“Well done,” I said, nodding at the rings. “What’s your point?”
“Let’s go, Janus,” said Feidan.
Guile held a finger in the air. “You might want to hear what I have to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have so much CR that I find myself running out of things to spend it on. I couldn’t help overhear that you’re trying to start a guild and, well, you’re running a little short. So I have a proposition for you, gentlemen. How about I fund the cost of the guild house?”
My instincts told me not to trust him. Nothing in Re:Fuze came for free. “And I assume you want something in return?”
Guile smiled wide. “Just something simple. A trifle. I want to join the guild.”
On hearing this, Feidan snorted. “An NPC can’t join a guild.”
Guile looked around him in mock fear. “Oh can’t they?” he said in a sarcastic tone. “Tell me, oh great one, who made this rule? Who says I can’t join?”
“Tell me why you want to join,” I said.
“Simple,” answered Guile. “I need access to the Grand Library.”
“Join the club.”
Guile crossed his arms. “It’s a simple situation for you. Either you let me be part of your guild, or you don’t have a guild to join.”
“Give us a second,” I said to him.
I put my hand on Feidan’s shoulder and guided him away from Guile. When we were far enough that he couldn’t hear us, I turned to the healer.
“He’s right you know,” I said. “Without his money, we’ve got no other avenues to go down. The thing is, we’re going to have to wait for Brian before we decide. We did elect him the leader, after all.”
Feidan took a deep breath. “Listen, Janus. Sure, you made Brian leader. But we all know that you’re the driving force behind this. Brian’s a clever guy, but he doesn’t have what you have.”
“And what’s that?”
“There’s a ruthless streak to you, Janus. Pragmatic. You can get things done.”
I knew that Brian would tell the banker that we didn’t accept his proposal. He’d prefer to find another way to do things. We didn’t have much choice. We either accepted Guile’s money, or we spent more time in Iskarg with the Old Serpent’s Sting and we waited for the Serpents to find us.
I walked over to the banker and stuck my hand out. “You’ve got a deal,” I said.
The next day we found an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Iskarg. The farmer and his family had died from the plague, and the city council auctioned the property off. Guile bought it outright and then signed it over to the guild on a two-year lease, which he then paid for upfront.
After that, he hired contractors to strip the house and turn it from a residential property into something more fitting of a guild. Feidan had said that I was a man who got things done, but I couldn’t help but feel that Guile outstripped me in that regard. All he had to do was click his fingers and wave his CR, and things happened. It seemed that money bought what bombs and daggers couldn’t.
After two days, Smoglar and Brian emerged from the inn. Usually, if Smoglar had been in an inn he would have been drinking. This time, he spent his time asleep in bed in a deep fever, while Brian watched over him. I’d taken over from time to time to let the giant get some rest. I’d watched my friend twist and turn under the bedsheets and mutter to himself about blacksmithing and plagues. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.
The four of us were outside the guild house one afternoon when a figure walked across the plains. I soon saw that it was Ozreal, and he held a slab of marble in his hands.
This was it. With the guild house built, we only needed to lay a charterstone. I had held it in until now, but I couldn't help feeling excited.
“This is an accomplishment you know,” said Brian. “Not many people could make a guild.”
“And especially not a level 14 tinker,” added Smoglar. He smiled at me, but I knew that he was just trying to put a brave face on things.
Although they hurt when you received them, wounds in Re:Fuze didn’t take as long to heal as they did out of the game. Although Smoglar would never get his hand back, the pain had stopped.
Ozreal greeted us with a grim nod. At first, I thought something terrible had happened, but I realised that was just his manner. When the old mage wasn’t making jokes, he had a sour look on his face.
“One charterstone, as requested,” he said, handing it to me.
I took it from him. The marble was cold and smooth. It didn’t seem different to any old piece of marble. I didn’t know what I expected; should it have glowed?
“Is it ready?”
“Almost,” said Ozreal. “We need to place this where it won’t be found easily. If someone destroys the charterstone, they can destroy the guild.”
This was interesting. I had assumed that once a guild was made, it would exist as long as there were members. If all it took to end a guild was to destroy their charterstone, then what did this mean for the Serpent guild? If I could get to their stone, could I finish them?
We placed the stone underneath the barn of the farmhouse. There was a hatch on the floor that led to a basement, and it was there that we set it. I used a bomb to blow a chunk out of a nearby cliff face, and we filled the basement up with rubble so that nobody could get in. With that done, Ozreal cast an arcane spell over the hatch so that nobody could enter.
I stood in the barn. I hadn’t made a tour of the new guild house since I was told it was finished. But now, with the stone set, I felt it was finally time.
“Just one more thing,” said Brian.
“What’s that?”
“We need a name.”
I thought about it. One name came to mind straight away; a name that I knew would get the Halons, Serpents and Mercs mad. It was a name that meant a lot to me.
“That’s easy,” I said, spreading my arms out. “Welcome, everyone, to the Tinkers Guild.”
Quest Completed: Create a Guild
Your Guild Rank: Officer
Level up to level 15! (239 exp to level 16)
Chapter Eighteen
Global Message: A new guild has been created. The Tinkers Guild is now the 5th guild in Re:Fuze.
Guild Leader: Brian the Giant.
The guild house wasn’t a palace, but we were proud of it all the same. It consisted of a farmhouse, a barn, two storage sheds and ten acres of land. That gave us a lot of leeway to do what we wanted.
In the farmhouse, we left 2 rooms as bedrooms but fitted them with cheap single beds that we arranged in rows. If necessary, we wanted guild members to be able to sleep here rather than paying the prices at the inn in Iskarg. We turned another bedroom into an alchemy lab. It was supposed to be for everyone to use, but Feidan took it as his own since, for the moment, he was our only alchemist. The idea was that he would brew us health, stamina, and mana potions and we would stockpile them in one of the storage sheds.
At Brian’s behest, we turned another bedroom into a library. We were going to stock books on various classes, skills and trades. We hoped these could be used to cross-skill our guild members. Brian also wanted a section devoted to Re:Fuze lore, but we decided that would be non-essential until our coffers were swelling. In the meantime, we allowed him to buy just a few history books.
One morning, I met Smoglar before the others had woken up and I asked him to take a walk with me.
“A strange thing for you to ask, Janus,” said Smoglar. “We don’t normally take romantic walks together.”
“It’s not far, trust me.”
I walked him around the farmhouse and to the back garden. In it, next to a pond, I’d placed an anvil, hammer and forge. Smoglar stood and looked at the equipment. For a second his eyes lit up, but then he turned to me and glared.
“Are you playing a joke?” he said, holding his arm stump in the air.
I shook my head. “No, this is yours.”
“I can’t use it, lad. I don’t know if you
remember, but you played a part in cutting off my hand.”
“I know,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Quick-Hand Kurug?”
Smoglar shook his head.
“He was a blacksmith,” I said. “He worked in a town a hundred miles away, according to one of Brian’s books. He was a humble guy, but he was obsessed with his craft, and he was so skilled that the king would send his men across the land to buy from him.”
“Never heard of him,” said Smoglar.
“Me neither, until I read about him. One day, a rich noble bought a chest plate from Kurug. Normally it wouldn’t have been an issue, but this noble managed to beat the king in a joust whilst wearing the chest plate. The king found out, and he was so angry that he ordered Kurug’s hammer-hand to be chopped off.”
“I feel like me and this Kurug fella would get on.”
“Here’s the real point to the story. Kurug didn’t stop blacksmithing. No way. Instead, he practiced one-handed until he was as good as, if not better, than he used to be.”
“And then what?”
“And then he stopped selling to kings and nobles and just practiced his craft for the sheer joy of it, apparently.”
Smoglar stared at the anvil in front of him. I heard him start to breathe deeply. He walked over and stood next to me, and then patted his hand on my back. We stood for a while and then I walked away, with the understanding that neither of us would get sentimental.
***
Later, a boy no older than twelve tugged on the handle of a cart and pulled it behind him down the streets of Iskarg. The cart was overflowing with onions and carrots, and the boy grunted with the strain. It seemed like he wasn’t used to the weight, and I guessed that his father had pulled the cart until recently. It was likely that he had perished in the plague.
Over at the city walls, I saw that the zeppelin moored there had gone, which was a pity. At some point, I had wanted to find the owner and see how someone would go about making an airship.
As we walked toward the Grand Library we passed the trader square. Rain lashed onto stalls covered by brightly coloured fabric, and then bounced down to the cobblestone streets.
Brian walked next to me, and Ozreal was on the other side of him. We had left Smoglar back at the guild house, where he had started practicing his one-handed blacksmithing skills. We doubted he would have wanted to come anyway. We extended our invitation to Feidan. When I went to his alchemy lab, I opened the door and saw him staring at a bubbling vial of liquid with a look of intense concentration. I decided that I'd leave him to spend some alone time with his potions.
“I’m thinking of putting a call out to all the guildless in Re:Fuze,” said Brian.
“Do that, and you’ll be surprised at what responses you’ll get,” answered Ozreal.
I nodded. “Some people are guildless for a reason, and there are people out there who we wouldn’t want to join us. What about if we left a message in Blundow?”
Brian nodded. “Good idea. We could have Percy include the Tinkers in his little information speech about joining guilds.”
When we stood in front of the library, we found that as before, the base of it was a cylinder-shaped block of metal that seemed to have no door.
“It’s been a while since I was here,” said Ozreal. “Come to think of it, the last time I visited the library was when I was part of the Halon guild. And I’m sure I still have a book that I never took back.”
“That’s going to be one hell of an overdue fine,” I said.
A mist screen appeared in front of us, and I saw the faint outline of a face. Where the last face we had seen outside the library was a stern-looking man, this was a young woman with round cheeks and a pleasant smile.
“State your guild,” she said, in a light voice.
“Tinkers Guild.”
On hearing this, she smiled wider. “I got your global message. How exciting. Come in.”
I stepped forward. “So…how do we actually get in?”
She arched her eyebrows. “The door, of course.”
This time, when I looked at the cylinder, a door appeared. We stepped through it and found ourselves in a room barely bigger than a cubby hole.
“What now?” said Brian.
“Just wait,” answered Ozreal.
The room started to shake, and soon I got the sensation that we were moving high up into the sky. A rush of vertigo shot through me, but it quickly passed. When the shaking stopped and the door opened, I saw the library for the first time.
If someone came here without a love of books, this placed would surely have given them one. The interior of the library seemed too big for the building, as though its dimensions altered once you stepped inside. Bookshelves carved from stained mahogany lined the room wall to wall, and the spines of books stared out at us. I could read a lot of them, but some were written in languages that I didn’t understand. Antique globes sat on custom-built tables on the polished marble floor. The ceiling above us was curved. On it were intricate paintings that depicted scenes from the history of the land, but I wasn’t well-read enough to know what they were.
From the way Brian’s eyes widened, I could tell he was in love. He looked the same as Smoglar had when I gave him his new axe. Ozreal stood with his hands in front of him and tucked them into his sleeves.
“Which book are we actually looking for?”
“Anything related to guild creation or guild lore,” said Brian. “And any history texts that relate to the formation of the guilds. Somewhere, in one of them, there will be something about the Greye homeland.”
I looked around me. There must have been hundreds of thousands of books.
“We’re going to be here a while, aren’t we?” I said.
Ozreal nodded. “They have rooms at the back where one can sleep and bathe. The scholars from the college would sometimes stay here for a month at a time.”
“Let’s split up,” said Brian.
As Brian moved to a section devoted to Re:Fuze lore, I stood in the centre of the library and looked around me. There were so many places to start that it seemed that no matter where I began, it would be the wrong place. I focused on the books and tried to use my appraiser skill, hoping it would somehow pick the right book out. The titles of the books around me flooded my screen, but none stood out.
As the day wore on I must have flicked through a hundred books. There was no time to actually read them, of course, so I resorted to skipping to the contents pages and looking for any mention of guild creation. As the afternoon wore on, I had nothing, and I knew I’d be working until well into the night.
I crossed the library and joined Ozreal at a shelf. The library was so quiet that my footsteps were the only noise.
“Any luck?” I said.
“I found a book called ‘Baking with Arcane Magic.’ It sounds so ridiculous that I might have to read it.”
I leaned against the bookshelf. I had been so obsessed with finding the book that I hadn’t realised that I was tired. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even sat down for hours.
“I’ve got nothing but papercuts,” I said. “I need to ask you something, Ozreal.”
Ozreal closed the book in his hand and turned to face me. “Go ahead.”
“Do you, by any chance, know my brother?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Who is he?”
“That’s the thing. Outside the game, I could tell you everything about Thomas. His hair colour, his favourite TV show, what cereal he likes to eat in the morning. In the game, I know next to nothing about him.”
“I’m not the best person to ask about stuff like this,” said Ozreal. “Although I’ve been around a long time, I’m not the most sociable of creatures. My idea of a party is reading a book next to a camp fire.”
“Worth a try,” I said.
The windows of the library turned black as night crept over the city outside. The librarian on duty, a short man with a crooked back and bushy beard, walked through the room and lit candl
es, making sure that the open flames were at least two metres away from the closest book.
We worked well into the night. I had flicked through so many books that my fingers were stained with ink. It was getting close to time to call it a night when Brian ran over to me. His booming footsteps disturbed the silence of the library, and the librarian looked at him with a scowl.
The giant held a book in the air. The cover was battered, and the writing on the front was spiralled and red. “I’ve got it,” he said. “It’ll be in this book, I guarantee it.”
Tinker, Tailor, Giant, Dwarf ( LitRPG Series): Difficulty:Legendary Book 2 Page 17
