"HOME? HOME IS RUN. NO. MORE." -1 'Bandit', We3-

  _____

  James flopped into one of the beanbag chairs up against the wall of his shared office workspace with a slow gentleness he normally reserved for times when he’d thrown out his back or was recovering from being stabbed.

  In this case, it was because he was more concerned about getting stabbed afresh, though it would be more accurate to say James didn’t want anyone to feel like they had to stab him. The reason was sitting in the other beanbag chair next to his; one of the crocamaws that had been brought back with them from Utah.

  They didn’t actually have scales, despite the appearance of reptilian hide. It was more like their skin was thicker than a human’s, primarily the color of deep green vegetation and textured with bumps and ridges where it was slightly denser. The crocamaws all had different coloration patterns, and this one had a cream stripe running from the bottom of their chin, down the front of their neck, and down to under the shirt they were wearing.

  The tooth-filled maw that made up about a third of their total body mass was currently scrunched up against their body, hands that looked surprisingly human though missing one finger and thicker enough to be less flexible, were currently gripping onto their arms as they watched James sit. They had claws on the fingers, but not the thumb; conical little punch-daggers of pointy keratin. But they showed a lot of control, more so than most ratroaches did when they first arrived.

  Their eyes tracked James. Their face was probably the farthest thing from human on them; their maw dominated most of it, and their ‘nose’ was apparently a series of tiny flaps down the length of that snout. Their eyes, then, were large sweeping teardrops on either side of their head. James had been told that crocamaws had binocular vision, but the range of each eye was much wider than a human, and they could see things in an almost two hundred twenty degree field.

  ”Hey there.” James couldn’t think of anything clever to start with. “Comfy?” He asked the person currently looking like they were nervously anticipating having to fight for their life while they sat on the beanbag next to him.

  The crocamaw eyed him suspiciously, though he relaxed a tiny bit when James shifted himself forward and settled his hands under his head. “It’s… okay.” He said.

  Crocamaws could actually speak English just fine. In fact, most of them had already known it, because they needed to take commands from their… users. They were just uncomfortable due to the obvious issue of being punished for speaking out of turn. James suspected that someone who was already inclined to think of any nonhuman life as demonic would have a problem with the way they seemed to slowly roll words out, or how their dexterous lips rippled and showed off sharp canines as they spoke.

  ”Okay could be worse.” James nodded, trying not to laugh as from their shared desk Rufus gave him a look that felt like a perfectly executed eye roll. “So, hi. I’m James, the guy over there is Rufus but he’s just here doing paperwork, don’t mind him. What can I call you?”

  ”…Me?” The crocamaw dropped one of his hands at the question, running a claw across the soft grey surface of the beanbag. “Lavant.”

  ”Neat. Did you pick that one?” James tried to make some small talk.

  Lavant shook his head, and James noted that crocamaws, while they’d picked up the gesture, did it in a way where they sort of rocked their neck and kept their snout in place, not wasting the energy flinging the whole maw around. “I don’t remember why. Just that it’s my name.” He turned away, the eye on his right side staying focused on James in an almost predatory way. “Do I have to go back?”

  ”…Back?” James asked.

  ”I don’t want to go back.” Lavant’s voice was guarded, a kind of twisting emotion put into his words. It took James a second to place the tone, and when he recognized it, he felt a sad familiarity. Lavant was trying to sound like an adult; faking confidence when he didn’t know what that actually looked like. “You can’t make me.” The crocamaw added defiantly.

  James nodded, interlacing his fingers behind his head as he didn’t stir too much. “If you mean back to Utah, back to… the last people you were with… then don’t worry. You’ll never have to go back.” He reassured the young bit of life, who didn’t seem to fully believe him yet. “I just had a few questions for you. But if you want to ask me anything, or if something is bothering you, you can always share, okay?” The silent look he got made James think that maybe his conversation partner didn’t believe him. “So you like it here?”

  ”It’s… okay.” Lavant lied to James so badly that James had to hold back another laugh. The fact that it was almost the same cadence as his first utterance of the words was even better. “There’s food. And…” after a very long pause, he eventually managed to overcome the trained impulse to stay silent, “…and Watcher is nice.” He said.

  Knowing that sometimes, admitting something was good was the hardest thing a young person could do, James just gave a serious nod of agreement. “She is.” He agreed with perfect honesty. He hadn’t really talked to Watcher-Under-Stone that often, but James got the impression she was one of those people who was unstoppably kind. “So, I can tell you’re nervous, do you wanna just get through some questions, and then you don’t have to pretend my small talk is that good?” He asked.

  The crocamaw’s heavy maw raised slightly, lips pulling up in a smile that would give a dentist nightmares, before he realized what he was doing and slammed the end of his muzzle into the beanbag. “Okay.” He said.

  ”I’m not going to be bothered if you smile.” James couldn’t, and didn’t bother to, hide how sad he was at the motion. “I know you probably hear this a lot, but no one here is going to be mad at you for being different.”

  ”Okay.” The word was muffled, and said with unearthed anger.

  James felt his heart hurt for the damage this poor kid had been put through. But he knew he couldn’t just say a few words and fix it, so he moved on. “Okay indeed. So. I’ve got a couple things we’d like to know some more about, now that you’re doing better and things aren’t so chaotic. Remember, if any question bothers you, just say so and we’ll move on, okay?” James got a small jerk of a nod, so he pressed on. “I say that because I know Watcher let you know about this, but we want to know about the spell that… that kept you prisoner.”

  ”I know.” Lavant jerked like he was suppressing the desire to run, but didn’t say anything else, just waiting for James to talk.

  ”What can you tell me about it? The spell Bell By Midnight, to be clear. What… what does it feel like, what does it… does it do to someone, if you know. Also how was it used, if you know how to answer that.”

  ”Nothing.” Lavant said sharply, elongated lips starting to peel back. “It feels like nothing.” James noted that down, but didn’t say anything else, and the crocamaw had to slowly remember that he wasn’t about to be punished for the outburst. Which, to James, was no more an outburst than someone saying ‘ow’ when they stubbed their toe. “I don’t know. I don’t remember the… the first time.” He said.

  ”That’s okay, we can-“

  ”I remember other times.” Lavant interrupted, words starting to pour out like he couldn’t stop them. “You can’t feel. But it’s dark. And boring. And long. And then when it ends, sometimes things are fuzzy, or the… my arms and teeth don’t work like I want… and I have to… and I don’t remember. I don’t remember.” His breathing had turned into rapid gasps, claws now digging holes into the beanbag as he pressed himself upright into the wall with enough pressure to hurt.

  James started to reach out. “Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything. Do you need a hug or-“

  ”No!” The word was a panicked scream, and it accompanied Lavant stabbing a claw into James’ hand. Or at least trying to; James was moving deftly to avoid the attack before it got close to him. “No, no no no…” the crocamaw shoved himself off the beanbag, landing heavily on the floor before grabbing the soft seat and pulling it up like a wall. “Bad, bad, bad, bad…”

  Moving himself farther from the panicking young dungeon life, James spoke softly, like he was getting far too used to doing for all the abuse victims the Order kept picking up. “It’s alright. You’re not bad, and no one is angry. Take your time, let’s focus on deep breaths, okay?” He demonstrated himself, focusing on the heavy push and pull of air through his lungs, letting Lavant slowly struggle to mimic him and join in, the crocamaw gradually calming down. “There. It’s alright.”

  ”I’m sorry.” Lavant said, tears made of a thicker liquid than human saline pooling in his eyes. “I messed it up. I was… was… I can’t ask now. I won’t get the treat. I’m sorry.”

  ”Treat?” James locked onto the out of place word, forcing the confusion to not put an unpleasant expression on his face. “I mean, I’ve got some candy in my desk… fine, in Rufus’ desk… if you want something sweet.”

  Lavant, still crouched behind the beanbag, shook his whole head at James. “No.” He said. “The…” he went quiet, whispering to himself “I can say this. I can say it here.” He repeated before speaking up again. “Sometimes. They would take me, and when… when I was let out… I had to hurt things.” He said. “The sssspell you said, it can make you do it. But if I am good, they give… they give a treat. Put light into you. And then no one has to make me do anything.”

  It was a confused mess of concepts, and James realized he was getting a picture of how the delver part of the church was using Bell By Midnight from the perspective of someone at the bottom of a well looking up at the sky. But pieces started to click into place, and James began to assemble a picture.

  ”One second.” He told Lavant, slowly standing to go over to the desk and ostensibly fish around for some candy. “Arrush was right.” He whispered to Rufus as he did so. “We should have fucking killed all of them.”

  The strider had paused in his reading of the organizational paperwork for the school, and met James’ eyes with his own, giving a bobbing nod before miming an explosion with his front legs.

  ”Yeah.” James sucked in a breath, trying not to start yelling as he found a granola bar that wasn’t from the Office for once, and took it back over to split with Lavant. “Well, I don’t have magic light, but I do have… dried cranberries? It’s not the same, I know.” He said in a friendly tone. “Are you okay with telling me about the places they took you?” James asked.

  ”Can’t. Forget if I try.” Lavant said as he tucked the chunk of granola bar into the top of his mouth, chewing with some of his teeth while he talked normally, showing off a lot of fine control of his maw that James found impressive.

  James smiled as he chewed a smaller chunk of his own half. “Planner is helping for this one. You should be able to.”

  ”Oh.” Lavant stared down at the damaged beanbag, wondering if he’d be in trouble for that. “It was green. And smelled… it smelled good. Nothing else smells right. I had to hurt anything my owner didn’t like, and collect the metal things for them. Sometimes they made me climb. There was a lot of climbing whenever they wanted to walk a long way. But there wasn’t anything to hurt up high, so it’s… it’s okay.”

  ”Did you ever have to go through somewhere that took you to a place that wasn’t green?” James asked, wondering if Lavant had ever gone through one of the thin points between the dungeons.

  ”N-no!” He denied instantly, and then flinched as James gave him a knowing smile. “They told me I was only useful for the green place. But… but sometimes there were other places that I wasn’t supposed to go. So I didn’t! I didn’t! I just… let them come to me… and…”

  He was starting to hyperventilate again, so James held up a hand. “Hey, it’s okay. I’ve been to both places too, and I don’t think they wanted me there either, you know? I get it.” He said. “How far in did you ever go?”

  ”Very.” Lavant answered. “Sometimes… we were there for longer than they kept me in the dark. They would take us to a… a…” he struggled to find a word. “Like a hole in the ground?”

  ”Crater?”

  ”It was long. There was water at the bottom.”

  ”Valley.” James couldn’t help the linguist part of his brain. “Or gully, depending. It’s… heh, sorry, I’m getting sidetracked. Tell me about it?”

  Lavant nodded, one side of his maw mouthing the word ‘gully’ while the other side spoke. “It’s where the big things come to life. They said… my person said it was timed. And then they put them in the dark place for later. I had to keep other things away while they did it. The… the water there is… it tastes like the light.” Lavant looked away awkwardly, wondering if he’d overshared. Quickly trying to gloss over it, not realizing James was taking notes in his head, he moved to something else. “We also went to the wet place. It smells the best. And it feels right. The water there doesn’t taste like anything but there are metal bits hidden under it that I had to get. I like that part, I can do that part again!”

  Nodding with a small smile, James gave a small shrug. “Maybe when you’re older and can decide properly.” He said. “We-“

  Lavant cut him off, shifting forward closer to James. ”I have another person now! I can go back to the green place!” He said, before curling his claws around the edges of his maw. “S-sorry…”

  ”You… you don’t have to go back.” James said sadly. “It’s okay. We’re not going to make you fight. Watcher-Under-Stone isn’t… you’re not assigned to her, Lavant. She’s assigned to you. She volunteered to keep you safe, and help you grow up.”

  ”I don’t need to grow up.” Lavant said with the angry tone of someone who was very, very wrong about that one specific fact. “I can fight!”

  ”I know you can fight.” James calmly told him. “I don’t need you to fight, though. I need you to be happy, and safe.”

  ”…if I don’t… if I don’t hurt the things you want me to… I won’t… earn a treat…” Lavant said with almost desperate words, speaking from different parts of his maw as he fumbled to sort out what he was trying to say.

  James took a deep breath, just for himself. “I will… I will see what I can do about that.” He said. “Thank you for giving me some helpful answers today.” James stood, offering Lavant a hand up, which the crocamaw stared at before taking just long enough to pull himself upward and then jerking his arm back. James moved past, intentionally showing no worry about the other person’s claws, to open the door to the office. “Watcher’s waiting for ya just down the hall, okay? And… don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay. You don’t have to go back anywhere you don’t want to. And I swear we will never put you back in the dark.” He said the last part gently as the crocamaw walked past, teardrop eyes slanted downward.

  “…okay…” Lavant’s reply came from near the floor, the whisper from the side of his huge maw barely audible to James as he walked out and guided himself toward where Watcher-Under-Stone was waiting with a claw tip dragging across the wall.

  James shut the door and turned back to Rufus. “What’s the biggest weapon we can use?” He asked. “Orbital laser cannon?” Rufus thought for a second then gave a bobbing nod as he remembered the food cooking spell they had one shot of. “Great. Point it at Salt Lake City.” He said, before Rufus started pushing buttons on his emote keyboard and trying to communicate the concept of collateral damage to him. “I know, I fucking know, I’m just…” James looked down at the hands that were gripping the edge of the desk; he felt like he was going to rip a piece of the wood off without meaning to, his body shaking from the anger that had filled him with the molten desire to find something bad and break it.

  Rufus jabbed the angriest emote he had, and James nodded as he slumped into the human chair behind the desk.

  The information from the chat was useful, in a way. They would have level three spell slots sooner of later, and that meant they needed to know what Bell By Midnight did before they accidentally tortured someone. Which it could apparently do.

  James put together the information he could. It didn’t automatically give control to the caster, but it clearly could. Probably if it was upgraded enough, which meant that it was a little different than most spells that just got slightly better and didn’t add whole new functions. The target was partly aware of their time in confinement, and from the way Lavant had phrased it, they didn’t heal or really suffer either. Except for… obviously… the horrifying isolation in the dark.

  And now he also knew there was another spell that was likely more cost effective or lower level. One that just gave a burst of some kind of good feeling. And why bother with devoting hours of spellbook time to being able to command your prisoner, when you could just condition them to want to obey you?

  He sent out a few messages to a few different people, making sure to quickly find some Climb casters who could erase addictions, and looping them in. Just in case.

  James wasn’t sure why he was surprised by the problem. This was action coming from the group that decided social pressure wasn’t enough to control their next generation, and started adding in magically assembled opinions as well. Ethics had gone out the window a long time ago.

  And there was a temptation to reply in kind. To just say fuck it, and go back to the original plan of doing as much damage as possible to this group. Arrush’s words from back in Utah came back to James. If a dungeon did what they are doing, Arrush had told him, you would start killing things.

  But because they were shaped like humans and not dungeon life… James was letting them get away with it. Well, that, and also he didn’t actually know how many people he’d have to fight. It might be a lot, and they clearly had more magic that the Order had no idea about. Had they even dealt the enemy a serious blow, or just bloodied their nose a bit, and this tenuous alliance was just one of convenience? He needed more rogues. Maybe he should go help JP close out whatever was happening in Alaska this weekend, so he could retask all of them to figuring out how many Mormons stood between him and a utopian future free of enforced brainwashing.

  At least the information about the Garden might come in handy when he went there later with Momo. She was still dead set on naming it herself, and James had promised since Alanna had sniped the other one. And Momo… Momo never really asked for anything, and yet, constantly did way more than anyone actually knew about.

  James tried not to think about the basement stockroom full of thousands of smartphones when he thought about things Momo was secretly doing. That wasn’t the point.

  The point was, he had two more crocamaws to talk to, and then a delve to get ready for.

  _____

  “You take me to the nicest places.” Alanna told James with a laughing grin as they stood in the grey concrete box that was pretending to be the back of a public park restroom.

  “That’s a little generous.” He joked back, waving a hand as if he could somehow banish the acrid fumes wafting up from the stairwell that pierced into the ground, descending at least three or four floors before opening into the Pylon Motoric.

  Four people, all human or at having started there, were currently standing in the ‘back entrance’ to the double dungeon. Well, James and Alanna were. Momo and El had, with the five minutes they had before they were told the dungeon entrance changed over, raced down the stairs to get El her first milestone from the Pylons. And while Alanna had a silent authority on her making her passively tougher, they were a little subdued here for this action that wasn’t where their power stemmed from. Zhu and Speaky, meanwhile, were off galavanting. Enjoying Zhu’s newfound energy, and just goofing off, which James wholeheartedly supported. And now, he could hear the two other humans returning now with just enough time.

  James really wanted to see what the stairs did when the entrance changed. Normally dungeons seemed to have trouble altering stuff around people, but Emma and Lincon didn’t seem to think that applied here, so he was curious.

  ”I’m serious!” Alanna said, smothering a badly timed cough as a fresh cloud seemed to billow out of the concrete steps ahead of El and Momo’s return. “I mean, I was being sarcastic, but now I’m serious. This is cool. Also should I have gone with these two lunatics? I should be collecting skill points, right?”

  ”First off, no, because we were doing proper stretches, which is more important than running up and down four flights of stairs. Second, skill points are Underburbs.” James reminded her. “The Pylons give AP. Wait, you’ve totally been to that dungeon! Haven’t you?” He tried to remember, certain that Alanna had been slotted in for one of their ‘escorted’ dungeon runs. “I know we haven’t been in together, but I thought…”

  ”I was busy.” Alanna shrugged. “It’s fine, I’ll get a chance. And then we can try to live up kissing!”

  James raised his eyebrows at his girlfriend. “I’m not complaining, but why…” he started to ask before El and Momo, panting with exhaustion from trying to sprint all the way up the stairs, dropped to their knees in unison next to where they’d left their bags. Noticing that El’s lipstick was a little smudged, a detail James felt was so specific he wondered if he had a skill rank in it from something he’d forgotten, he paused. “Ah.” He told Alanna. “That’s why.”

  ”Hey!” Momo announced, raising a hand as she kept gasping for breath and forcing words out between her struggles to recover. “Did you know you can get a milestone for I guess a speedrun? The Mormons didn’t tell us that one!” She adjusted the hat she was wearing, a wide brimmed leather thing to go with the cargo shorts and plain shirt she’d worn here today. James had almost commented on the lack of bathrobe earlier, but realized as the group was lurking and making sure they weren’t followed that Momo was actually making an effort to not be conspicuous in the alien city.

  ”Oh, cool. That’s an easy extra point then sometimes, huh?” James nodded. “El, you good? Got your point in breathing?” The other woman gave him a thumbs up as she squeezed the plastic soda bottle she was drinking to get the drink out faster. “That can’t be… healthy…” James watched as she downed the entire thing in a single series of gulps. “Cool. Alanna, we’re going to have to make sure these two don’t fucking die.”

  ”That was already my plan.” Alanna patted him on the head, and then grinned wildly when James figured out he was part of her plan and gave an indignant ‘hey!’ Pretending she hadn’t heard her boyfriend, Alanna checked her watch. “So, almost time, right? Everyone recording this?”

  The four of them stopped goofing around, not that Alanna had been doing that much to begin with, and moved close to the door itself just in case. The delver group took up a semicircle position as the last couple minutes ticked down. And then, slowly at first, but with a building cacophony of grinding rock, the room started moving. The stairs leading down didn’t just vanish; instead the concrete steps sank back into the wall, the metal railings swinging around to wrap around pipes like they were alive. Slabs of impassable grey concrete slid across the path to first block, and then completely cover, where the steps had once been, until all that was left was a half-flight leading to a blank wall.

  Meanwhile, the opposite was happening overhead. Rotating out of the wall like jenga blocks, rectangles of suspended mossy concrete seemed to leak black dust that solidified into metal bracings and supports. Railings grew like vines, twisting and curling until they formed the awkwardly organic guardrails. And at the very top of the stairs, out of sight with how the curved back over themselves twice, there was the echoing and unmistakable sound of a gate unlatching, heard cleanly over all of it.

  ”…You take me to the coolest places.” Alanna said, staring upward, without any sarcasm.

  ”That was rad as fuck.” El added, snapping her mouth shut when she realized it was hanging open. “I get that you guys love the dungeons, but that was moving. They never really do that! That was so cool!”

  James nodded, stunned into just quietly watching as the stairs settled into place. El was right, they didn’t normally move. Dungeons were awesome to explore, but very rarely were they kinetic experiences. This was something unlike most of what they’d found, especially here at the entrance. “We should come watch this again sometime.” He told Alanna. Then, shifting to a cruelly enthusiastic tone, added, “Anyway who’s ready for some stairs!”

  ”I’m gonna fukin’ kill you.” Momo gasped out.

  Fifty feet upward, her opinion hadn’t changed, but they weren’t in a rush this time, so they didn’t have to run at least. They did have to deal with the mingling smells of oil and compost, though one overpowered the other as they got closer and closer to the top.

  And then, out of the dingy and oddly lit concrete box, and into an open green field.

  ”Sky’s the wrong color.” Alanna instantly pointed out. “I mean, it’s not ‘the sky’, so that’s not fair, but it’s pretending to be sky colored and it isn’t.” As El and Momo nodded along, shading their eyes to look up, James just cocked his head sideways. It just looked blue to him. But then he closed his still-human eye, and realized that Alanna was right, and there was a hue to it that didn’t fit, visible more clearly through the modified eyeball he had. “So! What first! Climb over one of the walls and sequence break this place?”

  James smiled at how familiar the feeling of delving with Alanna was. Remembering the first time he’d gone into a dungeon with her, and the first thing she’d asked was how to get around behind the door.

  The first thing was securing the exit. The area was the same as the last time James had been here, with the little moss and mold covered stone structure that almost felt like a mausoleum holding an iron gate to the exit steps. And that meant that there might be something mean hiding in the arborvitae rows along the cobblestone path that cut through the grass. As the group fanned out to make sure they were alone and had a clean escape route, James actually thought about that grass. Maybe it was just Alanna being here and making him look at things differently, but he realized that it was short. Short, uniform, and yet, there was never going to be a lawnmower in here. So why?

  It was a question with no answer. So James left it for now, instead falling in at Alanna’s side as Momo found the only obvious life form in this part of the park, and made a show of flailing wildly at the swarm of pollen flies that didn’t seem to care about her, but certainly weren’t making her introduction to the place a pleasant one.

  ”I’m gonna call this dungeon something rude.” She’s commented, as El pressed a fist into her mouth to hold back a laugh behind her. “You fucking watch.”

  Their next step actually was doing as Alanna had suggested, and climbing walls. Every little ‘cell’ - James didn’t know what to call each chunk of park yet - had paths through it and nice convenient gates in and out. But not always in every direction, and while the last time they were here his map had shown that sometimes you should be able to navigate to either side of a wall, there wasn’t always a simple way to just walk through. So they were checking, to see if there was some kind of horrible spatial warp thing going on.

  It mostly involved the ladder Alanna was carrying along, in place of a heavier kit. James’ partner was, hands down, the strongest person he knew, and that was counting Anesh’s purple enhanced ability to pick things up. But he wasn’t gonna ask his girlfriend to lug a ladder and a survival pack through a whole delve. Which was what teamwork was for, anyway, so it worked out.

  As it turned out, what was over the stone wall was… another square plot of tamed greenery. This one with slightly higher grass, and a ring of the pillar like bushes slightly offset from the middle of it, but it looked quite similar to their entry point. They didn’t actually go over the wall, instead just using the ladder on each side to check for anomalies. But not only did it feel like everything conformed to physical space, they even found a point on the left side where the different size of the walled off areas meant they could see two of the other zones at once, and there didn’t seem to be anything that would stop them from just walking along the top of the wall.

  That wasn’t really what they were here for though. As a long term strategy to get farther into the dungeon faster, it was probably an excellent idea. But as a tactic for getting a feel for the place, it lacked something. And especially since the tops of the walls seemed mostly clear, it meant there wasn’t anything up here for them to be challenged by. Though James rejected the idea that there was nothing. Just nothing in this early visible area, before the shifting heights of the brick and stone walls made it impossible to see anything farther.

  ”Hey, question.” El said she climbed down from the final check, choosing to drop off the wall rather than take the ladder. “You notice how the horizon here looks wrong? Also weren’t people talking about cliffs and stuff?”

  ”Yeah, that’s super weird.” James admitted. “Thoughts?”

  ”Probably something like the Route, where it just twists things around so you can’t see certain things from too far away.” El shrugged. “Course now I’m wondering if we’re gonna get ambushed by a building or something.”

  “I’ll protect you from any buildings!” Momo declared. “I’m pretty good at that. Not cliffs though, you’re on your own for that.”

  James made a mental note to ask Momo what her experience with controlled demolition was later, as they passed through the first gate, and into the rest of the dungeon.

  Their path through the clean greenery and oddly shaped stone statuary that the Garden produced was a mostly straight one. Today, they were aiming for testing depth, and the value of loot drops relative to it. So they cut through the walled square of their second zone, and the more stretched out rectangle of the third, without any pauses. The pace they set was steady, but not strenuous, and while they didn’t see any dungeon life aside from insects on the way in, they kept alert.

  As they continued farther and farther, the team started taking time to investigate oddities. A wooden gazebo, rotten through and through with hanging streamers of moss forming a curtain around it. A string of eight person-sized clay pots tilted in offset ways. A tiered and flowing fountain with a handful of the goat swan demons greedily feasting on some kind of bugs they were plucking out of its waters. A red metal gate that led them through to a field where trimmed grass formed a clean line against chest high golden wheat, a scarecrow made of grey cloth fluttering in the middle of the field in a non-existent breeze. A break in one of the crumbling brick perimeter walls that let in a single curling vine with thorns the size of Alanna’s biceps.

  Not all of it was peaceful and unguarded, but they were trained and familiar with each other. James and Alanna alone could have handled the creatures that attacked them, and a lot of the smaller life in the dungeon seemed to be less monster and more animal in their instincts; keeping a clear distance as the four passed, and letting them investigate the fun stuff mostly uninterrupted. They fought when they had to, but mostly they were here to explore.

  As for exploring, well.

  That gazebo’s floor had been just as rotten as the rest of the wood. And once they’d made sure Momo wasn’t full of blackened splinters from where she’d fallen straight through it, they’d taken a little time to explore the underground burrow beneath the structure. The tunnels of it weren’t a complicated maze, but it was tight quarters and dark enough to be worrying as they checked it out. At something that was presumably the ‘end’ of the little puzzle, they’d found a wooden box, like a child’s toy chest, with three coins and a bark textured book in it.

  The clay pots, Momo and Alanna were certain were weird somehow. And they made their respective partners wait and keep watch on the big pillboar that was pretending to focus on eating through a shrub a few hundred feet away on the other side of the zone. The pots had markings on them in diamond patterns, and there were similar markings on the nearest wall, which was probably some kind of code. But with no way to know what the instructions for the puzzle started at, or what the cypher was, they’d be here forever even if it was as simple as ‘turn all the pots a certain direction’. Too many combinations, and too many shaggy ridge-shelled insect beasts slowly creeping toward them. So they left that one for later.

  The fountain was a fight. A chaotic fight, since James and Momo had brought some dried fish to try to make friends with these things. They knew they were hyper-aggressive little shits, but the ones that were contained in Townton were at least… not evil. And they wanted to give them a shot. It didn’t work, and before James could even offer a strip of smoked salmon to them, the creatures had taken wing and begun dive bombing the group. Which was when everyone found out exactly how much Velocity El had, as she had started Paving targets, and hadn’t really stopped until the menacing hooves and sharpened beaks were dealt with. After that, James had followed up on something the crocamaws had said, and checked the fountain itself for anything, in a reverse of his original wishing well gesture. Mostly what he learned was that the fountain was deeper than it seemed, that the bugs on its surface did not care if they ran into people but weren’t a problem on their own, and that putting your armor back on while soaking wet was really uncomfortable. He planned to bring a swimsuit next time.

  The scarecrow in the wheat field was, of course, alive. But despite scaring the shit out of El when it had moved, the empty air of its face seeming to collect pollen and bits of chaff to form the outline of an expression, it hadn’t attacked. Instead it had spoken to them like a poem, a simple ode to the feeling of spring fading into summer. When James had tried to awkwardly reply with a haiku about summer becoming fall, it had seemed… disappointed, but still flicked a silver coin his way with its sleeve. And while that was happening, Alanna had dug up a sample of the dungeon wheat to take back to Research, and maybe also Rufus.

  The massive vine they hadn’t taken a sample of at all, because trying to cut it at all had revealed it to be about as durable as limestone. Carefully navigating through the thorns that were sharp enough to punch into the delve armor they were wearing if someone were to, perhaps, lean on one of them, the group had helped each other climb up through the breach in the wall. And found, on the other side, some of what they had been trying to find at the start; an anomaly in the dungeon. A thin strip of space crammed between two different kinds of wall, and overgrown with plants that were far more feral than anything in the tame spaces. They hadn’t lingered, but just setting foot over the line had gotten them attacked almost instantly by a long creature with an undulating flat body and skin like chalk in a rainbow of colors. Reds, blues, yellows, and greens that stood out from the tangle of vines and flowers around them nearly taking Momo’s arm off as it had snapped a muzzle shaped like a lotus onto her shoulder and carried her back through the gap. That fight had been harder than normal, as the creature was difficult to damage, and only ended when James had risked the noise of shooting it.

  They didn’t find any overlays from the Pylons this time. And despite going farther and farther in, the most dangerous encounter came on the way out, when one of those long necked beasts with hooked tentacles draped around it had casually stepped over a wall on its path across the Garden and nearly stomped half their party flat. Fortunately they were all wearing earrings, and collectively had bailed on that encounter with mutual invisibility, but it was still a good reminder that there kind of wasn’t normal depth scaling here.

  Not everything produced coins or spellbooks, either from peaceful or violent encounters. And once, a coin had just appeared in front of Momo’s face, which had nearly caused her to fall into the koiless koi pond she was looking into. But the group was still leaving with a haul that was satisfyingly hefty for a three hour delve.

  Forty coins, at least one that might be a level three or higher and one that was definitely one of the altered level one coins. Two books. A few samples of plants that might not exist on Earth. And, most importantly, general knowledge of the place that would inform delving activities for a long future of Order interaction.

  ”So!” James said happily as they approached the exit tomb. “That was all kinda great, even if I am still moist and need a shower and can’t smell anything except for grass!”

  ”What about the part where Momo nearly died?” El asked, before sighing and answering her own question. “I guess you nearly died too and don’t care, so fine. It was fun. Hey, you got a name lined up now?” She elbowed Momo, who was flipping her safari hat in the air as Alanna retrieved the ladder they’d left here.

  Momo had been thinking about it the whole time. And she felt like no matter what she said, she was going to be fucking it up. There was no real pattern to their dungeon names, but if she was actually being allowed to name one, suddenly the pressure was on, and Momo… well she knew she wasn’t good about pressure.

  There were a couple things she’d decided early though. First, it had to use the nerdiest noun she could think of. That was just a given. Second, alliteration. Only the Stacks got any kind of alliteration, and Momo felt other dungeons were missing out. And third…

  She had to just say something. No ‘trying to find the perfect answer’. She’d known from before they’d even gotten here that someone was gonna ask, and if she put it off, she’d never find a name that was right enough.

  So she didn’t try. Instead, she just grabbed two of the words bouncing around her head, slammed them together, and pulled her signature move of opening her mouth before she could second guess anything. Thinking about how the dungeon felt not exactly less hostile than most, but more playful. It seemed like this place had been sculpted for delvers, and not for defense. So when Momo spoke, she took that idea, and jammed it into words in the most awkward way she could.

  ”I’m thinking Verdigris Venture.” She said with unearned and patently false certainty.

  ”Oooh.” El nodded, riding high on the adrenaline of the delve and the dopamine hit of finding loot in a dungeon. “Nice alliteration.”

  ”I thought so!” Momo agreed, wondering why she’d ever had a problem telling El that she loved her. The two high fived, as James and Alanna nodded appreciatively, the Order’s founder mouthing the words as he rolled it over in his head. “That’s okay, right?” She asked James.

  “Verdigris is the nerdiest word you could have possibly chosen.” James said with open admiration. Momo grinned back at him, glad that someone got it. “Love it. Now let’s get out of here, I have ten different kinds of sharp plant bit stuck in my socks and I’m gonna go mad if that keeps up.”

  _____

  “I’m telling you, you’re supposed to be right here.” Zhu told James.

  They were standing in one of the basements, in a part the Order hadn’t really fully moved into yet, but where at least a few of the rooms were being used for organized storage of non-dungeon stuff. It was at least well lit, with the electrical wiring having been updated and a whole array of the fancy warm light LED bulbs that didn’t have the flickering problem installed. But it was also mostly empty. Or at least, James thought it was.

  He absolutely did not mind taking a walk with Zhu though. The navigator had woken up last night at what was possibly the most awkward time possible, but neither that nor this seeming wild goose chase made James upset in the slightest. His friend was alive, his manifestation still bearing a lot of the cracks and scars that he’d picked up from the Underburbs, but lacking the deeper toxins that had been killing him slowly. And Zhu was in high spirits too, flexing the parts of his infomorph self that he’d been unable to fully utilize while suffering.

  Which was, according to him, why he had dragged James to this basement at just after six AM. The earliest that James would consent to getting out of bed, even with his apartment’s boost to how much actual sleep time he got. Eagerly explaining in his voice that he was still relearning the volume of that this was where James was supposed to be. Or possibly where he was not supposed to be, which was suspicious. James was honestly still half asleep.

  ”You know, I was picking through the basement one sideways from here the other day.” James said with a yawn. “The other day? Yesterday. Bleh, time doesn’t feel real.”

  ”You’re telling me?” Zhu laughed, a half dozen eyes along the long feathers that splayed off of James’ arm in a fan narrowed as he looked around the big room they were in. “I feel like I don’t remember the last six months. It’s all fog and washed out roads.”

  ”I’ll fill you in later if you’re serious.” James told him as he took in the space Zhu had brought him.

  This basement, the result of testing how far green orbs could before they stopped being useful, reminded him a lot of his grandma’s downstairs from when he was kid. The elevator had dropped them in a cramped carpeted hall, with a door across that opened into a chilly little bathroom, another door next to it that went to stairs back up to basement B-side Three, and then just a series of closets lining the walls until the hall took a right turn and opened into a spacious and comfortable den area.

  There was a short staircase that led down to it, making it technically even more underground than the basement parallel to it. A fireplace that had never been used because no one could verify where the chimney went. A thin interior door that led to a crawlspace that had previously looked like it belonged in Clutter Ascent; packed full of old board games and rusted garden tools before it had been cleared out and repurposed, the board games themselves now stocking a shelf upstairs. Most of the furniture was gone too, but there was still a flat hexagonal table made of a heavy varnished wood.

  Also a sliding glass door to the patio.

  ”Oh I hate that.” James said, pointing at the black glass square.

  It wasn’t completely dark; on the other side, Zhu could see the texture of either stone or dirt through the light that made it through. But he agreed, that was weird. Also a reminder that these green orb spawned basements always felt like they came from somewhere else, and weren’t just created from whole cloth. “At least nothing goes that way?” He offered James.

  James raised his arm sideways in front of himself so he could give as much of Zhu as possible a blank stare at the same time. “Harrowing.” He said with dull lack of urgency.

  ”Alright alright, fine, it’s weird, are you happy now?”

  ”Kinda yeah.” James shoved his hand back in his pocket, wondering if they could maybe just start a small fire down here. It was freezing in this basement, and while the carpet was nice it wasn’t making the place feel any warmer than the concrete tunnels a few basements up. “So, we’re supposed to be here, huh?”

  ”Sort of.” Zhu fluttered, feathers moving so energetically they made James yelp. “You’re actually not supposed to be here. Kind of. This is hard to explain but… uh… let’s see… okay, you know how you’ve been shoving your upper body into every weird part of the Lair just to see if someone else missed something?”

  ”Yes. Also it’s my whole body thank you.” James nodded as he wandered past the table, running a finger along its smooth edge as he kept a wary eye on the door to the ‘outside’.

  Zhu gave an amused rev of his voice. “Well, your path never intersects here. So I decided to put you here!”

  ”…and?”

  ”And that’s it. It’s weird, though, right? You’re exploring everywhere, especially in the lower levels, and you never come here? That’s fucked up.” Zhu’s own eyes were searching the room too, but with nothing there except a boring table and boring bare carpet, it wasn’t like he had much to look at. “Any idea why?”

  James frowned as he thought about it and came up blank. “Not really.” He admitted. “I mean I guess if these places do get sucked in from somewhere else, and we did steal someone’s actual basement, then there’s a chance there’s a natural antimeme here or something. How’re you on those anyway?”

  ”Shit terrible. I can only path you through them physically, I can’t actually make you remember stuff.” Zhu grumbled. “Want me to fetch Speaky?”

  ”Hm.” James looked around again, and realized he was moving weird. “Hang on. Watch me for a second.” He told Zhu, and then swept his gaze around the room the same as he had before.

  The navigator’s eyes tracked him, and Zhu almost wished he had eyelids so he could give a surprised blink. ”Oh, weird.” Zhu said curiously. “Do that again.”

  James did. Looking from the stairs to the fireplace to the back door to the lights on the ceiling to the crawlspace door and then back to the stairs. “Something feels off. But I can’t figure out what.” He said. “There’s no spiderwebs at least, so no giant insect ambush. That’s a big concern for me.”

  ”Why?”

  ”Too much D&D as a kid. It was in every prewritten module.”

  ”Sure. Hey. You’re not looking at the table.”

  James paused. “Yes I am. I’m touching it right now.” He said, looking down at where his fingers were on the edge of the table’s hexagonal surface.

  Zhu also reached out his talons, projected orange light of his arm separating from James’ body as he manifested the parts of himself he needed on the fly. Tapping his claws against the surface, he then moved to poke James’ hand. “You’re touching the edge of it. Are you looking at the table, or just the side?”

  ”The tab- hm.” James paused. “Wow that’s weird. I’m not actually looking at the center.”

  ”Try it.”

  ”Yeah I can’t do that either.” James put his hand back in his pocket as he and Zhu stared at part of the table. “How bad do you think this is?”

  Zhu stared up at his friend. “I mean I think I’m upgrading my offer to ‘want me to go get Planner’ instead of Speaky. So whatever that ranks as?”

  ”Hm. Bad.” James said. “Let me try something first.” He took a small flat stone out of his pocket and tossed it up in the air before catching it and feeling the weight.

  ”Why do you have that?”

  ”It was on one of the counters, I figured I’d drop it outside. Anyway, let’s see if I can hit the wall.” James tossed the rock over the table, which did not impact the wall at all. Instead, it hit the table’s unintentional centerpiece, neatly knocking the purple orb out of the two foot tall hourglass shaped wood and metal frame that it was placed in.

  The orb rolled off the table, while Zhu let out a startled yell at the appearance of the totem. Stooping down, James grabbed the purple and then looked back up at the apparatus that had been built here. “Well that’s just fucking creepy!” He said cheerfully, before noticing a piece of paper on the table next to the construct. “Ooh, there’s a note too! Let’s see… experiment begins October eight… design uses simplest configuration… no focus selected for testing… there might be.”

  ”There might be what?” Zhu asked.

  ”That’s where it ends.” James shrugged. “It’s, what, the twenty third today? So this has just been here… memeplexing? Is this where memeplexes come from?! I was fucking right!” He clapped once in satisfaction, after adding the orb to his pocket. “Also I find it hilarious that at least part of Research knew this was a possibility. They literally built a thing that made them forget they built it. That’s… I mean that’s bad, but at least it’s low stakes.”

  Following a sudden thought, James used his skulljack to open up the Order’s webcam feed for the Ceaseless Stacks tablet that had been churning away working on making an instruction manual for building purple totems. And nodded as he confirmed that either it had made reverse progress, or it had finished, and someone had started something new, because it was definitely not where it had been previously.

  This wasn’t technically above James’ pay grade, because nothing really was. But it also wasn’t his specialty. Having found and disabled the source of the problem, he and Zhu handed it off to Thermoclese and her team, who had apparently taken over the whole purple totem project since the other group that was working on it was mostly occupied with Kiki at the moment.

  It didn’t take long for Planner to verify that there had been something going on. The effect so unfocused that all it had done was prevent itself from being perceived. It was still, Planner confirmed, an actual memeplex. This was what caused them, at least as far as when the Office was involved.

  A lot of things got checked off as semi-verified in rapid succession. If memeplexes were different in different places, then this was why; they were dungeon constructs and different dungeons would obviously do things differently. If this part of the world had memeplexes that were from Officium Mundi, it meant they could be found and disabled physically to open up the Order’s options for going public. And if the Order could build their own memeplexes, it opened up options for… a lot of actually really creepy tactics. But it was important to face that head on and not ignore that there was potential there.

  The other thing that became clear was that, even for assignments that were really in tune with how the purple totems worked, if they weren’t actively looking for them or prepared to fight them off, there wasn’t really a defense against the effect. The Order was shielded in a lot of ways from different memory and perception alteration effects, but installing a new purple totem under their noses was a way to circumvent a lot of those protections.

  Several mysteries solved, one Research project put back on track, and a whole new horrifying thing to watch out for unveiled. And it wasn’t even seven AM!

  Which was good, cause James had stuff to do today.

  _____

  Hard grey carpet. Irritatingly bright white light. The smell of filtered air. Endless straight lines of matte metal strips marking off panes of beige. Known repeating patterns of doors and walls made ominous by just how many times they repeated. The ultimate expression of a hostile workplace environment.

  ”It’s nice to be back.” James commented as the small delver team moved along the ‘exterior’ wall, circling to a couple kilometers clockwise from the door to where the Order hadn’t done detailed exploration yet, so that they could take a preliminary scouting look at the environment. “I missed this place.”

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight, taking the lead and setting the pace for their group, swiveled her head around to look back at Arrush. “Your boyfriend is insane.” She commented. “This place is evil.”

  ”I also missed it.” Arrush admitted sheepishly, one of his lower claws tugging on the strap of his delver armor, tightening it almost uncomfortably around his midsection. “It’s not the best dungeon, but it’s clean.”

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  ”There’s an entire ocean of probably toxic ink in here.” Zhu pointed out.

  The glowing line of Arrush’s open smile didn’t waver. “I won’t drink the ink.” He said in the low tone Officium Mundi delvers needed to constantly apply when they were bantering while prowling the endless cubicle halls.

  ”I didn’t drink it, I don’t even have a mouth.” Zhu’s reply was almost a pout.

  “For which I am thankful, because I dunno if Vex woulda agreed to pulling a printer’s worth of bonus fluid out of you.”

  ”Ew.” Frequency commented glibly. “Also hey, I know this is supposed to be a team building exercise-“

  James cut her off. “What? No it’s not. We were just the only people who were willing to be awake at this hour and weren’t busy with other more important stuff.”

  The camraconda tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling tiles, slowing her movement as they approached an intersection in the cubicles. “Even more reason for me to ask why we didn’t bring Vex along! She seemed cool!”

  James wanted to refute the claim that Vex was cool. He hadn’t really gotten to know her very well, but it felt like the two of them were destined to mildly annoy each other by accident every time they talked. Maybe that wasn’t anyone’s fault though. And also James had offered to bring any of her and her partners on this delve, but she’d shot down that idea, claiming that if he wanted to kill her and dump the body somewhere, in a dungeon was the perfect place to do it.

  Which was… really stupid. But James hadn’t told her that if he wanted to he could just kill her and get Planner to make everyone forget she ever existed. That seemed like it would come across wrong. And in exchange Vex had added that maybe she’d get the next week’s delve. So they were making progress on getting along. Though that also implied that she had no interest in going home, even though there was no quarantine and she was welcome to leave.

  Part of that was the reason there were just the four of them - five if you counted Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s authority, but the little guy was more like a friendly roomba than a party member - were the only ones here. There were a lot of people that needed to be taken back to their homes, and Nate had apparently gotten some kind of in with the local FEMA incident commander. So the Order was helping not just get the civilians who’d sheltered in the Lair back down to Missouri, but also doing sweeps and escorts alongside disaster relief teams, making sure that not only were buildings stable, but that they didn’t have anything hostile and hungry in them.

  Between that, and also the knights who were living more organized lives taking care of crocamaws or ratroaches or Mormon kids in their foster family groups, and also the knights who were just hurt and out of commission, and also the people who were assigned to other delves and couldn’t do what James did and power through eight different dungeons in rapid succession…

  Well, the Order couldn’t just print off knights whenever they needed them, unfortunately. They hired new people, and they had the shield and response training programs coming together pretty solidly. But knights weren’t quite the same. They were, James was starting to realize, sort of like miniature paladins. Knights could have their one job that they liked, but they shared the qualities of being courageous and flexible, and those weren’t exactly things you could train into someone. Oh, they could be drawn out, and encouraged, and given fuel for the fire. But it wasn’t even something everyone wanted, and that was okay.

  It did mean though that, instead of doing another week-long Officium Mundi expedition, there were four people prowling around an unmapped area while a couple others managed the copying ritual back at the door.

  “I kinda like it with the small group.” James admitted, glancing at Arrush with his own smile. “We’ll have time in the future for another run. But besides, don’t you only have, like, four hours of earring charges anyway?” He asked Sunny.

  The camraconda hissed irately. “Yeah, yeah. We used a lot of these things in Springfield. We need to copy more. Or find some new way to cheat.”

  ”It’s not cheating.” Arrush protested as he checked one side of the intersection and James split to look down the other. His way had a bulky potted plant outside one of the cubicle doors, but they weren’t going that way, and it was twenty feet off, so he let it be. “Mars was… complaining… about the way we say that. Humans have been coming up with better ways to do things for such a long time, but even we don’t think paper or steel is cheating.” He looked back at Frequency-Of-Sunlight as he said that.

  She gave a hissing sigh. “I guess. I just think it’s funny. Maybe I should start saying it about alloys too? I bet I could mess with Research for a while with that.”

  ”I love that most camracondas seem to map out how they plan to screw with people.” James murmured softly to Arrush as the group pushed through the intersection, the two people with legs rising from their crouches and lowering the weapons they’d swept the halls with as they fell in again.

  The group progressed quickly through the outer shell of the Office once they’d made it the designated distance away. Well, as quickly as anyone ever moved through Officium Mundi. James had, previously, sprinted inside this dungeon. But it always felt weird, and he suspected that was intentional. Biking through marked off and widened known trails was one thing, but running or even jogging through areas that were unmarked just to get deeper in and look for new things was unsettling. It was partly because there was still a lingering social thought pattern attached to being ‘in an office’, but also there was the tendency for small orange totems to cause havoc if someone ran into them incautiously.

  They actually found one of those totems early on, concealed inside a filing cabinet. It had been seemingly randomly shrinking small strips of space down the corridor they were using, which meant that every now and then the group would realize that someone had fallen behind or gotten way too far ahead. On its own it wasn’t a big deal; it actually seemed like it would equalize over time. But it became an issue when mixed with an ambush by a pair of 2.0s and a swarm of staplers and paper airplanes that came along with them.

  The fight had been a surprisingly sustained one, rather than the bursts of violence James was usually familiar with in dungeon delves. Sunny had locked down one of the 2.0s right away, the plastic frame and geometrically patterned cable tendrils coming to a halt as the camraconda locked her lens on it. But then she’d had to pull back around a corner as the other one started trying to kill her with its internally mounted lasers, her armor smoking and starting to melt as she’d ducked and slithered herself away with some help from her mechanical arms.

  The other 2.0 had also pulled back, choosing to hide around its own corner as Arrush had tried to charge it. But the ratroach rapidly found that even without being shot at, he still had to worry about the fact that he had four times as much distance to run as he thought, the totem stretching space out and leaving him both exposed and away from the others.

  Then the swarm made it to them, the striders crawling over the edges of mostly normal cubicle walls to dive off at James and Arrush’s heads, and a flock of a dozen paper airplanes flapping their ‘wings’ in frantic bursts that accelerated their razor sharp edges toward the group.

  James bolted past the first few staplers, then grabbed the next one that threatened to actually headbutt him with its hefty frame and overhand flung the creature at the frozen shellaxy frame. The crack of the plastic shell was muffled by Sunny’s effect, but the strider had struggled to get back up, stunned by the force of the blow.

  Arrush, possibly at James’ side but also maybe twenty feet ahead or behind depending on how the totem was feeling, dodged around the paper airplanes while holding back his instinct to lash out at them. Instead he only struck with the long metal staff that he had brought, knocking them out of the air one by one, but ignoring those that flew past as he continued on to the other 2.0. As he neared the live computer’s hiding spot, it popped around the corner with a rapid ninety degree scuttle, angling multiple laser eyes up at Arrush’s face before the ratroach threw himself sideways into a cubicle to avoid being blinded. Or worse.

  There were another two exchanges like that. The delver team would make progress, the 2.0s would take a couple shots then pull back, and the delvers weren’t willing to commit to attacks that would have them in range of the lasers for however long it would take to reach their opponents. The hall was the problem, as they were rapidly realizing, because they didn’t have a clue how far away either of the 2.0s actually were.

  ”Got it!” Zhu announced as James slapped a paper airplane away and got a gouge taken out of his glove for the trouble. “Be right back!” An orange spear of light flowed off of James, zipping across the grey and green speckled carpet like a lightning bolt until Zhu reached Arrush’s footpaw, unbothered by petty things like ‘space not working right here’. Flowing up the ratroach, Zhu took on a different manifested form of thicker feathers focused in a mantle around Arrush’s chest and neck. But he also now had a much more conveniently placed ally with convenient hands. “There!” He pointed out to Arrush, who followed his directions with complete trust.

  The time it took for Arrush to open the filing cabinet, get a stable look at the totem with his armor’s bodycam just in case Research wanted to know what it looked like, and then break it, was enough time for a bunch of the striders to get close enough to Sunny that she had to break line of sight with the one she’d frozen. As soon as she did, the two 2.0s had started dinging and chirping at each other with alert tones, both of them striding out into the hallway side by side and stalking down toward the supposedly split up and exposed delvers.

  Then James burst out of the cubicle he’d climbed over to when they weren’t paying attention, crouched low as he shifted his momentum to explode forward and close the gap much faster than the Office’s puppets were expecting. The trusty and well used hatchet he’d brought along smashed into the front of one 2.0, disabling its laser array, while James just used his armored weight to shove the other one over. Knees planted on its side to pin it down, he latched his fingers into what looked like an old crack in its hull, and with a loud snapping, ripped that portion of the creature off as it wailed in operating system alert chimes.

  When Sunny raced toward him, freezing the other one, it gave James the opening to pull his hatchet back out and use it to start chopping into the exposed vitals of this 2.0, while Arrush and Zhu rushed back out to finish off the other one.

  As soon as the two creatures were dead, and their green orbs dropped, the majority of the striders and paper airplanes that had been in the area scattered. Some of them had been killed in the skirmish, and a few more seemed determined to continue the aggression, but a lot of the survivors just clearly didn’t want to be there, and the delve team let them go.

  ”Okay, that was really hostile for something this far out on the edge.” James said as he caught his breath, assessing how much of his stamina that had taken and finding himself pleasantly surprised to realize he was still basically a hundred percent good to go. “Arrush, you okay? Sunny, any of those lasers hit you past the armor?”

  ”I’m good! I’m a force multiplier!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight declared.

  Arrush nodded as he gently placed a clawed paw on James’ cheek to let Zhu flow back to the human host. Nominally, anyway. He let himself linger there, looking at how James smiled at him with excited eyes. “I’m… I’m okay.” He said, before looking down at the floor with a neon green tint around all his eyes. “I broke the totem orb by accident though. It gave two skill ranks in the Andes.”

  ”The mountains?” James asked, before wondering why he’d said that when he was pretty sure there weren’t any other Andes.

  Zhu fluttered across the arm guard of his armor. “It was a refreshing snack.” He said. “Geography skills always are! But also what was your certification?”

  ”Oh.” Arrush didn’t feel like that was as much of a loss. “I am a bishop now.”

  ”…Like from chess?” Sunny asked, curling her body sideways as she let the people with hands clear up the orbs into their packs. They weren’t using a cart for this run, so there was a limit to what they could bring back, but green orbs were always a priority for the Order. “That seems weird.”

  Arrush nodded. “I know, I don’t know what it means. Maybe someone referenced chess in their names for things?” The camraconda gave a bobbing nod at that, that sounded like something humans would do. “Like how James steals names for things for the Order.”

  James held up a hand. “Okay, hang on. First of all, I love you, this is adorable. Second of all, I don’t steal names, I… pay homage. Or something. But also bishop is a religious rank. You’re now ordained in… some church I guess. Did it say?”

  ”Yes.” Arrush squeaked out awkwardly, looking back at the carpet. “But I wasn’t looking because I was hurrying.”

  ”That’s hilarious.” James smiled as he set a hand on his boyfriend’s back and gave him a reassuring pat. “Don’t stress about it, everything’s fine and I don’t think that’s one we’ll miss. Let’s keep moving.”

  Their forward progress ran into another 2.0 ambush, and then a tumblefeed, all before they’d even gotten to the part of the Office where the cubicle walls started to tower overhead and form a ceiling of misshapen quadrilaterals. Neither of those fights were much of a challenge though, without the secondary issue of an orange totem around. Camracondas were a force multiplier, after all, and their main weakness was literally the power of friendship.

  Specifically having a friend to flank them.

  When the enemy puppet life came at them single file, Frequency-Of-Sunlight was a nightmare for them. Zhu spoiled ambushes, Sunny took the biggest problem out of the fight, and James and Arrush were more or less left on cleanup duty. They were more useful for their access to hands than anything else, spending a little time going through desk drawers and cabinets as they moved.

  For a while, the delve was comfortingly familiar, but despite the skirmishes, not that exciting. They ran into a vending machine that took some of the non-real currency they’d found in exchange for a refreshment break. They discovered a computer keyboard that pressed its own keys if someone focused on it, which was actually huge for camraconda communications. They made a stack of six sealed quest briefcases to come back to later on the way out, but the cash in them wasn’t a high priority.

  It was such a strange feeling for James how not having to worry about money anymore changed his priorities so drastically. Early on, he’d been coming in here just to steal fifty bucks from a wallet and maybe also grab some fancy suit jackets he could sell on craigslist. Now, he was here to hunt the tumblefeeds, not the other way around, and the money was secondary to the novel candy bars.

  Maybe it always had been. It had been so many actual months since James had snacked on a Baby Things, he felt like he was abandoning his roots.

  ”Eh?” He prompted Arrush as he made the ratroach try one. He’d offered Sunny but she’d outright refused. “Right?”

  ”It’s… sticky…” Arrush said, clearly trying to find a positive, or at least neutral, adjective.

  James sighed. “Yeah, yeah.” He shook his head as Arrush handed him back the majority of the candy bar. “I’ll be honest with you, these Things are not as good as I remember. I feel like I might have had my expectations skewed by being able to eat professionally prepared meals and not being starving all the time because I skipped lunch.”

  The words were something Arrush hadn’t really heard from James before. He paused as he walked past his human lover to leave the cubicle and search the next one. ”Sometimes… sometimes you say things and… and I wonder what your life was before this.”

  ”Kinda bad, but not nearly as horrible as yours.” James said instantly, with a grudging smile.

  Zhu fluttered up his arm to manifest an eye by his shoulder. “Yeah, you have nightmares about college sometimes, and it’s so fucked up. No one should be that stressed out about traffic jams.”

  ”Everyone’s a critic.” James grumbled. “Come on, let’s keep it down, everything in here has been mean today.”

  They continued on.

  Past pencil dart traps and collapsing overhead panels. Past hypnotic screensavers and violent potted plants. Past a break room that stretched in a single long strip that wound like a geometric river through the otherwise normal cubicles. Through a tunnel of a janitor’s closet and across a stretch of the dungeon where the floor itself was made of unstable cubicle walls.

  It was in the midst of mapping out a strange hexagonal grid of cubicle halls that they found the designated Odd Thing for the delve. James had been trying to not think of delves as just a quest to find the Odd Thing, but it kept happening, so he just kind of gave up when it did this time. He’d split off from Arrush and Frequency for a moment to double check that this wasn’t a totem zone, and was coming back to meet up with the other two. When the group reunited at one of the spacious and very exposed three way intersections that were frequent spots maul carts visited, they all saw the thing at the same time.

  ”Holy shit.” James and Zhu said, also in unison, pointing down the new hallway to the section of dungeon ahead of them. Where, at first glance, it looked like the dungeon had been destroyed.

  Keeping away from the black rubber vines of the phone flower on the cubicle walls to their left, the group crept forward to get a better view. It wasn’t actually destroyed, really. Not like someone had planted demolition charges and collapsed the walls and floors. But it was in a state of chaotic ruin. At least at first look.

  The ceiling had collapsed down, the deceptively massive panels holding fluorescent light bars that normally rested thirty or forty feet overhead had fallen to smash into the ground below. At least a few had hit with their whole flat sides, and had toppled hundreds of cubicle walls, which left the expanse looking like it was a cleared out flat plane within the dungeon. But others had crashed down on their edges, twenty foot long slabs of the thick fiberglass material still sticking up from where they were braced by other parts of the dungeon, or leaning on each other.

  Some of the lights were still flickering on and off, casting the devastated field in a shifting riot of shadows and darkness. And mixed with the way some of the fallen panels had smooth clusters of oval shapes that almost looked like they were growing out of them, the whole area seemed like a much more alien landscape than even the Office usually did.

  ”Oh, it’s a road.” Zhu said with surprise, and getting quiet questioning noises from the others as he said it. “Look, here.” A painted orange illumination took to each of their visions, showing where some of the panes were propped against each other, leading to a high point near the edge that had a number of thick black cables hanging from what was left of the ceiling tiles above. “This is traveled. See the marks?”

  ”The spiders?” Arrush questioned. “They live above, don’t they?”

  ”Yeah, but they never come down.” Sunny said with worry. “The only times they do is when they fall. Usually cause they got kicked off. And it’s hard to survive that drop.”

  James hummed. “Zhu, is this intentional?” He asked. “Like, did someone shatter the ceiling here specifically to try to create a repeatable path up?”

  The navigator thought about it, applying a little bit of his energy to the question in a way that he was gleeful to be able to do without exhausting himself. “Yup. But I can’t tell if it’s up or down.”

  ”Or both.” James offered quietly. “Look, there.” His eagle eye spotted motion on the far edge of one of the slabs, and once he pointed it out the others were able to make it out too. “That looks like a few things going up, but they’re not in a hurry. That kinda makes it feel like this isn’t some urgent last minute save. Actually… this feels like…” he trailed off before letting out a huff of amusement. “Are we watching ourselves?” He questioned.

  ”You think they’re delving.” Half of Arrush’s eyes widened as he leaned forward, his throat coming to rest against the back of James’ head. “But… why?”

  ”Has anyone here talked to our vent spider guest?” James asked, wishing he’d taken the chance the last time he was in Townton.

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight tapped the end of her tail against the nearest cubicle wall, which might have been a bad idea as it dislodged some gypsum dust that had collected from the destruction of the ceiling tiles. “Not talked, but I read the reports from Kirk and Chevoy. And I’ve met their kind before, when I was - a long time ago.” She snapped her mouth shut as she realized the memory had her fangs out. “Living in here, it’s not easy. But you can do it. Up there though? They need to eat as much as a camraconda, but there’s almost nothing there. So they form little tribes, and hunt each other, and new appearances either replace lost hunters, or end up eaten.” She hissed in annoyance.

  James nodded at the grim thought. “So if they found a way down to the surface, reliably… then they could sustain themselves better. They’re not puppets, right?”

  ”Don’t think so.” Sunny said. “But remember, being a dungeon puppet doesn’t give me special knowledge.”

  ”They’re delving.” James said confidently. “And that means they might be building something upstairs. Or at least getting to the point where they could. We should see about helping them.” On his arm, Zhu gave a revving laugh, while Arrush’s armored form leaned more into him with a comforting pressure and a similar little breath of laughter. “What?” James asked.

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight answered for them. “You’re you, that’s what.” She said. “Should we go now? Say hi? We’ve got an hour left in here.”

  ”No,” James answered as he scanned the area ahead of them again. “Because look there. Past that wall, on the right where the big diamond chunk is leaning up on the support pillar, look. See that shadow?”

  Arrush hissed, pulling back and shuffling to a fanned out position as he kept his secondary claws on the shotgun he’d been issued for the delve. “Large.” He whispered.

  ”I think that’s a maimframe.” James didn’t whisper, but was still keeping his voice low. “And I don’t think it’s the only one. The dungeon is watching here. We can mark this place on the maps, but it might legitimately be safer to visit the spiders through the vent entrance.”

  ”…the last time someone tried that, we watched Chevoy rip half her face off?” Frequency pointed out as she arched her body and pressed the end of her tail to the floor, ready to burst into motion if needed. “That seems dumb.”

  James was aware. “Yeah, we need to find a better way to do it.” He said. “But going through here is gonna require heavy ordinance. And I doubt Nate’s gonna let me bring the mortar in here.”

  ”He should. It’s your mortar.” Zhu complained.

  James laughed, but didn’t bother arguing the point. The group backed away from the wrecked chunk of the dungeon, having possibly found the reason for the ramped up hostility of the green orb life in this section. Sunny was right, even though she hadn’t quite phrased it that way; they were low on time, and it was about the point when they should turn around and make their way out of the Office.

  On the way back, they had a few more small adventures, but none were quite the mix of exciting and frustrating as finding a decision tree. It was a small one, maybe a young one, the black coiled cables of its center trunk clinging with determination to a drywall divider, the screens of its canopy mostly flickering with static or gauss lines. James had announced their presence, and while Arrush and Zhu had fun asking it questions, he began trade proceedings with the little glittering shard lizards that lived in symbiosis with the tree.

  The exciting part was that these things were always cool, and they also always had purple orbs for the Order to copy and potentially restructure their whole operation around. The frustrating part was that, apparently, inflation was alive and well in this magical cubicle landscape. Because James had to give up a good thirty yellow orbs - the lion’s share of their whole collection for this delve - just to get three purples in exchange.

  ”These had better be worth it, or I’m leaving a one star review.” He grumbled as they left, getting a reassuring pat on the back from Arrush, who was prepared to offer comfort even if he didn’t have any idea what the heck James was talking about.

  All in all, it was a productive delve, and a fun way to spend some time with people James honestly quite liked.

  It was always cool to find new stuff in this dungeon, because Officium Mundi wasn’t a dead place. This wasn’t a static endlessly respawning dungeon for the Order to farm, this was a living and vibrant place with its own pseudo-ecosystem, its own chain of cause and effect, and its own sense of creativity. The presence of more and more paper airplanes today was evidence of that; the Office tried things. And sometimes they didn’t work, and stopped showing up, like the old and kind of horrifying copy machines. But it kept trying. Sometimes totally new ideas, sometimes iterating on already used things.

  And it meant that the dungeon was always exciting. Not that there was much chance James would ever find it boring, but this was exciting in a different way. This wasn’t just a place to explore, this was a place that was making itself explorable. And that was such a cool thing that he would never not want to come back here, and bring more people he liked to see whatever fun thing showed up next.

  _____

  For once in his life, James wasn’t doing the obvious dramatic gesture while he took care of a task. He’d like to say it was a feat of true restraint, but the truth was, while he would have liked to have replicated a scene from a medical drama by standing outside the transparent wall of an injured comrade’s hospital room with one hand pressed to the glass in deep concern, he wasn’t doing that because Deb had simply asked to talk in her office. And also it would take too long for anyone to properly appreciate it.

  That didn’t mean the situation wasn’t serious. But James was an old hand at using humor to mask how uncomfortable he was, and nothing made him quite so uncomfortable as talking about death. “How’s he doing?” He asked Deb as he paced instead of taking a seat. Scratching at a phantom itch on his neck where Zhu was absent from, the navigator having sped off to hang out with Speaker for the afternoon, James tried to keep his discomfort mostly hidden. “He’s not a candidate for an isekai plot, is he?”

  ”…Does that mean dead?” Deb asked him pointedly, looking up from the desk drawer she’d pulled open with an unamused stare. She looked tired. She probably was tired. James wondered if she had any relationstick links, and if it would be possible to pull together a donation pool of naps for the beleaguered doctor. “Because no.”

  Well that was good at least. James kept telling himself that he knew the Order was going to sustain losses over time. But he was never ready for it. He didn’t know how to handle it, how to emotionally process the deaths of his allies and teammates. So knowing that one fewer person had died than they’d initially thought was a kind of relief. Even if it didn’t bring back the other four. ”Good. Good.” He sighed. “How is Tyrone doing?”

  Deb’s answer was rapid and professional, and told James nothing that he wasn’t permitted access to. “He’s still recovering. Awake roughly four hours a day, and showing improvement. His injuries are no longer critical, at least.” She didn’t share or speculate on how much of a recovery she expected the knight to make. Partly because that was one of those things that James wasn’t cleared for, but also partly because she didn’t know yet.

  ”That’s grim, but at least he’s getting better.” James shifted back on his heels, tipping the padded chair he was holding onto the back of.

  ”Most people take injuries half that bad, and die.” Deb told him as she pulled a small black case out of her desk, finding what she was looking for in her search. “There’s no way to know what kind of recovery he’ll make, but we have tools and powers no one else does. Even so. His survival is a miracle, and it’s not even the biggest one.”

  ”From who?” James muttered.

  Deb looked up from unlocking the case. “Excuse me?”

  ”I mean, who signed off on that miracle, and not the other ones I ordered?” He explained. “Sorry, I’m feeling bitterly atheist today.”

  ”Oh.” Deb gave him a look that, despite the downturned corner of her mouth, felt deeply understanding. “Well, no one delivered. So Mercy and I made our own.”

  ”And that’s why you’re in charge here.” James said with a tired smile of his own, sharing a moment of recognition with their most magically enhanced doctor. “Did you tell Tyrone about his loot drop? Is he even conscious enough for that when he’s awake?”

  Deb pressed her fingertips together before spreading her hands in a sharp motion. “He’s been informed, but I don’t think he understood. We’re keeping it secure for now. There were enough stockpiled healing purples that we just used those for now. Also… I owe you an apology. I pushed for more proactive use of the copy rite, and-“

  ”Okay you can’t say it that way, it sounds wrong.”

  “-and I am not going to apologize now. Dick.” Deb huffed indignantly. “Speaking of loot drops, though. We have a problem.”

  James nodded. ”I wondered why I was here and not just getting an update message from you.” He said.

  Ignoring that, Deb opened the case on her desk as she spoke. “Outline-Of-Green and Harold Barker both had their last request marked as… as…” Deb swallowed, losing a bit of the stoic professional look. “They were okay with their drops being used for testing.”

  ”Ah.” James didn’t know what to say about that.

  ”So you’re here because we need to test a few things.” Deb continued, pressing back the wave of black anger and disgust in her stomach. “We need to know, first off, if the skill crystals dropped by people exposed to the Underburbs are usable skill crystals. And then, we need to know if the orbs that our people drop are also skill crystals if they’ve picked up Underburbs points.” She sucked in a breath before letting out a long sigh. “Which means I need you to try one of the crystals that a civilian dropped.” Deb ended.

  James stared at her, sitting behind her desk looking like she hadn’t slept for the last week since this all started. The only part of her that was perfectly situated were her scrubs, and James was pretty sure that was because the light green garment was actually her authority’s manifestation. “I think you should be telling me this after you’ve slept.” He said slowly. “Also you have to know there’s no way I’m gonna be comfortable with this.”

  ”Tough shit.” Deb told him bluntly. “Because we need to know if we’re ever going to be able to have informed consent in the future, and that’s the critical foundation of all medical care. Magic doesn’t change that part. And you, out of everyone here, I trust to not get greedy or weird about it. Unless you want me to go get Dave?”

  ”…Dave actually would be another good choice, yeah.” James admitted with a shrug. “I know you’re using him as a bad example. I think? But Dave honestly wouldn’t care.” He was pretty sure Dave wouldn’t care for his own personal reasons and not because of any kind of deeper ethical trepidation, but still, he could probably be trusted with people’s loot drops. “But I understand. Even if I am being weird about it right now.”

  ”Oh, yeah, thinking through your actions before you randomly mess with something that’s kind of like a corpse is real weird.” Deb’s nose scrunched up as she sniped out the words at him before placing a hand on her forehead and leaning forward on her desk. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m… I’m kinda tired.”

  ”Yeah…” James was worried about her. “Okay. Let’s do this quick before I talk myself into thinking it’s a good idea. Also I desperately hope you don’t want me to crack one of the crystals.”

  ”No, sadly, we already know what that does. It transfers skill points. There was an accident.” Deb didn’t elaborate, and James didn’t press. Instead, he just let her take a few objects out of the case and set them on the desk between them, pushing aside a folder with a stethoscope sitting on it with the back of her hand to make room.

  Two orbs, two crystals. Identifying which orb was from Outline-Of-Green was easy, because it was the green one, the camraconda apparently still ‘counting’ as a puppet of the Office in death. James felt that wasn’t fair. At all. But he didn’t have anything to do about it.

  “We’re going to need to see if we can break one of the crystals we got from furniture too.” He said, mouth dry, as he stared at the dungeons objects. “If there’s a way to get skill points from that, too. Actually it’s kind of strange that the Underburbs seems to have so many functions overlapping, compared to something like the Office or Stacks that split it up across-“

  ”James.” Deb said quietly. “Please.”

  ”Yeah…” He took a breath and stopped rambling, carefully touching his fingertips to one of the crystals. “How many skill points am I putting in here?” He asked.

  Deb shook her head. ”You tell me. Half the reason I picked you is that I’m sure you have enough.”

  ”Fair.” He started slowly nudging the Underburbs skill points down the connection to the crystal. It didn’t feel like anything, though James thought that might be a secret bonus, because if it felt like anything at all it would probably suck. The lightly glowing yellow crystal, far too much like a skill orb, took in the skill points greedily. One after another, until James had put a total of seven into it.

  [+1.3 Skill Ranks : History - Criminology]

  ”You’ve got a look.” Deb commented.

  ”Yeah… do you know who this came from, out of curiosity?” James asked, and got a shake of Deb’s head in response. “Huh. Well, it took a lot more than any of our other ones, for a weird number of… wait do I have a Library orb for… no, that’s not an option. Okay. Yeah, it’s just an odd number.” He made a note on the paper Deb passed across the desk, marking down where she pointed. “So we know it works, I guess. Do I need to do this one too?”

  ”Yes.” Deb shook her head. “I know it feels bad, but verifying any oddities now means not redoing it later.”

  ”Fine.” James didn’t disagree, he was just, like he said, really uncomfortable using people’s loot drops. Even if this wasn’t consuming them, it still felt like it was so close to the line he’d drawn.

  The reason James didn’t want them using loot drops, even from their enemies, was the same reason he didn’t want to advertise that making friends with stuff animals gave people a protective shield. It created a perverse incentive - and a much worse one than just becoming friends for an ulterior motive. If it was okay to eat what your enemies dropped, then it became too easy to find enemies.

  It was one thing to harvest from a dungeon, especially like the Underburbs where everything inside was hostile and seemingly mindless. It was another entirely to go looking for reasons to, for example, start assassinating Mormons to take their spell slots. And as long as the line was clearly drawn, they could avoid even getting close to the ethical problems that came from those situations.

  It was different, using the Status Quo equipment or the Alchemist’s tree. Those were things. Objects that didn’t require death to move around. Arguably James would have been fine just looting the shit out of the first Status Quo as a way to remove their ability to operate at parity with any magical groups. Though they never would have let that stand, so things had gone a lot more violently. But it was still different than taking something that was only acquirable by death.

  This wasn’t really the same. They weren’t destroying the crystals, so if there was some way to eventually use a loot drop to bring a person back - a giant luminescent if - then there was no squandering of that potential. But all the same, James didn’t like it. He wasn’t even sure if the Order should have an option for ‘go ahead and use my loot drop’ for their fallen. The last thing he ever wanted was for a future version of the Order to look like a death cult.

  Still. He did as Deb asked, and started feeding this crystal points too.

  A lot of points.

  A lot of points. When it crossed the threshold of ten, James was surprised. At twenty, he was alarmed. It took twenty two before it finally gave him the little mental chime and seemingly grudging information.

  [+1 Power Rank : Throwing Strength - Blade - Small]

  ”What in the fuck?” James asked, eyebrows forming a concerned vee on his forehead as his whole face scrunched up to look at the crystal, then up at Deb. “What… do you know who this one came from?” He asked.

  ”Yeah.” Deb said with a sigh. “That’s the one Alex brought back, from the guy who walked off getting exploded.”

  ”Oh.” James paused, then looked back at the crystal with worry. “Oh.” He added. “Well that’s fucking… I mean, okay, fuck that guy. But this one is really different. You haven’t tested any of the other ones, have you?” James was now very concerned about how easy it would be to line up the crystals of all the dead civilians and see if any of them gave superpowers. He could already feel himself justifying it as something they’d be fine with, and if he wasn’t paying close attention, he might have let it get far enough to actually believe that.

  ”No, just these.” Deb said. “You’ve got a look that says there’s a new problem. So let me cut that off. You just can’t have the others, okay?”

  ”Good.”

  ”I figured using someone who was… on the other side… would be more acceptable than another civilian for the testing. My mistake. Of course.” She winced. “At least these two did volunteer, and… did you ever meet Outline?” Deb asked.

  James shook his head. “I mean, briefly. I saw him a couple times at movie night or the nonhuman support group. He worked here, didn’t he?”

  ”He… interned? Squired? Standardize our wording.” Deb ordered him irately. “He was here for a bit, but didn’t like it. But I knew him well enough. He was the kind of person who didn’t like it when anyone second guessed him.” She slipped into a thin smile, remembering the camraconda that had been… not a friend, but someone she’d never been unhappy to run into or work with. “If he put down that we should use his drop, and he saw you doing this? Hooooo boy, he would have words for you.”

  ”Rude ones, I’m guessing.”

  ”Did you know camracondas will just look up how to swear in other languages if they run out of English ones?” Deb asked. “…I’ll miss him more than I maybe thought.” She whispered under her breath.

  James found himself smiling sadly at the small eulogy. “Okay. Okay, I get it.” He said, gently resting his fingertips on the orb. “Let’s see how this goes.”

  It went weird. The green orb did feel like something as James tried to put skill points into it. Specifically, it felt… annoyed. Which was different. But he kept focusing on it, and after about thirty seconds, he felt the points start flowing into it.

  It took seventeen, and then in exchange, it gave James a migraine.

  [+...(#3 SKill) rAN*k ::| At?le&ics -. s#sLit*hERi*g]

  ”Ow.” The sound was a strained whine. James should have sat down, because now he was laying on the floor as Deb checked his pulse, and he didn’t remember getting there. “Wow, that… uh… that fucking sucked!” He laughed as he sat up, despite Deb’s protest. “I’m okay, I’m okay. Fucking ow, that feels… actually that felt almost exactly like trying to equip a Garden spell that’s too high level.”

  ”What happened?” Deb asked as she got him up off the floor and into a chair, manifesting a water bottle and some aspirin seemingly from nowhere.

  ”It gave me a borked report.” James explained. “And a fractional skill rank in slithering. Which… which confirms at least one thing. It is dragging stuff out of people.” He puffed out his cheeks, ignoring the sting from a scabbed cut on his left side. “Or maybe that’s because it’s an orb. Either way, it cost a lot to get a little. Also I know how to move a camraconda body now so I can totally fail to take advantage of that.”

  ”Sure.” Deb moved to put the loot items back in the case, but James held out a hand to stop her. “What? No. James no.”

  ”We need to know.” He said. “That’s Barker’s orb, right? It’s smaller than I expected.”

  “Now’s not the time for jokes you- oh you’re serious.” She still seemed unhappy about passing it to James.

  He smirked. “I think he would have appreciated it. Nate trains the shield teams with his personal crass humor. Which… might be a problem.” He took a deep breath. “Here goes.” He said, staring the process again and hoping it didn’t hurt as much.

  Nineteen skill points later, he failed to get his wish.

  [+.2? SpēCi*es rrrAnk :” Cerc(opi)the;ci*dae* -, PaPiO A\nub*is?]

  ”And you’re done.” Deb’s voice was less a suggestion and more an ironclad command as she snapped the case closed with the loot drops inside. James hadn’t even noticed her do it.

  The repeat test, painful as the headache and the shooting pain in what felt like his blood was, was still useful. Because this confirmed something; he was getting something back from the conglomeration of their orbs, not just from them as a person. And also, it meant that the problem wasn’t because Outline-Of-Green had been a camraconda. It was with the orbs themselves. Which in a way, was good, because no one would want to put up with this just for a few extra super expensive skill ranks.

  ”You know, Barker once shot me with an airsoft rifle and Nate made me give up my box of Library orbs for it.” James slurred out. “And nooooow I have one back.”

  “You don’t look good.” Deb told him. “You’re crying.”

  James nodded. “Yeah.” He said. “Cause of the pain. And also, cause of… because of the other pain.” He tried to laugh. “Because this sucks. Because no one should have died. Because I hate how things turned out for these guys, who were just doing their best.” He leaned back against the chair, feeling hot liquid running down to his chin. “At least they got to get me back for it.”

  ”Shut up.” Deb said, the blunt ire of the words snapping James’ eyes open as he looked at her in surprise. “Shut the fuck up. They didn’t die for you. They didn’t die for anything. They just died. Neither of them were idiots, they knew what they were signing up for, just like you did.” She stood and started pacing, though James could see her own steps were wavering. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I need you to keep going.” Deb told him.

  ”…why?” James asked, feeling like he wasn’t seeing the whole picture.

  Deb met his eyes. ”Because you’re like me.” She said. “And you’re onboard with ending death. And we don’t get there if you give up now. You don’t need to sacrifice people - god I hope we never feel like we would - you don’t need to stop feeling, but you also don’t get to give up.”

  James took a deep breath, steadying himself. He tried to stand up and found that it was easy enough, the pain not really going away, but his modifications letting him be a little bit more stable than Deb seemed. “Please get some sleep.” He said. “You’re starting to sound like me, and that’s gotta be a bad sign.”

  ”Christ, you’re right, normally Mercy stops me before I get too far into monologuing. Okay, get out of my office.” Deb shooed him away. “I am going to tell you, I’ll be doing a few more tests. You need to know that. But I’m going to spread it out, so no one feels… obligated.”

  It was probably the best way to do it. And James knew there were other people with a glut of skill points from the fight. Knowing, learning, that was something they needed to do. They couldn’t make decisions with a clear conscience if they were just guessing. But Deb’s method seemed like it was meant to make it an easier process for all of them.

  “Hey.” James said slowly as he stood by the door. “If the Underburbs happens again… can you prep a rough plan for getting a single skill orb to as many people as possible?” Deb gave him a curious silent look, and James explained without being asked. “Inoculation. The enemy delvers wanted survivors they could take crystals from. But if the Office trumps that drop, and it hurts like hell…”

  Realization dawned, and Deb nodded slowly. She didn’t say anything, just let out a long breath, pursed her lips, and repeated the nod. Which James returned, taking the quiet as his cue to leave.

  He got out of her office, before they started plotting the downfall of mortality together, and wasting time that could be spent napping instead.

  _____

  “Welcome in!” Sarah’s bright smile made Kiki’s even stare even funnier in contrast. The pillar trying to project confidence as she was let into the perfectly ordinary suburban house. “James said you might be dropping by today.”

  ”Yeah, because I told him what happened.” Kiki said flatly. She could feel the tension in the girl greeting her. Could feel the fear - reasonable fear - at what Kiki was and what she could do. And also, could feel Sarah’s implicit and determined kindness resonating in her chest. All of which was just Sarah, and had nothing to do with what had happened that had pushed both of them over the edge into deciding it was time for this to happen.

  What had happened was, she had been talking to the Researchers, working on feeling out how to help modify that weird ‘dungeon detector’ to work on her. Or other things like her. And then she hadn’t been.

  One second she was in the mountains, isolated and away from everything that had been causing her sanity to fray as she struggled to keep her powers in check and her actions her own. Just starting to wonder if maybe what she needed wasn’t complicated suicide, but just a gosh darn vacation. And then, the next second, she had been in motion.

  Falling from the sky, or from the ‘pocket world’ that she apparently put herself in whenever she did her Superman impression, she had found herself landing in a place with a lot of short buildings made of covered brick. Sandy but healthy dirt under her feet was held together with the roots of a hundred trees around the little village. It was the kind of place Kiki knew about, and had seen before when she was in her ‘travel the world for answers’ phase. But the style of construction wasn’t one she recognized, and likewise for the trees. So she had no idea where she actually was, or what had called her here.

  She felt herself changing as she landed. Her body, Reed said, wasn’t just one body. She wasn’t stealing anything either, as far as they knew, which was good. But she was growing more ‘person’ in herself. It wasn’t obvious if this was how all the pillars were, but for Kiki, it felt like sometimes she had a better face to put on, the same way she knew when to smile slyly versus sharply. Different faces for different places, to keep people comfortable and at ease. She checked her hands and found darker skin, fingers still bony and gnarled with age. Her hands, but also, hands from a different life.

  A brief sniff of the air brought her the smell of smoke, more than any camp fire would produce, and she frowned as something else was carried on the wind. The why of her presence became more clear as she stopped herself from thinking like a human, and started thinking like whatever she was now. The village of maybe a few hundred people was playing host to gunfire and violence.

  Kiki found what had called her almost instantly. A young man wearing a well worn but equally well kept white robe-like garment, with a colorful hat on, was talking to a group of soldiers at the center of the town. Arms extended, a placating smile on his face. Unarmed and unarmored, Kiki felt an echo within him that called to her, bid her pay attention as he faced violence with kindness.

  The soldiers were in uniform body armor, their rifles modern and sleek. Kiki still didn’t know where they were, but she recognized the gleeful cruelty in their grins as one of them waited for the young man in the square to stop speaking, and then raised his rifle in a casual gesture and shot him.

  Or tried to.

  Kiki was there. Where she had been called, where she was needed. The bullet hit her instead of the target, one of her charms splintering with a metal ting that echoed through the village. “That was not very nice.” She said, though the language that came out was one she had ever learned.

  The soldier had looked at his rifle like he was confused. And then he had opened fire on them again, his comrades joining in as they shot into Kiki, into the others gathered here behind the speaker, and into the nearby buildings. None of the bullets hit anything but her, though. They wore through her charms quickly, and then she began to feel them; not the damage a human body should take, but the animosity these bastards shaped like men had put into their shots. Wholly unnecessary and utterly pointless. She had soaked it up, along with the shots, her altered blood painting the ground that was packed tight by a village’s worth of foot traffic. Kiki could feel her magic leaking, but she couldn’t let anyone else get hurt.

  So she took all that hate and malice, and started to do something with it.

  Which was when one of the soldiers had shot her in the head, and she’d blacked out.

  When she came to, the air of the village had changed. There was no scent of unwanted fire or cordite, it was night with a canopy of stars overhead, and she was laying against the large well in the town’s center. Next to her was a whip she did not remember making or using, and in front of her, the armor, weapons, ammo, grenades, and keys to the technical that the soldiers had left. No sign of the soldiers was to be found.

  No one from the village would approach her or talk to her. Even the young man who had ‘called’ her had stayed back with eyes that tracked her like a particularly beautiful storm front.

  Kiki had left the whip with him. Or outside his door anyway. She crushed the weapons and the technical into charms, and left those too. And then she had left, throwing herself back into the sky to return to… here.

  ”It sounded like you had to go help some people.” Sarah prompted.

  ”I did.” Kiki tried not to sound bitter. “Just wish someone had asked me first.” She complained.

  Sarah nodded knowingly to the much older woman as she led her into the house. “That comes up a lot with us.” She agreed. “It doesn’t feel right that you have to do it. Do you wanna talk about it?”

  Kiki looked at Sarah’s face as the young woman walked backward, leading her into the living room, and then looked at the emotion surrounding her. Annoyed to find that the kid was being unfalteringly pure in her intentions, Kiki grumbled out a reply. ”I feel like a tool.” She complained, glad to at least be able to vent some of the frustration. “Oh, I don’t mind helping people out. But no one ever asked if I wanted to be yanked into war zones. And maybe it’s selfish, but…how long until… until it’s just that?” Kiki, for all her years, couldn’t help sounding desperate. She’d been ready to die, but this was so much worse. “I knew it was bad, and you kids knew it would get worse, but living it like this feels a little more urgent.”

  ”And you need to know if there’s an answer?” Sarah asked softly.

  ”That’s the sixty four dollar question, yup.” Kiki nodded. “Got one for me?”

  Sarah stepped around where Kiki was standing, gently patting the altered human on the shoulder. “I think we can try to find out.” She said. “Come on upstairs. Unless you want something to eat? Oh! Are you hungry? Ash-And-Smoke made chili last night if you want some and don’t mind beef!”

  ”I’m alright, thank you.” Kiki’s response felt like an autopilot answer, and she gave Sarah back the same somewhat coy polite smile as the younger woman stared back at her from the second step on the staircase, her hospitality challenged. “Really. I don’t need to eat that much.” She clarified, holding up her hands. Sarah kept staring, and Kiki felt that the kid was trying to bore into her mind to determine if she was only declining to not be a bother.

  After giving Kiki a bowl of aromatic warm chili, and then leading her up to the upstairs hallway, Sarah started talking about the dungeon they were here to see. “So we found Clutter… oh, a couple years ago now.” She said. “What did anyone tell you about her?” She asked Kiki.

  ”Mmh. This is good.” Kiki spoke without embarrassment around the spoon in her mouth. “I got a rundown of all the different places you kids found, but nothing very specific. I know it’s an attic, am I going to have to haul my old joints up a ladder?”

  ”You can fly.” Sarah accused her with a laugh. “Well, we call her Clutter Ascent. And we can’t really talk to each other. But we met her when she was still very young as far as dungeons go.” Sarah’s smile at the memory was nostalgic, and Kiki could feel the strings of memories coming off her, though the pillar restrained herself from picking through them. “So instead of sending in delve teams like we normally do to explore and usually get in fights, we… well, we moved in a little.”

  Kiki cocked an eyebrow. “A little?” She asked. “Wait, moved in?”

  ”No one lives in the dungeon full time.” Sarah said. “But we spent a lot of time there, especially the people who live- oh! Hello!” She laughed joyously as a group of four stuff animals and two human children that were probably around six or seven thundered around the corner at the end of the upstairs hallway, charging past with high pitched laughs as they raced down the stairs. A panting human adult came after them, leaning on the bannister at the top of the stairs as he struggled to keep up. “Good luck Liam!” Sarah cheered him on and got a thumbs up in reply.

  ”…normal around here?” Kiki asked, eyes narrowed as she traced the bizarre eddies the stuff animals left behind.

  Sarah laughed again as the two women heard the sounds of kids arguing over crayon colors downstairs. “Yes.” She said abruptly. “It is. They’re from Clutter. Well, the ones with fur, anyway. They live… well they live here. Both parts of it.”

  ”She… is it a she, or is it just a place? She made them?” Kiki asked, looking at the ceiling overhead and just seeing normal wood.

  ”We keep calling her female, I hope she doesn’t mind.” Sarah sighed. “I wish we could talk more. We have a few child developmental specialists that are here often to track her growth and changes, and she seems to be doing okay. We read to her a lot, we spend time there exploring and playing. We adopt and take care of the stuff animals. And Clutter… seems to like us.” She said with a happy little quirk of her lips.

  Kiki hummed. “Do you know the little guys are magic?” She asked, probing Sarah’s reaction.

  When Sarah’s happy expression slipped, Kiki worried she shouldn’t have said that. But then Sarah shook her head and spoke. “You might already know, because it’s ’like you’, but they have something special about them, yes.” She said plainly. “I won’t tell you.”

  ”Why not?” Kiki asked, feeling a tug toward some kind of behavior she didn’t quite know the shape of. It wasn’t that hard though, and she crushed the impulse. “Secret?”

  ”It’s secret because the more people who know, the more people who might hurt them in the future without realizing it.” Sarah said quietly. “We tell them when they’re mature enough to understand, so they know. And they can choose who they share it with.” The impulse faded, and Kiki nodded, busying herself eating more chili instead of talking. “So! Would you like to meet her?”

  ”The attic?” Kiki asked, realizing Sarah had led them to the base of a bare wooden staircase that led… out of the world. She hadn’t even noticed it, which shouldn’t have been possible. “What’s the plan, kid? Because I can’t touch anywhere like this without some bad stuff happening. But I was hoping you’d have an idea for how to… contain me.” She used the word Reed and Nik and the other Researchers kept using.

  Sarah shook her head. “There’s no plan.” She said. “Because that’s not how friendship works.” Kiki felt the tug in her whole self again as Sarah spoke, realizing that she was being wrapped into a story that the woman was telling. “We can’t talk to Clutter, but we know what she’s like. We can feel that she loves us, and we love her back. She’s the closest dungeon to being like you; with magic that centers on trust and kindness, in their own ways. So the only plan is to introduce you two. Gently!” Sarah held up a finger like a professor lecturing. “But clearly.”

  ”And if it’s just an oil and water thing?” Kiki asked as Sarah stepped up onto the folding stairway.

  ”Then we stop.” Sarah said simply. “We can work to find another way later.”

  ”What if-“ Kiki stopped. She was making excuses, and that was something she’d thought she’d gotten over doing years ago. Wearing a smile that she didn’t remember donning, she stopped resisting the tug, and let Sarah guide her.

  Standing at the top of the stairs, Sarah stuck half herself into Clutter Ascent. “Hey!” She called out, unsure if she needed to be loud for the dungeon to notice her, but wanting to make sure she was heard. “I brought someone for you to meet!” She told the dungeon itself. “Normally people just walk in, but she’s a bit different. It’s okay though! She’s nice, she just needs some help!”

  Grumbling under her breath, Kiki set the empty bowl she was holding on a little painted wood table on the side of the hall as she stepped to the base of the stairs. “Makes me sound useless.” She muttered. “You know that most of the time when I try this, it hurts, right?”

  ”If it does, I’ll pull you back.” Sarah promised her.

  ”Sometimes it’s felt like I could hurt them.” Kiki said warily. “Your… friend here…”

  ”Hey, hey.” Sarah stepped down out of the dungeon, reaching out to Kiki and quickly taking the older woman’s hand. “It’s okay! We’re not asking you to run in and start fighting each other!” She laughed lightly. “Okay, you say they hurt to touch. That’s scary, I know! But a lot of dungeons are jerks! Clutter isn’t a jerk. She makes sunsets and living rainclouds. She’s… she cares. In her way, she cares. She won’t hurt you on purpose.”

  Kiki felt like there was no way Sarah could know that. But she still stepped up one more time, ducking her head like she was worried it was going to get taken off by the panel of nothing she couldn’t sense in front of her.

  “Sometimes,” Kiki said, “in this last month,” she clarified, “I get the feeling you kids are a whole truckload scarier than I am.”

  Sarah smiled, laugh lines crinkling around her eyes as she spoke without replying to that. “Just reach with me, fingertips first, just in case.” She said, guiding Kiki’s hand, unwilling to be afraid of the coiled and dangerous power contained in the woman’s flesh. “Sometimes,” Sarah said, and Kiki felt that tug again, “what the world needs, and what we need, is to do something scary. To take a little leap of faith, and hope there’s someone waiting to catch us.” She inched their hands closer to the edge, one of her own hands already holding onto the edge and inside the dungeon. “Sometimes you just need to trust that no one wants to hurt you. And that things will be okay.”

  Kiki had lived a very long time. She knew that what Sarah was saying was naive, and foolish, and would inevitably get people hurt just as much as if they did nothing.

  But she didn’t want to live in that world. And she knew what she believed. She knew why, when the fire of creation itself had wrapped her up on her deathbed and asked her what she wanted, what she was, that she had responded with something… kind. Blunt, stubborn, a little aggressive, not afraid to stamp on the cruel, but still fundamentally kind.

  She pulled away from Sarah’s hand, and let her fingers come to rest on the edge of reality.

  Nothing happened. None of the screaming pain of her whole self being pulled apart to use for scrap that normally came from this. No feeling of being eaten alive. No sensation of having the parts she tried so hard to keep from leaking being scattered into the air.

  Instead there was just a buzz. Like her fingers had been drinking a particularly punchy soda.

  ”Hi there kid.” Kiki said quietly. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she felt like she’d taken a step toward something beautiful. Not just part of a solution to her own problem, but something that was just… nice for its own sake. Briefly, part of her wondered if Sarah had just used her special name against her; turning the moment into a story that Kiki followed along with, so she’d feel the way the Order had been sort of obviously wanting her to feel about her magic and her new self the whole time. But that didn’t seem right. It seemed like Sarah was just… one of Kiki’s people. Without thought of it, without being asked, she was someone that used kindness to alter the world around her. And it was hard for Kiki to say that she didn’t get some good results. So she put aside her moment of anxiety, and just… let herself meet something new and friendly. “My name’s Kiki. Nice to meet ya.” She said, pressing her hand more into the buzzing energy of the thing these kids called a dungeon.

  And then there was a squeal of delight.

  “Hi! Hi! Hellooooooo!” Clutter Ascent’s impossible voice chorused back at her.

  There is a discord! Come hang out with us.

  There is a wiki! It's starting to be come helpful.