With a much tamer Tusko as a mount, the ride back to the city was likewise much smoother and more pleasant. Even so, thorn-tusk boars weren’t made to carry the weight of two people—even if it was the weight of two young women—so the trip back was unfortunately also much slower than usual.
Initially, Anne insisted on walking, but Miri wouldn’t have any of it. Someone who’d just barely survived from getting eaten by a scorpider shouldn’t have to walk several hours back to their home city. Miri then insisted on offering the entirety of Tusko for Anne to ride, but the cleric refused to get on the boar unless the mage accompanied her as well.
In the end, they’d reached a compromise: both of them are getting on that damn boar. Miri was riding at the front while Anne was riding behind her, the cleric tightly curling her arms around the mage’s waist to make sure not to fall off during the ride. During the grueling journey, the creature would let out an annoyed grunt every couple of minutes due to the weight he had to carry. Despite that, he continued trudging on without much complaint. It’s truly surprising how much of an effect Anne had on that animal.
Once they finally returned to Hemera, Miri accompanied Anne to her guild hall. In this world, when it came to guilds, there were generally two types: public guilds and private guilds.
Public guilds, for the most part, have their guild meetings take place within one of the several public guild halls scattered throughout the city. Public guild halls were free to use so long as you made a reservation and each hall could house several individual guilds, each having their separate meeting room within the same building. Public guilds usually resort to going to these public halls because they don’t yet have enough money to afford their own building. Thus, public guilds were where most aspiring adventurers start off in since they have a low barrier of entry and were generally very accommodating to people of all social classes and backgrounds.
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Private guilds, on the other hand, have their guild meetings within their own privately owned guild hall. Since the purchase of a building generally requires a lot of money, the founding members of private guilds were often very wealthy to begin with. With a privately owned building, there’s no need to fight over the limited reservations within a public guild hall. Plus, with a private guild hall, the members could customize the interior of the building however they like, meaning that a typical private guild hall generally looks much nicer than a public one. In other words, a private guild was usually more or less just a nobleman’s playclub in the form of an adventure’s guild.
Of course, one might assume that there’s a clear divide between public guilds and private guilds, similar to how there’s a clear divide between mom-and-pop stores and major corporate retailers. However, there’d been cases where a public guild became successful enough through years of hard work that they eventually earned enough money to purchase their own guild hall, thereby upgrading their status into a private guild in a sort of “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” kind of thing. So while many of the private guilds out there might harbor a bit of snobbishness and elitism, there were a couple of them that were generally pretty nice to work at, especially if they started out at a public guild first—which usually kept their attitudes humble and down-to-earth.
And it just so happens that Anne’s guild, Golden Lion, was a private guild. While the attitude of the guild might go either way, Miri had a suspicion that it might be leaning towards snobbishness and elitism.
