The Nameless Guild - Chapter 1 - Part 1

Chapter 1: Apprentice

The sunlight shining down from the clear sky dimmed a bit, and I wasn't the only one to look up and see why. My level of interest dropped sharply, though, when I saw the reason - we get enough traffic in and out of Scaisil's port that the only real comment I had on what I was looking at was that it was a bit bigger than normal.

As tended to happen when I looked up at the sky in the daytime, my gaze was drawn from the big bulk freighter that was cruising overhead, shifting toward the far more impressive sight of Malith's ruddy disc. I smiled a bit to myself at the thought of how easily locals ignored the huge planet's looming presence, typically far more consumed with the daily details of getting on with whatever it was they did for a living, leaving marvelling at the sights to visitors.

Not that we had many of those, really... Still, there was enough of a mix amongst the colony's population that even a half-breed like I was didn't raise any comment. Though I suspected that was more down to most folks not really caring enough to try and figure out if I was Elven or Human, let alone wonder how a mix like me had come about.

A sense of movement from behind me dropped my gaze from the sky, and I glanced back over my shoulder, already pretty sure what I was going to see... and I was right.

"So, are you going to tell me or not?"

I kept my tone light, even though Mae had been bugging me on and off all day with the faintly shifty way she'd been acting. Now that we were done with our day in Scaisil's Guildhall, part of the annual intake that were hoping to find someone to take us on, I'd finally decided to just flat-out ask her what was going on.

"It's..." she started, then shook her head. "Look, it's nothing, okay Toi? I'm just trying to decide if I'm going to do something or not."

For a few moments, I just looked at her, trying to figure out what to make of her answer. Around us, the end-of-day mob was thinning out, other people making their breaks for freedom for the weekend, and being noisy enough that I'd almost not been able to hear what she'd said. It wasn't like her to be that quiet, usually, and that was definitely a clue that there was maybe a bit more to it than just 'nothing'.

She flushed a bit under my blue-eyed look, her coffee coloured skin, a sharp contrast to my own fair complexion, darkening as she quickly looked away toward the entrance of the Guildhall's parking lot, and I knew she was lying. I'd known this girl for over a decade, and now we were both well into our eighteenth year I had a lot of practice at spotting when she was trying to be evasive - just like now. She was usually better at it, though, and that actually had me feeling a bit worried...

"You sure?" I asked, resting a hand on her arm. "If there's something wrong..."

She shook her head again, this time laughing and giving me a genuine-looking smile.

"Gods, no. Just distracted."

I was about to say something more, but I caught sight of my mother's roller pulling in, Mae's father not that far behind in his own. Mae spotted the vehicles too, laughing again as she stuck her hands in her coat pockets.

"Timing." she muttered and I chuckled along with her. "I'll call you later?" she asked me, and I gave another nod.

"Sure. Have to be later, though. Mom's taking us out tonight, so..."

"Right. Remind me to hate you for that, will you? I'm stuck with the wireless."

I smirked a bit and slung my bag over my shoulder, the pair of us heading for the rollers waiting for us, the spirits bound into them for power humming to themselves. Or maybe each other. I wasn't totally up to speed on such things. When we were about half way there, I glanced at Mae again, and saw that she was looking like she was thinking hard about something. Just before we parted ways, she took a deep breath and grabbed my hand to give it a quick squeeze. That wasn't all she did, though, because I felt a pressure in my palm that told me she'd pressed something into my hand.

"Present for you." she told me with a smile that definitely had me wondering just what the hell was going on. "Just make sure that you're on your own when you look at it."

When she let go of my hand, I glanced down and saw the little crystal she'd given me, the intricate engraving in its depths shimmering with the data it held. Looking back up, I was about to ask her what was going on, but she cut me off by shaking her head a little and giving me that odd smile again. "Seriously."

Giving me the usual quick hug that always happened when we split up, she headed off toward her dad's roller, and looked a lot more like her normal bubbly self as she went. Which, of course, left me wondering even more just what that glint of mischief in her eyes had been before heading off.

---

She wasn't actually my mother, though I'd never known another. She'd found me when I was barely old enough to walk, and even after she and her husband had put a fair amount of effort into finding out where the hells I'd come from, there'd been... well, nothing. Occasionally, I still wondered about that, but over the years we'd simply settled in to the routine of being a family, even if I was the only one not actually a Human.

Not that the family had held together in the end, but at least I could be pretty confident that had been nothing to do with me.

The trip to the playhouse had been a couple of hours of fun, mindless entertainment, and Mom had been more than happy for both myself and Kyle, my adoptive little brother, to munch our way through plenty of snacks and drinks as we enjoyed the animated antics being projected up onto the big screen. Unfortunately, those drinks were catching up with me, and my first stop on getting through the front door of our house was the bathroom.

When I came out, I was met with a look of amusement from Mom, who'd just come back downstairs after loading Kyle, who'd fallen asleep in the roller on the way home, into his bed. There's been some confusion in the past, people pretty convinced that she really is my mother thanks to the similarity in our looks, the same blonde hair and blue eyes we shared with Kyle as well. Apart from the occasional amusement, I can't say I've ever really thought about it apart from to ignore the comments made by some of the more immature boys about her as I was growing up. It's not as if I particularly needed to hear them whispering their stupid little commentaries about her figure, after all. ..

"I did tell you..." she chuckled, and I shot her a mock glare that got me nothing but another laugh back. "Still, you both seemed to enjoy yourselves."

"Yeah, I did."

Giving her a hug, I was happy to enjoy having spent an evening with my mother. Something that didn't happen as much as either of us probably would have liked, given the times she had to work. She tried to keep what she did limited to the day, and she'd always seemed a bit evasive as to just what sort of Guild work it was she did, but it never seemed to matter - and it certainly kept us well and truly in house and home. Enough so that I probably didn't have to actually get an apprenticeship, or any other sort of work for that matter...

One thing that I had learned a long time before, though, was that she was there for us, and that was about all that really mattered to me.

Besides, Kyle enjoyed trying to milk everything he could out of me on those evenings she had to be somewhere else.

We chatted for a little while, migrating into the lounge where Mom put the wireless screen on and started looking over the list of stuff she'd told its resident spirit to record in preparation for her end of week evening of catching up on shows whilst sorting through the folders of cards that made up her Darkstone collection. I'd always thought it was an odd game, and not something I'd have expected a grown woman with children of her own to be so interested in both playing and assembling an unending stream of custom-made decks, but apparently I was wrong - and she was hardly a dabbler, as her recent win of a city-wide tournament had proved.

I liked the artwork in the cards themselves, though, and the idea that the people who made it were actually paying attention to the results of tournaments like that to weave the ongoing story that allegedly tied the whole game together, but my attempts to humour her and learn to play had been... less than successful. After about an hour or so of chatting and watching both the screen and Mom's painstaking care of her collection, I decided to call it a night, saying goodnight and accepting the quick kiss on the cheek that was the usual comeback.

With the evening I'd had, it wasn't until I got back into my room and glanced at the jacket hanging on the side of the closet that I remembered what Mae had given me earlier. Reaching into the pocket, I pulled the little crystal out and looked at it, still without a clue about what might be stored on it or why Mae had been acting how she had. Still, there was one way to-

A loud chirp cut off me off as I was about to wander over to my desk, and I didn't need to wonder what had caused it, or even who, since that particular tone only sounded for a particular person. With a smile at her timing, I pulled my hailer out of my pocket and touched a finger to it's surface to key the little device to life.

"Well?"

It seemed that she hadn't gotten that mischievous tinkle out of her system yet, if the tone of the question that came out of the sleek little device was anything to go by. Oddly, I was kind of looking forward to frustrating her...

"Been out all evening? Only just got back?" A bit of a white lie, that one, but she didn't need to know that... and the disappointed "Oh." I got as a reply was a good start on paying her back for being so frustrating all day. "I'm getting to it, though. Of course, I might get to it sooner if I was given any clue about what I was meant to be looking at."

"Not a chance, girlie. You'll find out when you find out - which should have been done by now, dammit!"

"Oh, like the wait for me to open your little surprise is going to kill you."

In the moment of silence that followed, I could easily picture her sticking her tongue out at me, and laughed at the image, something she was doing as well almost immediately.

"Okay," she told me, "I'll leave you to it then. Just remember what I said about making sure nobody's around and... enjoy."

As she ended the connection at her end, something about the way she'd said that seemed to send a little shiver down my spine. It wasn't a bad feeling, but that had definitely not been a tone she'd used for anything before except when she'd been nice enough to share some of the gourmet chocolates that she'd gotten for her birthday.

Eyeing the hailer in my hand a little suspiciously, I popped the gadget down on the desk. She'd been pretty insistent that I look at whatever was on here, and every other time she'd been anywhere near as sure I should do something, it had turned out reasonably well. She'd also been damned sure about something else, too...

Sticking my head back out of my bedroom door for a moment, I heard Mom muttering something snarky at the wireless, probably indulging one of her favourite hobbies - criticising fictional detectives for being stupid - and she sounded like she was going to be well occupied for at least the next couple of hours. Heading back to the desk, I ran a hand over the surface of the of my slate, leaving its resident spirit to wake up as I made sure the door was well and truly closed. That done, I sat myself down and let the slate read my palm and unlock itself slipping Mae's crystal into the slot on the side. Within a few moments, the slate had recognised it for what it was and the air shimmered over it as a projection of what was stored on it came into being.

What I was presented with was apparently a pair of collections, one marked 'Stills', the other 'Recordings'. Nothing gloriously interesting so far... With a shrug, I flipped a mental coin and went for the 'Stills' one, clicking to open it up. The projection shivered and changed itself, and what appeared was a list that seemed to go on and on, a list of entries that seemed to be mostly just random letters and numbers. The slate was recognising them all as images though, even if it wasn't providing any more hints than that, so I started at the top of the list, tapping a fingertip against the hovering display.

Continued in Chapter 1 - Part 2

---