"Excuse me, lady," Krys said as she walked up to the receptionist of the guild. "I have something I need to ask."

"How convenient," she said. "There is something really important I need to tell you."

"After my question though, it's far too important."

"Go ahead then."

"Okay," Krys said as she took a deep breath. "Is fwhdgads a word?"

"I'm sorry, but may you repeat that?"

"I said, is fwhdgads a word?"

The receptionist looked at her weirdly. "Why would you ask something that is so obviously true?"

"SEE PAN! I FUCKING TOLD YOU THA- wait... Did you say true?"

The receptionist smiled as Pan gave a large laugh. Sure fwhdgads was technically not a word and Pan only bribed her to get her to say it was just in case, but it was still too funny for him to resist laughing like that.

"Anyways," the receptionist said as she cleared her throat. "Miss Krystal Orez, you are needed in the local prison building right away. Please bring Mister Pan Depravo with you as well."

"Why so formal?"

"A few of your coworkers got themselves into a large amount of trouble."

Krys's face went dark as she then grabbed Pan by the arm and dragged him over to the prison building. One could swear she said something about "killing that damn Stercus" or something as she walked.

She slammed open the doors to the prison. She stormed through the waiting room and ignored the guards as she left for the cells. Behind the bars were prisoners of many different species, some with cat ears, some short with pointed ears, and some with a lot of furs. Krys ignored them and walked straight to the cell with a young boy in armor and a young girl with a lab coat on.

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS TIME!?" Krys slammed the bars and screamed at the kids while Pan sat down next to her and existed.

"We taught a kid to read," Stercus said. "Cleaned the city, gathered some wood, fixed a bike, murdered many gryphons, and collected some grass."

"You also broke the law," a large, black guard said as he entered the scene. "You took a large number of quests away from the quest board without paying the insurance fee, a crime punishable by death."

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"Wait," Krys said, starting to mellow down. "Are you saying that not paying for the quests can result in death?"

"That's correct."

"I'm sorry, but who made this stupid law?"

"The guildmaster."

The local guildmaster did gain a lot of political power after helping the governor get elected. Not only did it allow him to expand his franchise, but he also gained enough power to suggest laws and have them enforced by the state. They tended to just be guild regulations and such, with the bonus that many were punished through death and torture. According to him if you gave harsh punishment to petty crime no one would even want to imagine what it was for a big crime.

Either he actually believed that, or he was just an asshole.

"But can't you spare them? They're kids. Well, I don't know how old the random girl here is but Stercus is a kid!"

"I'm thirteen," Scitus pointed out.

"See? She's a kid! Spare the children and kill the murderers, or kidnappers, or rapists-"

"Hey!" Pan loudly objected to that last part.

"Shut up Pan. Anyways, the children of tomorrow need your support, but in order to get it, they need to be alive. So can you not kill them?"

"No," was the only thing the guard said.

"Seriously?"

"Just kidding, they can be let out."

"Yay!" Stercus and Scitus jumped for joy as they heard that.

"But you'll have to pay a fine."

"Okay," Krys said as she took out her wallet. "How much?"

"Ninety million one-hundred twenty thousand genty if I'm correct."

Krys's jaw dropped.

"Carl!" Another guard yelled at him from across the hall. "You got it wrong again!"

Krys looked up as hope filled up her eyes.

"It's ninety million one-hundred twenty thousand and ONE genty Carl!"

Krys slumped back down, clearly depressed.

"Does it have to be all at once?" Pan decided to ask something useful for once.

"No," the guard replies. "We could just give you a bill for 20,000 genty every month for... um... Let me do the math for a moment."

After a moment passed.

"Four-hundred sixteen years," the guard said.

Krys went back into depression mode. She clearly didn't have the time for that, nor the lifespan.

"Is there anything you can do to make this easier?" Krys begged the hardest she ever begged in her life. "Maybe you can increase it to like 80,000 a month and make it only 104 years or something?"

"Afraid not. Either pay up or pay for years." The guildmaster was an asshole after all.

"Fine. I'll do the chronic payment version."

"Great. Just sign some forms and they will be free in no time."

Krys reluctantly signed some forms and was given a cursed bracelet in order to pay regularly. After that, the group was then sent out of the prison without a hitch.

"Never do that again," Krys said to the kids. "Do you understand?"

"Yes mom," Stercus and Scitus said reluctantly.

"Calm down girl," Pan said. "They didn't know."

"Just because they didn't know doesn't mean I should let them go," Krys says with a slick unintentional beat. "They even forced over four-hundred years of fines on us!"

"It's only 20,000 genty per month, you'll be okay."

"That twenty thousand adds up to a fortune that I could've had in some years time. That's not okay!"

"Well," Pan said as he tried to think of an excuse. "It could've been worse."

"How exactly?"

"Well, they could've brought a dragon to the city."

At that moment a large fireball came from the sky and fried a house. Alarms started to blare all over the town as a large black dragon flew over, looking for the two rats that disturbed its sleep.

Krys glared at Pan.

"This is not okay."