Editing Archer's Bridge Merchants (section)

==Modus operandi==
The Merchants were a small group of drug dealers with no real aspirations aside from getting rich selling and taking drugs, only using their powers to make their line of work less risky.<ref name="SB1">-''The Merchants ( Not much known about them. Or even the new recruits from the Cauldron formula )''

The Merchants are a group that never took off. They don't have high aspirations, they just use their powers to make a risky business less risky, selling drugs. They're economically depressed types in an economically depressed area, making what money they can off people with very little money to spare. Bit-rate dealers (Skidmark), white trash (Squealer), and people down on their luck, trying to fix their situation in life and failing (Mush).

The people who took the formulas are more of the same, and were mostly throwaway characters. - [https://redd.it/2fbpza Comments by Wildbow on information regarding secondary characters, on Reddit]</ref> As such, they were never able to carve out much of a following in Brockton Bay, and did not engender much respect among other cape teams in the city.<ref name="5.1 e1">Another group arrived, and it was like you could see a wave of distaste wash over the faces in the room.  I had seen references on the web and news articles about these guys, but they weren’t the sort you took pictures of.  Skidmark, Moist, Squealer.  Two guys and a girl, the lot of them proving that capes weren’t necessarily attractive, successful or immune to the influences of substance abuse.  Hardcore addicts and dealers who happened to have superpowers. - [http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/hive-5-1/ Excerpt] from [[Hive 5.1]]</ref>

In the aftermath of Leviathan and the collapse of the [[Azn Bad Boys|ABB]] and [[Empire Eighty-Eight]], the Merchants seized the opportunity and shifted their operation, expanding their territory into the [[Docks]] and folding the dregs of society into their ranks.<ref name="9.1"/> In an attempt to bolster their forces, the Merchants held dangerous gladiatorial matches in order to trigger and recruit more parahumans.<ref name="11.5">[[Infestation 11.5]]</ref>