Welcome to the Black Company. If you've found this guild, you've probably looked through many pages of guilds to get to this point. I'm sorry to say that there's nothing here for you now. All that you will find here is a description of a guild whose golden age has long passed.
The Black Company was originally a guild started in Gaia's early days by the user 9-Lives, way back in August of 2003, making it one of the oldest and longest lasting RP guilds on the site. Back then, there was no guild feature on the site; guilds were just threads made in the guild forum like any other. In its heyday, the guild was active every day, with a page or more of posts being generated every minute. That's not a big accomplishment in some guilds now, but considering the number of users Gaia had at the time, it was an extremely lively place to be.
Though new members continued to come to the guild frequently, a nucleus made up of members 9-Lives, Aeris, TJ, D, Phia, Kogashi, Akki, and Kai was the most consistent set of posts for a long time. The number of contributing members also included KB, Xol, Nana, Tegral, and others whose names I have probably long since forgotten. The guild was an original character-generating machine with stories, adventures, plots, and interactions taking place like clockwork. The point is the guild was a wonderful mess of half-formed, well-formed, and otherwise batshit ideas. And this pattern remained remarkably consistent for many years.
By 2008, many of the members of the guild who'd joined as high schoolers had started to move on to the next stage of their lives, even though they frequently visited the guild. By the end of the year, however, the captain (me) had effectively stopped roleplaying or driving any of the story, and the guild began to fragment into smaller, more individual plotlines run between ever smaller groups of people, moving away from the epic guild-wide stories and adventures that had been the hallmark of the guild's early days. Still, stories continued to progress in spite of the downturn in activity.
Nearly 10 years after its founding, the guild has finally shown its age and the signs that it's time to move on once and for all. Whereas many of the core members had become online friends outside of the guild, we have thoroughly drifted apart, and some of us have not communicated for a year or more. It's with sincere gratitude to all the people who participated in the history of this guild that I make the decision to officially close it up. There were many attempts to revive activity in the guild, but it's clear the Black Company's time is over.
Where ever you guys are now, I hope you know this guild was awesome, and I'm glad I knew you. Maybe from time to time, you'll still stop by a post a little message, tell us what you remember, and what you've done. Those days won't ever come again but the memories don't have to die.
Good-bye.
~Twilight Justice
Nana_Wing