I see.  What if our trading company, like our party, was a little underhanded?  I think it might be interesting if the city we're operating in mainly has a ruler who's locked down numenera devices.  That is to say that they commandeer as many as they can come by out of paranoia, to arm their own personal guard or perhaps just to maintain control.  Our trading company deals with anything that a regular company might with one exception.  They smuggle numenera along with normal goods.  That way, it falls in line with two of our PCs (Olan and Bee) by dealing with numenera and by a slightly different two (Bee and Emmeret) by being a bit shady.<br/><br/>Emmeret himself could be hired by a rival trading company in the same line of business in order to find out what kinds of devices are being smuggled by this one or better yet, he could be hired by the authorities to find something incriminating.  Or better better yet!  Emmeret is a double-agent, hired by the trading company the party works for to get the rival company (or authorities) to hire him so that he could feed them false information.  That or he could just be working with the trading company legit.  He doesn't always have to have an ulterior motive, I suppose.<br/><br/>I was talking with Venus IRL about our characters and looking through the book to think about connections and something occurred to me.  Olan's focus suggests he choose another PC for that penalty in dealing with machines.  That's a little problematic for Bee since she's a mechanical nano and Seraph can't choose Olan himself for that (and I can't imagine why he'd want to), so having Emmeret be the one that the machines have a grudge against would make the most sense to me.<br/><br/>Given how young Olan seems, btw, and the suggested relationship of looking to Emmeret as a more experienced colleague, perhaps the party as a whole is a bit on the criminal side, but Emmeret and Bee have yet to turn him to the dark side.  As long as Azriel is open to the idea of the party as a whole, including Olan, participating in illicit activities eventually, I think exploring that facet could be interesting.  Of course, I'm thinking anything terribly dark.  No drugs or slave trade, but more along the lines of smuggling and general dishonesty.  Chaotic good/chaotic neutral, no evil alignments.