Chapter 30: Chapter 30

Chapter 30

<Would you like to form a guild?>

<Y | N>

Another complication. 

I immediately hit no on the prompt. 

It was impossible to be certain of how the guild screen functioned, god forbid if there was some sort of roster. If the leaderboard in the adaptive dungeon was any indication, it probably wouldn’t show my name, but there was a solid chance it would list me with question marks. 

Which would look preternaturally suspicious. The only reason I’d gotten away with it in the dungeon was because Brett wasn’t all that interested, and it only listed two members, which if he had been paying attention, he would likely assume was him and Audrey. 

Unfortunately, I had only just dismissed the prompt when I heard Kinsley exclaim. “Hell yes, I want to form a guild.” 

“Invite us, then,” Ellison said, packing his notebook back into his backpack. 

“Again with the notes, Ellison?” I asked.

“Yeah, I know. Just going to read over them one more time, and they’re gone.” 

I held out my hand, and he scowled but handed me the notebook. I ripped the offending pages out and handed him the notebook. Giving Kinsley an overly civil smile, I proceeded to shred the paper slowly. To her dubious credit, she seemed to realize her mistake. 

“Uh, uh, maybe we should hold off on the guild until we have a better idea of what we’re doing.” Kinsley backed towards her doorway. 

“On the contrary.” My mother came up behind Kinsley and put a hand on her shoulder. “It would be good to have us all grouped together and to at least test what the screen is capable of. The more we learn about the system, the more we’ll be able to use it. 

I stared at Iris, my last hope, begging her to help me. 

“I want to be in Kinsley’s guild!” My sister signed.

“Iris wants to be in your guild,” I translated, my voice dead. Now I had to come up with a legitimate sounding reason I couldn’t join, shining an unnecessary spotlight directly on me. The exact situation I’d been trying to avoid. 

“Okay then,” Kinsley said, sending me a silent apology. 

<Kinsley has invited you to join the Merchant’s Guild as a founding member>

<Would you like to join the Merchant’s Guild?>

<Y | N>

But there was a dropdown menu below the prompt that caught my eye. 

<Feat Option: Select Identity>

1. User: ???, Class: ???, LVL: ???

2. User: Matt, Class: NPC, LVL: N/A

Huh. Was that from <Double-Blind> or something else? It could possibly be <Emulation> as it promised a unique interaction with the perk. That opened many doors for me, now that I thought about it. I had no idea if there was a cap on the number of guilds you could join, but if there was, I would put money on the likelihood that those limitations no longer applied to me. 

Kinsley shifted back and forth nervously. “Uh, Matt might join us later, I think he wants to leave flexibility in case there’s an opportunity at the open forum.” 

Better. But your delivery and tone are way off.

Ellison, previously inspecting the new screen, had stopped to watch us, his expression clearly suspicious. That was nothing new. I was likely more open with my siblings than most older brothers, but I kept them out of the loop fairly often. Especially when it came to business. 

I shook my head. “Nah. Mom’s right. Any information we have could help us.” 

Kinsley’s eyes widened to saucer size. “But—“ 

I selected the second option. Text began to scroll. 

<You have joined The Merchant’s Guild>

<Guild Register:>

<User: Kinsley, Class: Merchant, LVL: 4>

<User: Gwendoline, Class: NPC, LVL: N/A> 

<User: Ellison, Class: NPC, LVL: N/A> 

<User: Iris, Class: NPC, LVL: N/A> 

<User: Matt, Class: NPC, LVL: N/A>

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Ellison snorted, then started laughing. 

”What’s so funny” Iris signed. 

“Sorry. The NPC thing.” He glanced over his shoulder at mom and lowered his voice. “And the idea of mom being in a guild with us. It’s kind of lame.” 

Iris put a hand to her mouth. 

Kinsley was glancing back and forth between me and what, I assumed, was an invisible screen, her mouth turned downward in clear confusion. “Huh. It looks like I can share a quest. But I’m not sure what the benefit would be. It mainly awards XP.” 

“Might as well try it.” Mom shrugged. 

Everyone got a modified version of the <The Cradle of Civilization> quest. The primary difference was that <SELVE (L)> replaced <EXP GAIN (L)> and none of the niche rewards, such as my <Progression towards Vocation ???> were present. That made me wonder what the vocations were, and whether civilians were capable of holding them. It didn’t make sense that they couldn’t, really, they seemed overly dependent on Users as it was. 

“Accept the quest if you want. Mom, get with Kinsley to find out what she needs for the marketplace. If we can’t get the online orders working through her contracts, none of this matters.” 

“On it.” Mom smiled. Her crow’s feet still stood out on her sweat-sheened skin, but there was no question she looked better than before. It was only a question of how long it would last. “Everyone else, let’s call it for now.” 

Then something happened I didn’t expect. Iris stood from her seat and bee-lined over to Kinsley. She started to sign, then stopped out of frustration. With a sigh, I started making my way over to translate. 

“Thank you for helping us,” Iris said aloud. 

I stopped. In my peripheral, I saw Ellison and Mom’s heads turn sharply. It wasn’t unprecedented. At Iris’s own request, I’d spent hundreds of hours working with her, maybe thousands, to help her with her inflection. I’d tried to tell her that it didn’t matter that anyone who cared or looked down on her wasn’t worth talking to anyway, but Iris was determined. As such, her speaking voice was excellent. It just… wasn’t perfect. Sporadically the monotone still came through.

And kids are cruel. 

I think what broke Iris wasn’t so much that they made fun of her voice—though they did—more that it felt, to her, like all her effort and time spent was wasted. She almost exclusively signed now, even around us. 

Iris was visibly nervous, shaking some, as she took Kinsley’s hand. “I don’t know many girls my age, so, maybe… we can hang out sometime?” 

Kinsley’s eyes flitted to me, and I knew she was thinking about our conversation earlier that evening. I gave her a minute shrug. Iris did this, from time to time. Imprinted on someone because she held them on a pedestal in her mind, overcommitted to friendships that had a tendency of not panning out.

Up to you.

Iris, oversensitive as she was, picked up on Kinsley’s hesitation immediately and let her hand drop. “Sorry—“

Kinsley grabbed Iris’s hand as it fell and gave her a horrifically awkward handshake. Still, everyone else in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

“Everyone my age hates me, so, yeah, it would be nice.” Kinsley glared at me. “Plus, the only person I’ve had to talk to over the last few days is him.” 

“Oof,” Ellison said. I ruffled his hair mercilessly. 

/////

I had more than a few health potions, my new crossbow, and a much more rounded skill set after the third floor. Still, as much as I wanted to go home and sleep, I needed to spend some time experimenting with what I could do before I could reasonably go back to the dungeon. I climbed a fire-escape on the community center. It was a large enough building that there wasn’t an easy place to look down at it unless you had a telescope. From there, I cast <Probability Spiral> over and over again. It seemed to work best on things that were somewhat old. For instance, there was a newly installed stop-sign at the end of the street that I couldn’t do anything to topple, no matter how much I visualized it falling over. 

However, when I shifted my focus to the bolts that held the stop-sign itself, I found much greater success. I imagined them loosening over time, and one after another, they popped off until the sign itself hung downward. Gravity was my friend, and targeting small objects—or rather, specific parts of larger objects—seemed to be my best bet. 

Leg-muscles, or any supporting limb in the case of non-humans, were a solid target. I knew that much from experience, but I was finally starting to understand why. 

I used <Suggestion> on many people who passed below, with the—admittedly thin—justification that I was also using the attached emotion to calm them. Some were susceptible, some weren’t. This led me to an interesting discovery. 

There was a balding man who, judging from the wide and creatively utilized applications of gendered slurs, was angry at his girlfriend who lived in the apartment across from my rooftop. He yelled for her to come out, and when she didn’t, he had, apparently, decided to take out said anger on her car with a tire iron. I sent a command, suggesting he target the driver’s side mirror. He did. Then I pointed out how shiny and new the hubcaps looked, and watched, in mild amusement, as he took them off one by one and stomped them. I gave him the idea to use them as frisbees, hurling them up in the air as hard as he could, trying to get one to land on the apartment rooftop. 

He only ignored me twice. Once, when I tried to stop him from prying the hood open, so he could do serious damage—I had to divert him to the trunk instead. And again when the calming emotion I was attaching to the orders finally got through. The effect seemed so strong I wondered if it was cumulative. But once he was completely calm, I could barely even get through to him, even to direct him around a puddle of water on the street rather than through it. 

Smart targets were an issue, and there were some people who were more receptive to images than spoken thoughts, but an overly calm target was unsusceptible as well. 

I was feeling more than a little tapped out after all the repetition, but I wasn’t done. I needed to work on my aim with the crossbow as well. 

/////

After returning from the rooftop, I spent most of the evening working with Audrey. Despite my somewhat contrived fears to the contrary, she had no problem eating store bought meat. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was fresh or not, as long as it was—you guessed it—meat. As I fed her, I used what little was left in my Suggestion reserve to convey survival concepts. What to do if I was knocked unconscious, and so on. I wasn’t entirely sure she would remain summoned if I was unconscious, but better safe than sorry. I communicated what I knew about body language. If I was eventually going to get some sort of tote to carry her around in, I wanted her to be as effective an early warning system as possible. 

At some point, I fell asleep. 

When I entered the dungeon the next day, I was mostly confident, even after I’d pressed the button. I had <Jaded Eye> equipped in the title slot, with the cooldown expended. 

It was only when the elevator had been moving for some time that I realized. 

One of the cages is empty.

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