"We're born dying, but we're compelled to fancy our chances." -Harry Brewis, Hbomberguy but the questions get worse-

  _____

  “So where’s Spire?” Alanna asked as she and James went through the morning ritual of making sure they had purged the hotel room of any sign of their presence. They hadn’t brought much, exactly, but ‘not much’ still left that paranoid gnawing that there was a pair of favorite socks somewhere in this room that they needed to find before checkout. Especially since they’d been here for the better part of a week; it was hard to go that long without leaving stuff around.

  James found one of those socks, and added it to the bag for their laundry. “Back at the Lair.” They’d given up entirely on not teleporting, now that the people who could detect them and make it a problem were either dead, in custody, or simply not doing that anymore. “She said something about catching up with her coterie, and left while you were asleep.”

  ”She doing okay?”

  ”Not really.” James sighed. “But she’s not doing worse. I told her to take actual time for herself, and did that thing you and Anesh do to me where you make me feel like an idiot for being too self-sacrificing, and I think she listened. We’ll see I guess.” He shrugged.

  Alanna threw a shirt at him. “We do not do that.” She challenged. “Except for… okay we do do that, shut up. Wait, if you know we’re doing that, then why does it work on you? Are you more insane than I thought?”

  ”I mean, it works cause you’re right.” James smiled as he walked past her, taking advantage of Alanna sitting down and planting a kiss on the top of her head. “And I think Spire knows it too. I’ll be here if she needs to open up, but I think she’s honestly close to Simon and Alex. So I told them too, like a good spider building her web.”

  The word choice made Alanna paused and turn her head, narrowing her eyes at James. “Uh huh.” She said slowly.

  James proceeded entirely normally. “So today, a dungeon scouting, and then finding a place that has authentic Canadian poutine-“

  ”There’s no way it’s going to be as mythically good as you think it will.”

  ”-and then home. We can go to the Lair baths and relax and sleep for ten thousand years and it’ll be so nice.” James could already feel the tension and strain on his body fading as he turned from staring out their hotel window to look at Alanna. “This can be Recovery’s problem for a while. All I’m here for is delving and being a teleporting umbral taxi service.”

  “I mean we have poutine in Townton. Fuck, buddy we have poutine at the food cart place over by our old high school.” Alanna also continued undeterred. “Okay. So no Spire.” She changed topics as she zipped up her suitcase. “Is Zhu around? Are we gonna find another magic system that interacts weirdly with infomorphs?”

  “Probably. And he’s sleeping. He said he was meditating on the shadow spell he got, but he’s sleeping and I can tell.” James declared. “I actually sent him back with Spire for some actual rest. I think he’s had a hard time up here, but I can’t really explain why, and I don’t think he can either. He can just chill at home with Aubs, and maybe hang out with his other friends for a bit. He doesn’t need more work. He’s not me.”

  Zhu had picked up his first advancement at the same time James did; an unintended recipient of Terror’s dramatic gesture. Alanna had too, along with every member of the shield team and all their rogues when the umbral had… well surrendered was the wrong word, really, but the magic didn’t seem to care about semantics. Even Rho had gotten an advancement and he’d only really been operating as a scout, which had started a long conversation about how this yet further new school of magic worked. They’d also all gotten their advancements after waking up the next time they slept, which was in keeping with what Tylor and Jubilance had originally shared; apparently Terror’s stunt came with a momentary blackout, which James felt was tactically abusable somehow.

  The magic itself was weird too. At least in comparison to most other magic that James had experience with.

  The first actual spell he ever cast was an absorbed blue orb. And while it had taken a lot of trial and error to work out even okay practices for that, much less the correct way to do it, he still kinda got the broad idea. Blue orbs worked off intent and creativity, and they were the magic version of putting your finger on a hose to make it spray farther. Compressing a burst of whatever power they had to change the world down into a tight beam through the lens of ‘smooth wood’ or ‘assign task’.

  Despite the fact that this could cause damage to a person, it was still simple. It didn’t actually take any special arcane skill, you just pointed and clicked. The Garden spells were the same way.

  Climb and Horizon spells were a little different, because they drew on something physical. Breath and Velocity weren’t abstract concepts, they were things that had feelings and sensations, tied to the body and the physical world. The spells were still just cast by sort of sliding them forward and bluntly presenting them to reality, but there was a little something there that was mutable. For Velocity magic, this was easy for a caster to feel, though James had never practiced enough out of crisis situations to really notice. For the Climb, it was inferred from the fact that the Pylon gave skill ranks in it, and as far as anyone could tell, everyone's favorite parking garage never gave skill ranks for things you couldn’t actually get better at, so other people in the Order were still working to figure it out.

  Shadow magic - James really didn’t want that name to stick as more than just a placeholder - did not feel that way. He’d used it once so far, a wavering shift in the air the only indication before a serviceable repair had been made to the tears in his pants, and already it was easy for James to tell something was different.

  For one thing, it felt like he knew what he was doing.

  That, on its own, wasn’t really that different from how the Office or even Library gave out a lot of their loot drops. Suddenly knowing a thing was pretty old hat to James, and he’d more or less built the Order on the back of being able to learn random things both correctly and quickly. But every skill rank, no matter how esoteric they’d gotten, had been about things that had wikipedia pages. Knowing how to drive a Panther V medium battle tank was… unlikely… but it was something that he could do on Earth.

  Knowing how to do magic felt alien. It felt wrong, in a way that he hadn’t expected it to. This wasn’t skill at using a tool, like with every other magic he’d picked up and worked into his training regimen. This was knowing how to cast a spell. A brief moment where James actually for real was a wizard.

  And then in the next moment he didn’t know how to do it. After getting Flowers for Algernoned, he had sat with a sense of painful loss, that something so amazing had been taken away from him after the abrupt and understated revelation that maybe magic was just real anyway, outside of the dungeons. Maybe this was something he could teach someone else to do. He’d just have to do it in split second intervals, because it’s a little hard to explain a thing that you’ve completely forgotten.

  It was also weird to know it would be back in about twenty four hours. Not an exact timer, though Research would probably have some questions and an atomic clock ready when they got back. James had almost mentioned that it was weird they hadn’t already done those tests on Tylor and Jubilance, but then again, those two had kind of been still getting their bearings before James had yoinked them back to their hometown.

  ”Speaking of Jubilance.” Alanna said as they stacked their bags by the door, the cold and slick grey light of morning slipping through the blinds behind them. “You wanna bet on if she goes back to her fiancé or not?”

  ”Not… really?” James gave her an uncomfortable shrug. “That seems mean. And also I think she’s too different from me for me to understand her decision process when it comes to relationships.”

  ”You can just say she’s normal.” Alanna laughed as she opened the door with the heavy clack of the hotel room’s latch.

  James could say that, but he felt awkward doing it. Even if he was thinking it. “I mean, I think the thing I really don’t get… like, I understand that not everyone wants to be like us, that’s fine, whatever. Not everyone is going to be touched by fate enough to have both an Anesh and an Alanna, much less anyone past that. Sure. But she just… never told him. That’s weird, right? Who fucking ghosts the guy they plan on marrying instead of inviting him to a dungeon?”

  “Yeah, when you found a dungeon, you used it to go on dates right away.” Alanna grinned at him as they made their way down the hotel hallway to the elevator, giving a polite nod to the contractor working on the window that passed them by on the way. “And then every other dungeon… wait, you cheeky fucker! You’re still doing it! You’re doing it right now!”

  ”Well yeah, this trip has been comically unromantic for us.” James joked. “And not just because we were sharing a room with Spire. So a nice little dungeon date sounds great, doesn’t it? We can risk our lives together, get silly superpowers, and then, maybe, at the end of it, smooch!”

  Alanna kissed him before the elevator doors opened to let them out into the lobby, totally fucking up his timeline. “Fine, I’ll go out with you, but only because you’re cute.”

  ”Thanks?” James was laughing as they walked across the carpeted line from the elevators to the front desk, past the hotel’s bar, and the spread out and brightly lit lounge space that had evolved over time from a spot for tired businessmen to read newspapers in comfortable chairs to a spot for tired businesspeople of all sorts to charge laptops in uncomfortable chairs. “Oh, I see our party is here, and has abandoned the prospect of being inconspicuous.”

  Anesh wasn’t really that much of a standout. A significant portion of Saskatoon was Indian already, and plenty of people had twins. Not many people had twins that they traded conversation duties with, but if you didn’t interrogate Anesh, you wouldn’t notice that. And the random people in the hotel’s lobby did seem to acknowledge that Anesh was pretty normal.

  Similarly, Sarah was a perfectly normal human, even if she was someone who had already engaged the woman doing janitorial work in passionate conversation in a language James didn’t speak yet but the custodian seemed delighted to hear.

  Arrush and Frequency-Of-Sunlight were not inconspicuous. At all.

  “So we’re just giving up on stealth?” James asked as walked over to give Arrush and Anesh a unified and awkward hug, breaking up some of the stares from the other hotel guests going through the checkout process today as he did so.

  Arrush nodded slowly, still careful despite his mostly fixed muzzle that didn’t drip as much, even if his tails were twitching behind him in a more energetic expression of contentment. “They will need to get used to us.” He said, though his voice shook slightly as he did. Then he gasped slightly as he pushed James back. “Your face!” One of his smaller paws rose up to almost, but not quite, brush a claw on one of the bandaged lacerations on James’ cheek. James caught that paw before it could poke his wound, but still smiled reassuringly at Arrush.

  “Also everyone here is cool!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight declared, missing all of that. “No one has asked me if I’m a drone, even once!”

  ”…how many people have asked you anything?” James questioned. He’d known they were meeting up before heading to the dungeon, he just didn’t think it would be here.

  ”Like, eight so far? A lot of human kids. The parents are awkward about it!” The brightly colored camraconda shifted from side to side, settling the waterproof cloak she had on over her body more comfortably. “I’m screening for your boyfriend.”

  With another nod, this one containing a smile, Arrush let out a gentle amused clicking from his chest. “I am less weird.” He told James, softly patting a paw on Frequency’s head.

  ”No one asks me anything.” Anesh shook his head sadly. “Which is actually more suspicious. Usually someone would… check if I’m running the robot controller or something.” He gave James a concerned look. “Are you sure this city is safe?”

  ”Pfft. No.” James rolled his eyes. “But I’m pretty sure we’ll be okay sneaking in a delve today, before we establish a more permanent presence here.” He stilled as he looked over Anesh’s shoulders, the two of his boyfriend twisting their necks to look between themselves as well. Someone had just sprinted into the lobby through the gilded sliding glass doors, the beefy human woman clutching her chest as she looked around the hotel, slowly gulping down air. James chose to keep an eye on that in case it was a problem, but continued talking to Anesh. “The dungeon properties are both on the open market, and as long as there’s no governmental law telling us not to, Karen’s working on snapping them up through some of our Canadian citizens.”

  ”I know.” Anesh said, his London accent coming through powerfully through such a flat statement. “I’m doing an on site inspection today. As part of my Canadian duties.”

  That got a chuckle from James. “Well. I’m glad to see you.” He beamed. “Anyway. Recovery has a ton of different meetings and conversations set up locally, people seem to think we’re in charge, and the transitional process should be smooth all around. I just… uh… hi?”

  ”Hello!” The woman that had run in had stumbled over to their group, sweat beading on her freckled face as she tried to stand up straight without passing out. “Can I interview you?!”

  James and Frequency-Of-Sunlight looked at each other, then turned in unison to look at Anesh and Arrush, who had both reacted to that question by shrinking back in abject terror, then back to the woman. “Which one of us?” The pair asked in tandem.

  ”Uh… uh…” the woman fumbled. “Any!” She squeaked out.

  ”I’ve got this.” James said, hiding his glee. “Can you guys go help Alanna load the van, cause it looks like she’s done.”

  ”And I shall extricate Sarah from her new lifelong bond of friendship.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight offered with a low bob, looking up at the new human while slithering past, and being stared at with wide eyes.

  Giving Arrush and Anesh each small kisses as he sent them off, James pulled his phone from his pocket to read the text from Alanna, who was staring at him from across the lobby. Curious, and afraid, but it’s anxiety and not actual fear of you. It read. He shot her an inclination of his chin that she returned before heading for the hotel’s garage to retrieve their vehicle. “So, hi?” James started. “Do you need to sit down?”

  ”Oh, yes please.” The woman gasped, collapsing into the lobby chair next to James, who just stood awkward with nowhere to go. “Do you mind if I record this?” She asked, pulling out her own phone.

  ”Go for it.” James was deeply curious himself where this was going. “Sorry, can I ask, in no particular order… who are you, who are you interviewing me for, do you know who I am, how do you know who I am, and are you okay?”

  Swallowing heavily, the freckle faced woman straightened her back and nodded dramatically to herself, eyes closed. “Okay. Okay.” She adopted what she probably hoped was a professional tone. “Hello. My name is Callie DuGaul, I’m here for the Saskatoon Underworld, you’re… uh… I don’t know who you are but I know you’re a person of interest! And I know that because you’ve been around all of our investigation for the last week, and also you’re hanging out with aliens in public! And I’m fine.” She finished with a burst of confidence.

  ”Okay, okay.” James unintentionally mirrored her as he took a seat off to her side, having to turn in the chair to face her. “What is the Saskatoon Underworld?”

  ”It’s… uh…” her confidence faded, replaced by red faced embarrassment. “A local cryptid zine.” Callie answered sheepishly.

  ”Investi… you’ve been tracking the umbral.” James realized. “Holy shit. Oh my god, you knew about them this whole time. We could have saved… excuse me a moment, I am going to take a deep breath while internally screaming.” He did so, before opening his eyes, rapidly shooting a text to Ben so that someone could share his pain. “Right, I’m good. So you want to interview… well you probably wanted to interview Sunny, but you get me. I actually don’t have a lot of time, but I can do a few questions and give you a number to call for later.”

  Callie’s delight at that was obvious, but she smoothed it out to semi-professionalism. “Right, right. So, first question… who are you?”

  ”Personally? Uh, my name is James Lyle. I’m a paladin with the Order of Endless Rooms, which is a group that handles emergencies outside the scope or notice of mundane authorities.” He paused. “Among other things.” James added coyly.

  ”Are you Catholic?” She asked curiously. “Because of the paladin thing. Or are you just nerds?”

  ”You’re the second person to ask that, and by far the more pleasant one!” And also the more alive one, though he didn’t say that part. James laughed easily. “It’s the nerd option. Thank you.”

  ”Are you with the government? Is this a secret initiative where the government is hoarding important technology away from the public?” She asked breathlessly.

  James blinked. “Nnnnno. No? Why would I ever answer that honestly if I was… no. We are not affiliated with any government.” They may qualify as a government themselves, in a small way, but barely a small one.

  The woman’s embarrassment didn’t seem to extend to asking him awkward questions. “Do you work for the aliens? Is this some kind of prelude to a takeover of world governments for an unknown purpose?”

  ”It… would it be unknown if I was briefed on it?” James should not do interviews, he realized. “No, I don’t work for… actually, can I go on a tangent?”

  ”That’s not how interviews work?” Callie seemed caught off guard.

  James smiled disarmingly. “Great. They’re not aliens. You just saw two species that are from Earth. Weird parts of Earth, sure, but still Earth! And the umbral are another. Hell, they’re from right here in your hometown.”

  ”But… they’re…” Callie cocked her head at him. “So they’re not cryptids then?” She asked him.

  ”I’m actually not up on the cryptid community terminology.” James admitted. “I don’t know how you’d define that word. But I do know that they’re just normal people, who’ve had a hard fucking time of things lately. Reverse question! How popular is your publication?”

  ”…we have almost four hundred readers?” All sense of professionalism had slipped away.

  ”Well, you might get more soon.” James said honestly. There was an idea, rapidly fermenting in his brain. This was an opportunity, and one that had just fallen into his lap. “Because the umbral aren’t going away. Life in this city, and maybe more places besides, is going to be getting a little bit weirder. People are going to be looking for answers soon, and bigger news outlets tend to have trouble with this kind of thing. How would you like a few early exclusive interviews?”

  Callie perked up. ”Would I!” She suddenly narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why? What do you get from this? I won’t just write what you tell me to.”

  The actual answer was that James got someone who was excited to report on this kind of weirdness, doing the reporting. Though he got the impression that her reporting was both amateur and less reporting, more wild speculation. But those were things that could be worked on. There was an instant benefit to having someone that was already personally emotionally invested in telling people about alien life, being given the job of doing that. It would cost the Order very little except time, and it would be a source of accurate information for the locals.

  ”I am aware of how interviews work.” James nodded as he stood up. “I expect you’ll write what you want, but if you’ve got a bunch of real information to work with, you’ll probably just write about that, right? Look, I’ve got some stuff to do today. Here’s the number for a guy named Ben,” he added a new problem to the friend’s day, “he’ll know I sent you. Now, you have one more quick question before I escape!”

  ”Do they eat people!” She burst out.

  ”So far I’ve mostly just seen them eat Indian food.” James answered as he ducked his head in a small goodbye, excusing himself to head for the main doors. “Maybe if you ask one of them nicely though!” He called back as he waved happily at the front desk, where one of the staff was watching him with open curiosity or maybe suspicion. And then, before Callie could catch up to him from where she’d grabbed her recording phone and staggered from her own seat, James was through the sliding doors and into the cold morning. His timing spot on, as he stepped through the side door of the Order’s parked van, and waved through the window as he buckled his seatbelt, Anesh gently taking them out into the hostile city traffic as the aspirational reporter tried to run after him and failed to catch up.

  ”You had too much fun with that.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight accused him with a sibilant hiss.

  Alanna reached back to bonk him on the knee. “Yeah, also, she’s a conspiracy weirdo. She believes in Mothman, she’s gonna think we’re either an evil government agency, or the main characters of… uh… that one show about hunting supernatural things.”

  ”Supernatural.” Anesh answered.

  ”That’s what I said!”

  James pressed his hand into his smile. “No, Alanna, the show was called Supernatural, don’t do this to us.” He told her. “Anyway, I’m aware she’s kinda weird already. I’m sorta hoping this is a way to duck the broader memeplexes that seem to nail anyone mass distributing information. Also Mothman might be real.”

  ”…I could have been part moth.” Arrush said with distant longing.

  James reached over to rub his partner’s shoulder in consolation. “Yeah, I’m sorry.” He said gently. “But hey! Maybe we’ll find moth people later and you can body swap with one!”

  ”Would you still love me if I was a moth?” Arrush asked him, myriad eyes peering up at James as he twisted his chitinous body around in an awkward way over the edge of the van’s central seats.

  ”I feel like you know the answer to that already.” James pulled himself through the center console to set his elbows next to their drive. “Now! Take us to the dungeon! If we get in fast enough, I can miss Ben’s reply texts and then forget about this entirely!”

  Anesh jovially pushed him back with one hand, keeping his eyes on the road. ”You have the weirdest plans of anyone I’ve ever met.”

  _____

  Ben looked at the incoming message on one of the phones he had propped up next to his laptop.

  Then he looked at the slapped together webpage for the Saskatoon Underworld zine.

  His head, currently and perhaps permanently human in form, oscillated between the two pieces of information multiple times, before he looked over the top at the other rogues he was sharing a table with in the hole in the wall bar they’d found.

  ”James hates me.” He informed them.

  _____

  There were no umbral to meet them at the dungeon entrance; last James had been updated, they were alternately celebrating or reeling from the abrupt change in their status.

  The place was located amid a business park. Gently curved buildings of brick and glass, arranged in a way that from overhead was vaguely recognizable as a rough spiral. Divided roads with trees and greenery in the middle running past small parking lots that were probably measured to exactly industry specifications to hold the proper number of vehicles for the employees and clients that used these places.

  The thing about office parks was, when someone told you one was ‘abandoned’, it was generally expected that there wouldn’t be any operational businesses there. But James could see that there were lights on in this place. And the style of construction, the cleanliness of everything, it made it seem like this was just somewhere on the outskirts of the city sprawl that hadn’t been fully moved into yet, not somewhere that people had left. He decided to ask Karen about when the area had been developed when he got back.

  Anyway, it wasn’t that there were that many businesses operational. And he didn’t think the place that installed window screens, the search engine optimization call center, or the travel insurance office, were drawing in the crowds. Also, none of them were in the specific arc shaped building that the Order was headed to. But they were still here, with people doing day jobs. Sometimes even useful day jobs; especially if they were the park’s custodial staff.

  Anesh found them a place to park that didn’t have a view from any of the other offices. Not that anyone was probably going to be watching, or that it would be an issue at all if they were, but they technically weren’t supposed to be here, and at the very least it would be nice to not emerge from the dungeon to find the police having towed their van and lying in wait to arrest them.

  The way into the dungeon was almost hilariously easy compared to some other places the Order was overseeing. Hell, it was easy compared to just getting into the locked office block around it. James knew how to pick locks, yes, but they’d chained up the interior door and padlocked it, and that wasn’t exactly something that was pickable.

  It was fixable with magic, though, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s quick attempt to hit it with a charge of Separate Alloy yielded quick results. Those results didn’t actually get the chain off the door though, just kind of made it into a blob, and it took a followup use of Move Person to get inside, and then picking the intact padlock to do the trick.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Then it was just a matter of bringing in their supplies and gear, quickly funneling way too much equipment from the van into the second floor of the three story building. They had a rough idea of what to expect, but it was better to have options and not need them than the other way around.

  The building had an elevator. A single car that connected all three floors and the maintenance basement, just enough to make the place accessible. It was, unlike every elevator James had interacted with on the Order’s turf, mundane.

  The other elevator on the second floor was not.

  It appeared on an exterior facing wall next to a janitor’s closet, had the rugged and scraped up appearance of a maintenance lift, and could not possibly connect to anything. James and Anesh even spent a while as the group got into their armor going back and forth trying to measure if it could even fit inside the building itself.

  ”I’m pretty sure this works.” James told his boyfriend. “This place is curved, right? It’s got kind of a teardrop shape.” He sent over an image from the drone he still had hovering overhead showing the building’s profile. “So the way these places are built, so you don’t have a whole column of offices with a tiny sharp corner, is that the actual interior is deeper in than you think.”

  ”I do not think they built it with enough tolerance for an elevator though.” Anesh argued, looking between the skulljack feed and the elevator in front of them. “There’s a window over there.” He motioned.

  ”Okay I’ll give you that.”

  Sarah spun away from helping Alanna buckle her armor on with a flowing motion, sliding up to where Anesh and James were talking. “He’s doing the thing! Stop him!” She accused James, and when Anesh gave her a puzzled glance, explained, “James does this thing where he likes to make bad defenses of silly ideas to test people’s ability to… I don’t know, use basic logic? I haven’t ever gotten a straight answer out of him!”

  James nodded. “It’s against my code of honor. Anyway Anesh is right, this elevator is super suspicious. Let’s all get in it together.”

  The elevator’s interior was the same style as its outside. In contrast to the clean style of the building, it had a layer of grime on its floor and the sheet metal walls were scuffed as if someone had repeatedly been leaning in the same place for decades. The buttons were scrubbed clean by a million presses, or, at least, they looked that way.

  ”Buttons don’t work.” Anesh announced as everyone crammed themselves into the tight space. Sunny made several hisses of protest as she squeezed her body into the corner, while James found himself smushed between Arrush and Alanna; a situation he would normally really enjoy, but the armor plating and weapons didn’t exactly make it fun this time. The door slid shut, and Anesh twisted uncomfortably, barely able to look back at the others including his own double. “Well, once more unto the breach, then.” He said, and followed the directions they’d gotten.

  Tylor and Jubilance had given them some intel about this dungeon. A few of the umbral, including Terror surprisingly, had been willing to give them more. The Status Quo prisoners hadn’t exactly been interrogated or asked their opinion, but the initial questioning that had happened sort of indicated they just didn’t know this one was here at all. Either way, it meant that they knew how to get in, and it was through this rattling and singular elevator.

  Once the doors closed, trapping them in a claustrophobic box, Anesh hit the red disc of a button that mimicked an emergency override, and the dungeon decided what direction they were going.

  Up or down. The one thing their information agreed on was that it was randomized on your first entry, and then seemed to stay consistent. No one in the Order believed that, and even Jubilance had admitted that it was possible it was just time based and she’d only ever been there when she’d felt like she could sneak in, which tended to be at night.

  There was no sense of motion. They just endured being crammed in an elevator for about twenty seconds, just long enough that Arrush was starting to hyperventilate and James was wondering if he could punch his way through the back wall, and then the doors slid open with a scrape of grinding metal on metal.

  The wall directly ahead of them had a cork board on it. That was the first thing James noticed as the Order delve team expertly moved out, Anesh and Sarah splitting and moving rapidly to the left and right to crouch and make room for Alanna and James to take up firing positions behind them, James having kept one of the stolen UMPs while Alanna had a heavier combat rifle. Frequency-Of-Sunlight practically rolled out after them, lens irising as she scanned the empty dungeon for motion, while Anesh and Arrush came last, ready to react to anything that had jumped the initial party members.

  As with so many dungeon entrances, it greeted them with silence.

  ”Welcome to the Compiled Wastes.” James’ voice was stifled and dulled by the strangling acoustics.

  The dungeon around the elevator was almost as cramped as their ride in. The door opened into a hallway that was only three feet across, the white paint on the drywall chipped and scratched. The wall actually had several fist sized holes in it just a little bit to the right of the cork board and the faded and torn pages that were pinned to it. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, casting white light on the space they were in, but failing to get bright enough to make it feel like it was well lit.

  The hall didn’t last long in either direction. To their left, it hit a T-intersection, with a splintered door barely hanging onto its hinges. To the right, after about ten feet, the wall that the elevator door was set in fell away and the space opened up. Not that it wasn’t cluttered though; it looked like if anything, the walkable space shrunk as low dividing cubicle walls coated in flaking green plastic covered most of the floor space.

  ”Yup.” James stated, lowering his SMG as nothing jumped out at them. “This sure is an office.”

  ”I know Tylor and Joob said this was an office,” Sarah said, as she took James’ hand and got off the knee she had on the hard grey speckled carpet, keeping her eyes on the door at the end of the hall, “but this sure is an office!”

  It wasn’t anything like Officium Mundi. If James didn’t know he was in a dungeon, he wouldn’t have a clue that this was anything other than a derelict room he was doing some urban exploration in. There were even scraps of trash on the floor, chunks broken off from ceiling tiles and piles of rotting paper shoved into the corner where the floor met the wall. There was no vista, there was no scene of a wondrous world. It was just a hall in an office building; albeit one that couldn’t possibly be here that they’d needed to get in an impossible elevator to access.

  ”Things smell wrong.” Arrush stated, one of his smaller arms twisting to support his main grip on the hilt of the sword he wore, tensing to draw it. “Do you smell that?”

  James almost laughed as everyone in the party sniffed at the same time. “Mildew?” Frequency-Of-Sunlight asked.

  ”…Ash?” Anesh’s interpretation was a lot more curious.

  Arrush coughed. ”Y-yes.” The ratroach slumped forward, one hand rubbing his throat through the tailored turtleneck that covered him under his armor. “Something is burning.”

  ”Good reason to move fast.” James decided. "Exit check?”

  An Anesh leaned into the elevator and tried the buttons. “Nothing. As expected. Telepads are all ready though.”

  James nodded. They’d need to find an exit on this floor and choose to leave or continue from there. Few dungeons were ever quite so blatant with their push-your-luck attitude, but it wasn’t exactly shocking that they could do this. “This floor should be about two hundred feet across in each direction. That’s not actually a whole hell of a lot for an exit to hide in, so let’s divide this up.”

  They ran through a quick check to make sure their skulljacks could connect in here, Anesh carrying a portable wireless router with a connection to a power source somewhere back at the Lair, and leaving a signal repeater by the elevator. Seven people moving together wouldn’t actually make them safer in these conditions, just more likely to hit each other.

  And then James, Arrush, and an Anesh moved toward the cubicles, the others hanging back for a bit to make sure they didn’t get eaten by a chair or something before the second team moved in the opposite direction.

  The cubicle room was also like an office without being anything like the Office. The dividing walls with their peeling green… stuff… only came up to about waist height on James and barely that on Arrush. The room was laid out in quadrants, with the hallway cutting through to a small gap in the wall on the other side, and an aisle intersecting in the middle. Each quadrant had an exterior cubicle wall, and then five or six desks inside it with only thin and short dividers between them.

  It reminded James a lot of work. Like, his actual normal human job from before all this. Again, in a way that Officium Mundi had surprisingly never actually done that much.

  The desks had stuff on them, but it was scattered and chaotic. A few unplugged phones, wads of dusty rubber power cords, a stained rag and empty spray bottle, an ancient desk fan missing its protective wire mesh. “This…” The Anesh with them started hesitantly, “this looks like someone moved out and didn’t bother with the security deposit.” He commented.

  James nodded in mute agreement, before locking eyes on the desk fan. “If you’re going to attack us, maybe reconsider.” He told it.

  It didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch.

  A few years ago, James might have felt silly addressing inanimate objects. But a few years ago, James was less of a delver than he was now. Had been through less, survived less.

  Also a few years ago, Tylor hadn’t briefed him on common Life in this place.

  So today, he stood watch over the room while Anesh and Arrush fanned out and searched the desks more closely.

  They weren’t expecting to find any dungeontech this early. Their sources made it sound like the Compiled Wastes barely ever made dungeontech at all, but everything that had been found had been on deeper levels. It had also all been lost at some point or another in the months of skirmishing between Status Quo and the umbral, leaving the original delvers of this place with only the replenishing material from their personal sanctums.

  But despite that low chance of finding anything truly special, it was still worth it to see what they were dealing with. Plus it was a chance to see what kind of dungeon they were dealing with.

  Apparently, the dungeon was the stingy kind. There were a few scattered coins - Canadian currency, so at least it was supporting the local economy - and assorted half used office supplies. But where Officium Mundi produced things that could have been fresh off the factory floor, the Compiled Wastes presented pens that were almost dry of ink, and the only candy bar anyone found had half the wrapper missing and looked like it had been gnawed on by a rat daily for the last month.

  Anesh ran into one trap, a drawer that attempted to slam itself shut on his hand when he reached in. Anesh’s purple orb boosted speed and reflexes were almost tailor made for this exact kind of bullshit though, and he spent a good two minutes just testing the trigger conditions for the snap trap while Arrush searched the other side of the room.

  James was too tense to get bored, sweeping his eyes around the walls and seeing shadows where there had once been things hanging. Posters maybe, or more notice boards. A spot where a clock had been high up next to a fire alarm that was still there and had its red paint flaking off and looked like it had broken back in the fifties.

  He had a lot of time to be in places that were forcibly emptied or destroyed, which was a worrying thought. But few of them looked so much like someone had half-assed a corporate move and then left the result behind forever.

  When the desk fan did try to murder Anesh, James was almost relieved to have something to do that wasn’t brooding.

  He had been told these things were often alive and evil, and James had, perhaps foolishly, expected that would mean that it would turn on like a fan and try to buzzsaw someone’s precious supple delver flesh. He was less prepared for when it bent forward like a cat about to pounce, jointed pen legs creeping out from its rectangular base to push it upward, the blades of the fan furling back in a flattened blooming flower configuration.

  It snapped when James caught it out of its lunge. The fan blades slamming forward not with their edges, but with the flat panels suddenly coming together and interlocking, small notches that would have been irreparable damage to a normal operating fan exposed as points where these could interlink and saw against each other as jagged metal teeth.

  ”Oh hell no.” James declared pointedly as he yanked the fan away from his boyfriend’s head. “Calm… down… augh!” He tried to play nice, but the mobile fan’s metal spine was flexible enough that it tried twisting toward him and planting a bear trap bite on his armored forearm. James was trying, especially since learning about pillar exposure, to be less violent on his delves. But he also didn’t want to get maimed on floor one, and this little guy was writing in hateful aggression to the point that he didn’t have much choice in the matter.

  James slammed it into a cubicle wall and found that the piece of terrain was so unstable and unanchored that it just bowed outward, not even having the good graces to topple over as it failed to provide a solid object to throw his opponent into. The fan redoubled its attempt to bite him as he held it away, and then vigorously flung it straight down into the floor. Stunned, the fan reeled as it tried to locate its prey, blades pulling back for another loud chomp. A chomp it never got to execute; James executed a perfect stomp onto its form before it could, pen legs snapping as he crushed its body so quickly that it didn’t even realize it had died.

  ”Oh good.” James said as he looked at the unfortunate remains of the creature that had tried to murder one of them. “They have ichor.”

  ”Sssstop saying that.” Arrush chided him as the ratroach emerged from the desks he’d finished looking through, offering James a silver loonie as the most valuable thing he’d located. “Deb hates that you keep saying that. You said that about me, and I thought I was full of ichor for months!” Arrush pressed his mammalian eyes shut in embarrassment. “That’s almost forever.” He added as he looked down at the black sludge oozing out of the dead desk fan. “Oh. No, yes, okay, that looks like ichor.”

  Anesh rejoined them from his side. “Everyone talks about Deb like she’s more dangerous than dungeons. I’ve never had a problem with her though.”

  ”You listen when she tells you to not aggravate your injuries.” James told him.

  ”I don’t really get injured that often.” Anesh admitted with a shrug.

  Arrush nodded. “That’s why she likes you.” He said, as they moved toward the next cramped hall out of the space and toward the rest of the dungeon floor.

  The rest of the floor was a hard thing to describe. The trio got through two more rooms that were almost identical to the one they’d just been in, with Arrush killing a single desk fan that they found, before they got to anything different. But the difference was just a door set into the wall next to the hallway that led out of the third cubicle room at a right angle from their entrance. The frosted and filthy glass window set in the door revealed nothing, just more of the opaque barrier.

  It was both unlocked, and cracked open. Arrush took up a position on one side, with Anesh back crouched in the narrow cubicle aisle with his gun ready as backup, while James kicked the door open.

  The bang of the dry wood hitting the drywall and punching a small hole in it was deafening in the silence of the dungeon. But the trio quickly relaxed as it became clear the room was empty. Just a few stray cables on the floor where a desk had once left indents in the carpet.

  It did have two things though. One was a window, though it was as opaque as the one on the door itself. Something black and choking having covered it from the outside; in the single flickering light of the empty office, it looked almost fuzzy in texture, but probably wouldn’t be very fun to touch. The other thing in the room was a vent. Up by the ceiling just to the right of the door, it sputtered with occasional bursts of warm air, each one bringing with it the smell of something burning.

  ”Ah, that’s why it smells like ash in here.” James noted. “Actually, do you think that’s ash on the outside, too?”

  ”Windows in dungeons always make me deeply uncomfortable.” Anesh said, not taking his eyes off it and leaving Arrush to watch their backs. “You know why I like the Climb?”

  ”It doesn’t smell like burning?”

  Anesh ignored that. ”I can see all of it.” He said. “Not all of it, but I know what’s there. With the Office, or the Stacks, or now here I suppose, every time we see something like this I have to wonder if the dungeon is just a tiny sliver of a whole planet.”

  ”Didn’t we confirm the Officium Mundi windows aren’t showing actual places?” James asked as he knelt and picked up one of the cords. HDMI, and someone had stapled through it at one point. “I kinda wonder if this dungeon makes stuff already damaged. That seems like a lot of extra work.” He mused.

  “Well I still hate it.” Anesh said of the window. “The real garbage idea is that I want to break it open, to see what’s out there. But that seems like an incredible way to learn that doing so is a horrible idea.”

  ”Yeah, let’s not find out unless we have to.” James said, nodding at the door. “Okay. Onward.”

  So onward they went. Past more cubicles, down hallways that they had to walk single file in, through a lobby that had a single L-shaped desk and a stacked pile of conference room chairs with all the padding faded and ripped. They stopped a couple times to try to read faded and peeling words painted on the walls in blocky letters, or to examine the one remaining whiteboard with some kind of tracking spreadsheet permanently affixed to it in dried out ink. But overall, there just… wasn’t anything here to discover.

  If there was loot, it would require ripping up the carpet. If there was anything to fight, it had either already tried an ambush and failed, or was hiding. And if there were puzzles to solve, they were so obtuse that James figured they’d be reserved for the protagonists of someone else’s power fantasies to stumble onto.

  Soon enough they found two things that mattered. Another elevator, sitting open and inviting, and the rest of their party, the second team having circled the floor from the opposite direction.

  The map that they’d been drafting via skulljack connected perfectly as they reunited. Plenty of empty space in the center, but no halls or doors to get to it. “I think it’s a secret.” Sarah declared. “We should tunnel in!”

  ”…with what?” James asked her, worried that she was serious.

  ”I could probably do it.” Alanna said, considering the drywall with hand rubbing at her chin. “I mean, I’ll need a shower afterward. And maybe new lungs if the insulation behind this stuff is asbestos.”

  ”It’s probably asbestos.” James and Sarah said together. Nodding in professional appreciation to each other.

  ”…But I could do it. Heck, we’ve got hatchets and a shovel in the kit, this wouldn’t even be hard.” Alanna’s argument was picking up energy. “Look. We get one shot per floor, right? If there’s a secret, and we don’t go for it…” Alanna pressed against James from behind, half hugging him. “No offense buddy but I don’t wanna pull a you on this.”

  Frequency started hissing a laugh in a burst of sound. ”That is the funniest way you could ever say that!” She said. “I’m in, let’s dig a tunnel.”

  ”Dungeon could give a reward for speedrunning a level too.” Anesh pointed out.

  Arrush nodded in agreement. “The Pylon does that.” He reminded them. “But… it has been…” he fumbled with his skulljack, still not used to using any of the programs. Computer skills were a thing he neither had an orb for, nor had grown up with. “A while.” He said when he couldn’t make the braid connected to his mind give him a clock.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re not breaking records.” Alanna admitted. “But we could uncover something. So? Anyone really wanna skip getting covered in fiberglass?”

  ”Constantly. But okay. But let’s actually pick where it’s most likely to have something.” James said, pulling up their map. “Probably not behind the elevators, because if there is something, expecting people to dig through metal dungeon entrance is absurd, right?”

  ”Or we’re supposed to dig around. But I’ll accept your logic.” Anesh said as he studied the same map. “You know how dungeons think worryingly well.”

  James smiled. ”Yeah I’m weird like that.” He picked a spot. “Okay. How about here? We can even go in at an angle, cross liiiiike… this.” He added a line to their map. “And I think that’s the best shot?”

  ”Great.” Alanna moved to where her partner had planned out the route, and unhooked the hatchet from her belt. “Someone grab the shovel.” She added as she swung, carving a line through the scuffed and damaged wall with a crunch like she was cutting a cake and not a structure.

  It took ten minutes for her to carve away a hole wide enough to move through. Behind the drywall, the skeletal wooden frame of the floor was flagrantly artificial; wood spaced unevenly and sometimes black with mold and rot. The insulation was, indeed, some kind of fiberglass fluff, and everyone clipped masks into place as they tore it away and hauled debris to one of the empty rooms.

  Bit by bit, they progressed in a line through the dungeon, just to see if it mattered.

  Secretly, James didn’t think it did. It was such a weird action to take, that it was unlikely that there’d be anything at all.

  Which is why he was shocked when they clipped the edge of a drywall surface as they tunneled through. Not the other side, but offset from the middle of the empty space they were digging through.

  ”Well fuck me.” James said in surprised admiration.

  ”Later!” Alanna declared with a grin as she shoved aside live electrical wiring with one of the standard issue all purpose wooden poles the Order had on delves for exactly this reason, among other reasons. “Hand me the axe!”

  A series of crunches later, with debris being passed down the chaotic tunnel they’d burrowed through the empty space and pink fibrous insulation, and Alanna kicked the wall inward, leaving a gap wide enough for a person with a triumphant yell.

  And inside, there was… just an office. Almost identical to the one James’ team had poked around in. It even had an ash-covered window on one wall.

  He pointed at it. “What does anyone think would have happened if we’d come in that way?”

  ”Maybe it’s the other side of the window in the other office.” Anesh suggested. “Maybe we finally found a dungeon with fast travel.”

  ”Horizon has fast travel.” James smirked.

  ”Shuuuuut up.” Arrush playfully shoved James’ shoulder. “But there is nothing here. Do we… keep going?”

  ”…I hate this dungeon.” Alanna declared, and from behind them in the tunnel, Frequency yelled an agreement.

  Sarah knelt down, squeezing past them to grab a coaxial cable off the floor. “I am taking this.” She stated, holding it up like a disobedient garter snake. “As… as spoils!”

  James didn’t make a joke about how hard she was trying to be enthusiastic. Just patted her on the shoulder as everyone filed back through their tiny gap, returning to where they’d left a growing mound of construction debris, and their gear cart. He felt like he was itching, and he hoped it was just a phantom sensation and not because there was fiberglass dust under his armor.

  Now significantly less comfortable than when they’d entered, but still intact, the party boarded the elevator. “Okay. Round two.” Alanna declared, as she hit the button to take them deeper.

  The doors closed.

  _____

  The tattoo that formed on James’ neck was painless, but he could still feel it. Just a small mark for now, it hadn’t had the time and delving to grow farther.

  He could also feel the conditions for the doorways to his new personal space. Though he had no idea what was in that space yet, and only that it must exist because he’d been told ahead of time by more experienced delvers. The feeling didn’t tell him what the doors were called, so James just went with the term ‘slip’ like Tylor and Jubilance used.

  Once every twenty seven days, one slip would form within a day’s walking distance.

  That was it.

  As the elevator doors slid open on the second floor, James hoped that any reward from finding the secret buried office was to the contents of his personal space, and not the way in, because if this was the upgraded version of slip formation he was going to be upset.

  _____

  The second floor was larger, but the team as a whole actually cleared it faster.

  The layout was less of a closed loop this time, with more offshoot hallways and closets, and they split up into their previous teams when they needed to. They were thorough, and careful, but every single one of them was experienced, skilled, and more powerful than a baseline member of their species in a number of ways. So they made good time.

  They found a vending machine, the front face smashed in and the snack food inside filled with glass shards and dust when they pulled it out. But when James purchased some of it on a whim, he found the motors still turned and the bag of chips that came out was perfectly intact.

  They encountered desk fans working in duos, still aggressive beyond all rational thought, but using attempts at strategy as they recklessly tried to kill the delvers. It didn’t work, and as before, there was no loot drop from them like from Officium Mundi Life. But it was a clear indication of things getting more difficult the farther in they went.

  They found a new form of life, which was an empty cardboard box that dragged itself forward with tiny fingers of smoky ash, the digits disappearing when it dropped itself back down. It didn’t seem initially hostile, and Sarah was delighted to find something that wasn’t aggressive, so their team gained an honorary member for the floor at least.

  They encountered their first working computer monitor, learning about it in advance when a translucent projection of a PowerPoint slide crept onto the wall of the hallway they were in. It displayed nothing but garbled text in paradoxically clean bullet points, but anyone standing within the rectangle of its projection started feeling pinpricks of pain. Maneuvering around the slow-moving projection took effort, and when they found a brightly glowing CRT monitor on a solitary desk, operating with no power connection at all, they destroyed it and watched the projection of damaging light splinter and go dark, leaving a ‘corpse’ of a faded shadow on the wall.

  They did not try tunneling anywhere this time.

  They found more loot, though the most space in the cart that got taken up was still from the cardboard box. A handful of coins and a few bills, a gift card to a website James was pretty sure was real but had died in the early aughts, a couple of screwdrivers and a box of nails from an overturned toolbox that was on the floor underneath an AC vent that had its wiring and tubing hanging from it like intestines. It said a lot that the biggest prize was a blank notebook with its black leathery cover scratched and pitted with a dozen marks. The pages were blank though, and no one could firmly say it wasn’t magic; it was the most potentially arcane thing, unless the screwdrivers ended up being imbued somehow.

  They passed through a reception area, in the core of the floor and unconnected to anything to recept, where rows of stained chairs sat against a wall and the overhead lights fully shut off every two minutes, leaving the place in darkness for a time. The light seemed to end like the doorway through to the room was a solid wall. Arrush had moved like lightning to grab Frequency-Of-Sunlight and Sarah before they could step in, his sharper vision adapted for darkness just barely able to see something moving when the lights were off. The team cleared that room in two minute chunks, speedily and efficiently checking every corner while the light was on, and leaving before they found out what lived there while it was off.

  They found the exit before they were done with the floor, but really, nothing on the second level stood out as interesting. So far they hadn’t found anything bountiful, hadn’t found anything awe inducing like a decision tree or one of those masked towering figures on the Climb that made the snowbeasts. And yes, they were only getting started, but James felt weird being in a dungeon that was clearly dangerous, and thinking it was… just a little empty.

  The scout team, having collected good information and needing to actually see what their inner worlds had at some point, returned to the surface world of reality.

  James knew, as soon as they did, that he’d have a new slip form once every twenty days, in the closest location that met a certain concentration of birds. He shared that, and was interested to hear that the others had gotten things that were similar as their tattoos expanded, but not identical, which meant that either there was an element of randomness, or team activities didn’t count for everyone on the team.

  This was going to be one of those dungeons that required an army of support personnel armed with spreadsheets and exacting interview questions. He could feel it.

  Afterward, they got take out poutine from a nearby place, before beginning the relatively short drive to an empty lot outside the city that the Order was going to use to swap the van back to their Oregon-based Lair before replacing the original ground.

  Much like with the dungeon, James found it disappointing and a little burned.

  “You are the only person I know who complains that the literal magic isn’t stupid enough.” Alanna told him with a laugh as she technically drove them toward home.

  ”That’s not fair!” James protested. “I don’t want it to be stupid, exactly, just… I’d like the dungeon to be a bit more splashy? Like, we just got access to this brand new place that might change everything, right? And all I’m thinking about is the next time we can go to the Pylon, because that dungeon looks so cool.”

  Arrush mumbled around a mouthful of curds, personally enjoying his own poutine more than James seemed to be. “It also smells bad.” He told them. “So many dungeons smell bad. I am going to live in the Library.”

  ”What about my dungeon?” Sunny asked, trying not to rub her cords against the seat she was in just in case the itching actually was fiberglass bits that she shouldn’t drive into her pseudo-flesh. “I don’t smell, do I? I don’t really smell the same as everyone else, but I don’t smell bad, right?”

  ”You smell like soap most of the time.” Arrush reassured her. “Your origin smells like someone tried to make it smell like nothing.”

  ”Which is different from nothing?”

  ”Yes.”

  Sunny waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “Well, fine! I’m just gonna hang out for a month until I can get into my special wizard home I guess. I agree with James though! This power is dumb.”

  ”They can’t all be world shaking alterations to reality itself.” Sarah said with a beaming grin, undeterred in her optimism despite being given a temporary full body migraine by the projection in the dungeon. “Also, this one makes friends!” Her cardboard box buddy was in the back of the van with their luggage, and James really hoped it wasn’t just biding its time until it was left alone with a rifle.

  ”They literally can all be crazy powers.” James reminded her. “We know that now. If it’s not, it’s because it’s got something weird going on.” He shrugged as he picked his fork carefully through his food. “Maybe we’ll learn something amazing about it later. That’ll be cool. For now, I can’t wait to get home.”

  ”Aren’t you bouncing out afterward to go right back to helping umbral move?” Alanna asked him with a smile.

  ”After a bath!” James agreed. “Being home doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop, it just means… I can teleport whenever I want now!”

  ”We could have all teleported and gotten the van later…” Sunny’s voice had a far away realization to it. “Why are we here?”

  ”Because we’re here anyway and this saves a couple pages.” Alanna said as she spun the wheel into an empty lot that didn’t even have a foundation or any underground pipes yet. They’d checked; no sense making that mistake again. “Now let’s go home, before someone starts shooting at James again.

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