"Tear it to the ground, obviously, what the fuck."

"Just wanted to reassure Arik."

"...alright. Well. If it turns out Eden did it I will destroy it with my bare hands if I need to."

"Unrelatedly I for some reason did not expect your evil witch was a partisan of the 'walls of Yggdrasil' hypothesis of what happened, from your description she struck me more as the 'the gods are preparing us for a war'. ...I guess there are people who are into both of those and say that the method the gods are using to prepare us for a war is thinning the walls of Yggdrasil."

"Well, the war will happen. She wasn't entirely confident that the gods... had that much control over the process, this late in the game?"

"Well, fair enough. I don't particularly buy into any specific theory for why the stuff that happened is the stuff that happened, personally" (that is a complete lie but he doesn't feel justified in believing his pet theories, they're almost entirely based on aesthetic) "but that's a good enough overview. So, I guess we've got the specifics to cover, mostly.

"So for general services you've got the Kafra Corps and the Kuru Corps, which offer basically the same stuff: teleportation to some specific locations, remote storage, stabling and caring for animals, rentals of animals, and the resurrection service. —feel free to interrupt me if you have any questions or if I'm going over stuff you already know and you want me to move on.

"Anyway. The resurrection service mostly doesn't actually resurrect people; you get the little doodad attached to you that detects when your heart's stopped and teleports you to the nearest Kafra center and puts you into stasis until someone can come see you and fix whatever is wrong with you. If you're actually dead when you get there you get an urgent resurrection though which paradoxically goes faster than if you didn't die because rezzes usually fix a lot more than just being dead. You need to be an active subscriber to get access to it and then pay for the doodad each time since they're single use but the lowest subscription plan is enough to have access to the service. Oh and that's Kafra, Kuru doesn't require you to have an active sub, though the rez prices are higher.

"The main difference between Kuru and Kafra is that Kafra is an independent org based in Al de Baran which is itself independent of everyone else, while Kuru is backed by the Rekenber Corporation and thus has implicit allegiance to it and the Schwarzwald Republic, though they claim they don't. 

"Sorry that was a lot and not very organised, uh."

"Great. A choice between that cult-of-gold, and Rekenber. Does the Shadow - uh, sorry, Loki-Hel - get a cut, I wonder."

"...the who now."

"He's Deic," Taharqi explains. "They do gods differently from mainstream Odinism and Freyjanity."

"I... see? What do gods have anything to do with this though."

"The people offering these services are either evil or slimy and I would like to know if the archetypal concept of being slimy and evil was somehow involved. I considered asking if Surt had his own service but it seemed more charged and like I was directly comparing Kafra to Surt, and only Rekenber deserve that comparison, Kafra are probably fine even if they make my teeth itch."

He opens his mouth.

He closes his mouth.

He opens his mouth again.

He closes his mouth and looks at Taharqi.

He rolls his eyes with a half-grin. "Let's not have a conversation about mercantilism, shall we?"

"Yeah, alright," he says, offering a half-grin of his own.

"Let'sn't! So - modern adventuring, right - Eden assign you a bounty and off you march to slay something? Is there someone at the top making sure the assignments are correct, or that the bounties are worthwhile, or..."

"Oh, no, nothing—ah, thank you very much," he says to the person arriving with their appetisers, a couple of breads to break and sauces to dip them into. "Nothing like that, Eden doesn't assign anything. Eden doesn't, all in all, do much at all, really. You'd do better thinking of it as a place or a networking hub or a platform. You do only and exactly the bounties you want to do, out of all bounties submitted to and accepted by Eden, on your own cognizance. Kind of."

"Huh! And it works? ...what's kind of, here?"

"So it's a couple of things. If Eden were just a bunch of buildings where people could post bounties that anyone could then take, it wouldn't be, well, that's not really that special." He splits a piece of a spiced bread and then splits a smaller piece off it to dip into a thick orange sauce while he hums thoughtfully. "I don't have an itemised structured list so bear with me. I think what I want to say is that Eden's value proposition has a few distinct elements to it." The pieces of paper he's been continuously floating get shuffled so that he has a blank one and he can start jotting down shorthand items as he speaks.

"Nowadays, Eden has a name, and a reputation, and it has procedures and standards. If you accept a bounty from them, you know it's legit, you know it's not a scam, or even if it is a scam Eden takes responsibility for it and will compensate you and then go after the scammer for you. That's really good especially for new adventurers, right, 'cause if you're just starting out having something stable and reliable and dependable is good for your progress. So that's one thing, the, the legitimacy that it lends to its endeavours is a perk in itself."

He pops the bread into his mouth and chews thoughtfully, watching as the ink he's telekinetically controlling writes and rewrites something several times in a row. "Then there's the incentive structures around the bounties. You're assigned a rank when you join—a green adventurer with nothing under their belts starts at rank zero but I imagine there must be ways to join at higher ranks than that?—anyway a lot of their operation revolves around these ranks. Bounties have ranks, and accepting and completing bounties of appropriate rank makes your rank go up, and higher-rank bounties usually have higher rewards to compensate for being harder, while taking a bounty whose rank is too low doesn't help raise your rank at all. If you take a bounty whose rank is higher than yours that can be worth a lot but the ranks are pretty good at tracking difficulty? The bounty I died earlier today to was a rank 2 bounty and I'm rank 1."

"The thing you and Annika and I killed was rank 2," Taharqi observes to Arik. "'Get information about what was going on' was a rank 1 bounty but killing the thing got revised to rank 2 when Annika reported what happened at the lounge."

"What was the reward?"

"Quarter mil."

He whistles long and low.

"I did mention I could have covered dinner."

"Well, you got a taste of some of the incentive structure, then. It's not just that, though; they have exclusive contracts with some of the best artisans in the world so that they'll only offer services to people who are of sufficiently high rank, or offer better customised things to them. For the cream of the crop specs and things that work for you as an individual you still want to chase down some genius who lives as a hermit in a cave in southwestern Payon and only sees three other human beings a year, but until you get there the Eden artisans will outfit you with the best stuff there is.

"Plus, not every bounty is available to be picked by anyone of the right rank who shows up. Some of the trickier, more sensitive, or more specialised ones go around via word of mouth, or via Eden knowing that you, specifically, would be a good fit for a certain task. Those tend to have very high rewards, not just tangible monetary ones but also, you know, credibility. For adventurers who aren't just starting out and who are looking to move mountains, they'll keep track of who's whom, they'll help connections get made, parties get set up, the whole thing. There are secret 'lounges' of various ranks around the world, and you know that if you're at a rank 10 lounge everyone else in there will be rank 10 or higher and so they have a lot of work under their belts."