Chapter 7: Guilds and Leagues
It took three weeks for the Julianne to reach her destination, which sounded slightly slow until Henri remembered that the Eadberht System was located some 260 light years away from the Red-Jericho System. Half-way across the "civilized" portions of the galaxy.
With modern FTL technology it normally took 2-3 days to cross the distance between solar systems. The distance between each neighboring star in the galaxy was an average of 4-5 light years.
The Warp drives commonly available on the open market could usually make such a trip in seven days. Military warp drives, and the drives used by certain elite organizations that operated under the canopy of the heroes league could make the journey in three to 1-2 days.
The meaning being that with the planar-conversion drives of the Julianne, Henri and Walder were able to make to a journey of roughly two years in less than a month.
Jules handled most of the piloting, and after Walder had finished preparing the things he was going to need before he reached his destination, Walder had spent most of his time, meditating, exercising, running through simulations in the ship's training room, and playing video games with his wife.
In other words, that last leg of the trip was fairly relaxed.
"Arriving at Olamide III, Captain." said Jules. The AI's soothing voice echoed out from the neural implant that Walder had installed into his own skull shortly before he created the AI. The implant being one of the first things he'd ever built using knowledge from his former-life.
Walder woke up, and waiting a few minutes before opening his eyes. Interfacing with his implant to check the status of the ship and its myriad systems.
When he finally opened his eyes, the first thing Walder saw was a dark haired, pale skinned women, who slept in a state of undress, having pulled his arm around her along with king's share of the comforter.
Walder wasn't entirely sure where he and his "wife" were going with this fake(?) marriage of theirs. On the one hand, the relationship had outlived its purpose.
Their families were able to cement their contract, and the youths had been able to use the circumstances to make their escape.
At this point, the two youths were so far out of the reach of either their families, that splitting up and doing their own things would be perfectly acceptable. So long as they were discrete it was unlikely that news of anything they did out here would ever make it back to either of their homes.
On the other hand, being alone in an unfamiliar part of the galaxy was a scary thing, and it wasn't like either he or Henri hated the other.
To give things some semblance of clarity in his head, he decided to define them as close friends who occasionally found their way into each other's beds. It made things sound a little more casual than they were, but it also kept away the worrying sense of pressure that would come with placing them in a more intimate, more committed bracket.
Walder gently extricated his arm from beneath his wife's body and did his best not to stare as he covered her back up with the comforter.
He got out of bed, and went to take a shower, letting the multiple nozzles that were installed in the ceiling, floor, and walls use hot, pulsing, water to beat him into a shape that more closely resembled someone who was actually ready to face the day.
He got dressed. Wearing a t-shirt with a smiley face on it, black jeans, light-leather breaches that were meant to go over the jeans, and a jacket he'd modified to serve as armor.
A window popped up in Walder's view.
The implant in his head created an AR(Alternate reality) feed, that basically served as a computer system in his head, though using it like a full computer for too long would leave Walder with headaches.
The pop-up window was a message from the spaceport of the Odilia city, a major city on one of the eight continents of Olamide.
Jules and Walder had initially decided that this would be the best place for them to land in because it had the biggest Heroes Guild HQ.
It seemed that Odilia was asking the Julianne to identify herself. Walder had thought he'd that already, but it seems that they wanted a little more information.
After reviewing what they wanted, Walder told Jules to give the Odilia spaceport what they'd asked for.
Fortunately, whatever had gotten their hackles up was resolved by the time the Julianne actually appeared above Odilia's skyline.
The spaceport directed the ship to a dock and within two hours Walder set foot on Olamide for the first time.
Craning his neck upwards and taking in the alien sky, Walder took a deep breath and filled his lungs with the air of a foreign world feeling the childish sense of wonder that had followed him since the earliest years of his first life.
After checking in with the spaceport administration, Walder wandered out onto the streets that abutted the spaceport, and used a public terminal to hail a taxi.
An automated car appeared ten minutes later to take him to the Heroes Guild Headquarters. Walder spent the car ride on his phone checking his Odilia city news feed.
After wrapping up his preparations for his new career, Walder had spent the rest of his time on the ship trying to familiarize himself with, and get up to date with, his new domicile. He continued to do so now, the habit of staying aware of what was happening in his surroundings was deeply ingrained in him after years of being the leader of a resistance group.
The ride ended, and Walder dismounted from the car, the cherry voice of the car's AI wishing him a nice day while also informing him that the cost of the ride had been deducted from his account.
Walder stood on the sidewalk outside the Heroes Guild HQ. The building was in the business district which meant that the streets were clean with most of the litter having been removed by janitorial droids.
Heroes Guild HQ was this strange mixture of government utilitarianism and capitalistic art-deco gravitas. The building was this single massive tower of shining steel and glass. Every few floors a segment of the building would be turned into a shifted cube, as if the structure was secretly just a giant puzzle box, whose owner had discarded it for ant-like humans to build a nest inside of it.
Walder walked inside the building and found that the guilds inner-confines were at least eighty percent shopping mall. There were clothing stores, music stores, furniture stores, books stores, and pharmacies. There were also a few shops that sold weaponry, armor, and hero tech but for the most part one got the sense that the first floor of the Heroes Guild was a place meant for the general public.
The second floor felt a little more administrative.
The department of motor vehicles hadn't really been a thing since the prevalence and safety of self-driving cars, and the fact that AI driven car services had significantly reduced the rate of people actually buying cars, lowered the priority the government gave the handling of automobile ownership.
The administration of aeronautics and stellar vehicles ended up becoming the new DMV. In other words, being on the second floor of the heroes guild was a little like being in AASV.
There were a lot of long lines and queues, with many of those lines and queues existing solely for the sake of of allowing the people in line to get into the line that they actually needed to be.
Most of the people at the queue windows and desks were holographic AI constructs. The holographic clerks were programmed with enough cheeriness to off-balance the morose mood emanating off of the folk who were standing in line.
Playing across the entire floor were scenes of real people who looked like they'd rather be anywhere but where they were standing having to deal with fake people who acted like they were about five seconds away from bursting into song.
The few real clerks and bureaucrats within the floor were usually hidden behind a maze of ropes and cubicle walls. They were the people that Walder needed to see because there was still a human bias about certain things requiring biological eyes to be properly confirmed.
Fortunately for Walder, his experience on the second floor was relatively painless. He'd done most of the more tedious, less important, paperwork online. He'd also made use of his mother's connections to get around some troublesome red tape.
In the end, he only had to stay on the second floor for about three hours, after which he could head up to the third floor to get his guild badge, and download the guild app. The third floor was essentially just a buffer between the lower parts of the guild and the rest of the building.
Most people didn't know it, but most Heroes Guild HQs were basically just office space and refrigerated server rooms. Most of the people inside a heroes guild were either bureaucrats or members of the public.
The actual guildsmen would only show their faces in the buildings on the rarest of occasions. Such as the first time a guildsman entered an official heroes guild building to prove that they were indeed an actual sentient being and not just a bunch of 1s and 0s floating on the net. As well as to get or replaces their guild badge which contained the guilds propriety web application and user login information.
To understand why this was so, it was necessary to know that there was an unbreakable connection between the guild and the heroes league, and despite reportedly being outside the government and lacking official authority, the heroes league was the true power behind the throne for countless nations within the galaxy.
The heroes guild was, at its core, an interstellar employment agency and trade group. They served as the intermediary for countless companies and clients. They employed countless freelancer "guildsmen" throughout the galaxy. Offering work in various forms, dabbling in everything from construction work, to production contracts, to delivery services, to item retrieval, to security, to threat elimination.
The rule of thumb was, that the more in danger you were while doing the work, the better paid you were likely to be, and the stronger you had to be if you wanted to have any chance of living to see any of that money.
Despite being a private organization, the guild was the oil that made the Msaran Galactic Government run smoothly as a whole, and its backer the heroes league had a lot to do with why that was the case.
The Heroes League was the result of the convergent evolution of several heroic orders and superhuman factions that arose on the myriad worlds that would eventually join to become the united Msaran Interstellar Government.
On paper they existed for the sole purpose of reducing through the threats that were brought by the uncivilized world of the galactic frontier, and extra dimensional entities from beyond the native universe. In practice they were a superpowered oligarchy made up of the most powerful beings in the entire galaxy.
The League used the guild in the same way generals used infantry soldiers. Elite guildsmen were the foot soldiers and first responders of the league. Helping the league pacify smaller, more isolated threats so they could focus on the bigger picture.
Of course none of this had anything to do with Walder. His interest in the guild began and ended with the fact that joining the guild meant that he could now finally be the humble hunter he'd always wanted to be.
He could live the simple life he'd found himself yearning for when his fights against the voracious darkness that had all but destroyed his former universe, had somehow led him into the realm of politics, and verbal battles within the houses of senate.
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