"GDI and the Brotherhood view the benefits and threat of Tiberium differently. They see a scientific anomaly. A curiosity. I see the future." -Kane, Command and Conquer-

  _____

  Dance and Manon were laying on the floor of the Grandparents Society clubhouse, in front of the giant flatscreen TV, which was apparently a product of fairly recent engineering design and material science advances. They were using it to play games on a Nintendo that was older than Dance by an order of magnitude.

  Between the two of them, they had roughly half of one human child’s ability to accomplish anything. On her end, Dance was eagerly struggling with getting her arm pack to move with enough dexterity to manage the kind of rapid button presses that getting Mario to make a jump demanded. The grippers of her mechanical prosthetic responded to her well enough for a lot of things; at this point in her life she could pick stuff up, read a book without ripping pages, and give numerically inaccurate high-fives, all of which were important. But Dance’s manual typing speed would probably be around ten words a minute, if that, and so she was struggling with the analog buttons of the old controller.

  Next to her, Manon was having a different problem. Whenever it was his turn to fail a level, the issue was that he was almost too twitchy. Much more like the kind of problems that the humans this was built for had, from what Dance had heard. His brain didn’t make the connection between button and on-screen action naturally yet, and so he played stiffly and panicked easily. And when he panicked too much, his fingers were tipped with claws and not mostly harmless fingernails.

  So far, he’d been almost heartbreakingly gentle with the game controller, dropping it in a different kind of panic whenever he started to get too frustrated. Dance knew for a fact that she wouldn’t accidentally damage anything, but that just meant that her own frustrations were loudly voiced, while Manon stayed silent.

  The truth was, she wasn’t that upset. Though she did think it was stupid that she couldn’t just plug into the console and play that way. But for some reason, all the old humans here didn’t have an Ethernet-to-NES-controller adaptor for her to use. So really, her vocal whining about the failure of human game design was actually in service of trying to make Manon feel more relaxed.

  Which was fuckin’ hard, Dance was learning.

  The crocamaw didn’t really talk unless asked a direct question. Didn’t seem to react to jokes or playing at all. Dance thought it was like he was living life halfway dunked into a parallel world; distant from everything and everyone unless it got really bad.

  Like when he’d saved her and Alice.

  Dance had kind of heard people talk about ratroaches like this, but she’d never really gotten to know any of them that closely. So this was new to her. She felt like she was trying to be friendly, but it was hard to tell if Manon was actually having fun.

  ”Stupid robot hands.” Dance complained as she fell in a hole again and the screen transitioned to player two, her annoyance briefly overriding her desire to figure out how to be friends with a traumatized lizard boy. “Stupid old games. Not letting me plug into a video game is illegal now!” Dance set the controller down and then glared at it, freezing the object in place on the area rug that sat over the hard carpet of the floor here. This served no purpose, the little grey and black rectangle was already stationary, but it was the principle of the thing.

  Next to her, Manon turned his head slightly to look at her. Crocamaws, Dance was learning, didn’t actually use their heads for body language nearly as much as camracondas or humans did. It took them a ton of effort, and their eyes were in raised sockets anyway, so looking in different directions was pretty easy for them without needing to turn that much. “We can stop.” The crocamaw offered in the quiet and high pitched way he spoke when he wasn’t whispering or actively in a fight.

  ”We could!” Dance wanted to flop sideways and roll into a ring, but that would fuck up her arm pack. “But it’s fine. Are you having fun?” She asked.

  Manon’s eye that was focused on her blinked slowly. The side of his long maw that was facing Dance opened up slightly as he spoke in her direction. “Why?”

  ”Because that’s what video games are for?” Dance said. “Okay, wait, no! Video games are for lots of things actually! Like dating sims are for being sad about unrequited love and roguelikes are for learning about how RNG is evil. But this one is for fun!” She declared. “Are you doing the thing where you don’t think you’re allowed to have fun?”

  ”…yes…” Manon whispered.

  ”Okay well stop!” Dance announced. There, problem solved. That was easy.

  ”…no?” Manon said plaintively. “I failed. Failures don’t get treats.”

  Okay maybe less easy. Dance flattened herself down so her lens was facing directly into his field of vision. “Okay that’s weird, and also stupid and wrong. When did you even fail? And also who cares if you fail? You can screw up and still play games and have fun my dude.”

  ”You are special.” Manon said with the grim confidence of someone who was darkly wrong about something. “No one would hurt you.”

  ”No one’s gonna hurt you either!” Dance was starting to feel a sick discomfort with this conversation. She wasn’t ready for this kind of thing, and maybe, she realized, she should have paid more attention to those conversations about ratroaches. “If they try we can make Charlie throw them into the sun.”

  ”Charlie is angry with me.” Manon said with whimpered resignation.

  Dance narrowed her lens at him, reaching out with one arched robot arm to poke the crocamaw in the side. “No? Dumbass. Why do you think that?” She demanded. “Is it cause he acts like Charlie? He does that to people he likes.”

  ”He’s mad at us. They both left us here.” Manon told her.

  ”Oh.” Dance’s manipulator arm stopped moving as she hissed, tongue flicking into the air in a way that made her taste the rug between them. “Yeah, that sucks. But they aren’t mad, they’re trying to keep us safe. Which is stupid! I wanna go to the other dungeon! Mom thinks I’m all fragile and stuff just because of my ‘internal bleeding and organ damage’ or whatever. And you were supposed to be with us so you could have a family thing without having to fight, and then we fucked that up so fast, so Charlie’s probably mad at himself. No one…” She stopped talking, her synthetic voice stopping too abruptly to really be called ‘trailing off’, but Dance found it really hard to end that sentence with something that felt correct and not stupid.

  Manon curled in on himself, pulling his long pebble-textured maw back as he let the game on the screen idle while he wrapped his arms around himself. “It’s hard.” He said. Eyes drifting up to the glow of the TV that covered the wall of this little corner of the library.

  ”I mean, the controllers were made for people with different fingers. This is why I use the skulljack when I stream.” Dance said, knowing damn well that wasn’t what Manon meant. Giving him an out if this was too hard to talk about.

  But Manon wasn’t used to a lot of things, and subtlety was one of them. “It’s so hard.” His high pitched voice came from the end of his maw, while a choked sigh emerged from a different part of the other side of his mouth. “What do I do?” He asked.

  The question, Dance realized awkwardly, was not actually something she had a practical solution for. He was literally asking for orders. “Uh… whatever?” She answered. “I mean, don’t eat anyone I guess. But yeah dude, just kind of go with things. If you like something, do more of it. If you don’t like something, tell someone? Like me! You can talk to me! I’m cool.”

  ”Okay.” Manon said, staring at her now like he was committing the fact that Dance was cool to permanent memory; which was how she knew she’d said something dumb. People were supposed to tell her that she was being a dork when she declared how cool she was.

  But at least Dance knew a little about what he was going through here. “It gets easier.” She reassured the crocamaw, and now it was her turn to stare at something that wasn’t his face. “One day you wake up and feel normal. You’ll get there. Cause we’ll make sure you get there.” She irised her lens closed, tipping her head up and breathing out the reminder of how she’d used to be. Dance had her voice set to never really go down into what she called the ‘serious’ tone, but she still pushed the program to lighten up as she looked back at Manon. “So hey wanna swap games? We’re not making it past world one like this.”

  Manon looked at her like he was actually taking the time to consider her offer. But for all Dance knew, the boy was just waiting to see if that was a secret command and she was planning to trap him. And when he eventually gave her the little grasping claw motion that crocamaws used to say no, Dance felt a strange sense of vindication, for everything she’d said, even if she didn’t really know what had been so important about it.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back to taking turns struggling to get the leaf powerup that let you fly to actually let them fly.

  Interrupting their game, suddenly, was the sound of heavy footfalls rapidly thudding down one of the smoothed tile hallways that led past the library. Dance didn’t look up, because she had her tongue hanging out pinched between her fangs and was trying to figure out how to navigate the stupid flying sun that killed you, but Manon’s whole body reacted like there was a violent assault coming. Bracing and twisting to watch the door.

  The figure that emerged as the source of the stomping footsteps was a small human. Child, not just a short adult. Manon caught a glimpse of sandy blonde hair before the kid rushing into the room was blocked by the furniture surrounding the spot he and Dance were laying on the floor.

  A second later, that same figure popped over the back of one of the faux leather couches. “Video games!” The child’s voice sounded. “Mom! There-“ He cut himself off as Dance died, swore, and then turned to look back at the newest arrival, the human noticing that Manon was also present and already watching him.

  Then he screamed, and fell over the arm of the couch before running away, voice wailing in fear the whole way out of the room.

  ”That’s new.” Dance admitted.

  “I am not meant to be here.” Manon’s own voice was back to being terrified and hurt.

  ”Shut up dumbass, it’s your life.” Dance prodded him back to their game. “Everyone here is cool with us! Betty made you lunch! You can be here.” She reassured him. “I’ll mess up anyone who says otherwise anyway.” The camraconda added.

  While Dance tried to get them both refocused, she was actually paying a fair amount of attention to the room around them. They were mostly alone in here today, everyone else having gone off to fight monsters or something. But the cat was still around, and watching them from a perch on a shelf that also gave him a perfect view of the fishtank. And every now and then, a knight or grandparent or someone would wander through. Sometimes taking time to sit and rest for a bit, sometimes just passing through the convenient connective tissue of the library to another part of the building.

  There was a lot going on today, but she actually didn’t know why there was a kid in here. Aside from herself, and Manon, who probably both counted.

  Because she had her lens up, Dance noticed when a group of a few people popped in via telepad. And it definitely didn’t make her jump either. She also ducked back down when James looked her way, avoiding eye contact with the paladin that Dance didn’t want to seem too weird around.

  From the hall outside the library, a woman’s voice echoed against the old walls, becoming steadily more audible. “-are not monsters in here, don’t make stuff up.” The voice became clear just as the woman rounded the corner, adding a hint of surprise. “Oh, mom! You are here!”

  ”Jessica!” Eileen’s voice was unconditionally warm. “Just the daughter I wanted to see today! And is that Jack I see hiding behind you?”

  ”Hi gramma!” The kid said.

  “Mom what are you wearing.” The woman sounded incredibly put out. “And who’s this?”

  ”James. Hi. I’m a friend of-“

  ”What is wrong with your eye?” Her voice split the difference between concern and something Dance was pretty sure was disgust.

  There was a pause before James answered, and Dance peeked around the couch to see the paladin confusedly poking at his face. “I didn’t think I got hit today?” He said with the kind of worry that happened when someone said something about the state of his face. “Nothing? My eye is…”

  Eileen patted him on the back with a knowing shake of her head. ”Dear, your eye stands out a bit. It’s very pretty, but people notice.”

  ”Oh! That!” James heaved a relieved sigh. “Sorry, yeah, I have an eagle eye. For reasons. Hi again. James.” He extended a hand to shake once more.

  The woman didn’t take his hand, instead just staring at him with different emotions flicking across her face so fast Dance worried she was going to pass out. It was Eileen who came to the woman’s rescue, pulling her into a side hug that also let her ruffle the hair of the young boy that was closer to Dance’s own height. “Oh Jessica don’t worry so much, he’s a perfect gentleman. Now what are you doing here today?”

  ”Mom you can’t just let strange men into your clubhouse. And what are you wearing.”

  ”Just a little something.” Eileen said, stepping back to show off the combination of heavy leathers and strategically placed hard shell guards, all accentuated by a shield bracer on one arm and a dozen of Kiki’s savior charms. The Order wore armor a lot; Dance had trained in armor, even if she wasn’t really a combatant, but Eileen made protection look like a fashion statement. A weird fashion statement, but still, it was kind of embarrassing to be outclassed that much. “We’ve just been doing a little group activity today.”

  “Well that’s needlessly vague.” James muttered.

  ”I don’t want her worrying about me.” Eileen muttered back, not very quietly at all.

  From her position behind the couch, Dance hissed out a laugh, ducking back when everyone turned to look in her direction. “You wanna chime in?” James called over.

  ”Eileen’s plan is dumb and everyone knows it!” Dance yelled back gleefully, trying not to worry too much about the wide eyed stare of horror that Manon was giving her.

  Cowering, she heard James chuckle before saying, “Well, she’s not wrong.” To a woman who was busy pouting at him like she was seventy years younger.

  She also heard the kid talking, but couldn’t make out what he was saying, though Jessica’s reply came through fine. “Jack, please.” She said, voice approaching where Dance was curled at the edge of the couch. “There’s no such thing as-“ she froze as she came into view and looked down at Dance and Manon.

  ”Monsters?” Dance offered helpfully. “Hi.”

  ”Mother!” Jessica yelled. “What is this?”

  Dance didn’t wait for Eileen to answer this time. “Hey! Stop yelling!” She ordered the human woman, slithering with a motion that made Jessica recoil away to interpose herself between the loud woman and Manon. Because Manon didn’t look like thought this was funny, he looked like he was about to either cry or hurt himself with his own claws, and Dance kinda didn’t want him to do either of those. “Damn girl, it’s like you’ve never seen an ambulatory security camera before.”

  ”Yes, Jessica, stop yelling, you’re being rude to my guests and I raised you better than that!”

  “See! Monsters!” The kid yelled, before Dance glared at him next, and he actually looked like he felt guilty, repeating “monsters!” in a bad stage whisper.

  “Jack!” Eileen circled around behind them, slowing her angry stalk forward when Manon flinched away from her, her face softening as she stepped away from him. “It’s alright.” She told the crocamaw. “My daughter and grandson have apparently just forgotten how to have manners."

  “Mom that’s a giant snake!”

  There was a wheezing noise from where James was apparently dying of laughter for some reason. Dance ignored that. “Hey, I’m normal sized!” She protested. “Ink-And-Key is a giant snake! Or, like… the snake from Anaconda. That was a giant snake! You’re bigger than me, and I’m not showing up calling you a giant human.”

  ”The giant snake is talking.” Jessica had abandoned feeling fear and anger in favor of what appeared to be dulled confusion. “Mom, what…”

  ”Honey, I told you, there’s some friends around the building today.” Eileen shook her head, crossing her arms and standing next to Dance in a way that the camraconda found to be powerfully similar to being in the presence of Kiki. “Now you two apologize to these kids for shouting at them! Yes, you too Jack!”

  ”Sorry.” The eight year old said without much hesitation or deeper thought. But he did follow that up with adding, “You have cool scales!” To Manon, who just stared back in his own confusion. Apparently if your grandma told you that the monsters were people, that was taken as pure truth; Dance would remember this for later.

  ”Mother.”

  ”Jessica.” Eileen did not sound amused.

  ”…Fine, I’m sorry.” She said, not looking at Dance.

  Maybe a different version of Dance would have let that go. That version of her wasn’t here today though. “Wow that sucked. Do you not know how apologies work? I can help if you need advice! I have to apologize to people all the time.” She saw James raise a hand in the air behind her verbal target, his mouth open like he was about to say something. “Like now apparently.” Dance rolled her head around. “Fine, I accept your shitty apology.”

  ”Alice told me to tell you not to swear.” Manon whispered to her.

  ”Have you been waiting this whole time?!” Dance demanded while the adults kept arguing, getting the rapid turning over his claws from Manon that was his version of a nod. “Fine! Hey new kid, wanna play Mario with us?”

  The young human looked at them, then at the big TV that still had a paused game on it. “Okay.” He eventually said with simple acknowledgement, sitting down next to Manon, who shifted like he wasn’t sure what the hell was going on.

  Dance was pretty sure that both she and Manon were keeping their senses open to the conversation still ongoing about how weird their presence was, though the singular adult human that thought that was outnumbered two to one and with a ratio that was about to drop as more people teleported back to check in. She did generally trust James to handle it. James could handle basically anything, that was sort of his job. But it wasn’t like her ability to play was going to get any worse just because she was splitting her attention.

  Besides, they had someone with fingers now, so they might actually make some progress.

  _____

  “Well that was fun.” James muttered mostly to himself. He’d survived dealing with Eileen’s daughter, but was still kind of caught off guard by it. In theory, he’d known that you didn’t call a place a Grandparents Society if you weren’t actually grandparents. These weren’t just old people, they had families, and while some of them had outlived different portions of those families, many hadn’t. That was why there was some kind of pot luck party coming up, because their family trees had living branches, and they actually wanted to spend time with them. “Man, Dance is a riot when she wants to be.” He commented to Anesh.

  Anesh nodded from where he was sitting awkwardly in a chair that had been pulled out of a storeroom somewhere. The room in the old schoolhouse that they were using right now was similarly storeroom-adjacent, the old block of a classroom not having any working overhead lights and just a couple standing lamps, one of the parts of the structure that had gone unused for a while. It was also where they’d found multiple heavy sealed plastic tubs full of bones that James had been amused to confirm were from one of the grandparent’s dungeon hunting exploits. Anesh just found it creepy to have that many skulls watching him. “I’ve heard stories.” He said. “Now. How are you feeling today?”

  ”Wow that’s ominous!” James laughed suddenly. “Is this going to be demoralizing in a personal relationship way, or a dungeon problem way?”

  Looking up at his boyfriend from the laptop screen he was staring at, Anesh frowned. “Alright, enough of that.” He said, and the lack of whimsy in his voice pulled James up short. “You make jokes about Alanna and I breaking up with you too often. Bugger that. We love you, and I at least want to spend my entire set of exceptionally long lives with you. The bad quips can stop now.”

  James worked his way through a series of expressions up to a glowing smile as he held a hand to his chest. “Aw!” He exclaimed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll try to be better about that. Of course, that does mean this is terrible news of a different variety.”

  ”Nothing you don’t already know.” Anesh said, stretching his arms out ahead of him and considering standing up to pace. He discarded that idea pretty quickly; he might have a few copies of himself rotating in and out of action, but this body still felt so exhausted. “Who would have thought that animal level intelligences wouldn’t respect state boundaries?”

  ”Ah. That.” James winced. Because he did already know.

  The spread of the dungeon’s expelled wildlife was still being mapped out, but they had confirmed sightings in both southern Kansas and northern Texas. James never actually remembered what city the Ceaseless Stacks was in, but he was pretty sure that if they let this go unchecked for another month or two, he’d be having to kick caerbannogs out of the way to get to one of his favorite delves.

  At least, in an unexpected turn of good luck, things got better the farther out the dungeon life spread.

  The thing was, when you packed a few thousand hungry omnivore animals that refused to ever prey on each other into a tight area, you ended up with a massive threat to anything that happened to wander into that zone. The various dungeon magics granted to each of the creatures weren’t actually the main threat, except for the spider-bear thing that had a fucking sonic cannon. The threat was that there were a lot of them, they were everywhere, and they were perfectly happy to eat humans off the street.

  As the creatures spread out, they kept in packs and clusters, yes, but they had less competition in their race to devastate the local environment. A lot of them settled in on farms, especially on ranches with high numbers of easy targets that were shaped like cows and chickens. When they weren’t starving, they started to act a little more like normal animals that happened to be slightly aggressive. Smarter target selection, less random alpha striking moving vehicles, that sort of thing.

  The reason James said ah, that, to what should be good news was that, while the Order was getting better data on how far the dungeon’s spawn had spread, they sure as hell weren’t finding all of them.

  Estimates put the total population at somewhere between five hundred thousand, and two million dungeon creatures. And those estimates were now more like actual estimates and not wild guesses. Over the last day of action, James had mostly been acting as a terrifyingly effective sentry turret, dropped into areas where he could ballistically chew through hordes of the rabbit and otter analogues that were attracted to the noise of the shooting. He probably had the highest total kill count out of everyone, and he had, if he had to give a guess, taken out at most five hundred of the beasts.

  The Order’s entire operation, working with the Grandparents Society, probably handled four to five thousand. And that was with them all clumped up, and angry enough to charge out of cover in packs. James didn’t need to plug into Anesh’s brain to do the math on that; they were looking at something that was going to take them actual years to clean up. And that was assuming the dungeon life didn’t reproduce.

  Anesh just nodded sadly as he saw James’ expression. “So, what do we do?” He asked.

  ”What do you mean?”

  ”I mean… what now?” Anesh shrugged. “Do we leave? Do we try to do what we can? Or are we committing to this and doing nothing else for the next three years while the world ends?” He grimaced as he said the lightly forbidden words. “I’ll help with what I can, you know that. I’ll follow you anywhere. And that’s without the fact that I can help with a fair shake more than most people, but it would be nice to… to know what our plan is.” He finished, looking up at James like he genuinely expected his boyfriend to have an answer.

  It wasn’t a smart expectation to have. James felt lost and adrift with this mess. “You know, it’s weird.” He said. “The Order’s whole thing of ‘do good recklessly’ was mostly a thing I was telling people like Alex and Karen, so they’d either not feel dismay over how big problems were, or wouldn’t feel dismay over how inefficient our own initial spending on those problems was.” James saw Anesh’s lips quirk in a small smile, and he let himself crack one of his own. “Because so much stuff in the world, we didn’t have the power to change the big picture on.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  ”And still don’t, usually.” Anesh closed his laptop and decided to stand up, packing his stuff into his carry bag so they didn’t leave this old classroom with even more clutter in it. “Magic only goes so far.” He tried not to think about how silly that sounded. And found, maybe worryingly, that it didn’t sound silly anymore at all.

  “Right. But, like, we could still help people. Maybe not break the - mundane - status quo up, but we could help. Start small, and be okay with that, because the big picture wasn’t our job.”

  ”Now, you say that with the voice you use when you’re about to tell me things have changed.” Anesh pointed out, watching James pace back and forth in front of the old blackboard that still held an ancient layer of chalk dust.

  ”Hasn’t it?” James asked painfully. “Is this not our job? If we don’t do it… who will?”

  ”At the risk of stereotyping your entire country, Americans do have guns.” Anesh said. “So… so many guns.” He mentally reached to the network connection that led to James’ brain, and sent his boyfriend a map using the horrible convoluted UI of a grown program specifically for this purpose. “Look, you can see how the density of the monsters thins out in the ‘shadow’ of towns and even just places like truck stops. It’s not because they’re getting distracted. The people here are more than willing to shoot anything with fur and claws if it gets too close.”

  James had noticed that. The attrition rate of both sides of this undeclared war was pretty high, but it was a factor on containing the spread. An alert farmer with a shotgun that shot a couple of the infrasound screamers every night was contributing to the fight, even if they didn’t know it.

  He wondered how long it would take for people here to show signs of change from the orbs that they’d inevitably be picking up and using. He wondered how long until some wild animal from Earth changed enough to be noticeable from the same source.

  “Are there bears in Oklahoma?” He asked with a frown.

  ”Don’t ask me that. I didn’t even know that bears aren’t native to Australia.”

  ”Anesh, I love you, but you have the internet plugged into your brain.”

  ”And on my phone, yes, but the hotspot signal is tenuous here.” Anesh confirmed. “And sometimes the mystery is nice. But… James, how long are we going to be doing this?”

  ”This, getting into fights with random mutant bunnies, or this, Oklahoma?”

  ”Oklahoma.”

  “Naive James would say ‘as long as we need to’.” James said, with a tone that made it clear he was going to give a different answer. “I think though… A week? Two? We’re shifting our objectives, overall. Clear out anything inside cities and towns, get some perimeter fencing in place where it’s feasible-“

  Anesh cut in. “Ah. That explains why I was told to source sixty miles of chain link fence.”

  ”…Okay good luck with that.” James gave his boyfriend an awkward thumbs up. “But yeah, that and then training the locals - which a lot of them are really into by the way - and maybe having a permanent posting here for hunting down clusters.” He sighed and looked up at the old ceiling tiles and the equally old spiderweb that had been collecting dust on one of them for what might have been years. “It feels so weird to not… you know.”

  ”Close the book?” Anesh asked.

  ”Yeah.”

  His boyfriend grabbed James’ hand as he passed by in his pacing, pulling him to a stop and making him look at Anesh. “Not everything needs to end.” He said.

  ”Well yeah. But I want some things to end. Like people being eaten by wild animals.”

  ”James that happens on a daily basis.” Anesh told him with a sigh, squeezing his partner’s hand and considering if he could use the appendage to bop James on his own head with. “Yes, it would be nice if we could solve every problem and have each of them go away forever once we’re done. But really… you already said it, didn’t you?”

  ”…I don’t want people eaten by animals?”

  Anesh gave him a flat stare. ”No, you… do good recklessly.” He rolled his eyes. “We are here. We can reduce the number of problems. Excellent. But we don’t need to be the whole solution, and that is okay. We can do what we can and understand it isn’t everything, but is still something.”

  The look of anxiety that James had been wearing slowly morphed into a small little smile as Anesh talked and he worked through his boyfriend’s comment. “Wasn’t I just saying basically that same thing to you?” He said.

  ”Yes, but you needed to hear it too.” Anesh told him. “I know you.”

  ”Fair.” James conceded. “I’m a bit dumb sometimes.” He moved to turn the hand holding into a closer hug, and maybe maneuver to grab Anesh’s bony butt while he was at it, when his phone cheerfully informed him that the timer he’d set had run out. Closing his eyes as he fumbled in his pocket to turn it off James gave a put upon sigh. “Break time’s over.” He said.

  Anesh still grabbed him into a hug, squeezing James tight for a moment. There was, really, not that much danger to the trained knight hunting teams here. But he’d never want to be proven wrong after having skipped showing his boyfriend affection. “At least one of me will be out there with you.” He said. “Make me some good memories. And also, stop taking your phone into fights.”

  ”It’s cool, this is my backup. Momo has a lot of them.”

  There was a moment of stern silence while Anesh appraised his love’s manic grin. “There isn’t a question in the universe I could ask about that where I’d actually feel better knowing the answer.” He decided.

  James kissed him gently. ”Isn’t it great?” He ‘asked’. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  ”Go save someone’s life.” Anesh smiled as he sent James back to work.

  _____

  The thing about younger humans was, they were kind of difficult.

  Not as a moral judgement or anything, but teenagers were purposefully defiant as a product of powerful new emotions they had no experience with and a willful desire to test limits, and younger children were often so eager to be noticed that they’d go along with any stupid idea in the world because the concept of context hadn’t sunk in yet.

  The northwestern part of Oklahoma currently had an infestation in it. Living, breathing, hungry creatures that bent sound itself to their own purposes and were definitely more relentless in their hunting once they’d picked a target than any Earth animal. Except maybe the honey badger, which was itself an anomaly and James wasn’t counting it.

  It was into this environment that six teenagers of around fifteen years each, and their four younger siblings that capped out around ten years old, had decided to have an adventure.

  The thing about kids that James recognized was almost universally true was that kids got bored. And this part of Oklahoma didn’t have high speed internet, which was one of the most valuable tools when it came to reliably finding something fun to do that was safe and indoors. Both of which were key points you wanted to hit when there were things outside that had bone scythes as long as a human arm and sharper than most combat knives.

  Learning from panicked parents that there were kids who had wandered off, probably to go to a nearby empty farm that some of the local kids were known to use as a clubhouse of their own, was unpleasant. Especially because someone had punched James when he’d stayed too calm about the situation. He’d just taken it, but now his cheek hurt and it was annoying that his streak of not having damage to his face had been broken by a completely mundane human.

  Retrieving most of the kids had been pretty easy. Half of them were injured with some pretty nasty lacerations, but they were holed up in the dilapidated old barn where they’d been told to hide. Because it wasn’t all of the kids, and two of the teenagers had decided to be heroic, and ran off making noise to draw the monsters to themselves. Or maybe they just panicked and were running, it was hard to tell.

  The scout drones couldn’t find them quickly enough, but James could. Call To Blood continued its own streak as one of his favorite search and rescue spells, as one of the two runners was definitely bleeding and so James could not only find where they were, but track their path as long as he was willing to keep feeding the spell Breath.

  He didn’t need it for very long, which was good. Despite having his Breath cap at over three hundred, James could spend maybe twenty of that at a time without just dying, fifty if he’d been drinking oxygen potion.

  It didn’t end up mattering this time though. He was the closest knight in the stretched out line that was combing the grassy field for the kids when the two came into view. They were running, clearly flagging, and when they saw James, they changed course toward him, both young voices screaming for help.

  James saw the things chasing them, and he was there in an instant. Two expended casts of Appointed Arrival let him build up his own run as he flickered into place halfway to the teens, and then just ahead of them as they stumbled out of a ditch. James and Zhu moved with perfect kinetic coordination as they slipped between the two kids, Zhu slicing a leaping scythe rabbit out of the air and sending it jerking sideways trailing blood and making a pained wail that snapped off as it got too far away, and James just snap-kicking the one that was still on the ground and in perfect kicking range, launching it out of bone stabbing range.

  On the other side of the old drainage ditch that cut this more wild area off from the disused farm field ahead, about twenty more of the creatures were approaching. They moved steadily, almost like they were pacing themselves, but seeing James standing there, they accelerated into bounding speeds, bone weaponry spreading out to leap. So with his own hands, James jammed the Climb-imbued shovel he had into the dirt at the edge of the ditch, and expended every point of Breath that had been collectively pooled into it.

  A dozen frozen icy arms erupted from the slope like a spear wall that happened to have fingers, the ice gleaming in the light. Casting through the connected dirt, James didn’t bother with complex motions, just letting the limbs move on his own instincts, grabbing and pinning the dungeon jackrabbits, leaving broken bones and frigid gashes where they got rough. A few of the rabbits scrambled in the soft dirt, stubby legs kicking up plumes of it as they frantically turned away from the sudden threat, but most of them just ran straight into it.

  Some got through, though James and Zhu, still moving with enough synchronicity that they could feel each other’s impulses, shot down the ones that started trying to fan out with casts of Pave. They had plenty of Velocity, and their casts hurt if they wanted them to, especially because James’ was overcharged from using the leveler crown. The rest of them, they engaged in hand to hand. Or weapon to weapon, as it were. James let the rabbits focus on him as the closest available target while Zhu kept the rest of the pack from slipping by, and just started stabbing anything that got close. He didn’t even need a magic knife for it. Hell, he might have punched one of them with an off hand jab when he needed a little more space.

  But the truth was, once you got past the far-too-sharp gnawing teeth and the bone swords these guys had for arms, they just weren’t that dangerous. They were thirty pounds of fur and muscle, sure, but they were pretty small, and if one was trying to execute a flying leap it was basically a free kill because it lost all control of its momentum.

  The plan had been to let them get close, then when inside the bubbles of silence, open fire to handle the threat. But it turned out James and Zhu didn’t need that at all. It took them eighty seconds to cut down everything on the field. Not counting the time to execute the ones that were trapped by the Reaching Frost arms.

  Afterward, James turned to the two teens behind him. They had more or less collapsed when he’d shown up, out of breath, covered in dirt and with a million burrs stuck in their clothes and hair, both bleeding, and both starting at him. James pulled the shovel out of the dirt with a shunk sound, the icy arms behind him going still and then cracking slightly, now waiting to melt in the cold December air. With his other hand, he high fived Zhu on a reflex he was pretty sure Zhu put in his head.

  “You two are so lucky.” He said to the kids. “Because your parents are going to be so relieved to have you back alive, they’ll probably forget to kill you.”

  They weren’t listening. And James wouldn’t understand why until much later, when Alanna would nearly choke herself unconscious laughing. ”You dumbass!” She told him as he poured the collection of clear crystal orbs into the current half-full barrel set up at Goodwell rally point two. “You teleported in a way that was very visible, ripped a hundred monsters to shreds, and I’m fucking guessing here but I’ll bet actual human money that you were probably framed by the fucking sunset or some shit when you quipped at them while wearing an entire glowing bird as a cloak.”

  ”I’m not an entire bird…” Zhu protested without much effort. “But yeah she’s right, that sounds cool as hell. Go us!”

  ”I can’t be cool, I’m… you know…” James protested weakly himself. “I’m just…”

  ”James.” Alanna punched his armor-padded shoulder just hard enough that he felt the impact. “You’re a paladin. This isn’t going to stop happening. Better get used to it now.” She said, before double checking her ammo supply and heading out with Arrush and at least some of Marlea to put down one of the big shaggy bear-spiders that had been sighted.

  James watched her go with a complicated expression. “Oh.” He said simply. “Well damn.”

  He just realized, he hadn’t actually expected anyone to really believe it.

  _____

  It was early the next day that James ran into someone he hadn’t really expected while preparing for another run of increasingly dangerous hunts. To save on the teleport budget, and to avoid the very real risk of an invasive species spreading to Oregon, they weren’t using telepads or logisticors to ferry people back and forth just for downtime. Instead, they’d kind of sort of commandeered multiple empty houses, rapidly cleaned and repaired them with a mix of blue absorbs and copies of the Stacks totems that turned combat victories into sanitization, and then upgraded them with a handful of select copied small green orbs. Then they’d put beds and food in them, and used them as places where knights could get quiet rest that wasn’t just sitting in a folding chair at one of the rally points.

  When they left, these houses would be going back to the community. There were about a hundred farmers in Goodwell right now, who had all been kicked off their property by the simple math of how many violent critters would eat them and their families if they didn’t leave. And a lot of them would be able to at least have a stable - and lightly magical - place to stay while they rebuilt once the Order cleared some of the dungeon’s flood away.

  But for now, it was where James had slept. And while the kitchen was a little crowded with a dozen different people in four different shapes eating breakfast, it was not so packed with people that James couldn’t spot someone he hadn’t seen since he’d been in Missouri fighting weird dogs and giant dripping power cable balls.

  ”Mags?” He said curiously, stopping with a bowl of cereal in his hand at the end of the table. “What… at the risk of sounding ungrateful, why are you here?”

  The broad shouldered woman with her buzz cut and row of ear piercings like an arcane antenna array looked up at him from the omelet she was in the process of annihilating. “Eating breakfast.” She told him bluntly.

  Across the table from her, TQ gave a sleepy hiss. “A coincidence! I am also eating breakfast.” He said, staring down at his plate of potatoes and fruit. “We should be breakfast friends.”

  ”Hard pass.” Mags said. “Did you need something?” She asked James.

  “Just curious why you’d here. You know, since the last time we talked, you were in the process of telling me to get fucked while you and your meddling polycule escaped my clutches.” James said, getting a choked snort of laughter from one of the other knights sitting at the end of the long table and pretending to scroll through their phone while James talked.

  Mags just rolled her eyes and went back to eating. “That didn’t happen.” She said.

  ”Yeah I know, I’m being a ham. How did you get here?!” He asked more directly.

  ”Teleported in with a few other people.”

  Cascading down James’ arm in a splash of orange light, Zhu opened himself up to the world and opened his mouth to jump into the conversation. “This is gonna be exhausting.” He said. “Is this how you are? Where’s Vex? I like Vex.”

  ”You would.” Mags said, though her voice was tinged with prideful admiration. “Fine. Dickhead. I’m here because we owe you about twenty grand and I hate owing people things.”

  ”…You know this operation doesn’t… pay… right?” James asked, sharing a concerned look with Zhu as Zhu paused in picking the dehydrated and entirely fictional berries out of James’ bowl of Captain Crunch.

  Mags just shrugged, shoulders rising and falling like an earthquake. “I pull my weight.” She said, irate.

  Zhu poked James gently. “I think she’s actually trying to participate.” He muttered.

  ”Yeah, I’m getting that.” James muttered back. “Hey, Mags, if you’re here is Vex also here? Because I wanna go be sarcastic at her about how I told you guys you don’t owe me money.” He said. “And I feel like she’ll actually feel shame or something.”

  ”It’s her big weakness, yeah.” Mags said, and then after a long silence, added. “She’s busy. Talking to her gramps.”

  James waited for her to say something else, before realizing that there was no more conversation forthcoming, and letting his gaze drift over to where TQ was watching while chewing down an entire half of a melon. “You know, I have magically more energy than I should? And I’m still too tired for this.”

  ”I am tired as well. Would you like to go sleep together?” TQ asked innocently.

  Deciding to just crash through the camraconda’s verbal trap, James just nodded and began spooning cereal into his mouth. “Sure, but later. We’ve got a job to do today.”

  ”Then I must follow you into battle, and return to seducing you later.” TQ hissed a sorrowful sigh. “Life has become so complicated.” He added.

  Next to him at the table, a knight James didn’t recognize leaned over to stage whisper to a similarly unfamiliar person eating beside them. “This is exactly why I joined up.” The human told the ratroach. “You can’t get morning entertainment like this anywhere else.”

  ”…I… I know Netflix is r-real.” The ratroach whispered back with a much raspier voice. “Y-you liar. You want to help people.”

  ”Well sure, but this is fun too.”

  James smiled as he ate, listening to the sounds of a very, very strange life that were collected here in this collectiveist barracks. He knew that he was going to be feeling stuck here for a little while longer. He knew there was no magical solution to the problem. He knew that the Order couldn’t do everything.

  And he knew this was going to become normal.

  But for just a moment, he also let himself know that the people who surrounded him were both capable and worthy of the challenges ahead.

  And so his cereal tasted pretty good, as he and Zhu allowed themselves a collective moment of serenity.

  _____

  “I think I’m gonna be unhappy.” Alex said to the office she was borrowing.

  Well, half borrowing. Rufus was still using this as his own private den for… whatever Rufus was doing. He’d apparently shortcutted his language issues by compiling a document of words and terms he was constantly copy-pasting from, and Alex still didn’t know why he wasn’t just using a skulljack, but asking Rufus a question like that was weirdly intimidating.

  And it wasn’t just that he was a stapler the size of a corgi. There was just something about Rufus that radiated a quiet intensity. He was a lot like James actually, except James made an active effort to make jokes and diffuse the aura he put off. Rufus just focused on his work; but not to the exclusion of everything else. No, he was focused on his work, and also on Alex, and also on the door, and also probably on two other things. That was what was intimidating. Not just that she was being outclassed by a stapler spider but that it was happening comprehensively.

  As soon as Alex said something out loud, she felt like she was intruding on Rufus’ work. Though the look he gave her after a second was one that somehow broadcast empathy and understanding. One of his pen legs tapped rapidly through his list of saved phrases on a secondary keyboard, before another leg tapped a bespoke button.

  ”James’ fault somehow?” Rufus asked.

  ”The fact that you have that specific phrase saved is really actually deeply worrying for about a million reasons.” Alex said, allowing herself to lean back from her screen and breathe in a way she had been failing to do for at least an hour.

  Rufus tapped the selector arrow once, and then hit the button again. “Yes. So is this one.”

  Biting her lip in silent laughter, Alex decided not to ask how smart Rufus actually was. There were a couple dozen striders in the Order now, and while they all displayed cunning and an ability to learn and grow at a very rapid rate, none of them ever seemed to get even close to this one.

  Which was hilarious, because Alex was one of the few people who knew the actual story of how Rufus and James had met, and it did not make Rufus sound that smart.

  The young paladin - technically the middle child of her batch of designated heroes - shook her head as she scratched at her injured flank. Then she froze, as her fingernails found the edges of stitches underneath her shirt. This was exactly what Deb had threatened to defenestrate her over, and her friend had informed Alex that defenestration was both apparently survivable for ‘people like her’, and also very on the table since Deb had never taken the ‘do no harm’ oath.

  ”It’s not James’ fault.” She told Rufus, focusing on that and not the itching of healing flesh. “I mean, not really. I actually do feel better doing something useful. But wow is there a lot to cross reference.”

  Rufus nodded in understanding. There was, after all, a bit of a mess in terms of the intersection of different magics and dungeons. His own personal hobby often brought with it a similar degree of confusing overlap.

  Alex pulled up a lopsided smile at the stapler, trying to look anywhere except at the eighteen different spreadsheet tabs she had open just for build idea testing and potion lists and blue orbs with good absorbs they could mass produce. She wanted to look at anything that wasn’t a battle plan for the Underburbs. Just for a moment.

  She’d been mostly focused on the Underburbs in her planning, ever since being told that her job was to design a flexible battle plan. A combat doctrine. The concept was something Alex hadn’t really thought about before, but made sense once James and later Nate had explained it to her. And she’d done some googling. A strategy was the big picture; what your goal was and how you planned to get it. A tactic was a maneuver you employed as part of a strategy, the steps of a militant dance. A doctrine, then, was almost like a single lego used to build both of the others. If X happens, react with Y. If they go this way, you go that way. If a situation pops up, here’s the stockpile of the solution to that situation.

  It had to be simple. Something basic enough that it could be drilled and trained into knights and shield teams. Something that could be relied on, so that if they ever needed to, they could throw people into a situation at a moment’s notice and trust they’d know generally what to do because there was a plan.

  Alex had started with something personal; how do you kill a dragon like the one that had sunk her most familiar cargo ship and tried to eat her? It was an interesting question, because it relied on two things. You probably needed the ability to be airborne, and you needed to be able to do it without metal. She’d quickly decided that the Order didn’t really have the magic needed to meet all the requirements for that, yet, and so had pivoted to something easier. Flight, yes, they could do, and she had the shape of a good foothold, but it needed more. Some kind of stockpile of equipment that would be safe. Dedicated practice time for people to commit to this specific horrible idea. That kind of thing.

  Since she wasn’t the person that set that kind of thing up, she’d just drawn up as much of a plan as possible, added it to her file, and moved on to something else personal.

  Fighting the Underburbs, when it showed up again.

  It was annoying that this was easier, because a lot of it was the Order’s standard military strategy, but adapted to make better use of their magic. And most of it was specifically telling people how not to use that magic. No drones or infomorph overwatch, because looking at the wrong thing could blow up your eyes. No environmental manipulation spells, because the Underburbs poisoned the ground itself and that bled through magic. Even the tactic of logisticor strikes to remove the dungeon’s anchors had to be done carefully because there were equal chances that you spread some hideous disease to random parts of the planet or accidentally brought along a dungeon-worshipping terminator of an enemy delver.

  But at least Alex knew what to write for that one.

  ”The thing that’s getting me about this is that James told me I could redo the armory packages, and then, that mother fucker goes off, lures my adjutant camraconda buddy with him, and a day later there’s a note that we have, like, seven thousand orbs of a brand new type and we don’t know what any of them do!” Alex paused. “Alright maybe it is James’ fault.” She conceded. “And also there’s two types of orb. So that’s cool.”

  Rufus nodded sympathetically, wondering if he could perhaps escape this conversation with his silence.

  Alex, though, was the kind of person who did best when she could talk stuff out. “So these things boost focus in a specific way, while I guess diminishing the others. So, like, do we… use that? Do we even want to use that? My first thought is we find the ones useful for armory packages and then anyone who’s a frontliner can pick enacting focuses, and the people who are planners - like Planner - can pick the planning focus?” She jerked her hand to wave in the air, biting back a scream as she tugged at the unhealed cut in her torso, and continuing to talk anyway. “But that’s awful, right? Because then we’re setting up a system where there’s an anti-pipeline between being a field knight and being a commander of any kind! And, like, okay. We’re anarchists. It’s not that big of a deal. But it kind of is? Because for a lot of people, hands on experience is going to be foundational to an understanding of how to lead and plan in the field they have experience in!”

  Rufus raised two of his side pen legs to her in affirmation, letting her talk while he got back to work.

  ”Yeah, see, you get it!” Alex decided to interpret Rufus’ motions however she wanted. “So what am I supposed to do with that? Even the studying option feels like a trap, because you absolutely don’t want a student that can learn better at the expense of doing better! That’s how you get career academics!” Alex paused. “Actually that’s how you get career academics. That’s probably a good use for it.” She mused quietly, looking back at the screen with the list of known orbs so far. “Maybe they’re best as noncombat tools in general then? Oh god that would be so nice, because then I can ignore them.”

  Rufus’ legs tapped into keys as he compiled a part of his own email to a group of teachers, completely unrelated.

  Alex heard the noise and nodded anyway as if he were speaking to her, her gaze distant again, her breathing tighter as she went back to focusing on her reading and planning and compiling. ”Oh yeah, good point, good point. Gotta get Research to tell me if these have absorb or imbue properties. Actually, shit, you think I can convince someone to bring me some?” Alex looked up and stared at the far wall in sudden realization. “Wait, I can! I have superpowers!” She started typing something in rapid bursts of the keyboard. “Hey, Rufus…” Alex started to say.

  And Rufus knew he needed to escape. Or at least make it known that he was far too busy for this. He did actually find Alex’s constant out loud discussions of her thought processes interesting, especially as she combined orbs on logistics and management and communication with research and her own practical experiences. It was a strange window into a world that did not yet exist, but Rufus was interested to see. But also, he did have things to do and he couldn’t be her aide the whole time she was in his office.

  Fortunately, a tapping at the door interrupted both of them. Cathy, the ever reliable human, pulled back the carved cane she walked with from where she’d alerted both of them to her presence. “Not too busy, are you Alex?”

  ”Nope!” Alex shot upright, before slamming her eyes closed and blinking away tears at the stress of the movement on her body. “Whaaaaat’s up?” She gasped out in a strained voice.

  ”There’s a call on line three for you from Alice. Something about a new dungeon.” Cathy said, as if that were business as usual and not a phenomenal blow to anything Alex was planning.

  Alex stared at the office phone on the desk, and the blinking light that indicated someone waiting to talk to her. “Why me.” She said, confused.

  ”Well, there’s no other available paladin, and someone should keep you kids in the loop.” Cathy said, the woman giving an almost thorny smile as she leaned on her cane. “Also I think Alice wanted some advice from an expert.”

  ”I…” Alex stopped. Oh no. She was a dungeon expert. That wasn’t good at all. “Yeah, I’ll talk to her. Thanks Cathy.” She said, trying not to sound like she was begging for escape from the position she’d ended up in.

  ”Of course dear. Oh, and Rufus, Fredrick just called for you and said something about plant containment. I’m not sure if-“ Cathy stopped talking as Rufus catapulted himself off the desk, papers spraying behind him in a plume of white page and black ink, the steady metal thump of his speaking pack on his flank as he scuttled between her legs and down the hallway at high speed, racing for the elevator. “-that was… a… serious problem.” Cathy finished, looking after him while Alex leaned over James’ computer setup to crane her neck in the same direction. “Well. I’m sure that’s alright.” She said.

  ”Hey, um…” Alex made a decision and calmly picked up the phone, already standing up and shifting herself around the desk. “Hey. Alice? Hi, it’s Alex. Yeah, is this urgent? Because if it’s not, Rufus is running like something is on fire and I feel like I should… yeah. Yeah I’ll put you on hold. If I’m not back in an hour can you and Charlie come find my corpse? Thanks.” She set the phone’s receiver down, and then turned and jogged as fast as she could manage after the stapler.

  It was always something around this place.

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