Guild of Tokens

by Jon Auerbach

  “Done.”

  4

  The ties that bind

  “Then the English sailed four ships into the harbor and took it from us. We crushed their navy in response, but let them keep the island anyway in exchange for some nutmeg trees halfway around the world. You tell me who got the better deal.”

  I read too many stories growing up about naive would-be heroes, who think they can outwit a demigod or a mischievous dwarf or some other creature but only end up indebted and forced into their service. Even knowing that, I still agreed to Polly’s terms.

  “Ooh, I like your style, Jade. Most people would at least ask what the favor is first before agreeing, but you’re bold. Anyway, here we go.”

  I didn’t think it was possible, but Polly’s hands moved even faster this time and I could barely keep up as the shells whirled around and around. I tried looking at her hands and the shells at the same time to keep track, but it was no use, and I resigned myself to owing this little girl what was hopefully a minor favor, like pretending to be her older sister to get her out of school early. As the shells slowed though, I noticed a new pattern in her hands. I could still see the extra exertion in one hand, but as the shells swapped places, so too did the tell. It was as if she was throwing the ball between shells, the receiving hand straining just a bit as the other hand relaxed. I watched the pattern repeat itself until finally Polly stopped and the shells were displayed in front of me to choose.

  “The middle one,” I said.

  Polly’s cheerful demeanor faded in an instant, as she uncovered the shell to reveal the ball.

  “Well, I’ll be darned. You won. I don’t believe it.”

  I smiled.

  “Neither do I. Now pay up, please.”

  Polly bent down to dig something out of her backpack and then set two iron tokens on the box.

  “Where are the other two?”

  “See, the thing is, I never expected you to win the double-or-nothing and so I don’t have the other two.”

  “Well then, I think that you are now in the position of owing me a favor.”

  Polly frowned.

  “I don’t give out favors willy nilly, especially not for this small a debt. Come back here tomorrow and I’ll have your tokens.”

  “No, I don’t think so. How about this: I’ll forgive the debt, but after you show me how your little game works, I get to ask you one question and you have to answer it truthfully.”

  We stared at each other while Polly considered my offer. Several times she opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, only to stop short. I was half-expecting a lucrative offer to play the game again, but I think she was scared that I had actually deduced the secret. Finally, she sighed and started flipping over the shells.

  “The thing about you noobs-you’re a noob, aren’t you?-is that you think this is all a game out of some Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale. Well, it’s not. And ordinarily, there’s no way I’d agree to answer your question. But I’m a Janssen and we keep our word. Plus, I still can’t believe you won, so I’ll indulge you. Now, watch closely.”

  Polly tapped the two outer shells together, and then took the ball and dropped it in the left shell. She stood back with her hands in her pockets. I bent forward and looked into it, only to find nothing there.

  “Try the right one,” said Polly.

  I looked in that one and there was the ball.

  “But, you didn’t … how?”

  “Watch again.” Polly took the ball out of the right shell, tapped the center and right shells together, and then put the ball back in the right shell. I peered into the right shell and it was now empty. Instead, the middle one held the ball.

  “It’s some sort of false bottom, right? You tap the shells together to open it?”

  Polly shook her head.

  “Any ol’ person could do that, Jade. You should know better than… oh. I see.”

  “What?”

  “What level are you?”

  “Umm, err.”

  I didn’t want to admit that the girl was right and that I was a noob. Nothing was more embarrassing than being that player who had no idea what they’re doing and who stumbled around like a fool, playing the game so poorly that their own teammates try to off them so they didn’t get in the way. But I knew so little as it was and if I tried to pass myself off as someone more experienced, I was certain that Polly would not tell me anything at all.

  “So, I’m about to be level two, once you give me the tokens. I’ve only been Questing for a few weeks though.”

  Polly hit her forehead with her palm.

  “Unbelievable. Lost to a friggin’ baby noob.” The girl shook her head, and a look of disgust formed on her face. “Look, I’m still going to show you how the trick actually works, but just tell me how you won. Tell me it was blind luck and I’ll sleep a little better tonight.”

  I told her how I noticed the muscles in her hand flex and relax as the ball moved from one shell to the other and she nodded, a slight smile on her face.

  “All right, I’m sorry I called you a noob. You clearly have some clue what you’re doing and next time I do this, I definitely need to wear gloves. And, you’re not entirely wrong about the false bottom. But, there’s only one ball. Here, hold these.”

  Polly handed me the middle and right shells after fishing the ball out first. I looked inside them but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “Tap them together.”

  I did, and felt a tingling sensation in my hands, as if the shells were now connected with an invisible tether.

  “Now, here comes the important part.”

  Polly flicked the ball into middle shell with a graceful throw and I caught it, only it never arrived at the bottom of the shell. Instead, I looked down into the right shell to see the ball rolling lazily around the bottom.

  “Impossible. How … you couldn’t have … I mean, I saw the ball go into the middle shell.”

  I held the shells in my hand, the tension between them gone. Without asking first, I quickly tapped them together, and the tension returned but just as quickly faded.

  “Look in the middle shell again.”

  I did and there was the ball. I tapped them together again and the ball went to the other shell. To an outside observer, I must have looked like a crazy person, tapping shells together next to a middle schooler.

  “You done or do you want to wear a hole in them? Those weren’t cheap, you know.”

  I handed the shells back to Polly, who put them back on the box.

  “I give up,” I said. “How does it work?”

  “Well,” said Polly, “not sure I should actually be telling you, given your level. I mean, the Council came up with those for a reason. But, a promise is a promise, I guess.”

  She turned the shells on their side so the insides faced me, and then tapped two of them together. The formerly opaque bottoms had changed somehow, a silvery circle in their place.

  “Promise you won’t scream?” she asked me. I nodded quickly, not wanting to miss out on what she was about to show me.

  “OK then. Stick your finger in one all the way to the bottom.”

  I stuck my index finger into the bottom of one shell, only to see it emerge from the other one several inches away. As if not believing what I was seeing, my brain told my finger to move, and the floating finger tip obliged.

  I broke my promise and screamed.

  5

  Level up

  “The English, in their stupidity, let us stay. We’ve been paying them back for that favor ever since.”

  There are moments in my life that are so vivid, I only need to close my eyes and think briefly about them before all the details come flooding up to the surface.

  Me locked in the middle school bathroom, sobbing for hours.

  My mother’s body draped in a sheet on the morgue table.

  There were others, too few of them happy.

  And now, I would have to add this one to the list.<
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  The next thing I remembered was Polly grabbing my wrist and pulling it away from the shell, as if I was a child who had touched a hot stove. I brought my hand up to my face and wiggled my index finger to make sure that it was still attached. It was. But before I could dwell on the stunning development of the magic shells, Polly began pulling me down the street.

  “W-what are you doing?”

  I yanked myself free and we continued walking away from the corner.

  “What does it look like I’m doing? Getting us the hell out of there. You promised you wouldn’t scream, remember?”

  “I did, but you could have warned me!”

  We walked to a grocery store at the end of the block and I followed Polly inside. Only when we had reached the middle of the cereal aisle did Polly finally stop and set down her bag, into which she tossed the shells.

  “I didn’t think I needed to. It looked like you had figured it out on your own.”

  “You said it yourself though; I’m newer than a noob; how was I supposed to know that you somehow created a tiny rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, a wormhole.”

  Polly shook her head.

  “I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. It’s just some vervorium painted on the bottom of each shell.”

  Oh, of course. Some vervorium painted on the shells. Her tone made it sound like she was describing how to make a sandwich.

  “I don’t mean to sound like an idiot, but what is vervorium, exactly?”

  “Vervorium, Jade, is a very rare but incredibly useful prima materia used to link two places together. It’s hard to make and you need a lot of ingredients. Like the spleen of a freshly killed rat, for one.”

  She did it again. Prima materia. Available in your local bodega next to a can of chili.

  “So that was you I was delivering the rat to?”

  Polly smirked.

  “Nope. This vervorium I stol-err, borrowed from my dad. Whoever wanted your rat was someone else and not necessarily to make vervorium. Rats are very useful. We keep a ton in our garage.”

  A clerk walked by with a cart full of cereal and we headed in the opposite direction towards the freezer section. I tried to process these new revelations and wanted to ask a million more questions. Was this real magic? Or some incredibly complex science that had been concealed from the world by a select few? At some level, it didn’t really matter, as one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clarke, had once opined, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Polly still owed me the answer to one question, so I wracked my brain for one that would reveal the most information.

  “All right, time for my question.” We stopped in front of a case of frozen fish sticks. “So the Quests are just some cheap labor to fetch ingredients for your magic potions, is that it?”

  I had formulated my inquiry with just the right level of ridiculousness in the hopes that Polly would relish the opportunity to disabuse me of my misconceptions by talking too much. But to my disappointment, she did not take the bait.

  “No,” was all she replied. I waited for more but she suddenly turned quiet and began drawing doodles on the freezer case.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Look, uhh, I’ve already told you way too much for a level one. Here’s your iron. Good luck to you.” She forced the tokens into my hand and then ran off before I could say anything more. For a second I contemplated chasing her out of the store, but realized the optics of that were abysmal and would likely get me arrested.

  I kicked myself for asking too big of a question. There was clearly something greater going on here than just a bunch of random fetching; my finger tip floating in mid-air was proof of that, but all that I had to go on was a bunch of tokens, a crazy message board, and an even crazier story about a teleporting ball.

  With a sigh, I started to walk out of the store when something on the freezer case caught my attention. What I had thought were mere doodles were actually numbers, six numbers in fact, separated in the middle by a period. It read “949.278.”

  I stared at them, trying to figure out what they could mean, then kicked myself for not recognizing the sequence immediately. After all, I had spent every summer since I was 15 through college working in the Borough Park Library. I could hear my old boss Ms. Bakadet’s voice in the back of my mind, berating me for not remembering the Dewey Decimal classification for 17th century Celtic literature, and I couldn’t imagine how many months of stack duty she would have assigned me for my transgression just now.

  But thanks to those hours she spent hammering into my brain every single Dewey Decimal number, I was sure I could figure out at least part of this one without resorting to what Ms. Bakadet referred to as the “idiot terminal.”

  900 was history. 940 was the history of Europe. 949 was the catch-all for the random parts of Europe that people didn’t care too much about. But the three numbers after the decimal remained a mystery, as there was only so much information I could store in my brain. And having not worked at the library in five years, there was no reason to remember this stuff any longer. The 2 would be the country, but which one I had no clue. The 78 would be some other topic and time period as it related to this country, though again I was stumped.

  I pulled out my phone to cheat, only to be bombarded with a flurry of Slack messages. Evidently, Ross, Russ’s replacement, had picked up Russ’s bad habit of fixing one bug by introducing two more. I quickly answered that I was on my way back from a doctor’s appointment and ran out of the store, but not before snapping a picture of the cryptic numerals and then wiping the glass clean.

  It took me the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening to undo Ross’s mishap and between that and the haunting visage of my finger that appeared whenever I closed my eyes for more than a second, I had no motivation to tread back into the world of library numbering systems. But, I still wanted to see if my level-up had gone through and so I clicked over to the Quest Board and logged in.

  I took out the two iron and set them in front of my keyboard, as if offering them to the Questing gods. My profile screen loaded and a big pop-up window appeared in front.

  “Congratulations! You’ve reached level two!” it said in fancy green script. I closed the window to check out my new stats:

  Quests completed: 12

  Tokens earned: 23 wood, 4 iron

  Level: 2

  Token experience: 31

  Level up: 100”

  One hundred experience to get to level three? What the heck! It had taken me 10 weeks just to get this far. I didn’t want to count how many more rats I would have to bludgeon to get close to level three. There had to be some way to take on more rewarding Quests or I would be stuck getting sneered at by the Pollys of the world for the next three years. But, to do that, I would have to get smarter on the subject of Questing.

  So, the next day, on my way to work, I stopped at the midtown library to look up the mystery number. I wasn’t sure how a book about the history of some random country was going to help, but I had a hunch that the decimal was chosen more for its obscurity than for its relevance to the subject matter.

  My theory was spot on, as a search of the library’s digital holdings yielded nothing with that number. Not a good sign. But knowing how the library system worked, I was sure that their hard-copy card catalog was lurking around the building somewhere.

  After several annoyed librarians gave me conflicting answers, I finally found the six-foot tall structure in a poorly lit corner of the basement. The handwritten labels were brown and peeling, and of course the drawer I wanted was just out of my reach, so I located a rickety wooden chair, leaned it against the cabinet, and stepped up. It held.

  A cloud of dust sprayed my face upon opening the relevant drawer and I began flicking through the cards. Finally, I reached 949.278 and was rewarded for my diligence. I pulled out the section number and the two cards that
followed it, carefully stepped down from the chair, and took my prize over to a small table nestled between two stacks.

  Someone had written the name of the section on the first card in cursive, the blue ink of the letters scrunched together so that they barely took up any space. I studied the writing several times before I could make out what it said:

  “The history of Dutch settlement in North America.”

  That was … not what I was expecting. I looked at the other two cards, hoping the book titles would shed some light on the relevance of what was turning into a wild goose chase. But instead of titles like I was expecting, there were only numbers.

  Fine, I thought. I’ll just go back to the stupid computer upstairs and type in the numbers and viola, books located. But the computer failed me again, bringing back nothing at all.

  Finally, I gave up and went to the reference desk. My run of luck continued, as a woman who could have been Ms. Bakadet’s twin was hammering away at her keyboard when I approached. I stood in front of her, remembering my training well.

  “Never interrupt a librarian mid-thought!” Ms. Bakadet had said. “She could be on the verge of locating a long-lost book that the next Nobel Prize winner needs to complete their master work!”

  As much as I highly doubted that this scenario had ever occurred, I waited patiently until the clacking ceased.

  “Umm, excuse me?”

  The librarian turned and glared at me above the spectacles on her nose, as if it weren’t her job to help people locate books.

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering if you could help me locate these two books.” I handed her the two cards. “I searched the regular catalog but couldn’t find anything.”

  She snatched the cards out of my hand with the speed of a cobra.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “I, umm, they were in the card catalog in the basement.”

  “And you just decided to rummage around in the meticulously organized card catalog that dozens of librarians spent years creating and maintaining?”