Chapter I: Prologue I
It was hard to guess for how long I had been sitting in that place. It was difficult to care about that detail, given the circumstance.
Death had come peacefully enough and with no regrets to really speak of, but I had been expecting an end when I had closed my eyes for the last time.
That was the way of things, humans were meant to grow lined and grey. To gain and lose loved ones, then they themselves passed from some malady or other. I had no reason to expect different.
I had certainly not been expecting my eyes to snap open as my body and mind were twisted, warped and stretched into something wholly different, because whatever I had become could only be vaguely called human.
Strangest was that my ignorance was incomplete, I was uncomfortably sure I knew what I was in fact.
Normally that revelation coupled with my mind desperately trying to adapt to its new circumstances would have been sufficient to drive me into a fit of panic.
I wondered if that was a trait of what I had become? I felt my fear and distress only as a dull echo which was rapidly fading. Where I would have expected crying or screaming before, I could muster little more than merely sitting there in silent contemplation.
Wherever 'there' was, that is.
The lighting was bad enough that under normal circumstances I would be quite blind. But my new eyes rapidly compensated for the lack of light and registering several spectra simultaneously, something I had only ever seen through goggles before. It was quite bizarre really, but like everything else I felt it quenched to a mild surprise at most.
I guessed that I could only 'know no fear' so to speak because I still felt everything else quite well, I felt confused, angry and curious well enough after all.
I looked down at my enormous but proportionate hands and let out a breath which almost immediately made me feel the beat of a second heart while the expulsion of air felt strange beneath the strange movement of my partially fused rib-cage.
It might have been a confirmation bias, but the changes I registered resonated with something in my mind. Something that assured me that my instinct was correct.
There could be little doubt, I was either stuck inside of a Primarch or inside an absolutely massive Space Marine (the last being improbable, given the proportions of my body). Which, if true, unfortunately meant that I stuck in one of the most horrible places one could find themselves in.
The absolutely demented reality known as Warhammer 40k.
Fuck. I observed.
Other possibilities were still possible, that I was in some sort of fevered death-dream or in some circumstance that merely bore some arcane resemblance to that accursed universe.
But something in the back of rapidly unwinding and re-knitting mind suggested otherwise.
I was not sure how much of me was in there, I had already noted that I could not quite feel fear or panic and odder still was the new shape my mind was taking.
Even the sheer sensory overload from having every sense magnified and altered was strangely muted, as if they had always been that way and it was only now that I took note of them. It was like a room whose walls were collapsed but the floor and ceiling remained without collapsing, my mind felt like it was impossibly expanded and empty, waiting with baited breath to be filled with knowledge.
This new formulation even robbed me of the bliss of my youth being restored after a fashion, old and sickly flesh cast aside in favor of something far more vital. The only reaction I could summon for that fact was little more than take note of it with mild disinterest.
What I felt more than any natural reaction was an intense craving for context and knowledge. A deep and abiding need to gain an orientation of my surrounding.
Well I was in the right place for it at least, I was leaning against a broken bookshelf of immense size and countless tomes laid on and around me since I woke up.
The shelf was joined by more in every direction which meant I was in some sort library.
That will work I supposed, a far sight better than doing nothing and thinking about how doomed I was.
I idly reached down for one of the tomes and gingerly plucked it up to look at the inscribed steel on the thick leather cover. I idly hoped that the leather came from an animal while reading the title, On the Matters of Warp Travel & Its Dangers…
I tossed the book aside.
Anyone who was knowledgeable enough about this reality would know that the chances of a picking that book up randomly from a pile without it being according to the plan of a certain blue schemer were absolutely nil.
Instead, I opted to pick up a book on early human exploration next, that seemed like a less ominous subject.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that I would start flipping through it at a great pace (with one grotesquely over-sized finger as the book could easily fit into my palm) while noting that I could somehow read what I was fairly certain was High Gothic despite it looking nothing like any alphabet that I could read (which was two unless you held Hiragana, Kanji and Katakana to be independent alphabets). More importantly my mind seemed to be filling in the gaps where the books or my own limitations should have stopped me. I mildly made note that this was likely the Primarch-quirk which was portrayed as being almost auto-didactic in their learning.
Their maker probably imprinted all the knowledge he deemed important into the infant's minds to be triggered by stimuli. A clever bastard, their maker. Strange to say, but the more the idea lingered in my head, the more something in me assured that my initial feeling was correct and that I had somehow been transplanted into a Primarch.
And also, that my brain could manage two entire different trains of thought without any difficulty as I poured through the tome.
I finished the book within about a minute, the entire thing internalized before moving on to the next and the one after and the one after that, my reading speed actually getting faster as I went.
Part of me realized how ridiculous it was that I was eating through the books around me like the reading equivalent of a wood chipper and managed to recall much less understand the entirety of what I read. After what must have been hours I had not only a rough idea of where I was but a solid understanding of Dark Age Technology, Culture, Language and History on this planet. Well, give or take a few centuries to go by the obvious age of the literature.
I figured that I must have been in the private collection of someone who must have held a wide array of interests due to the diversity within and given the undeniable wear of my surroundings (despite the books being in remarkable shape), this place and its information were probably ancient, a shame as the people of this colony were rather interesting.
It had always struck me as an amusing coincidence that every single Primarch had come from an incredibly unique and interesting world with none of them coming from one of the countless agricultural planets which seemed to later constitute the norm for the Imperium. It seemed that I had not been made exempt from that pattern as I too had been deposited on a world as intriguing as each of those which had had the fortune or misfortune of hosting a Primarch. In as much as one could attempt to fathom the strange and mercurial minds of sentient amalgamations of emotions I could not make even an uneducated guess as why they would have sent a tool of their hated 'Anathema' to this world however.
As I moved to look for a way out of the old library I reflected on the world it spoke of. It was colonized fairly early in the Dark Age by one of humanity's countless sleeper ships, its inhabitants were mostly wealthy men and women from around the globe who hoped to establish a civilized world that suited their desires and which they could shape to their pleasure. An interesting convention which quickly rose in their naming schemes however suggested that they had begun to rapidly adopt ancient Welsh and Irish names, myth and customs not long after their initial landing where before they had come from a multitude of different cultures. I chuckled bitterly at the notion that maybe a bunch of enthusiast of Irish and Arthurian mythology decided to make their own little Camelot, given my own predilections that just made my arriving here seem like even less of a coincidence. I decided not to dwell on the fact that I could not quite recall the look on my granddaughter's face as I read those tales to her, but my mind pushing back the desire to dwell on that particular issue in favor of focusing on the present.
From the reckoning of the books they succeeded rather well in their aims, until they didn't. They settled alright but a flaw in one of their Standard Template Constructs (an early model, some distant part of my mind recognized) had left them without a rather key component to human space travel, the predecessor to the Geller Field. Quite predictably this meant that they had some rather horrible results to their early attempts to replicate the technology and expand into the mineral-rich systems that their initial probes had determined neighbored the world. Oh, they eventually reverse engineered a drive from the ones on their colony ship, but it was one with less than ideal stability, this meant that the colonists had become considerably more familiar with the literal hell beneath reality than most.
I reached a door after some searching, it had been hermetically sealed but quite fortunately I was literally over a ton of pure awesome in the classical sense. It was actually quite simple to place my hands on the broken glass surrounding the door and pull until I ripped through the weakened steel and continued on into what were likely the hallways of an abandoned hive city.
The original colonists had found a rather ingenious work around to their daemon problem though, they figured out that the nasty reality-migraine otherwise known as the creatures of the warp did not really like some of the least popular folk in the colony. Some of the weaker entities seemed to suffer extreme existence-failure when around them in fact, it was with this in mind that the handful of individuals (eight in a colony of now millions) 'volunteered' for experimentation to better understand this resistance, by which I of course mean that they were dissected like frogs in a junior high science class. The work isolated a strange quirk in their genes, a rare one that was previously dismissed as just one of the pieces of junk-D.N.A. which we could not determine the nature of since it seemed to serve no purpose. Very much stumbling through necessity and blind luck into the solution to one of the great riddles of humanity in this reality.
I walked into what must have been a large plaza at one point, the roughly hundred-meter-high chamber was illuminated by sunlight, the floors where littered with truly enormous shards of glass from the shattered dome that once topped that chamber. I appreciated both the light and the flow of fresh air coming into the chamber before moving towards that largest chamber, moving towards what I hoped was the exit because the ruined remains and the state of this place did not bode well. It had unnerved me that I had almost forgotten to taken note of the ancient, ruined bones that had littered the chamber's floors. All the reaction which I could muster however was idly noting that it was a shame given how ingenious they had been about their problem.
They had tinkered with the 'gene', reproducing it on an enormous scale with far more muted effects while breeding a select few to carry the gene in its full strength. In a more familiar light they made themselves into Psi-grade Nulls while generating a smaller group of Omegas or Blanks. The end result was that they had managed to produce an enormous population capable of resisting chaos with a core of weaponized pariahs… and they quite obviously screwed it up. The books had done quite a lot to suggest something would inevitably go horribly wrong, the newer works had an intense pride in their ability to resist the tides of chaos, pure idiocy if you had the amount of forewarning I did. Maybe that was why the Chaos Gods had sent me here, assuming of course that they did which I personally considered to be a fairly safe bet. After all what better way to demoralize one of their foe's tools than to show them that even a people whose very nature was a weapon against them were still annihilated?
They attempted to harness the warp to their own wills, unable to fear it or be tainted by it like other men. In retrospect, I doubted they had encountered anything akin to a Greater Daemon when they began tinkering with it, just because it cannot corrupt you into being its loyal servant or drive you insane with a glance does not mean that it is any less a thirty-foot-tall monster with an axe as big as it is after all.
I emerged from the ruins a few hours later by my reckoning as I noted the sun setting, it shockingly seemed that the planet was in a rather good shape. The only real oddity was the few mathematical incongruities from a logical perspective with my oddly mute memories of a Terran sunset. My mind quickly worked them out while aligning them with my knowledge of the considerably larger nature of this planet before I could return to a more natural appreciation for the scene before me.
Beyond the overgrown fringes of the ruins rose idyllic rolling hills dotted with small groups of trees leading into a great forest which seemed to rise in every direction outward broken only by the blue lines of rivers which raced out from the ruined overgrowth.
There came a hint of a smile on my lips as I looked out at the beauty of it.
I did not look back until I had reached the first green hill since I did not much relish the prospect of starring at more ruin and death, but my curiosity won in the end (as it often did).
My head traced up and took in the sight of the ruins me, I had emerged from a dead hive as I had theorized but the vast sprawling structure that consumed my entire field on vision made it abundantly clear that I must have awoken in the outskirts of the structure.
The entire thing was migraine inducing, as my human-self's incomprehension and my Primarch-brain's casual ease clashed against each other. I struggled to properly come to grips with the shattered metallic spires reaching miles into the air, great roots rising and sinking across depressed towers the size of cities which I had only ever seen in the most disproportionate of media. It was as if the planet was attempting swallow the works of man in its efforts to heal, things had clearly gone south a while ago… well to be fair the last book I read was printed in M25 so things probably went south when the Storms hit.
Barring time travel, that should have been some five millennia past, I thought as parts of my brain forced themselves awake and rapidly evaluated the scene to confirm my guess. My lips parted as I tried to grasp the grotesque scale of the scene, closer evaluations made me realize that vast branches and vines were overgrown hab-segments worn away and fallen, only to become trapped between lower spires. Impossible vertical forests sprouted titanic arms outwards through shattered domes which would have been able to contain the hearts of my time's greatest metropoles with ease. It was hard not to be awed by it, even as my less human side was rapidly clamping down on that awe,
My musing was interrupted when I noticed small lights within the ruin begin to brighten from far away, my inhuman eyes could see well enough to know the fires were moves and I could tell some were assuming shape. To my growing unease, the light gave way to vaguely humanoid forms that did not quite seem real like some wild nightmare was slowly infringing upon reality as the night grew darker. One was at the entrance where I left and it was staring at me, it had a shape with tall pale horns and-
I turned around and began pumping my gene-crafted legs as hard as I could which turned out to be quite fast as I ran away, not from fear of course but rather from a very logical conclusion that I was both screwed if I stayed and that I did not in fact want to meet my demise yet again. My every experience and instinct told me that I would not do well in a confrontation against a bloodletter if I was lucky enough for there to only be one much less when unarmed and in a less than ideal condition. Such was my certainty that I even managed to crush the upsurge of confidence that tried to impose itself over my good sense.
Running straight into the forest seeking the cover of the trees , I weaved my way deep inside until I finally registered that I could hear no sound but my own breathing and the leaves rustling in the wind. With my inhuman senses the dark shadows of the forest were minimal at best while the sounds and smells of the forest were easily cataloged and fortunately natural. I found a great deal of comfort in the lack of movement in the forest and after pressing on a few more minutes to be safe, I began to look for a spot to rest. It did not take long as I located one of the streams that I had spotted entering the forest I mulled over what I had witnessed.
It was a safe conclusion that the ruins were Daemon-infested, frankly given the sheer amount of bones in the ruins and the works I had read it was would not be surprising if the damage was severe enough that something akin to a small tear into the warp had opened somewhere in the hive and let them slip into the material plane. Which of course raised the question of why I had not been attacked earlier, while it was entirely possible that I was allowed to escape that did not really seem like Khorne's standard approach and I somehow doubted that a single Primarch would be worth him and Tzeentch cooperating in such a fashion which left me with the conclusion that the Daemons were probably not a part of any real plan. Then there was the fact that they neither seemed to pursue but revealed themselves regardless when the sun set. Maybe they were somehow bound to that place? The library had been a private collection so it hardly had the full scope of this place's technology so perhaps they managed to trap the Daemons despite destroying the hive, which was certainly impressive even if they had allowed the monsters in in the first place.
I sat by the stream to take a moment's rest while contemplating what to do, or at least that was my intent but for some reason I collapsed into unconsciousness the moment I sat down.
Some distant part of my head seemed to register that I felt as if it had been months since I had ingested food.
The first thing I noticed when I awoke was the smell of cooking, the scent of cooking dark meat and no amount of inhuman modification could prevent my stomach from growling in hunger at the smell.
Of course, my less than ordinary senses were also registering several humans, one was close by and several more were further away which combined with the lesser noises I was picking up made it obvious that I was in some sort of settlement. Heartbeat, step patterns, taste, smells and a litany of other data which would have overwhelmed a human mind storing themselves away for later use.
What my inhuman-physiology did prevent me from immediately noticing was the fact that I was on the ground, on a fairly soft cot, but definitely on the ground. I groaned as I opened my eyes and pushed myself into a sitting position while hearing a startled grunt, I looked around to take note of my surroundings.
I was inside of a small and decidedly medieval house with somewhat rotten planks for a floor and walls of wood and stone, the house was furnished but the small bed, table, chest and what I thought was meant to be a kitchen space hardly counted as well-furnished despite the anachronistic oven which was clearly the source of the meaty smell.
My attention fixed on the source of the closest noise however noise, a young child, probably eleven or twelve at most with her hands clasped over her mouth and her green eyes shot wide-open in surprise, the spilled earthen jug at her feet (which was miraculously not broken by its fall) indicated that she had dropped it in surprise.
Data compiled in my mind across that brief moment. Most obvious was the paradoxes of the girl's appearance, the gene-alterations that the works had made mild mention of obvious in the muddy red hair, green eyes and freckles over clearly Asian features. Other conclusions from her musculature indicated some atrophy in her vocal cords which explained the unusually croaking character of the grunt and a host of other observations which would be a violation of privacy in a conventional situation.
I immediately concluded that I should probably calm her down since she was probably either related to my benefactor or was monstrously strong considering my enormous body had been moved here from what must have been a considerable distance (the muscle density beneath her worn wool shift making that supposition unlikely. It was obvious to me that the girl was unlikely to be capable of speech, given the atrophy my inhuman senses picked up on in her throat, but no flaws which would dissuade me from conventional communication.
"Do not worry child, I mean you no harm, did you help me?" I attempted to smile reassuringly but I was a little surprised as how different my voice sounded, it was deep before but now it sounded like my voice was taking notes from the Marianas Trench.
Fortunately, the girl steeled herself before shaking her head with a determination that made me wonder if I was particularly frightening in appearance or if it was merely a matter of her never having seen anything like a Primarch before. I hoped that it was the latter since a frightening face was not conductive to making allies.
As she shook her head someone else opened the door which I supposed was behind me and continued towards the child while speaking.
"That would be me actually," She said calmly as she walked around me and I got a better look at her.
Before any other features registered, I picked up on every dimension of threat. She was tall at about 186cm if I had had to guess (although that word was losing some value given the grotesque size of my frame) with a well-muscled but lean frame. The sword sheathed by her hit was worn with casual ease and the clink and taste of well-cared for chain-mail suggested that she was a reasonably confident fighter in mortal terms. No, the manner of her walk and traces of scarring suggested that she was an irregularly dangerous fighter by mortal reckoning.
It was only in the following heartbeat that I picked up on the natural features a human would pick up on first. The dark short-cropped red hair, green eyes and features to match the girl, it was obvious by that and her scent that she must have been a relative of the girl. It shocked me to conclude that she was attractive. She picked up the spilled jug and handed it to the girl before nodding down at her and indicating for her to wait outside.
I watched the exchange without comment as I was evaluating the fact that I could in fact find her attractive (which given my state seemed like a particularly mean-spirited joke), although it was in a strangely abstract way.
Another interesting realization was that she was giving her best attempt to glare literal holes into my head. It was rude of her, but I decided that it was best that I be diplomatic since I had no need to burn bridges. I noticed that she wore well-maintained leathers with what seemed to be a large sack in one hand.
It was vaguely disturbing to look at them as my senses took in far more detail than I was comfortable with, from the scent of sweat to their heartbeats I could analyze just about everything within a few moments before making my best effort to suppress the feeling before I was lost to it. I shook my head deliberately and remembered my manners.
"You have my thanks then, Lady...?" Again I seemed to have made a mistake as she snorted.
"No lady I'm afraid, just a Seeker, like you I wager," she said with mild amusement, the way one side of her lips curled upward and the laugh-lines on her face suggesting that she was often so amused.
"I am sorry, a Seeker?" Might as well take advantage of the convenient Exposition Fairy since I would rather be well informed, there was an ember of humor at the thought.
It was good to retain some positive emotion.
She arched a brow at my question.
"I do not know where else you could have come across that level of enhancement, I have seen some minor work before but you," she whistled, "you had to have hit a major Treasure."
"I am afraid that I do not what you mean by any of that?'" Superhuman mind or not I had to admit that I was not following her.
She stared at me for a moment making an audible 'hmm' before seeming to reach a conclusion and nodding to herself before speaking.
"You awoke in the ruin, right?" I nodded figuring that she meant the ruin, "Alright, a Seeker is what you call people whose coin-making it is to dive deep into the ruins to retrieve the Treasures of the Fallen Ones, we sell those that we can recover to nobles or upstarts who pays enough and sometimes," she pointed at me "those Treasures can really make a mess of your memory."
Although it seemed that whatever Primarch parts were altering my thought patterns they could not block the thought that was lodged in my head by the time she had finished her presentation.
Wow, that is convenient. I had been placed in a world that not only gave a decent if somewhat flawed excuse for my condition in addition to basically being a stereotypical role-playing setting which apparently included their own version of an 'adventurer.' I reached that conclusion quickly but I refrained from answering for a moment to look convincingly shocked before nodding.
"So whatever I found changed me?" She nodded while smiling confidently. "But what about those things I saw in there?"
It seemed prudent to ensure that I was not actually on a world of Chaos Worshipers, because that would be less than optimal.
She scowled at that, "Those are the voidspawn, no one is completely sure just what they are but they are very tough to put down, travel in packs and will reassemble themselves if you give them a chance. They are the main reason why we Seekers have a living in the first place since they make the cities perilous and you need quite a bit of experience to fight effectively." Her scowl defaulted back to a half-grin. "Don't know much of the other side of it, ask a priest if that's your fancy."
I arched a brow at the relevant part of what she said, "So they can be fought?"
She seemed surprised at that, "Of course, would not be able to make much of a profit otherwise, right?" She pulled off one of her gloves and showed me a strange brand on the palm of her hand. "While you need to know how to do it most figure it out if they do not go mad or become possessed, some like me can fight them much more easily it's why they call us Void-banes."
So it seems the colonists did not get themselves wiped out by their idiocy after all, which if my deductions were correct meant I was speaking to a super-blank without smashing my head into a wall.
Well there was a question for another time.
"Well then you have my thanks, if you do not mind my asking, why did you save me?" Regardless of unique characteristics this was still a world in one of the most horrible realities imaginable and I was not one to trust in altruism.
"Well to be fair, my party and I were preparing to venture into the City-Like-Woods when we found your overgrown ass laying by a stream," she chuckled at that, lips pulling back into a toothy smile. "We need a guide and I figured that you could give us some directions to navigate it by way of thanks. But I guess that is not a very viable option now though."
"I do still recall the corridors I navigated to get to the stream, I do believe I can aid you in this," I said perhaps too quickly but I felt that I had little choice, I needed money and resources, so it seemed that I had very little choice but to make an attempt at this 'Seeker' profession.
It was strange to act so quickly, to not give time to hesitate and fear and doubt. It was so painfully simple to reach a conclusion and act now.
The woman's smile brightened.
"I had hoped that you would say that! Let's get to the tavern and we can fill in the rest of our little group," she smiled widely and I was grateful that she was straight forward enough to waste time. As I began to stand up, came to realize why I had been covered in a blanket when she let out a chocked cough.
"Not that I am complaining but you might want to try some of the clothes I brought," she tossed me the sack that she had been carrying, I reflexively caught it but my mind grinded to a halt when I realized what she was saying and I felt my cheeks rapidly redden, Primarch interference or no. I had been naked since I awoke, I had walked through the ruin and ran through the forest completely naked and was currently standing naked. Maybe this Primarch-y stuff was not one hundred percent beneficial after all…
After a very awkward moment followed by an admittedly sheepish apology I tried the 'clothes' she had brought with her. It turned out she just meant the robes made from knitted together sheets that she had had a local woman quickly sow together as quickly as she could which resulted in me looking like an exceptionally big and shabby monk (which I had to admit to myself was incredibly ironic given what I was) before setting off to the tavern. As we walked through the village I noticed the rampant anachronisms compared to an actual medieval village were everywhere much like the primitive stove in the house there were simple electric lamps even some pieces of more advanced technology scattered throughout the village. When I asked her about them she shrugged and said that the more simplistic concepts of 'ancient knowledge' were never completely forgotten by 'our' people while some of the more advanced contraptions such as the distinctly advanced equipment at the blacksmith we passed were the result of either knowledge or larger Treasures salvaged from the cities.
Another thing which I could not help but take notice of was that the people seemed surprisingly clean by and large and if not particularly healthy still in far better health than I would have expected from a village this small as my guide indicated that it only numbered a few over two hundred people. When she commented that I realized that I had made a major oversight.
"I just recalled that I never heard your name, Lady...?" diplomacy was always a useful tool to me and it seemed only logical to build up rapport with my benefactor.
She laughed a bit before answering, "Name's Morygen and I already told you that I am not a lady, my giant friend. Now that I told you what I'm called why don't you repay the favor in kind if you can remember."
Well I could draw reassurance for the continued use of slightly different variants of mythological names for the world at least. Morygen sounded like someone could not make a choice between Welsh and Celtic myth for a name before giving up and going with a blend.
"I am afraid that it is one of the things that I do not recall. If I may, what offense is there in my calling you a lady?" I knew that it would have been wise to abandon that line of conversation but I unfortunately suffered from both a strong sense of curiosity and an inability to abandon a line of questioning.
She looked over at my eyes while we walked (which I considered mildly impressive given the four feet of difference at least) before answering, "You really don't remember much do you?" I shrugged admitting my ignorance, "Well let me tell you that it won't get you far to go around using unearned titles. I understand you're trying to be polite but I wouldn't go about repeating that to people since they might take it wrong. False Honors, False Faces and all that."
So, my attempts at courtesy managed to fly in the face of local customs, truly a fantastic start. "My apologies Morygen but it does seem that I am unable remember a great deal."
I scratched my head awkwardly while making a mental note to try to collect more information about the local culture in order to prevent more of these errors.
"Well at least your vocabulary was not damaged, so it's not all bad." Morygen said with a chuckle.
I offered her a tight smile, "I do not suppose that there is anything else I should know? I would much rather not repeat the same mistake twice."
She scratched her chin as she walked in thought, "Well I am not what most would call 'polite' but I guess I can give you some pointers." She pulled off one of her gloves and tossed it to me, I caught it and noticed a pattern on the back. I could not easily discern the purpose of the design, although at least one part of it looked identical to the brand I had seen on her hand.
"I suppose that there is some purpose to this symbol? It is the same one you showed me earlier," I figured that it was somehow associated to her blank status.
"That would be my guild brand- why are you chuckling?" She stopped and starred at me with a raised brow. I waved for her to continue while attempting to force composure onto my face. I did not wish to come across as mocking but I could not bite back the quite chuckle. Frankly, it was the greatest show of emotion I had been able to muster since becoming a semi-warp entity. "Well if you can contain your need to be an ass, guild brands mark your affiliation with the guild and status as a Seeker."
Plenty of organizations used markings to give themselves an identity, especially ones that had an implication of status. There was no reason to laugh at the cliche-ridden world I had been trapped in after all, or at the sheer ludicrousness of it existing within the crime against reality that was the Milky Way. Yet I could not help the smile.
"I suppose that I would have lost mine," I offered.
"Oh, no need to worry about that," Morygen waved a hand. "These things happen and Sect are not keen on losing Seekers because they lost their brands or names. Ah, 'Sect' is the branch of our guild here."
"So I might recover my identity if I go to a local guild then?" I deduced. That struck me as a potential problem, my excuse relied on my not having a memory to speak off and so no past to worry about justifying.
"Local Sect, and well, there is a chance," Morygen scratched behind her ear while eyeing me with a perplexed expression. "Although and I hope you don't take this wrong. There won't be much left to match you to."
That was a relief at least as was the large structure we were nearing. I caught the heady scent of liquor and the taste of human sweat along with the sounds of men and women making a raucous. I would broach the subject with her again but I needed to find a more subtle way of learning of this world.
"Ah," she said as if to distract me. Perhaps she mistook my silence for nervousness? "Well I am sure that we can figure it out, let's hope you remember how to drink, eh?"
"I recall that well enough," I forced my lips to curve into a confident 'smile'. Given my state, it was entirely probable that I was well-beyond any capacity to enjoy the altering effects of liquor.