Several missions, and several months, came and went, none of them particularly notable, with the exception of a mission to fight monsters. Beth's title came into play, not that it was greatly needed, as the monsters they were dispatched to fight weren't all that strong. It wasn't a rare thing for Gold missions, as even weaker monsters were often thought too much for Silver Emblems to handle. At the same time, some Gold Emblems were quite powerful and skilled, and the kinds of request to handle monsters that qualified as Gold missions weren't exactly challenging. Beth's team was that way, though it was rather nice for them to get a Gold mission completion credit for something that was relatively safe and easy.

Weeks passed and two more missions came and went, with the girls having made the acquaintance of quite a few Hall Leaders as well as some of the workers. It was circling around to the time that that network was starting to pay off, as their last few Gold missions would all come from places they had already been, starting with going back to the bandits. Well, to the place they had helped cleaning out the bandits, which had generated a lot of work for local law enforcement, but had made the local Hall Masters quite happy with the results. That was honestly a lot more important to Beth, anyway; not that pissing off the cops was part of her plan, but she considered missions like the bandit mission something the local law enforcement should have already been on. If she had to do their job for them, they could get frustrated with her and her team doing it at Beth's pace and in her manner and just deal with it.

The job they were there about would be their second to last for Gold missions; at least, it would be for the time being, as they would likely be doing quite a few more of those missions. Missions at the CRA meant Contribution Points, as Jaq had tried to grift her out of and Baelvyr had explained all those years ago. While the exchange rates for points to coins wasn't particularly great, they could be used to purchase things from the commissary that were available only to people with Emblems. Beyond that, some products and goods were only available to certain ranks; it was another perk of holding an emblem and working up the ranks at the Association. Many people would get to Gold for that reason alone, and a few even Platinum, as the exclusives available were just that good. People also often traded in goods and their services outside of missions, which included things like some of the training that Senior Enforcers offered, in exchange for points. While new members, like Copper Emblems, often paid in coins for their training, the Seniors could and would choose to be paid in points for their training sessions.

The biggest example of CRA exclusive items were items for tracking and hunting certain beasts, monsters, or people, though that last one was quite highly regulated and not available at all before Platinum. A person had to really prove themselves before they would be given anything that could let them much more accurately track individuals. Outside of the tracking equipment, the CRA did employ, or just generally have access to, the most crafters, and some of the most skilled crafters, that existed in the entire universe. That meant there were often very high level requirement and high rarity items available exclusively for points. One of the last things, and something Beth was quite interested in, was dueling equipment. This didn't mean equipment as in weapons and armor; instead, what it was referring to was equipment to create a dueling arena or challenge field anywhere, or similar conditions. The technology and magics used were quite advanced, and there existed items that could create a field as a fully separate space, the user only needing to deploy something that was little bigger than a standard sized car to create the field.

Beth had paged through the lists, which she still only had partial access to, and had asked some of the Hall Masters they were working with about the available items. That's both how she knew so much about the list, as well as how she determined some of the things that they should start saving for now. None of them had spent any of their points, and points couldn't just be directly bought; materials could be traded for points, which could amount to the same thing, but the CRA would not take coins for points. That did give points a certain level of both rarity and value, and Beth was little surprised to learn there was a black market valuation for CRA points that had them at a much higher number than what most of the basic items that could be bought with points were worth. Suffice it to say, somebody buying things that were known to currently be in-demand for points would be paying a bit extra, quite likely, and somebody selling exclusive goods would make a killing. Selling wasn't forbidden, either, and it didn't really need to be, considering how hard it was to earn points, even exchanging resources for them, and how expensive things were. Getting the points was already a big issue, so people were reluctant to trade out what they purchased with those precious points, even for vast sums. That, and the fact that people who made it to Platinum or Diamond or beyond had earned a high degree of trust with the CRA and were generally expected to do the right thing, in terms of not selling something highly damaging outside the association.

Points were for later, the mission was for now, with that mission being to retrieve several items. It was a bit unusual, certainly in terms of the missions Beth had seen and done so far, and item retrieval didn't seem like a Gold mission, more like fetch quest, but it was where the items were that was the problem. Or rather, it was where the items had wound up, considering that two of the three had been stolen and had, miracles of miracles, wound up in a griffon nest. It wasn't just a griffon nest, as in a mother and father griffon and their little babies, it was a griffon nest, with thousands of the extremely powerful beasts spread across the peaks of a vast, untamed mountain range. The story of the items' journey involved a rather slow thief's encounter with a rather fast, curious, and annoyed griffon and, well, one should be able to guess the rest just from that. The two items that the Hall Master needed most of the three were now deep in the griffon nest, and that meant a fight, and a tough one. The griffons at the center of the nest were supposed to be at or over level four hundred; the details were a little murky, as no one had really explored the nest yet.

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That would also be their job, and Beth massaged her temples a little as she pulled up the details for the third item. She had tried to get the Hall Master to make it three missions for getting three items, but that was shot down pretty quickly. She had tried to make it two missions for two different retrieval tasks, which had inspired much more debate than the first proposal, but the second proposal was also shot down in flames. So, now they had to get all three items for the price of one, and the third item was a painting that some yuppy collector had acquired through…possibly dubious means. Beth and the team weren't supposed to steal it, nor were they supposed to arrest the man, not unless they had clear evidence of some kind of crimes before raiding his place, so that meant they had to negotiate. Beth would've normally told even a Hall Master where to stick it, sending them to retrieve a piece of art like that, however, the painting was not just a regular painting. It was a magic painting that could put a person staring at it into an induced trance and allow them to experience a simulated world, one where they could train to their heart's content.

That sounded like heaven to Beth, and reminded her a little of VR when it was described, but that heaven was really a hell. See, the reason the Hall Master wanted the thing back, which was labeled as contraband in the first place, was because people in the trance state could be made very susceptible to suggestion. Basically, the long and short of it all was the painting was a flawed product that had some unintended consequences the artist hadn't wanted, or really tried to get in there. While it wasn't technically a cursed object, since it had happened as part of the creation process, it was considered a defective item. The thing had been in the hands of somebody at the CRA, had been put in storage, had been mislabeled, had been sold to a merchant shop when the CRA was unloading some, well, junk that was labeled as unnecessary. It wasn't Beth's job to track down that particular kerfuffle, as the Hall Master had done that personally, but she did have to track down the item and get it back. It looked like she would have to buy it from the person who wound up with it, and she did have a certain amount of discretionary funds available to make that purchase and she wasn't going over that. She would play by the rules of the mission as much as she could, but if buying it didn't work, she might be doing some arresting.

The first stop, though, was the griffons, and that was going to be a real pain in the ass. Just getting there was going to take time; even if they used the airship, Beth didn't want to actually fly right up to the nest with the ship, so they would be hoofing it at least some distance. Considering how dangerous the mountain range was supposed to be, and how difficult the terrain was rumored to be, they might not be flying all that close. They didn't have to kill everything in the nest, or anything in the nest, for that matter, but they did have to get the two items. And no big items for this one, unfortunately, as that would just make it too easy, looking for a giant painting or two in a nest. One of the items was a silver necklace, which was going to be a massive pain to try to find in a nest, and the other was a small buckler made of a titanium alloy with a green decorative crest on the front. At least the items were shiny, but the nesting area was literally several mountains they had to cover, which made it more than a bit of a needle in a haystack.

Beth had asked the Hall Master about both the items in the griffon nest, and it wasn't a choice; they couldn't recover just one, or give it the ol' college try and come back empty-handed. They had to find both the items, and it was made clear that if that meant culling the griffon nest fully and tearing down everything in the vicinity, then that's what they needed to do. The only good thing about the whole situation, overall, was that they didn't have a hard time limit, at least to start. If it took them a month, then the time crunch might happen, though that was more in reference to leaving the painting out there for a long time without supervision than it was about the necklace or shield. The reason the CRA didn't just go seize it, other than it being their mistake, was that the item wasn't either contraband or considered particularly dangerous. The person who bought the painting was also, by all accounts, a dilettante and a bit of a fop, without many levels under their belt and likely didn't even realize the painting had a hidden danger.

The group approached the griffon nests from the air after a day of preparation, flying out to the mountains in the airship. Blood put them down in the high foothills, not taking them into the range itself, not wanting to fight inclement weather, high-level beasts, and the terrible terrain. The group piled out, already dealing with beasts just at the foot of the mountains, and strong ones, too. Well, strong for others or for the overall standards of that world, but Beth's team wasn't just any team, and tearing apart a few beasts just under level three hundred wasn't even a warmup. Beth herself led the way this time, the team not really needing any scouting for this outing. They were going to be the apex predators in these mountains, and the griffon nest was quite obvious, both from sight and from the overwhelming smell. The beasts were not neat eaters nor did they take care of the area apart from where they slept and it was an incredible mess. The team had to slog through pieces of corpses, not all of them animal or beast, as well as other things best left to the imagination, and that was just to reach the edge of the nest.

What followed was best left to memory and a good cleaning weeks later. They had to fight through swarms of the beasts that, at times, darkened the sky to the point where it was like fighting in twilight in the midafternoon. They were also way off on the number of beasts, or else the nest was just cranking out high level griffons at an extraordinary rate, but either way, they had to fight well into the six figures worth of griffons before the place was mostly cleared out. They didn't need to exterminate the nest for the mission, but once they had set foot into the nest, the griffons decided only one group was leaving alive, so Beth made sure it was her group. That then left them to spend days, even with their enhanced senses and a set of detectors that could locate forged or hammered metals, searching through giblets and scraps and dung and worse, all looking for a shield the size of a small platter and a necklace the could easily fit in Beth's clasped hand.

The necklace was found, not surprisingly, in a pile of dung, and the less memories Beth had of that ordeal, and that smell, the better off she would be. The shield, more surprisingly, was found almost entirely pristine, as it had apparently been used as a mirror by some of the griffons, though beasts didn't really spend much time reflecting on themselves. Beth more suspected that the griffons couldn't figure the thing out and had tried to find the griffon reflected in the shield to fight, but that obviously hadn't been possible. Still, it kept the shield in good order and in a place that wasn't too difficult to suss out, which was the only bit of a bright spot in their near-total eradication of the nest. There were still a few griffons left on a couple of the farthest peaks, ones which they left alone, eager to get in the ship and get clean.

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