The Daily Grind - Chapter 115 (Patreon)

I'm way ahead today!  Enjoy these assorted scenes.

_____

Momo’s first totem, refined over a dozen iterations as her skill in making the things grew, guided them to where they needed to be.

It found emergency medical care.  Originally, it did that, didn’t have a range limiter, didn’t give extra context, and if you listened to it for too long you’d start to feel like someone was trying to scoop out your right eye with a melon baller.  These days, it did that, in about a thirty mile radius, and you had to listen to it for a *lot* longer before it started to cause brain damage.

Momo was pretty proud of that one.

Despite the fact that it was late, and only getting later, the veterinary that they pulled up to still had its lights on.  And according to the totem knowledge they’d all been imbued with, had at least one practicing individual inside who was capable of rendering emergency aid

“A vet?”  Neil groaned as they helped him out of the back of the van.  “You couldn’t find me a hospital?”

“We’re avoiding hospitals.”  Momo told him, the short girl comically struggling to help the wider young man towering over her.  “Stop griping.  You’re the one that kept going instead of letting Feeling-Of-Home freeze you.  You didn’t *need* to bleed all over my van.”

“S’not your van.”  Neil mumbled.  “Order property.  Traded gold for it and everything.”

“Sure, man.”  James agreed from the other side.  “Just shut up and let’s get you patched up.”

It was Momo’s James.  The two of them, two camracondas, and a handful of other members of the Order, had split off with this van to get Neil medical aid.  Another van had taken Ethan; he was going to some doctor’s house in the suburbs that leader-James said would be open to helping.  Others with more minor wounds had been similarly distributed, or just retreated to the Lair to get patched up.  Different places; one person being asked to treat a mysterious gunshot in the dead of night was a weird event.  One person being asked to treat *several different people* with similar wounds, was *far* more suspicious.  A lot of people were on their way back to the lair, but the vans were only so big, and making a casual stop at home base was awkward when you had people with bullet wounds.

The most worrying, at least in Momo’s mind, was that Frequency-Of-Sunlight had been hurt.  Hit by something through her main body, sometime while the firefight on the roof was happening.  Momo felt like she was in the wrong place; she should be there, tracking down a computer repair shop or a mechanic or something.

She shook off her thoughts as they made it to the front door, and she started rapping on the frosted glass of the locked barrier.  “Hey!  Open up!”  Her shout echoed in the night.

It took five minutes of standing in the dark between two winter-dead shrubberies that hadn’t bothered to regrow their leaves, bounding on the door and yelling, before the vet came to the front to see what the hell was going on.

Momo was, by this point, uninterested in wasting time.  Certainly, *Neil* would prefer if the bullet still lodged in his chest could stop being there sometime soon.  So, when the middle aged woman with her brown hair in a bun and a stained white medical coat opened her mouth, Momo cut her off, using every trick of communication and social etiquette she’d learned over the last few month - both from the dungeon, and just from other delvers and James especially - to get what she wanted.

“If you fix his injuries and don’t ask questions you can have this.”  Momo said, dropping a half-pound gold nugget into the woman’s hand.  Yet another random and unfair advantage their dungeon boons gave them; the ‘ore vein’ in the basement was of such a high concentration it was basically magic.  Well, it was literally magic.  Momo remained unsurprised.

The veterinarian did *not* remain unsurprised.  She stared, open mouthed, at the metal in her hand.  Eyes flickering between Momo, the gold, and the small mountain of an individual that was Neil.  The delvers were still in most of their body armor, especially Neil who they hadn’t wanted to move too much to remove it, fearing injuring him further.  They smelled like gunpowder and blood, and they looked for all the world like extras from a sci-fi dystopia.

The vet looked back at the gold.  Thought about asking if it was real.  Realized that was a bit pointless, made a decision, shut her mouth, and stepped back, swinging the door open and motioning them inside.

She *did* demand that Momo give something at least pretending to be an explanation when Feeling-Of-Home followed the humans through the door.

_____

“No projected losses.”  Nate spoke into the cheap cell phone he’d found along with a few others of the same model in a sealed plastic crate labeled “crab” from the last Sysco order that had come into the Order’s kitchen.  His kitchen.  There had been five phones, five prepaid SIM cards, and one battery.  Each one had a number loaded, and was single use, in that he was expected to add the phone and card to separate trash compactors and pocket the battery after making the single call.

Right now, he was standing just off the street a few blocks away from the building that the people he worked for seemed to unironically call ‘The Lair’.  It was a spot between the parking lots of three different fabrication companies, where the employees tended to congregate for late night smoke breaks.  A coffee can of cigarette butts sat half-buried in the dirt and bark dust near him, and he was planning to add his own contribution to it shortly.

After the call.  “I would estimate they… we... incapacitated or killed roughly thirty five individuals.  All of them were trained agents.  No clues on where they came from, though I’d be willing to be at least one used to be one of ours.”  Nate continued to report in a conversational tone, pausing as a pedestrian walked past.  He didn’t have a time limit, and no one was going to interrupt him from the other end of the line, where he was speaking into a recorder anyway.  “The opposition were trained, as I said. But sloppy.  They relied on…” Nate paused, not knowing how to say this.  At least, not in a way that wouldn’t get him thrown into a psych ward.  “They relied on *unconventional* methods.  Unprepared for a direct assault.”

All of this was technically true.

“The Order also relies on unconventional methods.”  He said it smoother this time, the obfuscation slipping into place like a well-worn shirt.  Warm and comforting, even if you could see a couple holes.  “At present, their operational goals remain unclear, as do those of their enemy.  I request any information we have on this ‘Status Quo’, if available.  The leadership has referred to them as such repeatedly.”

He paused for breath.  Wished that breath was a smoke.  Then continued.  “Despite the sudden turn to military-style violence, I do not believe the organization to be planning large scale acts of violence, or a threat to the civilian population.  Leadership continues to show both socialist and communist attitudes”  And wasn’t that an understatement?  Nate felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and resisted the urge to look around.  “Observation continuing.  Awaiting further orders.”

He finished the call, removed the phone’s SIM card, snapped it in half, snapped the phone in half, and dropped half the assembled mess down a sewer grate.  The other half he pocketed to do the same with later.  Calmly, he pulled out a cigarette from a crumpled packet in his back pocket, lit it, and took a deep pull.

*Then* he turned around.

“Productive phone call?”  JP asked politely, taking the second offered smoke from Nate as he leaned against a nearby tree.

“Won’t know.”  Nate grunted out, dragging on his smoke again.  He eyed JP idly for a minute, the slick-haired young man watching him through seemingly unconcerned eyes.  Nate briefly considered if he could, if needed, either disable or escape from whatever bullshit JP had up his sleeve.  Strangely, despite having about ten years of combat experience, and roughly forty pounds of muscle on the other man, Nate *didn’t like his odds*.

JP noticed.  He didn’t mention it.  “How very James Bond.”  He said, instead, sighing like a disappointed parent.  Nate hated that gesture; it felt like he was being lectured, in an absolutely condescending way.  “You know, James told me not to follow you?”

That took Nate off guard.  “Why?”  He asked, deciding eventually on the direct route.  The word rolled out without the confusion he felt, his words carefully contained and rationed.

“I’m pretty sure it’s because he trusts you.”  JP casually flicked some ash onto the ground.  “For some reason.”

Nate had a lot of training.  He also didn’t actually have any advice on how to deal with people who apparently were aware he was spying on them, and didn't seem to care.  JP obviously cared, but since Nate wasn’t already dead or handcuffed, he was guessing the weasel was the only one.  “You know…” Nate started, and for the first time in his life, he realized he didn’t know what to say.  “You know, it’s pretty hard, lying about the magic.”  He settled on.  “Especially when I’m supposed to be monitoring a radicalized domestic terrorist organization.”

“You do get that there are literal fascist white supremist groups that meet in this city, right?”  JP asked politely, not even bothering to raise his eyebrows.

Nate snorted.  “Yeah, I’m sure someone less lucky got assigned to those.”  He said.  “Also don’t tell James yet.  There’s a finite amount of gunfire that won’t get noticed.”  The bulky spy told JP.

JP did raise his eyebrows at that.  One of them, anyway.  “Tonight wasn’t enough to cross the line?  We blew up a building.”  He shuddered theatrically, only half faking.  “I actually didn’t know that we had that option, honestly.”  He admitted idly.  “James… may have overreacted.”

“Not from what I’ve seen.”  Nate whispered.

The two of them stared out at the few cars passing in the street, listening to the soft notes of sirens still wailing in the distance as an army of emergency response vehicles descended on the smoking crater that used to be a structure several miles away.  They smoked, and didn’t make eye contact.

“So.  What now?”  JP asked.  “Turn us into the government?”

Nate paused in his answer, before tilting his head slightly.  “As in, deputize you?  Because that might be on the table, if James asks.”

“No.”

“Then no.”

“Why not?”

Another pause, this one more personal.  Less professional.  He didn’t have a good answer, just a gut feeling.  The kind of thing that every good operative needed, but they were trained to not rely on, not to follow without thinking.  So he thought, like he’d been thinking for the last two days.  And when he spoke, it was with a real answer.  “You know, as near as I know, the Bureau doesn’t have an answer to this bullshit.”  Nate said.  “The magic, the living ideas.  The *dragon*.  I mean, the answer to the dragon is probably the easiest, if we’re being honest.  It’s shooting it.  But the rest of the stuff?  It’s outside context.”

“Oh god, no, don’t you start making nerd references too.  You were the straight man.”  JP moaned.

“The US Government isn’t equipped for this, far as I know.  And it’s going to take you kids months to untangle the web of paperwork that you liberated, but we’re already aware that this one, single group, this *one* organization, had puppet strings on at least one global corporation, and the ability to kill people in broad daylight without worrying about backlash.  This is the thing that my department was created to fight, and we didn’t even know it existed in our own backyard.”

JP snorted.  “The FBI was created to hunt anarchists after McKinley’s death.  Don’t pretend you guys weren’t just as bad as Status Quo, no matter who’s side *you’re* on.”  He stubbed out his smoke and dropped the butt into the coffee tin.  “I may not be as ‘eat the rich’ as Alanna, but I can recognize that your agency might have a vested interest in things not changing.”

“I… am surprised you know that.”  Nate said, stone faced.

“Yeah.  Well.  I’m not just a pretty face.”  JP turned to leave, preparing for the alarmingly short walk back to the Lair.  “You know, James trusts you?”  He asked again, almost disbelieving.  “I don’t.  But I trust James.  Please don’t fuck it up, okay?”

“No promises.”  Nate replied, dropping his own cigarette.

“Yeah, didn’t think there would be.”  JP started walking, and was swallowed up by the cold night.

_____

“Hand me the wire clippers!”  The shout echoed on the concrete floor of the warehouse and out into the parking lot.  The back roller door sat open, showing off the back of the white van that had its own trunk door thrown open as well.

The warehouse wasn’t empty, it just echoed.  They needed some rugs in here, according to Dave, and needed some sterile mats if they planned to keep doing improvised surgery, according to Deb.

Deb was currently elbow-deep inside a camraconda.  And it spoke to the tension of the moment that not a single member of the collective wiseass hive mind around them chose to make a joke about that.

“Here!”  One of the kids… god, they were her age, when did she start thinking of them as kids?... slapped a tool into her open hand.

Deb was halfway to bringing it to where she was working, crouched over Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s stretched out form on the flat surface of an irresponsibly quickly cleared dest, when she realized that someone had handed her the wrong tool.  “Clippers!”  She barked out.  “Not crimpers!”

“But…” Graham started to protest. Oh, it actually was a kid, Deb half-noticed.  He’d been nervously poking around ever since people had started pouring back into the Lair.  “But what are you cut…”

She cut him off, speaking in that steady, yet still urgent voice that she’d slipped into the habit of using from her time shadowing nurses during crises. “The shrapnel caused jagged cuts that need to be cleaned before we reattach.  Now hand me the clippers, she doesn’t have forever.”

She got the clippers.

Overhead, Harvey held a pair of smartphones with their flashlights turned all the way up, shining light from two angles into the exposed inner wiring of the camraconda.  Giving Deb light to work by.  Not the most makeshift surgery bay ever, but close.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight.  The first one of them to choose a name.  It was important to a lot of the Order’s members.  She was a known figure, a walking - slithering - story.  She was also Deb’s friend, and had over the last week or so spent an increasing amount of time hanging around the aspiring nurse.  Her name made her sound lithe and elegant, and in a way, she was.  But she was also one of the larger snakes, and one of the variety that had a wicked double-row of quill tip bronze fangs.  With her custom fitted armor on, she looked broad, intimidating, like a coiled menace.  She would have looked quite the monster, if you didn’t know her.

She’d taken a grenade for the others on her assault team.  And now, with the armor cut away where possible around the main wound, she looked *vulnerable*.

Deb hadn’t even been aware that getting blown up was on the table; she’d been on the roof while the thicker fighting had been on the ground floor.  Never heard the explosion.  She was still wearing half her armor, even now, though she’d stripped everything off her arms except for a pair of surgical gloves.

Her hands, thin and dexterous, snagged the end of a shredded cord, the material of the gloves keeping the fuzzed wires from shocking her, but Deb could feel the acid heat of the fluid dripping from inside it.  Whatever passed for blood for the camracondas.  She pulled it as far as she dared out into the open cavity, and deftly clipped the end off, turning a jagged wound into a clean cut.

She wasn’t even a professional nurse yet.  She wasn’t rated to perform surgery on *humans*, much less magical snakes.  Was this even surgery?  Or was it engineering? Tech support?  Deb didn’t know.

It was like her brain was running two processes at once, and while half of her was staying calm, hands steady, doing what she could, the other half was manically and furiously thinking of random things.  Like panic, only less directed.

An orb skill triggered, and she found the partner to the cut cord.  Brought the two together, set the acid-dripping clippers to the side as she started doing her best to reconnect the individual wires.  They were almost certainly nerves, if the analog to biological life held true, and she didn’t want her friend paralyzed by her own inaction.

Wires connected, Deb held out her hand again.  “Tape.”  Her voice echoed in the warehouse.  They needed some sterile mats in here, if they were going to be using it for surgery.  Though maybe she could get James to make them another basement for an actual medical ward.  She needed to start learning more camraconda biology, if she was going to be the leading expert on putting them back together.

A thin roll of black electrical tape was already in her palm.  She blinked, then was back in motion, carefully using teeth and one hand to tear off exactly as much as she needed, before firmly wrapping the interior cord at the joining point where it’d been sliced apart.

She repeated the whole process four times, the bleeding slowing as she repaired the life form on the desk.

At some point, Harvey’s arms got tired and he swapped out for someone else with the lights.  Deb didn’t notice.  Time lost a bit of meaning as she dug out another fragmented metal triangle of shrapnel with a pair of pliers, and started using a cut up slice of sponge someone had fetched her from the kitchens to mop up the blood as best she could.

“You’re doing alright.”  She spoke softly to Frequency-Of-Sunlight.  The camraconda was still awake.  Aware.  Deb didn’t know if they actually ever slept.  Another question for her thesis paper, she supposed.  “Almost done.”

The hardest part was patching the hole in the outside.  Her electrician engineering orb skill stopped working when she got to the exterior cords; they didn’t have any signal or current running through them, and she hadn’t had time to follow the Order’s standing advice to take time to meditate on your skill orbs and draw out the information for adaptive use.

Deb was mid panic, her hands starting to shake as they failed to understand, suddenly, what the hell she was doing.  And that was when Virgil stepped in.

He’d gotten back shortly after her, had been watching for most of the time, but hadn’t stepped in to interrupt.  Deb didn’t specifically like him, but he had an effective method of being *out of the way* unless actually required, which was an essential skill in the medical industry.

When Deb couldn’t figure out how to get the thicker external cables to go back to being their tightly woven scale-like selves, Virgil had picked up the slack.  Frequency-Of-Sunlight had shown some obvious discomfort, but that might have just been because she had almost died, and not just because there was someone who was a little less delicate tugging on her wiring.

Then, and only then, with the bleeding stopped and her friend safe, did Deb allow herself to finally sit down.  The last dregs of the night’s endless adrenaline rush bleeding out of her and taking her ability to stand up with it.

Someone helped her take off the rest of her armor.  That same person, one of the other girls thankfully, helped her into one of the beds downstairs. Deb almost laughed when Frequency-Of-Sunlight got tucked in next to her, but her presence of mind was fading fast, and the last thing she registered was that the camraconda was making a light, airy noise, that could only ever be interpreted as snoring.  

Ah, so they did sleep.  One mystery down, Deb thought as she closed her eyes.

______

“Hey.”  El’s voice sounded almost deafeningly loud to her ears.  Even standing in the cold and windy air on the roof of the building that they, for real, called the fucking *Lair*, it still sounded like her word came out at the wrong volume.

Probably didn’t help that her head was still ringing with the sound of gunfire and screaming.

She blinked, hard, and behind the lids of her eyes she saw men and women dying.  Figures wearing cheap suits and expensive blood.  They’d been monsters, just as surely as a tumbefeed or a toll eater.  But they’d also been people.  And the Order had reaped their lives like wheat.

When she opened her eyes, Secret was still looking at her.  Though to be fair, the physical version of the infomorph had so many eyes that he was basically always looking at everything.  He was perched on the waist high wall around the edge of the rooftop, on one of the corners that faced the road.  At this time of night, a driver going by might look down toward the building and wonder why, exactly, there was something glowing blue on the roof.  But no one ever stopped to ask questions; El was worried it was because Secret was doing something fucky with their minds, but it honestly might just be because people sucked sometimes and ignored the cool shit all around them.

“Your heart weighs heavy.”  Secret muttered, his actual head still staring out into the night with its windswept trees and blazing street lights.

“You talk like a nerd.”  El prodded, almost entirely on reflex.  Then she bit her lip to shut her mouth, shook her head and sighed a bit.  “Sorry.”  She added.  “I wanted to say goodbye.  I’m leaving.”

Secret turned, his serpentine form doing a long dip as he looped over his own tail to bring himself about to face her.  “You do not believe you can be here.”  He said, words simple and yet impossibly complex.

“I’m not… I don’t belong.”  El lied.  “I’ve got the call of the road!  Gotta be on my way, out exploring… the…” Her voice caught, and she strangled a sob before it could explode out of her throat.

“You have not talked to the others.”  Secret didn’t accuse her, exactly; El was pretty sure that an accusation required anger of some kind.  He didn’t even seem disappointed, just… critical.

“They’re busy.  They’ll figure it out.  Not like I’m robbing the place on the way out.”  El tried her best not to make eye contact with the dude that was mostly eyes.  “I’ll be more comfortable away from here.”  She said, lying less this time.

“A strong hidden truth.”  Secret acknowledged.

“Yeah.  Well.”  El shrugged.

“I… will miss you.”  For the first time, Secret hesitated.  “But if you must go, you must go.”

The words tore El up inside.  Secret had gone from literal nightmare to friend as the days wore on.  He was *interesting*, and *beautiful*, in a way that made the artist’s soul spark and writhe.  So far away from being a monster, but clearly inhuman in a lot of ways, and yet, and yet, every now and then he’d say something in that same dry tone James used sometimes and it wouldn’t be until hours later that El would realize she’d been *burned*.  But never in a mean way.  If he was far from human at all, it was that Secret was never, ever cruel or mean.

And now she was going to ditch him.  And everyone else, too.

She couldn’t stay here.  She wasn’t a hero, wasn’t some kind of dungeon knight, like everyone in this fucking building.  Even now, there were a couple armored figures on the opposite corner of the roof, politely giving her space with Secret, who were armored and armed in a way that made them seem like elegant black knights.  That wasn’t her.

She was just a girl with a car and a knife and a little magic.  And she was starting to feel like if she stayed here too long, she’d find that she’d ended up as *way* more than that.

El didn’t want to be more than that.

She stepped closer, threw an arm around Secret's body, and hugged him.  For understanding, for caring, and just for being a friend.  It was a long hug, and it was a goodbye hug.  The two of them stood on the Lair’s roof for a long time before El took her arm back, and stepped away.

“Hey.”  She said, again.  “I’ll see you in my dreams, I guess.”

“Always.”  Secret told her with a dozen warm smiles.  “And if you ever need me… simply speak the truth.”

El got the feeling that wasn’t exactly literal.  But she also knew Secret well enough to know that distangling his words was an exercise left to the artist, not something that was ever really spelled out.

Half of El’s stuff was already in her car.  The other half was crammed into a duffel bag in ‘her room’.  It was the work of a few minutes and one *infuriating* double elevator ride to grab her things, throw them in the back seat, and start the engine.  She’d discover much later that someone had, at some point, slipped a half dozen orbs into one of the pockets.

She idled in the parking lot for five minutes, waiting to see if James or Sarah would come try to convince her to stay.  If Alanna would yell at her for being a coward.  If Virgil would… what, come casually condescend at her?  El didn’t know.  If *someone* would want to say *something*.  But the minutes passed, and she remained alone.

El was still alone when she turned onto the street, and headed for the highway on-ramp.  The vibration of the engine fed through the vehicle into her fingertips and through the soles of her shoes.  She bared her teeth at the empty highway, screamed wildly into the night. The car’s accelerator getting a workout as she hit I-5, fired off a pulse of magic into the old junker, and took off toward the horizon.

But she still didn’t outrun the smell of blood

_____

Reed was pretty sure… *pretty* sure…. that James didn’t actually know how many people worked in R&D.

There had previously been someone who had been put in charge.  It wasn’t him, it was one of the older businessmen who’d been pulled out when James had rescued them all from the eternal conference room.  The guy had been kind of a twit, but he meant well.  He wanted to repay the kid who’d saved his life.  Except, of course, his life had been devoured bit by bit while he’d rotted in that forced network. His family didn't know him, his job didn’t exist anymore, and he just didn’t fit into the weird framework of the Order that was starting to form.

He’d vanished one day, and never come back.  Reed learned later that he’d killed himself.  He’d hid in the bathroom and cried for half an hour; partially just trying to process the information, partially terrified that was going to happen to him, eventually.

After all, his family didn’t remember him either.

But then, the weirdest damned thing had happened.  The two or three other people who experimented with orbs, and tested items for metaphysical properties, had started asking him questions.  Then started asking him for *permission*.  And then he’d realized one day that the reports he was dropping into James’ inbox weren’t just ‘this is what we failed to learn today’ notes, but actual reports.  And then budget requests.  And then project proposals.

And more people kept joining up.  By this point, Reed estimated that about eighty percent of the original survivors worked out of this building in some way.  *And* they’d hired new people, which was *bizarre*.  How the hell did they just hire people to raid a dungeon?

They had more space, now.  More tools.  They had actual safe testing environments and storage spaces.  He met with Anesh every couple weeks to discuss things they should be replicating for common use in the Order, and to get hints from the experienced delver on the feeling of different orb uses.

It wasn’t all perfect, of course.  He’d accidentally made, and consigned to death, a goddess at one point.  James had been *pissed* about that.  But he poured his spirit into his work and he held his head high when he walked now.  Reed could barely remember the cowering dweeb of an individual he’d been a year ago.

Almost dying changed people.

Now, though, he had a new project.

While he secretly lamented the *very intentional and dramatic* loss of the artifacts that could create magical items, Reed understood that maybe having something that ate blood and spat out power might not be a good idea to hang onto.  Their rival organization had clearly given fully into the temptation of that power, and it had been ugly.  A few clips of shared visual memory were flowing around the grapevine, and the facility under Status Quo’s HQ had elicited a wave of disgust from both himself, and the handful of trusted teammates he’d watched it with.

Still, though.  Their basement research area was now crammed chock full of boxes overflowing with the products of that vile process.  All of it ornate, human-wearable equipment, most of it shaped out of wood, ivory, bone, copper, silver, and bronze.  Arm bands, boots, jewelry, belts, piles and piles of these infused objects, every one of them containing reality-warping abilities available on demand to their wearers.

And Reed was *ignoring* them.

It had been four hours since they’d gotten back from the battle.  He suspected, in the back of his mind, that someone would eventually name this particular fight, just like they’d eventually settled on calling their escape from the clutches of the Office the Exodus Run.  But for now, it was just ‘the battle’.

Upon returning to the Lair, the mood had been turbulent and mixed.  Some people had crashed, immediately.  Falling into beds or couches and passing out; while Reed was upstairs recently he’d seen Alanna herself napping while sitting straight up still wearing her armor, before quietly slipping into the elevator.  Other people sat in silent groups in the cafeteria, sipping drinks and occasionally sharing shaky words.  Still others had looked for something, *anything*, to do with their hands.

Reed was one of those.  He’d wasted no time finding a task that needed doing, and throwing himself into it.

And that task was, mournfully, paperwork.

The other thing that was now filling his basement domain was a mountain of stolen paperwork.  A hundred bankers boxes of archives taken from Status Quo, dozens of PCs left unplugged and stacked in the corner to await infiltration, the dirty laundry of the organization’s last hundred years of operations.  It was almost beautiful, except it was also frustrating beyond belief.

He’d just started pulling stuff out to read, hoping to get a grip on the organization system, and build a starting foundation to expand on over time.  But no, there was no system.  Or if there was, it was as diabolical as Status Quo themselves.  Some files referenced other files, some of which were digital, some of which Reed was *reasonably* certain didn’t exist, and some of which - the minority - he actually found.  Those ones were usually heavily treated with bars of black ink, cutting out anything useful.

He massaged his closed eyes as he took a break from staring at a heavily redacted page.  These were *their files*, he thought to himself.  *Why* in the *hell* did they blank out all this stuff if no one even knew they existed to try to spy on them?!  Were they just future proofing against someone like the Order wiping them out and stealing their office?  Was this long-term spite in action?

He froze, fingers crumpling the paper’s edge slightly as he tensed up.  Three deep breaths later, he steadied himself, banishing the memory of gunfire.  Reed pushed away the thoughts of violence, knowing he was doomed to nightmares later, but feeling a form of manic energy *now*, driving him to get *something* done.

“Y’okay?”  Nikhail, one of his more trusted subordinates asked, concern in his eyes.

“Fine.”  Reed muttered.  “What do you think the Order’s policy on heavy psychedelic use is?”  He asked, only a little joking.  “Also, do we have anything for a document type MW-RLC?  I’ve got something here dated for today that references six or seven versions of it.”

“Ummm…”  Nikhail was a bit disorganized, which wasn’t great, but he was trying, and for someone who’d grown up a trust fund baby, he did a good job.  He was also one of those people who had instantly recognized the dungeon’s ability to solve some of the harder problems with the human condition, much like the rest of the research team.  In his case, transitioning.  And, Reed hoped, organization skills too, eventually.  Reed tuned out the muttered and shuffling of paper as he went back to sorting stuff into stacks based on how much the pages annoyed him, but eventually Nikhail replied more fully.  “Got it.  Yeah, we’ve got… two, so far.  Two copies of one of them, too.  Header’s have what looks like country and state abbreviations, and then the first half of what’s probably a zip code?  Last couple numbers are blacked on both of them.”

“Why.”  Reed made his displeasure known with the flat expulsion of the word.

The three other people down here with him shared a look that communicated something he didn’t want to understand right now.  In unison, the group of transhumanists shrugged.  “They’re a shadowy bureaucracy?”  Ryan volunteered cautiously.

“Ugh.  We should do something about that.”  Reed reached for the joke, and found he didn’t find his own words that funny.  “Ah, fuck…” He muttered, bringing a hand up to cover his eyes again.  “Nevermind.  I think I need to take a break.  Just set aside those files, and anything else with that tag.  I’ll look over them later.”  He stood, pushing back the wheeled chair against the wall.

He was sure there’d be at least a day or two to sort through this lifetime of a mess, before James dumped another problem into the basement.

_____

“I’m thinking we should build a city.”  James said.

He and Anesh were sitting together in James’ office.  Mostly because it had the most comfortable chairs.  But also it was one of the few quiet places in the building, with the only other people here being a couple of camracondas. They *really* needed more space for everyone.

“We don’t even have showers here.”  Anesh replied.  He was leaned back in the padded seat, eyes closed.  If he was at all concerned that his secondary body had been the one ‘death’ on the operation, he didn’t show it.  “And we *should* have showers here.  People smell after working out.  And we’ve been here for days now, on high alert.”

And on high alert they would stay.  James didn’t bother to say it out loud; everyone knew anyway. 

“This building needing showers, and more space in general, doesn’t mean I’m not thinking we should build a city.”  James clarified.

Anesh rolled his head around languidly to crack his eyes open and peer at his boyfriend.  “Is this.”  He asked,  “At all like your arcology idea?”

“Oh, I’ve pitched this before?”

“Not to me.  But word gets around.”

“Okay.  Well, yeah.  I was gonna build up to it and pretend it was reasonable, but we should build an arcology.”

“Just because I heard the word doesn’t mean I know what that is.”

“Oh.  Okay.  So, like, sixty years ago, this guy named Soleri had this idea for a community that was sort of the ideal human habitat.  His goals were maximizing community engagement and human happiness, while minimizing resource waste, travel time, and space used.”  James tapped off points on his fingers, drumming them on his desk as he spoke.  “So, an arcology - that’s architectural ecology, FYI - is basically a space designed to house people.”

“So a city.”  Anesh countered.

“Cities suck.”  James looked over at the map of the local area he had on his wall now, pushpins marking known dungeon locations. “We’re hugely spread out, but don’t have any personal space.  We pave over greenery, and fill spaces with useless businesses that technically provide services, but they’re mostly services we could centralize and do better communally.”

“Do you have an orb…”

“Not everything is an orb, buddy.  I just like watching philosophy videos on Youtube, and have access to an army of research goons in the basement.”

“Fair.”

“So yeah.  I think we should… do that.  Design a space, including the processes of society and governance, and then make it.  And then live in it.”  James met Anesh’s eyes.  “My sales pitch may need work.”  He smiled weakly.

Anesh frowned.  “No, I like it.”  He said.  “The obvious problem is scale.  But…” He tapped his chin.  “We have greens.  And can duplicate them.  We could systematically solve some problems that way, or create better spaces.  The real problem is cost.”  He frowned suddenly.  “Ah, and probably also nations.”

“Yes, nations *are* a problem.”  James agreed sagely.  “But I get what you mean.  The good ‘ol US of A isn’t gonna be too happy with us building a physics-defying city sized defiance of the heavens, and then inviting a million people to come live in it tax-free.”

Anesh choked on the sip of water he’d taken.  “Oh, so, you’re not really thinking small here!”  He exclaimed.  “Okay!  Fine!  A million!”  Anesh paused, halfway through throwing his arms in the air.  “Wait, if you’re thinking *that* long term, then you absolutely don’t have an excuse for not getting showers installed here.”

“I’ll call a contractor tomorrow.”  He conceded with a more real smile than before.

With a smug nod, Anesh, folded his arms over his chest and leaned back again.  “See that you do.”  He sighed.  “And Office day is coming up again.  I’ll make backup copies of some of the greens, and we can start testing them here.  See if we can find any that are… abusable.  Or, are we even going in?”  He asked.

All of a sudden, James was incredibly tired.  When they’d gotten back, Sarah had dumped what remained of her rest into James with a hug, and then retired to hopefully dreamless sleep.  But even that wasn’t enough to keep him going forever.  Mostly, it just made him worry that the bonds were almost painfully zero-sum games.  You really needed to trust someone, lest you be turned into a battery for sleep or whatever else they could link.  Maybe that was the point, though.

He shook off his thoughts.  “I’ll be going in.”  He said.  “We need to pick up at least a few yellows for Rufus and Ganesh.  Not that we’re ‘low’, but I want to be safe.”  He looked down at his empty cup, the food he’d forced down after the battle more or less eaten and then washed down with water.  “Maybe I’ll try to roll a vending machine out of there for the Lair.  I’m tired of not having juice.”

“Ah yes.”  Anesh rolled his eyes.  “Be safe, by going into the deathtrap.”

“Yeah…” James tried to laugh.

“Hey…” Anesh reached out and set his hand on the desk.  A second passed before James extended his arm, placing his palm against Anesh’s.  Anesh clasped his boyfriend’s hand, grip warm and firm against James’ cool skin.  “I know this has been a fucked up week, but we’re going to be okay.”

“Are we?”  James barely found the energy to whisper.

“Yeah.  We are.”  Anesh asserted. He stood up, joints creaking as he did so.  “Come on.  No one needs us right now, and we’ve got the building under guard.  Let’s get you to a bed.  And, failing that option, let’s go swipe all the soft things and make a nest on the floor here.  You can have a camraconda for a pillow.”  One of the cable snakes raised its head at that, single lens of an eye focusing belligerently on Anesh.

“Oh man.”  James muttered, brain making the kind of connections that only really made sense when he was beyond exhausted.  “I want a camraconda dakimakura.”

“We’ve had this conversation before.  It’s still weird.”

“No, before I wanted one of Rufus, specifically.”  James argued, as if that didn’t make it somehow more weird.

“You know, I’ve got a sewing skill, and I know you have some fabrication stuff.”  Anesh said as he guided James to the elevator.  “We could probably make some pretty cool dungeon Life stuffed animals.”

James glanced at his boyfriend, processing the earnest words.  He smiled, feeling his heart swell in his chest.  “I’d like that.”  He said.  “But after I sleep.”

“Absolutely.”  Anesh agreed.

James didn’t remember much after that, but when he woke up curled around Anesh in a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor of his office, he was the most rested he’d ever felt in his life.

_____

Across the Lair, the members of the Order and the assorted handful of other individuals in the building settled in for a quietly tense night.

Yes, they’d done it.  They’d started, and in the same night ended, a war.  In theory, there wasn’t much of a threat left to be posed by the survivors of Status Quo.  Maybe ten agents left alive, some of those with some pretty bad long-term injuries.  And they had outside contractors scattered around the world, though as the research team was discovering through their trawl of the paperwork, “scattered around the world” actually meant “one or two in most major cities, and most of them were just going to stop giving a shit when the checks stopped coming.”

Yes, they’d basically taken a massive step forward as an organization.  While most of them accepted that death was a constant risk, tonight hadn’t brought its sting.  And now, they were blooded against human foes that were both willing and able to shoot back.  The last couple had seen them laying the foundation for their protocols on use of violence, developing plans of attack, and overall strategies for employment of xenotech in combat situations.  Not only that, but the trove of artifacts they’d liberated represented the ability to step up the power of their own operations by an order of magnitude.

And unlike the Status Quo, they could probably make more of them without killing anyone.

But some people were still drinking coffee by the gallon, perched on the roof with rifles just out of sight or standing on street corners with mostly-concealed radios and earpieces.  Some people stayed up on their own nervous energy, flipping through paperwork, or checking in on the cat in the basement, or just cleaning up the mess from hewing nuggets of gold out of the wall.  And a lot of people sat quietly, not knowing what to say, or how to keep on going as they used to be.  Because they’d killed a lot of people.

Lua and Sarah were doing their best as the group’s resident therapist and counselor team.  But they were two people, up against a small army of panic, doubt, and sorrow.  Also they didn’t have a set office space to meet with people individually, just a set aside part of the warehouse space where they’d stolen a couple of the couches to, and the trust that everyone would give them a respectful distance.

Alanna was, after her nap, also trying.  Though her way of doing it was more along the lines of individual debriefs with the Order members who were more in control of their emotions.  Her words didn’t help repair damage, they shored up and supported the people who were dealing with it in their own way, lending credibility to the Order’s actions.  It helped tilt the attitude in the air, and over time it would spread around the knighthood, but it wasn’t going to reassure anyone who was already cracking.

There was doubt.  There was also fear of retaliation, either from Status Quo, or another organization they were allied with, or just by the police or government if they found out that the Order had bombed a building just to prove a point.  And there was a kind of worry about what this meant for their future, too.  What was the Order going to be?

Most of these people had signed up… well, okay, they hadn’t really signed up.  Most people had been rescued from the Office.  Or they were people James knew personally.  The people who *had* signed up certainly hadn’t done so for the dungeons, and *absolutely* hadn’t done it to march into battle.  There was this idea that floated around the membership, and the support group too, the people who didn’t directly work with them for now; and it went like this:  Sometimes you’d overhear James or Alanna talking about the future.  They’d be having a conversation, and it’d sound pretty normal, until they passed by you and you’d realize that they were discussing building an orbital solar farm, or the logistics of ending poverty.  Sometimes they’d ask random open questions to anyone in the room, often about very specific facts.  And when answers didn’t arrive, they’d run off to do research.

This was just what they did.  When they weren’t planning delves and organizing the Order with Anesh, they were planning the *future*.  And no matter how the world kept turning, their vision was bright, and glorious.

It felt like a promise of something more.

But now that came into contact with the fact that they’d fought, and killed.  And it was hard for the group to deal with.

Hard but not impossible.

The night wore on.  It was past midnight by the time most people settled down to sleep.  Guard shifts rotated with those who’d napped, Ganesh and the camracondas taking up watch positions to cover the lack of available humans.  They never did get attacked, and as it started to look clear, and words and stories were exchanged, tensions started to fade.

When the next day dawned, they collected in the cafeteria.  James made his ritual apology for not buying beanbag chairs to replace the shitty benches, Nate made eggs benedict, and Secret made everyone relax by saying that the Lair remained hidden information.  They ate, sharing close space as they packed more and more waking delvers and snakes and researchers and infomorphs into the limited room, an extended family of warriors and magi and other things besides.  And after the announcement that it looked like they were in the clear, as everyone became comfortable sharing tables and words, laughter started to drip back into the air.

People told stories.  From the battle, but also sometimes from past delves, or just from their lives.  Some of them talked about their work with magic items, others talked about dumb moments from jobs or school.  Some of the camracondas asked questions about the idiosyncrasies of human society, which led to having to explain that US society wasn’t *all* of human society, which led to having to explain nations.  Again.  Some people made jokes.  Some camracondas shared their names for the first time.  Some cautiously floated that they’d volunteer to go on a delve this week, you know, if anyone *really* wanted to...

And they talked about a better world, and how they planned to build it.  What kind of planet they wanted to live on, what kind of people they wanted to be.  James made his arcology pitch at some point, and Anesh threw goofy comments from the back of the room as he gradually got everyone on his side about building a single-structure city-state.  Momo talked about studying the duplication ritual, and threw to Alanna about how to convert Earth into a post-scarcity society.  Sarah talked about finding a solution to reworking how government in general worked while JP started daggers at Nate who was wiping his hands idly on a towel in the doorway to the kitchen.  Everyone had something to add.  Even Secret talked a little about his experience living, and what infomorph rights were probably going to need to focus on.

People started to leave around noon.  They needed to go back to their homes, and families if they still had them.  The Lair *didn’t* have showers, after all - though James had made a call.

But the building never fully emptied.  People *lived* there now.  People for whom the Order had gone from being a lifeline, to a life.

And as James waited for his partners to pile into the car so they could go home and actually have a few hours of real downtime, he realized that he was, for the first time in a long time, really actually excitedly looking forward to the rest of that life.  And he wasn’t alone in that, either.