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The Daily Grind - Chapter 205
🕑 Added 2022-09-24 19:54:49 +0000 UTC“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.” -Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals-
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For a while, James’ life threatened to approach something resembling a routine. One that would baffle anyone who thought that a routine meant what time you got up to go to school or work, and maybe what you liked to eat for lunch, but a routine all the same.
That said, while it wasn’t like James woke up whenever he felt like it every day, it was safe to say that ‘sleep’ was something he didn’t have down to much of a science. Sarah did, though, and she was learning how to pass on tiny sparks of rest through their relationstick bond, just enough to make him alert and get past that grogginess that happened just after waking.
This, too, was becoming a routine. No less special, for being something they were good at, but a small bit of magic harnessed and turned into a lifestyle.
But magic or not, James was forming a routine.
On Tuesdays, he went into Officium Mundi.
_____
He’d nearly been decapitated by a cat the last time he’d gone in, dodging it only by virtue of dumb luck. He got a cracked rib, instead, the armored plate on his chest slowing but not stopping the claws, and certainly not keeping the pressure from hammering into him as he was pinned to the ground.
The night had been going so well. He’d gotten a skill rank in tractor repair earlier, and they’d found a small orange totem that made walking distance shorter than it should be, which had been called in and retrieved by an escorted Research team with very delicate movements. And then a pair of skill ranks in cigarette rolling (useless) and French (less useless). All things considered, especially with them keeping a lot of the orbs unpopped to share with the Order, James was feeling excellent.
And then this. James tried to fumble out a telepad, to take the cat out to the real world, where the green orb it was made of couldn’t keep it enslaved to the dungeon. An older model, the one without the unfortunate time delay. But before he could tear it, an enterprising stapler had jammed a metal prong into his finger, and scampered off with it.
Bleeding and pinned, it had only been by virtue of his allies that James had made it out of that one okay. The two newer delvers that Daniel was training and James had come along to talk to shaking off their hesitation after the first few seconds of the fight, and pushing the cat back off him with a combination of boar spear and handgun fire that was a little too close for comfort.
James had lunged sideways for the strider that had his telepad, crushing it a little too hard to survive as he plucked the magic item back, rolling to his knees on top of the invisible cat. To the side, the illusionary kitten copy was mewling pathetically as it bled spectral red all over the floor.
He’d teleported back to the containment room, brain not quite registering that the fight was over, and there wasn’t anything to be done. Arriving on top of an artificial creature that got about two and a half breaths without the dungeon in its head before it expired.
James tried to roll off the cat’s body, and tumbled to the floor in a heap, the effects of teleporting out of a region of time dilation hitting him all at once as he struggled not to vomit. The smell of blood and wet fur sharp and cloying and inescapable in the small room. He’d tried to stagger to his feet, slipped, and cracked his elbow on the floor and his other outstretched hand on the manifested orb.
[Local Area Shift : Production Speed - Electronics - +/- 1.8 hours toward optimal]
[+1 Skill Rank : Logistics - Meal Planning]
[+1 Skill Rank : Templating - Resume]
[+3 Skill Ranks : Fabrication - Chairs - Rocking]
It didn’t feel good anymore.
“I’m sorry.” James whispered at the cat, mouth thick with his own blood from where he’d bit his tongue. He tried to stand again, and got about halfway there before he toppled backward, the next thing he remembered being Davis yelling for someone to go get a medic as the Researcher found him.
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On Wednesdays, he teleported down to Texas for the library, which Vad, a man who was a perfect fit for the Order, had decided to call the Ceaseless Stacks.
_____
“You don’t look so good.” Vad had told him. James had realized, as he listened to him under this less stressful condition, that Vad was intentionally affecting an American accent when he wasn’t under pressure. His voice slipped back to something that James identified as vaguely Russian when they were being attacked by books.
“Ah, I’m fine.” James lied with a smile. “Hey, you figure out what being part bird is good for yet?”
Vad had just rolled his eyes. “I haven’t even figured out what my wizard tattoo does.”
“Oh!” James slapped his forehead as they opened the door to the dungeon, dropping his voice to a hush as they entered so as not to disturb any books ahead of time. “If it ends up being magic, you can call it a spellbook.”
“…do you think that’s a pun?” Vad had asked, and James’s ego had shattered in his chest. Or maybe that was just his cracked rib, still not healed from last week.
They had entered with Thought-Of-Quiet again, who found the library to be fascinating, both the mundane one outside and this magical one in the dungeon, and also Nik, who was finally being let out of medical observation for his use of shaper substance to rewrite his body into something less dysphoric. Their goal was simple scouting and acquiring samples of as much as they could so Research could do their thing.
Once the dungeon had opened up as a place for adventure and not spontaneous death, Vad had really opened up. He had an endless stream of questions about the Order, which had dropped in frequency as they entered, but didn’t go away. And James would be happy to answer once they had time.
They’d done this once before, with just four people, and found it worked better to not have a larger group. So they slipped in, started making their way through without disturbing anything, and promptly got jumped by a Narrator.
It wasn’t even fair. This one wasn’t even humming, it was just laying on a top shelf, the tweed material of its robe camouflaging it as the spines of books. Before James knew what was happening, it had finished its litany about them getting lost, and the whole group was somewhere else.
It didn’t even feel hostile. More like it was shooing them away from its nest.
They kept moving, though without the ability to map, there wasn’t much direction to their poking around. They could always telepad out, after all.
As was tradition, James accidentally stepped on an orb after a small skirmish with a shelf full of fanged books.
[+1 Species Rank : Wolf - Mackenzie River]
“I really want to know what these things do.” He’d grumbled. “If I’m gonna be part wolf, I should know how to be part wolf.”
“You could become an furry.” Thought-Of-Quiet suggested without any indication of if it was a joke or not. James wanted to respond, but he also wanted to admonish Nik and Vad that snickers in the library were a great way to draw attention to them.
“Are there camraconda furries?” James asked instead, suddenly curious. “Like… if you could be an animal…”
“Bat.” Thought-Of-Quiet had answered instantly.
That conversation ended when they’d caught sight of something moving, and had crept around a low row of colorful children’s area shelves, chairs, and tables, to get the jump on the slinking paper lynx, a creature that was much thicker than its composition would have indicated. Literal sharp ears that hadn’t stopped Though-Of-Quiet from catching it off guard in his vision, and dozens of those circling, moving words dancing across its yellowed paperback skin. It was a fascinating creature.
James had told the camraconda to let it go. It hadn’t been hostile, after all, and they did have a policy about hunting things that didn’t try to hurt them. But instead of running or turning on them, the lynx had just stood back, its flank rustling as it turned its own pages.
“Maybe it knows the way out?” Vad joked.
“Three stairs upward, take a right, head to the far wall, right again, you will find a door, do not take it, it is the next one.” The lynx spoke, getting an alarmed yelp out of Nik and a heart pounding moment of fight or flight response from James. Then it turned, and fled, melding back into the shelves.
“What the fuck was that.” Someone said.
James thought for a second, then nodded to himself. “It was a cat, that gave us library directions.” He said, turning and making deliberate eye contact with Vad. “A card catalogue, if you will.” He raised his eyebrows at the other delver. “That was a pun.” James added.
“Shut up.” Vad said. And then, in a grumbling tone to the camraconda next to him, “But that’s also pretty good.”
They’d gotten out without any serious injuries, and with a heavy pair of duffle bags full of the computer parts that didn’t require connections to work with each other.
_____
Then it was a day of what could charitably be called admin. Checking in with the Alchemists and Horizonists, hanging around the Lair, doing odd jobs, probably getting in the way more than he helped. But being there. Visible, and open to talk to.
_____
“Do I have to go back to school?” Morgan had asked him, cornering James in the dining area.
Well, ‘cornering’. James had more or less been enjoying having people sort of clue in to the fact that he was here, and would talk to them. He had a fruit platter and a bowl of pretzels on the table for them.
“Like… in general?” James asked, raising his eyebrows.
“In a couple weeks.” Morgan clarified, the teenager not registering James’ mild sarcasm. “When the school year starts.”
“The fact that you said ‘have to’ kind of makes me think you don’t want to.” James said, folding his arms as he leaned back and offered the kid a seat. “Which, I get. High school sucks.”
“I’d be a senior, and I missed… a lot.” Morgan said, face red as he stared down at the table. “I’m gonna be an idiot compared to everyone else. And I’ll be the weird kid.”
James may have snorted. “Oh yeah, because that’s always what you want. High school students deciding what’s weird.” He cleared his throat as Morgan gave him a confused look. “Alright, here’s the thing. Legally… uh… I don’t actually know what the fuck is going on. But we’ve got a lawyer here, and a ton of resources to make this happen. You don’t wanna go to high school, that’s fine. But learning and education are important to a person. So, what do you wanna learn?”
“…plant stuff?” Morgan said, like he wasn’t sure.
“If you’re not sure, that’s more or less fine.” James said. “I switched college majors three times before getting a degree I don’t use. But we need somewhere to start.”
“Wait, you’re serious?” Morgan asked. “I don’t… I can just…?”
James looked around the dining area of the Lair, currently capable of holding about twenty more people than the physical space should have been able to. “How long have you been crashing here, now?” He asked quietly. “Morgan, did you really think we’d… just throw you back out into a shitty situation? We want the world to be better. That means all of it. That includes school. I’m not so old that I don’t remember how and why school sucks for kids. We’ve had plans for this for a while, but now seems like as good a time as any to start putting them into effect.”
“Like, starting your own school?” Morgan asked.
“Something like that. You do get that the summer program you’ve been in with the other kids is still learning, right?” James prompted. Morgan opened his mouth to argue, and then stopped, and looked like he was actually thinking about it. “Yeah, right? We tricked you! Got you to learn how to do research and learn skills and things! And how to talk to each other! Hah!” James bit at his lip as he gave a lopsided grin. “So we’ll probably just continue that. We’ve got the cash to get some professional teachers in, but we’ll want to focus on topics that you’re initially interested in. And, like, the legal thing. Emancipation, probably? I dunno, I’ll talk to Redding.”
“O-okay.” Morgan had said, overwhelmed. “Thanks?”
“Yeah, no problem!” James said. “I know that life hasn’t been what you expected. And, honestly, I cannot fucking imagine how weird it is for you, as a kid, you know? You’re living with a bunch of wizards and nonhumans and you’re doing a fucking great job of keeping it together. So, like, you say you don’t wanna go to high school? Done. We’ll make an alternative. We were gonna anyway.” James shrugged. “Sound good?”
“Yeah, it does.” Morgan looked like he was trying not to cry. “Oh, uh…” he distracted himself, “are there… more of the rat people around now?” He asked James.
James did a quick mental check to try to remember if there was an operational security reason to not answer, something he didn’t like but was trying to be better about. A tiny seed of Planner, resting in the corner of his cerebellum, shook their head. “Yeah, a few.” James said. “More coming, probably.” Morgan looked away, like he wasn’t sure if he should say anything, and James prompted him with a casual, “Why, what’s up?”
“A lot of the other kids still don’t like them.” He said. “I dunno, it’s… it makes me feel really shitty. Do they get classes?” And he did feel awful; he knew what it was like, to feel like you couldn’t have friends anymore. And as far as he knew, the ratroaches grew up that way. That was fucked up. And with all the subtly of a teenager, he was trying to express that in a way that didn’t make him feel subconsciously vulnerable.
“Not a bad idea. Would you be okay with that? Learning hands on agriculture with a ratroach?”
“I already live with a giant robot snake.” Morgan told James, like that actually counted as an answer.
James tried to smother a chuckle as he realized that he was hearing the sort of answer he would give, coming from someone more than a decade younger than himself. “So yes then. Alright! Make a list of a few things you’re interested in, and we’ll see about setting up class times based around those. You’re still learning math though!”
“Math is fine.” Morgan caught James off guard. “I’m good at math.” He idly rubbed the back of his neck in a motion that he probably didn’t realize he was making.
“…Okay…” James narrowed his eyes suspiciously, watching carefully as Morgan got up and left, stopping halfway across the dining area to exchange some kind of complicated high five thing with one of the other young interns. He looked over the growing teen, but his eye was drawn especially to the popped collar of the jacket he was wearing, and the way he kept his growing hair loose to cascade down the back of his neck. “God dammit.” James muttered. “I’m gonna find who gave that kid a skulljack, and be very disappointed at them.”
After he talked to Karen, who was approaching him with a look of professional determination. Assuming James survived the encounter with his psyche intact.
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Thursday was the day when James let his sleep schedule loop back around. Clutter Ascent had started to develop some kind of dungeon time dilation ability, and the time he spent there usually included a really good nap, which brought him back in line for the rest of the week. Technically, this was a dungeon day, but he didn’t think of it that way. It was more personal time. Especially with the nap.
_____
Lesson Continues : Biology III (1622/1800), Lesson Continues : Basketball III (390/1200), Merits : 266, Credits : 2
The words sat in James’ mind as he idly checked his ‘syllabus’ from the Akashic Sewer’s magical lessons. The pattern had changed again; everyone in the Order who had a Lesson had noticed it. Merits and credits were new-ish, but easily lined up to the red and green sparks given for killing Sewer creatures, or answering its grim trivia questions.
What hadn’t changed was that the thresholds to reach the next tier were getting farther and farther. James had asked the Research division, and it turned out someone had already done an analysis of how the requirements changed. At a base level, the things James knew were accurate. Higher level of the lesson, or more concurrent lessons, meant more things you needed to learn. And with each of those points representing a single piece of knowledge, that could get out of hand pretty quickly. What was interesting though was that it wasn’t the same for everyone.
The Order roughly knew that dungeon’s could change the way they handed out powers. But they couldn’t actually prove here that the changes in the Sewer’s magic came from the different books, and wasn’t just it adjusting numbers on the fly as people advanced.
Either way, James wasn’t running out of Youtube videos on mammal facts, so his biology lesson kept progressing steadily. It was getting harder to actually improve at basketball, though. Not when he… wasn’t really doing it.
He sighed, and then swapped that sigh for a grin as the door to the house he was waiting at cracked open.
The camraconda answering the front door of the suburban home looked up at James with a friendly bob. “Welcome, yes.” He said, sliding back and carrying the doorknob in careful teeth. “Please wipe feet. Upstairs is open.”
James brushed aside his worries about changing magic for now, and thanked the resident of the Clutter Ascent’s downstairs home. The camraconda was one of six people who lived in the nice home; the Order had bought the place off the last owner to secure the dungeon, and when it ended up being peaceful, had opened it up as living space to a few people who needed a stable place to live and weren’t especially interested in being involved with the Order of Endless Rooms’ constant whirlwind of activity.
He knew Recovery checked in here fairly often. And so did the people who came through to visit the attic dungeon.
James slipped upstairs, trying not to feel so awkward about invading someone’s home, and up the folded wooden steps into the Attic.
When they’d found the place, this climb had been covered in an almost physical aura of terror. Now, it just felt like walking into a sunset.
Clutter Ascent’s impossibly expanded space was held under a peaked roof, the ceiling overhead both too close and too far away, filled with rafters and insulation. Orange and gold and purple sunlight streamed in from false sunsets through windows that were at angles that could never have been facing the outside at all, much less all of them catching the sun at once, even if it weren’t noon outside.
The place smelled of sawdust and mothballs, the whole floor a mass of shadows. Stacked cardboard boxes and plastic containers housed a million dusty mysteries. Old furniture, some of which contained magical puzzles to solve that rewarded the participant with the magic of sharing, rose up to form halls and corridors through the mess. Gardening tools that still had old dry dirt on them poked out of hard plastic buckets like strange dead plants, while fake potted plants sat in stacks waiting for their dusty leaves to be cleaned off and presented again.
James loved it here.
He made his way, following a few paper signs with big arrows drawn in colored marker, to a growing structure amid the seemingly forgotten chaos. The place had been where he and Sarah had started reading stories to the dungeon, and it had since grown slightly. No longer a simple tent of blankets and a few couch cushions, now it more resembles a circus’ big top tent. Huge, soft sheets of fabric making up walls, supported by stacks of pillows that never seemed to topple.
The place had its own attic. James didn’t know how that worked. Unlike Officium Mundi, this dungeon didn’t seem interested in explaining its spatial warping with something as easy to steal as orange orb totems.
The sub attic was where he was going, though, to start. Saying hi to Lupe on the way, one of the people who they’d recruited who was a specialist in child development, to try to help guide the dungeon into growing into a good person. A task no one had any idea if they could do, but they were all interested in.
She gave him a steady smile and a friendly nod as he passed. Lupe was one of those people James knew was smart, and knew was on board with their organization, but he always felt like they were talking past each other when they tried to have conversations. Still, she was kind, and adapted well to taking care of a living space and all the new creatures it made.
Two more little amalgamations of different small wildlife scampered around the space, playing lightly and without fear as their caretaker kept an eye on them. And James suddenly realized that Fredrick, the first stuff animal, had grown quite a bit. Either that or been made larger than these other ones.
He spent about an hour, after escaping from their chittering pleas to play with them, up in the attic, talking to Sarah, and looking at a raincloud.
“She’s growing. Properly this time.” Sarah said proudly, arms thrown out to the array of terrariums and aquariums that she had set up like some supervillains would have a bank of security monitors in their lairs. “Look! Look at this one!”
“How do you have time for the mad science when I know for a fact you are always busy?” James asked his friend, shaking his head in wonder as he watched the chunk of living raincloud in the containment vessel Sarah indicated. It had veins of lightning and a swirling thick hide of condensation that seemed oddly opalescent at this close distance.
Sarah planted her hands on her hips. “I’m very clever.” She said. “But seriously, this… this is going well.” Her smile was kind of sad as she looked back at the living raincloud. “It takes kind of a lot of effort; May probably is always gonna need a habitat. And parts of her are… not gonna make it. But with induced electrolysis, evaporative cycling, and… uh… I forget the term. Putting… things in the water? Dosing? No.” Sarah trailed off.
James knelt down and looked into the hundred gallon terrarium tank, noticing that the raincloud moved and pressed its unnaturally thick cloud against the glass as he got close. The base of the tank was blanketed in lush greenery, a living carpet of plant life sustained under the cloud. “How come some of these tanks are less… uh… alive than this one?” James asked.
His friend clicked her tongue, and folded her arms. “Uh… how much time do you have for a biology lesson?” She asked.
“…I was literally just saying hi before I went back down and fell asleep in a pile of pillows while reading a book about human anatomy I brought, because if I learn enough biology, I might become immortal.” James replied.
“I don’t know why I keep asking!” Sarah laughed. “Okay, so, May’s weird. She’s not a single creature, exactly? Like, each of these little clouds is part of May, and if left with enough space, she’ll eventually split off a new one. But they can recombine if they want to, and it appears they maintain memories across this process.”
“Okay, kind of like a certain type of jellyfish.” James nodded. “I follow.”
“…Dungeons make jellyfish?” Sarah asked.
“No, jellyfish are weird and also technically immortal and… look, tell me about the…” he shook his head and motioned back at the tank.
Sarah gave him a suspicious purse of her lips before she continued. “Sure!” She said eventually. “So, May can do the jellyfish thing. But also the pieces she makes are sort of… adapted to their environments? Like, the new clouds start off very simple, and then rapidly change based on what kind of environment they have. It’s part of how we keep some of them stable. The ones that are rocky get thinner ‘bodies’, and are easier to keep in a living state for a long period of time, until they can split off again or safely re-merge. And in the tanks with a lot of plant life, they… uh… well, they grow plants.”
“…Like… magically?” James asked, shifting back from the tank. “Like if this got out and ended up over a forest or something, would it explode out and overrun the planet in some kind of tsunami of verdigris, crushing modern civilization into a state where we must rely on rustic treetop villages and old technology preserved with new magic?”
Sarah stared at him, before she carefully leaned back, cocked one leg, and slowly extended it to shove her sock into James’ face, hopping forward to press at him as he sputtered a laugh and tried to get away from her slowly advancing kick. “Why do you just have that line ready?!” She demanded. “You always do this! You say stuff like that, like you’ve just spent the last two weeks waiting for someone to give you an opening to talk about the world being eaten by plants!” James tried to reply, just as Sarah lost her balance and slipped away, the force of the motion toppling him onto his ass where he lost himself in laughter, unable to form words. Sarah joined him for a minute, before she wiped at her eye, and gave a real answer. “Anyway, no? Probably not. It’s not magic, except that May is actually just perfect irrigation, I guess. The botanist girl came through, and said that May is basically just keeping the perfect hydration level for the plants. And since we have sunlamps, so the cloud doesn’t block out the sun or anything, they’re just growing literally exactly as good as they can.”
“That’s amazing.” James said, staring to get up, then realizing the dusty wooden floor was actually kind of comfortable, barring a couple rough splintery patches, and slumping back into a laying position to look up at his old best friend. “Like, that’s just… that’s cool on its own, but if that’s something May actually wants to do, imagine what kind of farming systems we could build.”
“Always with the ‘building a utopia’ thing with you, isn’t it?” Sarah grinned toothily at him. “But you’re right. Also, I feel bad saying this, but I don’t think May really ‘wants’ anything. I’ve been doing this for months now, and… she’s a beautiful piece of unique life, and she’s clearly got feelings and emotions, she reacts and recognizes things. But I don’t think she thinks the way we do; making plants grow isn’t something she does or doesn’t want, it’s just a thing. I’m… sorta sure that she can’t get bored? But I can’t run a CAT scan on a cloud, so.” Sarah shrugged. “Anyway. It’s like how humans don’t really decide if we’re gonna breathe or not.”
“Anesh does.”
“Anesh also decided to go to school to learn more math on purpose, so Anesh doesn’t count.” Sarah said.
James stuck his tongue out. “Hey, if he hadn’t, I never would have met him. And that would be awful!”
“Yeah, you’d be stuck with one wonderful partner instead of two!” Sarah laughed back at him. “Imagine the terror!”
James snapped his fingers as he tried to get up, and Sarah gave him a hand rising to his feet. “Oh, by the way! That reminds me! You planning to ask Alanna out anytime soon?”
Sarah turned bright red in almost an instant, an effect James only rarely saw on his otherwise implacably cheerful friend. “We talked about this.” She muttered. “And then that conversation ended as it was meant to.”
“…with us getting shot at?” James tried to remember when that had been. “Yeah, wait, that was when a mind controlled police force tried to kill us, wasn’t it? That’s not…”
“I agree. It’ll be fine.” Sarah nodded, having a conversation James apparently wasn’t a part of. “No need to ever bother Alanna or let her know anything about this, and we can all keep being normal.”
James slumped his shoulders dramatically, giving Sarah a flat stare. “You do know that my partners and I regularly merge into an incredibly loving hive mind so we can all sleep easier, right?” He asked.
“Fuck!” Sarah exclaimed, before suddenly clapping her hands over her mouth.
James choked down a bellowing laugh, face twisting as he resisted the urge. “Yeah, you apologize to the dungeon we’re in for swearing. I’m gonna go read my book and enjoy the magically assisted nap field that Clutter has going on!”
He half expected Sarah to chase him down the ladder, but she was apparently more thrown off than he’d thought. But that was okay. They had a policy, as friends; she could come talk to him whenever she wanted, and he would literally always make time. Even if it would be, apparently, too awkward for even her to handle without blushing.
James got two chapters and eight biology lesson points into his book before he was ambushed by a stuff animal looking for head pets. He got another point, interestingly, just examining the joints of the creature’s legs while they sat quietly together. No points for the nap, though. But that was fine; he woke up feeling like he could take on the world. Which was good. He might have to, at some point.
_____
Friday, James and Alanna collected a strike team, and kicked the Akashic Sewer hard enough that it stopped thinking about trying to kidnap children again. The place was getting worse, and James wasn’t sure if they were enabling it, or actually keeping it from sortieing out, but so far they didn’t have a good answer to keep it contained aside from going in. And this way, they could at least try to rescue some of its created victims.
_____
The Sewer seemed like it was making a focused effort to be as horrible as possible. And to the three others in their team, it very well might have been. But to James and Alanna, it fell into a messy blur of constant violence and forward progress.
They had to backtrack to a different pipe tunnel when the wall of the one they were traveling down cracked open and release a burst of steam that was too hot for most of them to move through and smelled like someone had set a summer camp outhouse on fire.
They had a short fight when one of those fifty foot long grey and dripping arms had reached down from where it had camouflaged itself on the ceiling and tried to strangle their point woman. It didn’t succeed.
There was a set of quiet moments, interspersed in the whole delve, when they’d stop in a chamber of packed dirt and rusting walls, and deploy drones down different hallways to scout ahead. The trick to getting drones in, it seemed, was to take the batteries out first. The trick to scouting was that these rooms always only had one usable path, and the others were quick dead ends.
The team fought a hunched humanoid creature that looked like a cross between a bullfrog and a labrador, the dog frog erupting out of a river of flowing liquid meat, bulbous pustules across its slimy skin strained to almost bursting as it tried to drag Ethan down with its thick tongue.
They found a ratroach nest, where the inhabitants just watched them with suspicion and palpable fear. They didn’t need Alanna’s empathy to tell them these ones weren’t mindless monsters. One of their party teleported the four poor creatures back to the Lair’s hospital. None of them wanted to think too hard about what it meant that one of the ratroaches had been obviously, painfully pregnant.
A swarm of the small rat creatures, the ones that were just bone and muscle and patches of fur, had come at them down a tunnel. Someone had used an absorbed blue to crack one of the pipes under the swarm before it got too close, venting foul steam into their midst to the sound of chittering screams that echoed like human babies. The first few rats to die detonated in bursts of superheated blood, taking the rest with them. A flood of red sparks flowed down the surface of the piles and into Simon’s hand as everyone put distance between themselves and the slaughter.
They found a room covered in lists of names. Organized into groups, it took James a few minutes to realize they were the characters who died in different young adult books. They didn’t know them all, but they got a few ‘credits’, the green sparks that opened the treasure lockers.
They learned the dungeon had decided to experiment with water levels; an expanse like a gym locker room, the floor three feet deep with a liquid that smelled like Axe body spray and penetrated their filter masks without even trying. They left that one, and found another way. No one wanted to see what the shapes in the ‘water’ were.
They took a sample of a dripping liquid that set off someone’s Geiger counter something fierce. And another of a fungus growing on a ceramic pipe that shifted colors depending on how you looked at it.
And when they made it to an exit room, they found something different. A ‘priest’, different from the Beautiful One that James had become almost used to by this point. The ratroach wore scraps of backpacks like a vestment, held a staff of a mop handle topped with half a human skull, and chittered in barely coherent Spanish at them about the beauty of early death as it waved all four of its unevenly placed arms at them.
In front of a crowd of screaming ratroaches, none of which exhibited any real emotions aside from empty installed hate, James fought and defeated the priest. He’d picked up some actually useful Office skills in the last month, and even if he weren’t just more than capable of dueling a single ratroach, two ranks in wrestling and one in ballet would certainly have put him over the edge.
He offered the ratroach a choice. To come with them, to try something better. It had said yes, then tried to knife James in the throat. A move that was, disturbingly, becoming familiar to him. It hadn’t made it; Alanna had broken it’s neck before it got the chance.
They’d grabbed six new lesson books, and gotten out of there, before the swarm decided they could maybe take the delvers.
_____
Saturday was a meeting. Because people were available on Saturdays. The big ones were every three weeks, and they determined the direction of the Order as a whole, but every week, James still led a group discussion where they worked to hash out the foundational ideas for their first attempt at an arcology project. A project that had been a distant dream a year ago, a nightmare of impossible ideas six months ago, and suddenly seemed all too possible as of last week. They had a lot to talk about.
_____
“Fundamentally,” James said to the fourteen people in the audience for this particular niche discussion, “a huge set of laws fall under the banner of asking the question of ‘on a scale of one to ten, ten being death, how much risk is a given person allowed to put another given person in’. Usually, we don’t really want to go above nine. For obvious reasons. Or, what I hope are obvious reasons. This isn’t a philosophy class, though, so we’ll be assuming a value to sophont life and moving froward from there. There’s also a subset of laws that’s the same question, but for how much damage you can do to yourself.” He paused, and clicked a button to move forward on his PowerPoint presentation. “And before we decide to claim a metaphorical kingdom, we need to decide what those one to ten numbers are.”
This wasn’t one of the emergency sessions, for deciding how the Order planned to address a sudden crisis. No, this was just a conversation, laying the groundwork, and starting people thinking and talking. But James had still tried to rope in as diverse a group as possible. Camracondas and infomorphs and humans and living potions, one lawyer, one of the maybe-ex-Horizonists, and one of the certainly-ex-Alchemists who was here with minimal coercion.
They talked about the difference between risk and harm, about where the lines of self defense were. They talked about personal responsibility and informed consent, when it came to self-harm. Fairly often, someone who knew more on a specific topic than James would take his place to dig into modern civil rights documents or the nature of how wealth altered personal dynamics.
They had the room for three hours, and they used all of it.
By the end, they had made no decisions. But they were thinking. And, James reminded them, “We’re not going to vote on laws. Not at first.” It had come as a surprise to a few of them, until he continued, “We’re going to be smart, and we’re going to come to a consensus. Because I think we all mostly agree that we need to make the best changes stick, before we give people a window to undo them.”
_____
And then, because Sunday was also a day a lot of people had available, what remained of his fake weekend was thrown into the grinder of testing new magic ideas, and getting in practice with the growing cadre of people that Sarah had relationstick bonds with.
_____
It had taken almost a month for everyone to agree to spend some time together on this. Because getting thirty different people into a room together, when for most of them what would be required was ‘sitting down and speaking up if something went wrong’ was not an appealing prospect.
But Sarah was a very persuasive person. And the people Karen had working for her in the Recovery department were growing into almost unnaturally skilled bureaucrats, so while it had taken some time to place the date for this full scale test, it hadn’t been painful to do so.
What they were testing, a thing James kept calling the Avatar Project in the hopes that people would let him name a thing something cool for once, was dependent on two different magics, both from Clutter Ascent.
First, the relationsticks. Tiny wood sticks that, when broken with someone else, opened an empty path between the two. A strong shared emotional moment could shape what that path was, and what it carried, letting the two participants feed health or speed or alertness to each other. It was a zero sum power, but it had saved a lot of their lives in the last year, and as long as your relationships were trusting, it had no real downside.
Second, the book that Clutter Ascent had produced. No one knew why it had made it, but Sarah had found it one day; an old tome bound in black silk and filled with stars and nonsense words. It had taken a while to learn what it did, but the short answer was, it extended relationstick links one more step. There was some loss of the energies moved involved, it seemed, and there was still a limit on who you could draw from. But it meant that if two people shared strength, and one of them also shared health with someone else, then all three of those people could share both health and strength.
The sort-of third thing was Sarah. Sarah, who loved everyone, who flitted everywhere making friends, being compassionate, and being an absolute delight. Sarah, who had over thirty different relationstick links.
One of which was to James.
Not everyone here was a… well, whatever James was. And the atmosphere was less like a test of capabilities, and more like a friendly get together. Sarah had gotten some tables with snacks out, and everyone was either making small talk or finding quiet spots to sit. Folding chairs and beanbags making sure that, if this ended up being too much for everyone, no one would topple over.
It actually kind of caught James off guard, as he stood on the other side of the open basement room doing warmup stretches, that a few of the contributors here were some of the older people who’d been rescued from Officium Mundi’s clutches years ago. He’d known, in the abstract, that Recovery checked up on them, and that Sarah was sort of his mirror in terms of being an everywhere-everywhen problem solver, but they weren’t really people he talked too that often. Or ever. He kind of figured they didn’t want anything to do with the Order at all, really.
“You ready?” Reed asked him, himself, the camraconda James was pretty sure was named Ink-And-Key, and Davis all standing off to the side from where they’d set up what amounted to an obstacle course for James. “Because if you’re ready, we can start.”
“Gimmie a sec!” James laughed. “Look, give people time to plunder the cheese plate Sarah put out. It’s not like there’s a hur… is there a hurry?” He cut himself off suddenly to look over at the three Researchers.
Reed ran a hand through his curly hair, pulling and twirling at it subconsciously. “I mean, no.” The young man admitted. “But I’ve got stuff to do.”
Settling her laptop down on a safe surface and coiling into a stable position, Ink-And-Key peered up at James, the surprisingly tall camraconda giving him a flat look as she spoke. “Reed is distracted by a new video game.” Her digital voice informed James, putting a curious emphasis on the words ‘video game’, like she was pretending she didn’t know what that meant.
“You have time for video games?” James pretended to be offended. “Don’t you have alchemy stuff to do or something?”
“More my department.” Davis said, the older gentleman taking his own seat. Both he and Ink-And-Key were bound to Sarah as well, so they weren’t just passive observers here. James made their skewed version of small talk with the Researcher as they waited for everyone else to get settled, the last few people tricking in and finding seats, talking about the Alchemist that Davis was working with as part of a rehabilitation program. The challenges of dealing with someone used to having so much money they could pay the cops to turn a blind eye to kidnappings, the progress being made in therapy and channeling the Alchemist’s focus into productive and non-harmful work.
It left him feeling hopeful, when Sarah called out that they were ready. James looked over at the crowd, some of them really tense in their seats. They didn’t look ready, really. But this was, after all, just a test.
He finished his stretches that he’d been ignoring, while Sarah plopped herself cross legged at the front of the group, flipped open a book, and placed a her hands dramatically on the pages.
James felt her reaching out to him, through their shared bond. Normally, they had to be in contact to share sleep with each other. But like this, they could use whatever medium was in the network that was most convenient, as long as it was available, and at a further loss.
And behind her, James felt a field of stars, connected with gossamer lines to Sarah, and through her, to him. So many different things he could ask for. Strength, durability, stability, rest, warmth, connectivity, quickness, alertness, sight, hearing, heath, balance, stamina, flexibility, calculation, grace… And the sudden terror he normally felt when out on the ocean, of looking down and realizing there was no visible depth, of knowing that all those people could take all those things from him in an instant.
He took a steadying breath, remembered that he trusted everyone here, and that while they could just hollow him out and probably straight up kill him if they wanted to, they wouldn’t, and that would have to be good enough for now.
Then Reed asked him to start on the simplest of the tasks they had set up, and James got to work. Measuring and codifying the limits of this collective magic.
How much weight can you lift? How high can you jump? How much pressure does a needle or blade take to break skin? How quickly can you solve math puzzles? Run this small obstacle course. Now do it again, but take more. Now more.
James tapped into the audience, through Sarah and her book. The initial tests were probably pretty boring to watch. But then they got to trying to test the limits of James’ reflexes, with Reed setting up a couple pitching machines to fling tennis balls at him at high speed.
And he found, with everything he could do, and everything he was borrowing, that it took practically no effort at all to slide out of the way. When Reed didn’t have a higher setting available, he’d gotten a frustrated look, told everyone to hold on a second, and ran out of the room to a spattering of laughter. While he was gone, Sarah had said something, and James had seen five people in the audience, including her, start drinking cups of something all at once.
Reed had come back with a third pitching machine - why did he have all of these? - and it still hadn’t been enough to challenge James. The next time he came back, he brought everyone he could find from Research, and the basement turned into the most one sided game of dodgeball imaginable; fifteen people flinging projectiles, many of which were no longer soft tennis balls at James, just trying to hit him once.
He laughed through it. It didn’t even leave him winded. He twisted in ways his body, even enhanced by all the purples he had, should never have been able to. His feet were always where they should be. It felt like he could sense things incoming by air disturbances from ten feet away.
Then one of the camraconda researchers, fed up with this, locked him down. “Someone get him!” He echoed to his companions
And from the other side of the room, he heard Sarah cheerfully yell a direction. And through the shared link to her network of bonds, five people who had downed a significant amount of reflex coffee and were sharing forms of speed with him shoved.
Someone from Research flung a stress ball at his frozen form, an overhand pitch that a second ago he would have ducked like it was moving in slow motion. But now, a camraconda was holding him in place with its mock-basilisk eye.
So it was somewhat impressive when James slid sideways, body at a forty five degree angle to where his feet met the floor, a whole salvo of projectiles moving overhead as he hit the ground, rolled, came up to his feet, caught another tennis ball mid-flight, flung it to deflect another incoming one he knew would hit his slowed form otherwise, and then took off at a sprint at a right angle to his improvised firing squad.
“Cheater!” Someone called after him. Probably the camraconda he was wrenching himself away from. It felt like moving through heavy gel, but James was moving. He kept his laughter on the inside though.
It took the Research department another eighteen minutes of cheering from the crowd who were getting increasingly into their antics, and a dozen different magic items to finally land a hit on him. Even then, it was someone using the Friendly Fire power off one of the firearm bracelets and a whole salvo of paint grenades, to finally trip him up.
Afterward, James was alight with energy, laughing and exalting in the applause and whistles of the assembled crowd that had contributed to him, throwing an excited hug around Reed and high fiving members of Research and anyone else who surrounded him. “Alright!” He’d asked the collective who had poured so much raw ability into him. “Who wants to be next?!”
Half the hands in the audience went up. Sarah made a list for them.
Though a lot of those people took that back when they learned just how awful James had felt, when everything had pulled back, and his skin had felt like it didn’t fit for two days afterward.
_____
In a rush of flowing time, weeks passed. James picked up some Skills and skills, accidentally ended up with three emotional resonance ranks in sonder, honed his own movements, actually found time to exercise, and talked to members of the Order constantly. He and his partners had excited conversations about the potential for the future, about the things they were doing, and how they were finding new ways to improve and help. In between testing the limits of how much they could blend their minds together with the skulljack link, and testing the limits of how much sex they could have before one of their roommates surreptitiously knocked on their bedroom door and asked if they were okay, of course. Before he knew it, it was halfway through September, and while the world turned around them and things in the rest of human civilization got better or worse - mostly worse - James was starting to feel like he’d gotten a handle on things.
Which was, of course, a stupid thing to think.
It was on a lazy Monday that was soon to be less lazy as he and Anesh prepared to teleport with a supply run to Townton, and spend a day exploring the highways and byways of Route Horizon, that his phone rang.
Though it took James a second to realize it wasn’t his main phone, but the burner he’d picked up at the request of a certain individual who had made contact over the summer.
As far as FBI agents went, Malcom McHarn seemed better than most. But that didn’t make James less annoyed that he had to put his ‘vacation’ plans on hold.
_____
They met at a scenic viewpoint off highway 26 somewhere on Mt. Hood.
McHarn had taken pains to arrange a double blind of vacation time mixed with a semi-secret backing of “I am going to check on this myself” for anyone who was watching to find. And by anyone watching, he meant specifically one of his assigned field agents. The one who was haunted. He’d put a lot of work into making himself seem like he was on her side, and also the kind of guy who she could rely on to ‘get stuff done’. And knowing she was probably reading his emails, he’d left a trail for her to find that would lead to the conclusion that his vacation was a sham, but that he was doing it for reasons she’d approve of.
James teleported. He’d been there for twenty five minutes when Harn’s car rolled up, and he continued reading his book until the fed actually got out and came over to talk to him. If you asked him, he’d say he was just getting into the spy stuff. If you asked him for a real answer, he’d say he had no idea what Harn looked like, and his book on the history of zoning laws was requiring a lot of focus to actually make sense of.
“James?” The voice didn’t exactly shock him, but it did pull his attention. And it was slightly familiar, from a worrying month-ago phone conversation.
He turned to see a man in a thick coat over what looked like a formal dress shirt and slacks. Chocolate skin, though a dozen marks of small scars on his hands and one on his cheek. Bald, in a deliberate way, which went well with the thick oval glasses he wore. “Director McHarn, I assume.” He said.
“Thought you’d be older.” The other man snorted, coming over to stand next to the wall between the gravel parking area and the sheer drop down the pine forest side of the mountain that James was sitting on.
“No you didn’t.” James answered easily. “I’ve got a magically up to date military record.”
“Yeah, you do.” The assistant FBI director let out a long breath, a ghost of vapor visible in the cold air. “Call me Malcom, please.” He offered hand. James clapped his book shut with one hand and shoved it into his own coat pocket, shaking McHarn’s hand with the other.
He turned, staying seated, but facing inward now. “So. What was so important we’re meeting out here and not at my place?”
“Well, for one thing, I didn’t think you’d want to give up the location of your operation.” Malcom told him with a cocked eyebrow. “Whether or not we’re talking, I do still have standing orders to treat you as a threat.”
“I am a threat.” James said, heart pounding at a speed that contradicted how simple he made the words sound. “But also, does anyone remember giving you those orders? Actually asking, not being a jackass here.”
“Who knows?” Malcom sighed, and shook his head. Then, like he’d made a decision about James, he turned and sat next to the younger man. “So. You want to save the world.” He said. “And you scared a lot of people. Can I ask… what the hell did you do to DeKay? That woman has gone off the deep end, and she plans to take you with her. You know she’s asking around about getting a drone strike on your headquarters approved?”
“Well that’s terrifying. How’d she even find it? I know that What Is Owed To Me isn’t stronger than Planner is, and probably wouldn’t put up with that shit anyway.” James tried not to clench his fists.
Malcom glanced at him. “Did you just… how did you do that?” The older man sounded genuinely curious. Like he was examining the conversation under glass and not actually part of it.
“The capital letters?” James asked, and got a nod. “You pick it up. I can’t actually remember who taught me. And…” he felt something catch in his throat. “I… mean that kind of literally. Anyway. DeKay.” He felt a tear forming in an eye, and didn’t know why. “We treated her like we treat everyone. We were totally open about our plans and methods, we were willing to work with her, and… I do not actually know what happened. She pivoted from working with us to trying to kill us so fast. If it weren’t for the infomorphs on our side, I’d tell you something mind controlled her. But I don’t think that was it. Or if it was, it’s something way scarier than I am.” James took a deep breath, let it out through his nose. “You wanna talk about her?”
“Not really.” McHarn said. “I’m handling her. Though I’ll let you know if that changes. Oh, don’t worry about the drone strike. There’s a lot of bad in the world, but bombing our own soil isn’t one of them yet.” He shook his head as James considered interrogating the word ‘yet’. “No, I contacted you because I needed to meet. I like to see people, before I put my trust in them. Perhaps a bit old fashioned, but I prefer it this way.”
“So, you drove out here for an informal hello?” James asked, raising his eyebrows.
“It’s a beautiful place.” Malcom said, turning slightly to look out at the chilly afternoon light playing over the mountainous slopes of pine trees and eroded stones. “And that’s not the only reason I’m here.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded envelope. Handed it over to James who took it and gave him a look with raised eyebrows. “Look at it later. I can tell you what it is now.” His voice didn’t waver as he stared at the highway, and the few cars passing by in occasional clumps of traffic. “Six days ago, during a private business meeting, eighteen people were killed in an attack. Eleven were private security, three appear to be civilians caught in the crossfire, and four…”
“The last four were…?” James prompted, grimly curious.
“Executive account managers from the Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments.” The man said. “The main connection between whom, it seems, is a recent cooperative mobilization toward exerting financial influence on Exxon Mobil.”
James blinked. That answer was actually more mundane than he was expecting. “Uh… that wasn’t us.” He said simply. “We’ve got a whole thing about not doing assassinations. Also, what would this even solve?”
McHarn didn’t look at him. Just pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it, and took a deep draw. James swapped sides to be upwind before he exhaled, ruining the gravitas of the moment a bit. “That was six days ago. We became aware of it three days ago, when a car bomb eliminated two more employees of the Vanguard Group.”
“Uh oh.” James started to ask how he hadn’t heard of this, when McHarn kept talking.
“And then, yesterday, nine seperate members of the board of directors, or highly placed executives, were eliminated in three seperate attacks, or by sniper fire. That we are aware of. A number of members of these firms have been unaccounted for for days, and may in fact already be dead.”
“Fuck me.” James whispered. Then, in an increasingly angry voice, added, “What moron thinks this is a good idea?” He asked. “This doesn’t… fix anything. This doesn’t change anything! God dammit, the reason we haven’t been doing this ourselves isn’t because these people deserve protection or something, it’s because it doesn’t work! The money and power just transfer to the next monster!” He clutched the file Malcom had given him, and glared over at the other man, who took another pull from his cigarette. “And in the meantime, random people get killed in the crossfire.”
“I don’t think we’re approaching this from the same direction.” McHarn said, blowing smoke up into the sky and looking up at the clouds, quietly staring into space. “But I am glad you agree the damage is unacceptable.”
James glanced over, but then nodded. “So. Why come to me, I ask, dreading the answer.”
McHarn reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small plastic evidence bag. Gently, like he was afraid it might bite him, he held it out to James, who took it and looked at the five perfectly good bullets sitting in it. Five five six, it looked like. He looked up at Malcom and raised his eyebrows.
“Because.” The FBI assistant director to a department no one could remember very well said. “No one seems to have noticed the attacks are happening.” And then, before James could really fall into the pit of dread in his stomach, McHarn added, “And this is despite the fact that the group responsible continue to leave very explicit warnings at the scenes.”
“Warnings like…?”
“Essentially? Stop funding oil or we’ll shoot you.” Malcom said. “So. While I admit, our organizations aren’t exactly in perfect cooperation these days… will you help?”
James tucked the bullets into his coat pocket. “Of course we’ll fucking help.” He grumbled. “That’s what we do.”
“I thought it might be.” Malcom said. “Now. I need to get back to my hotel. Wife’ll will be wondering how lost I got.”
James wanted to say something about how the teleporter in his pocket could maybe skip a lot of the spy crap. But he held off for now, and just nodded to the other man as he got in his car and headed off.
He sat there for a while, trying to stabilize his breathing.
Things had been going so well. He’d almost had a routine.
But really, he supposed, this was a kind of routine all its own. Just another crisis on the table. One problem after the next. Until they were done.
James pulled his telepad, and vanished. He needed to find Nate. Fast.
Comments
I wonder if what they’re doing to clutter ascent is unhealthy like putting your cat on a vegan diet. It seems like there’d be places with positive/friendly enough associations that there’d be other examples like it otherwise.
Tequila Worm
Tyfc
