Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

=====Mercantile Noble House Carvan, Celeste=====
From the impossibly abundant fields of Combine to the endless latifundae of Cassie’s World, the breadbaskets of Cloudburst do business at every turn with House Carvan. This young and expanding mercantile concern has sprawled over the Sector like an indolent cat, and has a partial or fully vested ownership in a third of the farms on the technologically advanced worlds of the Sector.

Unlike some of the other manufacturing Houses of the Sector, however, Carvan rarely administrates most of their holdings directly. They prefer a less centralized approach to business that has served them well in the slow-acting field of agriculture. The science of agriculture is also more challenging than most interstellar trades, thanks to the combination of the slowness of Warp travel and the fact that no two planets have seasons of the same length (and may not have seasons at all). As a result, the work that Carvan does has to be customized to their target markets, and can’t be applied uniformly, thanks to the sheer variety of their vendors. This includes great deep-space hydroponic floater ranches where animals breed, live, and die in zero gravity so as to have less burdensome bones, seabed sponge farms, great herds of grox and cattle on the plains of wind-swept worlds, and slaughterhouses that fill whole cities. Attempting any degree of uniformity in most regards would be nothing better than a waste of time.

Thus, House Carvan prefers to rely on local oversight and supervision for their partner and subsidiary food vendors. The House has override and veto authority on most crucial decisions, but only employs it when needed and never without review, and always works their hardest to comply with the relevant Sector and Imperial laws. These laws concern things like tolerable bacterial and synthetic molecule load, expiration dates, and shipping regulation, as well as things like supplying ships that travel outside Imperial jurisdiction.

This does not mean Carvan is lax in its scrutiny of its foods, of course. The Carvan name can be found from the undercrofts of Gorum’s Folly castles to the gourmand kitchens of the highest Celeste society, and everywhere in between. Carvan’s most prestigious contracts are generally awarded by members of other Imperial noble families and Houses, including the Quintus family itself. The House also does not force itself to comply with a single brand identity, and has created thousands to apply to every conceivable market. Their most profitable is the ‘Clear Suns spacer foods’ brand, sold by the gigaton to ship crews, and often containing the most preservative-filled but guiltily delicious foods a low-ranked crewer can look forward to eating between the stars. For crews of very small ships, or ships that take decades to travel to between destinations, Carvan offers the ‘Solitas Meals’ brand, consisting of far higher-quality foods that stay good so long as specific storage and preparation requirements are met, since nothing drives an overstressed crew stuck in the Warp mad faster than lousy food.

Of course, the nobles of the Sector wouldn’t be caught dead eating such things unless they were slumming it, and so Carvan also offers the ‘Nine Star Dining’ courses, which consist of locally-prepared gourmet foods and come with a price tag to match. Most of these foods are actually prepared and eaten on the same planet on which they were grown or butchered, making the ‘Nine Star Dining’ brand ironically the most widely-varying in quality.

However, while Carvan are savvy marketers and regulators, their record of actual quality is less than perfect. Whole lots of megatons of food have had to be recalled by Carvan at catastrophic losses when pieces of metal from broken scoops or agitators were found in boxes of food labelled ‘metal detector certified.’ While alien bacteria are rarely a concern for human illness thanks to humanity’s unique cell membrane and receptor composition, it is a huge concern for food storage since some alien bacteria can digest nearly anything that is dead even if it is harmless to living humans.

The House Carvan headquarters is technically located on Celeste, but it may as well not be. Almost four sevenths of its production and eighty percent of its corporate staff are located on Combine, where they produce gigatons of food for the Imperium. Because Combine is one of the precious Agri-worlds that is in no danger of soil depletion, the world also takes in some fertilizers from other worlds to replenish the nutrients of the soil in a proportion to the rate it is taken away, instead of the more machine-like Agri-worlds that simply run their soil ragged. Carvan’s presence on the world means that they are able to take a more active role in the oversight of their vendors and farms than they usually are, even heading up the staff on several themselves.

Carvan is one of the few merchant Houses in the Sector that began as a merchant family and only gained a nobility title later, which is the source of some derision from their peers. However, this has served them in one crucial fashion: they are the only Cloudburst Peerage merchant family to have a foothold on the vast space station [[Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient|Port Maxient]]. They established their greenhouses there before receiving titles of aristocracy.