I Stand with my hands covering my sensitive eyes. Wolf eyes are great in the dark and spotting movement. But horrible when someone places you in a spotlight or asks you what is something more than 23 meters away, I just can’t do it.

[The light should have dimmed enough for you guys to see. ~ Berand]

I open my eyes and look around. We are standing in a plain and to my right is a raised platform with what I presume is a king with his five advisors, 20 guards, 8 mages and 6 servants. Three of the advisers are having a disgusting look. The guards are having a judging and alert look. The mages seem like they would rather be playing a game than dealing with this and the servants keep poker faces.

The king starts speaking, “Welcome hero, I am king Theodorus Magicas Jezus Ferguson von Kastania. You can call me King Theodorus. we have summoned you to this world to help us get rid of an evil demonic emperor. Since time immemorial he has taken over the land north of the mountain range you can see in the distance. We want you to kill this being so we no longer are in a constant state of war with the demons. The war has already costs us too much and we hope that with your hero powers we have read about in ancient books you can kill this being and free our resources to help our own people. We will be informing of all the information we have on this vile being. But before all of that could you guys say “status” and tell us what you read in the titles category?”

We share some looks and tail to one another, [wait a bit before saying things, we might want to keep some things secret.]

I start, “Status”

Clearly this is the local system and not the hero one.

The others soon follow. I tail to the others, [got nothing.]

Berand grabs Elise’s tail and sends, [I got a hero title, that seems what he wants to know.]

The other wolfkin get no title as well.

Megda speaks up first to see their reaction, “Why do you want to know that?”

I hear one of the advisers, the fat one, he is too far to see anything else, snort. He does not however speak out of turn. The king frowns and proceeds to answer the question, “because we want to confirm if you all are considered to be heroes.”

Dennis asks, “why ask that question before even asking our names?”

This time the fat man can not hold himself and shouts, “DON’T QUESTION OUR KING, BEAST.”

We all send at the same time, [dislike and distrust.] This means that we will question and verify everything that man says. If that man ever needs something from us we will not give it to him and if he is in danger we will let him die. We are not charity and will not help anyone that shouts words like that at us.

The king frowns and says, “Gradius Fertica von Darage, keep your opinions with you. The wolfkin are part of the heroes party. They possess unknown powers and we want them to help us with that power to get rid of the demonic problem.”

[dangerous and ally.] I think about it. The king is dangerous because he has not picked a side on the hate or like us camps and waits to see if we are even worth it to side with. He also remains neutral, so we might not or might be able to rely on him for problems.

The king turns to us, “Heather told me that summoned heroes have the Hero title and have the appraise skill on max level. That is why I wanted to know if you have any titles, before your names. As the titles might tell us more about you than your names.”

[I say we tell the truth about the titles to get some goodwill.] is the message that reached my tail. Six agreements later, Berand starts talking to the king and gives his agreement that way.

“Only I have the Hero title. The rest of my pack does not.”

The king nods, “great, could you all state your names and after that let’s continue this conversation at the castle, but if we do we have a slight problem. All beastkin within our kingdom are slaves. So if you guys do not want to get enslaved by someone that thinks you escaped, you need to wear a slave collar. I will provide for seven of them that have no master.” The king turns around and starts to leave to the back side of the raised platform.

One of the servants comes up to us, “the fourth carriage is for your transport to the castle. Please, follow me to your carriage.”

We shrug our shoulders and follow him. While passing the king and his advisers I hear the fat man ask, “Why do we not just enslave them if you are going to give them collars?”

The king responds, “Gradius, have you not paid attention to what Heather had uncovered in the library? He said that if we enslave them we can potentially get multiple gods on our roof. You just are not allowed to enslave heroes.”

“Who cares about some gods that may not even exist?”

“I care enough about those gods that I am not willing to risk it.”

After that I was out of hearing range. The servant hushes us into a carriage and steps in as last.

I share what I heard to the others via tail.

Ratan replies, [yes that is true, the hero system does not like that. We can at any moment call for a report on the hero system. If deemed needed we might even get pulled from the world. Also we need a way to be able to identify who is contacting who on the tail channel.]

Dennis replies, [Dennis to all. That might be an easy way to do that. Just at the start of every sentence your own name and the receivers. Would make it clear who is contacting who.]

[Megda to all. Yea, I can see this work. The tails do not really have a voice in any other way after all.]

[Berand to all. What are we going to do about the slave collar thingy, I rather not have your guys wear them.]

[Elise to all. Let's see how true to his words the king is, let him show how the slave collar fully operates with one of his guardsmen or advisers. Then we find a loophole in how the things work that we can wear them without any risk of someone truly binding us. This can potentially involve Berand contracting us all and commanding us to keep thinking for ourselves.]

[Dennis to all. I can see that plan working, and a different thing is our cheats and the mission. How will we get the king so crazy to let us train in different weapons? We did get those classes after all. That is why I want training, even for a few months. So that we can leave and live on our own and potentially as adventurers. If that cliche holds true in this world.]

[Filia to all. Tell them that even if we are regarded as slaves we still need enough power to be able to meatshield that demonic thing. If we get better than needed we can meatschield more than once. That should be sufficient reason for the slave-goers to also allow us minimal training. We might end up in a training barrack. But I think that they will want to keep Berand closer than that.]

[Berand to all. Seems like that would be the best plan of action. Get them to prove the slave collar, ask for a few months of weapon training for us all. Longer if the politics allow that. Leave to travel and fight against the demonic emperor. Although that last part seems to be strongly related to what the fighting situation will be. We might need their army after all. Lastly, let’s keep our skills if possible a secret.]