"We ourselves were also landed upon by the Demon Lord Malagord's forces. It took us about a half a year to clear them out, though I do understand that the circumstances between us are vastly different. We merely had a few islands to clear out with far fewer initial enemies, though they did damage some facilities on our main island as well. We'd like to offer assistance in exchange for future trade promises in lieu of current trade options. Should our current cargo be of value, we can discuss what materials or actions would be of the most benefit moving forward, and we can adapt to try to provide that in the future." I began.

  A human representative then began talking, and his translator quickly repeated in dwarvish, "You've come here in a strange ship made of metal not powered by either wind nor man, and begin talking of trade. The dwarven continent is in such bad shape because of your previous 'trade' with them, and my homeland is fractured after interacting with you. Your 'trade' is nothing but a curse. Anyone who accepts your trade offer is a fool!"

  A second human responded after that, "You surely aren't going to blame them for the foolishness of Besmond. Their hand in dwarven matters is a different story, but I'll remind you that others in this room besides the demon fought against Rathland in that war."

  The humans then started bickering untranslated for a few minutes until Kao eventually interjected to bring negotiations back on track, "Regardless of history, we should at least listen to what they have to offer, though all parties should be cautious. Indeed, previous interactions have resulted in a lot of tumultuous situations, regardless of what the intent was initially from said interactions."

  With the room once again silent I continued, "On our ship currently, we have another 50 tons of salt, a few tons of preserved foods, and a new artillery weapon you'd likely benefit from. There is a small problem with delivering it, however. It requires a very sturdy dock and a crane system to unload easily. If you decide you want them, we've brought the crane components, and we'll provide them along with instructional setup for it free of charge, but you'll probably have to reinforce whichever dock you chose to use for unloading. Each artillery piece weighs about five tons. If you can unload them manually, you're free to do so, though I'd recommend taking advantage of the crane in the future."

  "Lets address these piece by piece. Would anyone here object to either salt or food being traded?" Kao asked. A single hand went up from the human who had previously made the statement about accepting any trade offer. Kao then asked that human, "Would accepting such a trade for salt and food result in your departure from the defensive alliance?"

  "We would do our duty to defend from the demons, but we would refuse to partake in any unit or front supplied in such a manner."

  "Then I suppose it's just a matter of us doing the math for the situation. You've supplied us with 50 tons of salt so far, with another 50 tons on the ship. If each ton supplies ten soldiers for a year, then that's about 1000 soldiers worth of salt. With supply lines being as bad as they are currently, that's a deal we can't really turn down, even if it means we lose out on cooperation of about 3000 soldiers." Kao says, "Just how much salt could you supply us with if we decided to trade for it?"

  I had to do the mental math of our current salt production and stockpiles. The refined lightstone facility produces about 1.5 tons of salt a day at full capacity, though we haven't been running it at anywhere near full capacity. We brought about a quarter of our salt stockpile on this trip, so we have a stockpile of about 300 tons still. Rather than utilizing the lightstone facility to produce more, in a couple of months we could easily build out a few larger scale boiler systems that could easily produce 10 tons of salt a day, if necessary. Considering the extra food we're already wasting due to excess fishing for making glycerin, we could easily also begin producing preserved fish to trade.

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  "We have another 300 tons we could bring, and within a few months we could ramp our salt production up to about 10 tons of production a day, if we agree upon that as our only trade. If we need to increase production of other things, that could slow the time frame down somewhat. I'll also add in that we can produce about a ton per day of preserved food, though that only lasts so long, so we could probably bring along about 40 tons of preserved food alongside any particular salt supply run of 500 tons of salt, if that was something you'd want as part of that deal."

  Honestly, if the only trade we agree on is salt, that'd be beneficial to us long term since salt is a commodity valuable outside of war as well. Increasing our production of it alongside securing future trade would be a win in and of itself.

  Kao looked around the table to see if anyone else had a comment before forwarding the negotiations, "Then, I suppose we should next discuss these new artillery pieces. We have cannons, and we have our own artillery that we've installed in many locations with some improvements on the previous design that both us and Kembora were using. Is this new artillery any different, or is it just more of the same? Not that we couldn't use more."

  "Yes, well it is quite a bit different, though the fundamentals are the same. It fires a much larger 5-inch shell at a range of about ten miles with moderate accuracy. It no longer uses black powder as the explosive source either, relying on a much more powerful explosive mixture that is a little more stable than the black powder was. The shells are self contained in a brass casing and weigh 90 pounds a piece. We've brought 10 artillery pieces and 4000 shells on this trip, which was about a year's worth of production for us."

  "Ten miles? Look, if you planned on trying to pawn off false goods, at least make it believable. Kao's artillery is already pushing the limit at 2 miles with some degree of accuracy, and those cannons need to be repaired frequently!" One of the dwarves at the table exclaimed.

  "I can understand where those concerns would come from. Part of the reason previous artillery require so much maintenance is because of the black powder causing fouling in the barrels. It doesn't combust fully. The new explosive mixture we produce doesn't suffer from this issue nearly as much, and it packs a much harder punch. Which required us to design much heavier artillery to handle that punch. Of course, I don't expect you to just take my word at it. The turrets on our ship use a slightly modified design from the wheeled versions we're offering. We can provide a demonstration, though we'll be restricting how many can join us at a time for security reasons. I'd encourage you to wait until you see it before you vote."

  Kao let out a sigh, "I was hoping we'd just get this wrapped up tonight, but I suppose we'll need to wait until morning before we can continue negotiations. We can resume tomorrow, unless anyone has any objections to getting a demonstration?"

  "I've already said my objection earlier and don't plan to join in even the negotiations tomorrow, but I just want to remind everyone of the chaos that has followed trade in the past with them. Even trading for salt is a bad idea, even if we're desperate."

  After the one objection, we all went our separate ways. Once I was back on the ship, we removed the gangplanks to prevent potential intruders from sneaking onto the ship easily. It wouldn't be impossible for someone to climb on via a dockline, or perhaps to leap up with a magically empowered jump, but we didn't want to invite potential trouble. We're also stationing extra demons on the deck tonight as an additional security measure.