Would you believe me if I said that an empire was built on cotton robes? Imagine the population of the Mist Continent. The city of Lindblum alone harbors 30,000 engineers. Thirty thousand! Then you have the 275,000 factory workers, and then the 12,000 shopkeepers, and not to mention the 1,000 doctors!

The city of Lindblum holds nearly 900,000 men, women, and children within her walls. It is not called the 'grand castle' for nothing after all. It is also the center of the world, more or less, on Gaia.

Then you have the city of Burmecia which held 200,000, if only now 130,000. And you have the city of Alexandria which held 180,000, now only at 150,000. Not to mention you have Treno, city of Nobles, which holds just over 90,000 people.

Altogether, the Mist Continent has 1.7 million people. Now where do I fit into the picture? Cotton robes. Everybody needs a good cotton robe. Burmecians needs the robes to keep warm. Trennians need the robes for fashion, or still yet to keep warm. Alexandrians need it, as you might have guessed, to keep warm. And Lindblooms need them in order to just keep warm. Everybody, on a continent of mist and cold winds, needs a good cotton robe to keep themselves warm.

At the end of our journey, I decided to continue wandering, living off the fat of the land. However, making a Serpion steak every night and waking up to a Scorpion the size of a small shed every day isn't the sort of life that I envied. If anything, it only reinforced that there were a lot of people in this world that were better off than myself.

So, what does this all have to do with empires and cotton robes. Well, after the end of our journey, and I got sick of wandering with nothing but Choco and empty pockets, I happened to stop by Dali. Little Eve in there, cutest little shopkeeper I know, made me an offer I could not help but refuse. Her mother was getting ill, and the shop, like the rest of the town, was on the verge of collapsing. They were poor, cold, and destitute. So she made me an offer, buy just a few equipment pieces, things I could easily buy after a spar with a few Mu, and she could help buy medicine for her mother.

I could not refuse that sweet little face. I bought a few daggers, a couple of wrists, and a feather and steepled hat. If the 2,000 some gil didn't keep them alive just a few more weeks, I didn't know what would. It wasn't then, and it wasn't when I was leaving town, but rather when Choco nudged me late that night outside of town. His face, beginning to look a little weak itself, begged me to find a way so that we could get up off our lazy asses and find some means of living a little bit better. I obliged him and pulled out what I had in my inventory.

In gazing over the spilled contents I pointedly ignored the Athlete Queen that Vivi had won when Alexandria still stood in its' prime. Poor little Vivi had stopped not long ago, and it pained me in my heart to think on it for long.

In so looking over the equipment, I held a wrist and the steepled hat in my hands and just the inkling of a thought occurred to me. A wrist plus a steepled hat equals a cotton robe. You can synth a cotton robe in Lindblum for just 1,000 gil, and a wrist and a steepled hat didn't cost all that much in Eve's shop. Yet a cotton robe sells for just around the amount I had used to buy in Eve's shop. I could certainly have a few cotton robes synthesized, and then sell them around Lindblum, could I not? They're clothes! Everyone needs a good cotton robe!

So, gathering Choco into a hug I proclaimed to him that I had solved all of our problems. In fact, I had created dozens.

Eve was no doubt surprised when I came in the next day, smelling of dead Carve spiders, and bought 30 some steepled hats. I had spent the entire night cleaning up the heights of their huge, boney forms for the gil. I left, weighted done and dreaming a hot meal somewhere in Lindblum.

Did you know that by Chocobo it only take two hours to fly to from Dali to Lindblum and vice versa? In a week's time, I traveled back and forth between the two. Buying in Dali, synthesizing and selling in Lindblum. In just a week I have gone from the 3,800 gil I had from hunting Carve spiders that night, to 108,000 gil. That was after I had spent a few nights in inns, feasting of glorious 'not-made-by-myself' food, and a couple of girls I had been trying to impress. I think it worked...I ended up with hickeys down my neck and chest the next morning anyway.

Which reminds me, did you know that 50 gil, a woman is willing to kiss you? And that for 400 gil, she'll give you a blowjob. For a little while, a cotton robe began to equal in my eyes 40 kisses or five blowjobs or one really awesome threesome that included anal sex and a happy ending all over their faces. ...Perhaps its' no wonder I'm forbidden to visit the Industrial section of Lindblum anymore.

Anyway, I'm falling away from the point of the story. It wasn't long after a couple of months rolled by that I realized, I was siphoning money out of Lindblum and channeling it into Dali. It became apparent when Eve actually offered to sell me promist rings, reflect rings, demon mails, et cetera. I felt bad for her special ordering them from Alexandria just to have me turn her down, so I bought the lot of them. I actually bought nine promist rings, two reflect rings, and a really wicked coral sword that I bet Rusty would have worshiped.

I fell back into the routine of selling cotton robes around Lindblum when a guy in a bar asked me to try visiting Treno for awhile. He knew I was simply making a living, but Lindblum was actually feeling a few pains from my sales. I only had 700,000 some gil. Maybe that was a few years of wages for most of them, but I had spread it around the town. It wasn't really as if the entire town was now warm and poor as could be. They had been cold and poor as could be before. I should know considering I lived there most of my life.

For the sake of a good evening I agreed with the drunk man and flew off to Treno the next day with those same special orders within my bag and few dozen cotton robes ready to sell.

I started off in the poor parts of town, and ended up selling enough robes to consider my day a very profitable one. I decided wandering the town wouldn't be such a bad idea, and arrived at the auction house. Wouldn't you believe it, someone had stolen the promist ring and the reflect ring which were going to be put on auction that day. Feeling charitable, and a small nagging voice in my head that was lately prone to screaming gil at me, I offered up one of each of the stolen items and had them sold in their place. The promist ring sold for 37,200 gil. The reflect ring for not much less than that. I suddenly had, a much more profitable trade.

I offered up the other items as well and the auctioneer actually looked startled at the sight of so many precious add-ons. He told me that they would have to be spaced out over a week's worth of time and then he would give me the lump sum after a twenty percent fee had been taken out of the sales price. I was fine with it, and kicked back in Treno for a week's worth of time seeing how much an awesome threesome cost there. Naturally it cost about twice as much and the women were really stiff. Then again, when you're asking up all the low nobles for a romp, they need some way of paying off their extraordinary debts. That was actually how I met my wife, come to think of it. Well, not really 'meet' her for the first time. I'd been on an adventure for three months with her and known her since I was 13.

She was visiting Treno as well, as it were, looking for funds to help rebuild Burmecia. I came out my inn room without a shirt or pants. Somehow we avoided bumping into each other long enough for her to hug me, smack me, and call me a pervert. I never really have understood Freya...not really.

We caught up in her room, as mine still has the couple of low nobles who were passed out. We talked on how Burmecia was doing, how Sir Fratley had regained his memories and told her that her affection was misplaced. I even decided to tell her about the hundreds of thousand of gil I had. I was drunk at this point, rolling on her bed while giggling my head off. It isn't a surprise that she kicked me out, declared that she would cut me into pieces, and then slammed the door in my face. I only tried groping her whilst giggling.

We went our separate ways for a time, and I left Treno with enough gil to make an Antlion feel at home in the sea of my money.

But as weeks went on, I kept thinking back to Freya and all the help Burmecia needed out of the three cities that had been damaged. I turned Choco to the left on one of our flights to Dali and just headed straight over the grand dragons on Popos Heights into the raining land of Burmecia.

I came to a land and within no time, began selling cotton robes around a rather reduced fee. If you can believe it, I spent two months there in the rain without anything covering myself. I ended up sick as a dog, coughing into my hand every time I spoke to someone. It was this way that Freya found me, and it was this way that she hauled me back to her home while I slept on her shoulder. She's su-...was! Was such a forceful woman.

I awoke to her fretting over me, worried about if my tail meant that I was sick or not with something Burmecians catch, heavy pneumonia. It's where water in the lungs ends up sorting through the body and wells up in the tail. The blood letting, mostly very clear in the area, ends up helping so much that extreme pale bodies seem to instantly come alive.

Well, she ended up cutting my tail and I think I broke her cheekbone lashing out. She confessed she had no clue what to do, and mumbled about how it would have been so easy if I were Sir Fratley, and all I ever did was stress her out and make her worry. I felt like I was being scolded by my mother. I kissed her to shut her up and take my mind off the throbbing pain in my tail. It worked...till she attacked me.

I'd never tried it with a Burmecian girl before. I think I screamed so hard the neighbors house collapsed. She bit me a lot, pulled my hair, and somehow ended up rubbing her spear against my face as she dominated me. Go figure...

In the morning I left a letter which said I'd be back after I collected my things so we could talk. She ended up telling me to stay, and that if I didn't stay she would hunt me down and beg of Reis to devour me. I think it's only natural to say that I stayed. I found a few ways to keep myself from getting pneumonia, useful piece of knowledge that. I found a few grand dragon eggs that I was going to eat only to find out that the shell was where all the taste lay, so waiting for them to hatch was the safer and better bet. ...You just want me to say how much I enjoyed rubbing that rat girl's body down with oils and lotions so she'd rub against me every hour of the day for the entire week of the month she'd be in heat. Your perversion is natural...but I assure you that I did a lot more than that.

I heard of really desperate guys who are into big girls landing on them. Not just a 'oh Romeo' sort of dramatic fall of romance. It's where the girl is standing and then just falls on the guy, squishing him. Or rather... 'squashing' as it's called. Well, my girl isn't big. But she had this mean streak for jumping thirty feet in the air and landing on my face every time. It's okay when you're out for a stroll in a park. It was totally not cool while I was at my stall selling those cotton robes only to have this face full of 'Intimate Freya' whilst everyone pointedly ignored the sudden lack of shopkeeper and addition of loud noises.

...I think someone created Burmecians just for the laughs of it...

Then again, it could be that I would sometimes rub fruits into my clothing so that she would go wild.

Anyway, I almost forgot the best part. When I said 'empire', I wasn't talking of a king and queen ruling over millions of people.

Did you know that both Burmecians and Genomes give birth in litters? That, when combined their genetic structure doubles that? ... ... ...

My first of children numbered in the twenties and not long after that had another set on the way. My financial 'empire' broke after the 43rd child, little Uzra decided she would sneak into the King's Castle and steal his clothes.

Go figure...

AN: This is just another spoof I wrote after running back and forth between Dali and Lindblum. It didn't hurt of course that a naked Freya picture kept popping up on my computer nearby. (cough).