Guild of Tokens, Trainee
Part 1
The girl was late.
Ordinarily, Beatrice Taylor would not have cared.
She wasn’t a stickler for people following her Quests to a T, and could deal with a bit of improvisation if the Quester got the job done.
“Results-oriented” would be on her resume if she still had a normal job.
But this morning was different.
This morning, her usual sitter texted her at 6:15 saying that she had been up half the night sick.
And, the last-minute replacement looked more suited for changing tires than changing a diaper.
Beatrice sighed and took another sip of her coffee. She watched the throngs of people on Bleecker Street pass by and she envied the carefree mornings they were probably enjoying. She wished she could return to those days, when all she had to worry about was where she was going to meet her friends for brunch or when Garrett was finally going to propose. But that had been a lifetime ago, before the baby, before Garrett had started sleeping with his analyst, and before she had discovered the Quests.
“I’m so sorry I’m late!” A chipper brunette wearing a pink backpack sprinted up to Beatrice’s table in front of the coffee shop, and took the empty seat across from her.
“It’s fine. I take it you have the book?” Beatrice studied her latest trainee, who had clearly run the last few blocks, as her face was flush and her breathing heavy. Good, she thought. She liked it when her trainees were afraid of displeasing her.
The jury was still out on Kate, a sophomore at NYU from Nebraska. The girl fit the new profile perfectly: enthusiastic, hard-working, a desire to please, and most importantly, no strong attachments to family.
“Yep!” Kate dumped her backpack on the table and began rifling through it, finally withdrawing a leather-bound book.
“Excellent. How is the old professor? Still a disgusting lecher? I hope he didn’t leer at you too much. You’re just his type.”
Kate’s eyes widened.
“Wait, how did you know that he had… Oh. This was just a test. Again.”
Beatrice smiled. At least this one was perceptive.
“Of course. You think you’re ready for the big time already? Did you read the book?”
“I did. Was up all night. Then tried to take a quick cat nap but slept through my alarm. That’s why I was la-”
“Then you know that this wasn’t something I would leave to the likes of you if I didn’t already know I could get it back.”
The trainee’s face turned sour, her achievement quickly undermined by a few choice words. But Beatrice preferred it this way. Last time she had let a trainee get a big head, things had gotten ugly, and with a baby to take care of, Beatrice didn’t really have the time anymore to keep starting from the beginning.
“Oh don’t be so sensitive. You did well regardless. Here’s your reward.”
Beatrice set the stack of iron tokens on the table and took the book. Kate stared at the tokens for several seconds before finally grabbing them and stuffing them in her backpack.
“Thanks.”
The girl’s earlier perkiness had faded in short order. Kids these days. They wanted a pat on the back, a trophy, and to be enthusiastically congratulated for doing what was expected of them. Kate should be grateful that she was even getting this chance to be her trainee. Did the girl know how hard Beatrice had worked to get to where she was? Of course not. But she had to play with the hand she was dealt, even if it meant a little extra coddling here and there.
“And because you were up all night, here’s something extra.”
Beatrice withdrew a small green square wrapped in plastic from her pocketbook and slid it across the table.
“What’s this?”
“A little something to help you next time you need to finish a paper. It lasts only a couple of hours, so don’t waste it, but it’s one of my better buffs, if I do say so myself.”
The girl stared at her blankly.
“You don’t know what a buff is?”
Kate shook her head.
“OK, fine. Think of it as a magic version of the Adderall you’ve been dealing in your dorm for me. Which it is.”
“Oh. OH. Wow, thanks!”
“You’re welcome. Don’t waste it though. I don’t hand those out to everyone for free you know.”
“I won’t. So, what’s my next assignment? Do you have the next volume of the diary? I have so many questions!”
“Easy there, tiger. I’ll be in touch. Go get some sleep. You’re beginning to sound like a chipmunk.”
The girl nodded, grabbed her stuff, and left the coffee shop. If there was one thing Beatrice had impressed upon her trainees, it was that she didn’t much care for small talk. She wasn’t there to be their friend or their mother. Speaking of, little Jack Jack would be waking up soon. Beatrice sighed again, finished the last dregs of her coffee and headed back uptown to her “normal” life.
The apartment was finally quiet and the wine was flowing. Tonight’s selection was a pinot grigio that Garrett had brought back from his trip to Rome last year. Beatrice was relaxing on the couch in the middle of her second glass and Garrett, as usual, was late. But she didn’t particularly care. It gave her time to catch up on how her latest batches of Questers were faring.
She logged on to the Quest Board and flipped over to the inbox, expecting to see a bunch of messages asking where the Questers could pick up their tokens. But it was empty. She frowned. Maybe she had just been unlucky. It happened from time to time. She would post her standard set of Quests and the luck of the draw would bring her an utterly incompetent set of noobs who shouldn’t have even been told about the Quests in the first place. It was so frustrating, but also necessary, if Beatrice wanted to keep her pipeline fresh, to have a replacement for Kate far enough along if the need arose.
Maybe it was the wine, but tonight she was in no mood to let these idiot Questers continue on for weeks attempting to complete the simplest of tasks. She opened another page on the Board, clicked on her active Quests, and cancelled them all. Then she brought up the new Quest page and reposted the same ones she had just cancelled.
“I need a handful of blueberries, a tillandsia, an orange popsicle, and three pounds of 80/20 ground beef from Chelsea Market. Leave in the windowsill of 194 W. 9th Street. Thanks! Reward: One wood”
This was the standard opener, a modification of the first Quest she had ever done. None of the items alone or in combination did anything, she had later discovered, but it was a good exercise in attention to detail. She couldn’t count how many times she had received the wrong mix of beef or a flower that was not a tillasandia. Also, the building on W. 9th Street had been abandoned for many years, so it was a good drop location.
“One Central Park pigeon. Preferably dead. Well, actually, definitely dead. Reward: one iron.”
Pigeons and rats were the bread and butter of a good alchemist. The spleen of a freshly killed pigeon was an excellent source of prima materia and you could never have too much of that. Beatrice made a mental reminder to check her stock of preservatives at the downtown apartment. There was nothing worse than going through the laborious (and messy) process of extracting organs only to find that there was nothing to keep them in, and any off putting smell would most certainly result in the old lady across the fifth floor landing calling the super, or worse, the police.
“Three leaves from a khat plant. Dried. Reward: Eight wood.”
Those outside the Questing world knew that chewing khat leaves produced an Adderall-like high. Amateurs. Those within the Questing world, at least the ones that Beatrice had come across, did not have the creativity to come up with any new transmutations. So that had let her and her chemical engineering degree run rampant, combining all manner of ordinary matter with prima materia to get fantastical results, giving her a nice slice of the market.
Two markets, actually. One version of her offerings she diluted down and sold to regular college kids and 20-somethings as black market hangover cures, Adderall substitutes, and other mind-enhancing offerings. It brought in a steady stream of real money that gave Beatrice a degree of independence and also let her rent the downtown apartment with Garrett none the wiser.
The other version she sold to Questers for tokens. It was a much better method of accumulating wealth than what she used to do, when she herself was a newbie Quester. Sure, she liked going on raids and piecing together what the Questing 1% were up to, but she worried that her continued success would make her a target eventually, and she wasn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with the Guild or the Council. Yet.
The last Quest went live just as the door to the apartment opened, and Beatrice quickly closed her laptop and turned to greet Garrett. It was 10:45.
“Honey, you’re home,” she said, mustering a phony smile. “I was beginning to think you were spending the night in the office again.” Garrett dropped his briefcase unceremoniously by the front door and walked into the living room.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek and taking a seat on the couch next to her. “This new deal is killing us. Hopefully it’ll calm down after we close.”
She looked at her husband. His red hair was slightly out of place, his shirt was wrinkled, and his eyes were bloodshot. The rigors of the private equity grind, she thought. Or maybe the aftermath of a quickie at his analyst’s apartment in DUMBO. Beatrice preferred not to know.
She had her secrets too, her own past transgressions that she had never owned up to. And it wasn’t like she was trying to snoop around, but Garrett had stopped trying to hide what he was doing a while ago. Plus, his analyst was a step up from herself looks wise and ten years younger to boot. If he was going to cheat, and Beatrice long ago accepted that he was, then she would have preferred that his dalliances were with girls who were on the same level as her.
“But then you’ll just move on to the next deal,” she said. Beatrice knew that in addition to the cheating, this was what she had signed up for when she agreed to marry Garrett, even though it had taken him seven years to actually pop the question. These late nights bought her a big apartment on Madison Avenue with a view of the Park, a week in the south of France, and the freedom of not having to have a day job. Sure, she had her tutoring business to keep up appearances before she had Jack Jack. She would work with a couple of rich kids once or twice a month, blow the money on cabs and coffee, and spend the rest of her time devoted to the Quests.
“Anyway, I hope you don’t mind, I cracked open the bottle early, wasn’t sure if you were even making it home tonight. Want some?”
Garrett shook his head.
“Not tonight, B. I need to get some sleep. Have a 7 AM call with Taipei.” He got up from the couch and walked down the hall into their bedroom, leaving Beatrice alone again with the wine and her thoughts.
Next: Beatrice and Kate go raiding. Read Part 2 below and, if you’re an audiobook listener, you can listen to the entire story for free below:
