The Daily Grind - Chapter 133 (Patreon)

Sorry for being a day late.  My eternal bout of single combat with depression continues.

_____

“A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” - Agent Kay -

“Ughh.”  James let out the noise as he lay half-sprawled across the desk.  It looked like a chaotic gesture, but in reality, he’d flopped quite gently to avoid spilling the host of manilla folders that currently cluttered the space.  He’d also taken the time to make sure his ponytail had hit the desk next to his head, and so the cascade of black hair looked suitably dramatic.  James waited for a minute or two, and then tilted his eyes up toward the door.  Nothing.  “Uggggghhhhhh!”  He repeated, louder and with more dramatic infliction than the first try.

He was sitting in his office, on the thirty-somethingth floor of a building in another city from where most of the elevator that took him here was.  Securing the space had been JP’s doing, and as near as James was aware, he’d literally won it in a bet, which was worrying for all kinds of reasons.  Bridging the geographical gap had been the work of several people with individual powers and a lot of willpower coming together to create a very specific doorway from their main building, to this actual office space.

He had a corner office.  With shelves and decent lighting and stuff.  It was weird.  Or, maybe weird was a word he should stop throwing around, since he had dungeon adventures on half the days of the week now.  Absurd? Unexpected, at least.  There was a list of people who belonged in offices, and James wasn’t on it.  Not normal offices, anyway.

From the hall outside his door, which was currently sitting open and letting the distressed noises he was making circulate, came the sound of footsteps.  James slumped back to the desktop.

“What the butts are you doing?”  The eternally bubbly voice of Sarah asked him.

James looked up.  She was wearing a bright yellow sundress, ignoring the fact that it was December, and leaning against the doorframe.  “I’m being dramatic.”  James told her.

“Did your team lose at Blaseball again?”  She asked with a pitying gaze.

“First of all, *my* team has ascended to the big leagues.  Second of all, Blaseball has been on break for a while now.”  James told her.  “And while I would really, really like to tell you all about that…”

“No!  My hubris!”  Sarah exclaimed

“...I don’t have time.”  James said.  “Because we are doing interviews today, and I’m too buried in resumes to look over before then to talk about how a giant squid ate a god in a simulated baseball game.”

“Whew.  Hubris rewarded.”  Sarah said.  “So, anyone look good?”

“I don’t really know how to read resumes.”  James admitted.

Sarah stepped into his office and dropped into one of the chairs on the other side of his desk, pulling the other one over to form a footrest.  “You literally have a business degree.”  She accused him.  “How do you not know that?  Not that I know anything about it, but it seems pretty straightforward, and now that I say that, I realize there’s probably hidden depths?”

“It’s more like… hm.”  James considered how to phrase what he was thinking.  “It’s more like people *do* have hidden depths, and they don’t write them on a resume.  Also our resumes this time aren’t the same as we’d get if we were hiring for a normal job, because we actually attempted to do real recruiting, so half of these people are friends or contacts that Order members let in on some of the mystery ahead of time.”

“And that confuses you.”  Sarah deduced slyly, rubbing at her chin.

“No, that… okay, yes? It confuses things in general.  I guess I’m assuming that people are lying on their resumes as a matter of course.”  James shrugged as he flipped open one of the folders.  “Like, look at this guy.  This guy has multiple glowing personal and academic references, plays lacrosse, has a job as a baker, puts in volunteer hours at a public park, and… and…”. James slumped forward with his head in his hands.

“And…” Sarah looked at her best friend, and saw the nervous twitch in his eyes.  The way he seemed to shrink down a bit as he was reading the paperwork in front of him.  “And.  Ah.  You think these people are too good for us.”  She said.

“I know they are.”  James said flatly.  “Even the kids, though I’m reading between the lines on them and adding ‘survived’ to their resumes.”

“The high schoolers are still pestering you?”  She asked with a smile.

He snorted, but there was no malice to it.  “Yeah.  We’re going to *try* a few of them as interns.  But *not* on delves.”

“Well duh.”

“Oh, you say duh, but you tell me what high school us would have instantly tried to sneak into.”

“Delves.”  Sarah said without hesitation.

“So we need to prepare for that.”

“We could just not take on interns?”  Sarah suggested.  “Like, we don’t owe them anything.  I know that sounds mean, but you saved their lives.  That doesn’t… make them… part of…” She sat up, propping her elbows onto the desk and making direct eye contact with James.  “Are you collecting people you’ve saved?”  She demanded.  “You are!  I didn’t even think of this!  Ninety of the Order is people you’ve rescued!”

James looked at her with laughter in his eyes.  “Did you only just notice this?  Yeah, I’m taking my recruitment strategy from anime.”  He admitted.  “But also we seriously are hiring new people too.  Which has a decent track record, too.”

“Two of the three people you’ve ever hired...”  Sarah didn’t finish the sentence.

“Everyone forgets that I hired other people, and they just regular quit.”  James grumbled.  “Anyway.  Do you want to do interviews with me? It’d be nice to have a second perspective.”

Sarah eyed him warily.  “You seem kind of exhausted today.  Are you okay? I distinctly remember you being excited about this last time, what happened?”

“People keep dying.”  James stated.  “And I know, we’re all coping with it more or less.  But I’m terrified that anyone I hire might die, when they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“Yeeeeah…” Sarah started, “buuuut, they also might save people that they otherwise wouldn’t.  You can’t know, but you can give them a chance.”

James pushed himself off his desk, and brushed the papers stuck to his elbows off.  “That makes too much sense.”  He said.  “Which means I probably need coffee.  Oh, shit, I should use the wisdom coffee before this.”  He thwapped a fist into an open palm as he made the connection.  “We need to remember to use that stuff more often.”

“I one million percent assumed you just drank that by the gallon every day.”

“Hush.”  James told his friend.  “Let’s go find coffee and also Anesh.  He should be part of this.”

“He’s down in the refurbished research relabratory.”  Sarah said, pushing her chair back and moving to hustle after James as he strode out and through the short hall of their commandeered office space.  “Also he told me not to tell you that, because he doesn’t want to interview people, and that you should just make all the choices yourself.”

“God dammit.”  James muttered.  “Why couldn’t he have anxieties that don’t compliment mine?  This is… oh.  Karen.”  He let his complaining lapse and greeted the woman in the sharp-lined blouse who stepped out of her own office to face the duo as they walked.  “What’s up?”

“Don’t hire my daughter.”  The request, which was not framed as a request, came out in blunt words.  Karen was their… something.  She most likely saw herself as the moral compass of the Order, guiding them to be non-disruptive of the wider world, while still holding to an attitude of harsh personal responsibility.  As far as James was concerned, she was a bit of a jerk, with all the good points that she made - and she *did* make good points regularly - tied up in a philosophy of a selfish and unfair universe.  She reminded him a lot of his mother.  He didn’t hold it against her, though; not too much anyway.  Karen had been having a hard time, and the fact that her kid had nearly died on James’ watch was something that he felt okay letting her be a bit pissed about.

That said…

“Absolutely not.”  James said, nodding once.

“Good.”  Karen replied, her small and serious frown softening just a hair.  “Now.  I have a report for you.”  She handed him a printout that James stacked on top of his pile of folders and glanced at.  It was a list of addresses.

“First of all, we have a group chat exactly so you can send me stuff like this.  Stop killing so many trees, and also our printer ink budget.  Second of all, what’s this?”

“Six places where someone has done something unreasonably heroic in the last two months and made it into the news.”  Karen told him.  “Prioritizing the top two, which list an ‘unidentified woman’ as the person in question.”  She tapped a scarred finger onto the page, tilting James’ pile of documents.  “And I did send it over our group server, to the recovery channel.  Anesh said I should print it out because you respond well to drama.”

“Harsh but fair.”  James muttered, as his brain caught up with what he’d been handed.

Months ago, during the fight where Karen’s daughter had nearly been gunned down, James and Anesh’s partner had been lost.  Not dead-lost, but literally lost.  They’d teleported her away to safety, and had no clue where she’d gone.  Testing with the telepads showed that they really didn’t seem capable of telefragging anyone, which was *good*, because it meant that Alanna was almost certainly alive.  Or at least, not dead because of *that*.  But she hadn’t contacted them, and the Order didn’t have a global intelligence network to draw on to find one lost girl.

But they did have internet access, and a vested interest in their people.

This was what Karen did.  Her and her team.  They followed threads, navigated information craters, and looked for the lost.  They helped those impacted by the dungeons get back on their feet, helped families and friends reconnect unobtrusively, and put lives back together.  Recovery.  It was a good moniker.

It was also why James was willing to cut her a lot of slack for being kind of a jerk sometimes.

He was still staring at the page she’d handed him when he and Sarah stepped into the elevator.  Sarah, reading the feeling of quiet despair that was coming off of James, casually draped an arm over his shoulder.  She moved easily; the benefits of a magical bonus to ‘health’ having let her heal through a broken neck and bullet wounds perhaps a little easier than she should have.  James twitched slightly at the touch, but she didn’t take offense to that; he’d always been a little awkward about it, and the distance between the two of them had grown when she and her memory had been taken prisoner.

“So!”  Sarah said, verbally stabbing the gloomy mood.  “I notice that what you said to Karen could, in some ways, mean *exactly the thing she didn’t want*.  What’s up with that?”

“Surprisingly nothing.”  James cracked a smile.  “It turns out, not everyone we save is willing to instantly sign up to throw themselves into death and glory.”

“Go figure.”

“Also I think Momo intercepted Liz’s application, so she’s not here today.”

“This place, I swear.”  Sarah pretended to roll her eyes as the elevator descended a thousand miles north.

_____

There was a *snap* in the damp air as the trigger on the taser was pulled.  Two prongs flung themselves forward, connected with Alanna’s raised bare arm, and… bounced off.

Her skin didn’t rupture.  Not easily, anyway.  The taser would have more luck getting stuck in the sheen of sweat covering her body than actually embedding itself in her flesh.  It was *December*, for fucks sake.  Why was it so hot?  Hot to the point that, even though she could feel her physical self rejecting the reality of the temperature, she was still moist and uncomfortable.

Of course, she was in Florida.  Alanna was missing a lot of her memories, but she still had a seemingly endless list of complaints about Florida.  Gators.  Drug dealers.  Swamps.  Humidity.  Humidity in swamps.  *Retirees*.  She had a brief memory of watching a Buggs Bunny cartoon with one of her sisters where the rabbit had sawed through the border of Florida and let the whole thing drift out to sea; it warmed her heart.  Also, she realized with a start, she had a sister.  Had had a sister; at least one.  Did she still?  The thought was interrupted as someone grabbed her arm and tried to twist her shoulder out of its socket.

Oh, right.  Someone was trying to kill her.

Alanna let her arm move as if she were being effectively forced out of position, and as soon as her main assailant stepped behind her to let his buddy approach her from the front with a gun drawn, Alanna jerked a leg out in a sharp kick and crushed the guy’s hand.  The gun didn’t drop, but he did start screaming something at her; a command to give up that she ignored as she caught him by the wrist with her free hand, and *hauled* with all the power her clearly inhuman muscles could bring to bear.  The two men slammed into each other, neither expecting a girl in her late twenties to be able to fling them around like toys, no matter how physically strong she actually looked.  And one of them stayed down as their heads slammed together, something rattled in his skull enough that he was at least temporarily unconscious.

The other one tried to get up, reaching for his own gun with a slurred order to Alanna to stop fighting.  She kicked him in the head, twice, and he either gave up the fight, blacked out, or died.  She wasn’t sure which, though she hoped it was the middle one.  Either way, the superpower that she had that let her tell how people were feeling currently read both of the thugs as blank, so they’d either become emotionless blocks in the last fifteen seconds, or they were out.

“Come on.”  Alanna said as she turned toward the sidewalk behind her.  Cracked cement and scraggly weeds under a burning sun, the sidewalk ran through a depressingly run down neighborhood near where Alanna was sharing a house with six other people who were all struggling to afford rent.  This sidewalk in particular was currently decorated with a fallen bicycle, and a fallen teenager, and it was the second one that Alanna extended a hand to.  “We’ve gotta run before they wake up.”  She told him, bluntly.

“Holy shit!”  The kid stared at her wide eyed, scrambling to his feet and ignoring her offered hand.  “What the fuck are you doing!?”

Alanna glanced at the two adult men laying sprawled on the hot pavement.  The kid was right, she couldn’t just leave them armed; if they woke up too soon, they’d start shooting.  So she crouched down and grabbed the one gun from where it’d fallen, made sure the safety was on and checked the magazine with a smooth motion that she *must* have practiced before.  And then unclipped the holster of the other man and took his gun too.  She pocketed both of them, sliding them into the spacious leg pockets of the cargo shorts she was wearing.  “Okay, *now* we should run.”  She said.

The kid looked at her like she was insane, which was fair.  But he grabbed his bike and followed her when she started jogging.

The trick, Alanna figured, would be to get around at least a couple corners.  And then, if they weren’t being followed or watched, she could just make a straight line in some direction, and rent a new place somewhere else.  All her cash was on her person, and the three possessions she’d managed to amass weren’t worth writing home about.  Not that writing home was an option for her.

She still wasn’t sure if her home was even Earth.  It’d been a weird couple months.

“You fuckin’ killed em!”  The kid panted as he kept pace with her, now pedaling his beat up mountain bike in the street while Alanna took them down the winding side roads of suburban decay.  “Fucking psycho!”

“You’re still following me though.”  Alanna wasn’t even close to out of breath.  “And they were going to kill you.”  The statement did not ask for argument, and had the conviction of true belief behind it.

Because it was true.  She knew it, in her bones.  Like she knew how to breathe, or how to walk; she’d glanced into their eyes and seen a hatred like no other.  A desire to hurt, to break, to kill.  No matter the reason they’d directed it at the young man next to her, Alanna had known, in an instant, that as soon as she’d made it out of eyesight, he’d have been dead.  She had no idea how her power worked, and it was one of many small things, but it was a critical one.  Alanna didn’t have to spend more than a second on someone to know not just how they felt, but also somewhat how those feelings were going to manifest as action.  And this time, it had been unacceptable.

So she’d intervened.  It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last.  She’d gotten good at moving in a hurry, and finding new places that were willing to give her a couch or a small room in exchange for a few hundred bucks and zero questions.  At least this time, she’d come out with the spoils of war, and was now two guns richer.  She would have taken the car, too, but she was willing to bet there was a tracker of some kind.  And it was pretty fucking conspicuous too.

Cop cars tended to draw attention.

Six blocks later, Alanna parted ways from the kid when she was confident that they didn’t have direct pursuit.  He’d have nightmares for weeks.  She’d have nightmares too, but only the normal ones that she’d been dealing with already.  For some reason, life or death fights seemed comfortably welcoming to her.

Alanna wasn’t used to her life yet.  Maybe she never had been.  But she had a memory now, snatched from the fray of combat.  She’d had a sister, and a home.  Worn carpet, a green couch with cat scratches in it.  The cold.  It had been cold.  It hadn’t been here.  Somewhere north, maybe.

She wrote it in the other possession she kept on her.  A notepad, with fragments of dreams and thoughts and remembrances covering its pages.  The act of using the notepad also felt familiar.  She’d marked that in the first page.

Maybe someday it would help her home.  For now, though, she needed a new place to stay.  Alanna started jogging toward the town square and the local library.  Sometimes, the lack of a shutdown here was useful, and the free internet access would help her out.  Also she could wear a mask and it didn’t look like she was hiding from the police.

Just another day.

_____

They came into the Lair, and reality broke around them.

It was… easy to forget.  No, that wasn’t the right way to say it.  It was *fun* to forget.  When you’d already had your expectations crushed, when you lived on the edge of what was normal, when you didn’t know what was out there and that shrouded mystery was part of your day to day assumptions.  It was fun to pretend that your way of life was the only one there was.

James had experienced this kind of thing before, actually.  When you had a friend group and general social circle that was either progressive, or at least ambivalent about it like JP was, you could sort of start to feel like everyone was cool about a lot of things.  And then you ran into someone at a coffee shop or a family dinner who was both loud and biogted in equal measure, and you got this reminder that people sucked sometimes.

When members of the Order went outside now, they had to contend with that.  They had to remember that most people didn’t fight monsters, didn’t teleport into burning buildings, didn’t hang out with biomechanical snakes.

Only *now*, the tables had turned.

“I’m… uh…”  The young man, pale and freckled, wearing a button up shirt he was clearly uncomfortable in and a mask he didn’t mind, and carrying a folded paper in a sweating hand, addressed the camraconda that greeted him past the secure doors.  “I’m here for an interview?”  His voice squeaked a little.

“Yes.  Good.  On time.”  The camraconda said, nodding.  It hadn’t picked a name yet, but it had gotten a coat made, and felt like the heavy leather covering its cables made it much more secure when talking to new humans.  “Back hallway.  Left.  You will find them.”  It told the newcomer.

“Uh…!  Okay, thanks!”  The human *scampered*.  It was the only word the camraconda could think of for it.  It shook its head, a gesture it quite liked that it had stolen from the other Order members.  The new humans who had been coming in were… skittish.  It was only funny the first three times.

And just like that, reality was gone.

It had started small.  The offer to apply had come to him in an email from a professor at his college.  “They’re looking for smart people.  Kind people.”  The prof had said.  “You should apply.”  The old man had told him.  His granddaughter had asked him to point people that he noticed in their direction, apparently, which was suspicious on its own.  But hey, even though it was 2020, sometimes companies still reached out for internships, right?  That wasn’t too bad.

Then there’d been the application, and it had gotten slightly weirder.  He’d put in a lot of job applications, sent a lot of resumes during his time at college, and none of them had been like this.  There was exactly one question on skills, which simply read, ‘what can you do?’.  Nothing else.  Every other question was… creative.  Ethics.  Hypotheticals.  Stuff out of science fiction.  ‘What would you add to a first contact situation?’  ‘What options does humanity have to survive an out of context threat?’  ‘Would you be willing to work with other species?’

Even that wasn’t enough to put him off.  It was clearly a company run by nerds, and he *was* a compsci major.  So, he’d taken the time and sent off his answers, because the questions were *interesting* if nothing else.

And they’d offered an interview.

And he’d tried to show up early, and found that he couldn’t find the building.  He literally missed his exit, on a highway he’d driven a hundred times.  He’d taken wrong turns, circled blocks, hit *every* red light.  And then, parked on the side of the street, trying desperately to check the address in his phone as his email failed to load, he’d realized he had only a minute or two to get where he was going or be late to the first job interview he’d had in months.  And then, the address had loaded properly, and he’d realized with a start that he was literally curbside of the parking lot he needed to be in.

Then he’d stepped through obviously armored doors, past a highly paranoid security system, and talked to a snake that moved like a living thing but was made of cords.

And suddenly, a lot of weird things didn’t seem like one-off strangeness anymore, but part of a daily life reality that *actually existed*.  There *were* other life forms, there *were* strange reality bubbles and impossible technologies.  And now…

Now he had to sit at a table with three other people, while a guy wearing a tee shirt bearing a picture of a goose holding a knife asked them casual questions, while they waited for the last member of this group interview.  And while several of the snakes - *camracondas*, someone called them - a couple tables over spoke to a guy who had an orange wraith of energy moving along with his skin.  And while a drone shaped like a mantis took multiple trips into the kitchen to carry out packages that it took from a mountain of a man and ferried to the elevator.  And while someone in body armor came out of a back room, trading places with someone else that was going in, and both of them seemed totally casual about it.

“I have a question.”  He said, mouth dry.

“Hm?  Oh, yeah, sorry I figured we’d wait for the last person for questions, but they seem like they’re actually just not coming or are super late.  So yes, one question before we get started.”  James told him, seemingly unaffected by the crushing pressure applied to the normal world of his candidates.

The young man composed himself, and then asked the one thing that he couldn’t get out of his head, for the twenty minutes that he’d been quietly sitting here with his nerves screaming at him, waiting for the actual interview to begin.

“Where is that couch?”  He asked, twisting a bit to point down the hall that they’d come into the dining area through.  “Because it shouldn’t be anywhere, and I looked through the kitchen doors and there’s no alcove in there.”  It occurred to him that maybe he either shouldn’t have done that, or shouldn’t have admitted it.  The other candidates turned almost as a single unit, pursed lips and narrowed eyes staring at the impossible furniture.

“Ah!”  James *grinned* at them, and it was the grin of someone who knew far more than they were spelling out.  “Now *that*, is actually a very good question.”  His interviewer made a *note* in one of the pile of manilla folders he’d stacked on his side of the table, and pointedly did not answer the question.  Then he looked back up at the group.  “So.  Welcome to the Order of Endless Rooms.  Magic is real, we have some of it, the world has some serious problems both arcane and otherwise, and we’re looking for people who are more interested in being adaptable and kind over people who have any particular skills. That said, all of you have the mindset that makes you excellent engineers, which is valuable.  We also offer a generous salary, because we cannot offer health insurance beyond ‘we know a guy’.”  James looked at the four assembled candidates, each in turn, and then nodded when none of them argued with him.  “Alright.  I’m going to go grab a drink.  You have until I get back to decide amongst yourselves if you’re interested in the position, and come up with a list of questions.  You can ask three things, but only the ones you all agree on.”  He stood up, and walked off, pushing his way through the swinging double doors of the kitchen.

And leaving behind four people who shared a look of raised eyebrows and slightly open mouths.

“That’s… hi, I’m Chevoy…” the one woman in the group introduced herself.  “...that’s obviously a test, right?”

“Kirk.  Has to be.”  One of the other candidates introduced themselves.

“I’m out.”  The third one said, without preamble.  “This is stupid.  Probably some dumb practical joke.  Also no one here is wearing masks, so they’re probably some idiot cult.”  He stood up, and just walked off, pushing past a camraconda in a way that probably didn’t scan as rude if he didn’t think they were actual people.

“I’m… uh… I’m Mars.”  The newest arrival said, still trying to compose himself and curiously watching the last guy walk away.  “Is he serious?”  He pointed after their fleeing peer.

Kirk shrugged.  He was a big guy, so a little shrug had a lot of shoulder to work with.  “Maybe he’s afraid?  I’m kinda nervous about this whole thing.  But… you know.”  He grinned sheepishly at the other two.

“But nonhuman life!”  Chevoy exclaimed, the raven-haired girl leaning in to whisper conspiratorially with the other two.  “This is so cool!  Also, we need to figure out what we’re asking.”

“You said it was a test?”  Mars said.  “I don’t think it actually is.  At least, not intentionally.  The guy… James?... he seems kinda distracted.  I think he seriously just has time for a few questions.”

“Do you wanna ask him if that’s true and use up one of our questions?”

“Uh, no?”  Mars didn’t mean for it to sound condescending, but he feared he didn’t get it quite right.  “That would be… oh, I get it.  Okay.  So, what’s important?”

The three of them put their heads together, talking in rapid whispers, quickly building a profile of each other and what they figured would be the most relevant things to ask about.  All of them were technologically minded, in some way, they quickly figured out.  It made sense, their interviewer had said they had ‘engineer mindsets’.  But their actual fields were a little eclectic.  Computer science, electrical journeyman, and civil engineer respectively.  But their limited time ran out quickly, and as James came back, they were left with what they hoped were the more important things they needed to ask today.

“Is this some kind of global conspiracy?” was the first one.

James rolled his eyes.  “You know, there’s actually a section in our operations manual titled ‘We Are Not A Conspiracy’?  No, we have no interest in keeping things overly secret.  That said, obscurity does give us a certain amount of protection, and we don’t go posting our exploits on Reddit or anything.  I guess the best way to frame it would be as ‘we will probably answer questions, but you have to ask them first’, if that makes sense.”  James sipped at the juice he’d brought back with him, then made a small ‘mm’ noise.  “Oh, and we aren’t global.  Yet.  We exist here and almost nowhere else.  We’re more underdog than megacorp.”

“What do you want from us?  Or I guess, ‘why us’?”  Chevoy voiced that question.

“Because you fit what we want.”  James said.  “You’re outspoken, want to build better things, improve the world, and you’ve got people who vouch for your character.  You’re not experts, but that’s okay, because neither are we.  Yet.”  He looked around at the other members of the Order moving through the space.  “If you’re asking if you’re special, though, then I’ve gotta say ‘no’.  There’s no destiny that we can measure, you’re not secretly the chosen ones.  But none of us are, so, eh?”  He looked down at the folder that held their resumes.  “As for what we specifically want from you, our current focus is on either the design and construction of an arcology, or the implementation of security features for a mind-machine interface.  That second one is mostly for you,” he pointed at Mars, “because the other in this interview guy left, and we don’t have anyone here working on that anymore.  The arcology thing is new.”

“Oh man, I really want to ask a whole lot of different questions now.”  Kirk griped.  “But you brought up something and we all agreed on it, so, what’s going to happen to the guy that left?”

“What?  Um… we won’t hire him?”  James looked kind of dismissive, until his eyes widened and he let out a long ‘oooooooh’.  “I get it.  No, he’s fine.  We aren’t going to kill him or wipe his memory or anything.  Honestly, we don’t really have to.  Some people just kind of can’t accept magic.  Shockingly, it’s not the majority of the population, which a lifetime of urban fantasy novels conditioned me to believe.  And besides, our building is cloaked.  So he’ll leave, roll his eyes, and move on with his life, and that’s kind of it.”

“No one’s going to try to kill him for knowing too much?”  Mars found himself asking.  Internally, he winced as he went over the three question limit, but James didn’t seem to notice or care.

“Who?  As far as we know, we’re the last ones left in this part of the world.  Not that our intelligence network is what I’d call ‘operational’.  And it’s not like the government knows anything about all this.  Our last FBI guy was actually like our absent friend here.  We think government work might collect people like that.”

“You’re not going to make us fight each other for the interview, are you?”  Chevoy accused him again.  “This is feeling like that kind of thing.”  Mars blinked.  Again?  Why did he have such a strong sense of deja vu all of a sudden?  Kirk was looking confused too, maybe because the people in the room around them weren’t quite where he remembered them being, but their interviewer just had the same calm look on his face.

“No.  We already did the interview.”  James said.  “And you ask that *every time*.”

“It’s a reasonable… wait, what?”  The optimistic look on the girl’s face faltered.  “Every time?”

“He said they don’t ‘have to’ mind wipe people.”  Mars found his mouth moving without his permission again, but he was committed now, so he pressed on.  “That implies they *can*.  He’s got a different drink than we started with and there’s a stapler on the table now for some reason.  There’s different people here.  If we check our phones, it’s going to be an hour later than we think.  He knew the answers to our questions.”  He looked at James.  “Is *this* the test?”

“It’s one of them.”  James said.  “Planner, you can go back to what you were doing,” he spoke to the air, “we’re good here.”  He looked back at the three.  “Commendable.  You noticed it a lot faster than the group yesterday.  And your questions weren’t always the same, by the way.  Free will is real.  Also you’re all welcome here, if you want it.”

“Yes.”  Three voices barked out at roughly the same time.

“Alright.”  James grinned.  “Rufus will show you to the basement.  The Research division will have introduction packages for you.  Welcome to the Order.”  He stood up, snapping his coat around him as he turned to leave.  “Be good, recklessly.”  Was the last thing he said as he walked off.

A minute after he’d left, Kirk leaned over to Mars and whispered, “Do you know who Rufus is?”

“I’ll bet you a dollar it’s the stapler.”  Chevoy said.  The two boys glanced over at her with incredulous looks.

Then the stapler stood up, and she laughed while they scrambled backward.

_____

“I’m starting to think Virgil actually made this thing.”  A member of the Research team was complaining to Reed while the young man was trying to solder one last thing together.

“How?”  He asked, his heart not really in the question.

“I don’t know, science magic?  I don’t understand what powers people who level up in computer science get.”  Nikhail grumbled from where he was sitting at a desk across the room, playing with the file on the disc that Virgil had left them.  It gave a percentage in venom resistance to whoever ran it.  Sort of.  They didn’t know where it had come from.

“I know for a fact you have programming Ranks.”  Reed countered, still mostly focused on his work.

“Doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing.”

Momo jumped into the conversation.  “It does!  That is literally what the yellows do!”  She exclaimed, before Reed cut her off with a click of his tongue and the soldering iron off with the click of a button.

“Here.”  Momo reached out and accepted the pair of glasses being handed to her by Reed.  “They’re not perfect, but Nik got the right side of them to line up enough that they work.”

‘Pair of glasses’ was perhaps a generous term for the amalgamation of nonsense she’d just been passed.  The base frame were wide framed sunglasses.  Onto that, six different lenses had been affixed to the left eye; some of them with tape, some with tiny screws and clamps, one with glue.  On the side there was a little swivel clamp that held a pager in place where it could be pulled in front of the eye when needed.  The right bar had a pair of headphones coiled around it, which were then taped down to the single lens that had been added to that side.  There was a pen rubber banded to it.  It was a hot mess, and Momo kind of hated it.

It was also one of their more powerful research tools right now, which was *embarrassing*.  She wanted to be a proper witch, with rituals and cool crystal things and the whole *aesthetic*, and these dumbasses were over here being engineers and just handing her things that worked and looked like crap.  It wasn’t fair.

The sunglasses protected vision.  That was their magical effect, as well as their normal one.  Your eyes couldn’t get hurt while you wore them.  Which was important, because of what the other stuff did.  They’d figured out the trick to not breaking blue objects recently, and had used that to add some of their perception enhancers to these; when you wore this, you could see in infrared and microwave.  You could tell if the thing you were looking at was a person, or could become a person, and how that person felt about a half dozen things.  You could read any text from twenty meters away.

Most importantly, it could see the cracks.

They’d needed something like this.  A way to more easily detect the craters in reality where an infomorph or an authority had torn out information, had blanked a person.  And finally, they had a version that worked… well enough.

Momo got to use it, because either she was becoming resistant to brain damage, or she’d already hurt herself in the ways that mattered.  Everyone else *could* use it, in theory, but if they actually saw a crack, it hurt.  Not the *eyes*, obviously, that was what the sunglasses were there for.  But it still hurt.

“Thanks.”  She said, as she held the monstrosity.  “Ready for the last test?”

“Yeah.”  Reed had a grim look on his face.  “And then, we need to get rid of it.  Before James or Sarah find out and get pissed at us.”

“They’ll understand.”  Momo halfheartedly insisted.  “Besides.  We need to know what we did.”

She followed Reed through the basement hallways, past the garden that a green orb had added, around a corner that led to a dead end that no one used the rooms in for anything but storage.  This was where they’d originally piled everything that had spawned with the basement, with both basements.  Though an aggressive picking over by Research for anything useful, as well as using a lot of the blankets and furniture to stock the bedrooms down here, had cut down on the clutter a bit.

Now, the last door on the left led to a room that contained two things.  The door itself was one of the more locked portals in the entire building, which is to say, it had two locks for two keys.  It wasn’t magical, just something no one could stumble into.  Reed and Momo had the only way in, and only if it was both of them.

The two things in the room were a freezer, with a corpse in it, and a small tessellated hexagonal object with a pile of ID cards around it on the table.  There was nothing else, just that.

Momo slipped the ‘glasses’ on while Reed shut the door behind them.

The corpse was named Marion.  It wasn’t a person.  It wasn’t alive.  She’d been dead for ninety four days.  She had liked dogs more than people, prioritized gun ownership when she voted, and had no current long term plans.  Her favorite color was orange, and her current wealth was a solid $0.  She was affiliated with -

- Momo was looking up at the ceiling while Reed yelled something in panic.

“I’m okay.”  She lied, sitting up.  “Ow.  What happened?”

“You started transcribing notes, then just collapsed.”  Reed told her, the kid… fuck, they were the same age.  Why did she keep thinking of him as a kid?  Did he do the same thing?  Not important right now.

“What notes?”  Momo asked.

Reed handed her a piece of receipt paper, the kind that manifested when you printed stuff off through the pager.

“Affiliated, Status Quo.  Okay, we knew that, but it’s weird that *we* can remember they exist when the *rest of the universe* can’t.”  Momo muttered.  “Oh, there’s more.  Some stuff about her driver’s license, and then… killed by, Secret.”  She looked at it in annoyance.

Reed echoed her thoughts.  “It’s kind of irritating that we put this much effort and headache into this stupid thing just to be told that it’s a secret.”  He said.  “We… we know that.  We know!  That’s the problem!  We don’t know what we did!”

“Ugh.”  Momo lowered herself back to the concrete floor.  “Well, fuck it.  Help me up.  I need water, and maybe medical attention.”  She held up a hand and waited listlessly for Reed to stand up and pull her with him.

“I think we should get rid of the corpse.”  He told her.  “We’re not going to learn anything more out of this, and it really isn’t a good idea to hang onto bodies like this.  Camraconda religion excepting.”  Reed added with a tip of his head at the end.

“Okay.”  Momo’s head hurt too much to argue.  It was a throbbing pain that swelled behind the bridge of her nose.  She felt like if she tried to laugh too hard, her skull would split in half.  “I’ll talk to Pendragon.  We can take a trip to the coast and dump Marion here in the ocean.”

Reed looked at her as he locked his side of the door once they were out in the hallway.  Momo wasn’t paying attention to anything, just staring down the concrete tunnel with an idle look on her face.  “Do you ever worry that we might be exactly the kind of problem Status Quo was trying to fight?”

“Yeah.”  Momo sighed.  “But fuck them.  None of this had to happen.  James offered them an out.”

“As far as we know.”

“Eh.  I’d try to imagine James playing us like that, but I’m not seeing it.  Oh, maybe that means he’s *really good* at lying…”  Momo trailed off.

Reed ran a hand through his hair, curls bobbing in the still air of the basement.  “I just feel a little awkward dumping corpses in the ocean.”  He admitted.  “It seems like a ‘bad guy’ thing to do.”

“Well what are we supposed to do?  Go to a funeral home an be all ‘hey I found this body!’ at them?”  Momo groaned as she tried to huff out a laugh and instead saw painful stars in her vision.  “Okay, enough of this.  Painkillers now.  Ethics later.  And if James sends us more new hires today, I am going to yell at him.  Or send you to do it for me.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”  Reed said, offering her an arm and helping Momo down the hall.

_____

“I don’t think I’m the right person for this.”  The words came from a middle aged woman sitting uncomfortably across the desk from James.  They were in his actual office for this interview, because he’d needed more than anything to gauge her reaction to setting changes.  And nothing really said ‘setting change’ like going up in an elevator from a single story building to find yourself in a skyscraper.

The woman, whose name was Nancy, was someone who was best described as ‘showing signs of a life lived’.  She had rough hands with a couple fingers that were a little misshapen from where they’d been broken and reset.  Her voice was steady, and she smiled easily, but there were a couple of lines on her face that were scars mixed in among the forming wrinkles.  She wore her hair short, and her clothing with lots of pockets.  She’d also been staring out the window at the skyline and highways below when James had come out of his office to greet her.

“Why not?”  James asked.  Internally, he wondered why it was that half his interviews over the last three days had been people trying to convince him *not* to hire them.

He’d eventually brought all of those people on board.

“Because I’m a… I’m not… this.”  Nancy spread her arms out to indicate the office as a whole.  “I think you think I’m something I’m not.”

“And what’s that?”  James prompted, trying to see if she’d give a direct answer.

“Powerful?”  The woman questioningly replied.  “Magical, maybe?  I don’t know what you want from me.”

She sounded *scared*.  And in that moment, James realized he’d made a mistake, in pushing someone just a little too far beyond the boundaries of their reality.  He’d forgotten something himself; that humans sucked sometimes.  That not everyone would take him at face value, or assume he wasn’t being malicious.

“Okay, first off.”  James calmly raised a finger.  “We aren’t exactly looking for soldiers.  Which is good, because I’ve seen your resume.”

“I won’t fight anything for you.”  The woman seemed suddenly defiant.

“Again, good.”  James told her.  “Look, we’re trying to recruit people who have some specific skills, and you fit the bill.  This whole… thing… is mostly just to show you that what we’re doing is weird.  But I promise we’re not trying to take over the world, or form an evil cult or anything.”

“I’m a preschool teacher.”  The woman, Nancy, protested.  “What possible skills could I have that you need?  Unless… do you have children of wizards you need raised?  I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“That’s a *great* line of thought.  Good adaptability.”  James made a checkmark in his folder.  “Also no, but also yes.  Kind of.  Okay.  Here’s the deal.”  He took a breath.  Trusting people like this was a risk; there was a pretty low ceiling to how much Planner and Pathfinder could manipulate memories, and there was a very real chance that anyone who didn’t like what they were doing could bring down a police investigation, or just plain old angry mob on their heads.  “There are place in the world that aren’t normal.”  James explained.  “Where the space doesn’t fit where it’s supposed to be, where there are dangers and treasures to be explored.  And those spaces are alive.”  He made eye contact to make sure the woman was following along.  “You’ve seen the camracondas on the way in; they’re from a place like that.  But they’re still *people*, okay?”

“Of course.”  She answered quickly.  It had been strange, being greeted by a snake thing with a security camera for a face, but it had been very polite to her.  Good manners were *very* important.

“Great.  So, we have knowledge of a number of those places.  Relevant Spaces, someone started calling them.  And access to a few of them, as well.  But one of them is… new.”  James was trying to figure out how to explain dungeons to someone that didn’t have that context for them.

Nancy caught on to an important word.  “It’s new.  And you control it?  That’s why I’m here?”

“We don’t control it, no.  We’ve been inside it.  We spend time there.  We’re trying to… I mean, the easiest way to frame it is just that we’re trying to raise it to be a good person.  But none of us are actually parents or teachers, so we’re kind of lost here.  No one knows what we should be doing, or even how to gain a foothold to learn what we need to learn.”

“So I’m… you actually meant to put out a job offer for a teacher.”  She made the connection.

James nodded, idly moving a pencil around his desk.  “Specifically someone with experience with young children.  Because, as far as we know, that’s what Ascent is.”

“Ascent?”

“The place.  It’s… an attic.  It likes sunsets.  It hasn’t tried to kill us.  It’s a kid.”  James found he suddenly didn’t have the right words for this.  “I should have brought Sarah into this.”  He mumbled to himself.

“And you really think I can do something about it?”  Nancy was suspicious.  “Like what?  Raise it to do what you want?  You said they make rewards, do you just want to exploit it?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure.”  James admitted.  “There’s a part of my brain that would like to say ‘yup!’ and just start raking in the superpowers.  But this is the first one of these places that’s acted at all… like a person.  And not like a deathtrap.  And, well, we have a policy for dealing with people here at the Order.”

Nancy narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms in front of her chest.  “And what’s that?”  Her voice was still hard, but there was more curiosity in it than before.

“Be kind to them.”  James said.  “And hold off on the shooting until we absolutely have to.”

“I’ll take the job.”  Nancy decided suddenly.

“Would you like to do the interview process first?”  James asked with a laughing smile.  “The part where I ask you questions, not the other way around.”

Nancy flushed bright red, the first actual uncertain reaction that James had seen from her aside from the initial trepidation.  “Oh.”  She said.  “Well, get on with it.”

He’d probably hire her anyway.  Between her and the young man with years of experience as a babysitter, they’d be a good start to a caretaker team.  But still, the *process* was important.  James tapped his pencil on the open folder, and started asking questions.

_____

Myles went in the front door, shadowing a group of high school age kids.  He figured he was close enough to their age that maybe no one would notice that he was out of place.

The camraconda was weird to see up close, but he’d scoped enough of them moving around the parking lot that it wasn’t shocking.  Also, the building itself had been difficult to see directly, but whatever it was that did that seemed weaker around the asphalt and concrete of the parking lot and sidewalk.  So he’d known it was *there*.

It wasn’t right.  It certainly wasn’t normal.  It was something that shouldn’t exist; or maybe it was just something that had always existed, and the normal world politely ignored.  Either way, once he’d found it, it had been impossible to ignore.

Following the clues to this place had been the work of a month, ever since he’d accidentally stumbled across the first one.  It had been something that shouldn’t have existed, and people just… walked by it.  But he had to know.  So he’d deciphered the hint, and then the next one it led to, and then, content with the fact that he was playing a really cool ARG, he’d called the phone number that had been buried in an ammo can in the parking lot of a Safeway.

And been told about this place.

Not what it was, or what they did, or anything else.  Only that it existed.

And Myles just *had* to know what was inside.

And now, he was sitting around a table with a bunch of kids who were here for some kind of wizard internship, taking in the nature of this place with a frantic grin.

“Alright, so,” James was saying to them, “the four of you…”  He blinked, looked around the table.  “Hang on.”  He flipped through the resumes in front of him, complete with the pictures of the assorted students who now shuffled uneasily in their seats.  “You’re not one of mine.”  He said, pointing at Myles.

Welp!  The game was up.  It had been fun to get to see inside this place, but now it was time to flip the chair back, orient toward the exit, and *run*.  He should have had more of a plan, going in, besides just knowing the general layout of where the doors were.  But he’d just gotten so curious, and acting recklessly had always been one of his strong suits.

Myles turned, and ran, and smacked directly into the wall of a human wearing a chef’s apron that had seemingly teleported into his path.

“Nah.”  Said a second man, standing just off to the side.  “He’s one of mine.”

James sighed.  “JP, you know you can just *invite people to interviews*, right?”

“Figuring out where we are and getting in *is* the interview, you cretin.”  JP shot back.  “Come on.”  He tapped the back of his hand on Myles’ shoulder.  “Step into my office.  You’ll like my offer way more than the internship one.”  He leaned in and whispered theatrically, “We are *spies*.”

“No.”  Nate said as they turned and led the new kid away.  “Don’t bullshit him.  We’re… uh…”

“Spiiiiies?”

“Fuck off.”

James watched the two of them walk off, seemingly assuming that the infiltrator would just follow them of his own accord, and was mildly annoyed when that proved correct.  “I’m gonna have words with him later.”  He muttered, before looking back to the confused and worried group of actual kids in front of him.  “Alright, so.  Who wants to explain their incredibly hazardous desire to be here first?”