Also check Doom - if it's been active, and bandage, bolt and arrow prices are in the double digits (especially if they are in the 30+ range), you can make back the cost of buying a gold skull and then some by cutting up cloth for bandages (especially if you have a bod runner tailor with obscene cloth from cycling bods), farming arrows off centaurs (or bolts off meer captains - or both off changelings), hopping over to the gauntlet, and selling down the price of those 3 consumables at Nyx. The people doing the Gauntlet will thank you for it as well (Some people still want to have non-faction ornys, after all). A typical run allows you to take 20k items over to sell - 4k in the backpack, 16k in a ridden beetle. IF you can secure the beach long enough to get 2 packies over, that would be another 32k, but only worth the effort if the doom prices are 80+.
Cross over, run to nyx (keeping any of the pack animals alive is secondary - you just need to make sure to loot the packy corpses and drop the contents on the ground to come back for them), and start selling 500 at a time. Assuming that the items start selling back at 30 each, 20k works out to a minimum of 410k if you sell just 1 item, about 450k if you sell 7k of two items each, 6k of the other. If the prices are higher, profits get even greater.
And, don't worry about hauling the gold out - if you are overweight when you sell, the gold gets sent to your bank as a check - of course, you'll need to have room in your bank for about 40 checks to land there (100 checks if you manage to get a beetle & 2 packys in).