Brandt had scheduled the guild briefing for six o'clock.
"Membership count at three hundred and ninety-six," he said. "That's fifty-six new members since you left, thirty-one of those field-cleared, the rest still in foundational. Nine incursions in our response zone. Zero civilian casualties. Zero member losses."
"Iliescu cleared his tier. He's L4 as of last week."
Adam sat forward. "Good. That's fast."
"It's very fast. He's also the single most requested member we have for public appearances, but he says no to all of them, which of course makes it worse. There's a new toy too."
"A what?"
"A toy. Of the skeleton." Brandt let that sit. "It sells better than yours."
"I have a toy?"
"You have several. Ren has even more. Now that you brought those umm.."
"Pokémon. They are called Pokémon."
"Those, I assume they will be the center of attention."
Ren, on the couch by the window with her boots up and the Mawile asleep on her stomach, said, "I already knew. I get a percentage," without opening her eyes.
Brandt turned another page. "The Commission's garrison rotation on the Yhwcha front ended eight days after you left. Since then I have had Korven's office on the phone four times, and the fourth time he changed his stance from request to order, so I'm going to say this part slowly." He put the tablet down. "They're offering us a forward sector, and we have to hold it."
Adam stopped.
"Not a garrison," Brandt said. "Not sitting on somebody else's cleared ground for thirty days and coming home again. This is a sector on the line. Ours. Our name on the map, our own supply through the gate. They want an answer by the end of the month and I've been sitting on it three weeks now, because I'm not signing the guild into a front line war until you got back."
"Why us."
"Because you took Sector Five back on your own in three days and everybody with a desk has read the report." Brandt almost smiled. "Also because we're cheap and we listen. But mostly the first one."
Ren opened one eye.
"There's a condition," Brandt said. "They want a standing L5 team present at all times. Three minimum. We have three. So if any one of you is out for a rotation, sick, hurt, whatever it is, we're in breach of contract. I don't like running anything on exactly the minimum. Never have."
"So we need a fourth, at least," Adam said.
"We need a fourth."
Nobody said the name. Brandt picked his tablet back up and got as far as the research budget before the building shook.
While Adam was coming back from the meeting, he heard a loud bang and rushed over to check.
The Tyranitar had apparently gotten tired of the elevator, as he could barely fit in it even though it was replaced to accommodate it, and tried using the stairs. While trying to squeeze through the doors it broke a support pillar, which caused an engineer currently doing some diagnostics right above to fall through.
Aren't those rated as L7?
[ Host, most of that rating is applied to training halls and outer walls. ]
It has a self repair system right?
[ It repairs minor damage. ]
That's minor.
[ Host... ]
"It's honestly quite minor."
The Tyranitar, who had by now worked out that everyone was upset and that it was the reason, had gone and sat down against the far wall with its head lowered and would not look at anybody. Ren went over and sat on the floor next to it to show her support for the big guy.
Marchand chose that moment to try and make friends with it.
She had been building up to it for two days.
The Tyranitar looked at her.
Then it went back to being sad, having evidently decided that she didn't matter.
"It didn't even blink," Marchand said, standing up.
"He doesn't care about many things, let's say." Adam went over and petted him too. He already had a resort planned for all their Pokémon. It's currently under construction, but maybe for the Tyranitar it would be better to leave with them on the other side and eat as much as it wants on an alien planet.
By the end of the week there was a ladder on the wall outside the Floor Nineteen lounge with forty-one names on it, and the Metagross was at the top of it.
It played on the low table by the window. It did not touch the pieces with anything. Members would sit down opposite it, and it would wait with what everyone agreed was extremely poor sportsmanship for a creature that had never said a word, and take them apart in under twenty minutes. After this it would go straight back to hovering as though nothing had occurred.
Asha Okonkwo lasted forty seconds. She was still telling people about it.
Aldyn Tovis came down from Twenty-One on the third day to watch, which was notable, because Tovis never left his lab. He was a narrow, tidy man who had spent ten years as a science liaison in the Kessho Dominion and had the handwriting to prove it. He stood at the back of the lounge with his hands behind him for the length of two games. Then he went and found Adam.
"I would like to look at it," he said.
"You can look at it. It's right there."
"I would like to look at it properly. Nothing invasive."
"Ask it."
Tovis paused. "Ask it."
"It's not a sample, Aldyn. It's a person who happens to weigh half a tonne. Ask it, and if it says no, that's the end of it."
Tovis went and asked it. There was a long moment in the lounge where nobody pretended not to be listening. Then the Metagross drifted round the table, settled itself on the floor in front of him, and waited.
"Right," Tovis said. "Right. Thank you."
He had it up on Twenty-One for four hours the next day and came down looking like a man who had been enlightened.
Korven's office called within the hour. Brandt took it, the call lasted forty five minutes.
When the IEC heard about Adam and Ren bringing back alien creatures they dispatched a team to confirm if they were safe for the human race.
"They want an in-person assessment."
"Sure," Adam said. "Bring them up."
"They also want to know whether they're weapons."
"What did you say?"
"I said one of them is currently asleep on Ren."
As it turned out they were intelligent and well trained.
The officer wrote unclassifiable, non-hostile in the box and sent it back.
The Zoroark thing started on the Tuesday.
It got out of the apartment sometime after ten in the morning, went down four floors, and spent an hour and a half being Markus Brandt.
It was, by every account afterwards, a very good Markus Brandt. It had the walk. It had the way he stood at the end of a corridor with his weight back and waited for you to come to him instead of coming to you. It did not speak, because it could not, and this turned out not to matter at all, because nobody in the history of Eclipse has ever needed Brandt to say anything in order to feel guilty.
Then the real Brandt saw it. The corridor went silent. Both Brandts looked at each other for slightly too long.
Then the fake one waved.
People could see Brandt's eye start twitching. "ADAMMMMM."
Other things, in no order.
The Gardevoir made herself the most popular individual in the tower inside three days by the simple method of being polite and nice to absolutely everybody.
Ren spent two days trying to solve the Milotic problem. Apparently it didn't like the swimming pool, so it would often come out and splash everything on floor 40. In the end Ren took it to a lake near Kerenth.
Next issue was the Gengar. It by nature loved pranking people, and now it had a lot of new victims all around. So it got creative. Because many people stayed at the guild building in the hub they had to deal with its pranks constantly. Many of them would wake up with drawings on their faces, switched clothes in their closets, their alarms turned off and many more. Adam had to go through all the complaints and apologize to his members, promising that they would soon leave for the front lines and Gengar is definitely coming along.