Because of the constant influx of tourists and other outsiders through Newbridge, there have long been locals offering their services as guides, leading people new to the city to where they want to go, or suggesting destinations worth visiting. Ascanter Loire ("Scan" to her friends) worked as such a guide herself in a youth, but has now turned this into a bigger business concern, operating out of a building prominently placed near the bridge where she employs a whole roster of guides she hires out to customers, and advertising her business on Chanter Bridge and in widely circulated periodicals. Loire calls her company "Elistar Guides", after an old god of travel, and touts her staff as being the only fully licensed guides in the city, and as the most skilled and knowledgeable guides available.

The first part of that claim is technically true; Loire's guides are licensed, but by a licensing firm that she herself owns, and for which she sets the licensing criteria. The latter part is much more questionable. Loire hires guides at least as much for their physical attractiveness and charisma as for their actual knowledge of the city, and while the dapper uniforms of Loire's guides and the well-kept offices may lend an air of legitimacy and competence, in truth the Elistar Guides personnel are often less competent or useful than many of the cheaper guides that can be hired on the streets. Still, Loire's business is growing, to the dismay of other working guides who argue—not without justification—that she's putting style over substance and unfairly hurting the livelihoods of people who can provide a much better service but don't have the money to promote themselves as she does. Still, to be fair, there are two real advantages to hiring a guide from Loire's company. You may not be getting a guide as good as the best of the street guides, but you're guaranteed to get one better than the worst; despite the guides' attempts to police their ranks, there are charlatans who pose as guides and rob or swindle their customers or direct them to confederates who do so. The personnel of Elistar Guides may not really be the best of the best, but at least she screens and monitors them enough to weed out actual conmen. Second, Elistar Guides offers services that most of the street guides do not; most of her "guides" also engage in the soi-disant oldest profession, though this is something Loire doesn't openly advertise.

Ascanter Loire is a slightly pudgy woman with a broad nose, small eyes, and curly brown hair, her dile ancestry evident in the slight bluish cast to her skin and her faint scent of ozone. While she has let herself go somewhat since her days of working as a guide, she enjoys engages in various sports in her free time, and is stronger and more agile than she looks. She tends to speak in long, rambling sentences, wetting her lips frequently. On the job, Loire dresses in the same beige uniform as her employees, though with a slightly taller hat; off the job she favors loose cotton blouses and long skirts.