Spoon in hand, my world slowly came into focus. I was still in the fancy car, but the woman I determined was actually a robot had vanished. It also felt like the car had come to a stop. Other than the spoon, my only object was the black membership card, and I slid it into a pocket. The spoon, on the other hand, was too large. I contemplated ditching it under a seat, but then I figured the sadistic system would punish me for that mistake too, so I just held it awkwardly and waited.
After a few minutes, the door to my right opened. The car was parked in front of a set of concrete stairs bedecked in red carpet. The whole scene was very reminiscent of a red carpet movie premiere, except the building at the top of the stairs was far from a theater. Huge panes of glass towered into the night sky. Long red banners fluttered in the breeze to either side of a gargantuan steel and glass double door. Above the entrance, the words “Hanseatic League” sparkled in metallic gold flake. To either side of the staircase, a whole army of Agent Smiths stood at attention, though now they held weapons—long rifles, glowing pistols, swords radiating light, and all manner of other things I couldn’t identify.
I stood there in awe for a moment, trying to take in not only the building and all the guards but the immense city of skyscrapers all around, when someone finally came jaunting down the steps. He was tall, built kind of like the Agents, but possessed a distinctly human gait that quickly put me at ease.
“Hey! Stephanie, right?” he called, waving from a few stairs up.
I got out of the car, and the door automatically closed behind me before it rolled off down the street.
“Yeah. Uh, where am I?” I called back.
He waved again. “Come on up, I’ll show you around. Welcome to the Hanseatic League. My name is Mike, but most everyone calls me Crunch.”
“Hell of a name, Crunch.” I ascended the steps and let my newfound guide open the door. A proper gentleman.
The inside of the building was downright decadent. Everything was built from steel, glass, gold, and metals I couldn’t identify that shined and danced with light. The lights themselves were huge chandeliers suspended from a ceiling that had to be at least twelve stories overhead. And the building was immense. The main area we entered was relatively open, similar to the lobby of an office building, and banks of transparent elevators and other transportation devices flanked both sides. Farther down from the entrance was an area that looked like the most opulent hotel restaurant in existence. Between the restaurant and where I stood was a marble fountain that would make anything in Italy pale in comparison.
“When you pick your jaw off the ground, I’ll show you around,” Crunch said, nudging me in the ribs.
I hadn’t even realized it, but I had actually stopped breathing. I took a deep breath, blinked a few times to get my bearings, and then exhaled. “Am I dreaming? Dead? Where am I?”
“Question number one. You aren’t the first one to ask it, and you certainly won’t be the last. As I said before, you’re in the Hanseatic League Guildhall. Technically, the people in charge call it Bremen, after the city back on Earth, but everyone here affectionately calls it home.”
My heart pounded in my chest, and it felt like another panic attack was lurking around the corner. “What do you—”
“Yeah, yeah, you aren’t on Earth any more. That one will take a few days to get used to. Don’t worry about it. You’re standing on a planet in the same galaxy, at least, but you can’t go back to Earth. That’s the only planet off limits. Our planet, your new planet, is called Anchor-6. We’re a couple galaxies over from the Milky Way. It takes a few hours in a hyper shuttle, but you can go back and look at Earth if you want. I’ll take you tomorrow if you’re up for it.”
“Holy shit…”
“Yeah, gonna be one of those kinds of days.” Crunch gave me a reassuring rub on the back and pointed to a small lounge-type area off to our right. “Let’s grab a seat and some drinks. We have a lot to go over.”
To my left, a group of humans with some beings who were clearly not humans brushed past. Aliens. Fucking aliens. Another planet. It was a hell of a lot to take in.
I sat on a circular couch in the lounge, and Crunch took a high-backed chair across from me. “You want a drink?” he asked.
Before I could really process his words and respond, he snapped his fingers and an electronic tablet rose up on a hydraulic arm from the floor. “What’ll it be? What’s your poison?”
“I… what do you have? I mean I usually just drink Coors Banquet.” As soon as I said the words, I felt like an idiot. Anchor-6 didn’t feel like the kind of place where Molson Coors had much of a market share.
“Banquet? Like in the gold can? Who drinks that stuff?” He pushed a series of buttons on the tablet and looked disappointed. “Well we only have Coors Lite anyway, sorry.”
“You have Coors Lite? That’s wild. But I don’t drink that weak shit.”
Crunch’s face screwed up with a big class clown kind of smile, and I knew he was messing with me. “Nah, we have Banquet. It’ll be here in no time.”
“But why?” I had so many questions swirling through my mind, and of all the crazy shit I had seen in just the lobby, the presence of American beer was something I simply could not comprehend. It shouldn’t exist on another planet. It didn’t make sense.
“All the humans are from Earth. That includes a couple brewers and distillers, so we actually have most things from Earth.” He swung the tablet my direction, and I saw a little apple stamped in silver foil on the top. “This is basically a tenth gen iPad. Works more or less the same. Not exactly the same, of course, but you get the idea.”
Just then a robot on a single wheel whirred into the lounge with a tray of drinks. It extended the tray first in Crunch’s direction, and he grabbed a highball glass with a double pour of dark liquor in it. Then the robot spun to me, and a small door on its chest opened with a gasp of cold air. Inside was a six pack of Coors Banquet Beer. I grabbed the plastic drink carrier, and the robot whirred off.
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“Hey, any chance we can get a table?” I asked. The beer was ice cold—some would say cold as the Rockies—and I had nowhere to put it down.
“That’s the cool thing about the Guildhall,” Crunch explained, a dorky smile still plastered to his face. “Think of a table, look at the location, and snap your fingers.”
Anticipating another joke or some kind of prank, I focused on the space between us and imagined a low, modern coffee table similar to the Ikea one in splinters on my apartment floor. I snapped, and the floor quickly separated. Within seconds, a coffee table similar to the one I imagined rose from the ground.
“How—”
“It isn’t perfect, like you can’t summon anything you want, but its good. A table is easy. Most of the stuff that gets used all the time is just in storage. Tables, chairs, tablets, drinks, food—all of it. If you think of more complex stuff, the system has to process for a bit. And it might not work.”
By way of example, Crunch focused to his left and snapped. After a few seconds, the floor opened up and produced an old mechanical horse with a coin operation box mounted to the side. It was the kind a kid would ride outside a grocery store in the eighties.
“Damn, that’s pretty cool,” I said, impressed. I tossed my damned wooden spoon on the table and then pulled a beer from its five comrades. The beer was fantastic, basically indistinguishable from the real thing, with one exception of the alcohol content. I could tell after just a few sips that it was stronger than the stuff on Earth.
The mechanical horse ride retreated back under the floor with a flourish of plates. “The whole system is pretty complex, but something about nanites and rapidly assembling particles and what have you. I don’t really understand it all. But hey, what’s with the spoon? You cooking dinner when the goon squad picked you up or what?”
I laughed so hard I nearly spat my extraterrestrial Coors. “Ah, I wish. I think… I might have made some mistakes in the car ride. I didn’t really understand the process.” I grabbed the spoon and tossed it to him. “That’s my weapon proficiency, I think. I don’t really know. Maybe you can tell me.”
Crunch’s eyes went wide. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
I shook my head. “The honest truth. That bad boy materialized in my hand.”
“How did you even pick ‘spoon’ from the weapon options?” Crunch practically yelled. He tossed the spoon back on the table and took another long pull from his drink.
“Like I said, I didn’t quite understand the process.” I downed my first Coors and grabbed a second. It would take a fair amount of booze to wrap my head around everything, and I was still borderline anticipating waking up in my own bed at six when my alarm went off. “I’m a nurse in real life, so I chose Medic as my class. Then I realized how everything was geared toward fighting, so I picked evasiveness for my perk. I’m not really a fighter, you know. Anyway, when it got to the flaw, I went with Honor Code: Pacifism thinking it would prevent me from getting into fights.”
Crunch looked like he understood. “Damn, that’s a wild story. Never heard of the car ride going that way. Check this out.” Crunch closed his eyes and held out his hand. As though materializing from the air itself, a big piston-powered hammer slid into his hand. “That’s why people call me Crunch. I went with Bounty Hunter, combat mastery, and a kinetic hammer. I go into battle swinging Lucile here and crunch my enemies. Get it?”
“Little on the nose for me to miss, you think?” I was deep enough in beer number two to start getting snarky.
Crunch laughed and dismissed his hammer. “Try it with your spoon. Just think about the spoon and close your eyes.”
“Great. What a skill to have.” I did as instructed, and sure enough, the spoon vanished from the table and reappeared in my hand. “Wonderful.”
“You can dismiss it too, you know. Same process.”
I closed my eyes and dismissed my spoon, and the object simply vanished from existence. “Where does it go?” I asked.
“No clue. No one knows. Just works that way. But only with the weapon type you have proficiency in, so I can’t summon a blaster or anything. Only Lucile.”
“Did you really name your hammer—”
“After The Walking Dead? Hell yeah. Love that show. But don’t get your hopes up. We have TV and internet and all that, but none of the old Earth shows. Actually, we don’t have fiction shows and entertainment like that at all. Takes too much time to put it all together from scratch.”
I raised an eyebrow. “But you have time to mimic beer brands?”
“Yes, well, priorities are different from some, I suppose.” Crunch lifted his own glass. “But hey, we have Maker’s Mark too, and lots of Irish whiskey if you like that. One of the higher ups is from Dublin. He’s been working on Guiness for a while, but don’t try the prototype. Its terrible. Thicker than… well, than a Guiness, and that’s saying something.”
“Noted.” I relaxed a bit in my chair and finally felt my nerves settling enough to really get a good look at the people and not just the building. There were people everywhere. Most were dressed in silvery attire kind of like a tight-fitting spacesuit, but others were dressed just like me. But the aliens… some were naked, some covered in hair, and others wore shirts and pants with extra sleeves for their multiple limbs.
“So yeah, the basic gist of things around here. We still have so much to go over.” He pointed to a bank of clear elevators on the far wall. “Transporters, not elevators, will take you wherever you need to go, but only this building, of course. Fifth floor has living quarters. Your membership card will be your key, just like a hotel. If you think about it and look at the card, it’ll show you which room is yours and how to get to it. Super easy. Very convenient when you’ve knocked a few back. Down the lobby a ways is our famed restaurant, Salvatore Giamaccio’s. Best chicken parm in the galaxy, and that’s been scientifically proven. But Sal’s costs credits, and lots of em. Better save for a night there. Us peasants usually eat on floor six. Just a big cafeteria with robots cooking up pretty average food. Nothing special.”
“They have mozzarella sticks?”
Crunch thought for a moment. “Pretty sure they do. I try to stay away from the fried foods, but yeah, I think I’ve seen them.”
“Perfect.” Despite the kidnapping and all, I was actually starting to enjoy the Hanseatic League. It was feeling more and more like home. The moniker fit. And in a lot of ways, it was already far better than my real home back in Ann Arbor. “Hey, you didn’t mention your flaw. What did you pick?”
Crunch let out a sigh and fixed me with his blue eyes. “Well, the city we live in is called Bryan’s Station. It was founded by some guy named Bryan, believe it or not. I took exiled for my flaw, and I am exiled from… hold your breath… Bryan’s Station. I can’t go past the stairs outside. That’s why I am your one man welcome wagon, tour guide extraordinaire. Tips appreciated.”
“Oh damn, that’s rough. You can’t leave at all?”
At that, Crunch got a slight twinkle in his eye. “It really isn’t too bad, actually. You see, I can still go to war.”
The way he said it told me that ‘war’ had a very specific connotation on Anchor-6 that would be explained in vast detail later. “So what’s the League all about?” I asked. I still had absolutely no information on what it even meant.
“The Hanseatic League is our guild. There are thousands of guilds across hundreds of planets. You can think of the guilds all as teams in a sports league, and the Hanseatic League is the best of the best. We’re the Celtics in the sixties, the Bulls in the nineties, the Reds in the seventies, or any hockey team with Gretsky on it. We win, and we win all the time. We’re confirmed to be the richest guild on Anchor-6, and we have more victories than any guild in a thirteen planet radius.
“Ok, but victories in what, exactly?”
Crunch flexed his arm. Not super impressive, but he clearly worked out. Then he flashed me a mischievous grin and downed his bourbon. “War.”