After A Perhaps Better Era Is Long Dead
Along the many various terrains of your homeland, which is exactly as you think it is, with the rest of human civilization exactly as comparable as you suspect, there are traveling merchants. These merchants are different kinds, operating sometimes in black markets, grey markets, and other times hand in hands with local tribes or "governments". What do they sell? Narcotics? Medicine? Food? Faith? Weapons, they sell weapons? Do they sell blades or things you smash people with? For the vast majority of the time, no, they sell purely firearms. Maybe you suspect people have and are selling weapons that fire "lasers". Maybe you think you've seen one or that you actually own one, maybe you think that. These people don't sell anything resembling that in any way, they sell firearms, many of them using wood and steel. Aluminum and high strength steel alloys go back at least a hundred years, and if you think they go even further back, maybe they do. Maybe you know exactly when times were better, maybe you don't, but that was the past. Perhaps things were better all the time ago, perhaps it was oppressive, or not as remembered. Regardless, these are times of violence and chaos. There are lots of raiders and bandits, strange things you can't explain, and oppressors.
