Yule Hoff

Yule Hoff was a graduate of Gudersnipe School and a member of the Assassin's Guild. He spent most of his life as a deep-cover operative, living on a Kamian-occupied planet during the Kamian Succession Wars, and was a key player in Operation Rook Takes Pawn, and spent thirty-seven years living as a fugitive and vagrant among the Kami.

War Account

"Insertion was easier than you'd think. The Kamians weren't particularly pissy about a solitary, unarmed courier ship vilating their space. They shot us down, but only because they were in the area. We were watching COM traffic, the patrol that took us out didn't even bother to report. We crash-landed, but that was fine.

"No, the weird part was learning to survive. Funny story; there aren't a whole lot of bums in GS towns. I was Familiar with the concept of homelessness, but actually kind of had to go through 'hobo training' in preparation for the mission. Why? Because that was our cover. Sure, the Foundation likes to provide living spaces for the poor and downtrodden. Not exactly palaces, but our less fortunate permenant, safe shelters available to them if they do not desire to be homeless. The Kamians have a... somewhat different tack.

"Let's start with their economy: its all slave-based. Think your old-timey servants but without getting paid. All of their grunt work - mines, farms, factories, they use slaves for all of that. Their house servants? Slaves. But they don't really treat them like property, buying and selling them the way you expect with that sort of thing. It was kind of like they came with the buisness; if you sold a farm you sold the slaves along with it, part of the deal. If you needed more slaves you got them from the milary. They didn't "cost" anything, you just asked. It was assumed you could afford to feed and cloth the slave. The Kamians didn't tend toward a lot of individual cruelty, so believe it or not, most people who couldn't afford slaves didn't have them.

"The class differentiation was really interesting. At the lowest-levels of Kamian society, you had other actual Kamian vagrants. These were mostly orphans - war orphans - who had survived into adulthood. Since they had no families, they were denied status, and without status they couldn't work. But since they were Kami, they couldn't be used as slaves. Many such orhpans formed communities, constructed families for themselves; and, if they were lucky enough to find a piece of land no one was using, could build themselves a house and pull themselves out of poverty. It was especially interesting to me, because of the way it differed from poverty elsewhere in the verse. Kamians... don't really have stores, the same way you and I are used to. They all live in large houses, dozens, sometimes hundreds of family members; so shopping is done en-mass. You can't walk into a shop and buy a loaf of bread, your house has a bread kitchen and orders flour by the sack. So, for the poor, there was nowhere to buy food, at least not as inviduals