Kassen was the son of a lower-middle class merchant house in Dinnlan before the draft.
His basic education didn’t help him much when it came to swinging a ball & chain around at Beletan legionaries, though.
Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
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And Ukranian:
You can’t go wrong with lead!
MMM. Lead.
LEAD TASTES SO GOOOOD
Lead sweetened wine tastes best in lead cups.
Good for when people try X-ray vision on your drinks! It’s my own business what’s in my drink, X-ray Gerald, so shove off!
Nothing like a bit of lead poisoning, eh?
Did you know? Even the ancient Romans in the latter days knew the deletrious effects of using lead for everything, so just before the fall of the Roman empire, they were in the process of switching out lead plumbing for clay plumbing.
It would seem that in the Yinglet world, they have not yet discovered what lead poisoning is. Before they knew about that, it is my understanding that lead was very popular because it was affordable AND very sturdy.
Wait… Doesn’t lead harm you if ingested?
Yes. It settles in the body’s tissues, including the brain. Symptoms may include abdominal pain, constipation, headaches, irritability, memory problems, sterility, and tingling in the hands and feet. In severe cases anemia, seizures, coma, or death may occur. It takes weeks to months to show symptoms, and some people are more tolerant than others.
The non-neurological effects can generally be reversed with chelation therapy. (TL;DR: They give you a drug that converts the lead to a different form, and you piss it out.)
Yeah but it’s not a problem if you die before you turn 50.
Better than Uranium or Plutonium cups.
Even Depleted Uranium, which doesn’t give off radiation, is still super bad for you… And Plutonium is even worse, because the body mistakes it for Iron.
Well, it does emit radiation actually. refined uranium is generally about 0.72% U-235 and 99.28% U-238. Depleted uranium still contains U-235, but much less of it. U-238 is an alpha emitter, while natural uranium is both an alpha and beta emitter.
DU still has most of the radioactivity of natural uranium (two thirds as much).
Still it’s odd that a mining city didn’t know how bad lead is… any miner could tell you that mining lead is a nightmare.
Unless they have the slaves do the lead mining. Reading about the society of Var Salia, I think it’s safe to say that payed miners works at the more safe sites (stone, iron, salt) while the slaves (and the most stupid or careless workers) handle the mines that regular workers would refuse to go to (lead, mercury, coal).
Salt is not even remotely safe to mine. Salt powder dissecates the lungs and sinuses and leads to huge respiratory problems. That’s why the Romans used slaves exclusively to mine it.
All this concern about lead makes me wonder: Just how human are the inhabitants? Perhaps lead is harmless to them?