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You inhale, exhale. The smoke rises in a column toward the sun. "I, eh, helped people. More than I planned on, to be honest. I just thought I'd set something up to sort of... you know... go through manses, bail people out. So nobody else got stuck as beetles. But I was talking to Ellery about it, and that guy does not think small. Or practical. Kind of like you. So the scope got a lot bigger, quick. And I guess you... you solved everybody's problems for them... so they had nothing better to do but pitch in. And then it was going to be a local thing, but the Wind Court collapsed. Which I assume was also you. Their stupid hats were definitely you."
You let smoke out through your nose. "So then there was a power vacuum, and also a ton of unemployed Courtiers, and not all of them were like Lucky. A lot of them still wanted to do their jobs. And then you give it fifty or sixty years, and there's... there's the Gild."
Why not. You take your pin out and set it down with everything else. "Yes, Lottie. It is a stupid pun. It's not my fault. I— I didn't know what to call it, so I picked something I thought you'd call it. 'The Adventurer's Guild,' or something. Guild with a 'u'. But Ellery hears 'Guild' one time, and he thinks it's <span class="mu-i">Gil</span>-d, and then it's stuck like that for the rest of my life. That's how history works."
You sigh. "Anyways. It's like the Wind Court if the Wind Court didn't suck shit. More helping. Less jail. Uh, there's still some monster-fighting... that part was mostly C.R. But it's really good, Lottie. It does good things. Death rates are way, way, way down. Almost everyone who drowns is found and helped. And some of them don't want help, or they get so fucked they can't be helped, but most of them... and even way after that, we have medics, we have clinics, and things like that, and it's all run by volunteers, because nobody has anything better to do. Everybody's bored. And if they join the Gild they have a kind of purpose."
The waves lap on the surface.
"So it's good. It's important. And I did this. I— they— they report to me, Lottie, which still scares me. But I'm good at running this. I'm effective. People respect me. I can keep doing it as long as I want. I— I found a grey hair recently. One hair. I could probably go on for another 200 years, easily, maybe 300. Maybe longer, if I spent more of it as beetles. I could live 10 times as long as you did. 10 or 20 times."
A gentle current riffles past.
(4/6)
