A Walk Around Cetus

After a long night of trying to obtain the mod Augur Secrets, which gives +24% power strength and is worth about 100 platinum, I wandered around Cetus chatting with a nice Atlas who I’d gone doing bounties with. We chatted about all sorts of things, starting with our bad luck when it came to running bounties and getting rare items, going onto things like Zaws and weapons we like. We were mostly idling, him idling outside the massive Orokin gate to the Plains, me idling on top of one of the houses like one does. Then we met up and started wandering around the marketplace.

The first thing we noticed was that Old Man Suumbaat is a complete and utter fraud. On his stall, which sticks out like a sore thumb because of how shiny everything is, has a a currently un-released Ayatan Sculpture sitting there, a fucking massive Ayatan Sculpture behind him and another on a shelf behind him that works with no Ayatan Stars in it. We also noticed that he sells NONE of the things he has on display. He’s got Rubedo, Gallium, Endo and even oddly organic things like Nanospores and Plastids. Okay, sure, Suumbaat probably sells this stuff to fellow Cetus folks, but where does he get the stuff in the first place because he certainly doesn’t buy it from us, and I don’t see Corpus blokes coming down trading rocks for other rocks.

The more we walked about Cetus, the more weird things we both pointed out.

Literally one stall over from Old Man Suumbaat was a guy stirring a pot of nothingness. A big bronze pot being stirred over a fire, but with nothing in it. Sure he might be heating some oil before he starts browning meat for a stew, but he’s doing that all the time.

We also both pointed out the weird cutlery that a lot of stalls were selling. The spoons looked normal, your standard Orokin gold, but the forks all had one tine a lot longer and a lot further down the fork than the other two. Neither of us could work out how this would be a beneficial change to forks. The knives looked just like Fang and Fang Prime daggers except more gold.

There’s more though. A lot of people on Cetus clearly make their money by selling a lot of pots, pans and cutlery. Half the stalls seem to sell them. But the majority of these things are cracked and then seemingly stuck back together. A handful of stalls seem to only sell bundles of dirty Orokin trimmings, mostly to scrappers but also probably to rich Corpus hipsters wanting to pretty up their penthouses. A bit of polish and those metal pieces could have some value.

There are some more normal things on sale though. One person is selling nothing but baskets and has hopefully made a lot of money since everyone else is selling them. There’s a bloke selling carpets who’s probably made even more money since those are sold for platinum in the market – or more likely Darvo buys them en masse for credits and sells them to us for a profit.

But then there’s the sale of all that flesh. The flesh literally extracted from the walls of a building. We wondered what the meat tasted like. I guessed it tasted like chicken and mattresses.

Of course, the majority of this stuff is taken from the Unum, the massive Orokin tower right next door to Cetus. Not just the meat, but every little thing. The tower tells the citizens of Cetus what items they can take and what they can’t, and in exchange they get some form of protection, or at least an early warning system.

Weirdly, the people selling the most normal things were all closer to the gates, mostly selling various strange fruits. The dyes guy was there flogging his powders from the Eurasia Zone (which sounds more interesting than the Plains of Eidolon). There’s an empty stall next door though

We kinda missed out the little path where Nakak was, but by then we’d wandered around the rest of the market and almost an entire day cycle had passed, so we went back to Konzu. We checked to see if there was another Augur Secrets bounty, but it was just a bunch of normal ones.

At the end of the day, we decided to do one more bounty in an attempt to get Gladiator Vice (another useful but rare mod offering attack speed for melees), but we didn’t get what we want. By then, it was 2:30am for me and I was getting pretty damn sleepy, so we parted ways, wishing each other better luck next time. It was a lovely little evening though, very nice and relaxing. Would totally do it again.