Annotated 43-3
If we’d been sadists of a certain stripe, we could have had Byron and Gravedust find out first hand what had happened to Gastonia in their absence. Byron’s current chipper attitude, a throwback to his earliest appearances, would’ve taken a beating if he’d seen that adventurers were largely worse off than before, thanks to his and the Berserker’s actions and opportunists who exploited both. But we’re not that pointlessly cruel, so Byron gets to go “What the heck, I die for a few weeks and everything falls apart” without really suffering through the details.
I’m reminded of the conflict shown here, in which Bandit obeyed the letter of Syr’Nj’s instructions and went, “Y’can’t yell at me f’r followin’ your orders!” when challenged about it. The younger sky elves understand the Silver Rule a bit better.
FB:
KIDS! You can talk and talk ’til your face is blue*… KIDS! But they still do just what they want to do**… Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? WHAT’S the matter with KIDS TODAYYYYY?***
*[Because you’re on a mountain and it’s twenty degrees below zero]
**[Help reunite the party]
***[Not enough time reading GUILDED AGE! That’s pretty much their only flaw.]
I forget, do Sky Elves conjure ex nihilo, are they teleporting stuff out of storage, or teleporting/stealing stuff from the groundfolk?
Stealing.
It’s canon.
I like to think they’re taking these particular items from the sky elves’ existing storehouses (we know they’re ridiculously wealthy), but that’s open to interpretation.
How did they get wealthy? Do they manufacture things and trade them? Or are they just conjuring stuff to sell? Or are they conjuring money, and simply use that to buy stuff?
Conjuring does raise a question of “Are you going to eat that? Do you even know where it’s been?”
I guess a conjurer would have to get very comfortable with the unknowns involved.
Another question is: Would the magic adapt an existing object to the summoners expectations of the object? If so then we might be approaching Theseus’ Ship territory, at which point one might say they are not so much stealing as randomly obliterating other people’s possessions, in order to personally profit.
Changing the things they conjure does not necessarily make what they do any worse than stealing.
They might be conjuring up relatively low-value parts to create a high-value object (some branches from a forest go missing, and a stool appears)
… or they might conjure random components from elsewhere to assemble them differently (some load-bearing spars and stones from a house go missing, and they get a nice dog hut!)
We are not told which it is, but I suspect that “sourcing responsibly” might be a big debate among Sky Elves.
(The old ones look down at the practice because we never used to do this, and why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with tearing down the good tradition of summoning human hearts for Axemas dinner? Does nobody have values in this place anymore?)
Respect for other, “lesser” races is a relatively new thing in sky elf culture. Even Hollister and Clair can sometimes be a bit condescending (“You look so human! I just love having all these human friends,” Clair once said to a half-elf), but a few generations back, sky elves were taking from other cultures with little more thought than you would give to taking milk from a cow. “They don’t need all this, they’ll wipe each other out soon enough anyway. On a long enough timeline, we’re actually rescuing and preserving these artifacts, if you think about it.” The accumulated wealth of those centuries of pilfering would take centuries more to run out, even if the elder elves did nothing else to maintain their status in the meantime.