After an hour of the brained trio waiting for Kalon to arrive at the doorless doorframe of the guild, the quartet leaped over the drunkard acting as an obstacle carefully placed in front of the entrance and made their way to the counter. Samarís face wrinkled form the torture her nose had to undergo in that place. Piss, alcohol, garlic. Mainly garlic. And a smidge of oregano? Maybe. Definitively a pinch of cypress though…
The clerk had seemingly moved up in life, such that he now gasconaded[1] a lush, white, and even cased and properly drool-stained, pillow.
Kalon slammed the puppy scarf upon the counter to wake up the sleeping beauty.
The clerk returned to the land of the undreaming, his face untarnished by the nap: rheum crusts were on strike and hadn’t shown up to work, his eyes had decided to go green and avoided the usage of bags, and his breath had taken a bath. “Well, hello there. I see you returned from Diamonter town. And you brought a boy with you. “
“I may be a dick, but I shelter a cunt, thank you very much,” Samari violenced without hesitation.
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Samari readied her sweetest voice. “No, I am not into necrophilia.”
Kalon lifted her like a bag of potatoes and, despite Samari’s protests, kicks and scratchs on Kalon’s muscular back, he seated her over the counte.r “She haunted the town.”
“Troglodyte! Cultivator! Valelikevalian pest!” She continued insulting the ostensible leader of their one-man-two-canids-one-woman party.
With an appraising but tired stare, the clerk said “I would have preferred a real specter to this… banshee.”
She hopped from the counter and onto the wooden floor, making the planks croak. “I am a proud arrcagnostic. Only the talking dog can insult me with impunity.”
“That’s right!” Jagger followed. The clerk peeked over the counter and saw the minute creature looking at him with fire in his eyes. “You… were washed in hot water.”
“I underwent the most effective weight-loss program mankind ever devised.”
“He stepped on one of my landmines and died.”
The clerk took a moment to parse through the loads of information thrown his way. He raised his index finger, opened his mouth, closed it again, lowered the Index finger and had a brief return to contemplation. “I wish that, for a day, the world made sense.”
Samari closed her eyes and extended her condolences.
“And I wish to be paid,” Kalon barked, true to his Road.
“Yeah, we don’t live out of thin air, and Brunhilda has a limited amount of supplies in her stomach,” Jagger followed.
“Make sure to adjust their pay to inflation: according to the Pact of the Drunk Ginkgo, to which Honeytown adhered in exchange for one of the few maidenhair tree[2] flowers in existence and tax exemptions, organizations that hire adventurers and pay on quest delivery should compensate them adequately and in accordance with any fluctuation their local economy may have suffered since they accepted said quest,” Samari dropped the book on the man, who forwarded his lower lip.
“Are you older than you look?”
“No, I am just my mother’s child.” Samari, unlike certain child from the Gromera clan, was well aware of her ancestry. “Just my mother’s child,” he repeated, trying to keep her gaze unwavering to hide the pain.
Jagger, however, noticed something was amiss. Besides several centimeters of his height, that is.
Kalon decided enough brainpower had been wasted by his companion, and with a finger pressing on his right palm, demanded payment. “Money!”
The clerk tossed a bag of burlap filled with a hundred and five point seven thousand thirty-three diamond coins against Kalon’s forehead. The bag slapped against the sweaty surface with a wet plop, and peeled off of it slowly while Kalon gave the man a genuine thumbs up. “We are okay now.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Why don’t you use paper money like normal people?” Samari asked.
“We pay Arcagnostics in paper money, and cultivators with coins. The former understand that the value of money is not bound to how much it shines. What are you going to do now, little one? I cannot keep you in custody of the guild as evidence, and I doubt you want to return to the abandoned town you were —I presume— rescued from.”
“Can you give me a job? I’d be taking the idiots with me.”
“I am at least three of the idiots,” Kalon stated, his chest pushed forward, swollen with pride and other nasty things but no heart worms. Nobody present dared contradict him.
“Only three? Wow. Progress,” Jagger said.
The Clerk was genuinely surprised by how earnest the cultivator and his dogs seemingly were to work with an Arcagnostic they had met some days prior. He took out an Arcagnostic’s contract from under the counter, the kind whose clauses didn’t fuck you over because it was assumed these freelancers knew how to read. “I need to make sure you are an Arcagnostic, little girl. Show me the Incuthingy.”
Samari snorted. “It’s called Inner Control Incunabula.”
She held out her hand and extricated the spirit of her fingers and pumped a bit of excess energy into it, making the nodes of her anastomosed vital energy lattice shine dimly, little sparkling dust dancing over the palm of her hand. Some stars of this tiny constellation began shining brighter, little embers burning with pale blue passion amidst their unassuming sisters. Like a flame the distribution of nodes flickered over Samari’s palm, the threads that held them together invisible, able to entwine around each other, unseen mating snakes. Instants after this flame burned with newfound refulgence, the little stars ordering themselves into easily recognizable patters. “Ur mom,” they spelled.
“The clerk put on his galasses to look more authoritative, cleared his throat, and said, “It should say I.C.I for it to be valid.”
“Oh, but it says that.”
Samari turned her hand without rearranging the pattern, and when the clerk could see the side of the Incunabula that was facing to the left of Samari, it indeed spelled I.C.I.
“Turn it again,” the clerk asked, excited like a little child playing with optical illusions. “Splendid.”
Samari turned the Incunabula off, so to speak, and her spirit returned inside her fingers, leaving them tingling as though a bunch of spiders were playing banjo with her tendons.
“Give me the forms. Both for some job and for an inscription,” she demanded.
“Arcagnostics don’t get inscribed, dear, we just need you to fill in the request form by duplicate. Benefits of most of your kind being literate.”
Jagger was about to protest, but then considered that it was only human to assume illiteracy ran rampant among canids. It did, if only because they had developed better means to convey information to their peers—butt scents, to provide an example.
Samari snatched the forms from the clerk’s delicate hands. They were generic: it was just the Arcagnostic agreeing to not pursue legal actions against the guild for any sort of harm, real or perceived, they may be exposed to as a result of the guild’s quests, and accepting the terms related to the chosen task in particular: things like not burning down a city, which Arcagnostics rarely did anyway. And when they did, the city often deserved it. I am victim blaming cities. Yes.
Standing on the tip of her toes, she hastily filled in the requested fields and handed the paper back. “Now I must pick a quest from a list and you will fill in the remaining fields, seal the form and ask for my signature, yes?”
“Why did you put a single nine in the age field?”
“Because I was born nine years ago.”
The muscles of the clerk’s jaw gave up, letting the structure fall, leaving the mouth agape. A passing fly boldly declared “Salmonella willing, we shall exterminate the tetrapod infidels.” and immolated itself against the clerk’s tongue, getting stuck on the slimy flesh.
Eventually, the soul, tired of vacationing in a metaphorical paradisiacal island, returned to the clerk’s body, and he completed his reaction. “Heavens, you aren’t lying.” He tasted something weird in his mouth, but promptly disregarded it.
“Why would I lie about my age? Who do you think I am, my dead aunt?”
Kalon decided it was high time to intervene. “She’s not her dead aunt,” he sherlocked. One day, all jade beauties in the land would surrender to his superior intellect.
“Thanks, Kalon, pretty useful.” The clerk sniped, and then pointed at a white board with a bunch of written papers pinned on it. “See that? That is the board of choice jobs for Arcagnostics. Pick one according to your skill and make sure to return alive. There are no laws forbidding nine years old Arcagnostics form picking jobs, but there aren’t supposed to be nine years old Arcagnostics, at all.”
“We the Stradeajo are a proud and prodigious lineage.”
“Were,” Jagger interjected.
“Permission to kick the puppy?”
“No!” Kalon said, picking Jagger up like the dog was a valuable vase.
Jagger stuck his tongue out mockingly.
A second later, he was flying over the drunkards and their garlic-scented tables, set in a collision course with a flowerpot across the room. Maybe trusting Kalon to not punt him himself had been a rookie mistake. Maybe.
Then, a crash, a sigh from the clerk, and an exclamation from Samari, who was holding a paper up and ignoring the ensuing ruckus around her. “This one!”
----------------------------------------
[1] In my unostentatious opinion, the joke is funnier when the verb is obscure. I am not parading my language. Not at all. And even if I am, you are wrong in my eyes.
[2] Known in some regions as The Femboy Tree, as male trees can produce some branches with ovules to assure reproduction even if there is a shortage of female trees. (Author’s note: Ginkgo biloba can, in fact, change the sex of some of his branches, but in Earth we lack such levels of internet brainrot —as of 2023— to give this species the glorious name it deserves.)