“What does marble think when it's being sculpted? It thinks, "I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost." Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” -Orphée, Orpheus-

  _____

  Alex was on another boat. Or ship? She was, apparently, the only person in the entire Order who didn’t have any skill ranks in boat lore. She hadn’t even used her plentiful Underburbs skill points to get ranks in the history of sailing, just in case she ever picked up a new Sewer lesson and needed to accelerate it quickly.

  Actually, she hadn’t used her Underburbs points on anything, except for helping Deb write up her thesis on the things. James had done some work poking and prodding at the different skill crystals, and orbs too, so Alex didn’t have to go through the apparently excruciating process of learning what it felt like to get a skill rank from a dead comrade’s loot drop. But Deb had wanted to verify a few things, as well as test across species, which was why she’d made Alex, Spire, and honorary paladin Arrush sit down and verify if the skill crystal Alex had pulled out of the corpse of the first delver they’d fought did something different.

  [+1 Power Rank : Flesh - Unbruisable]

  It certainly explained how the guy had shrugged off Camille hits, but Alex had stabbed through his chest with ease. A memory she didn’t really want, but refused to feel guilt over. She’d been pretty effectively working through the feelings about all her kills lately, and this one was pretty easy. The guy was trying to kill a lot of people, Alex wasn’t going to lose sleep over stopping him, or using his skill crystal, even if she did understand why the Order had a general ethics rule about not doing that. It was, ultimately, just the kinder thing to do on a grand scale, and that did matter.

  Spire and Arrush had gotten the same thing, too, though Spire’s had been ‘settlement’ and not ‘flesh’, which was… weird. Alex sort of assumed that was the medical term for whatever biological rubber camracondas were made of, but Deb had been thrown off by it too. So was the Underburbs getting into defining medical terminology now? Was it just a random word because no one had come up with one before? She didn’t know, because her friend had done the thing where she’d shoved everyone out of her office and vanished off the face of the planet for a week to do ‘research’.

  Alex missed doing research. She missed when James would show up with an impossible problem and she and Deb would have to figure out how the Order was totally unsuited to solve it. Now when the impossible problems happened, she had to go get on another boat to solve them. It didn’t matter that this was, in a very real way, research. Alex had decided she hated the ocean, either above or below the surface, and she really wished someone else would come do this research.

  But the Order was kind of busy. Simon was busy harassing an organized religion, Spire and James were busy invading Saskatoon for what Alex was sure were perfectly valid reasons, and Deb was busy trying to figure out how camraconda skeletons worked probably. All the normal adults in the Order Alex might have asked for help were busy with putting together the facilities for a mass logisticor transportation company, or rebuilding Townton, or teaching bizarrely normal high school, or curing cancer, or whatever. And the only non-normal adults she knew were Frequency-Of-Sunlight and Ink-And-Key, and one of them was doing dungeon things, and the other had politely but vehemently informed her that he would be dead before he was ever anywhere near sharks.

  Alex was pretty sure Ink-And-Key didn’t really know that there were different varieties of sharks, and some of them were harmless and cute.

  Her thoughts distracted her from the slight waver of the metal hull under her feet. It wasn’t like Alex got seasick that easily, but she’d been uncomfortable with the reminder that she was over open water ever since the first boat problem.

  The first boat problem had been a crystal-shelled kaiju. Some kind of seafaring creature, obviously not a mundane Earth species, rising out of the water and heading for the cargo ship she had been on then like it was preparing to make it a snack. It wasn’t quite large enough to do it in a single bite, and actually probably wasn’t that much bigger than the quarter million ton boat, but that was still enormous. A quarter million tons of anything was more tons than Alex felt like she could manage.

  At the time, she’d been screaming on the inside as she’d flung herself across the gap to see if there was anything she could do to slow the creature down. And honestly, she had expected the answer was an obvious ‘no’, and that she’d have to telepad the crew of the boat out to safety. But instead, the mobile glittering island had freaked out as soon as she’d set foot on its back, and dunked itself back into the Atlantic. Leaving Alex to get picked up by the dinghy the cargo ship had, as no matter how much stolen speed she had access to, she couldn’t really use it to kick off of water.

  And then, quiet. There were three people in the Order, one recruited specifically for the task, who were monitoring ocean shipping. Specifically along this route, where the thing had been munching down on cargo ships for who even knew how long. And nothing had happened since Alex scared the thing away. Though how she had done that was still up for debate.

  Personally, Alex didn’t think she’d even been noticed. Either that creature or something that it suspiciously fit the criteria for had sunk, eaten, or otherwise removed multiple thousand-ton ships with full crews. It was impossible that no one had touched it in that time. It was unlikely that someone hadn’t tried hitting it with a boat, which, Alex had since learned, was kind of a traditional way to deal with colossal eldritch beasts. It was also a safe bet to say that, no matter what regulations or laws there were, the crews of these ships probably had a rocket launcher stashed somewhere that someone must have tried.

  In light of that, Alex was back on another boat. This time equipped with several powerful yet mundane tracking beacons, which were stored in tubes with very not mundane adhesive ready to be deployed. Waiting for another attack, and practicing her Climb casting whenever her Breath was full. Trying to figure out why people could get a few skill levels in this particular magic system, and what she could do to get a few more by being better at it.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite correct. Not the spellcasting part, she was doing that. But the ‘different boat’ part. This was the same boat she’d been on the first time. And she knew that, because of the guy who was nervously walking past her every few minutes, clearly changing his route across the deck so that he was getting close to her as he did his job.

  “Hey!” Alex decided to just cut through this, and called out from the deck chair that she had braced against one of the stacked shipping containers. The young man jerked like he’d been caught, but Alex just motioned for him to come over. “Ashe, right? Or is it Ken?” She asked.

  ”Kunashe, lady. Ken is below now.“ He said respectfully.

  No, that wasn’t right. Alex narrowed her eyes, though not at him. She’d just heard that tone before in her paladin travels, a few times. That was how people talked when they were trying to use respect to mask fear. “Ah, my bad. Anyway. You keep sneaking past. What’s up?” She decided on being direct. “I’m not that scary, am I?”

  “You…” the young human looked like he was considering if he had time to fling himself over the railing. “You saved the ship. And acted like it was nothing! And then you came back? The captain didn’t recognize you, and half the crew think you hexed him. The other half think you’re a good luck charm.”

  ”So that’s a yes then.“ Alex sighed.

  ”You’re… a witch. Is that the right word?” Kunashe asked her.

  Alex suddenly realized his english was heavily accented and paced in the way that someone who had it as a second language spoke. She’d gotten too used to .mems and skorbs to round out her own ability to talk to anyone she met, that she had kind of missed that the guy was making an effort to talk to her in her own native tongue. “Witch isn’t what I’d go with. I’ve got a friend that uses that though.” She smiled distantly as she wondered what Momo was up to; probably talking to that new magically generated mind in the basement.

  She didn’t want to call it an AI. That seemed both offensive, and probably inaccurate, for a creature that was more made up of mana than code.

  Kunashe brought her back to the present with his reply. “But you are… different. Powerful.” He said.

  ”I’m still human.” Alex rolled her eyes, trying to be casual about this conversation, and suddenly wondering if James also felt this kind of awkward embarrassment every time someone was impressed with her ability to cast, like, three spells. “And I’m not gonna curse the boat.”

  ”Ship.” He corrected her in a flash. “Captain doesn’t like it if you call it a boat.”

  ”I’m still on the boat, and not gonna curse it.” Alex tried not to scowl.

  He nodded, though it was obvious he didn’t actually believe her. “Oh.” He said sullenly. “The boat is already cursed.”

  ”Ship.” Alex corrected him playfully, and watched his face twist through four different emotions at the unexpected verbal jab. “Also no, it’s… okay it might be. Look, the world is weirder than I thought, okay? The ship might be cursed. Sorry.” She shrugged, tugging her inconspicuously armored coat around her as the cold breeze briefly escalated to a cold screaming gale. “But you’re not the only ship to see that thing - you remember the thing?” He nodded slowly, eyes sliding away from her to look out over the dark water. “Yeah, or at least, I assume you’re not the first. A bunch of other ships have just vanished. So I’m here to find it, and get it to stop.”

  ”You’re going to kill that?”

  ”I said get it to stop! I might not need to kill it.” Alex had no fucking clue how she was going to do that. She just felt like if she declared it loudly enough, the universe might let her get away with it.

  ”You have a net big enough?” The sailor asked with a cocky grin, finding his sense of humor. “Or is this an American thing? Going to politely ask it to leave?” The words were more than a little mocking.

  She was channeling James. They hadn’t, like, talked that much about how to be a paladin, but Alex had gotten at least a few questions in here and there. And he was really good about replying to messages. So Alex’s mental picture of the kind of vibe she was supposed to put off had gotten shored up and reinforced, gradually building up as she found her feet on her errancy, and then getting some reinforcement afterward in small moments of reflection between sprinting toward the next problem.

  The trust James had put in her was horrifying, and he didn’t even seem to realize it. Or maybe he did, and he thought it was funny. That would be how he did things. Either way, Alex was going to live up to it, which meant she had to know exactly what her goal as a paladin was.

  So when Alex pulled her phone out, swiped a few times, and then flipped the screen around, she waited as Kunashe leaned in to look. “This is a camraconda.” She told him. “This one is named Ink-And-Key, and he’s twice your size.”

  ”…Why does it have a name?” His eyes were wide white ovals as he jerked back away from her.

  ”Guess.” Alex prompted sarcastically. There was a shout from somewhere else on the ship; nothing serious, just the normal operation of a vessel where the sailors often communicated with each other via loud profanity. By the time Kunsahe had turned back to her after having checked he wasn’t about to be chewed out for slacking off, Alex had another picture up. “Ratroach.” She slid her finger along the screen. “Chanter.” Again. “Uh… okay, that’s a human. Human. Sorry, hang on.” She pulled her phone back and tried to find her next example, but her selfie habit was stabbing her in the back now. “The point is… well, like I said. Guess.”

  ”That you in those shots.” He said. “All smiles. You know them. Friends?” Kunashe asked.

  Alex nodded, rotating her deck chair and leaning her head back with a lopsided grin. “Yeah. Well, not JP, but everyone else.”

  ”Was he the rat?”

  ”…I am so glad I can bottle this memory.” Alex muttered. “Yes. JP is a rat.”

  The sailor nervous smile at the affirmation was crooked, but he still didn’t run away. “So you wanna make nice with the… what’s it called? Does it have a name?”

  “That’s what I do.” Alex said with a confident nod. “That’s what we do. We find the weird critters, and turn them into friends. I mean, I guess we find ‘normal people’ who need help and then turn them into friends too. We’re pretty good at weaponizing friendship. Also its name is George.” She’d decided that just now, and she also hated it. Alex was not good at being creative when put on the spot; she was one of the people who’d actively failed the counter-improv training for the Stacks.

  ”Dumb name for a hungry rock.”

  She glared at him, realizing that she’d lost her mystique enough that she was being mocked. Or flirted with. And Alex appreciated neither of those things right now. ”Be nice to me or I won’t give you magic.”

  That got a snap of attention and a reverent tone to the next words. ”You can give people that thing you do?”

  ”Hell no. I can give people obscure knowledge about niche topics.” Alex said. “And I will, too, if you help me keep watch.”

  ”We’re always keeping watch.” Kunashe replied with a sudden dark anger in his words. “Know it’s out there now, so we look for it.”

  ”For George.” Alex amended. “Also I spotted that.” She’d taken almost no time at all to realize that the sailors were dividing parts of their free time up so that there were always people keeping eyes around the ship. She wondered how they handled it at night; the ocean got dark, though as far as she knew from the info they had, all the attacks had happened during the day anyway. “I mean I need you to keep watch for the captain and the first mate.”

  Kunashe cocked his head to the side, giving her a toothy confused smile. “Why? You paid to be here.”

  ”Sure. Well, sort of.” It wasn’t actually illegal for Alex to be here, and in fact, there were three other civilian passengers too. Her problem was actually wrapped up in their presence. “They keep trying to treat me like a VIP.”

  ”Lady, they do not remember what you… did…” Kunashe trailed off. “So why are they treating you special?”

  Alex grimaced. “Yeah. Great question buddy. So if you wanted to let me know if one of them starts circling around here, then I can listen to my… uh… audiobook in peace.” The audiobook was a copy of the Smoke Salt spell…book? Spellfile? They needed better words for everything, Alex figured. It was an mp3 player dropped through a time portal from 2004, it had one thing on it, and it was a rather irritating two minute long file that gave the Smoke Salt spell.

  She didn’t know if she was going to need it at all, because she wasn’t planning to fight any shadow creatures, but once verifying that the copy worked, no one really needed it, and Alex had a ton of time on this boat.

  ”If I see them, I will shout loud for you.” Kunashe told her, and Alex gave him a thumbs up. “But when you see the… see George,” his accent made the name roll off his tongue like he was flicking the last syllable, “then you shout for us.” He pulled back his jacket, showing her the grip of a holstered handgun.

  Alex really, really wanted to slap the guy who thought he could get in a pistol duel with something that could basically be classified as terrain. But she actually did want their help, and his heart was in if not the right place then at least a place where he, and maybe the rest of the crew, was willing to help her out. So she settled for rolling her eyes and popping an earbud back in. “Thanks man.” She said as she leaned back, and watched the sky rapidly turn from dusk to a starry canvas.

  Once she’d gotten used to the engine noise, and the sensation of being at sea, Alex had decided it was pretty nice out here.

  As long as nothing sank the boat.

  _____

  Simon took a calculated sip of ghost juice - no filter mask, it was too recognizable - and let himself drop through the angled roof he was laying on.

  He’d long since gotten past the frantic question for how the incorporeality extended to things a person wore, or even carried. It didn’t quite work all the way on larger backpacks, but it was something that was unique to this potion that had the Reagent part of the Order ripping their hair out trying to solve. Which was a problem, because while Simon figured hair growth would be one of the first potions they’d discover, it still hadn’t manifested, along with a general red-flavored healing potion.

  The problem was apparently that potions affected the living body. Even when it was in weird ways, or even in the brain itself, they were still changing things that were physical, and personal. But the ghost juice let you slip through walls, fences, bullets, anything you wanted really; and it let you do it without losing your pants. Simon figured it was magic. Because magic potions, it turned out, were magic, and at the end of the day that was kind of all he needed to know to do his job.

  He landed roughly on the rough wooden floor of the house’s attic. His entrance making a thump that no one would hear; this house, like many others in this city, was empty of anyone to listen.

  There actually were so many empty houses even in this subdivision that Simon was confident no one would have noticed if he’d just walked through the door. But there was no sense taking chances when the Order wasn’t “supposed” to be snooping around, and when he lived in an era where every suburbanite had a porch cam. So the stealth approach through the roof it was.

  The attic was worth searching, since he was here. It was clearly never meant to be a lived in space, just plywood nailed down over support beams above the ceiling. Simon found more beetle husks between plastic storage tubs than anything else. Though there was a safe up here, and while he was still capable of selective incorporeality, he stuck his hand it, grabbed what felt like a tray, and then took another sip of his potion to extend the effect so he could pull it all out.

  Passports, some gold discs that weren’t coins either monetary or magic, a .38 revolver, a ruby necklace, and the deed to the house, and that was it. “It’s so weird what they leave behind.” Simon muttered as he checked the gun with gloved fingers before setting the tray back in the safe.

  Down the ladder to the upper floor, there wasn’t anything out of place. Four bedrooms, one for the parents, three for the kids with bunk beds in two of them. Signs that the house itself was subject to reckless behavior a lot, what with all the dings and scrapes in the walls. Closets left open and dressers half emptied, pretty standard.

  Simon used up a few points of Breath casting Call To Blood repeatedly on the family that had lived here. He didn’t bother to maintain the spell with its dangerously high drain, instead just sending out a quick ping for each of them, and verifying that they could be found at all.

  If the tracking spell couldn’t find someone, it meant they had been injured out of its range. And its range was everywhere that wasn’t dungeons, as far as the Order knew.

  Five of the seven family members returned results, with two of them pulling Simon toward bathrooms and one to the kitchen, the other two stretching off to somewhere else. It was impossible to determine time with Call to Blood, so he focused on the people hurt in the house, and quickly got their last most recent injuries tugging him away to somewhere else too. Not consistent with a pattern of abuse, which was good.

  But while it was good practice to verify that whenever he could, he was actually here for a different reason.

  The main floor was normal enough. Just… a house. Living room with a big screen TV, something Simon hadn’t seen in a while actually. Kitchen that was so pristine compared to the rest of the place it had probably been remodeled recently. Dining room that had that vibe of being off limits to play in. The usual. He checked the usual hiding places and found a handful of level one coppery spell coins, an occurrence that was becoming so common that Simon had stopped counting and started wondering what secondary use they were being kept for that the Order didn’t know about.

  And then, the basement stairs.

  The basement was actually also normal. Another big room with a big screen TV, someone’s office space, a play room for younger kids, a pantry. It was all far too quiet, but it wasn’t evil or anything. No, that special form of tension that Simon was waiting on was reserved for the sub-basement. The crawlspace door was through on the other side of the pantry, and he nearly knocked over one of the wire racks that was still covered in cans of beans when he went through.

  Not trusting the light switch, Simon flicked on his own pen light, and then let it float over his shoulder, the thing Momo had imbued for him tracking his head movements. He added another one at his side, this one mechanically brighter and magically dumber. And then he tried to keep his steps from being the loudest sound in the universe as he crouch-walked down the bare wood stairs, and across an unsecured plywood plank that was laid over a black tarp.

  After having to duck through a narrow opening with another set of wooden stairs, barely avoiding headbutting a thick water pipe, Simon emerged into a little workshop. The place almost looked comfy; a horseshoe of benches covered in tools to one side with a big table saw in the middle of the floor and buckets holding piles of scrap wood. Sawdust swept into a big pile, and the smell of varnish in the air. It was the kind of place someone who liked woodworking actually used.

  There was also another door down here. Labeled normally as a boiler room and jokingly with police tape, and locked tight. Simon didn’t really want to spend time looking for the key, especially when he’d done this part of the routine three times already.

  Forty houses searched, forty families checked out for any signs of coercion, forty verified consent forms from the Ark…ists? Arkists? It felt weird to just call them Mormons, because their particular activity, while definitely deeply rooted in the desire to live out the plot to a Fallout game and create a Mormon city-state in the aftermath of global apocalypse, was also deeply rooted in the desire of the dungeon life to feed their home.

  Simon needed to get in touch with that side independently. The Order needed, now and forever, more information on dungeons. And who better to find that than a paladin that had nothing better to do than interfere with people’s private business.

  Actually that wasn’t fair. Simon wasn’t exactly gratuitously spying on people, he was following actionable evidence and working to stop things that were already crimes. Or, if they weren’t crimes, should be crimes. The Order’s quiet probes through legal channels had led to the current understanding that, from the perspective of the law, nonhumans could easily be justified as not having rights. Plenty of people would - and did - treat them as equals, but a nation trying to secure resources or appease bigots would find ways to stall. So even if in the far future, it might be really actually illegal to kidnap a dungeon creation even if they weren’t born from a genetically pure human, right now that law didn’t really exist.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  But it should, and Simon was preemptively helping out that future world by solving the issue now. Along with a handful of other things that were magically problematic and technically-legal-but-sorta-evil.

  He waited for the earlier doses of potion to wear off so he could safely refresh, thinking and tapping his foot while he stared at the door. Simon didn’t know why James had made him a paladin. Not really. He was a decent delver, a more than decent responder, and he was weird in the way that was a little bit more dramatic than most of the Order. Not everyone had a whole other life blended into their personality after all, even the camracondas. But he didn’t feel like he was right for it.

  In a sense, it was ironic that he’d gotten a Sewer symbiote that fed off his anger. Because he found himself angry a lot. In the before times, he’d been… well, actually he’d been pretty placid. Not so much levelheaded as he was just bland. Being part someone else now let him see that with fewer blinders on. Now, he had a hard time not seeing situations that other people caused on purpose as intolerable bullshit, and it was more of an act of will to keep his anger in check.

  And that just didn’t feel very paladin-y. He wasn’t good with words like James, or good with people like Spire, or good with… whatever Alex was good with. Actually she was kind of shockingly good at getting out of situations, so maybe that. But still, all of them were constantly calmer about things than Simon would have been. This current situation was a great example; he was trying to apply his newfound skill ranks in statistics and medical ethics and food logistics so that he could help in a constructive way with an idea that he thought was dumb but kind of harmless. But he couldn’t help feeling a constant churning fury at… well, everything. Everyone in this mess.

  Simon might not think he was a good paladin, but he knew that he wasn’t angry at nothing.

  Maybe that was why James had picked him. Because once Simon saw something wrong… it hadn’t actually taken any influence at all from the little boney creature latched onto his wrist to shove him into wanting to fight to change things. He just needed to be put in the situations first.

  Simon sighed. He thought too much these days. His thoughts would often spin around each other until they orbited to a conclusion, which was a way of thinking that was new to him. But it killed time when he needed to wait a few minutes.

  Swallowing more of the ghost potion, he grabbed his pen lights and walked through the wall next to the door, darkness wrapping around him as he moved into solid matter. Two steps - Simon had the same answer for how steps worked as for equipment - and then a ninety degree left turn. A single long step brought him out into the secret room that absolutely wasn’t a boiler room, light filling it as he let go of his floating helpers.

  He wasted no time in gently removing the tripwires that were set up to the firebomb the room was rigged with. This was the fourth secret basement room and they’d all had this stupid setup. Which meant it was almost certain that either these guys were working together, or, Utah had a very prolific bomb maker that delivered via Doordash.

  The rest of the room was far more disgusting than the bomb itself, and Simon did have a moment of considering setting it off when he left. There were three pet cages with dog beds in them, with frantic scratches on the concrete floor and walls that were close enough to them. Bags of dog food and ten gallon jugs of water stacked on a shelf against the opposite wall, while a long hose and a drain in the floor covered the middle of the room. And then on a little raised step, something almost like a normal office setup. A padded chair and a desk with a pile of books open on it.

  That was different.

  The last ones had contained the pens for ‘demons’. And Simon, while he wasn’t fucking happy about any of it, would admit that at least one of them seemed like it was exclusively used for the less sentient knife-goats. But it was still bare minimum animal abuse, and one of the others had been part prison-dungeon part BDSM-dungeon, in a way that had been distinctly disgusting due to the implication of the combination.

  This secret prison seemed clean enough, but there was a cruelty to it that couldn’t be hosed off. Strips of shed translucent skin that had been left in the dog beds, a bloodstain that hadn’t gotten washed off in time, things like that. The presence of the desk was actually different enough that it seemed like a break from the cruelty that was ‘supposed’ to happen here.

  Alert for traps and keeping himself incorporeal, Simon walked forward and checked over what had been left. Documents on clipboards, feeding times, assignments for Bell By Midnight casters to pick up demons for delves, notes that looked like different medical checkups, all things that felt like standard kennel paperwork except applied to at least a few people. Then there were books. A couple religious texts, one of which was heavily bookmarked with those little post-it note flags. A copy of The Art of War that Simon actually sneered at before realizing what he was doing and sheepishly chuckling to himself. And then, in a desk drawer that was trapped, another book.

  It was made of chrome and glass, but it was still a book. And while Simon hadn’t learned to feel the vibration pattern of Garden magic like he could with the Office or Library, he was pretty sure this was a spellbook.

  ”Someone wasn’t supposed to have this.” He mused as he kept checking the room.

  The thing that Simon was learning about conspiracies, the more he dug into everything happening in North Smiths, the more he was starting to seriously appreciate James’ glib little dismissal in the Order ops manual. The thing about conspiracies was, once you knew a group of people were lying to everyone and pulling off secret plans for their own purposes - possibly knowing this by being in one - then there was no real reason to hold back on making your own conspiracy.

  So finding a hidden spellbook that the last owner had booby trapped wasn’t surprising. And neither was finding the secret wall safe and extracting the letters from it; kept either as reference or maybe blackmail material.

  Simon took stock.

  There was a broad plan within the Mormon church, probably known to an estimated thirty percent of their membership within the state, to make broad use of magic to indoctrinate the next generation. There was a less well known plan to turn those kids into delvers, capitalizing on their experience with the magic system and their implanted beliefs. There was a different, but non-competing plan to turn humans into possibly Matrix-style batteries for one of the dungeons, by the dungeon life. There was a sub-group within that plan that was dungeon life that had earnestly converted to Mormonism, and a different sub-group that Simon had unearthed that weren’t really Mormons at all but were interested in profiting from knowing the home addresses of Ark’d people.

  And now, there was another splinter. Because whoever this guy and his minimum two partners were, they were secreting away spellbooks to teach to their demons, and planning for something that they alluded to as being ‘a day of judgement’.

  So that was worrying.

  ”The thing that bothers me here,” Simon spoke to himself, and also partly to his authority, the little guy wrapping around his right eye as a kind of monocle that helped him read the sloppy cursive handwriting, “is that whoever this was, was willing to drop everything and move his family into the ark project. And leave… all this behind?” Simon looked around the secret prison room.

  Something didn’t add up. Simon didn’t feel like he was going to be as available around the Lair this week as he’d planned. He’d finally found a thick thread in this investigation, and he was going to start pulling.

  _____

  The Lair’s restaurant was never really dark, but there were certainly times when it was less populated than normal. Now, at close to one AM, was one of those times. There were a couple people cleaning, and a handful of individuals at their own isolated tables either eating late meals or just wanting a quiet place to sit and work, but the expanded room was far emptier than the hectic days. Practically devoid of life at all compared to the aftermath of the Underburbs, before the Order had relocated the hundreds of people they’d temporarily taken in.

  “You look awful my dude.” Was the first thing Tyrone said to Spire-Cast-Behind when he hobbled up to her table, the darker and now unfortunately bald human propping a cane against the edge after lowering himself into a chair.

  ”You are one to talk.” Spire replied without malice. “Your head appears that someone has ruined a perfectly good raisin.”

  Tyrone’s hand was halfway to covering up his head before he croaked out a laugh. ”Okay that’s probably racist.” He told her. “I’ll forgive you this time. Cause we’re friends, and I’m celebrating.”

  ”The occasion?” Spire asked politely.

  ”Not dead.” Tyrone shrugged.

  Spire probably could have guessed that. She also could have prepared better for this moment, but it still caught her emotions off guard, and her response was a long time in coming. “I am glad you are alive.” She said eventually.

  ”Sure.” Tyrone waved a hand dismissively, taking clear effort to do so. He was alive, he wasn’t healthy at the moment. “So hey dude. You look awful?”

  He was doing the thing humans did when they didn’t want to be direct. Spire hated it. It made her feel like she was being forced to decide if she wanted to be in a conversation, instead of just having a conversation.

  There was an older version of Spire, who was more of a camraconda and less of a member of the Order, that would have simply cut directly to the intended question. But she was frustrated and angry and even if that wasn’t Tyrone’s fault, somewhere in her mind she had already decided to give him a hard time for his conversation patterns. “I am pleased you are so focused on my appearance. But I am not interested in a relationship founded upon how I look.”

  Tyrone’s mouth moved soundlessly as he swung his hands in a very human motion of utter confusion. He only took a few moments of sputtering to catch up though. “Hey! I’m trying to be a good… uh… coterier here!”

  ”You are not the first one to use that word. I know it is not a real word, because the basic camraconda voice program won’t pronounce it. Who told you that you were allowed to make up words?”

  ”Don’t wanna know who started calling the paladin teams coteries?” Tyrone’s toothy grin was intensely aggravating, mostly because he was correct, and she did want to know that.

  Spire just hissed softly and made sure he noticed that she adjusted her position to look back down at the tablet she was watching. “We both know it was James.” She said. Incorrectly. “What is a coterier?” Her voice had no problem with the pronunciation, no matter how much it borrowed from French and their desire to exterminate the spoken r.

  ”Just a dude in a coterie.”

  ”And you are in my coterie now?”

  Tyrone started to spread his arms, and then hid a grimace of pain at the stiffness he was still feeling. ”We traveled the world together!” He said, and the corrected before Spire could. “We traveled parts of three states together! I can be your squire. Riho probably counts too, dude could be your… uh… aide de camp.”

  ”Typically I would expect someone’s vocabulary to decrease when they were stabbed so hard all of their magic fell out.” Spire-Cast-Behind said, and for the first time in her life, regretted a sentence the instant it was out in the air. Sucking in a sharp breath, she started to say something else. “I am-“

  ”Nah, you’re cool, you’re cool.” Tyrone’s lips were smiling but the mood was dampened. “You wanna know something wild?” He asked as he slumped back in his chair, and Spire turned her full attention to the human. “It’s kinda refreshing.” She gave him a tilt of her head, and Tyrone’s smile gained back a little life. “All the magic being gone, you know? Really gives a dude a feeling of vibrant and personal perspective!”

  Spire continued the questioning loop of her stare. “You have not used your loot drop?” She asked. “I know it cannot be copied, but. All of that. So many orbs. Your lesson.”

  Tyrone nodded along as she talked, but started speaking himself with a shrug. “I’ll make it up.” He said. “You know what’s cool though? I’m still me.” The human, older than she was but still young by the other species’ standards, laughed. “I didn’t even feel it bugging me! But you’re right, my dude! All those skills, all that stuff. Half our magic changes people. And… what if it changed me into someone else, yeah? But it didn’t. I’m still the same guy I was. I just… know less stuff. And also I can’t bench as much. Oh! You know what’s neat though?”

  ”Much of what you just said.”

  ”Yeah sure whatever. I’m talking about actually neat, cause it gives us a lens into the divide between magical additions and adaptive human neuroplasticity. See, I lost all the skill ranks, but the ones I was using for stuff, like, on purpose? Dude, I know a lot more than I should. Like my brain took all the bonus stuff and made it mine. Very cool stuff.”

  He seemed so proud of himself, Spire found herself giving an amused stuttering hiss despite her overall mood. She wouldn’t have said she was close with Tyrone if pressed, but there was something about a month long road trip series of adventures with a person that was something of a social crucible. And so Spire had developed, perhaps as a defensive measure, an amount of fondness for the way the human’s casual speech patterns were often woven with elaborate and specific language.

  She gave him a slight incline of her head. ”So you will be starting over?” She asked.

  ”Yup, yup. Back to square one. I’m gonna get a better orange job this time, I can feel it in my… uh… whatever part of a person is responsible for optimism.” He laughed. “Any suggestions for your squire?”

  ”Everyone in my coterie is required to…” Spire stopped talking. Her words just ending as she found that she didn’t really want to say the non-joke about finding the right orb combination to keep them alive forever. “I am glad you did not die.” She said, hewing off on a tangent as she looked away from Tyrone. “A friend of mine did.”

  The human froze, the smile slipping off his face before he sagged deeper into the chair. “Aw, shit dude. I’m sorry.”

  ”Everyone says that.”

  ”Yeah, it’s cause no one has a word yet for ‘I’ll turn on the machine that fixes that’.” Tyrone said, face pulled into a grimace. “That sounds stupid. Everything sounds stupid when things get serious. So, I’m sorry dude. You gonna be okay?”

  Spire didn’t know. “Yes.” She said out loud. “Are you?”

  Tyrone scoffed at her with a huffing sound from deep in his chest. “I’m fine!” He declared. “Look, Deb let me out of bed and everything.” A statement that was technically true, but might have been a little deceptive. “I mean, hey, Deb’s home and asleep, so she wasn’t there to stop me, which is the same, right?”

  The camraconda gave her companion a flat stare, her lens glinting under the restaurant’s soft lighting. “I do hope you are not counting on me to avenge you.” She said. “Because you are going to die when Deb catches you.”

  ”Only if no one tells her! Also I have a powerful need to eat onion rings.”

  ”At two AM.” Spire commented. “Even I know they do not-“ A young human set a plastic basket with a red and white checkered paper lining on the table between them, the container overflowing with steaming battered brown rings still glinting with hot oil. “-well then.”

  ”Thanks little dude!” Tyrone said as he grabbed one of the deep fried morsels, took a bite of it, and immediately started making pained sounds.

  Next to him, the other human sat down. This one a lot younger, and someone Spire-Cast-Behind also knew from her errancy, though in a more unfortunate way. “Did you ask her yet?” Karl asked Tyrone.

  ”I’m working up to it, keep your pants on my guy!”

  ”I had time to make you onion rings while you worked up to it.” Karl’s quick retort was delivered with pure teenage confidence.

  Confidence that melted at Tyrone’s own reply. “You ask her then. She’s right there, staring at us.” He pointed at Spire, who was, in fact, staring. Though mostly she was wondering if unhinging her jaw and consuming the entire basket of onion rings would be considered rude, and not staring at the bickering humans.

  ”I am not.” Spire-Cast-Behind had gone back to trying to watch Star Trek. “I am waiting for a point to be spoken.”

  ”I want to go into the dungeons!” Karl declared a little too loudly, mustering his courage and quickly finding he had more to say. “I’m a big guy, I know I can handle myself, and I don’t want to be defenseless for the next time.” He rattled off points with assembly line speed. “I’ve already been living here for months, I need some way to get job skills since I can’t afford college, and you know I’ll be loyal if you let me join your team! Because, because… you did get me out of Ophiem.”

  That was technically true. The fact that Karl was one of only a few people to survive was, apparently, incidental to his desire to leave home. Spire looked at the young human with an appraising look, before turning back to her video. “Agreed.” She said.

  ”I know I’m younger than most- wait what?”

  Tyrone brandished an onion ring at her, bits of fried breading sprinkling onto the table. “Kinda surprised too. You know the dude tried to sneak onto a delve, right?”

  ”A proud tradition for our youth, apparently.” Spire-Cast-Behind hissed in frustration. “Are you both trying to undo your argument?”

  The onion ring swung across Tyrone’s chest to point at the other person at the table. ”His argument!”

  ”No!” Karl protested. “I just didn’t think you’d say yes.”

  “You are an adult, by some human standards.” Spire said. “You are not my charge, you are my friend. I assume.” She let some of her fangs slip out in a tired smile as Karl gave a frantic nod. “Is there some reason I should not treat you that way?”

  ”Dude can’t get drunk.” Tyrone pointed out.

  ”I don’t get drunk either.” Spire said. “It has failed to impact me negatively.”

  ”Can’t rent a car?” Tyrone suggested. “That’s one of those things that has a waaaay more arbitrary and unjust vibe to it though, if you know what I mean.”

  Spire hissed at him. ”I do not. I also can’t rent a car. Why does it feel as if you are taking a side that does not exist?”

  ”Oh! Weed’s legal now! He can’t buy weed.” And then before Spire could make the same counter-argument for alcohol, Tyrone continued with a distant look in his eyes and a grin like he was holding back laughter. “Yeah yeah, you don’t enjoy the devil’s lettuce either, I get it. Which sucks! Because it’d be reallllly funny to see a stoned camraconda.” He opined.

  Ignoring the person who was somehow one of the people Spire trusted to watch her back, she turned her attention fully to Karl. “Why do you want to be a delver?” She asked, her synthetic voice perhaps making it sound like a sharp readjustment in topic.

  ”I… I just want to.” He replied, recoiling slightly from the focus in her mechanical stare. “Isn’t that how a lot of people are?”

  ”No.” Spire undulated her upper body but kept herself locked onto Karl’s own eyes instead of just shaking her head. “It is not. Everyone has reasons. Real reasons. I will not dismiss you for being young, but I will hear your reasons before I give you my support.”

  Karl nodded and started answering without even taking a breath. “I sort of said already.” He said. “I need to be stronger. Everything is dangerous, and I… I’m glad you saved me, okay? I’m glad I’m here. But I don’t want to be a survivor again. I want to be able to fight back when something happens.”

  ”What is something?” Spire’s words were effortless as she refused to take an easy answer.

  ”Something! You know, anything! Like the giant monster that ate home!” Karl’s voice rose as he subconsciously rapped his fingers on the table.

  ”So you wish to fight monsters.” Spire batted his answer into what she knew was the wrong interpretation just to see what his reaction would be.

  And it turned out it was annoyed. “No! I mean, yeah! Kinda? I don’t want a monster to eat my life and kill people I know again, okay? So I guess I’ll fight monsters. And if I’m strong enough to fight monsters, I can save other people too.”

  ”So what is a monster?” Spire asked pointedly.

  ”Oh! Sorry, I guess that might sound weird.” Karl didn’t sound that sorry, but he did get a creeping red flush up his neck in embarrassment as he remembered he was talking to a camraconda. “I mean… you know! Things that hurt people for no reason!”

  ”So if someone has a reason, they aren’t a monster?”

  ”If it’s a good reason, maybe?” His head whipped to the side as Tyrone tried to turn a snicker into a cough and failed. “What does it matter?”

  Spire straightened herself up in the cupped seat she occupied, showing off more of her long body than when she was just relaxing. “It matters because if you are a delver, you will need to make choices.” She told him. “You will often not have the luxury of orders, or protocol. You will have to think. And if you cannot do that now, you will not be better when you are hurt and tired and scared.”

  ”…Maybe I’ll realize I’m great at it under pressure?” Karl’s voice sounded like he wasn’t taking her that seriously. “I mean, I know what the Order’s motto is! I can just follow that, right? Just do what I can to help people!”

  ”Which people?” Spire’s voice was as steady as it ever was.

  ”Everyone!” Karl’s voice cracked as he tried to reply as rapidly as she asked questions.

  Spire nodded. “And what does everyone mean?” She pressed the young human.

  “It just means everyone!” He replied rapidly. “Like, everybody. Everyone who needs help, right?”

  Tyrone chimed in around the entire onion ring he’d shoved in his mouth. “Ya know, everyone probably includes some monsters.” He pointed out. “And not ‘lookin like a snake’ monsters,” he waved a flat hand up and down like he was presenting Spire-Cast-Behind to an audience, “I mean monster monsters. Some bad dudes that don’t deserve help, right?”

  ”I…” Karl stumbled at the tangential approach to this interrogation he hadn’t planned for. “Okay, but…” he actually stopped talking. His eyes dipped down, all the confidence and fire leaving his posture as he looked at the remains of Tyrone’s deep fried snack like it could somehow offer him answers. He didn’t say anything for a while; long enough that Spire went back to watching her tablet, and Tyrone went back to showing off how crispy the kitchen’s new deep fryer could make things. Until eventually, Karl said one of the things Spire had been hoping to hear. “I guess I don’t know.” His voice was sullen.

  Spire-Cast-Behind gave him another camraconda nod. “And that is a good answer.” She said.

  Karl’s eyebrows rose as he looked up at her, but it was Tyrone who gave a more complete explanation. “You wanna know the best way to deal with a bad person is?” He asked. “Usually it’s to make them less of a bad person. So we just do that. Using a sword on the bad guys will stop those bad guys. Using tactical restorative justice won’t just stop them, it helps stop the next bad guys.” He shrugged as he rustled the plastic mesh basket, sifting the surviving crumbs into a pile at the bottom. “It’s the proven sociological method central to the strength of the Order of Endless Rooms. Man.”

  Spire gave her knight friend an irate narrowing of her lens. “You are allowed to speak normally.” She told him.

  ”Nah, I’m too cool.”

  Karl took a nervous breath and squared up his shoulders. “So… what now? Can I go into a dungeon? I know I don’t know all that stuff you’re talking about, but I can learn it if it means I can get magic! And I do want to help too, even if it’s not the same way you do!”

  ”I am aware.” Spire said. Ultimately, she was concerned by what felt like a form of greed from the human. But she was also aware that magic was not something that humans normally got to experience, and there was an excitement to it that she definitely understood; she felt it herself with new dungeons and new encounters. She was still not certain; after all, she’d just seen the much more mature example of Morgan, and he had been missing some key part of being a delver. But she would never know if she didn’t take chances. “I will say yes. For now. One, two delves to acquaint you. And then we will talk more.” She looked at Tyrone as Karl’s eyes lit up and he had to hold himself back from vibrating through his seat. “I am going north tomorrow. Can you show him the Office and Library?”

  ”Yeah, sure.” Tyrone said. “But, uh… you know I’m supposed to be doing the R&R stuff, right?”

  ”You are going to ignore that, no matter what I say.” Spire knew him too well from their time on the road. Tyrone didn’t approach his careless attitude with the same self-destructive tendencies that Momo had, or the self-sacrificing nature of James. It was more that he was so convinced of his own indestructibility that he would try to push through such minor concerns as ‘food poisoning’ or ‘having a broken thumb’. He wasn’t intentionally hurting himself, he was just cheerfully stubborn. “And while you are doing that, figure out what you are doing with your loot drop.” She ordered, since apparently he was putting himself in her chain of command.

  Tyrone gave her a thumbs up. “Oh, that one’s easy! You take it.”

  “What. I not no.” Her speech slipped back to a pattern she’d thought she’d gotten out of the habit of as she was caught completely off guard.

  ”Yeah, it’s yours. Like I said, I’m good. Got a fresh start on this stuff, and it’s not like I can dump all these BurbBucks into it without it trying to off my ass and Deb finishing the job. So its yours. Probably useful for a paladin to have it, but seriously dude, I don’t wanna think about it, so I’mma just let you decide. I’ll get you a list of everything in there before ya go.” He stood, sweeping a hand across his side of the table and banishing a small army of crumbs. “Okay, I’m exhausted, I’m going back to bed.”

  ”You are exhausted because you nearly died.” Spire reminded him. “And you ignored our best doctor.”

  ”Yeah, that’s where the loot drop came from, I was there dude, I know.” Tyrone gave her a pearl-white grin. “You, though!” His grin turned menacing as he loomed over Karl. “Meet me in the lobby at 8 AM tom… today. And we’ll make sure you don’t trip on a chair and die three meters into OM.” Tyrone tried to stretch and kept at it even though he was clearly in a great deal of pain. “If you’re gonna be in her coterie, you gotta be good enough, right dude?”

  ”Yeah. Yeah! I can do that.” Given a direction and a challenge, the part of Karl’s brain that was firmly rooted in the experience of being nineteen years old and human activated like a sleeper agent, getting an agreement from him whether he actually thought about it or not.

  Spire just hissed at her friend. “No gatekeeping my coterie.” She ordered.

  ”See, you do have a coterie!”

  ”Get out of here.”

  Spire-Cast-Behind was left alone with her empty table and her hard drive full of Star Trek episodes. At some point, she planned to get hot chocolate to go with it, and have a complete experience. At no point did she plan on sleeping. She didn’t feel like she could do that right now, and fortunately, the purple orb that reduced her need for sleep even by just twenty minutes was here to help her out on her quest to be awake forever.

  Or at least until she was in the car tomorrow, and surrounded by people. That would be a safe time to nap, probably. Until then, she wasn’t thinking about anything except how impressive Spock was.

  And also what to do with an orb the size of her head filled with magic from five different dungeons.

  Spire didn’t want a coterie at all if this was what it was going to pile onto her list of problems.

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