"Most people nowadays are just as confused as you are when they meet him in person, but yes, that guy is the Pope, and he's been like that the entire time I've known him. Frankly, it still confuses me how people ever saw him as trustworthy enough to give his Church the power it has."
I sat there in stunned silence. The most powerful man in the city, both in position and, most likely, in physical power, had been sitting in a chair barely an arm's length away from me, and he had even offered me a job. I was in a state of shock, enough to make me not even realize how suspicious the situation was. In time, I would realize that was likely his goal in springing it on me in that way.
Once I started getting over the knowledge of who I had just been talking to, there was something I couldn't get out of my head. The thought of leaving would never cross my mind? There was such an assuredness in his tone, it made me feel that it went beyond simply confidence in my character or the quality of the job. The line also stood out because, unlike the rest of the conversation that had a sort of whimsical nature, it was just those few words in the middle of it all that were said with complete seriousness. I didn't know whether to be afraid of my lack of understanding of his intentions or not. I didn't like it.
"What now?"
"Now, I'm afraid we must go our separate ways. There should be someone arriving in the next minute or two to escort you wherever the old man wants you to go, and I have my own responsibilities to attend to. I don't think we'll be seeing each other much, but who knows. Our strings may only have this one knot, or they may be braided. Only time will tell."
With that, he gave the table a hearty smack and pushed himself backwards, wheeling himself between Bear and I before I could even react.
"It's been nice to have the chance to spend time together like this again, brief as it may have been. Take care of yourself, ok?"
"Always."
Bear passed the crutches over; Owl placed them by this side. He then offered his hand, and they grabbed each other by the forearms.
"Be sure to let me know wherever they decide to stick you next."
"Of course."
"Alright then. See you… whenever time allows, I suppose."
He gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, and, after a final shared look and nod, Bear stood and made for the exit. Owl then turned to me.
"Good luck. Remember to keep your eyes, ears, and mind open, in that order, and never let your lack of experience cause a lack of confidence. You are much stronger than you know."
We exchanged a firm handshake and he turned to leave. As he did so, his crutches, which were sticking out behind the back of the wheelchair, hit me directly on the knee.
"Ow?"
"Oops."
He headed for the door while I rubbed my new injury. Seeing that he showed no signs of stopping, I called out.
"You aren't going to pay?"
"This is a Hero-only bar. The owner doesn't charge and no one has the balls to tell him no or shut him down."
With that, he was gone. Looking at the rest of the room, there were three other people, all of whom were, luckily for me, minding their own business. I quickly stood up, grabbed the cups on the table, walked them over to the bar, and limped towards the door.
Outside, the crowd had died down significantly from earlier, but was still busy. Owl was nowhere to be seen, although I wasn't exactly surprised. I didn't see anyone who seemed to be looking for me immediately, but I had been instructed to wait, so I did. Not a minute later, the crowded street made a perfectly sized gap for a man in a white robe to walk through, the same gold-edged white robe the man at the funeral was wearing. He was a bit shorter than me and had a head of receding gray hair. We made eye contact, and he looked me over for a second.
"Come with me."
He immediately turned around, scarcely giving me the time to react. I followed him closely, watching in amazement as the river of people seemed to naturally part around him. After a short walk, we made it back to the large square the funeral was held at. The stage had been deconstructed and completely removed in the time I had spent with Owl. On the side of the square where the stage had been was a large staircase leading to a massive open gate; the crowd that had gathered earlier was such a sight for me that I hadn't even registered being at the front entrance of the city's largest structure. Another thing I was only noticing now was that, rather than the whole palace being made of golden crystal, only the top roughly half was, which was the only part visible over the city wall from the outside.
In the time I was marveling at the palace, my guide had made it nearly to the top of the stairs. I quickly caught up, following him through the gate. Inside was a grand hall with an arched ceiling, from which hung a large chandelier adorned with candles that burned with a golden flame. Every inch of the hall seemed to be carved with intricate patterns, all of which resembled snakes of various sizes, depending on which part the viewer focused on and from what angle.
I was led to a relatively small archway, inside of which was a large cavity with a rope of seemingly infinite length moving perpetually upward. Every two people of length, there was another rope tied in a loop.
"Place your foot in one of those and it'll take you up. You're to get off at the third doorway you see. Hold on tight, don't go all the way to the top, and don't let go. There will be someone there to tell you next steps."
Before I could ask questions, he walked away, leaving me to stare dumbly at the contraption. After a period of mustering up my courage and seeing no one else coming to give me an example, I reached out and placed my hand around the rope. I let it run through my hand, feeling out the timing of the footholds. Eventually, I grabbed the rope firmly, and moved my foot to one of the loops, which I missed. After a brief, mostly controlled descent, I managed to stick my foot into the next loop and tightened my grip on the rope enough for my knuckles and fingertips to turn white.
At the third doorway, I almost jumped off the rope, staggering a few steps forward when I landed. There was already someone standing there, waiting for me with an uncomfortably large smile.
"Hi! Welcome to the Church! We're very excited you're joining us, and I know you'll enjoy your life here as much as I do. Today, I'll be walking you through the basics of being here, what facilities are offered to you, we'll do a quick exam, and then I'll show you where you'll be staying. How does that sound?"
"To be completely honest with you, I didn't hear a word of what you said. I'm still a bit shaken up from that death trap."
"Oh, you'll be fine. I'm sure you'll figure it out in no time. C'mon, lets get going. Never too soon to start getting used to a new environment."
Before I had even had a chance to catch my breath, the two of us were walking down the hallway. The walls were made of simple stone bricks, with the trim carved in the same manner as the walls in the main hall. There were doorways placed sparsely and unorderly. The floor and ceiling were polished smooth enough to be a mirror, yet they only reflected the four sides of the hallway, not either of us walking through it. The whole hallway, for as far as I could see, was well and evenly lit in spite of the lack of light sources, and as we walked, no sound was produced by our footsteps, nor did our voices echo.
"So, this hallway is sort of the utility area of this floor. These rooms are mostly meeting rooms and storerooms; nothing too interesting, but there might be some useful stuff in one of the storerooms, which you're free to take – within reason of course."
I stopped to look into one of the storerooms. The door to the room was wooden but lacked the weight I expected. Inside, there were shelves upon shelves of stuff, none of which I had time to identify as my guide had never stopped walking, and I had to once again scramble to catch up.
"Up ahead on the left is the hallway that leads to the west side of the floor, and a bit further up is the door to the gathering room. It's sort of like the central hub of the whole floor, where I'm sure all of you will meet to discuss all the exciting mission details."
We kept walking forward until the hallway curved to the right, leading to more hallway. This one was much shorter, ending in a door and a left turn to another hallway, which also quickly turned left. This section of hall wrapped around a small section of the building which held another rope deathtrap, although this one had two going in both directions, with a wall separating them.
"To your right is the door to the training room, which we'll circle back to at the end of the tour, and to your left are the central ropes of the building. They can take you to almost any floor you wish, except for the main hall or anything below and the very top floors. For those, you'll have to take one of the other ropes or the stairs, but I don't think you'll have any reason to go that far up or down. The important destination for you though, is the library, which you'll find on the floor just above this one."
"What's in the training room?"
"Oh, the usual stuff; spare weapons, weights, practice dummies, automated training partners, strength measuring equipment. Pretty boring, but I can't deny its usefulness. I'm sure you'll figure all that out on your own. Next up is the north hallway, which gives you a good view out over the city."
I was confused for a moment until we turned into the hallway and I realized the entire north wall was completely transparent. I didn't even think there was a wall until I reached out to touch it and nearly sprained my finger. As it turns out, depth perception doesn't work when there's nothing to perceive. As we continued through this hallway, and while I tried to rub the pain out of my finger, it struck me that the reason the floor and ceiling were made so reflective was to spread the light from this window throughout the whole floor. I was sure there was some magical element to it as well, but I couldn't say where the design stopped and the magic began.
"And lastly on this tour, we come to the living quarters."
We took one more left turn into what I hoped was truly the last hallway in this tour. The wall to the left was completely sparse apart from a single door, which I guessed was another entrance to the central gathering room due to the layout of the floor I was creating in my mind. The wall to the right had a series of doors placed at regular intervals. There were six in total, although the last door was on the far wall of the hallway, not in line with the others.
"Let me guess, I get the odd room out?"
"What? No. Yours is the third one down from this end. The guy in room six said he didn't want to be in the middle of everyone. Well, he didn't really say that, but that was the feeling I got from him, y'know? He didn't actually say much of anything. Kinda scary."
"Oh, alright then. Do you have a key for me then or what?"
"So, the doors don't actually lock, but no one will come in unless you want them too."
"Seems very safe and not at all prone to burglaries."
"You have nothing to worry about. No one who would wish to rob anyone here would make it far enough to actually do it. Anyway, I'll trust that you can find your way here on your own, so I'll take you back over the training room and hand you over."
We walked back to the training room, completing a full loop of the hall. Once we reached the door, my guide said goodbye and walked to the moving ropes, grabbing it with a practiced ease. I shuddered at the thought of having to use that thing again while I turned and opened the door. Inside was a room big enough to fit multiple houses, made of a white stone, different than the rest of this building and different than the buildings in the rest of the city. Braziers burning with a brilliant white flame hung in the four corners of the ceiling, with mirrors placed behind them to reflect their light into the room, making it near-blinding until my eyes adjusted.
In the room were, as described by the guide, a number of things that looked useful for honing combat skills. There were vaguely humanoid shaped wood structures at various places around the room, with a large variety of other things I didn't know the purpose of. Along the far side of the room were about half a dozen metal balls of different sizes.
"Hey! Yous're new arrival, right?"
Someone called out to me from one of my sides. I turned to see someone standing up from a desk. Around the corner of the room the desk was in were a number of strange apparatuses. The person now walking towards me was a short, stocky man with bronze skin and only a sparse amount of hair on his face and seemingly none on the rest of his body. He also spoke with a strange, hard to understand dialect I had never heard before.
"Welcome ya on in here, don't be shy. I'm sure yer gonna get used to seein this room in no time. My job here is to get records on ya so we can track yer progress and get ya outfitted."
I walked over to him hesitantly. When I reached him, he walked around me, inspecting every part of me. When he completed his loop, he pulled out a rope with knots placed regularly along its length and used it to measure the dimensions of nearly every part of my body. Before I could react, he was done and back at his desk, scribbling down his measurements.
"Right, now then. Over here. Strength test first, then reflexes, then how well ya can actually kill shit."
He walked over to the corner of the room. An area of the wall was cut out in a square, leading into a rather long tunnel. From the middle of the far wall of the tunnel extended a long pole with a pad on the end. Thin poles with small hooks on the end were placed in the wall on either side of the tunnel at regular intervals, which hooked into small hoops placed at the same intervals along the central pole. They were what kept it upright throughout the length of the tunnel.
"Just go on ahead and give that there pad a good whack; how far it moves will tell me how strong ya are. You can hit it as hard as ya'd like, but for the sake of the sanity of both me and the pencil pushers that pay me, do not try to make yerself look good. I've seen enough needle-nosed, sniveling, know-it-all fuckwits come through, trying to use their fancy-pants magic to help them, and still have the nerve to be offended by getting my boot to their neck. Just hit it. Nothin' fancy 'bout it. What's so goddamn hard to understand about that?"
"If the test is to measure our strength, why wouldn't we use everything at our disposal to, well, hit it as hard as we can?"
"Because this is a physical strength test, with a very heavy emphasis on physical. If I wanted to test yer magic, I'd say that. If I wanted to test both in combination, I'd throw something at ya that was tryin' to kill ya, which comes later. If I wanted to test how well ya can manipulate my words into a meaning that suits ya, I'd have ya run for election."
"Understood. Just hit it, no magic included, not that I could if I wanted to."
"Good. Makes shit too complicated when ya start throwing weird invisible shit in the mix."
"And I won't break it? Parts of it look a bit fragile."
"Yu'll break yer hand before you breaks it, trust me. Now stop dawdlin' and hit the damn thing. I got shit to do today."
I walked up to the pad, shifting my position a few times before I found one that felt the most comfortable. It had been a while since I had thrown a regular punch from a stable position, so while the knowledge of how to do it was still there, it took a bit to knock the dust off the metaphorical book. While I prepared, I could see the tester getting increasingly impatient, visibly biting his tongue to not disturb me and make it last any longer. When I took a practice swing, I saw him get a bit excited, only to be disappointed when he saw I didn't put any power behind it.
With my preparation completed and my mind in a state to smack something, I set my feet and took a few breaths. With one more deep breath, I twisted my body and punched the pad, sending it about halfway down the tunnel, where it then sprung back to its original position. I was a bit disappointed to see the result, as I had been trying to get at least close to the maximum. When I looked back to the tester, he was just looking at me with an amused smile.
"Do you allow do-overs? I feel like I can push it out a bit farther."
"Y'have no idea what ya just did, do ya kid?"
"What? Middle of pole means average strength, right?"
"That's not a bad guess, but ya forgot that this is meant to measure the strength of everyone, not just newbies like yerself. To account for that, I made the resistance increase exponentially along the length of the spring; basically, it gets harder the farther down the shaft ya get. It was a pain in the ass to figure out the forces of the springs for each segment, but that don't matter right now. What matters is that about a quarter of the total length is average for what yer level is supposed to be, accordin' to the information I got here. What ya just did, on the other hand, puts ya in the top quarter of everyone."
"What do you mean by everyone?"
"Ya got a worm in yer brain or somethin'? Everyone is everyone, from the old guy with a different person to wipe his ass for each day of the week at the top of this pile of rocks to the old guys outside who shit themselves like real men, and still make it everyone else's problem."
"You lost me on the metaphor, but I get your point."
"I doubt it, but it's not my job to tell ya yer place in the world. Step over to the thing next to ya now."
To my side was another strange contraption. There were two vertical poles with four posts, about the width of my arm, sticking out of each one, making it look like a claw waiting to grab me. The first two posts were at about eye level, the second were about should height, the third were at the bottom of my ribcage, and the last two were at the level of my waist.
"Stand in the middle of it. This one'll test yer agility or somethin'. You'll figure it out. Do you best."
I did as he instructed, standing about arm's length away from the center of the two poles. As I was about to ask what the test was, one of the posts swung at me. It wasn't very fast, and I blocked it instinctually, but as I did so, another post swung at me from the other side. At that point, the function of this was clear. I continued to block the posts as they came at me more frequently, faster, and more erratically. It didn't take long for it to become difficult, and within a few minutes, I was hit in the side and the test stopped.
"Not bad. Now ya did about average, if ya wanted to know. Two minutes, twenty-three seconds is yer time to beat."
"What now?"
"Now, it's fightin' time. Go to the big empty area on the far side of the room. Unfortunately, live beasts tend to not know how to stop before they kill someone, so we use the kid's bots now."
"The who's whats?"
"Eh, seeing it's better than me explaining it. There's a rack with some weapons over there too. Grab one while I set this up."
"Oh, I already have a sword."
"Anything over there'll be better than anything the forges in the outer cities make, even the spares."
"Mine wasn't made in one of those. I think."
"Suit yerself, but don't come crying to me if ya breaks it. Not only do I not care, I also haven't made a sword since before you were a thought in your parents' mind."
I walked to the empty space he mentioned. Against the far wall were the strange balls I saw when I first entered the room. Even being closer, there was nothing else I could see about them, there was only the sense that there was something more to them. What exactly, I wasn't sure. Other than those, there was nothing else there. I looked back and saw the man fiddling with something on his desk. A few seconds later, the floor split, forming a border around the empty area I was standing in. From the gap, walls that reached about waist high emerged.
"Ready yerself."
"For what?"
I didn't receive an answer. The next moment, I heard the sound of metal scraping behind me. I turned to see that the second smallest of the balls had rolled forward and unfolded, for lack of a better term. There were now gaps that streaked around the formerly seamless ball. The next moment, what looked like four metal snakes shot out of the gaps in the ball, two on each side. It then stood up, and I recognized it as a metal mimicry of a beast. I readied myself and drew my sword, now understanding the purpose of this test. Holding my sword to my side in a defensive posture, I began taking steps forward, waiting for it to start moving.
Suddenly, without warning, it pounced towards me like a lightning bolt. I instinctively sidestepped and slashed towards it but hit nothing but air. I turned, expecting it to come at me again, but it was instead crumpled against the wall. After a few confused seconds, I looked up, intending to question the test administrator, but he was just looking at me with a strange smile and a twitching eyebrow.
Ignoring him for the moment, I walked over to the unmoving mass of metal. I hesitantly tapped it with my foot, only for the top half of it to simply slide off, exposing a mass of wires and tubes on the inside, most of which had a clean cut through them. With this preponderance of evidence, I realized I was an idiot. I had indeed gotten a good hit in with my sword, but since I hadn't had the chance to ever really use it, I had completely forgotten how sharp it was.
"Who exactly did ya say made that blade?"
"No idea. I just found it."
"Ya found it. Of course ya just found it."
"Sorry about the, um, what do you call these things?"
"Combat training robot. No need for a fancy name. Don't worry about it though, it'll fix itself eventually."
"Oh, alright then. Do you want me to fight another one now, or what?"
"No, no. I have what I need. Ya can return to yer room for the day. They also wanted me to tell ya this room and the library are completely open for ya to use."
After that, I left and returned to the room that had been assigned to me. It was a simple accommodation, but far nicer than many of the places I had stayed in. There were some shelves, a dresser, and a desk with a small lamp. There were windows along the top half of the back wall, which let in a good amount of light. The dresser held a few sets of clothes. On the desk was a badge-looking thing with the symbol of the Church on it. Next to it was a note explaining I could use it to buy whatever I needed from the shops in the city.
I set my sword on the desk, put on a clean set of clothes, and laid down on the bed. The fact that this was going to be my life for the foreseeable future finally sunk in, but I wasn't too concerned about it. I started planning what to do over the next week. I decided to start with the library and try to fill the gaps in my knowledge Owl had pointed out.