The Daily Grind - Chapter 124 (Patreon)

I got another review this week from someone who was mad at how I'd 'tricked them' into thinking that James and Anesh were straight.  Normally, I get kinda annoyed at these, but ultimately I'm just mildly amused and a bit tired of them.  This time, it was actually quite funny, because they didn't even read all the way to the part where things get *very bisexual*, and instead, they got offended at the foreshadowing itself.

I guess that saves time?  I dunno, most people complain that there was no foreshadowing; so the one guy who actually spotted it being upset by it is... hilarious to me.  

Anyway I wrote a chapter that's not about that.  Here ya go!

_____

“Alright, I’ve got a proposition.”  Alanna was saying.

She was sitting with Anesh in James’ fancy new out of state office, the three of them eating lunch together, supposedly taking a break from their responsibilities, but actually just brainstorming ways they could impact the world.

“Is it going to be duplicating the wallet you found?”  James asked.  “Because I’m still *super* concerned about the fact that you folded a pistol in half.”

“Yeah, in retrospect, that was a really bad idea.”  Alanna agreed.  “Especially since it came out creased, and I *absolutely fucking will not* fire it now.”

“What’re you gonna do with it?”  Anesh asked around a mouthful of gyro.  He’d opted to break basically every reasonable security suggestion to take the stairs down to the ground floor and visit a food truck that he’d ‘heard good things about’.  How he’d heard of a random food truck in another city several hundred miles away was anyone’s guess, but with Anesh, there was always a near constant possibility that he had in his head a given piece of information.

Alanna shrugged, turning away from watching the traffic out the window.  “I’m thinking I maybe mount it on my wall with a plaque that just reads ‘hubris’.”

“Good plan.  So, what’s your proposition?”  James prompted her.

“What?”

He sighed, and leaned back in his padded chair, dropping his fork into the takeout tray on his desk.  “You said you had a proposition, and then we derailed you.”

“Oh!  We should end crime!”  Alanna stated bluntly, before taking another mouthful of salad and failing to clarify like that was a normal statement.

“Alanna, you can’t just say stuff like that.  I love you, but your addiction to dramatic pauses is tearing this family apart.”  James snarked at her.

She made a fart noise at him, but did start speaking to clarify.  “Okay, so, I’ve been doing some digging in FBI statistical databases, which our good friend Randall is weirdly willing to provide us with.  DId you know roughly ninety percent of crime in this country is motivated by financial pressure?”

“Is financial pressure coded language for poverty?”  Anesh asked politely.

“Yes!”  Alanna jolted to her feet, point in acknowledgement at Anesh’s words.  “It is!”  She started pacing back and forth on the lush carpet of their skyscraper office.  “And that figure includes violent crimes, too, by the way.  Even though violent crimes are actually only a small fraction of totally crimes committed.  These numbers are for actual crimes, by the way, not arrests.”

James tapped a finger to his cheek, processing her words.  “So, what you’re proposing… can I skip ahead here?”

“Please.”  Alanna spread her arms magnanimously to him.

“You’re proposing that we address the root cause, and end poverty.”

“Yes!”  Alanna exclaimed again.

James and Anesh traded a look.

“Okay…” Anesh said.  “Now, I’ll admit, I think we’re leagues closer to being superheroes than I ever really expected to get.  But that seems… like a big ask?”

James had to agree.  “Alanna, you are both beautiful and terrifying, but I don’t think that we have the capacity to kill the abstract concept of poverty.”

“The average human…” Anesh paused, and corrected himself.  “So, this would be a massive undertaking, yes?  And the average member of western civilization is… I don’t want to be a dick here, but the people we have in power have a vested interest in stopping this, and everyone else would kind of like to just get high and watch Shark Week to forget about the first half of this sentence.”

James glanced out the window, out to the sprawling cityscape below them.  “We really could just start assassinating people who stabilize problems.”  He said.  “Like, people who keep problems going to benefit from them, not… you know.”  Looking back at his partners, he shrugged.  “It’s an option.  And it’s kinda sad that it seems like the easiest way to influence a large scale.”

“I knew you’d say that.”  She said.  “Which is why I planned ahead, and have prepared some suggestions for footholds.”  Alanna flipped open a binder that had been on James’ desk the whole time, that he hadn’t even noticed.  “Now, we don’t need to launch directly into getting in a fight with capitalism. We just need to address the roots of what people *need*.”

“Water, food, shelter, security, community, entertainment, purpose.”  James rattled off rapid fire.  “What?”  He asked of the looks the other two gave him.  “You think I’m fucking around with the arcology thing?  That’s *happening*.  We gotta know this stuff.  Mazlow!  Herntnon!  Do the supplemental reading!”  He turned back to Alanna, propping his elbows on his desk.  “Anyway.  You have ideas for addressing these things?”

“Somewhat.”  She said, a wry grin on her face.  “The problem with a lot of them is the issue of ‘there are eight billion humans’.  We can, locally, solve basically any problem at this point.  Or we can assume we will shortly have the ability to.  The dungeon provides shelter and food, if not security.  Or we can use greens, or assume that we will have the ability to manipulate oranges soon to create safe spaces of our own.  Similarly, with oranges, we can solve basically any scarcity problem.  Now…”

“Wait, hang on.”  Anesh cut her off.  “How does spatial contortion solve scarcity?  I, too, am looking forward to fitting an entire neighborhood inside our supposedly-one-story commercial space, but that doesn’t actually give us any manufacturing or production capability.”  He paused for a second.  “Though I guess stacking greens might?  Like, have we considered buying farm acreage and stacking orbs there?  That could get… weird…”  He trailed off.

“*Now*.”  Alanna picked up where she left off.  “Using orange orbs to *warp time like we know they can do to speed grow crops* is a *little ways off*...”

Anesh shrunk into his seat a little bit, a sheepish copper flush on his cheeks.  “Sorry!”  He exclaimed, hiding behind the lamb wrap he was eating like it would protect him from too much scorn.

“But what we do have,” Alanna continued like nothing had happened, “is a way to subvert the entire thing.  To alter what the core needs are, and basically change the complex list of food-water-shelter-communications-transportation-and-sex-toys from *that*, into a much more compact *electricity*.”  She looked James dead in the eye.  “If we’re stupid enough to try.”

His brain spun for a second, trying to catch what she meant, until the thinnest thread of his enhanced memory caught on a conversation from a month ago.  One that he’d had with Virgil, and that he’d quietly filed away under the increasingly cluttered header of ‘oh dear, that will be a problem later’.

“You’re talking about mind uploads.”  James quietly spoke, not breaking Alanna’s eye contact.  “You want to turn people into digital life.”

“What.”  Anesh quirked an eyebrow.

“Yes.”  Alanna raised both of her own, expectation written on her face.

“You guys finished Ghost In The Shell at anime night without me.”  James accused.

“Yes.”  She said, waggling those same eyebrows.

“Okay.”  James said, shrugging.

The other two both tilted their heads a little bit.  “You’re just gonna let that… go without comment?”  Anesh asked, concerned.  “Are you feeling okay?  What was in your curry?”

“Curry, mostly.  Also chicken.”  James quirked a smile.  “But yeah.  Okay.”

Alanna crossed her arms in challenge.  “Just okay.”  She stated.

“I mean, I’m not gonna let you turn into a supervillain, wandering around with a horde of autonomous drones, installing skulljacks into people and sucking their brains out through a straw to dump into some data vault in the arctic.”  James exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air with a dramatic flourish.  “But somehow I *doubt* that’s what you meant!” He calmed down a bit.  Not too much, but a little.  “We’ve got the skulljacks, we should use them.  I think the biggest problem is that we’re going to need to actually create some kind of society that functions while disembodied.”  James looked back and forth between his two partners.  “Any suggestions?”

There was a fairly long pause while they stared at him without saying anything, before Alanna cleared her throat.  “I kinda figured that we’d have a little more of a disagreement about this.”  She said, clearly uncomfortable.

“Psh.”  James waved it off.  “It’s a good idea, isn’t it?  I mean, we can’t do it for the entire human race.  But… a person is a person, right?  We don’t - shouldn’t, anyway - think people are less human if they’ve lost a leg or an eye.  So why not just go all the way, and lose the body?”  He tapped the desk with his fork, accidentally spraying curry onto some papers that he hoped he wouldn’t need later.  “There have to be physical people for maintenance, obviously.  We need to generate power, keep the machinery running, that sorta thing.  But this is actually something where putting some massive server architecture inside the Office might be a good idea?”

“I would worry that the thing hosting an untold number of minds would, itself, develop a mind, get up, and walk away.”  Anesh pointed out.

“Valid point!  Somewhere else then.  An asteroid?”

“Asteroids are not safe just because they’re hard to get to.”  Anesh chided him.  “They are, in fact, empty of most of the defenses that our planet has, with such luxuries as ‘an atmosphere’ and ‘the moon’.”

“But you’re on board with us trying this?”  Alanna pressed again.

James nodded at her, putting aside the joking with Anesh for a second.  “Yeah.”  He said, honestly.  “It’s a step.  And it’s something that we can scale up a lot easier than most of our current small solutions.  Assuming we can build the digital space with mundane stuff.”  James sighed as he realized this was going to require a certain level of logistics outside of what they normally did.  “Okay.”  He said.  “Anesh!”

“Yes sir!”  Anesh snapped to attention.

“No, no.”  James waved him off, clearing his throat awkwardly.  “Nope.  Don’t like that title one bit.”

“Yeah, we should save you calling him sir for later tonigh-”  Alanna started to say, before Anesh shut her up by cramming what was left of his gyro in her mouth.

“Anesh.”  James tried again, struggling not to giggle as Alanna processed the mouthful of pita bread and lamb.

“James.”  Anesh said, calm and composed, like nothing strange had happened at all.

“Find us some office space.  Doesn’t have to be fancy or big, but the kind of place that we could host ten or twenty programmers and engineers.  People we’re willing to *show* the skulljack to, but not specifically people we’re looking to recruit into the Order just yet.”

Anesh nodded.  “Got it.”  He said.  “You need me for anything else?  If I go now, I can probably catch people coming back from lunch and get this started today.”  He stood up as James nodded at him.  “Oh.  Here, or in Oregon?”  He asked.

“I mean… anywhere, right?”  James shrugged.  “It… hm.  I guess it does matter for who we’re hiring.  Let’s say Oregon.  It’s easier to keep things central to us that way, and there’s already a couple tech companies there.”  He groaned.  “Ugh, this is gonna be expensive, isn’t it?  I just realized.”

“We can get more briefcases.”  Alanna offered.  “Our map of Officium Mundi is getting more detailed.  We actually might be able to open those reliably in the near future.”  She thought about it for a second.  “Or we could just start stealing from people who deserve it?  Or you could go abuse your card counting powers again.”

“That last one doesn’t work for long before people get mad.”  James said.  “Although it *is* now insane with the boosted short term memory.  Also we’ll put the crime on the back burner for now.  But I’m not saying no.”  He snorted a laugh.  “Fuck, we used to joke about having plans to rob banks.  Now the joke is that we don’t have the time.  Anyway.  Can you do a quick skill pass on everyone who’s around today, see if we have any opportunities to bring in some wealth that we can use?  I’m gonna go talk to Research, and see if we have a toehold for this one.”

Alanna stood up, and both she and James grabbed Anesh in a hug before he headed out.  “So, we’re just doing this now?”  She asked him.  “I give you one small suggestion, and we pivot toward it?  That’s hardly fair.”

“We play with live ammo around here.”  He grinned at her.  “Also it’s a long term thing.  May as well start when we can.  Now let’s see if we can catch up to Anesh before the elevator arrives, and make him feel awkward for leaving first.”

_____

James had been in the basement for six and a half minutes before someone from Research gave him a headache.

At this point, the Research division consisted of a score of dedicated human students of the arcane, a half dozen other people who dropped in to offer outside context, three camracondas who’d gotten really into the study of their own biology and kind of kept going from there, and one infomorph.

The infomorph was named Plan, and until yesterday, it had been contained in James’ dreams by Secret’s attentions.

The idea of converting things that tried to kill them into friends and allies was, in addition to being one of James’ more fondly remembered anime tropes, kind of just the way the Order operated.  But for some reason, it made James nervous that a weaponized schedule had been quarantined in his mind, plucked out, and then intentionally spread to a small network of other members.  Right now, Plan couldn’t manifest physically.  They couldn’t even really communicate with everyone.  It was something of an experiment, to see if a group could host the same infomorph in a way that would mutually aid its growth and development.

Secret was keeping an eye on it, like a watchful and vaguely suspicious older brother.  But so far, they hadn’t eaten anyone’s memories, and seemed more or less to be accepting of having to acclimate to living in the heads of ten people who were all insane.

Oh, right.  James had a headache because these people were insane.

By this point, everyone had become aware of the fact that Alanna had found a wallet of holding.  And while, yes, it was problematic that it folded things in half, that could also be a good thing!  For example, it could easily replace a metal press, with a tiny piece of leather.  Somehow.  The precision problem was something that was still being worked on.

“I know we have a limited resource budget for duplication.”  Reed was telling James.  “And I’m not saying that we should go overboard or anything.  But seriously, I would like to have a giant pile of these to experiment with.”  He handed James a few piece of paper stapled into a stack.  “Here’s the reasons.  Mostly, we want to see if we can reverse the effect.”

“Reverse the… so make a wallet of… unholding?”  James worked his way through the comment.  “I am super confused.  I came down here to ask about a computer thing.”

“Exactly!”  Reed said, ignoring the back half of James’ comment.  “Now that we know that warped spaces can be made mobile, without them being part of a sentient creature, we can start to look into using them for applied practical purposes.  And a container that’s smaller on the inside would be the best logical first step.”

James slowly ran both his palms up and over his forehead, dragging them through his long hair in an attempt to buy time for his brain to figure out what was happening.  “Why.”  He asked, eventually.  “Why not just a container, *of holding*.  The classic.”

“Well, the wallet maintains mass.”  Reed said with a sad shrug.  “So it’s too heavy to do too much with it.  It’s not compressing stuff, it’s just extra space.  But if we could make one that has *less* space, we can use it to make lightweight armor!”

“Oh god, this is physics, isn’t it?”  James let out a quiet, long, groan.  He glanced around to see if he had any escape routes; but unfortunately, his only options were the vault, which was locked and would take him too long, or back toward the elevator.  And being trapped in an elevator with someone trying to tell him about physics seemed worse than just listening.

Reed didn’t notice, or at least, didn’t acknowledge his leader’s distress.  “Logically, smaller on the inside spaces should make things take up more space and keep the same mass. Make a specially shaped unspace, shape it like body armor. Not like where you would go inside the smaller space, but where there’s a layer of compressed space between you and the world.  Then fill it with steel, or titanium, or whatever. The bag won't fit much because of its compressed insides, which makes it light. But if a bullet or something pierces the bag, then it will always hit the metal because the entire bag is filled with it.”  Reed looked absurdly smug about the entire idea.  “*And*, bonus, because it’d be cloth, and compactable, we could cram a lot of them into a duplication ritual!  I checked with Momo, and she says it’s probably possible to make.”

“Momo is smart.”  James acknowledged. “And I appreciate having someone who is arcanely minded, and also has field experience.  But I think the two of you forgot something.”

“Ah, fuck.”  Reed didn’t wait for clarification, he just dejectedly took back the papers that were still hanging loosely in James’ hand.

“Did you want to know what it was?”  James called after him as he turned to walk away.

Reed stopped, like he hadn’t thought of that.  “Oh.  Um… yeah?”

“Dang, man.  You’re allowed to know why I say no to things.”  James told him.  “There’s a reason I make so many notes on your proposals.”   He raised his eyebrows at the younger man who was currently running a hand through his own curly hair.  “You do read those, right?”

“Uh… yes?”  Reed lied.  “Sometimes.  Eventually.”

“Oh my god, read the notes.”  James rolled his eyes.  “The reason this doesn’t work is because it’d be an orb-imbued object.  Which means if it’s damaged to the point that it’s considered ‘broken’, then it *dissolves*, and that’s not a feature you want in armor.  At least, not without knowing exactly how many bullets it can take before it decides it’s done.  But damn, man.  It’s okay to accept feedback.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Of course.”  Reed nodded.  “Um… I need to go feed the shellaxies now.  Did you need anything else?”

“Yeah, what would it take to upload a full mind into a digital environment, and keep it running at baseline capacity or more?”  James asked fluidly.  He hadn’t really rehearsed the question, but the words came out easy now that he had a goal in mind.

“Like… an AI?”  Reed paused.  “Or like a simulation of a human mind?”

“Which one’s easier?”

“I’ll ask around and get back to you.  I was reading a study on this the other day, and I have a couple new physics yellows that could help out with designing a complex enough simulation.  Maybe?  I dunno.  We could just ask some chips to do it and come back to it in a decade.”  The young man shrugged.  He had an almost self mocking tone to his voice, until James realized that it was a little closer to exhausted sadness.  “There’s still a bunch of those in… Virgil’s desk.”  He looked away again.  “But yeah.  I’ll look into it.  After I feed the little guys.”

“Sure.”  James nodded at him.  “I’ll check in later.”

Reed waved over his shoulder as he walked off toward the shellaxy pen, leaving James standing in the entry hall of the Research section.

He stood there for a second, taking in the moment.  There was, James realized, a lot of small secret feelings here.  Not here in the basement, but ‘here’ in the Order of Endless Rooms.  There were so many people here now that he would never have time to be close with all of them.  And while he could be kind, supportive, enthusiastic, and guiding, he couldn’t ever get close enough like he could with Anesh, or Alanna, or even Dave and JP.  To know their secret hurts and small worries and big losses.

The Research section felt subdued, James realized.  It was a little too organized, a little too quiet.  And not just because he was down here.  Virgil had been its beating heart for only slightly longer than the concept of a research team had existed for them.  He’d gone from being a skeptical jackass to… well, still a jackass.  But one that churned out wonders and miracles on the circuit side the same way Momo did with her totems.  And he’d dragged the rest of them along in his wake.  To their delight, James imagined.  Though he didn’t know, because he hadn’t asked.

He didn’t have enough time.  Didn’t have the space in the days to check in with everyone.  He read *reports* now.  That wasn’t right.  But James felt a level of responsibility for these people under his banner, and he didn’t know exactly how to manage the disconnect.

“Oh shit.”  He muttered to himself.  “I need to hire an assistant.  Why didn’t I think of that earlier?”

The follow up thought was because it was probably hard to find a professional assistant that would be into the whole dungeon thing.  But then again, they’d found an engineer, a chef, and a therapist.  Though that last one hadn’t really asked.  And the chef was an FBI plant.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, James shook his head and turned back down the hall, reconsidering the line in the operations manual where he told everyone they weren’t a conspiracy.  Maybe just a *little* conspiracy would be okay?

James paused at one of the doors on the way back down the hallway toward the mezzanine space that the elevator’s landing had become.  There were a *ton* of doors on this side of the basement, many of them partitioned off to be bedrooms of sorts, but several still served as storage spaces or whatever else was needed.  Usually these rooms were simple ten foot by ten foot concrete boxes, but there were enough cramped closets that you never really knew what was behind a door unless you were familiar with the layout.

He’d paused at this door because he *had* been pretty sure it was a closet with a water heater, a single exposed lightbulb overhead, and about one square yard of actual space.  The kind of room that humans didn’t ever actually go into and close the door behind them.  But his memory, enhanced as it was, was put to the test when he saw there was a nameplate attached next to it.

Knocking lightly on the door, James waited a moment, and then quietly cracked it open, pulling it out into the hallway and peeking inside.

He’d been mostly right about the contents of the room.  Water heater, harsh lighting, piping - did those pipes go to the rest of the building? - and very little room to move around.  What he hadn’t expected was that a number of steel shelves had been bracketed into the concrete brick walls, and that around the room there were ten or twenty little plants growing.  Plants in only the loosest sense of the word; they were thin bronze stems, producing bulbs of neatly aligned staples.  And on one of the shelves, tending them, was an old friend.

“Oh hey Rufus!”  James greeted the stapler-spider-crab-friend creature.  “I haven’t seen you in a while!”

Rufus, his red and black hull glistening in the damp air, was watching the door with his one main eye.  He raised a pen leg in greeting to James, and then tapped it impatiently on the shelf in front of him, eliciting both a metal ticking sound, and the sense that he would appreciate an explanation for James’ absence.

“I was mostly dead for a bit.  Sorry I haven’t been around.  You’ve been busy!”  James looked around the room, before doing a small double take.  “You have more than one plant in here.”  He commented, idly, reaching out slowly to poke at the carbon paper leaves of what looked like a fern made of perfect squares.  Rufus practically leapt from the shelf he was on to one just below where James was reaching, reaching up with his forelegs to catch James’ wrist before he could touch the Office plant.  “Wh… don’t touch that one?”  Rufus nodded.  “Got it.”  James pulled back, and Rufus sighed in relief.

There was a minute or two of James just looking at the stuff growing in the room, before he spoke again.  “You’ve been doing a lot here.  I’m sorry I haven’t been home much to hang out, even being not dead anymore.  Or, I guess, you were here.  Shit, I lost track of you a bit.  I’m sorry, I guess.  That’s all.  I’m sorry and your staple plants are *really* cool to look at.”

Rufus nodded.  James wasn’t wrong; his plants were excellent examples of pseudo-organic geometry, carefully tended so as not to run amok.  He’d only had a few seeds, carefully carried out of some of the wilder, deeper regions of Officium Mundi, and it had taken him a lot of time and communication tricks to acquire this space and some resources from the Order to start to grow them in a controlled way.  The little stapler took pride in his work, even if sometimes he had a fleeting thought that he didn’t fully know what his work was… for.

“Do you need anything?  Like, we could probably rig up a sprinkler system or something.  Some grow lights?”  James asked, cutting Rufus’ thoughts off.  The strider’s mind changed tracks rapidly, forgetting his self doubt in that moment.  Did he need anything else?  The little creature looked around at his growing domain.  If he were human, he would have shrugged.  What else would he need?  He had everything he wanted to work with here.

“I could get you a cactus?”  James offered, offhandedly.

Rufus’ wants and priorities changed rapidly.

_____

“Yo.”  James poked his head into the kitchen, catching the attention of the pair of people currently being taught how to properly cut a sandwich, and the ex-agent-now-chef teaching them.

For someone who’d lied about the big thing, a surprising majority of Nate’s backstory was legit.  He had been in the navy, he had worked as a galley cook on a naval vessel for a long time, and he had held a chef’s position at more than one restaurant.  The fact that his cooking helped his spying - and he did not appreciate it being called spying, though James had intentionally forgotten the technical term he’d used - was just convenient.

Right now, the big man was explaining to the human who’d been roped into helping with lunch today how a knife was used, while also trying to adapt knife techniques to the camraconda who had… difficulty… without the whole ‘thumbs’ thing.

“A sharp edge isn’t magic.”  Nate was saying.  “And I can *say* that now, and mean it.  Look.  Hold it here, keep one finger on top, and you sliiiiide.  Got it?”  He walked the person through the motion once, then prompted them to do it themselves.  “Good enough.  See, this way, you’re not just smashing stuff all over the place and making a mess.”  Nate looked up as soon as he was done, having largely ignored James’ interruption midway through.  “Boss.”  He said solidly.

“I thought we agreed we weren’t calling me that.”  James said, slipping through the swinging door and into the kitchen proper.

“You agreed to that, and everyone else kept doing it.”  Nate told him.  “You know, for someone who’s in charge, you don’t have a lot of discipline around here.”

“Yeah, we play it kinda casual.”  James admitted.  “Except for the big stuff.”  He said, in the same lighthearted voice, but with a serious implication as he met Nate’s eyes.

The chef nodded once at him, approving.  “Yeah.”  He agreed, the two of them sharing a mutual understanding that sometimes, when the stakes were high, this was a group of people that didn’t cut and run just because they hadn’t had a proper chain of command.  “So, what’s up? Here for lunch?”

“I had lunch with Anesh and Alanna, actually.”  James said, feeling mildly guilty.  It was weird to employ a professional chef and eat from food carts instead of your own kitchen.  Then again, Nate typically fed thirty to sixty people a day, so James could think of it as just not giving him more work.  “I’m actually just here because I’m going out to the store to get a cactus, and I wanted to know if you needed anything for the kitchen.”

“Why a…” The other human in the room, who James recognized as a member of Sarah’s support group, but couldn’t quite get the name of, started to ask.

“Fish oil.”  Nate said, ignoring everything to do with the cactus comment.  A few months here in this bizarre place had largely taught him that questioning things like that would just get him sent down a rabbit hole of conversation, and he didn’t have time for it.  So, for a different reason than James did, he just rolled with it.  “The Sysco order showed up with it broken, and I need it for later.”

“How much?”  James asked, making a mental note.  “And what… kind of fish? Is that a thing? I feel like I should know this.”

“It’ll be in the Asian foods section, and it’s probably going to be herring, but it really doesn’t matter.”  Nate told him.  “A quart of it.”  He added.

“Does it oil fish, or oil of fish?”  The camraconda, Knife-In-Fangs, asked.

“Of fish.”  Nate and James said idly at the same time.  “Alright, got it.”  James continued.  “I’ll be back in an hour or so.  Don’t burn the building down while I’m gone.”

“You’re the one going out to buy a cactus for some weird magic thing.”  Nate told him, circling around the kitchen’s central island to start turning knobs on their grill.

James held a hand to his heart in mock offense.  “It’s not ‘some weird magic thing’, it’s…” He stopped.  Thinking about it, James realized, Rufus’ weird little garden totally was some weird magic thing.  But he wasn’t really ready to admit that right away.  “Look,” he said, deflecting, “there’s much more dangerous things in this building than an innocent cactus.  Somewhere around here is a nerf gun that shoots fireballs.”

“What?!”  Nate barked out the word like a gunshot of his own.  “Where?!”

“I actually don’t know.”  James admitted with a guilty smile.  “We used up all the darts for it, and it doesn’t work with mundane stuff.  If we’d been able to keep one in reserve, we could copy it, but we had to use them all on… some stuff.”  James tilted his head toward the support group member.  “Ask him if you’re curious sometime.”

“A nerf gun.”  Nate repeated.

“Yes?”

He slowed his words down and emphasized them.  Hard.  “A nerf.  Gun.”

“I’m so confused.”  James glanced at the other two in the room, but they gave him a shrug and a hiss respectively.  “Yes, a nerf gun?”  He looked back at Nate.  “Why is this a... big… deal.”  James trailed off as the chef held up his left arm.  The sleeve on his chef’s jacket was rolled back, exposing a burly mass of tattooed muscle, but also, the one singular piece of adornment that Nate was never without these days.

A small copper and bone bracelet.  The kind that, if time had been given to it for the cooldowns to tick over, could bind to and reload *guns*.

“Oh.”  James said.  There was a long pause, as Nate just stared at him with a kind of expectant incredulity.  “Oh!”  He repeated.  “We should figure out where that thing went to!”  James exclaimed, turning to slide back out the door.

“Yeah no shit?”  Nate called after him, shaking his head as James retreated.  “Ugh.  Either I’m gonna have to go buy my own fish oil, or he’s gonna forget about the gun.”  Nate grumbled, glancing up at the two prep cooks who were watching with badly concealed amusement.  “Back to work.”  He gruffly chuckled at them.

Outside the door, James grinned to himself.  He planned to forget neither the gun, nor the food.  Both of those were important.

“Hey, Momo.”  He caught the other girl as he was passing down the hallway back to the front room of the Lair, just next to where a small alcove with a couch in it lay indented into the wall of what should have been the kitchen.  “Do you have a minute?”

Momo had a faraway look in her eyes, which was actually pretty normal for the girl these days.  There was a pervasive sense of concern from basically everyone in the Order about how Momo handled her own emotional needs; she was brilliant, frequently saw connections in the arcane nature of the Office’s orbs that no one else did, and she threw herself into working with that with an almost frenetic vigor.  But she was also trying desperately to ignore the fact that her family didn’t remember her, that she’d traded all her friends for a bunch of adventurer’s and snakes, and that she lived in a basement.  It was a *nice* basement, and the last time James had seen her room, she’d had something like twenty lava lamps in there, which was great.  But it was still… hard.

So, when she walked by like she was staring at something a million miles away, it tended to be because she had in her pockets a few different hand crafted red orb totems, broadcasting information in a very short range, all of it being soaked up by her rapidly adapting mind.  This was part of how she coped.

“Oh.  Hey.”  She greeted James cheerfully, the silver charms clipped into her hair chiming lightly as she bobbed her head at him.  “What’s up?”

“I’ve gotta go pick up a thing, and I just had a favor to ask if you had some time today.  Can you try to find where that nerf gun went to?”  James asked her.

“The one that shoots fireballs, or the one that spawns spiders?”  Momo asked instantly.

James was already answering by the time his brain caught up.  “The one that shoots… sorry, *fucking what*?”

“Spiders?”  Momo asked, grinning.

“Yeah, what… we have that?”  James rubbed his nose.  “Okay, that’s awful.  Why did we keep that?”

“In case we need to make spiders.  Duh.”  Momo rolled her eyes, putting on a perfect impression of a sarcastic teenager.  “But yeah, I can probably find it.  I’ve been working on a tracking totem, this should be a good test for it.”

“Yeah… how’s that going, by the way?”

Momo gave a side to side motion that was half shrug, half excited ripple.  “Eh!  I’ve had some good luck using dungeon materials in totems lately.  So I’ll probably explore that more.  A lot of it is trial and error until I can come up with something that works, and then I hand it off to Anesh or Nikhail to do the math on how to replicate it.  Still can’t get another ritual item to work, which sucks.  But I hear that we can start fucking around with space and time now? So I’ll probably do that tomorrow, after I finish what I’m working on now.”  She leaned in conspiratorially, and whispered, “It’s a totem that tells you how likely you are to successfully flirt with people.”  Momo leaned back, glancing off down the hallway with a sad look.  “It’s not going well.  I don’t know how to measure flirting.”

James looked at her for a minute, before clearing his throat.  “Is magic real, and are you a wizard?”  He asked.  “You have to tell me if you’re a wizard.”

Momo cackled out a laugh.  “I’m pretty sure my official title is ‘war witch’, which is cool!”  She said.  “But yeah, I’ll find your wand of fireball for you.”  She told James.

“Seriously, though.  Are you doing okay?  Your eyes look… not good.”  James’ own eyes softened into concern as he looked down at the short goth girl.  She looked, as always, frayed and tired.  She *always* looked tired, and James understood that feeling all too well.

“I mean, no.”  Momo admitted.  “Can’t go outside, can’t go to a restaurant, don’t really have anyone I can talk to.  I’m… man, I’m tired.”

“Me too.”  James said.  “Hey, you wanna just hang out and play card games tonight?”  He offered.  “I’ve got nothing going on.”

“You literally cannot help but cheat at poker.”  She accused him.

James snorted.  “I meant *fun* card games.  Like, the kind where you do math as a form of combat with your opponent.”

“I don’t know how to play Magic.”  Momo countered.

“You’re a witch.  You’ll learn.  See you in a few hours!”  James called cheerfully, walking backward out toward the main room and waving back at her.

_____

JP rapped his knuckles on the wood panaling of the ajar door. “You wanted a meeting?” He asked, pushing the door open without waiting for an answer.

The office used to be James’ office, before JP had claimed by right of conquest a floor of a skyscraper for them to use, and then the Order had collectively figured out how to abuse their poor elevator into bridging space and time.  He’d not had a lot of time to talk to James lately, what with his friend being mostly dead for the last couple months.  So it felt weird to come back to this office, now occupied by someone new, and vaguely unwelcome.

“I’ve been told you’re the financial director for this company.”  Randall, the FBI liaison on the other side of the shiny new desk said.

The desk, JP decided, had *zero* personality.  James’ old desk had been something like a thousand years old, bought from an estate sale for a bargain price because no one wanted to haul five million pounds of wood away from the remote hilltop manor where he’d found the damn thing.  It had intricate hand carved detail in it, marred by decades of dents, scrapes, and missed pen strokes.  It had real character, a sense of a warm, inviting den where an old man wrote letters to his grandchildren.  *This* desk was a modern, lightweight metal and plastic box, that looked like exactly what you’d expect the FBI to assign a junior agent that wasn’t worth a real desk to.

“I deal with a lot of our financial stuff, sure.”  JP said in a neutral voice, unwilling to admit how much of that may or may not be crime.

“Your organization, I’ve been instructed, has reasonable rates for government consulting when it comes to outside context problems.”  Randall stated in a similar tone that said ‘I will not be volunteering information’.  He finally looked up from his laptop at JP, who was standing leaning against his doorframe with casual arrogance.  “Does that include on white collar crimes?”

JP kept his face blank.  Unlike James, who had what felt like a compulsive need to emote and ham up every tiny bit of confusion, JP had a need to play his secrets a bit closer.  So no quirked eyebrow, no confused grunt.  Just a simple statement of “It depends on the crime.”

“We don’t know what the crime was.”  Randall responded.

“As in, you want us to… what, scry a potential crime scene for you?”  *Now* JP was willing to show some confusion.

“As in,” Randall said, “we have reason to suspect there is evidence in an insider trading investigation that has been removed.”

“But not ‘we lost evidence’.  Interesting.”  JP noted.  “You mean, you think there should be evidence, otherwise you wouldn’t be where you are, but that evidence isn’t there, and you’re lost.”

“Yes.”  Randall confirmed.  “I can tell you more, but we’d like your official cooperation on this.  The agents assigned to the case aren’t read in on… you.  So you’ll need to operate with a strict NDA.  But my superior has instructed me to extend an offer for a contract here.”

It was strange, JP thought, that the man could say all that with a perfectly normal tone, and no sign of any distress, and yet the *feeling* in the room was akin to when someone swallowed an entire lemon and was really trying to hide it.

JP wasn’t one to torment people, though.  Not when those people were dealing their pride, and their citrus, to offer him money.  “I can agree to that.”  He said.  “I’ll need to check in with someone else first, but I’m reasonably sure that we can help you here.”

“Good.”  Randal said, a sliver of relief in his otherwise flat voice.  “I want you on a plane in two hours.”

“I...what?”  *Now* JP lost his hold on his confusion.  “Me personally?  And a plane to where?”

“You’re the abnormal finance expert.”  The fed said, like that explained anything.  “And New York.  We’re on a timeline here.”

“I… um.”  JP drew himself up.  “Yeah, okay.  Yeah, that makes sense.  Sure.”  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, already texting Alanna just to make sure he wasn’t about to cause any major problems.  He figured she was the one most likely to give him the green light, out of the trio in charge of all this.  “I’m gonna go see if I can get Secret in on this.  I’ll meet you in the parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

“Did you want to talk about the contract rate?”  Randall asked, and JP could swear he heard a hint of humor in there.  James was already corrupting the guy, it seemed.

“Oh, don’t worry.”  JP said as his phone buzzed with a reply.  “It’s going to be extortionate.”

Never miss an opportunity.  That was JP’s personal motto.  And the government asking him to solve magic stock market crimes was a massive window of opportunity.  You could fit a lot of consulting fees through that window.  And JP intended to bill them for every single one of them.

_____

It was just another day.

It was strange, to everyone, how quickly it had become normal.  Most of them never really thought about it, but some did.

There was a pair of mindlinked partners who were rapidly approaching total unity, who would sometimes wonder if maybe they were making a mistake.  But they wondered it together.

There was a therapist, still working with young students, though now over a digital medium.  She’d saved a lot of lives, and taken more than a few in doing so.  There were rumors about her, even without the physical classes to help them spread.  She wondered if she was doing enough, with all their new power.

There were a half dozen camracondas who spent every morning on the roof, watching the sunrise that didn’t seem *real* to them, wondering how much of this world they’d ever get to see.

There were so many members of the Order who wondered if they were losing more than they could handle.  Who worried about when they’d break.  And sometimes they shared that with each other, and found that when they put their worries together, they didn’t seem so world-ending.

There was a copy of a copy of a copy of a young Indian-English man, who alternately worried about his own *realness*, and whether or not he could successfully track down the identity of a mysterious dead woman who was a savior figure to the thirty-odd snakes in the building he leased for their secret organization.

It was a Thursday.

There was so much strange in their lives now.  Some of them hadn’t even had lives until the Order had bulldozed through and opened up the path ahead of them.  And now there were choices.  Agency.  Power and ability, balanced with responsibility, and the desire to do good recklessly.

It was almost overwhelming.

But every single one of them knew, more than anything, that they weren’t in this alone.  That they had each other, and they had a fighting chance.  Whether that was against an unjust society or a murderous building didn’t matter.

They weren’t alone.  And they were in it, for real now.