Emett:

It took me longer than I had expected to find the Summoners' Guild in the chaos that was city life. Luckily, a reasonably friendly local pointed out some of the layout of the Capital to me, and from there it was fairly simple. It turns out most of the Guilds were located in the aptly named Guild District, all right next to each other. From there, it had just been a matter of finding a building with a sign declaring itself to be the Guild I was looking for.

I entered, finding myself in a fairly spacious lobby, sparsely but practically decorated in an almost aggressively neutral way. I found a desk in the middle of the room, manned by an animated skeleton, dressed in a simple black robe... I approached the desk, and its head snapped toward me.

"Welcome to the Summoners' Guild!" it said, its haunting voice somehow cheerful, despite the unsettling unearthly echoes. "My name is Cheryl. How may I direct you today?"

"I have this letter," I said, digging the letter of introduction out of my backpack. "The King of Light implied that this Guild would help me get up to speed on summoning."

"The King of Light?" Cheryl asked. "Does that mean what I think it does?"

I handed the letter over to her, and she took it and started reading. Despite the utter lack of anything other than the most basic facial features, I had the distinct impression her eyes widened. "You'd be The Summoner, then! Welcome!" she said. "Give me just a moment while I call the...wait, are you under a Binding? Salamander's, it looks like?"

"Yeah," I said, somewhat sheepishly. "I had some...run-ins on the way into the Capital and had to do some emergency summoning, and Salamander wasn't willing to help without some conditions."

"Oh, that's a doozy of a Binding, too," Cheryl said, her eye sockets boring through me. "Looks simple enough to resolve, but I do not recommend trying to just ignore the thing. Give me just a moment." She picked up a crystal orb, which started glowing as she did so. I was relieved as she took a moment to stare into the orb rather than my soul, before she looked back at me. "Perfect, the Head Invoker and Head Evoker are together right now! We can catch them both at once." She stepped away from the desk, and started toward a door.

I followed her, assuming that was her intent. "Where are we going?" I asked.

"To the Elemental Temple," she replied. I was struggling to keep up with her pace. You'd think being long dead would slow a woman down, but apparently not Cheryl.

"You must have been terrifyingly spry in life," I said.

"What do you..." Cheryl started, then let out...what I assumed was a chuckle, but the echoing quality of her voice rendered it to be more of a diabolical cackle. "Oh, you're new here, of course you wouldn't know. You assumed I was a reanimated dead woman, didn't you?"

"Well...yes?" I said. "Isn't that what a skeleton is?"

"Sometimes," she said, drawing to a halt before a large wooden door. "Not usually the case in Guild-sanctioned necromancers, though. I'm actually a psychopomp made manifest into the physical realm." She knocked on the door, a surprisingly firm and powerful sound for how frail her skeletal hands looked. "Proper necromancy is...frowned upon."

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I frowned. That made sense, honestly. I just hadn't thought too much about it. "Issues to do with desecrating the dead, I take it? Also, what is a psychopomp, exactly?" I asked.

"To answer the first," Cheryl said, "not as such. It just made inheritance disputes particularly nasty, sometimes, as laws don't generally cover what happens to your stuff after you die if you're still around to use it. Easier to just not run into the situation. For the second, we're something like...the guides for the dead. We help the spirits of those who have died move on to whatever comes next."

"That seems like a particularly important job," I said. "Shouldn't you be doing that instead of, you know, manning the front desk of the Summoners' Guild?"

"Oh," Cheryl said, chuckle-cackling again, "there's a lot more of us these days than are actually needed, since the Divine Game started up. A lot less death overall, honestly. Sometimes we get bored, so we'll answer summonings."

"You got bored," I said, somewhat incredulous, "so you do paperwork."

"Yes, exactly," she said.

"That doesn't seem particularly fun or exciting," I said.

Cheryl rapped on the door again, even more loudly this time. "It's better than aimlessly drifting through the world. Plus, I get to meet all sorts of interesting people this way, which was my favorite part of the job, anyway."

"Oh?" I asked. "Interesting people like who?"

"Like The Summoner who walked up to my desk having fallen into an extremely novice mistake, and who didn't already know all this," she said.

"That's fair," I responded as the door finally opened.

The massive door finally swung open, a short, squat man on the other side. His robe was a deep blue, and seemed to billow on invisible currents of water. "What do you want, Cheryl, with your incessant knocking?"

"The Summoner for you," she responded, "as I told you just minutes ago. Emett, this is Evan, the Head Invoker. Evan, this is Emett, The Summoner."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, reaching out a hand for me. "Forgive me, Summoner, I had already forgotten you were coming." I moved to shake his hand, and he recoiled. "Ouch! You're a feisty one, aren't you?"

"What?" I asked. "I didn't do anything, though."

"Not you, that." He pointed at something above my head. I reached up to brush off whatever he was pointing at, but there was nothing there.

"I'm lost," I admitted. "What are you pointing at?"

"Your Binding Spirit...?" Evan gave me a flat look. "You do know that it's there, right?"

"I...guess?" I said. "I was aware I was under a Binding, but I haven't seen a spirit, if you don't count the giant angry fire snake in the sky."

"Wait," he said, "can you see the spirits at all? What do I look like to you?"

I looked at him. "A man in a blue robe that's floating impossibly through the air. Is there something else I should be seeing?"

"Yes," he said. "How in the world did you manage to do a full evocation of Salamander without even being able to see the spirits?"

"I just sort of called out?" I answered. "Is there supposed to be more to it than that?"

"I... look, just come inside, will you?" he said. "We'll get all this sorted out and get you summoning properly, and maybe we can avoid this kind of mishap in the future.

I stepped in with him into the room.