"Get consent if possible and the curse allows." -Jacob Burgess, The Panalysts; I Have Two Goblets-
_____
The late November Oregon morning was, in James’ personal opinion, only a little bit as bad as being repeatedly kicked in the spleen.
The sky was still dark, but the creeping reminder that the sun existed was slowly turning the clouds from invisible black blankets into a barely visible churning storm cauldron. And the clouds themselves were a lingering threat that it was going to dispense either freezing rain or wet snow depending on how the world was feeling later. The ground was still covered in a layer of frost, with an endlessly persistent chill wind stripping away any lingering warmth left on those unfortunate enough to be outside.
Except James, who had gotten a new imbued shirt that kept him warm. This time though he had another shirt underneath it, for when he inevitably got stabbed. And even that magic wasn’t quite enough, so he’d layered his coat and a fluffy hat that looked like a penguin that Sarah had given him on top of it.
”O-kay!” Alanna’s voice pushed through the wind as she set a heavy red and white cooler in the back of the van in the Lair’s parking lot. “That’s the food. Which, I still think, is a bit overkill.” She dusted off her hands, looking perfectly at home in the cold air despite wearing her thin workout gear. Setting one palm on James’ head, he felt the sensation of everything getting lighter as Alanna passed back the part of his strength that she’d borrowed to him.
”The new guys don’t know how much of their hometown is under new management.” James said, tugging his coat’s collar closer just looking at Alanna’s exposed skin and feeling a sympathetic freeze. “So playing it safe.”
”I know, I know.” Alanna craned her neck to the side, stretching out her tightly developed muscles. “I’m just saying we could fit another camraconda in this thing if we cut some of our cargo.”
Zhu, manifestation also hiding inside James’ coat and making it look like he’d been puffed up from the inside, called out from the shelter he’d chosen to take. “I’m just saying I don’t want to share a brain with someone who got food poisoning!”
”Touche.” Alanna pursed her lips. “Also if we actually wanted to we could fit two or three more bodies in here anyway. But I’m happy to sideline Anesh from the danger this time. So, what’s next?”
James started running through their travel checklist. Everyone’s basic travel luggage, food, orb stockpile, twenty telepads, the usual things people needed on a road trip, even a short one, were all there. Things that someone from the Order might need on a sortie were also present; neatly packaged cases with their combat armor stacked in the back of the van next to the sealed and secure crate that held their heavier weaponry. Also one suitcase that was just assorted dungeontech, placed at the top of the pile so nothing got crushed before it was supposed to be. There was a little space left in there with a dog bed placed in it, which James felt was kind of weird and insulting, but Spire assured him would be very comfortable for her during the drive.
Spire didn’t get carsick. It wasn’t a camraconda thing, it was just her, and it was deeply unfair.
“Uh… us, I guess.” James said, finding that the van was fully loaded. “Unless you wanna add anything last minute.”
”I still think we should be bringing the Climb wand we made!” Zhu’s muffled voice came from inside James’ coat.
James rolled his eyes so Alanna could see as the two walked side by side back up the little concrete wheelchair ramp to the front door of the Lair. “We are bringing wands.” James argued, knowing damn well that wasn’t what Zhu meant. “We’re not loading a whole-ass unattached traffic light into a van that, while admittedly spacious, is already going to hold five physical people and all their stuff.”
One of Alanna’s hands tugged the heavy door open for her partner. “Hey, so, what’s that wand do anyway?” She asked.
”It’s the one Zhu and I made that stores a ton of one kind of spell Breath, and then acts like an improbable useless Bond villain trap as it sweeps an ominous green light over an area looking for someone to cast the spell.”
Alanna swatted at James’ ass as he tried to dodge away from her, both of them laughing as they reentered the Lair’s warmer atmosphere. “Seriously, why’d you make that?”
”Well, I just wanted the mana pool, all that other stuff I said was mostly unintentional.” James defended himself and his predilection for odd imbuements. “Anyway the point was to see what Cathedral Sanctum does. Cause no one can cast it without just fucking dying.”
”Oh! So, like, the thing can take bits of Breath without you having to cast the whole spell? That’s cool. Wait, do all the wands do that?” Alanna held a finger up to her lips with a thoughtful tap. “We should be making a fuckton more wands, and loading them up with Mountain casts.”
”They all use Mountain spells.”
”No like the one spell with Mountain in the name.”
James blinked rapidly ”Oh!” He said as a yawn overtook him so powerfully that he could feel it making Zhu tired too. “Sorry, I didn’t sleep much.”
”Aaaaand I’m driving.” Alanna declared. “So, where’s…” she trailed off, looking around the six AM variant of the Lair’s lobby, where there were only a few other people, one of them was a ratroach sleeping on a beanbag in the far corner, and two of them were the people on duty at the allocation counter.
”Oh, it’s in the basement.” James answered the wrong question. “Bill’s been slowly charging it up with the spell about ten Breath a day. So we’ll get to know when we get back.”
”No, not where’s the wand.” His girlfriend clapped her hands around his chest and back and gave James a good friendly shake to wake him up. “Where’s our crew for this adventure?”
Voice oscillating as he was ragdolled around, James tried to point behind Alanna. ”Spi-i-i-i-re is he-e-e-ere already!” He got out as he was released from the grip.
Alanna stepped around James like she hadn’t been torturing him for information with a smile on her face. “Morning Spire. You ready for today?”
”I am less than excited.” Spire said, her voice as even as ever though her body language looked exhausted. “I am going to go wait in the vehicle.”
Clearing his throat, James started to raise a hand in a hesitant gesture. ”Yeah, so, it’s got three rows of seats, you can just take the back-“
”I will be in the trunk thank you.” Spire-Cast-Behind said as she pressed against the door’s lower lever and slithered outside, a thin green glow from around her neck illuminating her as her authority kept her from freezing on the way to the van.
”I worry about her.” Alanna said flatly. “We should do something nice for your paladin.”
”Our paladin, comrade.” James said automatically. “But yeah, agreed. I don’t know what though. Maybe get her a hobby. Let her know being a paladin doesn’t have to be a full time thing.”
”It is for you.”
”Though it is for-“ James cut off as Alanna beat him to the words, laughing softly. “Yeah, yeah. Alright, where’re the other two? Also, you remembered to say goodbye to Anesh, right?” He elbowed his girlfriend as the two of them leaned on the row of spatially manipulated lockers by the main entry.
Now it was Alanna’s turn to roll her eyes. “I’m getting a lot of xp in the skill of saying goodbye to a polycule.” She said. “Anesh, Sarah, Anesh, Aensh, Arrush, Keeka, you, Sarah, and Anesh. I got ‘em all.”
”I’m… on this road trip…” James’ tired confusion didn’t stop him from making his voice sound comically pitiful. Then, as his brain punched through the fog of sleep, he spoke more normally. “Hey, hang on. Why is Sarah on there twice? Is there another Sarah? And you’re counting Arrush and Keeka, but not Zhu?”
”A, Zhu’s on this trip.” Alanna ticked off on her fingertips, her sharpened nails making crisp rasps against themselves. “B, just because I’m not, like, dating-dating Arrush doesn’t mean I can’t tell him to take care and that I’ll miss him, and he was at our apartment anyway, and then Keeka was there too, so it was a package deal. C, uh, no just one Sarah. I just got distracted.”
James turned his head up to see how much his girlfriend was blushing. It was, he estimated, maybe a three out of ten. So not too distracted. “Anesh is secretly glad he’s not coming.” James said. They both knew it, but saying it out loud was kind of different. “I don’t actually worry about him, but I am glad he’s getting to live his magical life more the way he wants, and not just as a member of our adventuring party.”
”Agreed.” Alanna nodded. “Also it feels so fucking weird when you do that.”
”Do what?”
”Estimate how I’m feeling.”
”You can tell?” James raised his eyebrows.
”Buddy, I can tell which of your many boyfriends you’re thinking about based on the flavor of your passion.” Alanna said with a grin. And before James could ask, she held up a hand. “I cannot tell when you’re thinking about me because I’m always around when the Empathy is on, so I can’t do a double blind trial.”
James tipped his head sideways to impact her shoulder, a peaceful grin on his face. “I love you.”
”Yeah yeah. So seriously, where are our new guys?”
A burst of orange light pushed its way out of the end of James’ coat sleeve and through the collar that he’d loosened while they waited inside. Zhu erupted from out of his hiding place with feathers and eyes still ready to be tucked back if needed. “Jubilance and Tylor are going to be here in about forty seconds, they’re waiting for the elevator right now.”
”That a thing you can do now?” James asked, a bit surprised Zhu knew that so specifically. Normally he was about getting places, not other things arriving at his place.
”Nah, I asked Plan. They’re doing better! Anyway, we should get in the van, preemptively. Just for a little bit. And then for the whole drive. Ooh, actually, if James is tired can I drive?” Zhu addressed the question to Alanna, knowing full well which person was most likely to give him the answer he wanted.
Alanna didn’t even look down, just letting James rest his head on her stoic form. “Get a license and we’ll talk.” She said.
”Actually good idea. I’ve got fifteen seconds, hang on.” Zhu’s form flowed into an arrow of orange light, peeling off of James to shoot down to the floor and then away from the two humans at high speed.
”Well that’s ominous.” James muttered. “Also yeah, Plan’s feeling a lot better. It’s weird, their manifestation is what got hurt, you know? I feel like they should be able to just reset, but I guess assignments don’t work that way.”
Alanna huffed out a heavy breath. “Yeah, and I’m not gonna miss being late to things.” She said. “I know Planner is special and cool. But we should think about how to handle it if they get hurt again. Because what Plan does is, it turns out, fuckin’ vital for us.” Alanna mused, turning a hand over and running fingers over a wrist that hadn’t worn a watch since middle school as she spotted a pair of humans heading their way. “Ah, fresh faced fools for our journey.” She intoned dramatically.
”Whatever.” Jubilance’s voice held a small drop of venom. “Too early. We going now?”
”Yeah, van’s loaded. Grab a seat.” Alanna’s face flicked toward the front door, and the ironically named woman walked past, swearing at the cold outside.
Tylor rubbed the back of his neck as he watched her go. “Sorry about her. Joob’s not a morning person. I think she planned to sleep in and hope no one would mind waiting an hour.”
James and Alanna gave a unified singular heh of laughter. “Yeah that doesn’t work here.” James said. “You feeling okay about this? I know we’re working with a faster turnaround time than normal.”
”You don’t have a single clue what normal means, don’t lie to me.” Tylor commented as he fumbled to zip up his bright blue jacket. “But it’s cool. We’ve got a few days on the road, right?”
Alanna glanced at James, then back at the newly joined delver. “Did you send Joob to the briefing while you did other things?” She asked.
”Oh, don’t call her that.” Tylor said as a cheerfully upbeat warning. “And yes.”
”Yeah, it’s not a super long drive.” James said. “We’re pretty sure we know the limits of how far they can detect teleports, so we added fifty percent to that and made a deal with a farm southwest of Hanley for the use of a chunk of their unused acreage for a little bit. It’s, like, an hour driving to get to where we leave from, then maybe two hours driving into Saskatoon.” He paused. “I still love saying Saskatoon.”
”The novelty wears off.” Tylor assured him. “You guys can teleport cars?”
”Well, sort of.” James admitted, figuring he’d explain the powers of logistcor teleports on the road. “The important thing is it preserves a kind of ‘straight line’ that navigators can make use of. So while Zhu had words for me about how I turned an adventure into a commute-”
”It was kinda cute to watch.” Alanna interjected.
”-this lets him, and also a few of our other navigator friends, map out a route for us that includes at least one relevant chance encounter. Which should kick off our investigation.”
”And you don’t just have them do that all the time becauuuuuse…” Tylor held up a hand, wanting to guess the answer himself. “…I mean I guess you’d need a long trip every time. Does the trip have to be ‘legit’ to work? That’s how I’d do it.”
”That, and navigator routing can have some unforeseen costs.” James admitted. “But yeah, accounting for someone wanting to go to Wendy’s, which I presume you have in Canada, and the roads not being cleared all the way, we’ll be there around noon.”
”So less time than I said to get used to going home again.” Tylor nodded. “Okay. Cool man, s’cool. I can handle this.” He took a long breath, closing his eyes and moving his hands slightly like he was meditating. “Yeah. I’m gonna go have an emotional crisis in the van.”
”Kay. We’ll be out in a minute.” James told him, shaking his head as the guy left before turning up to Alanna. “This might be a bad idea.”
She shook her head with a frown that she’d been hiding from Jubilance and Tylor. “I think the bad idea starts with them hiding something from us.” She said. “I dunno man, they don’t feel hostile, but there’s some weird concerns in their aura. They haven’t told us everything.”
”Yeah.” James let the word rumble out of his throat. “I’m not happy about it.”
She sighed. ”So… how ruthless are we gonna be about this?”
”Two out of ten?” He offered, and tried to get her to smile back at him. “Seriously. We’ll find the truth sooner or later, and if they aren’t trying to use us to hurt people, it’ll probably be sooner with them around. We can add their dungeons to our spreadsheet, make hopefully peaceful contact with their shadow people, probably be minorly heroic. The usual.”
”Our usual is fucking weird buddy.”
”Ain’t it just.” James smiled as he saw Zhu taking a ninety degree turn around the stairwell door and angling straight for his face. Holding out one arm like a falconer, he let the navigator slam into him with minimal actual force, feathers and eyes blooming across James like an avian shockwave. “Welcome back. You ready to go?”
”Yes!” Zhu peeled a set of talons off of James’ arm, his own limb clutching something he’d brought with him from the basement. “Also check it out!” He held up a rectangle of plastic, which appeared to be, improbably, a driver’s license.
Alanna delicately plucked it from him with two fingers. “This is for Kentucky.” She said.
”Yeah!”
”And it has a photo of you.”
”Right? Very strange.”
”Well.” She looked at James. “I guess we gotta let him drive. I did promise.”
James bit his lips shut to avoid either laughing or saying something stupid as he turned and headed for the parking lot. Doing one last check to make sure he had all his normal devices mundane and magic on his person, he did allow himself a little laugh as Zhu screeched and burrowed back under his coat when he opened the Lair’s door. “Alright, I could use some relaxing anyway. But I’m taking the wheel when we’re in Canada. I was a citizen once, I think it’s more legal for me to drive there.”
_____
The situation that Jubilance and Tylor had brought to them was, in general, fucked.
Normally, the Order held a mindset that James had built into it, that they should act quickly when they saw problems they could solve. If there was someone who needed help, if there was a situation that required action, the Order should move.
Sometimes they would miss things, and like apparently everyone else on the planet they were vulnerable to being made to miss things, even if they were more defended than most against memetic attacks. And a lot of what they targeted was from what crossed their path, and not the result of targeted research, which meant they were often scattershot in their approach.
The whole thing with Utah was a great example. One day, JP came back with some weirdly specific and mildly useful potions. And now, the Guild of Alchemists had been dismantled, the Order grew the core ingredient for a whole potion industry in bulk, the Mormon church was apparently involved en masse in multiple magical projects and dungeon explorations, and a team led by a paladin was busy hunting something like the fifth layer of a conspiracy that had as its stakes kidnapping and slavery.
So what if JP had, all that time ago, instead checked out Missouri instead of Utah? Not even somewhere wildly afield, just a different part of the US. Would the Order be safely farming and containing the Underburbs? Would the crocamaws not have a single hope of freedom? It was impossible to say what would be different. But it was also something that gnawed at James. The ever present question of, what if they’d been faster? What if they’d not waited?
So while their approach wasn’t perfect, he was determined to not wait on this one. Tylor and Jubilance were still hiding something, yeah. But they were honest in their fear, and their pain. They’d lost people, and that didn’t happen by accident. And as the Order continued to grow into the collective ability to rapidly turn new magic into new improvements for real life, so too were the paladins growing into their ability to identify an issue, form a strategic goal, and go to work. Really, James was realizing almost by accident, the paladin thing was even better than just ‘heroic people doing heroic things’, because all of them were capable of operating at high levels with minimal logistical support. They could just kick in the door and start causing problems, and that let them operate at the speed that could maybe cut off disasters before they ramped up.
Hopefully. Alex seemed like she was struggling with the whole sea monster thing.
But maybe this situation wasn’t. Even better, this time around, there was space to gather information and actually make a plan. Not a perfect one, but more than just launching knights at the problem. And it meant the Order had gotten a better picture from their new members about what was going on.
The city was called Saskatoon, a place that James had known existed, but still loved the mouth feel of every time he said it. And it was not, as Spire-Cast-Behind had assumed, a small town. It was a city, and a fairly populated one too. A quarter of a million people and another sixty thousand in the spread out metro area.
The city was an agricultural hub, and had biotech as a big part of its identity, and as far as the Order could tell, its economy was operating more or less normally, whatever that meant these days. It was described by tourism websites as ‘charming’ and by Jubilance as ‘a hive of crumbling brutalist architecture’.
It was also being taken over by something from one of its local dungeons.
Now. If dungeon life wanted to run for local office, James had the Order-standard opinion that they should be allowed to. In point of fact, at least two camracondas were running for local office for the city the Lair was located in. They came from here, they lived here, they should be allowed to participate. And he’d said as much to the duo too.
Which had gotten the clarification that no one had elected the shadow people. They’d just kind of started being present in places of concentrated power.
Jubilance’s companions had taken notice, right around the time the disappearances started. It was coincidental, because they’d sort of by accident stumbled into what looked like a hard drug production operation, and Jubilance and Tylor had helped some of their friends take it down. An action that might have kicked off the more overt action from their enemies, and also sparked the disappearances. Or which might have just made everything that was already happening a little faster and more noticeable.
Those disappearances weren’t hidden either. No memeplex, no infomorph attack, just people vanishing, and a little bureaucratic chaos until things stabilized. But this time, with people who could be traced back to the shadows, taking their orders from an external power.
That original group of companions, too, was interesting. Jubilance and Tylor had had one more friend themselves, but they’d worked with two other semi-separate groups. One of the other groups had also had three people, too, which James took note of. But once they’d joined together to investigate what was happening and try to provide a sort of delver’s union to stop the dungeon from messing with them too much, half the collective group had been killed over the course of a week. Then more casualties over a month, with their attempts to recruit more people stopping when their new allies kept dying.
So the response seemed disproportionate, just a little. And more than a little suspect. James wouldn’t be surprised if the reaction had been provoked, but Tylor was adamant that they had never actually gotten violent with the shadows, and that up until the whole takeover started, they’d even been able to barter with them in their home dungeon.
The way the man’s expression had changed when he talked about it made it believable. Either he was a very good actor, or he was legitimately furious that he and his friends had been attacked without provocation. And having spent some time keeping tabs on him at the Order, it seemed likely it was the latter; he was actually a pretty angry person, and he sucked at hiding it, even though he was clearly trying.
So that left the question then of what, exactly, the dungeon life was trying to take over. And the answer to that was, worrying, just about everything
The Canadian delvers didn’t have a timeline for the Order, but they had tried multiple approaches and met with resistance or disaster every time. The police had been compromised since before they even noticed. Hospitals in the area definitely at least had watchers and agents that reported anyone with odd injuries stumbling in. The fire department had been added to the enemy roster at some point when the delver team was larger, and that surprise had gotten someone killed.
For most people, life went on as normal. Because most people weren’t the ones being subverted or replaced. But those with authority, those with leadership positions, either government or corporate? One by one the options for help had vanished.
But life did go on. So the Order’s plan came in multiple parts.
First, determine what the end goal was. Then decide if that goal was evil or not. Because different wasn’t evil, and it really was possible this was just a cruel and unfortunate misunderstanding.
Second, because the odds of this being something solvable with diplomacy were actually quite low, get a full picture of the opposition and what their capabilities were. Not just the dungeon creatures taking over either, but any human allies that would be on their side if push came to gunfire.
Third, assuming it was possible at all with the resources the Order had, call in those resources, put them to use, and remove the invaders.
And fourth, and this part was something James was looking forward to putting into action far more than anything else, establish leverage.
Returning the city of Saskatoon to the way things were before, albeit with a few missing persons, was not good enough. If the Order of Endless Rooms was going to start fucking around making military decisions about the politics of a region - and it was that, no matter what ethics they held themselves to - then they weren’t going to just roll things back to the status quo.
The motto was “do good recklessly”. And James was determined to prove that part.
_____
Stolen story; please report.
“So how’s the authority doing?” James asked with a little more life in his voice now that he’d had some perfectly normal but very good coffee, and an hour long nap in the driver’s seat to help him out. That itself probably wouldn’t have been enough, but his limited boost from his Energy stat was picking up a lot of slack.
Jubilance and Spire were both sleeping in their claimed parts of the back of the van, while Tylor was focused on actually reading the operations manual that he’d apparently brought along to make himself carsick to. Next to James, Alanna was watching the landscape roll by with a languid posture, while Zhu hung off her arm out the window in a flurry of orange feathers. He was still upset that James wouldn’t let him drive once they teleported across the border, claiming that the Order didn’t obey most laws anyway, so why start now. And, that was fair, but James just wanted to drive for a bit.
“It’s pretty good.” Alanna said, not really having to work that hard to raise her voice over the wind coming through the open window and currently freezing anyone foolish enough to be on that side of the van. Which was why Tylor had moved. “I’m sorta… not giving up, but I’m done expecting them to ‘grow up’, if you know what I mean.” She held up her off hand, looking fondly at the woven dull green bracelet wrapped around her wrist.
”Like the… okay, can you drag Zhu back in here? I can’t hear a damn thing.” James laughed as he spoke, but he meant it. Alanna complied with her own smile, both of them ignoring Zhu’s rumble of indignation as he was taken away from watching the snow-covered highway from up close. “So like the shellaxies?”
”I guess, yeah.” Alanna shrugged in her seat. “I mean, we know what other infomorphs are like. We know how assignments grow up, we know how to nurture navigators, that’s all cool. We also, because Momo is a problem, know more about the factal bugs than I really want to.”
Zhu opened the hawk eyes that he had running down Alanna’s arm. ”Momo’s not a problem, she’s…” the navigator trailed off. “I mean Speaker says she’s doing a lot better. That counts for something, right?”
”Absolutely.” James said. “Also Momo dropped the factal-bomb plan she was working on after I stared at her for four minutes straight without saying anything and she decided her own frantic defense wasn’t good enough. Which is also an improvement.”
”Wow, her time is getting better.” Alanna nodded in appreciation. “Anyway. Authorities are uncharted territory despite them being around for a while. And I think mine is as tough as it’s ever gonna get.”
Unless, James thought but did not say, he made Alanna a paladin. Or unless she got elected to a position somewhere out in the mundane world, and the Order got to see how broader accepted authority worked with the odd infomorphs.
”Still not a person though?” James asked.
His girlfriend slapped her hand that had been hanging out of the van over one of the heating vents, absorbing every bit of warmth even if she didn’t need it. “Ah, but what is a per- alright, alright!” She barked out a laugh as James and Zhu pinned her with glares from two directions, even if one of those looks only lasted a second before their driver snapped his attention back to the road. “It’s more like a dog, though, yeah. I know these guys have personalities, but they’re all basically very loyal companion animals. That can shrug off gunfire.”
”That’s good cause I don’t want you getting shot.”
”Oh, I can get shot! It just won’t do as much.” Alanna ‘reassured’ him happily. “Honestly though, it makes me wish we had a higher spawn rate for these little dudes. I want a world where we find out what authorities can do for things like industry and infrastructure, not just… you know…”
James felt the smile on his face slide downward. “Our bullshit?” He asked.
”Yeah.” Alanna sighed out.
”Hey, uh, question.” A voice from the backseat got James looking in the rearview mirror to meet Tylor’s eyes.
Alanna twisted, propping an arm on the center console. “Sup?”
”Can you guys define maybe at least one of the nouns you just used? I feel like I’m listening to my cousins talk about video games.” Tylor asked plaintively. He made a sudden noise as the van hit a bump of packed ice in the road, and while James easily kept the vehicle under control, he did smile a little at Tylor losing his grip on the printed operations manual, catching it again, and holding it facing the wrong way as if nothing had happened. “Or tell me what pages they’re on at least.”
Sounding like a muffled engine, Zhu’s manifestation flowed from Alanna to James so that he was on the right side to focus one of his eyes backward into the rear seats. “There’s only a few nouns, it’s not that bad.” He started, but did quickly get around to being helpful. “Assignments, navigators, and authorities are all species of infomorph. I’m a navigator, and we occupy navigational data, and grow out of journeys. Assignments can eat any structured information, and they can mess with memories a lot more, but they have a harder time growing up. And authorities are… uh…” he looked back at Alanna.
”Like the idea of a guard dog, maybe?” She offered.
”Okay! And they bond to a single person and then get stronger when that person gets promoted or recognized for a job. We think!” Zhu used the limb he had splitting off of James’ own hand on the steering wheel to shrug. “It’s complicated!”
”Right. Right. And factals?” Tylor asked, reorienting his book and flipping to the index.
”Bugs that eat words or names.” Zhu answered. “Sort-“
”Sort of. Got it. That’s your favorite term, huh?” Tylor cut the navigator off, getting a quiet pout from Zhu. “Ah, here’s the section. Sorry, done interrupting.” He leaned back away from them, returning to quietly and intensely reading.
Alanna eyed their passenger through the rearview mirror, and James recognized the way that her eyes steadied when she was trying to dig as deep as possible into someone. But he didn’t say anything, just smiled slightly and focused on the road.
The highway they were on was technically the fastest route, but it was slower than it should be, because there was snow. And while the snowfall itself was over and a lot of the fallen white flakes had been reduced to blackened slush by the passing of a thousand tires, that didn’t actually get rid of some of the potential delays. There were more than a few places where accidents required traffic to drop down to a single slow lane, or where snow hadn’t really been cleared and the road was abruptly a massive environmental hazard for a few hundred feet.
Mentally, James adjusted that to ‘about a hundred meters’. It was Canada after all, and the imperial system sucked anyway, even if he was used to it.
So they weren’t really making good time, though it wasn’t like they were on a deadline.
A few miles crept by in relative quiet as he navigated part of the road that had a sudden influx of traffic, before suddenly they found their van alone again on a winding stretch of pavement that went out to the cloudy horizon.
”You know what I haven’t been thinking about?” James mused, getting Alanna to stop humming and tapping her foot along to the music coming through the van’s stereo. She made a different kind of hum, one denoting curiosity, and James continued. “The holidays.”
”Oh shit, yeah. I was certain you were gonna say Springfield.” Alanna’s eyes widened as she checked her phone. “Holy fuck buddy, we missed Thanksgiving. How’d that happen?”
From the backseat, Tylor leaned forward again. “Uh…”
”American Thanksgiving.” James clarified. “Halloween too, if anyone’s keeping score. American Halloween.” He tacked on.
”Right. No, I get that, I’m not…” he rolled his eyes. “What’s up with wherever Springfield is?”
Alanna was starting to get annoyed with this character trait she was learning their new recruit had. “Seriously? We have security briefings and multiple news sources. Come on.”
Holding up his printed book like a defensive shield, Tylor ducked his head but didn’t lean back into his padded seat. “Hey, I know some! I know that guy JP was ranting about buying property there for something. Is that it?”
”Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that.” Alanna sighed.
Zhu tapped a talon on the center console. “Actually, not a bad idea. If the county is selling off the Big Chomp area for cheap, we could get a lot of it and build a really cool go kart track or something.”
”That’s not funny.” James said flatly.
”Sorry.” His friend’s voice also dipped as Zhu realized quickly he’d gone too far.
James took a breath and shook his head to clear it. “Also I think Nik and half the Horizon delvers are already building some kind of horribly unsafe driving course in Townton. Yes, we can check that out later.”
”Also,” Alanna added thoughtfully, “we could put quarantine facilities there?”
”We can’t really build those from nothing just like that.” James reminded her. “And if we could, we could just… put them anywhere? Actually we could build them in sealed Ominous Sphere configurations and just torpedo them into anywhere we need them, now that I think about it.”
Alanna blinked as she caught up. “Ooooh, logisticors, right. But wouldn’t that put any contaminated territory we were putting them into out? Like, out where the facility started?”
”Surround it with flamethrowers.” James and Zhu said in unison.
”Alright, that’s two votes for Team Burninators.” Alanna snorted. “You’re also still saying we should build the thing. Or hire people to do it for us, which is always slower. We need a full Order division for construction, I swear.”
James and Zhu, still operating in unison, both spoke at the same time. “Rebuilding.”
”What about regular building?”
”There’s enough stuff to rebuild, we won’t run out.” James said with cheerful grim humor.
”Guys.” Tylor thwacked his palms onto the shoulders for the two front seats. “Proper nouns! Please!”
James laughed as he eased off the gas, seeing a car ahead of them that he didn’t want to casually rear end in the snowy conditions. Their era of making good time was at an end, it seemed. “Getting away from the proper nouns he doesn’t know,” he addressed Alanna, “Christmas? Or any winter holiday? Maybe?”
”Christmas and Hanukkah are super weird to tell dungeon life about.” Alanna said, glancing back to check on Spire, but the camraconda was still sleeping or keeping her head down in the cargo compartment, covered by the last bench row of seats where Jubilane was still sleeping herself. “Solstice?”
”I could go for that.” James said. “Make our own tradition?”
”Lots of people celebrate the solstice you dumbass.” Alanna chuckled, turning to look out her window at the hundredth farm field they were passing. Covered in a layer of white and with no crops visible at the moment, it was still clearly an orderly form of human mastery over the land. “What’s Endless Rooms solstice look like? Orb ornaments? Orbnaments?”
”Hey, making up new words is my job in this relationship!” James countered playfully. “Also I had literally no thought beyond orbnaments and you stole that from me.”
”I’ll make it up to you later.” Alanna said, smiling out the window, hand on her chin. She felt more than saw the calm sense of love billow out of James like a fog bank. “Actually! Related to that! How about some kind of celebratory orgy?” Alanna’s smile turned into a sharp grin as she pierced through whatever expectations James had held.
James felt like he did a good job of not swerving into oncoming traffic as he recovered from his partner’s verbal strike. “You’re gonna make our guests think we’re weird.” He said.
”Yeah, hey, Spire told Joob that you guys weren’t a cult.” Tylor pointed out.
Zhu flicked a manifested claw idly. “Cults cannot possibly have a monopoly on orgies.” He said. “Wait, no, that’s the kind of thing someone in a cult would say. Have I been subverted?” He asked, multiple eyes twisting around in their feathered sockets to look up at James with false concern.
”I was thinking maybe some kind of shared creation tradition?” James decided to ignore all of them. “Like, gingerbread houses are fine I guess, but what if instead of gifts at all, we just had a tradition of making something together with people? I dunno, like I said, I literally wasn’t thinking about this, so I’m brainstorming from nothing.”
”I don’t hate that. And there’s always my idea if that falls through.” Alanna said, tipping her seat back so she could try to crack her spine. “What I do hate is that we’re doing, what, thirty? On a highway? We’re gonna miss our check in.”
”Hotels don’t just kick you out if you’re a couple hours late in the middle of the day. We’re not even late, we paid for the rooms, we show up when we want.” James reminded her.
From the back seat, as if summoned by the hint of things to come, Jubilance’s sleep-addled voice added a shout to the in-car conversation. “If anyone asks if we’re there yet I’m killing everyone in this vehicle!” A moment of awkward silence followed, with Tylor looking apologetically at the three people in the front seat. Then there was a stuttering hiss from the cargo, and Jubilance corrected part of her statement. “Everyone in a seat in front of me. Sorry Spi.”
”Oh yeah.” Alanna said in a quiet voice that only James could hear. “This is a great idea. This is gonna go so well.”
James tried his best to project the feeling that it’d be fine back to her.
But he did wonder if maybe he could have replaced half of their local guides with someone he didn’t feel like he had to be impressive in front of.
It wasn’t too late. They could always teleport someone in, if they didn’t mind getting noticed.
James knew that was a dumb idea though. And really, Jubilance and Tylor were fine people. There was friction with their personalities, and the Order ideal, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Plus they did know the city the van was steadily heading toward. And even before they’d gotten a little boost in ability from the Order’s own delves, they had been the kind of people that James would have found challenging to deal with if it had come down to a fight. And this was an opportunity to get to know them.
So he didn’t mind having them. Especially if they did decide to share their dungeon, and James could get his own wizard sanctum.
Even though, it turned out, that was kind of less critical to their activities than some of their other abilities.
James let the conversation lapse into silence as he kept driving, sharing a hand on the wheel with Zhu while they got every closer to Saskatoon.
_____
Tylor and Jubilance - or Jess, or Joy, or whichever of her names she had decided to have the most tolerance for that particular day - had an odd collection of powers.
By normal human standards, the powers were odd because people weren’t supposed to be able to do magic. Any powers were odd. But humans still had a long history of myths and legends, from ancient gods to modern superheros, and there was a kind of assumption about anyone who did have spells and powers and mutations.
They were supposed to follow a theme. Gods had their divine domains, superheroes had what fit into their costume style or origin story, spellcasters drew from singular sources. Even in the increasingly culturally relevant Dungeons and Dragons, the variance between a sorcerer and a wizard was both visible and coherent, no matter that they both threw fireballs.
Reality, though, or at least the constantly surprising and often amusingly dumb reality James found himself living in, disagreed with that. Dungeon magic, even within a single dungeon, could span multiple different metaphors or concepts entirely unintentionally. And so anyone normal looking at a list of what Joy and Tylor could do was going to wonder what the hell kind of magical mutation they had.
By Order of Endless Rooms standard, they were weird both because their magic was bizarrely coherent.
The growing development of language for dungeon taxonomy had led to the use of one new distinction for dungeon types. “Free” dungeons, and “mana” dungeons. The Office and Stacks were free, the Climb and Horizon were mana dungeons, and the difference was if they had two-part spells in some way. Breath and Velocity were neat, but they were, more than anything else anyone had ever found, themed. They were about something, and that was kind of weird for the places that often acted like especially chaotic random magic generators.
Within the boons you could get from a mana dungeon, a delver was likely to find powers that hewed toward the theme. Horizon spells were about motion and personally controlled vehicles, Climb spells were about temperature and altitude, that sort of thing. There were only slightly fewer exceptions than proofs, but it mostly held together. What did definitely hold together was that those dungeons were the only source of reusable and actively expressed effects.
Which was all fascinating to think about, but it was ruined by the fact that Tylor and Jubilance’s first dungeon didn’t fit the developing taxonomy. It wasn’t a place where you could cram an unlimited number of loot drops into your blood and expect to keep getting skill levels, but it also didn’t use a mana type, and its abilities were both free and reusable.
Despite being a couple hours of driving and two thousand miles away, James felt like he could still hear Nik and Davis wailing in despair. Or, more likely, Nik and Mike wailing in despair while Davis tried to get the younger Researchers to shut up and update the spreadsheet.
The other thing that made them weird was their use of two dungeons. Actually, aside from the Statuses Quos, James was hard pressed to think of any opponent that had made use of multiple distinct dungeons, not counting the Pylonic and Venture. The only people he knew of that did so were… them. The Order.
If no one had come in and killed them, would these new people have eventually been something like the Order of Endless Rooms? Was Jubilance on the path to being her own kind of paladin? Would Tylor have ended up as some kind of JP-esque figure? Would they have been competition, or allies, or maybe just a future branch office? Or would they have turned into another Guild of Alchemists waiting to be broken by someone furious at what they’d done?
It wasn’t possible to know those alternate timelines. But it wasn’t too late to find out.
As for the two dungeons, one gave the new delvers a possibly extradimensional space of their very own. The entrances were not under their control, but each upgrade could sometimes give them better options for where the things spawned or were used. What grew inside those spaces ranged from mundane materials or constructions of varying utility, to sources of potential wealth, to effects that felt an awful lot like green orbs.
Both of them had these, but while they used them often for escapes, neither of them had anything they felt was useful aside from that. Tylor’s had a garage that let him park cars through his entrances - they called them slips - and bring passengers along, but aside from a recharging stamina booster and a painting that showed the local weather conditions, he hadn’t figured out what half his own magic did yet. Jubilance was in a similar boat; she had a little cafe in hers that would gradually convert raw ingredients into pastries and drinks, and a metal tree that seemed to be a telepathic beacon of questionable value, but she admitted they’d been kind of frantic and unable to actually spend time poking stuff while they ran for their lives. She did have a mannequin that would recall any lost pieces of an outfit, though, which she used to ditch armor if she needed to blend in, and then retrieve it later.
When asked why they didn’t just lay low in their private worlds, James was told that those worlds lacked certain things like ‘the sun’ or ‘life support’. They had air, and that air seemed to recover over time, but spend too long in one and you were subject to CO2 poisoning.
Their other set of powers was more directly useful, and what they put to work for both delving and fighting on Earth. And that was the dungeon that was weird, because of how dead simple it was, in a novel way for the Order to see.
Go in, and survive, and eventually you would level up. Well, advance. The deeper in you went, the faster it would happen. They believed that winning fights helped, as did making things out of the stuff that spawned in there, but there wasn’t any dungeon-given information so James put that in the ‘maybe’ column. Either way, as with any Skinner box, the first couple advances came easy, and then progress started to stall, eventually seeming to dead end unless you went deeper.
Deeper and more dangerous and more likely to kill a delver. The opposite of the kinds of dungeons that incentivized people to fuck off.
Simple, though. And each advancement was simple too. Tylor told them you could feel it when it happened, and you’d stop advancing until you slept. At that point, you’d get a choice of abilities, in a way that sounded similar to the enforced dreamscape of the Sewer’s lessons. Abilities ranged in utility from party tricks to superpowers, but all of them had a finite number of uses every day, and from the sound of things, took actual focus and willpower to use, in contrast to most other dungeon magic that wasn’t absorbed blue orbs.
Jubilance was at her eighth advancement, and she’d doubled down on a couple of her abilities so she had less variety than she could have. [Projectile Deflection 10], [Move Through Glass 11], [Sunscreen 5], [Mild Improved Narcotic 3], [Cramp Prevention 6], and [Bonus Sauce 1] were her abilities. Two of them had been from early advancements when she had few choices, two of them had come after people had started shooting at her, and which ones were in which categories had not been what James had expected.
She described a lot of her magic as ‘flexible’. Like despite the names being broad and open ended, the spells had an intended use, and as long as you weren’t fucking around, they’d work the way you wanted. In sharp contrast to Office blues, which seemed to take ‘humans fucking around’ as the default.
Tylor, despite having never missed a delve that Jubilance was on, was only at his sixth advancement. But he’d accepted that, despite the two of them having been making plans for how to find ways to improve their leveling speed before it all went to hell. He’d never stacked advancements on the same ability, so he had the same number total as Jubilance did. [Adept Fingers 5], [Bounce 6], [Flame Protection 4], [Caffeinate 3], [Undo Spill 2], and [Ghost Bicycle 1] were his spread of powers.
He’d seemed embarrassed actually listing them. But James knew better than anyone how something innocuous and seemingly silly could save your life, or turn a crisis around at a critical moment. He’d shared some of his own bizarre magic in reciprocation, which had seemed to put Tylor more at ease
Their magic was odd. But then again, James figured, that was a little hypocritical for someone who had a phantom map living in his head, who was capable of regenerating fingers and detecting fungus, to say that someone else’s magic was odd.
It also wasn’t the sum total of what they could do. They were delvers, and more importantly, they were survivors. It was likely both of them were capable of things they didn’t even think of as useful skills.
But at least they weren’t going into the situation without knowing a little about what each part of their group could do.
_____
The line of the snowy highway cut through a hundred sprawling farms and an equal number of wild spaces too unprofitable to cultivate. A few times, they’d passed through small towns and once by a truck stop, areas where traffic picked back up and sometimes you even had to account for stoplights. But overall, the trip had continued with scattered bursts of light conversation amid the quiet tension.
Both Jubilance and Spire woke up at some point. The former had interrupted James’ turn to control the in car entertainment, which he had chosen to be a podcast about the history of basketball, to ask him a lot of questions about why he had basketball magic. The latter had, eventually, pulled herself over the stacked cargo and into the backseat, though Spire stayed quiet and seemed to be focusing on reading something through her skulljack.
At one point, Tylor had caught his friend’s eye, and jerked his head out the window in what was clearly a common signal to them. Alanna hadn’t asked what they were doing, but since they were currently in the middle of more farmland, it seemed likely it was just the two of them keeping track of slips into their pocket dimensions and informing each other about it.
When Alanna got her turn back and put on some kind of shamisen jazz music, she and James spent a few minutes being overly romantic with each other before the more boring of the passengers in the back seat - and also Zhu - politely demanded that they stop being saps. At that point, they switched to a casual debate on whether or not the Office ever planned to give them skill ranks in totem construction or camraconda athletics.
That was when Alanna learned that James had a skill rank in slithering, and also what happened to a person who used one of the mixed Underburbs loot drops. After she agreed to put her ire at him over hurting himself on hold, their conversation shifted to wondering what exactly decided how the Underburbs drops worked. Some gave skills, some gave powers, and it seemed like they could draw from other magics if you had them.
They stopped talking about it rapidly when Alanna felt the ocean of hurt that Spire was carrying around in the back of the van, switching to a more mundane topic.
And then, abruptly enough that it almost felt like being ambushed, the farmland gave way to buildings. Developed land spreading around the highway that itself added a couple more lanes. It wasn’t a complete transformation, but the road signs informing them that they were closing in on their destination put James on alert.
They were entering hostile territory, that just happened to look like a normal functioning city.
Zhu decided to ruin the mood. “I know you’re repressing the desire to ask how much longer this is going to take,” he said, the tenor of his voice filling the van over the muffled noise of tires on the road’s lingering slush, “but, what if, we extend that time just a little bit?”
”What? No! Why?” James asked his friend, the incredulity in his voice injecting some levity back into how everyone was feeling.
”Because this place has a race track!” Zhu announced. “The Saskatchewan International Raceway! And they do all sorts of racing stuff, and I wanna check it out. It’s just up ahead, it won’t be that long.”
”How do you even know that?” Tylor asked curiously.
Jubilance, having moved up to the seat next to him, delivered a jab to his shoulder that seemed a lot more violent than most of the play fighting James was used to with his own friends. “Dumbass. He’s some kind of car spirit. He can probably sense things going fast.”
”What?” Zhu laughed. “No! Don’t be silly.” No one rose to that bait of a comment. “I just have Google.”
James shook his head, letting out a breath in exasperation. ”Yeah, he’s got his own phone, which he makes me carry. I’m constantly overburdened.”
”You have eight pockets on those pants.” Alanna pointed out. “Wait, are those magic pants? You know that’s a bad idea.”
”They’re cargo pants.” James protested, before getting back to Zhu’s question. “We’re not stopping at the racetrack. Maybe on the way home.”
Zhu’s feathers bristled across James’ exposed arms. “You know we’re going to end up teleporting home.” He complained.
”Then we’ll go to the Portland raceway. Actually yeah, why do you never ask to go to the one near where we live?”
”There’s a race track in Portland?!” Zhu was way more excited about this than James had expected.
More than expected because James did know how navigators worked, as a species. And he knew that Zhu fed off of travel, even routine travel, and grew out of geographically complex journeys. Despite being from a dungeon that provided Velocity as a mana pool, navigators didn’t actually have a connection to speed itself.
Which meant that this wasn’t really about Zhu’s status as a member of his species. This was just… something Zhu thought was cool. He wanted to watch a drag race. Or, worst case, participate in a drag race, possibly involving this van, a thing that would absolutely expose at least some of their magic if the group took it seriously, or would end with them crashing a van if not.
Maybe a little dramatic, but James was kind of used to that with how his friends were with their hobbies.
”It’s cool that you’re into this. I promise we can check something out when we get back. I am not taking us to a place that Google says is closed for weather conditions, especially not when I want to get to our hotel and get out of this car.” James said, using his skulljack while driving in a way that would probably be illegal one day.
Despite Zhu’s pouting, they made it into the city, the metropolitan area giving way itself to the denser concentration of taller structures, heavier traffic, and a sudden lack of things like single family houses. Or easy parking.
Their hotel was in the downtown business district, and for how rote it was to get the van parked and their rooms checked into, it was likely that four mid-thirties people getting two rooms was the least interesting and most average thing that had happened to the front desk staff that day. Their system ending up compromised by a custom grown program that Ben was operating, showing that they were actually in slightly different rooms than they were physically occupying, was a little paranoid, but the Order had paid for those other rooms through an intermediary anyway so it wasn’t like they were stealing space.
Zhu stayed hidden, and Spire teleported into their room once they’d gotten there. “I don’t like hiding.” She said bluntly as she arrived.
”Yeah, I agree.” James told her, sitting on the end of one of the bed and enjoying the tenth floor view of the river outside. As always, the air in this new place felt different in a way that he always felt like he sounded crazy trying to explain to people. “And normally I’d say fuck it. But this time…”
”I understand. Simply don’t like it.” Spire replied, moving to the window to look down on the city herself. “Know it is temporary.”
”Yeah.” James nodded. “One day, probably one day soon, camracondas are gonna be recognized. I’m looking forward to it. Ask Alanna more when she gets out of the bathroom, she’s got political designs.”
Spire hissed softly. “I meant that while we are here we will cause a scene.” She said.
”It’s true,” Zhu added, “you can’t help yourself.”
”Okay now hang on.” James laughed. “I could maybe be subtle!”
”Doubt it.” Alanna said as she emerged from the bathroom with a hotel towel being grappled in her hands. “You’re gonna have to try though, we’re here for espionage.”
James nodded, taking a deep breath. “Yeah.” He said seriously. “Okay. Before we go meet the others to figure out where we’re starting tonight… open mind, right?” Spire and Alanna nodded. Zhu just fluttered on him. “We are here to learn. Not to start a fight, unless what we learn means we should.”
”No prejudging just cause they’re dungeony. Yeah buddy, I know.” Alanna laughed.
”I could not possibly not know.” Spire added.
Alanna set a hand on the camraconda’s boxy head. “Oh, don’t say that, plenty of people are idiots about their own problems.” She told Spire. “But yeah, I hear ya sparky. The Order special; making decisions based off evidence, not looking for evidence to justify our decisions.”
”Our true magic.” Zhu added with smug sarcasm.
”You joke, but it kind of is.” James sighed, pushing himself to his feet. “Okay. Let’s go get Tylor and Jo… Jubilance. God I’m gonna call her Joob and she’s gonna glare me to death, huh?” He snorted a laugh. “Whatever. Let’s decide who’s going where.”
”Yes.” Spire said with a sharp bob of her head. “This time, we are the sudden problem. I like this more.”
The four of them left their temporary home base behind, only having taken the time to drop off their stuff and rest for a half an hour. Next door, their companions for this operation were doing the same. And now, it was time to see what was wrong with this city, and how the Order could start working to put it right.
Hopefully without gunfire this time.
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