‘Round Trip Back To These Here Parts...

Previously:
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-last-becomes.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-one-last-time.html

Full-Fair Ladies
1: Cut off their noses as girls and give them to the flesh-fixers, to be preserved and returned to their faces on their wedding day.
2: Dye their hair white, as maturity is associated with skill and discretion in affairs.
3: Wear dresses with cavernous shoulder-extensions that emphasize their collarbones and trapezia, highly-fetishized parts in these parts.
4: Keep the hair from their children's first haircuts to stuff into apotropaic pillows.
5: Know an herb-rite to transfer unwanted gravidborne children into their father's abdomen, and so are given a primacial berth as it relates to such matters.
6: Maintain secret cults and duelist-societies among themselves, charged with honouring the feminine aspects of the gods and discharging familial blood-feuds through ritual combat.

Courteous Knights
1: Inhale asps that coil through a bronchi around their hearts. Should the asp taste the heart turning against the knight’s liege, it will bite down with all the venom it’s got. As a side-benefit, the knights can breathe most poisonous gases without ill effect thanks to the asp acting as a filter, and march into battle with cauldrons boiling off the stuff.
2: Wear a brass ring engraved with a vow. Should they die without fulfilling the vow, and if the ring’s still on their finger (and their finger still on their hand, and their hand still on their arm, and so on) their corpse will rise for a day and a night in pursuit of it, the ring and their veins glowing an incandescent cherry-red.
3: Begin to consume progressively-larger meals of iron sand as they approach the end of their life, paired with internal alchemy practices. The aim of this is to turn themself into an iron colossus, able to go on one last mission for their lord before going still and falling to rust.
4: Wear colourful tatterdemalion and bells on the ends of their boots - for war is a misery and those who wage it are charged with bringing mirth to match the tears they've made others shed.
5: Make a drink similar to kuchikamizake together on the eve of battle, only made of dried and chewed strips of a tuber instead of rice. Those who survive the battle will share the drink and share stories of their fallen comrades. The grips of swords are often roughened and dyed to resemble these strips.
6: Wear their hair long and braid their locks with the same patterns of beads as their steeds' manes - these unique bead-patterns being their heraldry.

Valiant Lords
1: Commission another tier to be added to their crown when they inherit it. The oldest dynasties hunch under the weight of generations of coronations - and to help bear the weight of a ruler's crown is a very coveted position indeed.
2: Rule in pairs, matched at birth, twins ideally but any two will do. Both have their skulls bound, though to different ends and shapes - one for clarity, retention, and depth of long-term memory, the other for quickness and sharpness of wit. They lose in exchange what the other gains, but if performed properly should more than make up for the other's deficiency.
3: Hold court in chambers limned by magnetized pillars - no weapons of metal may be borne within. Violent intrigues are carried out by specialized cadres of assassins trained with weapons of horn and bone, useless for open conflict.
4: Have an overt spouse whose children will inherit their property, and a poison spouse who (if proper) will discreetly share their wealth. As the name suggests the poison spouse is unknown publicly and tasked with unrooting and eliminating the lord's enemies.
5: Place their thrones upon the backs of fearsome beasts, and rule from pastures of anointed & gilded sacrificial cattle - their ability to tame these beasts represents their proficiency at rulership.
6: Make their honour guard out of those who've committed lèse-majesté and suchlike treasons - tortured and artfully lobotomized by the lord's own hand into perfectly obedient slave-soldiers.

Well-To-Do Merchants
1: Tattoo the names of God on the soles of their feet, which go untrod and uncovered. If they must move, they're moved by servants or on ankle-wrapping stilts.
2: Replace their teeth one by one with gold prostheses - the glitter of a merchant's smile is equivalent to his lifetime profitability.
3: Bind themselves to angelic guarantors, manifested as glowing tattoos of chains around their extremities - they have become adept at skirting the limits of their bindings, clinging to the literal wording rather than the spirit.
4: Are required to be eunuchs, to reflect the sterile endeavours of commerce and interest.
5: Will carve a hunk off their fattened sides to fry up and serve when sealing big deals.
6: Measure trades with weights designed to resemble themselves - it's believed that if they make misleading measures, they will starve to gauntness or bloat to lethal obesity accordingly.

Benighted Serfs
1: Wage ceremonial wars against neighbouring villages at the height of summer, counting coup by whipping each other with straps of woven grain-stalks. The winning village is believed to have the favour of the field spirits come harvest-time.
2: Compute taxation amounts through bee-like ritualistic dances, often biasing these calculations in their favour through intimate knowledge (and therefore manipulability) of the steps.
3: Sacrifice their elderly, stringing them up as scarecrows in the field - the birds that taste of these sacrifices are overcome, thereafter serving the community.
4: Not only bring in the harvest but are themselves a harvest - preyed upon at contracted times by vampires or suchlike devourers - at the same time protected from outside predation.
5: Keep a breed of sheep which produces such quantities of lanolin that bees preferentially make hives in their fleece over extruding their own wax, and defend the flocks to the death (though not from shepherds whose scent they're familiar with).
6: Have an purplish tinge to their skin and scleras, from the mildly toxic yet starchy "milk" they make by washing a nettle-like plant - fermented, it makes a palatable, watery wine.

Iniquitous Criminals
1: Must belong to one of a great number of sclerotic and splintered guilds, who on pain of clandestine war can never trespass on each other's turf - the Cutpurses' and Pickpockets' and Swindlers' and Muggers' Guilds are all separate and politely-hostile organizations, for instance.
2: Will never harm a widow, in fact donating some part of their proceeds to their support, thereby gaining a population of informants and shelterers.
3: Are required to get high off their own supply of a drug derived from black lotus extract to ensure their addicted loyalty.
4: Are, after reaching a certain rank, subtly trepanned through their temple - almost impossible to notice even on close inspection, yet will cause brain hemorrhage should they fully bend over. This guarantees that they will bow to no one, on pain of death.
5: Pay a fat percentage of all their illicit earnings to the King of All Cats, and in return are granted the privilege of using his extradimensional alleyway home as an escape route - though the favour of a cat can never be fully relied on.
6: Practice a subtle and particular language composed of cricket-like chirps produced when they rub their specially-notched fingernails just so.

Learned Scholars
1: Eat nothing with a brain, out of the belief that unlearned thoughts from their food might outcrowd their own - however they file their teeth, as they make an exception for the offensively ignorant.
2: Submerge themselves in logico-aesthetically artificial ponds with nothing but a hollow reed for air and ducks for company - and when they dream sub-aquatically they pluck those ducks for the quills they'll use to write their oneiric revelations.
3: Desiccate the brains of their forebears into hard little walnuts, and then pack these into ceremonial rattles which keep the beat of their memory-songs.
4: Keep a private language-device of piercings and intertwining stitch-threads for confidential records - like a lukasa of living flesh instead of wood.
5: Have one eye put out, so that they can still read but can't apply their reading to violence.
6: Write everything in cipher - the exoteric meaning of their work remains the real meaning, the encoded stuff is just chaff to occupy wizards and other such fools.

Pious Priests
1: Induce serious cases of pectus excavatum in themselves by weaving an iron bar through their ribs. In the cavity so created they set a small shrine to their patron deity.
2: Work the bodies of the sinful dead barred from graveyards into marionettes and put on pedagogical morality plays with them.
3: Consume a special diet when they are close to death, which turns their sweat into incense. When their time finally comes they work up a coating through intensive and esoteric exercises before setting themselves alight.
4: Join hands and dance in circles, each priest singing a single syllable of a mantra repeatedly, together becoming a prayer wheel made of people.
5: Know magical rites to transform the viscera of sacrificed animals into unique and useful plants - the kidneys of a lamb into flowers which produce nectar like little fountains, for instance, or the heart of an ox into a capillary nexus which can irrigate an entire field.
6: Pray in a headstand, to cause more blood to flow to their crown - their connection to the cosmos, to the divine. The devout - or those seeking to appear as such - possess abraded and calloused tonsures.

Rowdy Sailors
1: Set cloth dolls on beaches in the hope that should they end up overboard they too will be washed safely ashore.
2: Worship the main mast of their ship as a divine phallus, carving it with sacred iconography and parading it through port after long voyages.
3: Keep an owl on-ship in the belief that the night-birds will recognize the stars to lead them home when all other navigational methods fail.
4: Scrape barnacles from the hulls of their ships and work them into protective amulets.
5: Wear hooded ponchos of manta ray leather.
6: Make amphibious assaults with flambuoyant skirts of cork-wood.

Starving Artists
1: Wear hairshirts made from hair donated by the fans, patrons, and lovers, to spur them on to greater creative heights. Lesser-known artists make do with just a scarf, or a wristband.
2: Operate food carts selling colourfully (and dubiously!) spiced concoctions to drunkards, collecting their vomit to boil down into pigments.
3: Launched a sculptors' crusade some years ago into the bowels of the earth, and a few are trickling back now with bizarre scars and a fortune in rare stone.
4: Are forced to make a living dying and weaving the beautiful and distinctive garrotes of the moonblood assassins.
5: Will, in desperation, sell themselves to temples, being given the resources to make their masterpiece in return for being sealed inside it as an unliving idol of the temple's god.
6: Support themselves through the sale of beautifully-molded clay cakes, a favoured treat of children and pregnant women.