Chapter Text
The first appointment of the day was a walk-in.
Sasha had been working the registration desk at Arx for about six years, which meant that she had processed around four thousand first registrations, give or take, and she had developed a knack for catching the things that needed catching, enough to catch the things that needed catching, not so much that every new registration's stat distribution became her anxiety about stat distribution. You had to learn to calibrate; learn to what look for a first registration from the moment they come through the door, process them, and went home.
The man who walked in two minutes after they opened at nine in the morning today did not look like a first registration.
He looked like someone who had been inside a lot of buildings and had his own thoughts about all of them, currently trying to figure out what he thought about this one now. He was wearing a modified trench coat with a shortened hem that went to the back of his knees, a belt with pouches, a whip on his hip that she thought was an unusual weapon in this ecosystem given their triple scaling. Dark pants, boots that looked heavier than they should be. His right eye, covered with a finely made eyepatch, scars distributed across his face and hands in the patterns of someone who had been doing dangerous things for a long time.
He took a number without being prompted, sat down, and didn't look at his phone, the motivational poster, or anything in particular, which somehow produced the impression he was looking at everything.
Sasha looked at her screen, then back at the man, and back at the screen again, calling the next number.
The man sat across from her like someone who had arranged themselves in a chair many times and had since stopped noticing doing it. The scars were more visible up close, not fresh or recent, but enough to have become part of what you would associate with his face. The eyepatch was plain but made out of finely made heavy black fabric; the eye that remained was doing something she couldn't tell, while not quite unfriendly, almost like he was calibrating for something.
She pulled up the registration form. "First registration?"
"Yes." He replied.
"ID, please."
The man slid his ID across the counter, and she scanned it; standard procedure, waiting for verification, and the scanner produced a yellow warning instead of a green verification, which it occasionally did for IDs of international jurisdictions, entering the details and moving on.
"SYSTEM activation date?" She asked.
The man paused for a moment. "I don't have one."
She looked back up. The form had a field for this for a "SYSTEM Status: Withdrawn", which she had almost never used before, but found it strange that this happened enough times it warranted an option. She clicked it, with the form updating as she watched several fields grey out and others becoming mandatory, and she worked through them while trying her best to show she'd hadn't done it enough to be used to it.
"Reason for withdrawal?"
"Cardiac arrest." He said. "Dungeon poison from three years ago."
"And you were resuscitated?"
"I wouldn't be here if I wasn't."
"...And where were you treated?"
He named one somewhere in Europe; she didn't verify it in the moment because verification was someone else's responsibility and her job was intake.
"Any residual effects?"
The man looked at her, and then his hand. "Just some."
She typed "yes" and moved on.
The SYSTEM display was where it went wrong. Standard procedure for registration was to pull the applicant's display for stat assessment, certification determination, contract eligibility, the whole baseline the Guild's matching system ran on. She asked him to focus his display, but the response she got was not something she expected.
"I don't have one." He said.
"The display should still be accessible for assessment, even when withdrawn-"
"I don't have one." He said again.
Sasha pulled his display herself with an override function, the kind you used for applicants who didn't know how to focus their menu yet. The system processed for longer than normal, with its little processing indicator, and then returned a result she had never seen within her years of registration work.
The field was empty. Not zeroed, not pending, or flagged for review; empty, as if nothing had ever been entered in it, when the system had looked for information and found nothing, then returned that nothing. Sasha stared at it for a while.
"That's-"
She stopped herself. She was going to say "that's not possible", but she was a professional. She typed a note in the comments, flagged it for a supervisor, and moved on.
The age verification was the second thing; standard cross-reference, the SYSTEM checking the activation date against the date of birth on the ID to confirm the applicant was of age by the time of registration; she had processed four thousand of these and the system had never returned anything other than confirmed or pending documentation for international applicants, but the system this time returned "Not of Age".
"...I need to get my supervisor." Sasha said, standing up.
"I assumed as much." The man commented, leaning back in the chair.
The supervisor's name was Antony, and he had been working for the Guild's administrative branch for nearly nineteen years; he looked at Sasha's screen, then the applicant, and the screen again with the expression of someone running numbers in his head and taking longer than usual.
Antony sighed. "The age flag's probably a system error resulting from SYSTEM withdrawal. It would have-"
"Desynchronized the timestamp, yes." The applicant said.
Antony and Sasha looked at him.
"The SYSTEM withdrawal desynchronized my timestamp from the standard activation calendar. The system is reading it as failure to activate instead of withdrawal post-activation. Known edge case." He continued, crossing one of his legs over the other.
Antony and Sasha looked at each other. The applicant didn't bother looking at either of them, knowing that what he said was getting the gears turning in their heads by now.
"Is that-" Antony stuttered and cleared his throat. "Is that documented?"
"Check the 1979 addendum to the membership eligibility guidelines. Section four, subsection C. Timestamp desynchronization resulting from temporary death, or near-death experiences. It's a footnote."
Antony left to his office to look at the technical addendum. He was gone for four minutes; Sasha sat across from the applicant and did not quite look at him, and she was very aware of the whip on his hip and the empty display field, plus the warning on the screen.
"How do you know our registration documentation that well?" She asked, trying to lighten the mood.
"I've read it." He replied.
"All of it?"
The man looked at her. "Yes."
Antony came back after having read the footnote, but he seemed worried. There was the relief of having a documented category for these incidents, and the unease of the man who fit into it.
"Section four, subsection C," Antony began, "timestamp desynchronization. We can process this under a different designation. It's not too common, but it's documented."
Antony grabbed another chair and sat beside Sasha, taking over the process but not forcing her out.
"I know." The applicant said.
"We'd want to note your areas of expertise for the 'sherpa' role, so to say. The designation is typically for-"
"Experienced adventurers who've lost their SYSTEM and can act in an advisory or guide capacity." The applicant interrupted, stating it flatly. "Dungeon navigation, contract assessment, new adventurer orientation."
"Exactly. And you would say your areas of expertise are-"
"Dungeon navigation, contract assessment, new adventurer orientation."
They paused for a moment.
"Right. Alright, we- we can work with that. Survival rate in your previous contracts, how-"
"Perfect."
They paused again.
"Perfect?" Antony asked.
The applicant nodded.
Antony typed it in, not wanting the conversation he would need to have if he pressed on his claim. "And you name for the record?"
"Rhun." He said.
"Last name?"
"...Just Rhun."
The name tag printed while Antony processed the final paperwork; Sasha handled the printer, probably to get away from the strange man, while Antony made notes about perfect survival rates and comprehensive knowledge that even he didn't have. The tag came out standard size, standard font, with the Guild's logo in the upper left corner, position underneath the name in smaller font.
"RHUN"
She brought it back to the desk and set it down between them; Rhun looked at it for a moment, then he picked it up and attached it to his coat lapel, slightly crooked. He picked up his membership card, glanced at it, and then put it in one of his belt pouches without much ceremony.
"Thanks." He said, which was probably the most normal thing he said in the entire interaction.
Before they could say anything more, the man stood, the metal in his boots meeting the floor with the sound; small, bright, almost musical, like a faint ringing note at the back of each step as if something had been installed in the shoe. Sasha had heard that sound before, somewhere else, recently, but she still couldn't place it, almost like a sound effect in a show she recognized from a different one, but couldn't figure out where it came from. He walked to the door as Sasha looked at her screen and thought back onto the things she couldn't name about him, ranging from the eye, the knowledge, and other odd details.
When the door closed, she looked at Antony.
"Alright, crisis averted... hopefully." He said.
Sasha thought about the sound his boots made on the floor.
It sounded like spurs.