“How much is the venom? Ain’t nobody selling it. You’ll have to work out a deal with the Guild on that one, Jack.” Gerald Thompson said as he led Zack Adder into the Adventurer’s Guildhall of Fortninium.

  The first thing that struck Zack as he stepped inside was the smell.

  Stale, spilled beer and ale. Firesmoke. Sweat.

  And blood.

  To the left as he entered was a stone-lined area a step below the rest of the floor. A number of tables stood, most of them unmanned, with various knives hanging off the edges from hooks. One of the tables was manned, by a slender, tall middle-aged man wearing a leather apron and thick leather gloves, dissecting some kind of creature. A slender, somewhat short woman with pale skin, dark hair, and crimson eyes watched him carefully, leaning on the haft of an absolutely massive battle-axe.

  There was a row of counters beyond the dissection area, at which sat various receptionists. The right side of the lobby area was full of seating and there was a service window at which stood an attractive young woman pouring beer for the small number of adventurers hanging around just after noon.

  It took Zack a moment to notice that the interior of the Guildhall was just as brightly lit as the outside had been. Though there were candles on sconces along the walls, the dissection area was lit with some kind of intensely bright lightsource, at least as bright as the LED lights of Earth, and that light scattered and brightened the entire interior.

  Gerald led Zack to the reception counters in the back corner. There, a smiling woman, not yet middle age, greeted him.

  “Hello, welcome to the Adventurer’s Guild of Fortinium! I’m Stacy, and I’ll be helping you today. May I have your name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Last name?”

  “Werdruf,” Zack answered smoothly. He had a number of generic names he could draw on as aliases.

  “Werdruf…” The woman started writing. “How do you spell that?”

  That done, she looked back up, but at Gerald. “Gerald, the box is secure?”

  “Yep, I checked it.”

  “Okay, good. You’ll have to meet with Rosa—she’s the head receptionist—to negotiate about milking the taipan for venom collection, but, uh…”

  “What?” Zack asked.

  “Well, first, we’d like to confirm that you actually tamed a taipan. Ah, don’t open the box!” She hurriedly raised her hands, waiving them before Zack could move. “Please keep the box closed at all times!”

  Zack nodded. “Okay.”

  Stacy breathed a sigh of relief, then pulled out a large book, almost two feet in height and width and several inches thick. She flipped through, stopping on a page with a large, incredibly lifelike drawing of a yellow-ish tan snake with dark scales spotting it and big, round black eyes.

  “Is this what the snake looked like?”

  Zack leaned in, getting a closer look while being careful not to jostle the box he was still holding.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Okay, taipans are usually about six feet long, and weigh up to four pounds.”

  Zack frowned. “This snake was about three feet long, and half that weight.”

  “Maybe a juvenile, then,” Gerald surmised.

  Stacy made a note.

  “Okay, so here’s potentially the problem…” she started. “Taipan venom is incredibly toxic. Each bite injects enough venom to kill a hundred men, if you split it up between them, and taipans tend to bite multiple times in a row.”

  “And these things live near the city?” Zack asked.

  How had they not been hunted to extinction yet?

  “No, they live beyond the deep forest, near the coast. They rarely come near the city. Millie told us you found it in an orphanage on the east side of town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll have to notify the Cartelone family to be on the lookout, then. Someone might have found a clutch of eggs and brought them to the city.”

  Gerald nodded grimly.

  “Back to the venom,” Stacy looked Zack in the eye. “We might not be able to make antivenom at all. We’ll still try, but given how much we’ll need to dilute it, we may need very little. Additionally, the venom’s toxicity means we’ll have to store it in the high security vault.”

  Zack just stared at her blankly.

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  “What I mean is, we probably won’t pay for it as much as you might think, given how rare it is.”

  Zack Adder was, fundamentally, unworried about money.

  Money was just how society tracked information, specifically, information about who owned what, and who owed whom.

  Information was his specialty—or had been, back on Earth.

  All it took was a couple numbers changed in a couple ledgers, and suddenly an account went from no balance to however much money he wanted.

  So he fundamentally had a weak sense of the value of money.

  Beyond that, however, money was used as a stand-in for favors that one might do for another. Trade. And so long as Zack could figure out what a person wanted, he could figure out a way to obtain money.

  One example was his newly developed [Sew] skill. Now that he had Millie’s stamp of approval, he could go work at any tailor shop in the city and be confident of earning money in that way.

  And already, he had an idea of what the Guild as an organization wanted.

  And he knew what he wanted from the Guild.

  [Tame].

  He had known that Amelia, the unique skillholder known as [The Friendly], had been an Adventurer known as a Tamer.

  What he hadn’t expected was the attachment he now felt to the snake whose feelings he shared.

  If the Guild knew about Taming, he wanted, no, needed to learn it.

  Stacy was staring at him, waiting for him to respond.

  Zack nodded. “Okay.”

  Stacy smiled. “Good, thank you for your understanding. Rosa will be with you—”

  “Stacy!” A woman’s voice rang out from behind her counter. “Send ‘em in!”

  “Ah, she’s ready to see you now.”

  Gerald tipped his hat to the receptionist, and Zack dipped his head, and they walked over to a door at the end of the row of receptionist windows, into the back. Down a narrow hall they walked, Zack following Gerald, until they reached a back office. Two people waited inside for them. The one, a woman wearing noticeably finer clothing than Stacy had been. Clean, brightly colored fabric tailored to her body, a leather bodice over linen shirt and an embroidered skirt. She had light auburn hair and narrow-frame eyeglasses and a sharp chin.

  The other was a witch.

  Her clothing was straight out of a movie, although she herself was just a normal, if pale, woman with dark brown hair and dark eyes under drooping eyelids. She wore a pointed, black hat, and a black cloak covering her entire body down to her feet, save for hands which clutched a staff of wood, gnarled at the end around a clouded crystal.

  “Welcome, Jack, Gerald.” Rosa greeted them both without rising from behind her desk, then she turned to the witch. “Zinnie, if you would?”

  Gerald moved over next to Rosa’s desk.

  “I will now cast a barrier spell,” the witch, Zinnie, announced, then waved her staff.

  Nothing appeared to happen. Zinnie, however, knocked her staff against the air in front of her, the sound like she was knocking on wood revealing that there was something between Zack and the rest of them.

  “Good. Now, Jack, feel free to stand or take a seat.” Rosa gestured to several chairs along the wall, and Zack hooked one with his foot and tugged it closer to the desk, then sat down carefully, placing the transparent box in his lap.

  Gerald and Zinnie remained standing.

  “Apologies for the precautions, but taipans are classified as B rank threats, even though they aren’t monsters.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Now, I got a report,” Rosa looked down at a piece of paper in front of her, “that you [Tamed] the snake. How did that happen?”

  Zack explained.

  “So it was when the snake entered the box? It must have been the mouse you fed it, then…”

  “Excuse me, but how did I manage to [Tame] the snake? Is that something that just happens?”

  Gerald answered. “Sometimes, for people who are born with the [Skill], or are just naturally talented with animals. I’m an example of the latter. I bonded with a vulpefin as a child, before I knew what I was doing. You can imagine how troublesome that was!” He smiled, and Zack merely smiled back and nodded, understanding nothing.

  “So normal animals can be [Tamed], not just monsters?”

  “Wild animals, but yes,” Gerald nodded. “The first bond is intense, however. And a taipan is going to be a more complicated bond, being a snake—and such a deadly one at that.”

  Rosa was content to listen as Gerald explained the basics of taming.

  “The more your [Tame] skill improves, the easier it will be to tame more familiars, and the deeper your bond with your current familiars will grow. You’ll both be able to understand each other better, and you’ll be able to command your familiar with more reliability. The speed at which your bond deepens depends on your affinity with the familiar. Most people find it easier to bond with mammals, then birds, then reptiles, and insects and fish least of all.

  “So, how do I hurk—”

  Zack choked on his words, and Gerald and Rosa both frowned at him.

  He was physically incapable of suggesting getting rid of the snake.

  “You’re bonded, Jack,” Rosa said. “It’s a two-way street with familiar bonds. They can’t be undone so easily.”

  Zack had never had a pet before.

  He had been too unstable and busy, working as a secret agent.

  And he hadn’t had the leeway to care for another creature before his emancipation.

  “You and the taipan are one, now.”

  “Ahem,” Zack cleared his throat. “And this just happens to people, out of the blue?”

  Gerald shrugged. “Yeah, sometimes. Almost never with B-rank threats, though! Usually with kids and stray cats or birds, or slimes and slinks on the outskirts of town. Now that you have the [Tame] skill, though, you can choose not to do it. Just make a conscious effort not to use the [Skill], and you should be good. You’ll get the hang of it quickly.”

  “But it’s too late with the snake,” Zack clarified.

  “That’s right,” Gerald confirmed.

  Rosa interrupted. “You can both discuss more about [Taming] later. For now, it’s clear that Jack indeed has [Tamed] a snake. But we still need to confirm it’s a taipan. Hence,” she tilted her head towards the witch, “Zinnie and her barrier spell.”

  Zack consciously kept his face neutral.

  “Jack, we need you to open the box so we can confirm it’s a taipan.”

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