Ivory Banner runs a public training exhibition twice a year, and they moved the sponsorship hearing into the middle of one.
Four hundred seats, six cameras, plus a floor marked out for demonstration bouts that nobody was going to watch now.
Putting a hearing inside an exhibition means the guild expected to win it in front of an audience.
Ruan presented the claim as concern for a vulnerable former member who had come into power without any guidance around her.
"Calista was ours when she was hurt," he said it to the cameras with his hands open, "She is ours now that she is well."
'He has put the whole thing in the language of care... and four hundred people are nodding at it,' Ossian sat where Paloma had put him, 'say nothing, this is not your fight.'
Paloma had spent the night inside Ivory Banner's own standard contract, which is a document the guild has not rewritten in nine years.
She found the abandonment clause on page four, in a paragraph the guild put there to protect itself from hunters who walk out.
A sponsorship lapses where the guild terminates support before the sponsored member's capability has commercial value.
"Your own wording," Paloma read it into the microphone without hurrying any part of it, "Not mine, not hers, yours."
Nine years is long enough for a clause written against deserters to grow teeth pointing the other way.
The burden landed on Calista, since the clause turns on when the guild let go rather than on what she is worth today.
She had to prove Ivory Banner ended her support before her power had any value to anybody at all.
The medical discharge went onto the wall screen with a date printed across the top of it.
A guild doctor had signed that form while she was still in a bed, and his name sat there at forty feet wide.
Her binding posting went up beside it, dated a week ago, in front of four hundred people and six cameras.
Between those two dates sat eight months, and every person in the hall could read both from their seat.
'Eight months of nothing, then one week of being worth collecting... up on a screen forty feet wide,' Ossian watched the hall do the arithmetic, 'shit, she does not need a word from me.'
Ivory Banner offered a settlement inside two minutes of that screen going up.
The offer carried a payment, no admission of any kind, plus wording that left the claim alive to be reinvoked later.
"Decline," Calista said that into the microphone herself, before Paloma had finished reading the terms.
'Shit, he has moved off the sponsorship and onto her safety... same voice, different door,' Ossian watched him turn toward the floor, 'here it comes.'
Ruan changed direction the way he does, and asked whether a woman one week into a new registration should be fighting at all.
Then Ivory Banner's active prospect walked out onto the demonstration floor, and that question had been built to bring him out.
'They want her carried off that floor on camera... and then the claim writes itself,' Ossian was on his feet before he thought about it, 'sit down, she has to do this one alone.'
Calista looked at him once across the hall and shook her head about a centimetre.
"Nobody helps," she said it into the microphone, on the record, so the transcript could never say she was carried.
'She is refusing me on the record... a rescued woman reads as a guild asset in every write-up of this,' Ossian sat back down with both hands flat, 'damn it, she is right.'
The prospect came in with two years of Ivory Banner coaching and a registered Level above hers.
He had been on the platform beside Ruan ten minutes earlier, and that is where the guild keeps the people it intends to use.
Calista took him in eleven seconds with a spear her left hand could grip for the first time in eight months.
Nothing about that was the fast line either, since she used a slower one that kept him inside the marked floor, and a bout leaving the floor scores as a foul.
'She is fighting to a rulebook while she does it... and the Mantis will be screaming at her about the angles,' Ossian watched her put him down clean, 'she has been practising the refusal.'
The hall made a noise nobody in it had heard at a demonstration bout in nine years.
Paloma voided the claim on the abandonment clause while the prospect was still getting himself up off the floor.
Nine years of an unrevised standard contract came apart in about ninety seconds, on their own exhibition floor, in front of their own cameras.
Ivory Banner terminated support on a documented date, and their own contract says a lapsed sponsorship cannot be reinvoked afterward.
'Their paper, their clause, their exhibition... and Paloma has turned all three around,' Ossian read the panel forming above the floor, 'hell, this is what a lawyer is for.'
Paloma leaned across before Ruan reached the microphone and told Ossian who had filed the objection on his licence application.
Ivory Banner had lodged it the day after he applied, in writing, well before the board ever wrote back to him.
'He killed the licence and I never looked his way... I blamed a crew lead and a technicality,' Ossian kept his face flat while the hall watched Ruan stand, 'twice now, unnoticed.'
Ruan took eleven seconds to change direction again, then made an acquisition offer to both of them from the platform.
"Ivory Banner would sponsor both hunters, at full terms, with immediate registration," he said it to the cameras rather than to either of the people involved.
The offer was worth eleven thousand credits a year each, and the whole hall heard the figure.
'Sponsorship, eleven thousand a year, the licence with it... the exact thing I have wanted for a month,' Ossian stood up with the number in his chest, 'from the man who took it.'
"No," he said it into the nearest microphone, in front of six cameras, without dressing it up in anything at all.
Refusing that cost him the licence twice inside eleven days, and the second one he did to himself on camera.
The Unmasked had no income at all that afternoon, and Calista's follow-up care is not free.
Nothing the two of them had built together carried a name yet, and he turned down eleven thousand a year on its behalf anyway.
Ruan smiled at the cameras and sat down, in the way a man does after losing in public twice inside three weeks.
'Four hundred people watched a guild lose an argument with its own paperwork... on a Tuesday,' Ossian followed her out through the side door, 'she never looked at me once.'
Afterward, in a corridor behind the seating, Calista asked Paloma what a two-person operation has to file to be a thing at all.
"A name, an address, and four signatures," Paloma had the form open already, "Two members minimum, two witnesses."
Paloma named her fee for the filing, then knocked it down by half without being asked, which none of them mentioned.
Calista wrote The Unmasked at the top of the form before anybody had suggested a name to her.
Two words in her own handwriting, on a filing form, in a corridor behind four hundred empty seats.
'She named it after what the guild did to us... and she wrote it down before asking anybody,' Ossian read it upside down again, 'that is the second time she has done that to me.'
Four names went onto the page underneath it, since a form needs four and four of them were standing in that corridor.
Bastien signed third, having come to watch from the back row without telling either of them he was coming.
Then the system opened a panel wider than any it had shown him before, over a registration form in a corridor.
[An Apex Court has been created]
[Four members recorded, one of them bound to you for life]
[Identity Fracture, twenty-seven percent]
'Eighteen when it last spoke, twenty-seven now... nine points hidden across the binding, her six days with the Mantis, plus this Court,' Ossian read both panels, 'it is charging me without naming which part.'
Calista put the pen down and told Paloma to file it before anybody in that building changed their mind.