“If the changelings want to destroy what we’ve built here, they’re going to have to do it themselves. We will not do it for them.” -Sisko; Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Paradise Lost-

  _____

  “Alex says she’s got it handled.” James said as he hung up the call. He turned away from the edge of the parking structure’s rooftop and the brackish clouds darkening the Utah sky. It was cold, and the cutting wind made it colder, and he would have wondered why anyone would have chosen to settle down here two centuries ago. He could smell snow on the air, though it hadn’t started yet; an implicit threat from the below freezing weather.

  Behind him, Alanna finished her stretching routine. The tank top and leggings she was wearing did almost nothing against the freezing temperatures, but, to be fair, the freezing temperatures didn’t really do much against Alanna anyway. “No she fucking does not.” James’ partner said.

  ”I’m not saying she does.” James countered. “I’m saying she says she does.”

  ”She got bodied by a magical whale.”

  ”She did do that, yes. Or something like it. Details unclear. Actually I'd really like if the details... were here. Now. In my head.”

  Alanna turned to their third party member for the night, who was wearing a trenchcoat meant to hide her armor and wings and doing a bad job of both. “Could you fight a whale? The global shipping industry might rely on it in the near future.” She asked Cam.

  ”I sink.” Cam said simply. And then, when Alanna kept staring at her with raised eyebrows and a scrunched up little smile, she relented to add, “But yes. I might even survive it.”

  ”See? Send Cam next time. James why isn’t Cam a paladin?”

  ”Social issues.” James and Cam answered in unison.

  “Hey Morgan!” Alanna shouted to the kid running up the concrete stairs and giving them a broad wave with both arms at them from the pool of light by the stairwell. “Could you fight a whale?”

  Morgan didn’t want to yell his honest answer to that. So instead, he just shouted that their ‘escorts’ had arrived, and it was time to go delving.

  They’d arrived well before their scheduled time, and the general consensus among this particular four-person exploration team was that it was wildly irresponsible for the Mormons to not actually have any guards or watchers around their known dungeon entrance. The dungeon wasn’t really a limited resource, and there were at least four other entrances - one of which was currently a trade secret for the Order - but the people they’d negotiated with had made a big deal about how they only wanted the Order going in with escorts and at specific times. And then they just… left the place open.

  Initially, the plan had been to arrive and try to spend some time working on subverting their escorts for the night. Social combat was pretty easy for James when he could essentially bribe anyone with the promise of a happy life. Not in the future, but right now. The main barriers to that with these people were their self-cast mental tampering spell, and their religion, which was itself often reinforced by the hypno-magic.

  But with no one there, the plan shifted quickly. Not wanting to lose an opportunity, they’d ridden the elevator down into the Pylon Motoric, gotten off, looked around, and then gotten back on the elevator and left.

  Scoring the Initiation Crossing milestone for two of them, and the Furtive Crossing one for James and Morgan, accomplished two things. It meant that three of them were going to have a slightly easier time dealing with the constant acrid smoke in the air with their new level in breathing, and it meant that they could benefit from actually delving. No one was going to waste their single exit on the first milestone that you got for just walking into the dungeon.

  It also gave James one extra AP, which was how he learned that you could level up in swallowing, which he mistakenly chose to tell the others about, and only escaped from Alanna’s teasing over when he got a call from Alex telling them that there were kaiju in the Atlantic Ocean and the world was fucked.

  Well, more kaiju than normal. James, in an effort to push his biology Lesson up one more level before the next time he got blown up and thrown through a window, had been learning about giant squid. There were already kaiju in the oceans of Earth, most people just never worried about them because they didn’t eat boats.

  That wasn’t really what their plan for the night was. Tonight, he was here to accomplish a few goals in tandem.

  For one, and most important, he got to spend time with Alanna. And while they were here, they were getting Cam and Morgan acquainted with the process of delving as part of a small team. Also, as always, trying to weasel more information out of their ‘escorts’. And looking for any interesting dungeontech in the Motoric. And mapping out both the physical space of the dungeon, and more of its milestone flowchart. And teaching Morgan how to fight dungeon life. And teaching Morgan how to talk to dungeon life, which, admittedly, he needed less training on.

  Finally, there was a distant pipe dream of a goal, which James knew they probably wouldn’t hit tonight. He wanted more people, himself included, to hit level five in different Pylon skills. To open up the link slots with the Venture spells, and to see if there were patterns, similarities, or predictable paths that could be built around. To see if there was more to explore there in enhancing the melded magic system.

  The problem was his closest was walking at level two, and everyone else was breathing at level one. And this dungeon, while often consistent and low-threat, was stingy. Most early milestones gave one or two AP. And so far, ‘early’ was all they’d actually found.

  But they could at least make progress.

  “Why do you have wings?” Was the first thing one of their escorts asked as soon as they were through the elevator and into the comparatively balmy warm air of the dungeon. It was Scott, who James remembered as the same Scott who they’d had as an escort before, but not the same Scott who’d knifed him that one time, and one of four current known Scotts in the magically active part of this city.

  Cam just stared at him as she emerged out of her coat, scaled and leathery wings unfolding to her sides in a stretch that would make a lazy cat proud. “Because I do.” She said. “Will that be a problem?”

  ”No!” They early twenties human said a little too quickly. “They’re cool! I just wanted to know!” The other guy from his side delivered a hard punch to his arm at the comment. “Right, sorry. So, we’re supposed to wait here for you. And one of you needs to wear this.” He had a GoPro for them, which James begrudgingly agreed to having affixed to the shoulder of his own armor. Also… we’re supposed to make you tell us what milestones you get.”

  Alanna raised her eyebrows and gave James a ‘you hearing this?’ look, before leaning down to the shorter man with her hands clasped behind her back. “No.” She said with a sharkish grin.

  ”I said we were supposed to. I’m not actually going to try.” Scott admitted, getting a glare from the other escort. “What?” He asked the other, better armed, Mormon delver. “What are we actually supposed to do? Threaten them?”

  ”Also that’s just straight up not what our treaty specifies.” James offered peacefully. “Like, we have an agreement. The camera is me being polite, but it’s also not something I agreed to. You can’t just change contracts at will without asking the other party, that’s… uh… not an agreement. That’s just bullying.” James laughed easily.

  ”Sorry.” Scott said, clearly embarrassed. “Everyone’s nervous today. It’s not their fault.”

  Cam finished assembling the rifle she’d pulled out of her duffel bag in pieces, and slung it across her back, strapping a sword into place on her hip. “It is their fault how they react.” She said, still being glared at by the other human. “I learned some time ago that we must be responsible for our own behavior. Or else we are just beasts.”

  ”…That’s weirdly poetic, thanks Cam.” Alanna said, evaluating the winged girl. “So! Who wants to get started hiking?”

  Everyone except Cam did.

  As they quickly learned, Cam had no strong feelings about hiking. But Alanna loved how easy it was to move in the wide open rows sized for cars and on the smooth dungeon floor. The air sucked, and breathing was going to be a long term issue, but she felt like she could literally do this forever. And James and Morgan, despite being exactly the same human when it came to their lack of willingness to do sustained exercise, were enthralled with the dungeon’s geometry.

  Their trek was not without danger. The traffic cones that populated this place were numerous, and as rude as ever. As they ascended the structure they were in, climbing past the hollow husks of vehicles that would never drive and making notes on caution signs that warned of everything from blind turns to active x-ray fields, they frequently found themselves ambushed from odd little formations in the concrete. Some of them felt at home in a parking structure, like the rectangular blocks overhead that were probably supports for the whole thing, but offered blind spots for the cones to drop down from like bats, while others were more clearly designed to combat delvers, lIke the rippled parts of the walls that hid deeper crevices behind optical illusions.

  The threats were minimal though, and in between enjoying the view of distant towering skyscrapers of concrete and strange vegetation, James used the opportunity to get Morgan familiar with the common missteps of melee combat with small enemies. They’d practiced, before this, but there was something about trying to actually cut a tooth-filled orange traffic cone in half with a hatchet that drove home how easy it was to fuck up and gave valuable experience in what to do better and what to work on.

  Also, Morgan loved dungeons the way James and Alanna loved dungeons. So it was just cool to see the teenager react with open awe at some of the stuff.

  ”Holy shit!” Morgan pointed with the hatchet he was holding at a red and white striped thing gliding across the wall of the lot ahead of them, dipping out of sight behind a van with all its moving parts fused together. “Snake! Think that one’s friendly?” He asked, moving ahead when Alanna gave him a silent nod of her head that she was covering the aisle, and keeping a proper distance from any of the shadows the thing might have slithered into to ambush from.

  ”Could be.” James said quietly, following next to him in a low crouch. “I didn’t see it, what’re we looking for?”

  ”It’s like one of those… blockade… things. The bars that stop cars from leaving.” Morgan said, and then his speaking pattern shifted as he started talking like he was giving the most precise report he could. “Red and white stripes, fins on its back like whatever those things stegosaurus have are called, maybe fifteen feet long-“ James wanted to tell him to lead with the size next time, “-and it’s not just a moving piece of wood, it had a face and teeth.”

  ”What kind of teeth are we talking about?” James asked as he and Morgan scanned the far wall and saw no movement. It could slide along concrete, so that was worth keeping in mind, but it had vanished. He motioned Morgan to spread out while Cam watched their surroundings for them, and James knelt down.

  Morgan didn’t know exactly how far away to get, and James resolved to explain the reasoning behind the distances they walked later, but he did get around to a wider angle on the van that the thing was probably hiding under. “I think fangs?” He said nervously. “Not a lot of teeth, like the crocamaws or anything.”

  James nodded. Might be venomous then; dungeons tended to steal a lot of design notes from nature, and animals with their own venom tended to have a smaller number of bigger fangs for punching into prey. Especially snakes. Lowering himself farther down to the ground, he flicked the flashlight on his armor’s webbing on, and scanned under the van.

  Nothing.

  ”Hm. I know we saw something here-“ he turned as he started to rise, and the spread of his flashlight passed under one of the adjacent faux-SUVs, the one that Morgan was standing near. And the light glinted off the reflective scutes of the rectangular red and white striped serpent that was gliding its way across the smoothed concrete. “Morgan!” James barked out as he saw it.

  Just before the snake lunged out at the nearest target, Morgan stumbled backward. He wasn’t prepared to throw himself into a roll or anything, but he reacted quickly when he heard James shout, even if he couldn’t see the snake. Which meant that when the thing whipped out from under the car, he wasn’t in range to be bitten.

  Morgan did trip as he stumbled, falling back on his ass with a heavy thud as his armor took most of the impact. And then he froze as the long bar of a creature, exposed now that it was out of its shadowy hiding place, met his eyes.

  It was thin, maybe a couple inches across at most, and it really was shaped like a rectangle. It didn’t have normal eyes either; instead, Morgan saw motion within the scutes on its back, the plastic reflector plates shifting as the pupils within their polygonal shapes focused on him. Despite looking like something normally made of wood, the thing had no problem smoothly flexing itself like a ribbon, at least horizontally. Vertically, it didn’t do much more than raise the front of its body.

  Morgan and the snake thing stared at each other for a long moment. The human trying very hard to not panic at the sight of the fangs the size of his thumb that were poking out of its pseudo-face. Slowly, so as not to elicit another burst of motion, he looked over at James, who was struggling to get closer.

  That was weird. Morgan looked back at the snake, narrowing his eyes in concentration as he tried to figure out what it had done. Its long body was folded back and forth a few times where it had landed, and the striped bar was mostly pointed in James’ direction. Did it… stop people from getting closer? Was it a literal barricade?

  Its own line of sight shifted to look at James, who seemed unable to take another step toward them, and then back to Morgan. The snake made a hiss like a whirring printer, its fangs extending as it laughed at him.

  It was kind of bizarre. Morgan lived with a camraconda, he had friends or at least acquaintances that were nonhuman, and he sort of had a handle on picking up body language from different sources. But he’d never seen anything that could be described as cruel before, quite like this thing.

  The thought galvanized the teenager, and as the snake lunged forward at him, snapping its ribbon body out to take another bite, he shoved himself forward, the grip on his hatchet tightening as he swung his weapon for its face.

  The blade didn’t connect, but he hit it hard enough with the flat of the metal that the snake flailed back like it was surprised anyone would actually try to fight it. It hissed in a much more angry buzzer, and tensed up for another strike, when it got hit in the side of the head by a hatchet thrown by Cam. And when Cam threw things, she didn’t do it softly.

  Buzzing in pain and anger, the snake turned and fluidly glid back under its hiding spot, its sounds of irritation bouncing off the smooth concrete of the local dungeon area all the while.

  ”You okay?” James asked as he rushed over to help Morgan up.

  ”Yeah.” Morgan briefly considered trying to stand himself, but the hand up was helpful. “Did it stop you from moving?”

  ”Yeah. It blocked Appointed Arrival, too, which is… real shitty. I wasted half an hour of my life on that.” James shared a worried look with Alanna. “You don’t think…”

  His girlfriend shrugged. “We’ve seen dungeons learn before. You taught the Office how to make paper airplanes. This one just seems to be more on its game, and took some notes from… camracondas.”

  ”Yoikes.” James sucked breath through his teeth. “Okay. That was worrying. Morgan, how you feeling?”

  ”I can keep going!” Morgan insisted instantly. It wasn’t like he was hurt or anything. And he wanted something more than just ‘not dying’ as his milestone.

  So they kept going. Up, and up. Past hanging rubber vines with flashing yellow caution bulbs. Past glyphs graffitied onto the flat parts of walls. Past tire pangolins feeding on glittering concrete burrs that grew out of the walls. Past a truck with its hazard lights on. Past dozens, maybe hundreds, of other parked cars, some of which James and Alanna checked almost compulsively to look riffle through the glove boxes and center consoles, shoving wallets, documents, charging cables, tools, food, pens, anything they found into their backpacks.

  Cam watched over them as they went. Trying to understand why they found this place so fascinating. Though… even she would admit that there was a certain majesty to the monoliths outside whenever they passed by the gaps in the walls. The creatures, especially the cones, she could have done without. At least in the Office, the striders were as likely to listen to reason as they were to wildly attack. Here, it was just teeth and slick rubber skin going for her wings at regular intervals.

  Eventually, though, they had to turn back. “What do you think?” James asked, looking up at where the road itself had been broken in half; rebar and fractured concrete leaving a ten foot gap between where they were and where they needed to progress. They could have maybe climbed across the cars that were wedged into it where they’d apparently fallen when the break happened. Or crawled carefully along the thin curb on the side, using the pipes that ran across the wall as grip points. “How long have we been walking, even?”

  ”Three hours.” Cam informed him. “Though our return trip will be faster. Assuming there are no extra ambushes in the shortcuts.”

  ”Yeah, I’m ready to go back.” Alanna said. She was probably the one who’d been doing the least work, mostly just helping loot and talking to Cam as they walked. She wasn’t even wearing half her armor, since she wasn’t fighting much this delve, but she was still sweating and starting to feel the effort, especially whenever they had to go through one of the clouds of smog that flowed in from the gaps in the structure. “I can’t wait to get better at oxygen!”

  ”Okay, you say that like it’s a bad thing,” James laughed as he ruffled her hair affectionately, “but it makes everything easier, including Climb casting. It’s silly, and I think the dungeon did it on purpose to seem low-value, but it really is worth it.”

  ”I knoooow, I just want to get levels in something like…” Alanna trailed off. She didn’t actually have a long term plan for what she wanted levels in, she just felt cheated by breathing. Which sort of proved James’ point. “Huh. That’s a mental stumbling block I’m gonna have to work through, isn’t it?”

  ”Probably. Anyone want to take bets on if our escorts remember to ask for their GoPro back?” He asked coyly.

  ”If they do, they’ll hear this.” Cam pointed out. “Also I have no belief in their ability, so I bet no.”

  ”Harsh. Scott, if you’re listening to this, I believe in you.” James said as the group started walking back, his words getting a silent heave of laughter from Morgan. “But I’m also betting you’ll forget though. Forgive me Scott.”

  In the final accounting, Scott would not forgive James, as the men who were essentially guards by the exit elevator did get their camera back.

  Cam and Alanna both got milestones called Amber Bitterant, which was likely for a large number of traffic cone kills, and gave them two AP each. Morgan was given Wilding Searcher, which James felt like he had seen before and had thought was only for Verdigris life, but apparently wasn’t. It was a single AP, but it was something.

  As for James, well.

  (Milestone - Sustaining Crossings : +3 AP)

  (Breathing : +1 level, 6 levels total)

  (Walking : +2 levels , 4 levels total)

  (3 AP spent, 0 AP remains)

  He’d been so close.

  Close enough to hold his breath waiting for the notification.

  Which was, of course, the dumbest thing he could do.

  But the low burn in his legs was a lot more manageable as their group left the parking structure and headed to their decoy car. And it was fun poking fun at Alanna for getting her own level in swallowing since she had done the same thing he’d done and thought too hard about it when she got her points.

  It was just nice to have a delve where they didn’t feel like they were in a hurry to find something critical, or rushing to uncover the power they needed to turn the world around.

  And, as a bonus, James hoped he really confused their stalkers when they turned a corner and teleported out of the car, leaving it empty by the curb to be picked up later.

  ______

  James met with Malcom McHarn in the bleachers around an outdoor basketball court at the edge of restored Townton.

  Technically, it wasn’t just a basketball court. There were several rectangles in the smoothed clay zone that were fenced off for their own thing. Basketball, tennis, some kind of hockey variant that James wasn’t quite sure on; they’d set the space up after the lengthy and laborious process of fully clearing away the ruins of a burned down Hooters was complete, the cleared area on the edge of their expansion into Townton’s ruins close to central to the main housing units they had so far, and planned to be near more as they kept going. The bleachers had come from a middle school that was currently intact enough that it might see use in the future, but its own sports field hadn’t survived the fires and was too far away.

  It was nice. It was a place for people to play. And as James was rapidly discovering as part of his ongoing study of the logistics of cities and human habitats, when you ran things with a different set of motivators than normal? People could have a lot of free time.

  So both kids and adults used this space, and he figured they’d need more places like it in the future, because Townton gave people the opportunity to live without the grim spectre of the forty-plus hour work week. They did need to come up with more sports that nonhumans could participate in, or maybe get them to design their own sports. Camracondas were a little limited in how they could test themselves athletically right now, though there was at least one who was helping his team in a pickup game pull of some absurd basketball passes right now.

  ”This sure is something.” McHarn commented.

  James tried not to smirk. That was, to the individual notes, the exact way that JP and Nate had been teaching people in their intelligence gathering training to phrase questions so that the listener would open up to you. “You can just ask me things you know.” He said. “I think we’re a bit past the cloak and dagger stuff. Also I notice that Tiffany DeKay is in my city?” James arched an eyebrow. “Weren’t you concerned she was going to kill… I don’t know, anyone?”

  ”I was. And I am.” Malcom replied, the older man intertwining his fingers in his lap as he sat on the bleachers under the winter sun in a full suit and tie. “But right now, I think you get a pass from her.”

  ”Yeah.” James sighed. “Okay. Do you wanna ask me anything before I get the explanation out of you, or…?”

  McHarn kept a level gaze on the group playing basketball, who were currently cheering for at least one side scoring a basket. ”All of this. How long?”

  ”As in, how long have we been here?” James asked. “Or how long have there been people like the camracondas?”

  ”Surprise me.”

  James didn’t want to do that. He wanted to be straight with the guy. ”We’ve been here since a couple years ago, sort of. Townton was… do you remember telling me about Morocco?”

  ”Vaguely. A US city with the name, correct? Something happened to it, but the details…” He shook his head, frowning and not looking at James.

  More or less correct, James nodded. “It went missing. Townton would have done the same, if we weren’t here. We saved who we could, but since what was left was off the grid… we moved in. Mostly to keep what we could from burning down, and to salvage what was useful. Also there’s a dungeon nearby, so having a small team here was a good idea. And then some things happened, and… well, you’ve seen the chanters.” In a way, it was funny, to be able to say ‘we have a place to stay’ and that place being a ruined and stolen city. But it still hurt James in the heart to think of what the chanters had been through, and not just because he’d touched on one of their minds directly to see it. “Once we started helping them, we needed a more permanent presence. So scavenging and having a forward base turned to restoration and development. And now we… bring a lot of people in here.”

  ”I notice a lot of people speaking some interesting languages.” Malcom waited, and then saw James giving him a look halfway between annoyed and amused, before he changed his sentence. “Is that why there’s people speaking so many disparate languages?” He said, as if he hadn’t spoken the first probing comment.

  ”I’m assuming you mean the human ones. And yes. We’ve got a fair few refugees here from different places, as well as just hires from all over the world.” James pointed to a cluster of five shelled people scurrying past on the road across from them. “And of course, the chant, which is its own special language. Oh, and whatever the necroads are working on. I hear that’s going well!”

  “It’s… cohesive.” That comment wasn’t out of a desire to extract an answer, that was just because he didn’t know what else to say. “What about the others, then? The ones that are… different.”

  James smiled as part of his brain sorted through the amateur level of the plays of the game going on below them. He could almost feel a few points ticking into his basketball Lesson. “Nonhuman life is made - mostly- by what we call dungeons. Places that are concentrations of magic, threats, and rewards. A lot of them are made to be weapons, and in a way… they’re refugees too. Worse, really, because it’s hard to tell them that the world outside of here isn’t so kind.” James sighed. “A lot of our cohesion is out of anger.” He told McHarn. “Anger that things aren’t better. All we do is give people clear instructions on what to do to live in that better world, and… it’s not perfect. People still make mistakes. But we’re not shy about shutting down anything intentionally cruel.” He shrugged and got back to the question. “The oldest magical event we can verify was in the early 1980s. The oldest nonhuman I know was born roughly around 2016, maybe a little earlier.”

  There was a pause as McHarn digested the information. James couldn’t actually hear people think, but he got the impression that he was sitting next to someone with a mind like a factory. Each fact run through a litany of machines to examine, dissect, and assemble it. Each word analyzed and picked apart to find samples of pure truth concealed within.

  ”Interesting.” Malcom said eventually.

  ”I think so too.” James replied. “Now. A question for you. I know, in a vague way, how you found your way to Alaska. I know, in a way that is respectful of your team’s hypercompetence, how you got your agents into the Priority Earth camp. What I don’t know is… why?”

  Malcom’s eyes traced the path of a delve team returning down the road out of the restored town from Route Horizon, looking like he had a whole lot more questions. But he chose to answer James’ instead. “My department, the…” he went quiet, and then continued, muted. “My department was created on the directive of an anonymous congressional committee to investigate impossible events within the borders of the United States and her territories.” He started.

  ”I…” James bit back his reply. He could complain about every part of that introduction that he hated later. He let Malcom continue, words spoken with a kind of resigned firmness over the background noise of a game in progress

  ”Evidence says we had at least thirty people. Analysts mostly, but some field agents. Oh, you met Danson and Ports already. Amy and Stephen aren’t field agents at all. They’re the closest thing to new hires the FBI has ever given me. I like to think they did alright.” He gave a sardonic smile.

  ”They didn’t get shot.” James pointed out helpfully. “But again, this isn’t answering the why.”

  ”That department, whatever it was called, I know we were making progress. We closed cases other people couldn’t. We found things we maybe shouldn’t have.” Malcom took a deep breath and leaned back to look up at the cool blue sky. “Then one day, we weren’t a department. There were four people left who showed up for work, five if you count DeKay’s passenger.”

  ”I do.” James less helpfully interrupted.

  McHarn ignored him. “Then everything stopped. Not just that people weren’t showing up, or forgot about us. Everyone forgot about us. The machine forgot. Paychecks stopped, security clearance stopped, phone calls didn’t go through.” He shaded his eyes as he kept looking at the sky, voice taking on a tiny amount of distraction as he tried to identify a bird flying overhead. “And all we could find, all we could confidently say, was that we’d talked to you. That you’d told us something about a terrorist group in Alaska. DeKay, if you can believe it, told us that you probably didn’t do this to us. But… we had a lead.” He turned to James and pointed upward. “What is that?”

  ”Uh… camcondor.” James said as he squinted into the bright sky. “Sometimes they leave the dungeon nearby. They’re mostly harmless once they’re out, though they do eat streetlights.”

  ”That’s not mostly harmless at all.”

  ”I know, but there’s a lot of streetlights we aren’t using here, which means I count them as honorary salvage team members, so…” James shrugged. “So you had a lead. But why follow it? Just to know?”

  ”Wouldn’t you?” McHarn asked with a chuckle. “Looking around here, I can’t think of you as a man who turns down a good mystery, says no to curiosity.” He didn’t wait for James to answer, before giving his own real reason. “The truth is, we know that we found something important. And the memories aren’t there. The paperwork isn’t there. We know though.”

  James met Malcom’s eyes as the man adjusted his tie, his gaze a fortress. “So you’re on a hunt.” He said, understanding.

  Malcom nodded once, a tight motion of the head with no room for distraction. “This wasn’t an accident. This was something done to us, to stop us using what we knew. And if it was important enough to risk drawing this much attention, it must be bad. A mass threat. To what, I don’t know. But maybe the whole country. Maybe more.” He placed a hand on the back of his knee as he sat forward, fingers drumming. “I know you’re no patriot. But I think we both want to know if someone’s planning mass murder, or worse.”

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

  ”Yeah, I’ve had enough mass casualty events for a lifetime.” James whispered. And then, louder, “Okay. So, how’s your hunt going?”

  ”We have some leads.” Malcom said. “We have some ideas. But it’s slow. We’re relying on DeKay to keep us going, her and… Debt. And there’s only so much they can do.”

  James nodded. One assignment-class infomorph, with one host, was… powerful, technically, but not on the order of constantly screening investigators against multiple memeplexes that all actively obfuscated information. “Do you want help?” He asked.

  ”What’re you offering?” Malcom didn’t say no. He didn’t say yes, either.

  ”I don’t think you want to straight up join the Order right now.” James admitted. “Our priorities are too different. But you’re trying to save lives, and I respect that. You also came out ahead in the open vote that ended last night.”

  “You’re voting on me.” He paused. "I feel like I'm regressing back to dorm life. Not that I don't appreciate the assist, but you see how this feels like..."

  ”Shenanigans? It's not. But yeah, we're voting on your team, yes.” James tried not to grin. “Anyway. We’re offering an arrangement. An alliance of sorts. We provide the support, especially when it comes to dealing with the memory loss, and you guys keep investigating stuff. Just tell us if you discover anything that would… you know.”

  ”Be valuable to you?”

  ”Well yeah, but I was going to say end the world.” James laughed, an empty laugh without any humor in it. The world was already ending. The world might have ended. How long had it been happening? How bad had it gotten, and none of them could see? “Anyway, there’s just two conditions.”

  Malcom McHarn loosened his tie further. “Let’s get them out of the way. What’s it cost?”

  ”Well, first off, I’d like to know if Tiff plans to kill me.” James said evenly.

  ”I don’t-“

  ”No, sorry, to be clear, I’m asking her.” James said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “DeKay? What do you think? Murder, or no? If you’re gonna do it, maybe wait until your line of fire doesn’t overlap a bunch of kids, you fucking lunatic.”

  McHarn’s head snapped around, but he couldn’t locate anyone up on the bleachers with them. That, however, didn’t mean he was letting his guard down. And he had a number of mental tactics he’d picked up to slip around Debt’s masking trick. But none of them applied right now; if his most violent agent was sneaking around then he couldn’t see her, which was a concern all on its own. “DeKay?” He asked out loud.

  There was a shimmer in the air, and the woman appeared like an oil painting being wiped clean, kneeling two rows up on the bleachers from them. “How’d you spot me?”

  ”Trade secret.” James said, because there was no way in hell he was going to tell her that he could sense when people aimed weapons at him, and also they’d put a tracker in the leveler earring she’d stolen already in the short time she’d been given refuge in Townton. “Well?”

  Tiffany DeKay looked a lot less composed compared to when James had first met her. Her hair was cut shorter, almost hacked back like it was just an irritant. Her stare was less confused curiosity and more overt anger. And there was a rough look to her whole person, though that could be explained by living on the road for who knew how long. She stared down at James and her department’s boss, one of them more concerned than the other, before she decided to say anything at all. “You’re still dangerous.” She said.

  ”You know, I still don’t get it.” James told her, trying and mostly succeeding at keeping the anger out of his voice. “We’re building a kinder, safer world. I don’t understand why you hate us for it. I know the words you use, but I don’t see how you can believe them.”

  ”It’s because you’re dangerous.” She said back. “Because I don’t see how you can believe that your stupid ideas are going to work forever without anyone getting hurt.” DeKay stared him down, but James didn’t even flinch, and eventually she just wrinkled her nose and holstered her pistol. “You’re the kind of people that create extremists. And you already have the power to do damage that no one would recover from. I’d be an idiot to trust you.”

  ”DeKay. They’re not our enemies.” Malcom informed her calmly.

  ”Not your enemy. Not now. But they don’t have to be your enemy to ruin your life.” DeKay snapped.

  James raised a hand slowly. “Hey, uh… you know we have the ability to do a frankly horrifying amount of harm to the world. But we haven’t. Is that not worth something in this conversation?” He asked.

  ”It’s worth me not killing you.” DeKay said.

  James pressed his fingertips into his eyebrows, trying to keep from groaning at how childish she was being. She had said that like she thought it made sense, and James really, really wanted to slap her until he made room in her skull for a coherent thought. “Sure.” He said instead. “So, since you heard all that, you can hear condition number two. We’ll help, but you guys need to give Debt a choice to leave.” He looked at DeKay, who just silently stared back at him, and when that didn’t work, he turned to McHarn. “He can make his own choices, but I want to make sure, you know?”

  ”I do agree. And… if you can replace his abilities, I would also rather have someone or something that doesn’t feel trapped with us.” Malcom said honestly. “I admit that I find his presence uncomfortable, but I don’t wish him ill. DeKay? Can you pass on a message?”

  ”…You already took him away.” She told James with a petrified scowl.

  James matched her own unhappy look. ”I did not. He’s not with you?”

  ”Ever since we got here.” She answered.

  ”…Okay.” James sighed. “I’ll… I’ll see if I can find him and have a conversation. I guess that answers the question though. Are we in agreement about the rest of it though?” He asked.

  Malcom looked back at the basketball court, where the group of various people were taking a break. Grabbing water, sitting on the sidelines chatting, laughing, hissing. He thought about how he’d seen this same after-game ritual play out in Queens, in Boston, on a half dozen base postings. He thought about how these people were, at the end of the day, people. That even if the majority of them probably weren’t Americans, he didn’t feel any conflict of interest in keeping them safe too. Hell, the constitution said anyone born in the states was an American, so if those ‘dungeons’ were in the states, maybe they all counted as citizens, even if he doubted most of them had birth certificates.

  He knew what he was loyal to, but he also knew that didn’t mean he had to hate anyone.

  The older human reached a dark skinned hand across his body, arm extended toward James. James took it, his own hand calloused and starting to collect new scars, and the two shook.

  ”I’d like a few days to take a breath.” McHarn said.

  ”Take as long as you need.” James told him. “Townton is open to you, as long as you behave. It’s safe here. Try the Mexican place, we grow our own beans, and I’ve started to really appreciate them.” He tried not to frown again as he glanced back at DeKay, but this time it was just sadder version of the expression. “And… if you need to talk to someone,” he added with a tone that made it clear he thought Tiffany DeKay needed enough therapy to keep someone booked for a few years solid, “we’ve got some trained counselors here.”

  ”Thank you.” McHarn said, planning to not at all take advantage of that.

  James nodded as he stood up, the bleachers creaking under his feet as the metal frame bent slightly. “We’ll touch base when we have something ready to go for you, and you’re ready to get back to your own investigation. And… thanks for talking. Again. Thanks for letting this be something we can work through with words.”

  ”Most people don’t just say that part.” Malcom told him.

  ”I know.” James sighed.

  It would be a better world if people did. If appreciation was spoken openly. At least, he thought so.

  Regardless, he felt like that had gone well. And in the time before he went off to find Debt and see if the assignment was doing alright, he was right next to a pickup basketball game, and he did have some nervous energy to burn. Not to mention another three thousand points of learning before his shooting accuracy got a magical buff again.

  It was a nice day here, for the middle of November. And James was going to enjoy it while he could, whether the world had ended already or not. Maybe he could get on a team with TQ and they could combo their respective magic into some stupidly impressive layups.

  _____

  The Akashic Sewer was an interesting challenge for the Order of Endless Rooms. Which was a little bit like saying an aggressive and angry hurricane was an interesting challenge for the National Weather Service. Technically correct, but underselling things a little bit.

  There were three big issues with the Sewer. Probably a hundred other small ones, and one extra bonus weird issue, but three main ones.

  First off, it was underneath a high school. That was suboptimal, at best. The fact that a lot of the older kids were both aware of the Sewer and the Order, and survivors of the inversion event that had seen ratroaches spawning in their classrooms, was deeply disturbing. But they at least knew who to report any doors or scouts they found to, and to not try to be heroes. It didn’t actually stop people from trying, because they were teenagers, and at least a few of them had gotten hurt picking fights with giant rats. But there were no known casualties since the event.

  The real problem was that the method Research had deciphered from the Status Quo files for how to close a dungeon down for good sort of involved controlled demolition of its main entrance site. It wasn’t the only step, but it wasn’t like they could test how required it was without actually having a building they were willing to flatten. And that was hard to do when the school district insisted that the building be used as classrooms.

  The second issue was that the Sewer was growing. What had started out as a childishly simple route to the exit, with all the deeper parts of the Sewer being blank and unfilled, was rapidly turning into a maze. The Order’s study on dungeon taxonomy had started to identify some broad patterns in dungeon growth; some of them went for sprawling worlds like the Office or the Horizon, some went for directed paths like the Climb or the Venture. And now, they were looking at what might be a third type, maybe in the middle of the other two. The maze. The network of tunnels and rooms that actually seemed more like a flat out dungeon crawl than anything else.

  The Sewer’s experimentation with different types of rooms had continued as time passed. It hadn’t pulled out any new forms of life, but it had expanded on turning what had previously just been pipe-lined tunnels into obstacle courses. Added more verticality to places to hide potential rewards in dangerous perches, as well as creating more precarious nests for its creations. And there were more of those pedestals in weird spots that gave purple sparks, and far more of the ‘eggs’ that could be hatched with them. Though so far, the Order had gone with a strict “don’t” policy until they were more comfortable with whatever the one on Simon was doing.

  But it was also growing. Which led into the third problem.

  The Sewer kept making more ratroaches, and more frogdogs, and more buzzards. It made other stuff too, and it would be a flagrant lie to say that anyone was happy about the growing population of razor eels that lived in the pools that smelled like even more toxic than normal Axe body spray. But those three, those were the ones that had a small chance to be alive.

  It was, they suspected, intentional on the part of the Sewer. It was more active in the lives of its creations than most any other dungeon, and it seemed to revel in the cruelty it created. But cruelty required targets. So while a lot of the ratroaches were literally created without the ability to feel anything at all, and others were locked into experiencing a lifetime of anger and hunger and pain, others were… people. Capable of more. Capable of more so that it could be taken away.

  Which was gross and horrible and exactly what everyone expected from the Sewer. The Order in general, and James in particular, had begun to make a habit out of stealing the Akashic Sewer’s toys. Which was becoming an issue.

  Not a problem. James would fucking cut his own arm off before he called their dungeon refugees a problem. But there was a real world concern that had to be addressed. The bigger the dungeon got, the more likely it was to encounter people who needed to be evac’d. And there was a finite amount of time that the Order had that could be spent on the care, therapy, and education of brand new beings that had only ever known how to fight for their lives and were confused by concepts like food that didn’t hurt you.

  The average ratroach needed serious medical care, including the time, therapy, and education it took to get them to the point of reshaping. They needed a place to live with someone on call for them, hopefully in the context of a foster family. They needed structured therapy, and for at least a few months, help with daily tasks. Frogdogs were a bit better; they were socially isolated in the dungeon most of the time, and hitting them with Charm River Transformation and turning their toxic frog bits into less painful bat bits was both confirmation that dungeons cheated when they stole ideas, and also a great way to jump them forward in terms of care and established trust. But they also needed time, and family. Buzzards were the worst; the crow wasps tended to die. Painfully, and also easily. The Order didn’t really know what to do about them yet, since only one had survived more than a week so far with the injuries they tended to accrue.

  Already, half the knights in the Order were fostering someone. Whether that someone was human or otherwise, didn’t really matter. The point was, when James went through the Sewer with Arrush and Frequency-Of-Sunlight, he was the one of the trio that was most acutely aware that they were going to have to do more for the people they removed from the dungeon’s influence. That while Arrush was focused on coaxing people to their growing expedition, and Sunny was alert to stopping any traps or ambushes cold, James was focused on the fact that they were going to need to be hiring ten new people every week just to keep up with their rescue quota.

  If the Sewer kept growing, and couldn’t be killed, then it was going to get out of control fast. It could just drown them in costs, unless they broke first and stopped trying to help.

  Which was unacceptable. So the Order, already possessing excellent records of how long it took the Sewer to get upset with being ignored and start sending out hostile scouts or hunters, had a plan.

  It wasn’t a particularly compassionate plan, but the Sewer wasn’t listening to them anyway, and they didn’t yet have the power to rip it apart and stop its engine of torment for those made or born there. But they did have the power to do one last delve, at a specific time, and then stop.

  It lined up with the December two-week-holiday. And after that, the Order had a plan in the works to shut the school down for ‘maintenance’ for a week or two. It would be disruptive, yes. It wasn’t good, exactly. But it would cut the Sewer off from any interaction for over a month.

  There were no hard numbers on exactly how dungeons got nutrition from the people wandering into them, but the worst case scenario here was that they impeded its growth by a month. The best case was that they both pissed it off, causing it to lash out and waste more energy, and also that they caught it overextending, its growth having relied on the steady stream of Order teams coming in and looting.

  The best case scenario was that the Sewer collapsed under its own weight. And the Order could save who they could save, lament the lost magic, but also know that they hadn’t just kept the murder factory around because it was convenient.

  Their delve, the last one for a while, went mostly smoothly. They did add another frogdog to their band as they moved, an ambush spoiled by James just fumbling a snap of his fingers and turning slimy hide into slimy fur as the transformation spell took hold and abruptly warped the creature into something that was less maddened by the pain of a body rebelling against itself. They picked through a dozen quiz rooms, acquiring the sparks they needed to turn into over thirty different Lesson books as they explored. They found out that Frequency-Of-Sunlight was terrified of spiders, and that the dungeon had made a spider out of glowing mushrooms that camouflaged itself paradoxically well in the broken pipes of the walls. They bottled gallons of shaper substance, and carefully added it to a totem-enhanced briefcase, using a little cart to awkwardly pull a few hundred pounds of spatially compressed liquid around with them.

  One thing stood out to James though, and he and the others discussed it in quiet tones as they led a trailing group of skittish rescues through a dirt-floored cavern where whistling metal pods that radiated so much heat it was a surprise they weren’t glowing red hung from the walls.

  There was a specific kind of thing that dungeons made. It was difficult to explain exactly what made them different from ‘normal’ dungeontech, but James used the term ‘artifact’ for them. The explanation tablet from the Ceaseless Stacks, the Nokia phone from the Office, even perhaps the starlight book from the Attic. Items that were singular, and also impossible to copy, things that were seemingly hand crafted to be powerfully useful, and that might even break certain rules on their own.

  It hadn’t escaped his notice that the Attic had almost doubled in size within a week when the Order had found and started using the book it made. And while he hadn’t been back to the Stacks in a while, he’d be willing to be it was happy that they’d looted the tablet too.

  The Sewer hadn’t made anything like that. Not yet. But they had a robust discussion as they pushed on toward the exit. They obviously wouldn’t be able to take it, but Arrush and Sunny got into a bit of an argument on whether or not it would be prudent to douse whatever they found in lighter fluid and have a bonfire. They hadn’t resolved the question by the time they made it to the exit with their nervous pack, won a brief skirmish against a corpulent ratroach that looked like he’d shaper modified himself to be able to eat his brethren whole, grabbed a half dozen other terrified people from the bleachers that were desperately looking for an escape from this nightmarish place, and then kicked the door down to get out.

  One delve complete, thirteen lives given a new chance, and one new Lesson in wood shop for Arrush. And one closed door behind them, sealing the Sewer into itself for at least a month.

  James wished it would listen to them. Wished he could help it. Wished a million things that he didn’t know how to achieve.

  But wishes weren’t as loud as actions. So instead of just hoping things would get better, they sealed the door, and prepared to repel hostiles.

  _____

  James had been through two cycles of getting clean after an interaction with a ratroach, though for wildly different reasons, when he rode the logisticor line into Townton and made his way toward a refurbished bar.

  It was located next to a somewhat less refurbished stylists salon that was currently undergoing a complete redo of its interior because someone had decided that the residents shouldn’t have to travel via teleporter to get their hair cut or… other… materials… treated. James didn’t actually know what ratroach or camraconda or chanter grooming was like, now that he thought about it. He knew they all liked the baths, but was there some kind of chitin treatment for ratroaches? Did chanters like having their shells polished or trimmed? He didn’t really know, and it was very cool that someone else was filling that lifestyle niche here.

  The bar was also only a little in use. The rate of drinking was actually a lot lower in Townton than in most of the US, as far as he could tell from statistics he could easily find. James had sort of understood as background knowledge that a lot more people were actually alcoholics than would actively identify that way, but it was wild to actually watch the tracked numbers from their own nascent civics department shift as the availability of the anti-addiction spell became common, and people stopped needing a drink.

  James found he had a lot less of a problem with alcohol when it was a mild social background element, and not something that was hard at work annihilating lives.

  Like a lot of places in Townton’s restoration zone, it was a strange mix of old structure and new magical improvements. The windows had a weird texture to them like they were still ponds and not just normal glass, an artifact of being put back together with a blue orb power. The building had several rounded edges where damage had been repaired, making it look alien compared to the normal engineer desire to have everything be a perfect square. The interior had pleasantly cozy orange lighting, shadowed slightly by the Office potted plant that was quickly growing to cover the ceiling in artificial green. And the bouncer at the door was a guy who had the look in his eyes of a man who was staring into an ethereal spreadsheet with the species and matching acceptable drinking ages for the population of the city.

  James liked it immediately. It felt like a place that wasn’t taking itself too seriously, even going so far as to have intentionally shadowy tables at the back corners by the bathrooms and six different salvaged neon open signs in the front window.

  He found his way inside, showing his ID to the man who just gave him a flat are you kidding me kind of look and waved the paladin past, and locked on to where his target was sitting at the bar.

  Passing by three late sixties humans and a singular mimic pretending to be a dog that were playing mahjong, James took a seat next to her and extended a hand. “Hi.” He said in greeting. “James. Paladin and professional problemizer.”

  ”Problem solver?” Jubilance asked as she gave him a sideways high five instead of a handshake. James recovered quickly enough to add a fist bump at the end, though he had legitimately no idea why he’d done that.

  James gave an embarrassed smile. ”Nnnnnno.” He drawled out. “I’m about fifty-fifty on solving our problems, or causing other people problems. I figure it’s good to be honest about that in my title.”

  ”Sure. Well, I’m… Jubilance.” She hesitated on saying her name, before jerking a thumb over her shoulder to a guy with a fluffy beard and matching hair lurking at one of the little round tall tables in the Social Zone. “That’s Tylor.”

  ”I will call you literally whatever you want.” James told her bluntly. “You got brought here by a camraconda that I willingly refer to as Spire-Cast-Behind, you can just make up a name you want.”

  ”Yeah, I mean, sure.” She waved around the room with a slim hand. “This place is the queerest thing I’ve ever experienced, I believe you. I just… haven’t done that yet. Jubilance is fine, or Joy, whatever.”

  James nodded in understanding. “I get it. I’m still not a moth.” He said.

  ”…Sssssure.” She held the tumbler she was drinking from up to her nose and sniffed, like she was trying to determine if she was drinking something hallucinogenic. “Right. Eh. So you’re my… what, immigration interview?”

  He shrugged slightly as the bartender made eye contact with him. “Something that makes me feel like I’m on vacation, please.” James said. “Non-alcoholic.” He got a nod and a smirk from the woman, before he turned back to Jubilance. “I guess you can think of it that way. I mean, I’ve got some direct questions, and I bet you do too. Spire said you wanted to just join the Order, and I don’t really know what you expect from that, but if you’re serious, then we can cover things like expectations and training schedules and stuff. Also, at some point, I’m gonna point at your neck and say ‘cool tattoo’, and then do this.” James raised his eyebrows, widening his eyes as he tipped his head forward in expectation.

  ”Thanks. It’s magic.” Jubilance said with blunt precision. “Can you go first, so I feel better giving up all my secrets?”

  ”Sure! What do you wanna know?” James asked. “I know you got the ops manual, but I can cover anything. I’m sorta all around this place.”

  She took a breath, looking around the bizarre bar and letting the warmth of her drink soften her nerves. “What do you want from us?” Jubilance asked. What she really meant was, what did they want. What was the cost. What was the fine print and where was the devil hiding in the details. And from the sad look James had on his face as he looked away from her, she felt like he knew that too.

  ”A full explanation of your magic, and the location of any dungeons, as well as intel on the threats you’ve faced. Especially ones that spill out into Earth.” James said honestly. “Now, a counter question. What do you want?”

  ”I want… fuck I don’t even know. I want my life back?” She shrugged. “Tylor doesn’t really care, he’s into this, which is why I’m negotiating I guess. He’s fine to just ride the chaos. I want… I want to go back to having a place to sleep where I don’t worry I’m gonna get shot. I want the world to make sense again.” Jubilance downed her drink in a single gulp, gently dropping the tumbler back to the bar with a rattle of glass on wood. “I’m also kinda sick of being broke all the time.”

  ”Okay.” James’ own drink arrived as he spoke; the bartender having had fun filling a coconut with mixed juice and cherries stabbed on a plastic sword. There was a wedge of pineapple in there too. It looked absurd, and he loved it. “I don’t know what we can do about your specific life, but from what I understand, your hometown is… compromised?” She nodded at him. “And we will definitely want to address that. I’ve got two paladins ready to deploy for that, and while I don’t expect instant results, we can at least try to make your familiar home feel safer.” He knew too well the value of having a home; he’d never lost his own, not really, but he’d seen too many people who had. “For as long as you are in Townton, I swear you are safe. And also if you’re joining us we pay really well. Though if you’re not, we still have a resident UBI.”

  ”…did you just decide your civic policy based off of communist buzzwords?” She asked him, though it wasn’t with any kind of hostility.

  ”Yes.” James lied. And then, as she pierced through his falsehood, he elaborated. “Okay, no. The reason Townton is safe is because there’s no internal threats. When everyone has what they need, and most of what they want on top of that, the motivator for crime drops to almost nothing. Obviously it’s not perfect, but… why bother robbing someone when you’re never going to go hungry, right?”

  ”Alright, calm down Karl.” Jubilance motioned for the bartender to refill her glass, which the woman did with a flourish of her hand and a tiny flicker of blue light, liquid appearing from nowhere in a way that made even James wonder what that orb was. “What’re the cops here like?”

  ”Civil safety.” James corrected. “Currently a volunteer group, though we have plans in place for a sort of semi-mandatory service to rotate people through it. They aren’t cops exactly.”

  ”Mmh. Sure. What about the bug things?”

  ”Which ones?”

  ”The… the ones with the shells that seem like they own the whole park out there?” She motioned into the night.

  James spread his hands in a snarky defensive move. “Hey, there’s ratroaches in this building, you have to specify!” He told her. “Anyway, the chanters. What about them?”

  ”…I don’t even know where I was going with this.” She sighed morosely. “I know you already think they’re fine, why am I bothering asking?”

  ”Maybe just to see what I say? Like, I can give you their tragic backstory, direct you to where you can start to learn the shared language we’re building, tell you it’s probably not a great idea to date one of them right now, and also let you know that the bell peppers they grow with their magical garden zone are delicious. But I’m just sorta shotgunning out potential answers to questions I don’t know.” James offered helpfully.

  Jubilance let his words wash over her, and then shook her head, trying to not look like she was amused. “At least one of those helps. Thanks.” She said. “God, you really are just like this aren’t you? This isn’t fake at all.”

  ”Like… what?” James suspected, but didn’t want to assume for something like this. Instead he just locked his feet into the barstool and tried to relax while he waited for her to ask.

  ”People actually warned me about this. Like you’re a good person. Like this place is good.” His conversation partner sounded almost angry. “Places like this aren’t… real. Or they aren’t supposed to be.”

  ”Yeah, I’ve heard that.” He’d actually heard it really recently from Vex before she and her polycule had parted ways with the Order, though he suspected it wasn’t the last they’d seen of each other. “It sounded like crap, so I ignored it.” James declared. “Okay, well, it’s more complicated than that, but you know what I mean.” He laughed off the explanation of the complexities of community building. “What next?”

  ”…what does a member of the Order do.” Joy asked in a voice so quiet that no one but James would have heard it over the humming of the bar’s soft music.

  He smiled, but not in a way that would make her feel bad for giving in. Or at least, so he hoped. “It depends on what you’re doing. At first, new people get bounced around from place to place so they can find something they like doing that they can semi-commit to. If you’re a knight, which is like an experienced member that has the capability to do more than your average person, then we have a system for putting yourself into rotation for being on call to solve problems that come up. Once you’ve found your place… you do that. Help out on some other stuff too.” He shrugged. “We’ve got a distribution method where we make magic available to people, and sometimes it upends a person’s life. Like you get a skill in something you didn’t know you were into, and you pivot what you were working on, that kind of thing. Our goal is to enable and enhance those moves, so that people don’t feel trapped or stagnant. Because… well…”

  ”Because it’s been working so great everywhere else?” She smirked into her drink, voice echoing around the glass.

  ”Exactly. You get it.” James nodded. “Look, the rest of the world is super useful to me. Because it provides a template for what we know doesn’t work. Or only works by hurting people.”

  ”So we’d be… knights?” She asked.

  James shook his head. “Not by default. You’re delvers, I know that. You’re fighters too. So you could be. Knights aren’t soldiers; they’re like human bookmarks for crisis situations. But some people… okay, my friend TQ lives down here. He’s incredibly dangerous, and he can just shut down a whole range of threats. He also doesn’t want to be a knight. So he’s not. He does social integration, under the guise of playing games with new people.” James needed to catch up with the camraconda, it had been too long. “You can join us and be a janitor if you want. There’s no requirement to use your abilities.”

  ”But you want me to.” She pointed out. “That’s the problem, ability creates demand. Just like you keep delving, even though you probably don’t need to.”

  The challenge amused him, and James chuckled as he tried some of his tart juice. “I also spend time working as a janitor.” He countered. “You might think you need to do more. But no one will make you.”

  ”…Fuck it.” Jubilance said with determined vigor. “We’re in.”

  ”Glad to have you.” James said with a welcoming nod. “So hey. Cool tattoo.” His eyebrows started to go up in the previously threatened motion.

  ”Alright, fine!” Jubilance felt like she should be offended or maybe suspicious of the way she’d been so easily convinced, but… well, he really was just like that, wasn’t he? A good person, who was honest about his curiosity. “Fine. Yeah. The tattoo is magic. It’s from dungeon number two.”

  James’ eyes flicked to the side as he opened a note document through his skulljack braid. “I’ll label it that way. Unless you have names for them? We name our dungeons silly things as a way to keep ourselves sane.”

  ”We call that one the Compiled Waste.” Her little smile slipped, and James felt like he might have over a boundary somehow. “Well. Tycho used to.” She shook off the gloom and got to the point. “The place is an office.”

  ”No shit?” James raised his eyebrows, mouth curled around a fancy straw as he stopped sipping his drink. “That’s a first!”

  ”Are you mocking me?” Her eyes hardened.

  ”No! Our first dungeon was an office! Is an office!” He wanted to laugh with delight. This was going to annihilate so many different Research theories on dungeon development. “Please go on.”

  She was still eyeing him, but started to open up again. “Alright. It’s like an office tower fell apart. The whole place is ruined, and it goes up and down for what feels like forever.” Jubilance tapped a slim finger on her tattoo. “Every floor you get through, you get an expansion. The tattoo is mandatory, and it doesn’t ask. Also the ‘better’ you do on a floor, the more potent the expansion. I’ve got a personal wizard sanctum now, with some stuff in it, and I can open a portal to it from a few specific kinds of places. Which is cool as shit.”

  ”If we agree on literally nothing else, I think we’re gonna agree that yeah, that is cool as shit.” James confirmed. The two of them shared a fist bump again, this time much more organic. “I’ll get details on that one later. What about dungeon number one?”

  ”We never named that one. It’s… uh… normal?”

  ”That’s a fucking wild thing to say to me, here.” James told her, pointing over to where her partner was apparently flirting with a camraconda.

  The no-longer-independent delver flipped him off, but was laughing while she did it. “I mean, it’s a hole in the ground with rooms and monsters and treasure chests.” She told him. “Though it was growing when we lost access. More stone, more columns. Like it was becoming an ancient temple or something. That one…” she shuddered.

  ”That was the source of the problems?”

  ”Yeah. Oh, the magic. Do stuff it rewards, level up, get superpowers that work a few times a day.”

  James scrunched up his face. ”I’m familiar with that headache.”

  She didn’t question him. ”Well we can’t get in.” There was a bitter laugh following that statement. “Understatement of my fucking life. The dungeon started making these shadow people. Among other stuff. It’s guarding its entrance like it’s the last thing on the planet; no one in or out unless it wants you. But the shadows… they didn’t stop at just taking over the area.”

  ”Yeah, Spire said something about your town being under surveillance?”

  ”They just took over.” She told him, quiet exhaustion present in her voice. “They were watching the roads in and out. They paid off or mind controlled the cops, the government, the fire department, everything that mattered. They were, and probably still are, just taking over. Why, we never figured out. We tried to stop them, all of us. But…”

  James looked away, a hand covering his cheek as he pushed his drink away from himself on the bar, trying to not intrude on the quiet moment of his fellow delver reliving the loss of her friends. “Sorry.” He muttered.

  After a few minutes of her silently staring at the back of the bar, she put her own empty cup that she’d been fidgeting with back down. “Not your fault.” She said. “Anyway. We were trapped. Everyone in that city is trapped but I don’t think it’s really as bad for them. Normal people, nothing’s changed. It’s just whatever the dungeon is doing, it’s doing it in control.”

  ”That…” James ran a hand through his hair. “That is… not normal.” He thought about the world as he knew it. Thought about the Last Line of Defense, at the very least. But also just that there were pillars in general, and delvers out there that were willing to throw down. The idea that a whole city could be taken over was…

  Well it wasn’t like he hadn’t done the same thing. But it was more like he’d moved into an empty husk and started putting it back together. James hadn’t needed to subvert a government, he’d just built his own. Still.

  ”Okay.” He said, standing up and stretching until his spine popped with a satisfying crack. “We’ll get a complete list of your powers later, no pressure on that. But that’s… a terrifying summary. And I’m gonna assemble a security council to figure out what we’re gonna do about it.” James didn’t know what to do about it, yet, but he was already feeling like he’d had his life force siphoned out with a straw just thinking about having another major problem and perhaps enemy on their hands. “In the meantime…”

  He extended a hand. Jubilance, rolled her eyes, but did actually shake it this time. “Is this an important part of the ritual?” She asked.

  ”Nah, I just think it’s nice to have moments sometimes.” James said with an unoffended smile. “Welcome to the Order of Endless Rooms. Oh, your stipend for the allocation counter is active from your first day, since you’re already a wizard.” He said.

  ”Our… what?” Jubilance cocked her head.

  ”To… get more magic?” James raised his eyebrows. “It’s in the manual.”

  ”I didn’t read the… Tylor! Hey! Hey! Did you read the manual?!”

  James got out of there before he got besieged with more questions. He wanted to take a nap before the next problem came up, and he wasn’t gonna make it to a bed if he had to explain exchange rates for orbs.

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