly merchants and landlords, the latter of which typically descendants of the nobles who did not inherit the family name and title. Instead, they were given a parcel of land as their personal property which they then passed down to their descendants.

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There were a few places like taverns and brothels too, mostly to cater to these people’s needs as well as those of the rare travelers. Vitalica was not in a good relationship with Ptolodecca, which it shared most of its border with, but had some trading going on with the Beruslav Jarldom to the east. Their merchants mostly made their money through that trade route, and a few Beruslavian merchants also settled down in the nation after some time.

The situation in the towns were more akin to what the group had seen in other nations in their travels so far, not the most prosperous, but reasonable and relatively normal for the most part. It was typically the homes of the landlords and local nobles that broke the normalcy and displayed more opulence than others, whereas the merchants kept a lower profile.

The wealth disparity was obvious, with the nobles and the landlords growing fat from the work of the serfs below them. On the other hand, those who did the actual work were only given barely enough to survive, if that. Aideen and her charges saw how many of those poor villagers risked their lives – in multiple ways, since the forests and the beasts within were considered property of their noble lords and stealing the property of the lord was punishable by death – to go hunting in the forest when they lacked food.

Several times the group even ran into scaffolds built near the villages, some with rotten bodies or skeletons still hanging off them. That the local serfs had been pushed so hard to the point that they had little left to lose didn’t bode well for the nation at large, and some part of Aideen wished that she could do more, but she knew that Vitalica was a larger, stronger nation than the small ones she had been to in the northern region, probably on par with Caracan in terms of power, so it was harder to affect the nation with just her own power.

She knew that the thoughts likely came because she still felt partially responsible over the current condition that the Vitalicans lived under. Her family was once in charge over the region, until the rebellion shortly after her father’s death which forced them to evacuate and seek refuge in Ptolodecca. Even though Aideen had helped take back the original territory her family once had with her own hands, the rest were still out of her reach.

Logically she knew that the conditions Vitalica’s people labored under now was due to the choices their own ancestors made three centuries ago, but she was not one to associate blame from an ancestor to their descendants, and thus couldn’t help but sympathize with their plight. She wanted to help them, but other than some discreet healing to the people they ran across, there was little else she could do for the time being.

While the situation in Vitalica might seem ripe for a revolution, the power – especially the military power – was held firmly in the hands of the nobles, so even if the serfs rose up in rebellion they would just be put down judiciously. Similarly, there were only five people in Aideen’s group, so there wasn’t much they could do to a nation on their own.