As Millicent Van Gard dropped into her large office chair with a soft thump, she gently tossed a packet of paper onto her over-sized, wooden desk. The slovenly pile of off-white papers looked out of place on the blue-grey behemoth, the rest of the surface was meticulously organized. Millicent spun her chair around to face the cabinet behind her, grabbed a platinum drink shaker and began the ritual process of making herself a nice, strong drink. She wasn’t some heathen to make her drinks any which way. Ice goes into the shaker first, followed by a hefty portion of the booze, a dash of mixer and a chunk of fresh fruit. The ingredients contained in the two-piece drink shaker, she shook vigorously waiting for the tell-tale frost to form on the exterior before removing the top half and straining the liquid into its new home. Drink in hand Millicent finally glanced at the coversheet of the guild-contract she had just been handed. There, stamped diagonally across the front page in bright-red were two words. RESIGNATION ACCEPTED. She downed her drink in a single gulp and began emptying her desk of personal effects.
5 Hours later
Millicent Van Gard sat quietly at her usual booth. She had stopped frequenting the Guild pub years ago, preferring to spend time in this little hole in the wall bar to hobnobbing with the Guild Officers, Elites, and fellow shareholders. The guild had been everything to her for the last 17 years, it was practically a second family to her and now she had given it all up. With a sigh, she lifted her drink and thought to herself to starting over before quaffing the drink in one smooth motion.
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“This is bull Millie, and you know it” a figure said as he slumped down into the booth with her. “And how long have you been here. I’ve been looking everywhere for you since I heard.”
Millie looked up from the bottom of her empty mug. With a small frown she looked at the young looking man across from her. “I wanted out . I am done with all the stupid infighting. Done with all the bureaucracy. I started to feel like I had to fill out a request sheet to take a dump. ”
“You can’t just quit because you got outmaneuvered Mil.”
“Apparently I can Bill” she snapped at him. Then, feeling a little guilty for her outburst, she added “besides, this wasn’t just about the Kakos incident. I’ve been unhappy for a while. Don’t you ever feel like we should be doing more?”
“No. I don’t” the man rolled his eyes while running his hands through his midnight-blue hair. “The world is a cruel and unforgiving place. The best thing to do is to secure your own power and take as few chances as possible.”
“You sound just like them Bill. We weren’t always like this. YOU weren’t always like this. What does this matter” a small black orb crackling with energy suddenly appeared between her thumb and index finger “if people are dying out there. On top of that, if we never take chances, we will never become more than what we are.”
“People are always dying, I just don’t want it to be me or mine. Besides, I am pretty happy with how WE are.”
“O yeah, where would we be if everyone thought that way Bill? Do you think you could have survived the whole Onset? Do you think all four of us would have made it? Strangers helped us, and it's because of them that we are in the positions that we are now and now we are just pissing it away to be safe and minimize risks.”
“Stop being an idealist Mil. People don’t help people just because they have big hearts. They must have gotten something out of it. Either that or they are just zealots.”
“You are an asshole Bill. You weren’t always like this. Helping people used to be important. It used to mean something to you...now all you care about is protecting your own bottom line. We would have been screwed if no one stepped in and showed us the ropes. Maybe it wasn’t pure altruism- but don’t forget, well over 70% of the total population of our planet died in the first year after integration. Billions of Erassians wiped away in practically moments…”
“People die every day. This is a cruel world Mil. Now that we have carved out a niche for ourselves we have to protect it above all else. Erras as we knew it is gone. It’s now ruled by a two-bit despot who is exploiting every resource he can before someone knocks him off his throne. You can’t snap your fingers and make bad shit go away.”
“I just wanted us to take a chance for once. To be a early move in on a transitioning planet and try to make a real difference. But the fucking Guild board won’t risk anything. It won’t even let me lead a fist of twenty people to lead new territory exploration and aid efforts. I am leaving the guild because its goals no longer align with my own. I am done with self-serving assholes who want to build a bigger pile of creds to sleep on at night but aren’t willing to take chances to make something special happen. It’s unbelievable that moves were made to block every new zone exploratory mission I proposed, which can yield huge guild profits by the way, but we managed to entrench ourselves in what seems like a never-ending galactic war.”
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“We needed allies M, and we don’t have spare members to send on a fool’s crusade” Billy spat at her with venom.
Millie finally met her brothers eyes, suspicions finally morphing into certainty within her heart. “It was you wasn’t it. You were the one leading the faction blocking me. You used your pull as Guild Leader to convince the board that I was trying to complete a fool's errand. That I was, how did you say it, a zealot. How rich, I dug around everywhere to see who was throwing up blockades… everything always pointed at you. I assumed it was a setup because no brother would go out of his way to squash his twins dreams. I assumed that you were being set up by the operating board, I assumed they just formed a block to strip me of power. I’ve been trying to get a mission through for six years Bill- and this whole time you’ve been stopping it? That’s six years of dreams you shot down time after time.”
“Yes! You got me Mil, congrats on figuring it out. I blocked your dangerous plans to send people into life or death situations with absolutely no promise of future gains. You couldn’t even guarantee us an ally to help maintain our territory much less that you would stay alive.”
“Well, you just made this decision a lot easier on me Bill. I was actually sad to be leaving you. Now... now, I am just happy to get a break from you.”
“You aren’t going anywhere Millicent. You just need to let go of this need to save the world. Come back to the guild, be our eyes and ears again. No one can make the connections between events like you can. You make leaps of intuition that our guild analytics department can’t even dream of. We NEED you to steer us through this territory dispute, that way we can keep growing. This way the guild grows and you stay nice and safe. I promise after this is over I will help take back Erras. Win-win for everyone involved.”
“A win-win is when both sides get what they want. Not when just you do, douchebag… and I am leaving. The guild already accepted my resignation. Remember.”
“Nice try Mil, according to guild bylaws, ones that you wrote by the way, I as Guild Leader can stipulate emergency powers to require all stakeholders remain at Guild HQ for up to six months. And the system enforces it, so you better frog march your ass back to HQ and get comfy, you are going to be there a while.”
“Two things Bill. First, you really are an epic douche. Second, I already sold my stake in the Guild. It was the one of the conditions required by two of your loyal and trustworthy board members. What, they didn’t tell you that VanGuard purchased back my 15% stake to be split evenly amongst board investors?”
“What?!” Her twin exclaimed, shock evident on his face.
“It looks like you’ve got more troubles than little old me, brother. I think it is time you go. I don’t have anything more to say to you right now.”
Bill got out of the booth and began to walk out of the bar. “We’re going to talk about this later Mil” he said before walking out the door. His sister didn’t even turn her head to look at him, she simply raised her hand with one finger up, indicating her desire for another drink.
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An hour after her brother left, Millie finally got up from her booth. She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out a wafer thin hexagonal card with her personal signet embedded on it, and tossed it on the table before walking away. The card contained over a thousand credits, far in excess of what a few measly drinks cost. Millie didn’t care though, she had liked this bar and she wouldn’t be back for a long, long time.Besides, she had just made a shit-ton of credits selling he guild shares. As she exited the bar she looked back, a sense of nostalgia setting in, before beginning the long walk home.
Varanthis was a sprawling megalopolis in one of the older parts of the Integrated Worlds. The city was tremendously well-fortified, its defenses added to constantly for at least the last hundred years, in order to protect against incursions from enemies of any kind. It had been quite a while since a sentient had laid eyes on the city and thought of it as a target,but Integration did have the nasty side effect of creating an endless supply of dangerous, hostile creatures of varying degrees of intelligence. Word on the street said that the city walls had been breached by a horde nine years ago, but tonight was destined to be a quiet one.
Thirty-five minutes later Millie arrived at her home on the outskirts of the city. She trotted up twelve flights of stairs before entering her unit. She owned the whole building, but rented out most of it while keeping the entire top floor as her living space. As Millie walked into the apartment after passing through the multitude of layers of security, she stopped to look at herself in huge entryway mirror. While Integration had many downsides, such as having to constantly be aware that the world was trying to kill you, there were a few perks. The Onset, or the first-phase of Integration, hit her world when she was just a 23 year olds trying to get a job in the financial industry. Now, she was 42 years old and she didn’t look a day older than when her planet began the transition into full-integration. Luckily, she had been crashing at her brothers apartment while she tried to nail down her first job. Who knows how long she would have survived the horrors that followed if they weren’t together. Shaking herself out of her reverie, she walked to bed and collapsed without even taking her clothes off. It had been a very long day, and tomorrow was going to be a whole lot busier.