The Daily Grind - Chapter 125 (Patreon)

Trying something a little different for this one.  The Daily Grind is one coherent story - as much as I can make it anyway - but I still like to experiment with style and theme within it.  I probably won’t do exactly this again, but I would appreciate feedback.

Also, there will be no chapter next week.  I’m moving to a new place, it’s a whole *thing*, and while I’d love to say that I’ll try to push a chapter out, I’m just gonna play it safe and take the week off. We’ll return in a fortnight.

Thank you, all of you, for your support.  I know I say it a lot, but it still means the world to me.

_____

It had been a week of setbacks, and minor irritations that piled up until they weren’t minor things anymore, but one amorphous blob of frustration.

In ‘small things’ news, they’d learned that duplicating the blood objects didn’t really… work.  You could do it, sure.  And then you ended up with an object at level one, of a single ability.  And sure, that wasn’t the worst thing ever, for most of them.  But the really dangerous objects all started getting that danger level when you looked at the second, or third, ability on their lists.  A bracer that could record incoming attacks wasn’t actually useful without the shield that stopped those attacks.  A bracelet that bound to a gun was *interesting*, but it didn’t make the gun sing without the reload or burst fire powers.

It seemed likey, and Anesh and Momo were in agreement on this one, that it was part of the expression of power that they already knew the objects had.  From both their own discoveries, and also Status Quo’s notes, they knew that the objects were made from the life force of people.  And the stronger that life, the better the starting grade of the object.

So when they duplicated the things, they were copying the object, but missing something critical that came with it.  And that meant no starting powers.  No good ones, anyway.

Technically, they could still use the powers.  And over time, they’d level up; their cooldowns would drop, and new abilities would unlock.  But when a bracelet had nothing but Bind Weapon at level 1, and it demanded an almost two year cooldown, and *twenty uses* to advance, it didn’t actually seem likely that these things would be useful for anyone except future generations.

They’d offset that setback by raiding the other two towers that they had within easy range, going far enough up that they could supply Anesh with the coffee for six or seven activations of the duplication ritual.  And while they still hadn’t made it to the top of either of those towers, it did net them a good haul of bags.  All of those had been put to use restocking their telepad supply, and also deploying a basic orb survival package across the entire Order.

James had found it satisfying to have their hours of testing and wasted duplications refined down to a package of skills that would make all of them harder to kill.

[+1 Skill Rank : Melee - Quarterstaff]

[+.3 Skill Ranks : Athletics - Running]

[+1 Skill Rank : Medical - First Aid - CPR]

[Shell Upgraded : Immune System Infection Adaptation Time - -44 Hours]

[+2 Skill Ranks : Botany - South African]

[Local Area Shift : Intrusion Cost - +$129.50]

That last one had been applied to everyone’s homes, apartments, rooms, and cars.  As well as being layered a dozen times on the Lair itself, to diminishing returns.  It was… silly.  The words all independently made sense, but put together, it was madness.  And yet, it did exactly what it said on the tin.  Breaking into a place so defended seemed to carry a material cost to anyone trying.

The unfortunate thing was that, while it did tend to break physical objects on their person first, the effect *would* switch over to bodily damage if you weren’t carrying anything to lose.  And in a country where an ER visit could run you a bill of a few thousand bucks, hitting the threshold was not hard.

Still, it was a speed bump for any potential attackers.  And James would take what was offered in that regard.

Setback one-and-a-half was that Anesh wasn’t letting James actually try to drink the mana coffee.  He wanted to see what happened when used with one of the magic brewers, but it was just too valuable for that right now, so he’d been shot down.

Setback number two was that James had woefully overestimated how much money they had.

Or, perhaps more accurately, they’d all kind of undershot at the costs of what it took to keep an organization running.

The Lair had a lease; and so far, none of the green orbs they’d found had lowered that.  Though that hadn’t stopped them from pouring more and more greens into the place; it was rapidly acquiring that magic that James loved.

But on top of that lease, they were paying their members.  Often times, they paid them out of loot from the dungeon.  There was now a reasonably effective workflow of harvesting viable computer parts, making sure they were mundane, and then selling them off.  Same thing with coats and suits.  There was money to be made, and when they streamlined the operation, they more than made back the cost of labor.  Even though they paid their people as well as they possibly could.  And that was before considering that about once a month, they found a way to crack a briefcase, and added about a hundred grand to their war chest.

But there were always more expenses.  Food, utilities, ammo, drone replacements, armor parts, new equipment to test out, old equipment to replace or repair, furniture for the Lair, devices for Research, bribes for whatever real world nonsense they were up to this week.  It all added up.

And when they wanted to pursue a specific project, they were finding that the budget just wasn’t there for it.

James had assumed that “hire a score of programmers to figure out mind uploads” would be the work of an afternoon.  But after actually figuring out what the wages would be on people like that, especially if they were kept separate from the Order’s more surreal operations and he couldn’t pay them in orbs, it had become clear that they just didn’t have enough money for things.

The counterweight to that one was that JP had vanished for several days, taking Secret with him, and promising that he could get the government to pay through the nose for something.  He hadn’t elaborated, and while James was almost overwhelmingly curious, he knew when his friend had his “I’ve got a plan” face on, and knew to just stand back and let things play out.

Still, the thought of a government paycheck rolling in didn’t offset the fact that they churned through tens of thousands of dollars a month.  And JP could commit all the finance crimes he wanted; they just weren’t in a position to keep that expenditure rate up forever.  Especially not if they added a million-a-year expense for a project that might not work.

So mind uploads as a solution to poverty were out.  Well, not “out”, but tabled.  Set aside, until such time as they could drown the issue in resources.

It also didn’t help that the more they talked about it with various people, the more problems cropped up.  Yes, the skulljacks made it comically easy to get started, but actually building a place that could run a human brain didn’t solve the problem.  They’d need to actually have some form of quality of life, and for that… well, they were more looking at copyright infringement for stealing the idea from the Matrix movies, than they were pure mind uploads and untethering from the mortal coil.

Also, there’d been a conversation about the ethics of offering people an “escape” from poverty that cost them their bodies.  That thought had nagged at James for a while; that it didn’t feel like they were actually doing something good.  If digitizing people couldn’t offer them a healthy, fulfilling life on the other side, then they were just building another low-income housing project, except this one literally cost arms and legs.

Having a body shouldn’t be a luxury for the rich.

So yeah, that project was on hold.

Still.  That had freed up a lot of time to be disappointed with other, unrelated things.

Like how fewer people frequented the Lair these days.  The Order was taking the quarantine… not exactly “seriously”, since with their newest collective upgrade they were probably largely safe from the worst of it.  But they weren’t the only people they interacted with.  So, while they weren’t in full lockdown like a lot of the world, they weren’t doing as many meetings, weren’t letting everyone come in every day, were trying to limit non-essential personnel on delves, and were certainly trying to cut out just ‘hanging out’ around the Lair.  For now.  Just for a little bit.

It wasn’t like the place was empty.  But James still felt like it was very lonely there; especially for the people who lived in the building.

Which brought them around to another problem.

Graham was still being kept prisoner in their basement.  One of the basements, anyway.

It had been three months at this point, since the incident at the school.  And nothing they had done had actually convinced the kid to leave that room.

“Kept prisoner” was the wrong way to phrase it.  He was keeping himself a prisoner.  Prisoner to guilt, to grief, to anger.  The ex-student barely ate the food they left him, had dropped twenty pounds since waking up.  He didn’t talk to anyone who came to see him.  Didn’t want to interact with anyone who offered him help, or therapy, whether it was Lua or someone else.  They’d actually had to take a lot of energy to convince an unaffiliated professional to come try to have a conversation with him.  And that hadn’t worked, anyway.

He hated himself.  And if he was being honest, James could understand why.  The young victim currently partaking of their hospitality had lost his parents, lost one of his best friends, been mindjacked, killed his other best friend himself, and been pushed into an action that had gotten hundreds of people killed.  Almost everything that mattered to him had been taken away, and the closest thing he had to a sense of stability was the self-imposed prison of the concrete walls of his basement room.

James dropped in once a day to let him know that he was available.  So far, it hadn’t changed anything.  But he was going to keep doing it.

Graham wasn’t the only high school kid who’d been around the Lair lately, either.  With the coming of summer vacation, the darn kids these days had a lot more free time.  And while there were something like four high schools within five miles of the Lair, only one of them had recently been transformed into a battlefield of heroes and monsters.

And *those* students, the ones who’d survived, had not all forgotten the Order.

James had, very early on in their life as an organization, made it clear to everyone that they were not a conspiracy.  It was something he liked to say to people a lot, partially to drive home the point, but also partially because it was funny.  Lately, he’d kinda regretted that, as they weren’t really capable of staving off attention from the superpowers of the world, and being hidden might have helped with that.  But by this point, it was kind of a part of their culture that magic and the fantastical was something that it was okay to share.  That they weren’t shadowy agents, the were people, trying to do as much good as they could.

This made it almost comically easy for several students to track them down.  Some of them in twos or threes, some of them independently.  But over the course of the last couple months while James had been recovering, as twenty three different teenagers walked through their doors and started asking questions, everyone had just… told them to come back when James was awake.  And that they didn’t know when that would be.

He had learned this when the first junior had wandered in, said hi to the camraconda door guard that he’d apparently become familiar with in the four or five times he’d dropped by so far, and asked if the ‘manager’ was in.

He had asked this to James.

A nearby Sarah, naturally, had doubled over laughing so hard that James had a momentary flash of panic that even with her health stat upgraded she had hurt her neck again.  After assuring him that she was physically fine, James had switched from concern to confusion, until the situation was explained to him.

The teenager, and so many others like him, wanted to say thank you.  For a few horrifying hours, they’d been closer to death than any child should have been allowed to come.  And it had been James who had saved them.  Not *just* James, obviously, James himself had been quick to point out.  And this kid knew that.  But he’d already said thank you to everyone else, and he knew that James was the reason the Order existed, and besides that, he had a specific question for ‘the person in charge’.

Were there, he asked, any entry level job openings?

Because - and here James had to struggle not to start giggling - his parents wanted him to get a summer job.  But also because he wanted to do what they did.  They were heroes.  Not just his hero, but actual heroes.  And he wanted to know if they’d take him.

James had looked the kid up and down.  He was skinny, lanky really, with no muscle, no poise, and a sort of twitchy nervousness that felt like an itch in the conversation.  He’d also phrased his request not as ‘protect people’ but as ‘fight monsters’.  None of this was particularly surprising, because he was a high school student.  James wasn’t so far removed from his own high school experience that he didn’t remember how everything had seemed so much simpler then, and how ‘punch the bad guys’ had seemed like a solution to everything.

But he still didn’t know what to say.  So he told the kid that he’d think about it, and to bring back an application.  The kid had asked if they had any, and James told him that the application was a six hundred word essay on ethics.  He had honestly expected that to drive the dude off, but instead, he’d just nodded seriously and said he’d be back tomorrow.  And then left, saying a friendly farewell to Sarah, who was still wiping tears of laughter out of her eyes.

This process repeated itself about ten times over the next week or so.  James kept telling them the same thing, and kept forgetting to bring up the problem with anyone else when he had time for conversation.  He’d kind of given up on being surprised when they started bringing him the essays, and in an effort to buy more time, he just kept sending them out to bring him a write up on a new topic.  He really needed to bring that up with Alanna, because against his expectations, they kept doing it.

Another thing James kept doing was experimenting with the telepads.  Though in a much safer way than some people, and arguably with less of a headache than dealing with teenagers.

Basically ever since learning that Pendragon could eat blue-aligned objects and incorporate their powers into herself, James had been trying to get her to eat one of the telepads.  But the dragon was an almost pathologically picky eater, and while her uncooperative nature was frustrating, it wasn’t like it was something that they could change.  For one thing, it was super unethical to force a physical change onto a being that didn’t want it.  But more importantly, Pendragon was, as her name implied, a dragon.  And it was one of those situations of “We can’t really *make* her do anything.”

What had been an amusing source of pseudo-frustration for James had been seen as a challenge by Research, however.  His mild attempts to try to find creative ways to use the telepad had always been just that - mild.  They didn’t actually *need* to get too clever to abuse the things, they were really, *really* powerful.  On their own, they were probably in the top five of powerful Order assets.

Research took this as an invitation.

The majority of their attempts failed, which was good, because some of them were comically dangerous.  The telepads would not, it seemed, send you to the moon.  That one, incidentally, had exacerbated the budget issue, as they had spent a *lot* of money while James had been unconscious to rig up a functional space suit, in case it worked.  They also couldn’t time travel; if you tried, it just did nothing.

However.  The damn things *did* have either a sense of humor, or a literalist interpretation of reality, which often looked like the same thing.  And writing abstract concepts on them was *not* a good idea, as the budget had been further stretched by having to buy someone a plane ticket back to Oregon from where they ended up.

If you wrote “home” on the telepad, it turned out, you were almost certainly going to land in the town square of Home, Kansas.

James instructed them to stop testing that.  It was cutting into the budget.

Research had finished, more or less, going over the notes that Status Quo had.  Their hard drives were encrypted beyond what humans could actually deal with, so they had a couple emeralds working on that problem in what was almost certainly a bad idea for the future of cybersecurity.  But the printed and written documentation they had was more or less accessible.

A lot of it was redacted, which was frustrating.  A lot of it also used code words, or alphanumeric designations, that weren’t explained anywhere.  Or if they were explained, it was redacted.  Which was more frustrating.  But progress was getting made.

They’d found that the dungeons that Status Quo had actually found were only a slim fraction of the ones they knew existed.  They’d killed dozens of delver teams, with power sets well outside what they themselves had access to.  And while James knew that dungeons could spawn anywhere, Status Quo thought they were limited to this part of the world, so they’d never looked elsewhere.

The first dungeon they had access to had been the blood magic one, formed in an abandoned playground near the coast.  No notes on how they’d found it, but they had.  And, through the use of construction equipment, had removed the object spawners from it, and transplanted them to their own basement.  So as to streamline their sacrifices of life force.

On the one hand, this was monstrous.  On the other hand, and ignoring all the infinite problems with first hand, this did speak to the possibility of moving ‘reward sources’ out of dungeons.  Like the copier from the Office.

The second dungeon had been in a church.  They didn’t know which one, but the notes talked about it being Lutheran, and having undergone a schism in the late eighties, which narrowed it down.  That one was apparently why some of the agents shrugged off bullets, and also where the entity called Authority came from.

It was still unclear, even with the notes, if Authority was a name, or a classification of being.  Either way, it was a big problem, and Secret had been clear on the fact that he hadn’t actually *killed* it, just rendered its attacks broken.  Whatever that meant.

What was clear from the notes was *yet another* frustration.  Both of those dungeons were dead zones.

There was no indication if Status Quo itself had been the ones to destroy them, but either way, there were end dates to the production of resources from both sites.  Both dungeons were gone.  And while their records didn’t actually state why, it lent support to a leading theory of how the dungeons subsisted.

Status Quo had found these places through delve teams.  They’d eliminated the teams, and then posted guards on the sites, and removed assets from the sites themselves.  No delves were authorized; Status Quo weren’t explorers or adventurers, they were a quarantine crew.  So they didn’t go in, and they killed anyone else who tried.

And the dungeons *starved*.  And eventually, they withered to nothing, until the only things left were some strange artifacts recovered from the sites after the breaches no longer opened.

Those artifacts were nowhere to be found, incidentally.  Various records had physical testing statistics on them, and there were sign ins for a chain of custody, but no one could figure out what they *were*, either in the Order or in Status Quo.  And they weren’t anywhere in the Lair, so far as anyone knew.  So where they’d ended up was anyone’s guess.  What was clear though was that they didn’t fit the patterns of the dungeon rewards.  Or the patterns of reality at all.

There was one other thing that the notes had been used for.  And it was actually the focus of an entire new part of the Order that had cohered while James had been asleep, and been officially recognized by him after he’d awoken.

They were called Recovery.  And their mission statement was to help put lives back together after crises.

It was a job the Order, even before it had a name and a roster, had been doing already.  But they weren’t, honestly, very organized about it.  Sarah’s support group was part of the process for the original dungeon victims, and they’d poured a lot of resources into getting people back on their feet and reintegrated with families or friends that half-remembered them.  But it had all been haphazard.

It wasn’t much of a surprise to find that Karen had taken charge of the efforts.  It had mildly surprised *her* when James had held an official ceremony to name her head of the division that had started to come together under that banner.

He recognized what she was doing, though.  She had drive and ambition, but it wasn’t hostile.  It was to do the absolute best; and sometimes, the best required spreadsheets and rules to help everyone participating make it work.

Recovery had a budget now, and daily operational tasks.  And it really was stuff they’d already been doing; but now, with less likelihood that anyone slipped through the cracks.

They also had, in terms of Status Quo’s documentation, one massive self-assigned objective.

For James, Alanna, and Anesh still had missing loved ones.  Their parents and siblings and extended family.  Swaths of people just removed from their lives.

The man in charge of Status Quo had admitted that some of them had probably been killed, just because it was more expedient.  But that the majority had simply been *moved*.  And the documentation bore that out.  Transplanted to a new city, dosed with both drugs and memetics to make the transition feel like a blur, installed into new jobs and schools.  And all the while, the memory of the delver that had been their family was wiped out of their minds.

His parents weren’t ever going to call and ask if James was doing okay, because they didn’t know they had a son.  Alanna’s sisters weren’t going to be able to rely on her to support them anymore.  Anesh had lost not just several lives, but also his connection to his past and his heritage.

And Recovery had looked at that state of affairs, and decided that they were gonna fix that bullshit.

So far, they’d come up empty.  But they were tenacious.  And Karen, as much as she could be downright petty when she’d disagreed with James in the past, was fundamentally a woman of principles.  She would be damned if she let *anyone* suffer when the Order could repair their lives.

So they applied their not insignificant resources to the task.  They poured over Status Quo’s notes, they found likely sites.  Dispatched knights as investigators when it was possible and time and money allowed.  Made use of multiple iLipedes that had social and divinatory apps.  Repeatedly consulted with Secret.  Trawled Facebook.

Nothing.

Yet.

But still nothing.

The real problem with this crime being perpetrated by an organization of monstrous humans instead of a single alien intelligence that organized monsters, was that humans were really good at being detailed in their attacks.  The dungeon’s memeplex that gradually eroded the identity of those trapped within it long term was dangerous, absolutely.  But it left giant information craters.  Holes in the physical nature of things, where anyone looking could pretty easily start poking around the edges.  At least enough to know there *were* edges.

Humans - these humans anyway - didn’t leave craters.  They smoothed over the problems, made the edges fuzzier.  Complicated infomorphic attacks with modern subterfuge, bureaucracy, and lies.  And it was making it hard to sort out where they’d even bothered to do anything supernatural in the first place.

For not the first time in the last couple weeks, James was internally agreeing with Randall that they maybe should have taken prisoners.

Randall, incidentally, was one of the few things that hadn’t been some kind of disappointment in the last ten days.  James had been prepared to be surprised by that information, but it wasn’t actually that he was being useful, ethical, or good in any way.  It was more just that he wasn’t in the way, that he’d gotten JP out of the Lair to go solve crimes, and that he was still comically blind to magic in a lot of forms.

Research had been wanting to experiment with Randall, but James vetoed that hard.  But for all that he didn’t want them poking the bear, there was actually something very weird going on with the man.

He had been *into Officium Mundi*.  He had seen people throw around spells, do physically impossible things, and spawn things out of thin air.  He had met Secret.

The federal agent acknowledged all of this. And didn’t change his behavior, at all.  He was aware that magic was real, he was aware that he was here on a job to liaison between the Order and the government when magic solutions were needed.  But there was some kind of mental block there, where he literally could not change his world view in response to the existence of magic.

They’d even tried to get him to use magic items.  And he couldn’t process their functions; couldn’t come up with ideas on how to use them.  Again, he knew this was happening.  But he didn’t, or again, could not, care.

It was spooky.  It was spookier because no one knew why.  Every infomorph they had was keeping an eye on him, when possible.  They all confirmed that it wasn’t anything like them.  But still.  No one wanted to risk that kind of problem being contagious somehow.

Even as they were keeping an eye on him, James was pretty sure that it wasn’t something that could spread.  Unless it was a long term thing.  After all, basically everyone in the entire Lair had advanced in some way in the last week.

For him, personally, it had been after a basketball game.

The thing about the pandemic and the lockdown was that people were rapidly going mad with boredom.  And while the Order had a measure of resistance to the disease, many of them *did* have family, and were intentionally avoiding group gatherings.

But a lot of them didn’t.  Some of them lived at the Lair, some of them were all alone.  Some of them were people like James, Anesh, and Alanna, who had a pretty closed social circle.  And while they took the usual precautions, and sometimes griped about wearing masks all the time, they still did use the Lair as a meeting point for a lot of things.

Like basketball training.

Which was why, sometime Friday evening, James found himself thinking a message that read;

[Basketball : 33/1200

Accuracy I, Agility I]

Team games were far more potent for his learning than one on one with Anesh had gotten.  Anesh was still *good* at Basketball, in a way that was kind of hilarious.  Like he’d mentioned, the skill put him at the level of ‘good’ with basically zero effort.  But that hadn’t stopped him from continuing to get *better*.  In a team game, though, there were so many things to focus on, and James found his syllabus tracker rocketing upward a lot faster than before.

He chose agility, on the grounds that he wanted to stop getting hit.

And while he was doing that, the rest of the Order was making progress too.  Alex and Neil independently figured out how to internalize orange orbs.  And while it wasn’t really combat applicable, being able to break bricks to get a mountain bike, or read a book to spawn six kilograms of steel, were both practical in different ways.

In between that whole mess, James still found time to take the haul of human hearts to the director of the surgery department that was currently responsible for covering up a lot of awkward questions for them.  There had been, pleasantly, absolutely no complaints from anyone that they had used roughly half a week’s replication supply to make a care package of almost three hundred stable and usable human organs.

Doctor Nikita was almost exactly the opposite of Agent Randall when it came to magic bullshit, in a way that James had cackled a hyena’s laugh in his car about when he’d realized it.

The man had independently derived the existence of something weird going on, had processed the facts, had struck a deal that would save hundreds of lives, putting decades of human life back into circulation, and somehow, didn’t seem to acknowledge that it was magic.  He knew something weird was going on.  And he adapted to it, like a seasoned professional.  And he absolutely did not *care* that it was magic.  He cared about *results*, not petty things like “the nature of reality” or other childish concepts.

It was refreshing, and easy, and James got scolded for putting too much weight on his still-technically-healing leg.

He also got kinda scolded by his partners, after one too many nights spent working, instead of coming home.

At some point in his life, without realizing it, James had built up momentum.  And he hadn’t actually stopped to ask if it was a good thing.  He worked hard, he spent more and more time keeping up with members of the Order, keeping apprised of the things going on in the group that he really did think of as ‘his’.  And without even realizing he was doing it, he’d started to prioritize that over his own life, his own friends.

James hadn’t actually talked to Dave in a while, even though he knew what was going on with Pendragon.  He hadn’t said hi to JP except to ask for accounting stuff.  And in a move that was really starting to annoy Anesh and Alanna, he’d been trading rest with Sarah to spend late nights plugging away at tasks instead of going *home*.

They’d had a long talk about it.  No one was really mad, it was just that they were starting to feel like they were losing touch.  And also, as Anesh pointed out, it was weird to be sleeping in James’ room, in his bed, without actually having him there.  Because for all that they shared their lives now, it still kinda was James’ room.  James and Alanna’s at the most.

James hadn’t even realized he’d been doing it.  But while they talked, he resolved to fix that shit.  The more he thought about it, the more it came to him that he *missed his friends*.  They’d all kinda let the constant crisis mill of the weirdness they dealt with overtake their lives, and now James was essentially trying to replace the small connections of D&D games, anime night, and sleeping with his partners, with the wider scale connections of knowing everyone in the Order, running training exercises, and troubleshooting every small thing.

Like, he’d missed the gang’s movie night because he’d been trying to track down the camraconda’s messiah figure’s family.  Which he could have assigned to anyone, really.  Though in this case, it had felt like it was a bit more personal.  He’d found them, too, which wasn’t really a justification for missing things, but it did feel satisfying.  They had one surviving next of kin.  James sent the guy an email, and left him a message, but hadn’t heard back yet.

Even having resolved to do better at spending time with his partners and friends, though, it was still hard to actually do.  He’d missed a couple months, and the current vibe of humanity was already starting to wear him down. For everyone else, just daily life had become exhausting, and social events were sometimes more cost than benefit.  Anesh especially had lost a lot, no longer doing math tutoring or going to classes.

Alanna and James had *mildiy* teased him at first, about how he’d have to postpone his math dates.  But then they’d seen the look on his face, and pivoted rapidly to concern.  It turned out, Anesh really did like the person he’d been getting coffee with.  And while he was, he admitted after a little well-meaning prying, still kinda uncertain about what their relationship was or how it worked, he’d just liked this person.  And now they were cut off by the pandemic.

It sucked for everyone, is the long and short of it.

Except the camracondas, though.  They were more or less sticking to the area around the Lair.  Except Frequency-Of-Sunlight, who went home with Deb, which was a source of endless cross-species gossip at the Lair, and a source of equally endless amusement for James.  With the lockdown going on, and foot and vehicle traffic down to basically nothing, they were getting more comfortable roaming the outdoor areas around the building.  For them, even just taking a loop around the block was an act of exploration; trees, birds, traffic lights, the gas station across the road.  All of these things were new and bright and wonderful.

They met people sometimes.  And it spoke a million words about the nature of the place they lived that most people just kind of gave friendly nods, or treated them like people, and went on with their days. Oh, yes, basically every one of those uninitiated humans did a double, tripple, quadruple take.  But it was at the point now where they could wander into the gas station’s convenience store and buy snacks, and the dudes who worked there were more likely to try to make conversation about sports than ask what the hell the camracondas *were*.

So it was that a few weeks passed.  With problems and setbacks, only sometimes offset with upgrades and reconciliation.

JP was still away.  The school dungeon hadn’t reopened, the attic was silent.  No one figured out how to turn a green orb into a totem.  Randall was still a twit.

They did a couple Office delves with reduced numbers, and while they didn’t make progress, they did keep their supply of blues up.  James even got to absorb a couple that he didn’t instantly want to burn all the charges on to replace.

[+8 Activations : Replace With Glass]

[+13 Activations : Repossess]

That first one was worryingly vague, which was perfect.

So was the state of things as they moved into another Tuesday.  And as James stood in the lobby of the Lair, saying hi to the trickle of delvers coming in to prepare for the upcoming adventure, letting the action swirl around him, he found that all the setbacks hadn’t really left him feeling that demoralized.

The world was exhausting and hostile, and the events still rocking human civilization were approaching catastrophic.  But at the end of the day, whatever happened, he knew that he and the rest of the Order too would be contributing more than they took away.  Every delve put them a little closer to saving the world.  Or at least saving a chunk of humanity, of sophant life on this ball of rock.

As long as they were around, they could keep fighting.

It was a good thought.  And it warmed his heart as he watched everyone arrive.

They were all about to go do something dangerous, and yet, *normal* for them now.  And then, they’d leverage the reward from that risk into actions that would reshape either society, geography, or both.

Setbacks happened.  But this wasn’t a video game.  There was only one failure state that was absolute.  And eventually, they’d overcome that one too.

James flipped his coat over his shoulders as he walked toward the door.  He could see Alanna and Anesh were smooching each other in the parking lot, and taking their sweet time loading the drone cases into the trunk of the van.  Which made this the perfect time to show ‘leadership’, and get them back in motion.

And maybe also get a kiss of his own before they headed out.