Lillene
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Chapter 789 - Not Fitting In
🕑 Added 2023-07-10 22:59:35 +0000 UTCTechnically, this chapter happens during the timeskip at the end of 787 … but that would mean delaying showing how Serenity decided to deal with the fighting on A’Atla. This seemed like a better place to put it and it’s only a one-chapter delay so I think it still works. It probably works better for people reading the story in chunks.
Enjoy!
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“Why are you here?” The guard sounded bored; this was a question he asked all the time and he probably expected the same answers from this group as all the others. There were about thirty of them and none of them looked likely to cause problems. That was the point, after all; they needed to be meek to get through here with no one catching on. There were more of them than a normal group and they had the kids as well, but that was unlikely to raise any alarm bells.
Mary smiled and tried to look intimidated. It was surprisingly difficult when she knew the guard was weaker than she was, even without her gun. Despite the fact that he was stationed at a portal that had once been just outside a dungeon, he’d probably never even been in a dungeon after the Tutorial; he was still Tier One and clearly depended on his gear. The gear wasn’t even enchanted!
To be fair, Mary had a slight advantage there. Legion had decided to invest in enchanting supplies on the way back from Asihanya, enough for the few bodies with crafting-focused Paths. Mary wasn’t one of them but she did have one item the guard couldn’t expect her to have: a harness that held her mana-powered gun, hidden away so that it just looked like a strap. It was based on Serenity’s Quick Belt but was far weaker. The only thing it could hold was the one item attuned to it.
Less than a third of Legion even had one of those when they reached Earth, but Mary was one of the lucky ones. They’d gone first to the bodies that intended to go places where showing a gun, even one that looked like a toy and wouldn’t shoot, could get them in trouble. Mary had one of the extras.
“Shopping,” Mary answered. “We heard it was cheaper per person if we opened a portal for a large group, so we figured we could bring the kids, get them a treat.”
The guard let them approach the portal and Mary set it up. Instead of selecting one of the two slightly larger towns the Mayor had permitted, Mary selected New York City. It was locked out, but Legion had Serenity’s authorization to override it.
She’d never expected problems like this in the small town she came from. When she asked for the ability to override lockouts to any city portal, Legion had expected to smuggle families and friends out of oppressive nations, not tiny towns in the middle of nowhere!
Of course, if there were anything nearby, she wouldn’t be using this method.
There was nothing illegal about what the Mayor had done. He wasn’t forcing people to stay in town; they could leave, all they had to do was drive away. He’d limited the portals to the two cheapest locations to “save them the cost of going farther.”
The fact that the dungeon break had destroyed all of the vehicles in town and the aid money they’d been promised hadn’t covered replacing them wasn’t his problem. Quite a few of the wealthier families in town had been able to replace theirs, but Mary’s family was relatively poor; they rented the land they worked and a bad year was enough to put them deep into debt.
There was still enough farm equipment to farm, at least for now, and you could always use the portal to get to a slightly larger town if you could somehow scrape up the Etherium. Of course, once you got there you’d only have what you had on your back, so the Mayor wasn’t worried about people leaving that way. You’d have to be desperate.
Well, desperate or have outside help.
Mary counted and made sure everyone was through before stepping through herself. She was looking forward to delving once again; delving was fun and profitable. It didn’t hurt that she knew she’d made some better gear for herself; she just couldn’t get it until she got back to the body that did the crafting.
Before then, though, she needed to get everyone settled. Six families was a lot of people and they’d need a lot of space, but at least each family had at least one person that could work once they got their feet under them; Legion wouldn’t have to support most of them for all that long.
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“Please state your name for the record.”
Legion seethed a little but managed to mostly conceal it. The cop wouldn’t understand the problem; he’d take it as “Roger” being uncooperative. “Roger Miller.”
“Thank you. Now, please describe what happened. Take as much time as you need.” Maybe he shouldn’t be so hard on her; she really was trying to make this as easy as she could. How should she know that he hated this body’s old name? That he hated the man Roger Miller had been?
That Roger Miller was just as bad as the people who’d experimented on them? That he had to continually fight to not become that man again even though he knew with most of the rest of his bodies that it was the wrong choice?
There was more than one reason Legion hadn’t tried to resume Roger’s life.
Which wasn’t to say that there weren’t dangers in the new life. This wasn’t one he’d ever expected. “I was on my way home … do you want me to start at the dungeon or at the bus stop?”
“If you didn’t notice anything until the bus stop, the bus stop is a good place to begin.” The cop was writing something in her notepad; Legion couldn’t tell what it was.
“The bus stop then. It’s only a few blocks from there to my apartment and I was tired, so I wasn’t paying much attention. I didn’t notice anything until I turned the corner onto Maple; the street light was out, but it’s been out for a few days. I almost bumped into someone; I didn’t get a good look at him, but I could see he was wearing a mask, one of the cloth ones people sometimes wear when they’re not feeling well.” That seemed like an important detail.
“He said something like “Say you’re sorry,” so I apologized for almost running into him and moved to go around. He stepped in my way and told me I apologized for the wrong thing, that I should apologize for invading Earth. He didn’t believe me when I said I’m from Earth and told me to drop all my stuff and strip, that he’d take my stuff since I wouldn’t even say I was sorry.” Legion paused. Should he say something about the other people there? Yeah, probably.
“He wasn’t alone, because someone laughed at that. A couple of people also wearing masks had come over while we talked. I figured that wasn’t a good sign so I said no and tried to go around him again.” Should he … Nah, she didn’t need to know how firmly he’d spoken. “That’s when he shot me. I was lucky I was already moving, it didn’t hit anything important.”
The cop nodded. “I don’t need details on that; I already have the report from the paramedics. What happened after that?”
Legion shrugged. “I punched him. Probably a bit too hard. The other guys ran. Someone called 911; I bet you know everything from there.”
Legion knew a bit more than he said, but none of it seemed important. He’d heard the initial assessment of potentially broken ribs; there was a reason he’d had to wait for a second ambulance despite his own injury. They weren’t about to put two people who’d just fought in the same ambulance together and his injury was painful but superficial.
It was especially superficial since the gun was completely nonmagical; there was nothing to counteract his amplified healing. It was nothing like Serenity’s, but it was still enough that a graze from a bullet wasn’t a long-term problem.
He just had to get through the process and avoid getting in any more trouble.
Legion’s green skin had gotten him into trouble more than once; at least this time it seemed like he’d get out of it with nothing more than a warning to be more careful if he hit people who were lower Tier. It certainly hadn’t helped that “Roger Miller” was darker than most; Legion could understand why he’d been assumed to be an alien.
Understanding it didn’t mean he had to like it. Why couldn’t people accept that some people changed?
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Legion leaned forward and grinned at Kerr. “How would you like to manage the first branch of Earth’s Adventurers’ Guild?”
Kerr blinked once, clearly blindsided. “Earth’s what?”
Legion shrugged. “You know how the Mercenaries’ Guild manages dungeons on many planets?”
Kerr nodded. She was the one who explained it to Legion, after all.
“Well, nothing quite seemed to work for me until I decided to put it all together. We can do the same thing here - get a contract to protect a city or exploit a dungeon, hire people to do it. I can even manage the app development; it’s a pretty simple modification of-” Legion stopped herself at Kerr’s blank look. Kerr barely knew what a smartphone was, she didn’t need to be blasted with the details of app development.
“Anyway, I can definitely get people for the places I can’t be. We’re starting a bit late, but this may actually be the best time. There wasn’t a business model worth using when this whole thing started unless you happened to be lucky enough to own a dungeon. Now? Now they’re trying to get enough people to run through the dungeons to keep them cleared out. Some of them are becoming a liability instead of a product.” Legion was still trying to figure out which ones that was, but the declining prices showed that business was no longer booming.
“What does that have to do with the Mercenaries’ Guild?” Kerr definitely wasn’t following.
Legion tried to gather her scattered train of thought and make the whole plan make sense. She’d been looking at it so much and with so many of her brains that she’d started with the end, not the beginning. “Okay, first, mercenary is a word we can’t really use. It has a lot of baggage that I can explain if you want me to…”
Kerr shook her head. “You’d know better than I would about that.”
Legion nodded. “So, mercenary is out. It’s a good translation for the Guild generally, but if we want to focus on dungeons, Delver and Adventurer are both commonly accepted - delver for the dungeons specifically, adventurer as a more generic title. So it comes down to which we want to be. I’d like to leave things a bit more open, so Adventurer. It’s the better known one anyway, or at least it used to be.”
Kerr nodded; she was following so far.
“The trick was figuring out where to start, and the answer is - we can start in a dozen different places, places where there aren’t enough people going into dungeons or they’re going into the wrong ones. We just have to get the contract or license, depending on how the city is handling it and who actually owns the dungeon. I can’t afford to buy any yet, but that’s the eventual goal - if I own it, I can set a lot of the rules. Prices are coming down, but they’re not where I want them to be yet.”
Legion started to point at the map then realized she’d forgotten to put it on the table. She had hundreds of minds but she still couldn’t remember to do one simple thing. Once the map was where it was supposed to be, she pointed out a group of dungeons that were only a few miles apart from each other.
More importantly, they were all close to Pelham Bay Park. “Aki is willing to set up a headquarters for us, attached to her crafting hall. Her lower dungeon hasn’t been found yet, so we’re going to move the entrance to below the Adventurers’ Guild. We have a huge advantage because we have Aki and Raz; they can talk to the dungeons and let us adjust things if we need to. Serenity can too, if we can get his attention for long enough.”
Land ownership was likely to become a problem. Technically, no one was really entirely certain who owned the land that was created as the planet expanded, and that was the category that most of Aki’s land probably fell into. With that said, it varied from state to state and country to country but the best guesses Legion had in the United States were either the federal government or whoever owned the land that surrounded it; it could depend on exactly how the original ownership papers were drafted, but as long as no one fought it, it wouldn’t be noticed.
In time, Legion expected that to change. Aki should own the land she created; unfortunately, that wasn’t how it worked now and probably wouldn’t be any time soon. It was a long term project and probably not one the Adventurers’ Guild in general would be involved in directly.
All of which meant that she needed a lease from New York City if she wanted to avoid a fight. Fortunately, she already had that figured out; with Lancaster’s help, she’d found the right people, the people who were already happily looking the other way about Aki’s additions.
Unfortunately, she still needed a Guildmaster and it couldn’t be Legion. The anti-invader sentiment was too strong to have someone who didn’t look human as the leader. It was odd but true that an actual offworlder who happened to be human was a better choice. “I can set everything in motion, get the land, get the contracts, contact people … but you know how a Guildhouse is supposed to work.”
“Give me some time to think about it,” Kerr answered.
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Author's Note: At the moment, Legion’s “Adventurers’ Guild” is little more than an idea. She has some pretty large advantages because she is … er, has … a bunch of delvers who are already committed to working with her, but she won’t be the only company in the space; there are already a lot of people trying to make something work.
Her chances are pretty good as these things go … but it may be worth remembering that most start-ups fail. Admittedly, this is a story so I can decide whatever I want, but I haven’t made the final decision yet.
