Chapter Twenty-One - In the loudest storm, we can be so proud

A couple of minutes later, we were back in our bedroom, fixing our clothes. Mostly replacing soaked lower body wear, but my shirt had picked up a bit of blood splatter and needed replacing, too.

“Now, what should we kill today?” Geri asked.

“How about we do something more constructive?” Samantha asked.

“What are you thinking about?” Livia asked.

“That guild hall quest. If this is like any book I’ve read, the guild will become the most important building in the city for adventurers in the future. The primary hub to get quests, to register and be rated, get member cards and so on,” Samantha explained.

“Oh, come on,” I exclaimed. “You not only look like me, you read the same kinds of books, too?”

“Of course! I have devoted my life to be a perfect copy, making sure to develop no personality of my own,” she answered, trying to sound miffed. I knew that tone; I used it myself.

“Good,” I replied. “If I’m ever assassinated, you have to take over and make sure Livia’s getting her daily orgasm.”

“Um, guild hall, guys?” Livia said.

“Fine, guild hall first, being assassinated second,” I said. “I think it’s a great idea. And not just that, we do have the means to do it.”

“Which means?” Geri asked.

“Livia and your dad.”

“What’s dad got to do with it? He ain’t no player, is he?”

“No, but he’s got more brains than we four together. Bad in a zombie attack, good for organising things.”

“But he doesn’t know anything about players and powers and that stuff. How would that work?”

“He watched us fight those goblins. And you know what his reaction was? He wished us ‘good hunting’ when we went after the troll.”

“What exactly did he see there?”

“Me transforming and ripping those little buggers into very little pieces with my claws while Livia threw magic at another and Samantha decapitated the last one. Although he would have missed half of it if he blinked.”

“Should be enough so we can treat him as an ally. Don’t you think?” Samantha asked.

“Fits the description on the rule page, but…my dad!”

“And? We don’t want him to run the show, just to organise it.”

Geri nodded, still not fully convinced.

“We’ll keep him safe, I promise,” Livia said.

“So you in with it?” I asked Livia. “It’s your money, and I get the feeling we need a good chunk. A building central to the city, or something like that?”

She nodded. “That was my understanding, too. But there’s one tiny issue.”

“And that is?”

“I don’t have that kind of coin personally. A couple thousand Pounds won’t cut it.”

“Oh…”

“But that doesn’t mean the org can’t afford it. I just need you to clear it with my mom.”

“Good. Wait! Did you say you need me to clear it with your mom?”

“Exactly. She trusts you not to spend the money on drugs.” She already had her phone in hand and was dialling. Why do we still call it dialling when we select from our contact lists?

🙚⚜🙘

The phone only rang twice, then it connected, and Elisa’s tanned face in front of a gorgeous blue sky showed up. She wore big sunglasses that looked like they had survived from the seventies, and her shoulders were bare. Knowing her, I suspected the same to hold for what was out of frame. “Hi, mom!” Livia said with a wide smile. She had the phone angled so the camera only showed herself.

“Hi, darling. How’s your day? Good weather up there in North-Rainland Central?”

“Um, the weather’s outside. I’m not…” She raised her hand to her face, faux-scratching her nose. I also grinned wide as I noticed what that brought into the picture, front and centre.

“Oh my goodness! Did she actually manage to ask you already? Ernest, Ernest, Jane has asked her!” Elisa sat up straighter, waving to her side maniacally.

As Ernest got into the picture, Elisa extended her arm to get him into frame. And her bosom. Well, I could ignore that. I also snuggled up to Livia and said, “Hi, future in-laws,” while waving.

“Congratulations, you two,” he said, way calmer than his wife. But then, I had asked him for advice about the ring, so he had some forewarning. “When’s the wedding? Or did we miss that already?”

“No, Dad, we haven’t yet set a date. It has been a bit busy lately. And that’s why Livia’s calling you, to be honest.”

“Jane has a business idea, and I think we should do it.”

“Or, in other words, she wants me to beg you for money.”

“Since when do you beg, miss ‘remind me I own your parents some old rent’?”

“I think I’ll start today. Please!” I folded my hands and tried to make those adorable fawn eyes. From the preview image on the phone, I looked like a frog.

“Hold your horses, girls,” Elisa interrupted us. “What’s this about, and how much do you need?”

I relaxed. Asking how much was Elisa’s way of saying yes. “It’s basically a community centre. Nothing big, just a desk and a back office. There are plenty of people in town in a couple of communities that want to get in touch with each other, in person, not just online. It’s not a big business opportunity, as Livia said, but I think we can run it so it at least covers its cost if we don’t splurge on it. The only issue is that we need to buy or rent a place halfway central to the city.”

Elisa looked at me, and I felt like a fly under a microscope. I had given her no information whatsoever. I knew that, she knew that, and she knew that I knew. Now the question was, what she would make of it.

That’s when Samantha leaned into the picture. “Mrs Hameswood? I think it’s a great idea, if that helps?”

“Miss O’Brian? How surprising. I guess you’re not there with the blessing of your father? I remember the last time we talked, he told me in no uncertain terms he would bring me down if I ever got in the same room as you.”

“Oh, hell no. He’d be livid if he knew anything about what we did yesterday. Or today…” Samantha sounded outright shocked at that thought. “He’d have to lock me away for a long time, and not the ‘go to your room kind’.” She winked, although there was a wavering in her voice I couldn’t place.

A small smile flickered over Elisa’s lips. “Well, in that case, Livia you remember that old esoteric store at Clayton Square? Upstairs, near the gym?”

“I think so…that one I said smelled like grave dirt when I was seven?”

“Exactly. It closed a decade ago and the window front went to another store. But everything behind that is still there. It is not very big, but it has two small back rooms, as well as access to the upper deck. Would that work for you?”

“Yes, I think that would be great. We don’t need that window front anyway, and the outside door would be a great boon.”

“Good, then Jane can have it. Ernest, be a dear and call Jimmy. Jane needs a business licence, bank account and a hundred k to get it all rolling. And get her a contact at the HR provider and the cleaning company we use. The official ones, Jane?”

“Um, yes. For now.” No, I didn’t need crime support services, thank you very much.

“Good. Have you met Greg?”

I nodded.

“Ask him if you need anything done hush-hush. He knows his shit.”

“That I’m sure of,” I said. “I already told Livia she’s underpaying him and Bill, and I don’t even know what they earn.”

That made her laugh. “You’re not wrong. How we pay them is outright criminal.”

We joined in with their laughter. Nice pun.

After a couple more niceties, and a promise to call more often, we ended the call.

🙚⚜🙘

“Congratulations, Jane. You now officially have more money in the bank than I do,” Livia said afterwards.

“Really? I find that hard to believe. Also, it’s not mine; it’s in that business account.”

“Money. I have maybe 10k left in cash; the rest is partial ownership in a couple of businesses.”

“That’s still more than I ever owned in my life.”

“Which is why mom gave you the money. She knows you’re used to being stingy out of necessity.”

My phone started pinging with notifications at that point. As it rarely pinged even once, I picked it up and looked at them. “Your dad’s fast,” I remarked. “That’s the bank details, account, pin, account balance, then the transfer of a retail store licence, some company registration, and a bunch of contact details. That’s eerie. When I got my personal bank account, it took me 6 weeks of paperwork and fighting red tape.”

“It’s way easier to create a sub-account,” Sam piped in. “The account holder already is identified, and the bank doesn’t give a damn about who you give account access as long as they can pin it on you. Let me guess, you’re technically the managing director of an existing LLC, aren’t you.”

I looked through the paperwork on my small screen and found the information. “Yoana YiLong Trading Company LLC, established five years ago. And it lists me as owner and director…”

“YiLong?” Geri asked.

“Yeah, that’s my name. Part of it, anyway. Yoana Asterfield-YiLong, if you ever need the full thing.”

“Someone planned ahead,” Samantha said. They sure did. “Then let’s check out that store of yours,” she suggested.

“What for?” Geri asked. “We’ll only see a locked door. Not very interesting.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, scrolling through the myriad messages I got. “Here it is. A lock code and one for the alarm system. I think that’ll get us in.”

🙚⚜🙘

The store was close enough to walk to, so we did just that. It wasn’t a quick over-the-road, but what’s half an hour when you’re young and have supernatural endurance? The weather was nice enough, too, even a bit warmer than usual, getting up in the upper half of the twenties.

We entered the shopping centre through a normal entrance, admiring the vaulted glass ceiling. The centre had seen better days, but it was far from run down. That changed as we made our way up to the upper storey. Away from the glass dome, the corridors were depressing and not very inviting. Yet there were stores that thrived in such an environment, just outside of the open view one had in the main part.

There was a Thai massage parlour whose proprietor bowed to Livia, hinting at more going on in the backrooms, what amounted to a gambling den in these parts of the world, and an adult store. The latter was what had taken over the window front of the old esoteric store I now owned. It made it look larger on the outside than it really was, but otherwise, I couldn’t see a good reason for a store that couldn’t put 90% of its wares into the window to want more windows. Maybe they just wanted that corner of the mall not to look deserted?

But in between those windows, set back half a step because the fake windows had been put up in front of the real ones, was an old-fashioned wood and glass door with a deceptively simple-looking keypad. It had the simplicity and clear lines typical for expensive tech that didn’t need to impress with cheap plastic imitations of quality. It felt cool under my fingers, a sign of thick metal. I tapped in the code from memory, the date and time I had first met Livia. Either that lock was networked, or the Hameswoods had planned way more things ahead than we suspected.

The lock opened with a nearly inaudible click. I pushed the handle and the door opened easily, the hinges being well-oiled. Behind it, the store was dark but for an angrily blinking alarm panel. I stepped up to it and entered another code, this one with no relation to me, but it also was just four digits and easy to remember—2580. The panel turned green as expected. Next to it, I could see a light switch, so I toggled that one and after a series of blinks, the overhead lights went on. Mental note, get someone to put LED lights in.

🙚⚜🙘

The shop was indeed not very big, maybe five metres wide and eight deep. It still held a couple of racks, randomly standing around, with some items piled onto them. I could feel a faint whiff of old magic in the air, but it had a distinctly decayed feel to it, like a wilted flower. In the back of the store, behind a wooden counter with an ancient cash register on it, was a door.

“Why do people always leave their trash behind?” Samantha said as she walked around. “Really, would it have killed them to dump this stuff?”

I ignored her and opened the back door. It led to a narrow corridor that was devoid of clutter. To the right, there were a tiny kitchen, more like a closet with a sink, and a bathroom, barely larger than the kitchen. On the left side, there were two office rooms, both not square as they ended at the slanted outside wall. One held a couple of boxes, labelled in Chinese characters, that looked like they hadn’t been opened since the factory taped them close. The other held a desk with a phone and a lone CRT monitor, its cables missing. Two filing cabinets stood open and empty.

I continued to the door at the other end of the corridor. It led into a stairwell; a wire door blocked the downward direction, but the upstairs one was open. To my left was a heavy steel door with another electronic lock and an alarm system panel beside it. This would lead outside; I could check that later. For now I was interested in the upstairs.

The stairs were sturdy and relatively wide. From the looks of it, this stairwell once had belonged to a different building than the store. When the mall was installed, those buildings had been merged, as was often the case. There was only one more floor above, but the landing held two doors. One was directly above the corridor door below, so I checked that one first.

To my surprise, it led into a single big room. It looked like it had the same footprint as the store and its backrooms together. The ceiling was slanted at the edges, as if those had been cut off, so this was the top floor. At the other end of the room, a round window gave me a view of the mall’s dome. Otherwise, the room was empty. Large but empty.

Next, I checked the other door, expecting it to be locked off as it veered off the store’s footprint. But to my surprise, it was open. Behind it was another corridor, maybe ten yards long, with foggy windows on the right side and a number of doors on the left. It didn’t match the store side; instead, it looked like it had been abandoned in the fifties.

I checked the first door and found an empty room behind it, maybe three by five metres. The far wall was slightly slanted and held another window nearly blind from age and dust. The next two doors led to identical rooms, but the last one gave me access to a corner room with windows on two sides and a bathroom in extension of the corridor. But unlike the other rooms, this one wasn’t completely empty.

In its centre stood a desk, a white and modern electrically raisable one. It was accompanied by a very nice-looking office chair, and on top sat a pair of oversized sleek monitors. They were cabled in, and following the cables I found a computer hanging in a mounting bracket from under the desk.

There also were a keyboard and a mouse, but nothing else on it—aside from a Post-it note on one of the monitors that read: “Plug in to establish guild—𝛼.”

Now, that answered a couple of questions. First, how to actually establish a guild. I had suspected players had something in their menu for it, which would be an issue for us unless we wanted to delegate to Samantha or Geri. Second, it meant that this wing either belonged to the store or was added to it by the system. In any case, it was mine, and I could use it. Third, it told me what I would do next.

Plugging this in was easy, the whole desk had been wired up as a unit already, and the plug lay conveniently next to a wall outlet. I pushed it in and flipped the switch. When I turned around, the Post-it was gone, and both monitors showed a picture. The left one showed several CCTV feeds from inside the store, leaving no corner invisible to me. I was pretty sure I had not missed any cameras while exploring, so this must be a system feature. The right one held a more traditional desktop, although I didn’t recognise the operating system.

It could be some Linux with a customised theme, but I somehow doubted this. Even a well-tuned Linux system would be hard-pressed to boot up fully in the second it had taken me to turn around after plugging it in.

There was one icon on the desktop that begged for my attention by pulsing, “Guild Settings”, so I clicked it. The mouse moved buttery smooth, and the cursor followed my will as if it were reading my intentions instead of my movements. Which, thinking about it, wasn’t that unlikely.

Without delay, a window showed. It was kept simple, with no graphical elements, just labels and entry fields. The first one, and the one where a blinking cursor sat, was labelled “Guild Name”. A smaller text below stated, “Note that in order to establish an adventurers’ guild, the name must be generic and must include the name of the area it covers or the name of a place that dominates the area. Personal guilds can be named freely.”

I typed in “Greater Liverpool Adventurers Guild”. A green checkbox and a “Submit” button showed up next to the name when I stopped typing. Hovering over the checkbox informed me that it was a valid adventurers’ guild name, So I pressed submit.

The next couple of fields, which had been greyed out before, opened up. It asked me for the guild offices, with the store’s address prefilled, about guild officers, again suggesting my group members, and had me confirm it was an open guild.

In the next step, I had to create a guild charter. For this, I could select guild rules from a list or type in my own. The list of predefined rules wasn’t short, but I went through it one by one, selecting the rules I liked, anyway. Many of them were marked as only available for private guilds, like joining requirements, so I simply skipped those.

In the end, I selected what most people would have. Things like “No fighting on guild premises” and “No gender discrimination” weren’t really worth discussing. I opted for the second lowest guild tax of 2% for now, but I also took the “Optional welfare fund, 3%”, a pool that would pay out to the relatives of dead adventurers. I set the rate higher than the guild tax on purpose to emphasise that the guild was about support, not about making a guild master (me) rich.

There were a couple of discounts I just couldn’t ignore. I set the joinup fee to free for people under 21, and the guild tax to zero for minors, as well as a guild tax reduction to 1.5% for members in relationships not recognised by the law. Or, in other words, for harems like the one I was in. I also made sure those were recognised by the welfare fund.

I didn’t have many options in the field of punishing people for unwanted behaviour off-premise, but I disabled guild protections for members committing rape, statutory rape or murder of non-player humans. This meant anyone could post bounties on those.

At the very end of the list was the only rule that had been pre-selected, and I took extra care to leave it there. It enabled monsters to join the guild at the discretion of guild officers and enjoy the same protections as player members.

This concluded the initial setup but there were other icons on the desktop I needed to look into. In the opening hours app, I selected “by appointment” for now. We didn’t have staff yet to have regular hours. This hopefully would change soon, as I requested applicants in the “NPC HR” app. Not having to staff the guild hall with real people was not something I had expected, but it was too nice a feature to ignore. There was a warning about NPCs having lower productivity than people, but at the moment, I had no good alternative anyway.

Then I leaned back and watched the camera feed. How long had I been at this? It felt like hours, but then the others would have looked for me, wouldn’t they have? Or had they, and I hadn’t noticed them come in? It was a possibility. At least I didn’t have to worry about where they were, as I could see them cleaning up the store room.

I contemplated joining them when a notification popped up on the screen. “NPC applicant incoming. ETA 4:59”. The seconds ticked down steadily. Ok, that made the decision for me; I needed to be downstairs to handle that. The others would have no idea what to do.

When I stood up, the computer beeped at me angrily and flashed three more icons. With a sigh, I sat down to handle those quickly. The first one was titled “Guild Hall”. Inside it there was a floor plan of the shop, various rooms labelled with different tags. It seems the whole hallway off the side was tagged “guild officers only”, with my room being restricted to the guild master. Now that would explain why I had been left alone in here.

Interestingly, there was an “expand” button next to the door blocking the staircase, but I left that one alone, too. More pressing were three icons to the side the app wanted me to place on the map. The first one was “main entrance”, which I dragged to the inside door. The second was a “registration desk”; it went to the counter in the store room. I placed the “quest board” on an open wall in the same room.

On the camera feed I could see my friends (partners? Lovers?) scramble as a physical pinboard plopped into existence there. It was a bit funny, to be honest.

With that app being happy, I moved to the next one. I had ignored “Guild Titles” before, but it seemed I needed to at least confirm some things in there. Opening it, it presented what I had expected; it gave me a way to assign various titles, honorary and job role based, to people. But it also had some necessary entries, like the one for the guild master and various levels of guild officers.

They had predefined lists of commonly used titles but also allowed free text entry. I considered making myself the “guild mistress” for a moment, but I couldn’t come up with matching titles for officers. Then I had an idea—my partners weren’t some strangers, so why treat them like subordinates? They could be mistresses, too. Of course, there was a difference, but I considered myself primus inter pares[^cf2] at worst. And that’s where I took the titles “mistress prima” and “mistress secunda” from.

For the members, I decided to stay with Latin, looking it up on my phone. People would have the free choice between socius, socia and socium. All of them meant “member”, just in the male, female and neuter forms. I wouldn’t force any gendered form upon people, so allowing only one of those wasn’t an option for me. That there was no fourth form, one to reflect people using “they” instead of “it” as their pronoun, couldn’t be helped.

The last app had only a single button in it, “Open Guild”. I left that for the moment; the time until the arrival of the first applicant had run down to only thirty seconds. Let’s staff up first.