The group is just inside the guild hall’s entrance, off to the side a little to be out of the way. Jason looks left and right. “So, we need opposite lines and one of them needs all three of us so we can’t split. Which should we hit up first?”
Rosha frowns, “I would say we take care of rent?”
Courtney shakes her head, “That will take longer as the line for that also holds people dealing with apartment problems, not just payment. Though even then, you can hit someone trying to drag things out.
“More than that, or anything else, is the fact that there are a lot more receptionists handling the monster drop-off. So if someone seems to be slowing the line down? They’ll move off to the side, and a new receptionist steps in to take the next person.”
Jason nods, “I can get behind that. Besides, we don’t Need to pay rent today. There’s still a couple of days left on that.”
Rosha taps the box, “But this isn’t an emergency either?”
Jason shakes his head, “It’s worse than an emergency. It’s an unknown. If I knew this would go bad in five hours or five days? That would be one thing. A wonderful thing! We’d know if we could ignore it for other things. As it stands? It could have five seconds and we wouldn’t know. So we’re dropping it off asap.”
That decided, they all lined up. After all, his logic is sound enough. At the moment, they don’t even know if the tailypo body was still viable! Let alone how long it had been . Better to hand off the hot potato to someone else.
And besides, the bit about switching in receptionists as needed meant the line moved. While shorter, the line for matters of housing could end up on the same person for long periods of time. With the monster desk, at most a person would take up five minutes, or else their matter would be shunted to the side and a new receptionist would step forward to take the next person.
So, with that in mind, it takes a relatively short amount of time to reach the front. It was only about an hour!
The receptionist glances at the box, “So, what do you got for me?”
Courtney nods at Jason to put the box down and gestures at it, “Well, depending on how well the preservation runes worked, we might just have a critter for you guys to examine.”
The receptionist leans forward to look over their desk at the box, “This isn’t going to stink, is it? We’ve had more than a few preservation failures that have tried to clear the building.”
Courtney shakes her head, “This is more about whether it was preserved enough to retain the fine details. The preservation box has, at the bare minimum, made sure it will be like a refrigerated body.”
The receptionist shrugs, “Well, don’t waste my time, crack it open so we can see what you've got.”
Jason takes that as a good enough cue and uses a throwing dagger to pry open the lid.
As the lid finally pops up, there is a sound akin to glass shattering and lines flare across the box.
The seal and preservation enchantment now broken, Jason can easily lift off the lid and reveal the dead tailypo. Which, as Courtney had assured the receptionist would be the case, was well preserved.
Courtney steps over to the box and observes the outside for a moment before having Jason lift the monster body up so she can observe that as well. “Okay, looking at how the box failed and the fact rigor mortis hasn’t set in? The box and my modifications worked. Shame about the box, but we don’t have the biggest need for it, anyway.”
She turns to the receptionist, “Okay, we intended to turn this in a city over, but as we all know, things are a little wild right now so we just skipped visiting and continued on to here. The critter itself, we’ve been calling a tailypo, since it liked to say that and suspect it is one of those critters from our myths instead of local legends.”
The receptionist frowns, “Well, at the very least I don’t recognize it. This was local? I know what you said, but you did use a modified preservation box and you can never tell with those.”
Courtney nods, “You should be able to pull up our quest we just did. Which we really should get the reward for while we’re here as well. Anyway, this was the critter causing trouble.”
The receptionist pulls something up and nods, “Okay, yeah, that is close enough. Even if it is simply rare, we’d want to examine it. Let alone if what you said is true. This examination will at least be free. Do you permit us to examine the body?”
The group all confirm this, and so the receptionist calls in an assistant to take the tailypo body.
That taken care of, the receptionist takes a few minutes to get the full story and the group’s details. Technically, that should have happened first, but when dealing with raw materials that aren’t fresh, even if preserved, you want to move on them quickly. Preservation magic works miracles, but sometimes the preserved item can begin to age wonky if kept preserved too long.
At this point, there isn’t anything to do about it, though. So with the tailypo body handed off and the paperwork filled out, the group moves over to the line handling apartments.
It uh, didn’t exactly move all that much, though thankfully it also didn’t grow much either. Still, it seems someone at the front was causing trouble.
Jason sighs, “We’re going to be here the rest of the day, aren’t we?”
Rosha shrugs, “We should probably pay a little ahead or set up some kind of auto-pay. I assume a guild account can be drawn from automatically?”
Courtney nods, “That is an option. In fact, it could be quite convenient if we end up doing a bunch of quests around the area. Instead of getting our coins out, we can leave it with the guild to pay the rent. We just have to set up the group fund properly for this. Which we should be able to do at this receptionist since it will be expressly for matters of housing and not just a general finds kind of thing.”