Bizarre Bazaar

The Bizarre Bazaar is an outdoor open market space which has been the economic heart of Saha'i since the early 300s.

It has changed shape and specialty over the millenia, but it has always been a source of great pride and joy for the city of Saha'i and its industrious people. The Bizarre Bazaar is just one of many such outdoor marketplaces in Saha'i, but none of the others are nearly as famous. Or weird.

### Cruelty-Free Spellcasting

By the time of The System's founding, most of Ijzeria had already adopted cruelty-free agricultural systems. The Dignity of Life Act of 21AU had explicitly made many forms of animal cruelty explicitly illegal throughout the entire planet, and over the years the rights which were extended to animals and non-sentient life continued to increase. The Dignity of Life Act was expanded with the Animal-Sourced Magical Reagents Act, which went into effect on Dixember 30th, 322AU.

Magicians had largely been able to continue exploiting animals with special licenses and allowances, but it was always intended that the use of animal-sourced materials would be made illegal entirely. Ultimately, after over a century of court cases, scientific studies, and public debate, animals were afforded their right to life and limb, regardless of the needs of certain practitioners. Things as simple as a beetle's wings were now just as illegal to harvest as something so great as a dragon's heart.

This was devastating to folk practitioners who did not receive traditional schooling, and thus relied on the extant mana contained within animal tissues and fluids in order to perform higher-level magics. The effects of this culture shock are still felt today, over 8000 years later.

### Founding of the Bizarre Bazaar

Saha'i has always sat in the centre of a great trade route, though this has not always brought the city wealth and prosperity. It just so happened that the complete ban on animal-sourced magical reagents coincided with a major economic downturn for Saha'i. Sensing an opportunity to breathe some life back into the city's downtown area, the city council of Saha'i decided to turn a blind eye to poaching.

To allow the bazaar to continue selling whatever it wished, the guard's patrol routes and schedules were posted publicly, and their uniforms were changed to plate mail armour so that they would audibly jingle as they walked. This would provide merchants the forewarning and the time they would need to cover-up any illegal merchandise while the Saha'i police were doing their foot patrols. The city's mothrider patrols had their routes changed so that they would only pass over the market during days it was closed.

And so the illegal animal trade had begun! The Bizarre Bazaar would still be subject to periodic shutdowns or investigations, but for over a thousand years, unscrupulous spellcasters had only one place to go if they wanted the eye of a newt, or the toe of a frog.

Well... Two places, if you count swamps.

### Modern Day

Over time, the world's desire for animal-sourced components simply fell away, although in most cases if an animal-sourced object is desirable, it can still be purchased at the Bizarre Bazaar, it will simply be harvested ethically; either after the animal has died naturally, or if the object was acquired without hurting the animal (like hair or feathers).

By cash value, the Bizarre Bazaar is currently the world's most active marketplace for antique magical items and artefacts. This is exclusively due to Saha'i's tradition of looking the other way when it comes to dangerous or illegal items. Anyone can sell anything to anybody - as long as they have a Saha'i vendor's license!

The local authorities still do not proactively prevent illegal items from being traded or stored in the Bizarre Bazaar, and the uniforms worn by Saha'i police are as noisy as ever.

## Trivia

* The name "Bizarre Bazaar" was chosen because in Canada, it's a sort of wordplay. In english its name is "Bizarre Bazaar". In french, its name is "Bazar Bizarre". In english, the words "bizarre" and "bazaar" are pronounced the same, whilst in french, the words "bizarre" and "bazar" are pronounced quite differently. This gives the Bizarre Bazaar a nice bilingual strangeness to it, on top of it already just being a weird phrase in either language.