The Cart Merchant and the Magic Beans.

The realm of Cryptopia is vast and largely unexplored, with new land seeming to appear every day. As each new variety of creature appears on Portal Shore, Cryptopia adapts like a welcoming host, growing to accommodate. But with the fluctuating nature of life in the realm these extensions of land aren’t always used, leaving their fruits open for discovery.

Therefore, Cryptopian explorers need appropriate methods of traversing the impressive landscape, and that is where Cart Merchants find their use. They’re dotted usefully around Cryptopia selling convenience to those that wish to travel faster, but none offer a service that rivals that of Poor Chez. With a name that is coated in irony, Poor Chez is the most successful Cart Trader in all of the realm, widely recognised for his style and status.

You’ll find Poor Chez a short distance east of the town of Twit, conveniently located towards the centre of the largest land mass. But it isn’t his positioning that drove him to greatness. His carts are recognised wherever they go, the fastest and finest on the market and carrying a great deal of prestige.

But that prestige comes at a price.

A Poor Chez cart will cost you a pretty penny, making them inaccessible to a large portion of the characters that realm Cryptopia. People don’t buy Poor Chez Carts because they need to get around; they do it to be seen. It’s vanity in an acceptable format, which is quite common across the realm.

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More recently Poor Chez has been trying to expand his reach by moving into the Magic Bean industry. Thinking that it will give him an opportunity to appeal to customers that were previously out of his reach. But despite aiming for a more commonplace customer, he’s having a hard time letting go of certain things. Especially the price tag.

You see, Poor Chez’s success has led him to think that his global respect is unwavering and that people will jump at the opportunity to own one of his products. It is true that his name has become synonymous with luxury and performance, but even legends have their limits. He set the price of his Magic Beans way above the market average, as he did with his carts, and waited for punters to get excited.

But they didn’t.

The main issue is that of the Magic Beans that he hopes to sell. Though often profitable, there is much speculation about the use of Magic Beans, with many left wondering what they do. There are many types of Beans, with some not so magic at all, but people unfamiliar with the industry naturally assume that the money is guaranteed.

Poor Chez was so blinded by the potential financial gain that even he struggled to do his research and cater his new product to the people that were buying it. He wasn’t dealing with the mega-wealthy anymore — these people needed to understand what they were buying.

When people started to realise that the benefits of Poor Chez’s Magic Beans were questionable, cracks started to show in the entrepreneur’s reputation. Was he just hungry for money? Yes. Was he using his reputation to push a potentially useless product? Yes again. Sentiment was slowly changing.

Though Poor Chez was always going to be able to sell his Carts, he will always be remembered for his error of judgment, and his failure to appeal to the everyday person.

Or he could just lower the price.