“There is no prize to perfection. Only an end to pursuit.” -Viktor, Arcane-

  _____

  A round faced man tilted his head up at James with a long-practiced look of exasperation. Pinched fingers clasped the edge of the rim of his reading glasses as he pulled them down, getting a look at James’ face and also revealing dark circles that still stood out against already dark skin. “Here to cause more trouble in my library?” MacDowell Shoemaker said.

  ”Correct.” James sat in the office chair he’d wheeled over. They weren’t out in the library proper, and instead he’d bypassed a keypad-locked door to get into the staff area of the library. “But not in the way you think!”

  ”Here to take my most useful junior librarian to his death again, then? Some other hell you’ve dug up?”

  James shook his head. “Vad’s at his grandfather’s funeral this weekend. How do you not know that? Also I’m trying to get him to use his fucking degree anyway more than I’m trying to get him to be a delver. Did you know he has a degree in agricultural engineering, and he never told us? He just pretends that he’s a human bookmark.”

  ”Oh believe me, I’m aware.” MacDowell sounded somehow more irate than he had with just James. “That boy could be a rich man if he applied himself.”

  ”Yeah, I’d say it’s weird that he’s so willing to throw himself into danger, if I didn’t get it.” James kicked his feet up onto a short two-drawer filing cabinet next to Shoemaker’s desk, precisely avoiding knocking over the basket of paperbacks or the cup of pens. He’d gotten really good at maneuvering around office supplies in his lifetime. “It’s pretty clear he’s got a little bit of the depression. And he doesn’t respond well to outside pressure to do more.” James gave the librarian a raised eyebrow.

  MacDowell readjusted his reading glasses and looked back down at his laptop, pecking away at the keys. “When you admitted you were here to cause trouble, I didn’t think you meant gossiping about my employee and wasting my time.”

  ”I’m also here to talk about the dungeon.” James said with casual grace and a bit of a shrug.

  The older man froze. He might have been the senior librarian here, he certainly had had a lot of time working as the one who ran this building, and he was a practiced natural at the kind of professional socialization that his position called for.

  But he had a vulnerability to one specific topic.

  ”What about it?” He asked James, voice back to being tightly annoyed. MacDowell tried to pretend that he was focusing on his work, but at this point he was just filling a spreadsheet cell with random gibberish to keep up appearances.

  Any attempt to ease into things ruined, James just forged ahead. “Well, we were hoping you’d tell us more about it.” He said placatingly. “You seem to have experience with the place. Personal experience. And… well, we’re explorers, you know? We’re going to explore, and it seems like you gave up on trying to stop us pretty fast, but we’re past the time threshold where the Order is going to politely wait for you to approach us again. Also I had some free time. So I’m asking.”

  ”It kills.” MacDowell said bluntly. “You need any more than that? You’re still alive, so maybe praying for you worked better than usual, but there’s no fancy tricks. No secret past those doors. It just kills. And it’ll get you too, sooner or later.”

  ”It does do a bit more than just kill. It gives empowering orbs, for one thing.”

  ”Oh, so you can learn faster? Too lazy to pick up a book and do the work yourself?” MacDowell didn’t sound like he actually meant that part. This was more like a backfilled logic; he had a stance and needed to make his opinion fit it instead of the other way around. “Not that half the things you could speed up learning about are worth a damn anyway.”

  James frowned, settling into the chair and getting comfortable while he tried to point the expression at something other than the man that looked like he was one more irritation away from shutting up completely and maybe calling the cops for good measure. “So you’ve never been through the doors?” He asked curiously.

  ”Once.” The man said quietly, before remembering he was supposed to be annoyed at James and snapping out of the distant look he was giving his laptop. “Only once. That was enough.”

  ”The thing is,” James said, “you say that people eventually stop coming out. But you watch us go in regularly. I know you’re around every time the door opens, even if you don’t ever say hi anymore. How often do people find the dungeon? How long has it existed? We just have so many questions, and you could help us establish a bit of our own world’s history, you know?”

  ”That’s your world.” The librarian shook his head, though he was less angry as he listened to James open up honestly about his curiosity. “But fine. Maybe hearing will scare you off, though I doubt it.”

  ”Me too.” James admitted.

  MacDowell snorted at him. “How often? Maybe once every few months. Then they bring friends, then they don’t come back out, usually a month later. You lasted longer. Maybe that’s why I stopped trying. As long as you’re here, you keep anyone else away.”

  ”That’s a long time to establish a pattern.” James pointed out.

  A single nod came back in reply. “I’ve known about it for eighteen years. Can’t be sure if it were here before me.” The aged librarian closed his eyes, closed his laptop, and leaned back in his chair. “It never stops taking people.”

  ”Right.” James swung his feet down off his impolite footrest and leaned an elbow on the edge of the man’s scuffed desk, pointing a finger as if he could highlight words in real life. “That. Taking. Does it ever send anything out? Attack anyone? We tend to see more passive behavior from dungeons we’re actively delving, but a big part of what I want to know is if it could be predatory or hostile.”

  ”Killing isn’t enough for you?”

  ”Roughly two hundred people die in US national parks every year.” James answered. “But I’m not advocating for the extermination of trees.”

  The head librarian stared at him as if he were annoyed that there was a person arguing the point at all, regardless of what information was being used. “No.” He said with an unamused light drawl. “Never anything out. Unless someone brings it on purpose.”

  ”I just…” James felt like he should have more questions, but he was halfway stuck between confused and depressed by the man in front of him. “How can you not be curious?” He asked, letting himself get distracted. He knew, knew, this was the wrong thing to say. But he just had to know.

  ”How can you be?” MacDowell asked back. “You think you’re special? You think you won’t screw up and get lost in there? I’ve seen that door eat up men, women, kids, cops, even a few national guard friends that I tried to warn. Oh, I know your type; young and reckless and don’t believe your life has value. Maybe that’s all it takes to care. But I’m both older and wiser than you, and I’m telling you, it’s nothing but trouble. Deadly, deadly trouble.”

  They’d met people before who bounced off of magic. Who didn’t care so aggressively it was like they had a blind spot to the existence of anything weird. But that didn’t seem to be a memeplex-induced problem; it was just how some humans were. Those same people did the same thing to basically any new information in their lives; gave it a cursory glance then kept doing what they were already doing, uncaring. That was just something that was stupidly normal about humans.

  They’d met people who had been so willing to believe in magic that they’d assumed the Order had far more power than it really did. Not just delvers, either, but random recruits and civilians who had been prepared with almost zero evidence to accept the existence of wizards and creatures from beyond normal space. Eager for the world to change, somehow.

  But they’d never really met someone who had looked deeply over the edge of mundane reality, acknowledged the other side, and then… what? Shoemaker wasn’t running from it. He wasn’t even really trying to control or block it, like a Status Quo would. He was just acting like the most passive aggressive lifeguard, warning people that they were going to die but unwilling to do more than that, or to see what he was afraid of in deeper detail.

  In just a brief conversation, James realized that they had missed out on basically nothing by not approaching the man sooner. He wasn’t someone who knew something the Order didn’t, he was just an irrationally scared old man who saw the change coming and balked.

  James just sighed, shaking his head and saying nothing as he stood up and smoothed out his pants. He needed to go get his armor on before the door opened for tonight’s delve. “Well.” He muttered, feeling like he’d failed somehow in this conversation. “Thanks for your time.” He turned and left, feeling himself being watched silently. James stopped at the door to the staff area, having woven his way through a few other people’s desks in the shared little space, and turned to ask one more question. “You say that it’s just a killer…” he said.

  ”All it ever does, eventually.” MacDowell confirmed with his steady frown and a nod.

  ”Right. Well.” James opened his mouth to tell the man that the dungeon extended past the door. That he was sitting in the Ceaseless Stacks right now. That it had subsumed this library in the daily world, that it might actually have built the library itself depending on how the timeline worked. But that, at the very least, it had never killed a single patron on this side. In fact, if nothing else, it was a shell that kept every pillar out there at bay. An imperfect shield, to be sure, but still one that the dungeon had put up without ever asking for anything in return from the people under it.

  He closed his mouth and pursed his lips, realizing that anything he said would probably be taken as a threat. That with how this man spoke about one of the calmest and strangest dungeons they’d found so far, James would have no way to trust that he wouldn’t burn the whole fucking normal library down just to spite it.

  ”Well? Anything else before what might be your last conversation on Earth?” Shoemaker asked bluntly, already actually back at his work and ignoring James aggressively.

  ”No.” James said. “Have a good night sir. I’ll see you when we leave.”

  The whole conversation left him feeling annoyed himself for the first half hour of the delve. But before too long, TQ’s cryptic humor, the gentle light and smell of old books, and the various ranks in table saws, cardstock, and dove trees, all wore him down and back into his natural state of someone who smiled at the constant danger and loved the adventure.

  Which was a relief for TQ, especially. Every time the camraconda had seen James serious, there had been an explosion of some variety shortly afterward. And he’d said as much too, which had helped even more to put a sheepish grin on the human’s face as they’d prowled farther and farther into the depths of the supposedly-killer Library.

  _____

  “Heading out!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight called through her shared apartment. “The window for affection is now!” She declared as she slithered through the short connective hall of her home.

  Deb poked her head out of the bathroom as she passed by. “Careful.” She instructed as Frequency rose up to exchange a kiss with her girlfriend. “Hair’s still got dye in it.”

  ”We live in a world where you can go to a magical hot spring and get different colored hair for the experience.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight said as she reared back and narrowed her lens at Deb, the arch of her body putting her at almost eye level with the slightly bent over human. “It is a very special world, and it is weird that you are bringing hair dye into it.”

  ”Yeah, I know about the hot spring. The only one that does hair turns it green, and I didn’t like the color. And Alex said it made me look like an anime character.” Deb scrunched up her lips as she looked away from Sunny. “I think she meant it was a compliment, but I wanted something different.”

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight lowered herself back to the carpet. “I knew you were more reasonable.” She told Deb. “This is why you’re in charge.”

  Deb gave her partner a blank stare, trying to figure out what that comment was supposed to imply. Camracondas in general, and her girlfriend in specific, had a really satisfyingly aggravating habit of saying stuff with complete blunt openness, and wrapping within that direct honesty far too much subtext.

  It was, in truth, the thing that Frequency-Of-Sunlight had kept doing in the early days that had convinced Deb that the camraconda, however old she was chronologically, was an adult mind. Not that younger people wouldn’t try the same thing - the various teenagers around the Lair that Deb was often forced to interact with at her job when they hurt themselves were a great example of that - but that most younger people would just be bad at it.

  Sunny executed surprisingly complex conversational maneuvers so often that there was no way it was a mistake.

  Also while Deb had been staring and trying to think of a clever response, Frequency-Of-Sunlight had echoed an “Okay goodbyeeeeee.” With her synthetic voice and slithered her way out of the apartment.

  Today, Frequency had a few things to do, that unfortunately didn’t involve Deb. The two of them had gotten to spend a lot more time together ever since things had calmed down around the Order of Endless Rooms, though Frequency often thought that Deb didn’t really think of it that way. As calm, that is.

  Deb had a bad habit of picking up more work and more projects whenever she had free time. Frequency had learned, since coming to this place, that humans in this part of the world were just sort of like that. They had a persistent need, which was implanted and reinforced by their society, to always be working or busy in some way, and they felt a lot of shame when they failed to keep up. The Order acknowledged this was a problem, and took steps to mitigate it, but on an individual level it was really hard to get Deb to stop taking on more work. Even if her main job, of running the medical wing of the Lair, had gotten substantially easier after they’d established a collection of skill ranks and .mem files that let them turn anyone into a professional overnight.

  Right now, Deb worked twenty nine hours a week, which was above the target of twenty that the Order held as their first main goal for everyone. So she and Frequency should have had a lot of time to hang out! Frequency-Of-Sunlight really wanted to get Deb into watching more old scifi shows with her, and she knew Deb had a passing curiosity in doing some kind of craft thing, which would have been really cool to do together.

  But, the camraconda was willing to accept she was complaining to herself as she got on the elevator and tagged one of the buttons with her snout, Deb kept wanting to be ‘useful’. She picked up responsibilities like obsessive flutters from the Office, first getting into running long term studies on medical dungeontech and purple orbs, then working on doing nutrition and physical therapy research for the chanters, and even taking shifts doing potion production just so she could know what went into them and how the testing process worked.

  The thing was, Frequency-Of-Sunlight got it. She also wanted to be useful, and busy. Not because America told her she was a failure if she didn’t, that was stupid, but she’d spent her whole life as someone else’s tool, or as a person trapped in a place where boredom was a dominant form of torture. She never wanted to be truly idle again, but she didn’t count lounging around and enjoying the quiet on her own terms as ‘idle’. Deb did.

  The elevator doors opened to the Research floor, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight slithered off, passing by the intertwined trees that grew down here up into the domed false-ceiling and the observation balcony. Someone had finally done the inevitable and put some low tables and seating up there, and it had started to become a quiet space for Researchers to hang out. It honestly surprised Frequency-Of-Sunlight that it had taken this long; though the thing had initially shown up during a time of trouble, so it probably just got forgotten.

  Her path on the way to where she was going took her by the trees, and the camraconda that was waiting there for someone else. Spire-Cast-Behind still gave her a hiss of greeting anyway, the sharp shortly rising noise being a holdover from their time imprisoned together. “Frequency.” Spire said as she waited on a comfortable coil.

  ”Hey Spire.” Sunny replied, pausing and tilting her camera eye around the room, wondering if she was the one being waited for. Looking back at the other camraconda, she noticed Spire drooping slightly. “Are you okay?” She asked.

  ”Not recently. I am told it will get better.” Spire-Cast-Behind said. “Don’t worry, you did not forget an appointment. I am waiting for the rest of my coterie, you are a coincidence.”

  ”Oh, good!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight sighed out her own soft hiss. “…Can I have a coterie?”

  ”No one would say no.” Spire said after a moment of consideration. “I did not ask for a coterie, it seems to have happened to me.” She pulled back the thicker cable around her mouth, exposing fangs in a mimicry of a human smile; a gesture that had caught on among their kind, just as some humans in the Order had started nodding with deeper bobbing motions. The fun kind of cultural exchange. “First you will need to find a collection of disparate persons not affiliated with a major project.”

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight hummed slightly to herself, drawing up the noise from deeper in her body. “That might be hard, all my friends are Researchers, doctors, or paladins.” She twisted slightly to smile back at Spire. “Want to be in my coterie? There’s probably no rule against it!”

  ”You would make a good paladin, if you wanted it.” Spire said out of nowhere. “When I die, you can pick up where I left off.”

  ”You… aren’t going to die though.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight framed it as more of a statement than a question.

  Spire-Cast-Behind looked away. “I don’t have plans to. But my role is one that courts death.”

  ”Oh, I’ve been reading that!”

  ”What?” Spire’s lens widened in curiosity as she peered at Frequency.

  ”The story about trying to seduce death! It’s pretty good.”

  ”…Frequency why are you down here?” Spire finally asked, finding it secretly funny that the camraconda tactic of being incredibly silly was working on her.

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight swayed the upper part of her body loosely, enjoying being unencumbered today. “I’m here to check in on Bea! And also do some more work on the remnant material from the big wyrm thing from Ophiem that you killed.”

  Spire went quiet for a moment, turning her head away and hissing softly as she watched the pair of gardeners on the other side of the ring of stone-enclosed dirt work on the small patch of plants around the trees here. “Perhaps I will have more samples for you later.” She said, volume turned down low.

  ”Is that what you’re worried about?” Frequency asked her, pulling her tail out of the way of a human pushing a cart past from the elevator. “Ophiem?”

  ”That is what I am waiting for my companions for. A return to that place, to explore the ruins and search for truth.” Spire framed it as a dramatic moment, but one of the downsides of having a high level of integration with her voice was that she couldn’t quite make herself sound enthusiastic. Instead, she sounded distantly sorrowful, and almost afraid. “I had forgotten that we even had pieces of the wyrm.” She admitted afterward.

  ”It’s hard to work with.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight admitted. “Doesn’t really do anything, it’s just sticky smoke. Research thinks it’s supposed to go with something else, like the light part of the creatures. So if you can capture one alive, that’d help!” She declared with direct excitement. “But also don’t die.” Frequency added. “I’d miss you. I don’t want to lose anyone else, so you can’t die, okay?”

  The sudden comment didn’t exactly catch Spire-Cast-Behind off guard, but it did make her stop and think, which was far more important. In a way, the idea that someone else might miss her had passed by without her ever thinking it herself. To hear it directly was affirming, and it pulled her slightly out of the dark pit she had found herself in. “I promise I will do my best.” She told Frequency, leaning into the sudden motion of the other camraconda as Frequency slithered closer around her coiled resting place and bumped her head onto the back of Spire’s cloak. “Now leave me to wait. I want my coterie to think I am mysterious.”

  ”You are mysterious!”

  ”Then all I need to do is act the part.” Spire-Cast-Behind said as Frequency-Of-Sunlight hissed out a laugh and left her to her waiting.

  Navigating the Research tunnels was easy for Sunny. Some people got lost down here, but she didn’t see how. Compared to Officium Mundi, this place was practically an open field. All the signs even pointed to real places!

  She had to help a couple new people find their way. There was a ratroach that Sunny found in a small offshoot hallway that was almost having a panic attack, having ended up on the wrong floor entirely when trying to find their first therapy appointment with the Order’s mental health experts. That had delayed her briefly, especially explaining that they weren’t going to be punished for the mistake.

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight actually loved dungeons, unlike a lot of her fellow camracondas. Not the Office, for obvious reasons, but generally she liked them. The Sewer thought just seemed so pointlessly evil. The Office was evil because it didn’t care about people, but the Sewer was so evil it had to be bad for it, right?

  It was something that was still on her mind when she finally got to the little laboratory room that she’d been helping Bea out in. “Hey, do you think that evil could be defined as a kind of inefficiency?” She asked as she slithered through the airlocked doors, avoiding letting any of the constructs out.

  Bea didn’t miss a beat, treating the conversation as if it weren’t abrupt and flowing into it perfectly. “That seems optimistic. Our own separate experiences with evil have shown us that it is often malicious for the sake of malice. I will accept that inefficiencies are a certain side effect of evil.”

  ”Oh right.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight had sort of not been thinking about Bea’s own creation. “How’re the cats?” She changed topics just as abruptly as Bea had engaged with her question.

  ”They are not cats.” Bea said, covered in cats. “And they are doing well. The tablet has provided an example of a different style of generator, and I have begun comparative linguistics.” She turned slightly on her stool to show the laptop she was working at, Sunny slithering over and pulling herself up to an extended height to read it. “Do you know how to do this?” She asked.

  The camraconda hissed a laugh. “Not yet.” She said. “Are you calling them generators and not totems?”

  ”They generate things.” Bea said stiffly, the inhabitor accidentally betraying the fact that she did indeed have emotions by trying too hard to mask her defensiveness. “It makes sense.”

  ”I like it.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight commented as one of the fake cats produced by the Library generator in the room crawled over her tail. “Any news on these guys?” She swung her head to indicate the slightly ethereal cats.

  Bea’s flat expression twitched into almost a frown. ”They are not guys. An attempt was made to use the body swap table, which failed. They appear to be nothing. But that is suspicious.”

  ”It is!” Frequency agreed readily. “Every dungeon seems to have its own personal definitions for terms that it uses in its magic. We know three different things from the Office don’t think they have thoughts, but that doesn’t mean it’s true, just that the Office thinks it’s true.” She dropped back to the floor and watched the cats prowl around. It didn’t take long to notice that they were a little too specific in their motions; it wasn’t that they were mechanical or stiff, they acted exactly like cats. But it was more that there were patterns repeated among them as a collective that were hard to miss once you started looking. The same sequence of jumping, wandering, grooming, yawning. Normal behaviors, but looking like they came from a limited video game AI and not a living creature. “Have you tried giving them a Sewer book?” She asked Bea.

  ”That resource is limited.”

  ”So?”

  ”This is not an important project.”

  ”Bea.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight didn’t have the same vocal control that Spire did, but she still made the word sound pointed. “If it works, then it’s important. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t consume the resource.” She paused and flicked her tail, dislodging a cat construct that had become stuck on it; another small indication the things aren’t really thinking. They don’t react well to things that aren’t native to their environment, that environment being ‘Earth’. “Are you doing the thing again?” She asked Bea.

  ”I do not do a thing.” Bea instantly denied.

  Frequency narrowed her lens. “Yes you do!” She protested. “You know the thing! The thing where you’re feeling something but don’t want to admit it because you think you either don’t deserve to or would be inconvenient to! That thing!” Frequency looped the central counter of the lab so that she was once again in Bea’s line of sight, forcing the inhabitor to turn away again in a much more obvious way if she wanted to ignore the camraconda. “Well?”

  ”…I am doing that thing.” Bea said in a hollow voice.

  ”Okay!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight said loudly, before she realized she was being a jerk to her friend, and let herself relax, her whole body intending and lowering slightly. “Okay. Can you tell me why?”

  ”I need to be useful.” Bea said, and before Frequency-Of-Sunlight could find a way to strangle her without hands for being like every single human in this building, continued. “Amelia will not let me work on potions. And this is a project that I can participate in. If it…”

  She trailed off, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight paused before she made a long shot of a conclusion. “Are you worried if it changes, other people will take over?” She asked, and Bea gave her a stiff nod. “Wait, you can’t work on potions?” Sunny had almost glossed over that. “What happened?”

  ”Amelia was upset that I was testing batches that were inconclusive in lab rat trials.”

  ”Testing them… how?”

  ”Drinking them.”

  ”Bea!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight exclaimed, raising her synthetic voice’s volume. “No! What happened?!”

  ”I was caught.” Bea said without a hint of remorse. “Amelia believed that I needed time away from the potion department until I had recovered. She was unhappy that I had consumed certain risky products, mostly batch RH-22.”

  Frequency took a brief second to check that through her skulljack connection to the Lair’s network. “You were drinking bone hurting juice?!” She demanded. “Bea! No!” And then, after that, “Why did anyone even make that?!” The camraconda asked rhetorically.

  ”All potion experiments are unknown quantities and have pseudo-random effects so far as can be determined.” Bea replied. “And it did not damage my bones.”

  ”Did it hurt your bones?”

  ”Yes.”

  ”Bea I am trying really hard to be your friend but you are going to drive me insane.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight said with a long, long exhalation of a hiss. This was much worse than Deb’s behavior; Deb would at least make sure the potion had a positive effect before causing herself intense pain for it.

  There was a lapse in the conversation, the only sounds in the lab the rustling and shifting of false cats scrambling over clean surfaces. And then Bea asked something Frequency hadn’t really expected. “Why are you trying to be my friend?”

  ”What?”

  ”Is there a reason?” Bea pressed.

  Frequency’s lens widened to its midpoint expression, a soft look that conveyed her sympathy as she tilted her head to the left. “I just wanted to.” She said. “You seemed lonely, and interesting. And also you might need help with the generator project; a lot of people who are the only ones on their projects need help!”

  ”I am not the only one on this project.” Bea protested.

  ”Yeah, but you’re the one that does all the work, right? Everyone else is doing confirmation tests, you’re the one building totems… generators… and doing linguistic analysis I guess. But also I just thought you might want to be friends.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight was wrong about that last part pretty often; not that she ended up hanging out with people that didn’t like her, but just that she would admit openly that she didn’t really know what it looked like when someone wanted to be friends. She wasn’t going to let that stop her though.

  Bea didn’t seem to grasp that particular nuance though. Instead, she had her own blunt question. “Does that mean that if the generator project’s scope changed, you would continue to visit?” She asked.

  ”Yes?” Frequency-Of-Sunlight thought about it. “Yes.” She decided, bobbing a nod.

  ”Oh.” Bea looked back at her laptop, then back at Sunny. “Can you help me get a Sewer book?”

  ”I bet we can work that out!” She said happily. “Come on, let’s go ask. Also what’s the new generator model for? One of the other Stacks colors?” Frequency-Of-Sunlight asked as she maneuvered around some of the cats.

  “Bears.” Bea answered.

  Frequency-Of-Sunlight waited for the rest of that answer to come, and had to remind herself as they were out the door and halfway down the connecting hall toward the central Research zone that Bea didn’t do long form answers unless directly commanded.

  _____

  James had wanted a little more time to mess around on dungeon delves. He really wanted to see what the results of their first Compiled Wastes delve were, so he could start the Order on the path to repeat delves of the new place with himself as a test subject. He wanted to go back to Saskatoon and be normal about the umbral hanging around in the open now and see what it looked like when a modern human city suddenly did have to deal with a dungeon species showing up. He wanted to go back into the Pylon at least one more time too, just him and Alanna looking for the deeper parts of that dungeon and not worrying about milestones, but also maybe getting a milestone that could bring his running up to level five.

  But he couldn’t just fuck around in dungeons for his whole life. There were other people that needed him being useful, and even though the Order was doing a more and more impressive job of creating a place to actually live a whole life, there weren’t enough core members around to do everything if people like James just fucked off all the time.

  So while Zhu zipped off to hang out with Alanna and her younger sisters for a while, James took up the unenviable task of talking to fascists.

  The emotional suppression field on the transplanted Priority Earth camp sitting on the outskirts of Townton’s rebuilding zone was weird. Not in that it dulled emotions; that was something James had plenty of experience with. It wasn’t even weird in how it let certain kinds of emotions through, like anything involving appreciating the natural world or having opinions about sports.

  No, what was weird was that it was the closest thing they’d gotten to a magic effect requiring consent.

  Not explicitly, because that would be a little too nice. But it only worked on people who were invited into the perimeter and were supposed to be there according to the rightful owners of the mystic blueprint that powered the place. Which meant that it was being treated as a benefit in some ways, which was wild. It was also very unlike the green orb effects that were just always on whether you wanted your schedule messed up or not.

  This condition explained why JP and his rogues had never noticed it when infiltrating the Priority Earth camp. They weren’t supposed to be there, and so they only noticed the weird behavior without feeling why it was happening.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  The problem of course was that James was supposed to be here. So he had to wait for Planner to have a free moment to wrap him in a protective infomorph shell. Zhu could have poked James in the right direction, but that didn’t work when Zhu was also supposed to be there now, as opposed to the first time when he’d snuck in without being invited. Assignments so far were the only ones that could just block the incoming effect, and while James really wanted to try making friends with Debt now that he was here, Debt didn’t seem interested in doing anything but hiding from James.

  So he’d gone in with Planner’s tentacles shrouding him, and he’d spent a large chunk of his day just talking to people.

  The impulse to be dismissive, and to be angry, was definitely there. These guys were Status Quo. Eight survivors of that group, some still recovering from pretty brutal injuries that James and Spire had inflicted on them. Not all of them had survived, but the ones that the Order could give medical attention to, they did. And then, when they’d gotten this camp ready, they’d moved all of them here.

  James had told Earl and Buddy that he refused to hate the Squo soldiers. Not just because they were only soldiers, either; they seemed to lack any kind of management or leadership, and it was unclear if they had ever even had any to begin with. But just because they weren’t sure whose orders they were following didn’t mean they hadn’t caused a lot of damage and harm.

  But he still refused to hate them.

  A long time ago, James had decided to commit to a path of restorative justice. It was one of those things that was very easy to decide at the time, because he could see all the studies done and information available, and know that it was correct for the world he wanted to build. But it became significantly more challenging when it came time to apply it to people who were violently and actively genocidal.

  And yet. Everyone means everyone. James had committed to that belief, so strongly that it was the motto that adorned the entrance to the transplanted camp. One of the few modifications made to the place since it had come to Townton.

  The members of the Gatekeepers, this particular Status Quo cell, had done great evil. But they still deserved the opportunity to become something better. And if they absolutely couldn’t, or wouldn’t, then the Order would have to get past that new hurdle when it showed up. In the meantime, James was treating them a little bit like how he planned to treat the Beautiful One, when she was stable enough for him to visit. Like a victim.

  Because after a few hours of talking to the people here one on one, that was really what they came across as. Victims. None of them had been hit by infomorphs or memetic effects, as far as anyone could determine, but they all had similar threads running through their explanations for their actions. Painfully simple reasons, really. Fear. Ignorance. Superiority. Faith. The basic stuff that was always waiting to turn any human that listened to those feelings too closely into a monster.

  A few of them had thought the umbral were literal demons, in a familiar mirror to what was going on down south. Some had assumed the existence of another species would naturally lead to war, and that they had to strike first. Others earnestly believed that only humans were capable of being people, with one even taking it farther and saying it didn’t matter if they were people because only humans mattered. Blunt force racism, easily laid out in front of James without obfuscation when the emotions behind it were muted.

  There wasn’t a single reason that actually made sense, it all just came from a lack of curiosity and a lack of willingness to talk. The really annoying thing was, James had met dungeon creations that were unthinking threats. The Underburbs didn’t make stuff that was willing to engage with civilization, the Sewer constantly produced a supply of ratroaches that were hollow puppet soldiers, and even the simple wildlife of the Office or Pylon, while not hostile, was definitely dangerous and not interested in being people. But these guys had just picked the first thing that looked different and set it as their one true target.

  There also weren’t any reasons James found novel, which was kind of disappointing. He could have mentally swapped the word ‘umbral’ for ‘Hispanic’ in the conversations and ended up just listening to contemporary mundane American conservative rhetoric. There was no special consideration for the existence of magic or the way the umbral rewarded those that ‘beat’ them, there was no thought to the real complications that a whole different body style added to a city brought. There was just cowardly fear met with violence instead of courage.

  But he still refused to hate them. Because James knew that he could turn them, eventually. Devoid of the sting of those darker emotions, with just rhetoric and time to think ahead of them, it was only a matter of time and education to purge the motivations behind their cruel behaviors.

  No, what bothered him was that not a single one of them knew where they’d gotten their shield bracers from.

  By the time James left the camp from his series of part-conversations part-interrogations with the prisoners that were healthy enough to chat, he was worn out and irritated, and kind of wished he’d just forgone Planner’s protection in the first place. Maybe not feeling would have helped a lot. But then, he’d rather get used to controlling his own anger so he could do it when he needed to; this place’s effect was a crutch, and crutches were only as useful as the need for them was.

  Being irritated didn’t help when he had someone else to talk to before making the walk back to the core of Townton’s restoration zone.

  Instead of taking the looped road back in the direction of the populated area, James circled around to the side of the fenced off camp. The debris from several demolished structures was still stacked up here, being slowly processed and moved by the construction team and a few helpful magical effects, and it was past a pile of partially organized shattered wood that James found his target.

  ”Oh hi Terror. Fancy meeting you here.” James said to the umbral that was currently pooled against the broken dirt and concrete ground at the base of the debris pile, resting on what used to be the foundation of a small house. “What a weird coincidence.” He spoke as if he were under the emotional effect, voice dry and monotone.

  When James stubbornly refused to leave, instead just standing there in the cold late morning sunlight and staring at the patch of shadow, Terror finally decided to stop pretending. The umbral rose back up, three dimensional form filling out as his upper tendrils seemed to draw the rest of him upward, the multijointed crablike legs coming off the ground last and drawing with them the rest of the darker shadow like a straw sucking in ink.

  When Terror was fully upright, one of the heavy limbs that made up his torso unfurled. Thick fingers that each outsized James’ whole arm, full of the dance of sunbeams on dust caught in shade, brushed off the dirt and chunks of gravel and grass seed that had come with Terror when he’d ‘stood up’. “What a coincedence.” He mirrored James’ tone. Or tried to anyway.

  ”Yeah. What’cha up to?” James asked, a little more personally but still with a dry cut to his tone.

  ”I am enjoying the freedom of movement allowed to me as a supposed citizen of your world.” Terror said, his arm replacing itself to fuse into the thick bulb of his torso. He twisted away as he spoke, though, most of his colored eyes not pointed James’ direction. “Or is this something you lied about?” The umbral asked.

  James kind of wanted to laugh. The usual bite of anger that Terror often spoke to him with was mostly gone, replaced by a loud shame. The problem was, the reason the umbral was here wasn’t really funny. “If I tell you these assholes,” he jerked a thumb toward the odd kind of prison, “were exercising their freedom of movement when they camped outside your dungeon entrance, what would you say?”

  ”That you were provoking me.” Terror bit back, anger now properly on display. “Why?”

  ”Because that’s what you’re doing, you dumbass.” James told him directly. “Terror, is there a reason you keep treating me like I’m an idiot? Like, I get that you disagree with me and the Order on some things, but you keep acting like I, personally, am just fucking stupid, and I’m kinda curious what’s up with that?”

  The big umbral bristled, his serrated tendrils snapping backward along his bulky frame. “You are imagining things.” He told James.

  ”Uh huh. So you haven’t been lurking around here specifically looking for the most vulnerable points where you could attack and pick off one or more of the prisoners we have in those cabins?” James asked directly.

  ”They deserve it.” Terror didn’t bother denying it. “And how do you even know?”

  James hadn’t actually known, he’d just spotted Terror slinking around from the drone overwatch he kept up at every opportunity. He needed as much practice with that as possible, and if his vigilance gave him the edge against even a single crisis, it would be worth it. He chose to ignore that question though, and reply to the important part. “Depending on how you measure it, they deserve a lot of things.” He told Terror with a nod.

  And the umbral was shocked by the agreement. “Then… why?” The shadow person asked, cool winter air filtering through his body in a sharp breeze. “Why keep them alive? What are you doing?”

  ”Arguably? I’m killing them.” James said, setting his mouth into a flat line as he shook his head. “I’m taking away their choice about who they get to be, and using a magical backdrop to convince them to be different kinds of people. I know it’s not as satisfying as just murdering them, but we’re trying something different here.”

  ”Something different will get you killed.” Terror said in a surly growl.

  ”Yeah, that’s what they said too.” James nodded as he tipped his head back toward the cabins.

  ”Oh, so you’re treating us the same then?” Terror bristled further, shifting sideways as he he talked. It looked like idle pacing, but James could tell what was actually happening was that he was putting himself in the position to have free mobility if a fight started between them. A real fight. “Treating me like a killer and a monster?”

  James snorted, and tried to casually lean on the debris pile before flinching away as he toppled some of the collapsed wood siding over with a crush. “…Whoops.” He said, blushing as he looked back at Terror. “Uh. Sorry, no, I’m treating you like a person.” James told him directly. “That’s why you’re not in there. Was that not clear? Terror, I don’t actually know what you think is going on here. The Squo… the Gatekeepers, they fucked up. They fucked up so badly there might never be a way to come back from it. They’re still fucking up in their belief about the world, constantly, and it’s gonna be a hell of a long road to fixing that. That’s why they’re in containment while you and the rest of the umbral get to hang out with everyone else and do whatever you want!” He swept a hand between them. “Do you think that restorative justice means just taking it when someone tries to do a genocide? That’s the thing I’m talking about! You’re treating me like I’m too stupid to act, and after a few hours of listening to their bullshit I am really not in the mood to have you pile more on top of it!”

  The big umbral paused, and looked at him, swelling up to his full height as he towered over James. The seam where his hands fused to form the majority of his body split, like he was preparing to lash out, but James just stood there, looking at him like he was expecting something.

  And Terror, given a moment of quiet, took a step back, and surprised both James and himself. “Sorry.” He said, letting his shadowy body deflate. “I… no. You are right. You’re right. I have been doing this repeatedly, haven’t I?”

  ”Little bit.” James was still angry, and he’d sort of forgotten to reign it in for this conversation. “Please don’t kill these guys?” He asked plaintively. “There’s so much else to do down here that isn’t murder. Get a hobby or something, I’m begging you.”

  ”I’ve been fighting them for so long I don’t know what to do now.” Terror admitted suddenly, his strange buzzing voice tightening with sharp reverb as he spoke. “I… oh, this doesn’t feel very good at all. I don’t think I realized.”

  James softened. “That happens a lot.” He said, stepping forward to close the gap between them. “Hell, I worry it’s happened to me already. It’s okay, you know? I’m not even saying you should do nothing and let us handle it, I’m saying… if you want to help, you can. You can even help us keep an eye on them, to make sure no one breaks out and tries to burn down my favorite city. But you need to get settled first.”

  ”I hate them.” Terror whispered, staring over James’ head with his zig-zag line of eyes.

  ”Man I’d be fucking shocked if you didn’t.”

  ”But you don’t.”

  ”I’m trying really hard not to.” James said. “But that’s a work in progress. I’ll hate them less if they prove me right, and actually change.”

  Terror sighed again. “This is uncomfortable.” He told James. “Can we skip the part of this where you reassure me things will be okay, and go to the part where you offer food and I can silently fume while we eat?”

  ”…you know, sometimes I forget that every dungeon species I meet tends to be funnier than I am.” James complained as he turned to lead Terror back to Townton, his drones following a couple hundred feet overhead. “Also you can just get your own food if you’re so sick of being around me!”

  ”I am trying to meet you on your own terms. Stop mocking me.” Terror snapped back.

  James just laughed, making the sound welcoming and kind. “Okay, fine. Do you want poutine? The poutine place should be open by now.”

  ”Just because I am from Canada does not-!”

  ”Not everything is a personal attack, calm the fuck down. I want poutine, you can join me or not.” James sighed. “I’m gonna invite TQ. He’ll fucking appreciate it. And maybe you can get along better with him and I can escape in the chaos.”

  _____

  “Morning K.” Alex said through a stifled yawn as she left metal echos in her wake, boots clomping across the deck of the ship she was legally a passenger on.

  The young Somali man turned toward her with a rude gesture that marked the growing familiarity between them and the paired lack of fear he had for the witch that kept showing up on his ship. “Lady, you speak more English than me. You know I have a name.”

  ”You know I have a name but you keep calling me lady!” Alex protested, covering a smile with the back of her hand as she stretched.

  ”Out of respect.” Kunashe nodded. “And so you don’t curse the ship again.” He added.

  Alex rolled her eyes. She had tried, repeatedly, to inform Kunashe that she was not a witch that did curses. And she almost had him believing her, until she’d made the mistake of going ashore with him and a couple of the other crew. Ken and Mutabi, and also the ship’s chef, a scrawny woman named Jiir that looked like she’d lost a fight with a blender in her past and somehow hadn’t died.

  Being back on land, and finding herself increasingly comfortable in unfamiliar places, Alex had let her guard down. After all, she was here to hunt a sea monster; and for some stupid reason, her increasingly tired brain had interpreted that as everywhere that wasn’t the sea being safe.

  Now, Alex was fully willing to admit that she didn’t understand - or actually care if she were being honest - about the different racial and ethnic divides that swirled around the island port city. But something that had been said had led to Ken getting himself punched. Which had led to his friends diving in to help, and Alex left sitting wondering how she’d ended up in a bar brawl when she literally was just trying to order whatever a pate kode was as part of her ongoing exploration of foods that weren’t sandwiches.

  She’d been warned about this, and she’d politely waved off an attempt to involve her in the fight when someone had matched her to the crew and tried to throw a wooden plate at her head off one of the outdoor tables they were currently fighting through. Alex was too fast even without her special magic to get hit by a throw that shitty, and when someone slammed into her side after Ken started getting his return punches in, she did her best impression of someone unamused and immovable.

  Then someone pulled a knife. Well, someone pulled a machete, but Alex didn’t really care. At that point, she decided the fight was over.

  She just might have been… a little overdramatic in getting everyone’s attention.

  Multiple weeks of time with almost nothing to do on the stupid cargo ship, aside from updating her map of where other ships had been attacked or sunk, and checking in with the Order whenever she was near land and had reliable signal, meant that Alex had a lot of time for cramming an increasing number of repeatedly advanced Garden spells into her grimoire. And it was made even easier by the fact that Smoke Salt came in audiospellbook form.

  So when she decided everyone was going to pay attention to her and stop hitting each other before anyone got hurt, she did so by grabbing every single shadow within fifty feet, and pinning them to herself. Dark puddles of shade maintaining their shape as they flowed effortlessly away from what was casting them and to Alex’s feet, the ground around her quickly going from sunny to dark as night, while the rest of the little eatery’s front benches lit up. The spell didn’t create light from nothing, but it did seem to let sunlight temporarially ignore physical objects, so everything else was suddenly lit like there was nothing covering it. And all that extra light that would have been casting extra shadows instead just deepened the darkness around Alex.

  Everyone had frozen. She’d stood up. And, picking a language she’d heard as part of the brawl and thankfully had at least one rank in, said without too much stuttering, “Everyone sit the fuck down.”

  And now Kunashe was afraid of her again. So that was great. But at least Jiir hadn’t gotten stabbed, and Alex was pretty sure she wouldn’t ever end up in that same place again unless she had to spend actual years hunting her target.

  ”Any sign of George?”

  ”Nah, nah, nothing out there lady.” Her conscripted watchman told her. “No one’s seen it. You know we’d all tell you!”

  Alex sighed again, wishing that she had coffee. She could have gone back to the Lair for a bit, but given how quickly the sea monster had shown it could show up, she didn’t want to risk even teleporting away for a moment. Also telepads were sort of fifty fifty on if they thought ships at sea were valid destinations.

  She was getting bored. Bored because it felt like she’d taken the least interesting job. Spire got to explore new dungeons, plural, even if one of them hadn’t been delved yet. Simon got to assassinate assholes and overtly declare that magic was real to a whole city that seemed insulated from any kind of memeplex effect. But Alex?

  Alex got to sit on a boat and wait.

  The thing that was really pissing her off was that she kind of wanted to be here. She had a more than passing interest in marine biology, and marine dungeon biology wasn’t going to suddenly make her less into the subject. She’d made contact with the upper edge of the giant beast once, and it was a legit thrill to suddenly realize how small you were compared to another living thing.

  Then it had run. And it hadn’t come back. Though Alex knew it was still around. Other cargo ships that used this general region had vanished, or reported damage that they couldn’t explain the source of. So she was still here, trying to catch another glimpse of a piece of wildlife that shouldn’t exist.

  Even knowing it was kind of pointless, long term. The last report she’d gotten from the Order had included the little detail that they were preparing to start their own shipping operation in the next few months. And Alex wasn’t dumb; she knew that once you told the world of global commerce that you had a teleporter, things were going to change rapidly. Cargo ships like this one, stacked with lashed down towers of weather battered standard sized containers, were going to belong on the endangered species list. A single rogue sea monster messing with shipping lanes wasn’t going to be a priority when there were no more shipping lanes.

  But then, right now, it did matter. Alex couldn’t deny that there were people being hurt now. That didn’t mean that she didn’t just feel like she was wasting time out here when she could be getting better at being a paladin like she was supposed to.

  ”Lady.” Kunashe’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

  ”Alex.” She reminded him, unfolding the arms she had crossed behind her back like she was at parade rest while she whined to herself in her head. At least her authority didn’t mind the whining; they barely seemed to mind anything, but if they had a personality, it might be right to say they were just as impatient as Alex was for something to happen. “What’s up?”

  “Look! Look there!” Kunashe exclaimed, so frantically that Alex barely registered his switch away from English. Even without a linguistics orb and months of practice, she would have gotten the meaning from the tone and frantic pointing.

  But when she scanned the seas around them, there was nothing but clear water and deceptively small looking swells. “K, you gotta be more…” Alex glanced back at him as his deck chair went clattering away, the young man scrambling backward. And when she looked, she realized he wasn’t pointing at the sea.

  He was pointing up.

  Alex titled her head, just a little, and just in time to see an angular black shadow flow over the underside of one of the clouds that was lazily drifting above the surface of the ocean. “Oh.” She said, eyes widening in numb shock as she began to understand the size of the alien bird that was about to end up directly overhead. “Kunashe! Move!” Alex barked out as she heard shouts coming from other parts of the ship. “Get everyone in the galley in case I have to get you all out of here! Go!” She ordered, and he gave her a terrified rapid nod as he rolled over, calloused hands scrambling to push himself up off the deck and into a run.

  The shadow in the clouds continued to roll forward, contours sliding around the fluff of the white mass of condensation. Alex kept staring upward, even as one hand unclipped the scout drone from her belt and powered it up, lobbing the thing upward before she caught it with her skulljack control and sent it up to get some altitude. Hopefully, this one was like George, and it could be deterred by just poking it. Or maybe it wasn’t hostile at all.

  Any thought of that vanished as it burst out of the side of the cloud, vapor streaming off its triangular wings in white streamers.

  It was hard to tell how big it was, aside from saying ‘big, but smaller than the ship she was on’. Or where the fuck it had come from, either. Something that size, Alex should have seen it somewhere before Kunashe spotted it. But here it was, poking its head through the clouds, with slitted black eyes focused on the ship below it. Two sets of scaled wings like offset sails supporting a slim serpentine body. It had a set of legs that looked like curved ribs, six or eight - it was hard to count - of the plated limbs coming off its curling form to create a cage underneath it that made it look almost like a lizard and a dragonfly had decided to team up.

  ”That’s a dragon.” Alex said as the wings angled forward, and it began to dive. “That’s a fucking dragon!” She added her own shout to the others on the deck of the oceanic cargo ship. Alex’s drone twitched its rotors, putting it in the path of the slowly descending creature, and she watched the feed spiraled off to a randomized view of the sea and sky as it lashed out with a whiplike flex of its wing’s edge. That gave her a close up look at the size of it though, which was good. Alex didn’t do any fancy math, just estimated based on experience. The wingspan was probably clocking in at sixty or seventy feet.

  It was huge. But it wasn’t so huge that it could support flight if it weighed anything substantial. But, like, it was a dragon; so magic was probably in play. Her hand went to the sword at her waist, but that seemed just a little bit small for what was coming down at them. “Mon ami,” she whispered to her authority, “I am going to need you to be tough for me.”

  It was diving faster now. Aiming for the ship for sure; this wasn’t some fishing attempt that happened to land near them, it was after either the boat or the humans on it. Alex turned and used a little bit of a boost to climb the built in ladder on one of the dull red containers, keeping up her momentum and hauling herself up to a second layer of the stack on the ship’s cargo deck. It was only when she was there that she turned, and drew the rapier she’d pilfered.

  Alex had no idea what she was thinking. There was a feeling, burning in her blood and bones, that she couldn’t possibly name. But as she looked upward and seemed to meet the eyes of the predator descending, she felt an enormous grin crack her face.

  “What are you doing?!” The richly accented English of the ship’s captain reached her ears as the man yelled from the base of the shipping containers Alex was surmounting.

  “All hands to battle stations!” Alex yelled with an almost joyous laugh in her voice, wondering if she had maybe gone insane. “Prepare to repel boarder!”

  “What boarders?!” The captain nearly screamed, until he saw where Alex was pointing with her sword, and his mouth opened in a silent gawk, the man’s arms windmilling as he stumbled backward and tripped over something on the deck.

  Alex strained to hold back the gale of laughter that threatened to burst out of her. “Singular!” She added for clarity as she leveled the blade in line with the diving beast, hoping no one heard her voice crack and squeak as she barely kept it together.

  She didn’t have a plan. She barely had an idea. But she was still there. It was kind of a simple math, really; if ships were going missing and crews were going with them, then it was something like this that was doing it. George had fled so fast when she’d touched it, it seemed insane to think he was the culprit when there was a fucking dinosaur about to do the job with a lot more vigor right here. Which meant, if she could take it out, or even just stick it with a tracker, then her job was a lot closer to being something that ended up being useful.

  Alex still tried to deflect it though. Twisting her blade in the sunlight, she started hitting the dragon with Pave strikes every time she flashed it with the glint of the reflection. Or at least, something close to that; her Timing was good but not omniscient.

  Pave didn’t seem to do anything but eat up Velocity that wouldn’t be coming back that fast; a cargo ship was only so speedy, and Alex wasn’t driving it. But it did get the lizard’s attention. Its dive was joined by a wailing warbling shriek, the sound hitting the boat like a solid wall of pressure. It passed quickly, but Alex was still dazed by it. Her nose was bleeding, fat red drops splattering to the metal she was standing on, and her head hurt.

  She got her eyes up just in time to watch the massive creature fall the last hundred feet, its wings flaring out like a bird catching the wind for a landing. As its legs slammed into the side of the ship and tipped the whole thing an inch downward, curling around the railing and beginning to scramble up the ship’s hull with the raking sound of claws on old metal, it lashed forward with far too much dexterity, snapping at Alex directly.

  Its head was the most dinosaur thing about it; just an elongated mouth with row after row of what looked like very sharp teeth, and it was rushing toward her, that pebbled brown hide about to slam into her even if the teeth didn’t.

  Alex didn’t hesitate this time, shaking off the daze and the headache. Her legs bent as another row of the dragon’s legs crawled a section of its serpent body up onto the deck, and then leapt at the same time it did. The stolen speed flooding her felt and smelled like lightning as she pulled her legs up into a flying crouch, the dragon twisting to snap at her as she cleared its bite.

  One of the wings slapped at her, the bone edge directly ahead of Alex’s path. But that was fine. She couldn’t adjust her path, but she could curl her whole arm around it, changing direction and swinging herself into the tough membrane of a wing that was capable of keeping this thing aloft over the ocean for who even knew how long at a time.

  The sword in her other hand slashed against it, but found no purchase. Her feet slammed into the wing, and Alex found herself suddenly deprived of a hand or foothold without her momentum. But she didn’t panic, instead letting herself drop to the second wing below this one, feeling the dragon’s body bow under her at the unexpected weight.

  She tapped into her lightning again, and whispered to her authority to help her get this fucker, and made her own badly stanced lunge off the wing toward its body. And this time the sword drew blood, cutting a thin laceration down the scales with the tip.

  The dragon screamed again, its legs lashing out one after the other like they were all wired together, while the main body thrashed and writhed. Alex found herself suddenly airborne, the wing having flung her back toward the center of the ship and the railing to the lower deck stairs that she suddenly slammed into; and that fucking hurt, her left arm going numb as she felt something in it give that wasn’t supposed to.

  ”Lady!” Alex heard someone yell from below.

  ”I got this!” Alex coughed out, eyes widening as she put way too much pressure on that numb arm to pull herself down and under the deck railing, sliding roughly and with a few bumps onto the metal stairs as the dragon - now fully on the ship - charged through it like it was made of tissue paper. “I maybe got this.” Alex wheezed out a correction as she pulled her head up to check around.

  The dragon had kept charging, slamming a dent into a shipping container and threatening to topple the one on top as one of the heavy duty straps was knocked loose. Not quite enough to create a deck hazard, but getting close. Alex glanced back below to see Kunashe staring to take the steps up to her two at a time. “What is that-?!” He started to ask.

  ”My quarters! Black case under the bunk! Get it to me, fast!” Alex told him. “Go!” She ordered as she turned and stepped back into the sunlight. She would like to go grab her gun herself, but the captain was still on the deck, and she was pretty sure there were a couple other people ducked down on the bridge too, peeking out from the dirty glass windows at the thing currently picking its way across their small patch of walkable space in the middle of the vast blue sea.

  Alex heard the captain’s voice screaming something in frantic fear, and she started running. Cornering one of the side stacks of containers and forcing the fingers on her left hand to work as she whipped herself around on one of the tie-down straps. Alex guessed at where the man was by where she saw the dragon crawling toward from between gaps in the metal, and where his voice was, and she let herself burn some of her limited lightning. Her blood speeding up, her legs pumping, the world becoming a blur around her as she went from here to there, and found herself standing in front of the dragon as it snapped forward again.

  But this time, with a tuned shield bracer.

  The captain, trying to open the sealed door of the comms room and failing, didn’t see her appear. But he did see the golden glow of the shield dome as the dragon’s teeth came together around Alex and started trying to saw her apart like the world’s biggest chew toy.

  ”Bad!” Alex barked out, her sword flicking out and slashing through the barrier to pierce the flat hard tongue in the center of the dragon’s mouth. “No biting!” She punctuated the words with a stab into the fleshy top of its mouth, blood beginning to pool through her shield as charges ticked down precipitously, along with charges of Perfected Strike from her earrings. “Drop it!” Alex yelled with a final slice before the dragon did let go and reared back.

  All of its legs, still looking like they were perfectly sized and shaped for carrying off whales, not hunting humans on boats, worked in concert to pull it back away from Alex and her annoying shining knife. The dragon crawling up to the upper metal mesh walkway around the bridge, and then curling its body in a light squeeze of the bridge itself as it perched on top of it.

  She could hear screams from inside the bridge, and Alex understood, but she wished they’d shut up because they’d be a lot safer if they stayed hidden and let her handle this.

  Alex saw the dragon starting to get interested, so she slapped it in the face with another Pave, making sure it was paying attention to her and not the humans that couldn’t survive a single bite from the mouth bigger than they were.

  Which seemed to be enough for the dragon. Not enough that it left, though, but enough that it started making a sound like a ten ton cat about to puke on the carpet. “Oh I hate that.” Alex muttered as she nearly retched from the sound alone, turning and grabbing the captain’s arm as she started sprinting away to get them both to a point behind one of the massive boxes for cover.

  Abruptly, gunfire split the air. And Alex had an unhappy moment of realizing that Kunashe had interpreted “go get my gun, for me to fire” as “please provide fire support for me personally, Kunashe, I trust you with an automatic bullpup rifle”. A thing she had never said, and never would say, in her fucking life.

  Especially since he missed most of the shots. Worse still, he wasn’t the only one shooting; half the crew in sight on the deck seemed to have small arms and were using them, to minimal effect. But the one that did elicit a small puff of blood from the dragon was enough to get it to whirl on the source of the damage. And whatever wretched breath weapon it had been preparing suddenly pointed at a completely different person.

  Alex let go of the captain, and started to move again, but she wasn’t quite fast enough this time. Even as she fired off one of her last Move Person charges to stick herself on top of a crate, and then hopped down the other side with minimal concern for her long term knee health, she was already watching a purple-black bubble of mist growing from the dragon’s mouth as it pressed the substance outward with a wail.

  The metal where the stuff hit started to bubble. Roiling like it was boiling, before those bubbles burst and popped and left behind shredded fragments of metal that then repeated the process. The cargo containers, the deck, the railings, the whole fucking ship on that side was melting.

  One of the stacked shipping containers caught part of it, the right corner bubbling off and spilling a growing torrent of cardboard cases that hit the deck with a sound of shattering glass and spreading pool of something.

  Alex did not, she decided, have this.

  So she switched tactics. “Take this!” She shoved one of her telepads into the captain’s hands. “Get to the bridge crew, grab hands, tear the page! Got it?” She made eye contact with him, but he was staring blankly at the dragon that was spewing another wave of ship-melting cloud onto his workplace. “Mon ami, get his attention.” Alex told her authority, the green collar around her neck extending in a crooked line to tap the captain on the forehead, jolting him to focus. “Bridge. Crew. Hold hands, tear page. Right?” Alex repeated.

  ”R-right. Yes. Yes ma’am.” The captain said, taking a shaking step forward. “But it’s…”

  ”I’ll distract it.” Alex said glumly, leaving him behind and running for the others, sheathing her sword and pulling a different tool from her coat as she did, avoiding the lingering cloud. “I got this. I got this.” She muttered as she kept running, her feet cleanly avoiding the pitted holes in the deckplate as Alex felt a profound thankfulness for the Order’s enchanted fitness program. “Come on big guy! Free snack here!” She yelled as she kept running, vaulting the pool of what she realized was olive oil and hearing more than seeing the dragon’s wings beat into the ocean wind as it pounced.

  It was so big, Alex’s brain had a hard time with that until it was right up close again. The thing wasn’t a big animal, it was a small structure, and its weight caused the boat to list as it slammed down again, the singular claws of its curved legs screeching as it just tried to smash her into the deck.

  Alex didn’t have an exact read on how fast it was, but she did have really good Timing, and so she only had about a second of wasted time as she exhaled too much Breath in a cast of Mountain Of The Self. Her first, and favorite, Climb spell. The dragon hit her with its body and just slid off, scales crushed against her as she stood with her shoulder squared up, refusing to move while it had to deal with the consequences of the impact. It didn’t damage it nearly enough, but it did piss it off.

  And it also gave Alex the perfect cover to focus her authority into arm strength, and spike the dragon’s tail with the tracker piton she had. The little barbed end of it sinking in and holding it hopefully enough for the Order to find this thing later.

  Now all she had to do was get out of here.

  Her Breath didn’t run out, but she did have to drop the spell before she fucking died from hypoxia. And the dragon, unfortunately not stupid, took the hint that she was hard to damage and just spewed another purple-black bubble of fog onto Alex directly.

  Around her, the ship came apart. She fell through a gap, an edge slashing through her flank as she dropped, and could see holes all the way through to the horizon through the front of the boat, which was probably a really bad thing. She landed hard in the hall outside the engine room, Jiir almost taking her head off with a swung pipe wrench before the woman jerked to a stop seeing that it was Alex. “Everyone down here?” Alex wheezed out as she stood up, pressing her damaged hand to her damaged side and feeling warm blood on her cold fingers.

  ”Girl you look like shit!” Jiir told her. “Captain’s missing.” She answered. “And Mati. Bob. Two of the engine boys.”

  ”Captain and the bridge should be okay.” Alex said. There was another gut punch of a wail from overhead, and then the flapping of wings. Heavy, but growing farther away. “Oh good, it got bored.” She breathed out, testing the edges of her pain, before the dragon decided to add one more spray of metal melting breath weapon to the mix, the fog pouring through the gaps in the ship, flooding around Alex and ripping more sharp flowering holes in the hull around them. She felt her phone cut into her thigh too, which was fine; Momo had a thing for this or something.

  ”What is happening?!” Jiir demanded of her, slapping Alex twice on the cheek to get her attention.

  ”Ship’s going down.” Alex said, starting to feel dizzy, but definitely feeling that the ground they were standing on was starting to tilt, which was not something you wanted to feel at sea. She was not old salt, but she’d picked that little tidbit up pretty early on. “Can you get Kunashe down here? I’ll get the others. We’re getting out of here.”

  ”Witchery?”

  ”Yeah.”

  ”…you did this to us.” Jiir said, stepping back from Alex.

  ”Fuck you.” Alex spat to the side, not offended, just trying to clear the blood out of her mouth. “I fought a dragon. I’m two for two on driving off giant monsters from your boat. Now go get Kunashe, and we can leave, and I’ll keep my record of keeping you all alive.”

  Jiir stared at her, before turning and bolting down the melting hall without saying anything else. Alex hoped she moved quick, because they were running out of time.

  Her own trip to gather the other crew took less time, and she’d sent half the people ahead with one of her many backup telepads before Jiir got back, dragging a bleeding Kunashe behind her. “He won’t shut up. Says he lost your toy.” Jiir said as Kunashe kept staring at the bloody ruin of his hands.

  ”Not worried about that now.” Alex turned to the remaining crew. “Everyone grab hands! You saw the drill, let’s get the fuck out of here!” She said, hearing it repeated a few times as the people clustered around her, everyone now definitely aware that there were growing spined holes in the ship that were not getting any smaller. The part of the ship they were in was already half exposed to open air, which was not what you wanted when it was coming through the walls of a vessel that was supposed to be watertight.

  The gap gave her a great view, right before she ripped the telepad, of the dragon taking a corkscrew path up toward the clouds. It was dripping blood, but didn’t seem like it was in any serious danger. And it was, Alex noted with a sharp inhalation, on track to rejoin the other two similar shapes high up in the sky.

  “This is gonna be a fucking hell of an insurance claim to make.” She said as she teleported the crew out of the sinking deathtrap.

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