Three people shuffled into Polly’s office, all of them wearing suits, none of them human. The one who entered first, presumably their leader, was identified easily enough as an elf. Or something close to it. The archive didn’t work on the intelligent races, and even if it did, I’d just learned that it was rude to use without permission. Point was, the guy had long, pointy ears and was beautiful. After him came some sort of fish-man. His skin was grey, he sported a set of gills, and his teeth were sharp and on prominent display, as he grinned at me when he came in. The last one looked to be a type of undead, judging by the taut, darkened skin and the clear absence of flesh. The empty, glowing eye sockets also helped with identifying him as such.
They were all smiles, exchanging a few fake pleasantries with Polly before they grabbed a bunch of chairs and sat down on the opposite side of the table from me. While they were getting themselves settled, one more newcomer slithered through the door before closing it. It was a rather long and thick snake, sporting a set of black scales. The sun coming through the window was reflected off its scales in a rainbow pattern, reminding me of a snake back on Earth. I couldn’t quite recall their name, but remembered thinking they were cool.
“Gary, I presume?” The elf across from me asked, smiling like his life depended on it. “Pleased to meet you. My name is Alandril, and I’m a lawyer in service to the guild Remnant. These are my associates, Garbl and Druag. We’ve come seeking you out to make sure you don’t get scammed into an unfavorable contract, while providing excellent conditions should you choose to join our prestigious guild.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Polly called from his desk, where he was discussing things with the snake in hushed voices. “Gary does NOT understand anything about guilds or traveler society as a whole, so putting a contract in front of him before he gets all his questions answered is not going to happen.”
“Of course, we’d be happy to answer any and all questions you have,” Alandril didn’t even glance at Polly, as if to say he wasn’t worth his time. “Our guild master is one of the Nineteen, and it would reflect badly on him if we did things halfway.”
“Yeah, well, he does plenty of things on his own that reflect badly on himself…” the snake muttered just loud enough to be heard, which earned him a glare from the well-suited men, and a smack over the head with a wing.
I watched the whole exchange without saying anything, trying to figure out the general dynamic between the two parties. The three stooges seemed incredibly invested in getting me to join their guild and seemed generally antagonistic to Polly. Polly, on the other hand, seemed annoyed at their presence and would probably do all he could to get in their way and trip them up. Hopefully, to the point of sharing information he normally wouldn’t have if the meeting had been one-on-one. Ideally, the lawyers would in turn call him out if he talked out of his ass.
“Thank you for coming,” I addressed the trio for the first time, and they all snapped their heads around to look at me, Polly and the snake completely forgotten. “I appreciate your interest in recruiting me to your guild, but before I commit to anything, I would very much like to have my questions answered.”
“Of course, please do not hesitate!”
“Alright, then, just before you interrupted our meeting, Polly was about to explain to me what the Nineteen were. Considering that both guilds are led by one of them, I am highly interested to learn about them, to say the least.”
I could tell that the fact that Polly was also one of the Nineteen really grinded their gears. In any other situation, they probably would’ve been able to bulldoze over the smaller guild and lure me with vastly better conditions. Not like I’d spring for the first offer that sounded good, but by the way these new guys acted, I could tell they were used to getting their way. That didn’t exactly put them in a good light, but I was technically using them to get more accurate info without being too interested in their offers anyway.
Maybe having some shady dudes sit in on the meeting would make Polly put his best foot forward as well.
“Allow me to tell you, as I intended to before we got interrupted,” Polly spoke up from the side. The snake had curled up next to the desk, eyeing both the lawyers and me with mild interest. “Any traveler that reaches tier nineteen automatically becomes part of the Nineteen. They are the pinnacle of strength, pioneering the path toward tier twenty.”
“Wait,” I interjected, a bit confused. “There’s not a single traveler that’s tier twenty?”
“Correct,” Polly nodded. “And not just travelers either, across the whole expanse, no one has reached the twentieth tier yet. Once you reach tier nineteen, you hit a wall where the system does not guide you any further, and you are forced to forge your own path ahead.”
“Then, how do you even know that it’s possible to reach tier twenty?”
“Because it’s a quest given by the system,” Polly gestured with his wing and a system window appeared before me.
========================================================================
Break The Ceiling!
Reach Tier 20.
Rewards:
???
========================================================================
“Huh, so it is,” I said after reading through the extremely simple quest. “I assume this is somehow incredibly hard to pull off?”
“That would be an understatement,” Polly confirmed, and everybody in the room seemed to agree. “It’s been somewhere around twenty thousand years since the first traveler reached tier nineteen, and there have been many since, yet nobody managed to do it so far. There is a fierce race going on, with every single member of the Nineteen attempting to be the first to do it.”
“Twenty thousand years?” I asked, trying to process how long this had already taken, with seemingly no progress. “Is the first one still around?”
“Oh no, he’s long dead,” Polly shook his head. “While most of the Nineteen are functionally immortal, they can still die. And, since finding any threat at our level is close to impossible, every time one shows up, there is fierce competition around it, usually resulting in a few casualties among the Nineteen. Whoever wins gets to not only reap the rewards for completing whatever quest was issued, but also gets rewards for killing fellow high-level beings, so there’s a bit of an ebb and flow going on regarding how many of us there are.”
“How many are there?”
“Hard to tell, since there are so many hubs, but it is generally believed that across the whole expanse, there’s currently somewhere around four or five thousand beings at tier nineteen,” Polly moved his wing in a vague motion. “Considering how many travelers there are, that’s a minuscule amount.”
“And how many travelers are there?”
“Now that’s even harder to estimate, and nobody but the system knows the accurate number,” Polly shrugged. “Our best guess is somewhere around a few quadrillion.”
“Damn, that’s a lot…” I said, not really understanding how much that really was. “And out of so many travelers, only a few thousand made it to tier nineteen? Why?”
“Most of them die before even getting to tier ten,” this time, it was the snake that spoke up. “It doesn’t really matter how strong you think you are, as long as you haven't reached the tenth tier, you’re barely worth mentioning as a traveler. Just another face in the crowd.”
“That’s maybe worded a bit harshly, but not entirely untrue,” Polly supplemented. “With the mortality rate as high as it is for travelers below tier ten, most other travelers don’t pay them much mind, as long as they do their work.”
“Yet here we are,” I said, letting my eyes wander over Polly, the snake, and the three lawyers. “Two top-tier guilds, running after a tier eight.”
“You must understand that you're not just any face in the crowd,” Alandril piped up again, after letting Polly explain the Nineteen. “Your status as a voidling makes you very special indeed, even at the lower tiers. As previously mentioned, we are willing to offer you very…”
“Can you not?” Polly interjected, stopping Alandril’s attempt at sliding a document across the table, no doubt a contract. “I know Remnant is desperate, but we got to Gary first and haven’t even made an offer yet. You’re already skirting the line just by barging into our meeting, at least wait to make your attempt until we have made ours.”
I was enjoying the little squabble that ensued, as the lawyers tried to argue that their rude conduct was anything but rude, while Polly shut them down time after time. He did have a good amount of authority as one of the Nineteen, but since the other guys were here as a stand-in for one, they apparently felt no need to bow to it. Watching the whole exchange, Alandril and his little gang were rapidly losing any chance they ever had of recruiting me. While I didn’t believe that Polly was some kind of saint, at least he seemed nice, as opposed to the gaggle of lawyers that seemed entirely focused on getting results and getting me to sign a contract. One that undoubtedly had a lot of shit hidden in between the legalese.
I watched them bicker for a bit longer, making eye contact with the snake, who was seemingly amused by the whole thing. From what little I’d seen and heard of him, he was reminding me a bit of Orbos, which made him alright in my books. Maybe I should get him more involved in the talks; surely his type was the natural enemy of uptight lawyers.