Chapter 7: Help I’m a Psychotherapist, Get me into Here.

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No one is born on Planet Psychotherapy. The only way onto the Planet is through any number of tortuous routes, twisting and turning through the mountainous rule books of the Guilds. All Guilds guard access to this privilege tightly. Words, paper, gold. Arcane rituals rule.

There used to be monasteries on the Planet. Places where novices and interns could live, copying from the masters, aping the silences, echoing the insights. Occasionally novices were allowed to sit at the feet of their masters, even turn words into paper themselves. Visitors could stay in these monasteries, providing the words for the initiates to practice with.

Well before this new age, the Keeper lived in such a place. For four and a half years. The first three years were novice years followed by life as a junior intern. There was a choice of Guilds, as in those days cooperation between Guilds in Monasteries was more common. The bureaucrats insisted. Monasteries were the first proving grounds, the Planet’s nursery beds. The Guilds took the cream of the crop.

Of course there were hierarchies here. Novices struggled to be recognised, usually passed over by the Guilds in the annual harvest. Newcomers came in directly as interns, after a short time unaccountably disappearing into the Guilds. The novices stayed on, overlooked.

Many Guilds insisted that their novices and interns also became visitors. Provide the words for Guild paper. Present your own words for the internal fireworks of Guild members, interns who needed the advanced but safe practice. This was the Keeper’s route too. In the hope of being noticed. They praised him with paper. But the paper was worthless. The truth about the Guild rules is that no one knew them. All were blind except the chosen, the harvested.

Then one day a Doer came. The bureaucrats had insisted on some Doers working in Monasteries. Disliked and unwanted, they existed on the Monastic margins, little different from the outlaw lands of the weird and the doings from which they had sprung. Unwanted, unloved, persuasive. To listen long enough to a Doer was to catch a strange missive of experiment, doing and new alchemy. Their eyes burned bright with excitement. They knew the future, they KNEW the future.

At the moment the Keeper left the monastery, the monastery left him. Visitor and intern days over. A fast track to certainty. He travelled to the margins. And there stayed, until the first great battle between the Guilds and the Alchemists, the Doers and the Experimenters. When they left the margins during that original great assault, the Keeper was there in the first wave, a non-commissioned officer of that determined army. Alchemists, Doers and Experimenters. All together.

When the Turncoat first came the Alchemists hid their gold lust well. As the mercenaries were seduced, they knew the power of alliance. The assault had faltered. Visitors yet to be persuaded. Alchemic memories of the doings of the past. Doers and Experimenters cannot be cast aside. Not yet.

Special missions were planned. Interns sent to far flung places, to do battle with strange Guilds. Powerful Guilds. Mere cannon fodder for the new Guild. Their missions? Probe for weaknesses. Be exposed. Tough, dirty fights. No problem if lost. Find your way back if you are lucky. Interns can be replaced.

United in their naivety. Even during the first assault, the die had been cast. The officer corps were all Alchemists. Alchemic generals for the Doer Grunts. The Doers saw this but hid their doubts, believing that all was the cause, the cause was above all.

Some of them returned, intelligence gathered, skirmishes undecided. Survivors. Proven.