POSSESSED BY BORED GEEKS FROM ANOTHER WORLD
CHAPTER 3 DESDEMONA JOINS THE GUILD
The next morning Faux and Sara took Desdemona to the Adventure Guild to register. It is a solid building made from large stone blocks. The OWL party has its own guild clerk. Her name is Iris Morning-Dew. She is mostly hobbit, but also a small part fairy. She has charcoal grey hair and pastel pink eyes. She looks smart in her guild uniform, but the cut and style of the outfit cancels the shape of her body. Sara and Iris filled out the guild paperwork for her. They left a lot of blanks and simply made up a number of responses. Her martial arts styles included nonsense like Drunken Boxing, Bear Hug Defense and Foo Fighting.
Iris had mixed feelings about the OWL party. On the one hand she was their dedicated clerk, made most of her money from their commissions and rationally should be thanking them and not the gods for putting food on her table. On the other hand they felt like a scam. She worried that one day the authorities would go after them and press charges and that she would be forced to defend herself as a conspirator. The way the OWL party paid their people was probably criminal.
Normal parties had their pay-outs set by the party leader. A newly formed party of four would normally divide the division of the booty into fourths. This quickly changed as it became apparent that some adventurers were more valuable than others. A solid front line tank or exceptional mage might make more on a raid than the party leader. Some parties were constantly renegotiating the shares.
Ultimately dungeon diving was a form of gambling. A lucky drop, winning a rare find was like claiming a jackpot. The same group of people visiting the same floor on different days would routinely have different results. Days with windfalls, days when they lost money. They were professional gamblers and the buy in was their lives. OWL did not do shares.
OWL paid out a salary or set wage to their employees. The money they earned was a fraction of what the dives were worth. They were unable to attract actual functional adventurers to their group because they openly cheated the help. They somehow convinced ordinary citizens into defying death in the labyrinth for a pittance. Desdemona was a prime example of this, she was trained to be a housewife, had a run of bad luck and now in her desperation to avoid starvation the OWL party was going to place a weapon her hand and force her to fight monsters.
They gave the unfortunate survivor the gender neutral codename "Flash" and posed like she was now a warrior. The truth was that Desdemona was a walking timebomb. The question was not IF she would self destruct but WHEN.
The OWL party lured people in by providing a pleasant party house to live in. Luxurious rooms, fancy clothes, master cooks, and staff to coddle them day and night. If they went the usual guild party setup, they could get all of that on their own and in the end the stuff would all belong to them.
The only real dungeoneers in OWL were the barbarian, the cat woman and the halfling and all three of them were miserable failures during their time as real dungeoneers.
In the end, the only reason to risk your life as an adventurer was for the chance of a life changing incredible win. OWL members give the chance of instant riches up. There are no big wins for them. There is also a rumor that their party enchants them, turning their wards into meat robots, puppets, mind controlled zombies to force them to fight.
Iris honestly thought the guild should shut down the Owl party for mercenary business practices. The irresponsible party would end up with a massacre one day and the guild would finally act, but the blood would already have been spilled. Iris laid awake at night thinking she should be a whistle blower but she was just making too damn much money in commissions. Her family relied on the money she sent home. Beside even if she did report what was happening, there was so much corruption that she might just be ignored. Or simply replaced by someone with no morals.
