The Daily Grind - Chapter 134 (Patreon)

The Shandification of my work begins.

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“Each meeting occurs at the precise moment for which it was meant. Usually, when it will have the greatest impact on our lives.”

-Nadia Scrieva, Fathoms of Forgiveness-

Every two weeks, there was a meeting.

The Order of Endless Rooms had, more than a little bit, an anarchistic structure.  People did what they thought was important, worked with who they trusted, and didn’t really follow any formalized command structure that would have made much sense to a formal business or government.  A lot of what they did was seen through two shared lenses; first, the existence of the dungeons, and second, the desire to do good regardless of petty things like ‘social norms’ or ‘laws’.

Often, what this led to was enthusiastic cooperation.  Whether it was working on some new strategy or gear for use in push farther into the Office, testing the weird stuff they hauled back into reality, taking a shift on the response team, learning what camracondas absolutely could not eat, or helping the survivors of dungeon events get back on their feet.  There were always people who would throw their time and skills at problems.  And while there were natural leaders who stood out, there was absolutely no cause to discount the dozens of others who worked and fought and strove for the Order and its ideals.

Of course, boundless energy and enthusiasm didn’t equate to infinite resources.  And there were more than a few arguments over who needed what more.

This was where Karen stepped in.

Originally, their finances had been JP’s problem.  And then later, Harvey had managed the operational budget.  In both cases, Karen supported their efforts by meticulously tracking expenses, building a litany of spreadsheets that she was pretty sure no one ever read, but that put all the information into neat rows.  But now, Harvey was running dispatch for their newest operation, fielding panicked phone calls from people who didn’t want to call 911, or who were willing to take a gamble on the rumor they’d heard.  And JP was…

What *was* JP doing?  The last time Karen had asked, he’d stared straight ahead for eight seconds, before blinking, refocusing on her, saying ‘security’, and then pushing the ‘close doors’ button on the elevator without ever stepping off it.

So Karen’s spreadsheets suddenly got a lot more relevant to her.  Because no one else was going to balance the books.  God knew that James was too busy with whatever his latest scheme was to actually participate.

Karen resented James a bit.  But only a bit.  He was an overenthusiastic child sometimes, but his heart was in the right place.  Which she’d never tell him, out loud, of course.  But it was the thought that counted.

Right now, though, Karen was easily able to accept the new work, because it was fairly closely tied to what she’d already been doing, and that task was mostly self-sustaining at this point.  Recovery had seen to the immediate needs of everyone who needed it, and now, it was mostly about long term care, weekly check ins with survivors, and the ongoing attempt to locate lost family members.  Of those things, only the last one was one that she actually put personal work in on, with the others being delegated to the people who considered themselves her staff.  And so she ended up with quite a lot of free time.

In theory this was a dream job.  She literally set her own pay, didn’t have to do much more than check in with a few people every week, and had the backing of everyone involved in this lucrative endeavor.

In reality, Karen got bored fast.  And while she wasn’t going to admit that she was a workaholic, that did seem to be the trajectory her life was taking these days.

All of this was preamble to how she found herself in one of the Order’s basements, mediating an argument about use of assets, and wondering if she could go back to not having any responsibilities while nursing a headache.

“I was *going to use those*.”  Momo was accusatorially shouting, throwing her arms in the air as she did so.  “You can’t just take whatever you want!  I left a note!”

“And I *told you*,” Deb was trying to stay calm and clearly not doing a great job,  “that I didn’t see a note, and that we only took two of the damn things anyway!  Why are you so mad about this?”

“They’re a limited supply!”  Momo yelled.  “And I needed them.  For a thing.”

“They come from a seemingly infinite world!  They aren’t limited!”

“What.”  Karen cut in from where she’d been standing nearby, having come down to the basement some five minutes of argument ago.  “Is going on here.”

“Deb’s keeping me from building a panopticon!”  Momo exclaimed.

“Momo’s starving our shellaxies.”  Deb flatly declared.

“Wait, what?”  Momo looked more than a little hurt at that.  “Is that what you needed the chips for?  Why didn’t you say so?”

“I tried to, and you started yelling about how I’d crippled your masterpiece.”  Deb was doing a much better job staying level headed now.  “But yes, since you asked so nicely, we wanted to get a couple of the working on a program that generates ‘bugs’ that a shellaxy can effectively use as a food source.  In case our supply line of yellows is cut again, once the pandemic ends, and the company that owns the building starts having things like ‘employees on site’ and ‘security’ again.”

“I… I’m sorry.”  Momo had a look to her like she was about to fall apart.  “I didn’t mean to… I just…”

Karen turned and left before they started hugging or crying.  Either one wasn’t really her domain.  Sometimes, all it took to solve a problem like this was someone requiring that the participants explain themselves.

And in the background, it would require another row on her spreadsheet.

The first step was understanding the problem.  Which she had the shape of, now.  Resource scarcity wasn’t uncommon, though usually in the Order it came in the form of not enough money.  And more recently, not enough magic coffee - a shame her suggestion to copy the coffee itself hadn’t worked.  But mostly money.  So the next step was gathering information.

“How many emeralds do we acquire from Officium Mundi each week?”  Karen asked, not bothering to waste time with a greeting when half the people here already understood that direct approaches were best.  It was the one benefit of working with a pack of anxious millennials.

“No idea.  Why?”  Nate didn’t actually wait for an answer as he turned to head back into the kitchen.  Step one point five was acquiring a carafe of coffee, and their chef didnt like ‘non-staff’ in his realm.

Karen didn’t bother filling him in.  If he didn’t know, he didn’t know.  He was just the first active delver she’d run into.  She had a list, of those who spent time in the relevant spaces.

Fortified by caffeine, and also the subtle magic that made her common sense an order of magnitude more powerful, Karen started running down her list.  JP wasn’t on site, so he’d get an email later.  Dave was aware of the emeralds, but didn’t have numbers.  He did tell Karen he could get her more, though,  She made a note.

Rapidly, Karen ran out of people to talk to face to face.  At that point, the texts and emails started.  And finally, she got a hit.

“I think there’s, like, ten of them per sheet of silver?”  Daniel filled her in via phone call.  “We’ve only actually ever brought two sheets out.  They’re kinda bulky and hard to manage, and we weren’t really using the chips for anything important yet.”

“How bulky?”  Karen needed to know.

“Like… you’d need a cart to carry more than one.  Unless they can break into pieces, I dunno.  Also, we still have those silver plates in the basement, no one’s using ‘em.  If that matters.”

“Not right now.  But noted.”  Karen added that to the pile of potential income sources.  “Do you have tactical details about their source?”  She put no infliction on her words. Not on purpose, anyway.  She was focused on the notes she was making.

“Uh… I remember El saying they came out of a cave.  James built a weird magnet thing for the time he went in there.”  She could almost feel Daniel shaking his head and shrugging.  “No ideas beyond that.”

“Do the caves resupply themselves?”

“Maybe?  I mean, probably.”

“Mmh.  And finding them? Could you do that?”

Daniel sucked air through his teeth.  “I… *could*... but Path and I don’t…”

“Thank you for your time.”  Karen cut him off.  “I’ll leave some yellows in your locker for when you’re next at the… Lair.”  She bit off the self-agrandizing title for their work space.  And then, before Daniel could continue protesting, hung up.

More information was needed.  What was Momo working on?  That was actually easy to find out from their shared chat server.  Karen wasn’t overly familiar with the interface on her computer, but she knew how to search key terms.  And despite Momo’s use of broken english when she typed, it wasn’t hard to find out how many of the emeralds she wanted.  ‘More’.

An expanded search turned up old records from Virgil, rest his heart, about a number of projects he had planned.  Eventually, someone would rekindle those ideas, so Karen accounted for them, as well as the smattering of other ideas thrown around.  Projects were filtered through her mind by low and high priority, by number of chips needed, and by how likely people were to remember they’d grabbed their phone off a nightstand at 4 AM to send a text reading “what if grow a program that hates comcast”.

Karen stared at that for a full minute, before moving it to the high priority column.  Then she copied her compiled list of ideas and sent it to the Research channel in the chat server.

More information was needed.  The Order had a map on its server, and Karen started pouring over the spaces in Officium Mundi that had been charted.  It was, after only about a mile or two out from the entrance, only a sliver of a fraction of the whole thing.  But there were points of interest noted, including two caves.  One of them, James had even attached pictures of the silver sheets that bore the emeralds like eggs.  Karen checked it; thirteen of the chips, latched onto the plate of metal.  There was also a reference to something in the Operations Manual.

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Order of Endless Rooms Operations Manual

Section 3-1, Part 19 : Officium Mundi, Life Forms - Points of Light (Pinpricks)

Native to the below-floor caves of Officium Mundi, the pinpricks are generally nonhostile swarms of pins and thumbtacks.  They are airborne, with very high maneuverability despite having no visible wings.  Estimated speed is about four miles/hour.

Pinpricks emit light in small flashes.  At first, it was thought that they were just catching light off their metallic surfaces, but further inspection revealed that this happens even if there is no local light.  Unknown if this is a method of communication, or just a random dungeon flair.

While pinpricks will mostly stay in drifting swarms over the main bodies of water in the caves, they will become agitated, and eventually violent, if anything is removed from the environment.  So far this is verified for the metals embedded in the walls or floors, but is also suspected for the crystal growths, or even the water in large quantities.

There are no confirmed kills on a pinprick swarm.

See Also, Part 10 Section 14 - Tools - Electromagnet Bolas

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Karen read over the information twice.  Then she opened the linked part of the Operations Manual, and read that, too.  While she did this, she tried not to think about what it would feel like to have a swarm like that fall on you, and was mostly successful in suppressing a shudder.

The next step was planning.

Planning was a combination of a lot of little things.  Karen didn’t have the kind of absolute control over things that she could assign individual delvers to jobs.  Hell, there wasn’t actually a promise that a given delver would actually show up to any window of entry.  And this put a mild frustration in the mix.  But it wasn’t an impossible obstacle, because Karen was learning one very important thing.

The members of the Order were *ravenous* to be useful.  To help out, to share the burden.  If, and it was an impossible if, but *if* everyone in the world was like them, then communism would work right the first time and without complaint.

So actually making sure there were some people doing a job was less important than making the job doable.

So.  Back to logistics.

A column in the finances spreadsheet got updated to show the purchase of new equipment, and within two days there would be a package at the Lair with two pull-carts designed for trail hiking.  If they could handle forest floors, they could handle the Office easily.

Later in the afternoon, as the sharpened mind the coffee gave her started to wear off, Karen found herself in the warehouse part of the building, filling a pair of duffel bags with work gloves, crowbars - actually the tool for the job this time - pliers, anti-static bags, and extra alcohol wipes.  The thought that went into the tool selection was one of balancing time and weight; the chips could be extracted from the silver casing they ‘grew’ in, but they weren’t invincible.  So, there needed to be a way to easily haul the unprocessed ‘ore’ away from the threat zone, but from there, the equipment to carefully harvest the emeralds and lighten the load would be important for a long trek back to the door.  Especially if, as Karen hoped for with a best case scenario, they could be bringing back dozens of the things.

The silver was of marginal value.  She did a quick profit analysis, comparing the value of a single potential program from one of the chips, to the value of one of the chunks of silver.  The upper ceiling on program value was simply too high to worry about the little extra from the material.  Not compared to the risk of dungeon delving.

The delvers didn’t talk about it, but the Office was still dangerous.  No one had died in it yet, but it wasn’t for lack of it trying.  Karen remembered waking up in that dusty conference room, skulljack cord suddenly cut away, her muscles unused, her mind fragmented.  The first thing she’d registered was a cracked rib from where Alanna had hit her.  And the entire way out, she’d known, *known*, how close to death they all were.  And then people like James were excited to *go back in*?  No.  Not for her.  And she’d minimize any risks she asked them to take.

The bags were left open as she took the stairs down to the recently renovated space that Research operated out of.  Karen didn’t talk much to the Research department, but she knew their general ‘type’.  Goal-oriented, easily distracted, and averse to spending time outside.  She grabbed the attention of the first one of them that made the mistake of meeting her eye.

“I need six of these built by Monday.”  Karen said simply, handing over a printout from the Operations Manual describing the magnetic device used to handle the pinpricks.  “I’m not too concerned about improvements to the design, but if you can manage it, that would be appreciated.”

“Oh!”  The young man she didn’t know the name of looked down at the design specifications.  “I can… probably… yeah!  Yeah, sure.  But we don’t have…”  He looked sheepishly around the basement.

“The Research account should already have some extra funds in it for this.”  Karen assured him.  And then, he did that thing that Order members did that still threw her off.  He smiled, nodded, didn’t press her for more time or money, and promised to have it done.

She noted down his name, and made sure that his locker would also have a couple extra orbs in it.  Karen didn’t like the orbs, really.  But she wasn’t above handing them out like candy to those who did.

The equipment bags were set aside in her office.  Relevant parts of the map were printed out to provide a set of directions to the objectives, and those printouts added to the bags.  The receipts were filed properly.  The report she was compiling was printed off six times.

It was almost 3 PM.  Still time to get work done.

Karen contacted a precious metals dealer that also operated as a smelter, sending a polite email detailing the need to have a quantity of material turned into hundred ounce bars, and inquiring about price and timing.  She sent the same email to two other locations for comparison, and then another to a bank to get a second angle on the final sale.  There was, after all, no sense letting money go to waste.  Despite the fact that they wouldn’t be prioritizing the silver going forward, especially if it was a needless risk to the delvers, that didn’t mean she was going to just leave what they had in the basement.

Following that, as a method of relaxation, she read through the notes that Virgil had left regarding the use of the emeralds.  Virgil had been her favorite member of the Order, before his death, because he had been both direct, and very well documented.  His notes were immaculate, when he chose to leave them, and when he used English and not Engineer.

As she learned more about the resource, Karen began to see a problem that would require addressing.  The emeralds were not perfect.  In fact, they had two major problems.  First off, they required an amount of time to fully manifest their product.  That wasn’t an exceptionally large issue, but with only one use per emerald, that left no room for iterative prototyping - Karen learned that term from Virgil’s notes, and instantly adopted it.  The only real counter to this problem would be using multiple emeralds on the same task, and letting them ‘grow’ into different solutions.  Which necessitated adjusting her estimated requirements.

The second problem was that, as they grew, they became specialized into near uselessness.  Karen didn’t actually see a problem with that, as the entire point was to create specialized tools.  But Virgil referenced it several times, and the number of italics he used made it sound like he had *opinions* on the process.

The eventual metaphor Karen’s mind settled on was that the emeralds essentially ‘ripened’ over time.  And once they reached a certain sweet spot, needed to be harvested, before they went too far.  Which was fine enough when you were farming actual fruit, but when you couldn’t easily check the code the magical computer chips were growing, and actually testing them stopped the growth entirely, that meant, again, that they would need more of them to accomplish the same goal.

Karen updated her estimates.  Then she added a printout to both gear bags asking for scout reports on the number of ore plates in each cave.  Clearly this was going to be a constant asset expense, and not a one time influx of material that they wouldn’t need to replenish.  Perhaps one of the teams that exploited the other towers that held the copy coffee could be tasked to swing by the cave.

Would that be too much like an actual job?  Karen was not *completely* unaware of the prevailing culture of the Order of Endless Rooms.  She might not understand it, or mesh with it, but she had some of the key points internalized.  First of all, there was a predilection for giving things names with a sort of mythical language.  Karen was not a fan.  Things should have simple, clean names, that didn’t stand out, as far as she was concerned.  But the second thing was that not a single one of these people wanted to do work.

It was important to note that she didn’t think any of them were lazy.  Even James, who suffered from depression that he really should be medicated for, was a remarkably driven individual.  But no one was really here to do ‘a job’.  They were here to pursue their passions, and sometimes, those passions overlapped with keeping the lights on and providing paychecks.  Which was convenient, but not sustainable.

Right now, there were new hires that were slated to come in for orientation sometime next week, in ones and twos, and Karen had an almost desperate hope that she could abscond with one of them to use as an actual employee.  Before the great sundering took place, and they realized that they could essentially get away with anything, as long as they were getting away with something.

Halfway through that thought, she realized she’d just referred to ‘disconnecting from modern western society’ as ‘the great sundering’, and knew that she’d lost a part of herself to whatever culture the Order was building.  But it wasn’t so bad; she still had spreadsheets.

At 4 PM, she heard back from the smelter, and began reevaluating whether or not they should be hauling out large quantities of silver after all.  It wasn’t quite as lucrative as billing the federal government, or whatever borderline securities fraud JP was doing, but it was a *lot* of money.

Or at least, it was enough to keep the Order running for a while.  Karen often felt like no one really truly appreciated how expensive this operation was.  Usually, businesses that leased out buildings used those buildings to actually generate an income stream, and not just as a glorified clubhouse.  Not so here, where basically everything in the Lair was an expense and all the profit happened offsite.

Lease, utilities, constant remodels, paychecks, an endless stream of replacements and upgrade to delver gear and weaponry, ammo, *food*.  The camracondas could eat most human food, which was nice, but was also another several dozen mouths to feed.  At least they had their kitchen centralized.  It cut down on waste to have meals prepared and distributed in a group nature like that.

The thought sparked a memory, and Karen made a note to offer this as a potential solution to James.  He’d been rambling about food waste in general, lately.

There were just a lot of expenses, was the thing.  Many of them little things, like laundry.  They had beds here, which meant they needed to clean bedding.  She hadn’t gotten around to figuring out if it was more cost effective to purchase a laundry machine for the Lair.  Normally there would be a concern about where to put it, but honestly, Karen had given up on that worry after the second basement manifested.  And all of the costs were fairly important; she couldn’t exactly ask them to cut back on their ammunition usage, after all.  Or maybe…?

Karen sent an email to an old military friend of hers.  They’d gone to high school together, and kept in touch over the years.  Karen kept in touch with everyone; it wasn’t hard.  Last she’d heard, he’d made corporal.  Perhaps he’d have some insight into ammunition logistics.

At a quarter to five, Karen got up and left her office.  She took the time to go ‘down’ to the kitchen again, descending one floor and nine hundred miles north in an elevator she still didn’t fully understand, to pick up another carafe of coffee.  And a plate of cookies.  A brief thank you to Nate for his work, and then it was back up-south to the office, where Karen spent five minutes wiping down the conference table that they had in the main room by the elevator, and setting out her printed reports and the traditional workplace meeting food-bribe.

At exactly 5 PM, just as she’d finished coaxing the incredibly clingy living fern off of the last chair and back onto its - his? - trellis by the wall, Karen sat down.

Every two weeks, there was a meeting.

Meeting was a strong word.  Every two weeks, Karen had convinced the command structure of the Order that they absolutely needed a coherent face to face gathering where everyone could explain what they were doing, so no one stepped on any toes.  It had been an easy sell after the time between testing the telepad’s capabilities and the training for Response, they had actually almost used up every single one of the irreplaceable artifacts.  Well, irreplaceable if they didn’t have any to copy.

Harvey arrived first, because he was, Karen appreciated, an adult.  He was also one of three people who rotated through working as dispatch for their infant vigilante service.  Though as far as she understood it, they didn’t so much ‘fight crime’ as they did serve as a crisis intervention team.  Harvey gave her a sleep deprived ‘hello’ as he sat down, and Karen made a note to look into hiring some new people to fill that role.  Harvey was a natural leader, but he had a habit of taking on work that they could train someone for.  Perhaps hiring people who had volunteered with the sudicide prevention hotline would make for the right mix of compatible ethics and needed training.

Reed and Anesh arrived next, the two young men showing up ‘late’, but seeing as the elevator’s travel time could be flexible as it crossed the gulf of space that was California, Karen gave them a pass and a nod.  Reed apologized to her for the incident in the basement earlier, which Karen almost raised her eyebrows at.  She’d been unaware that either of the two women were actually in his management structure, but then, it wasn’t like anyone ever wrote those things down.  She made polite small talk with Reed about how they were handling having new people working for him, and made mental notes about the individuals he identified as new members.

To Karen’s surprise, it was Lua who showed up next, stumbling out of the elevator like she knew she was late.  The other woman had been, Karen decided, unduly influenced by the younger people she spent time around all day.  That said, she was still the most knowledgeable about the treatment of mental health issues out of anyone here, and her presence in lieu of Sarah’s most likely meant that either Sarah was busy with one of a dozen other projects, or that Lua had something relevant to discuss regarding the school.  Polite greetings were exchanged after she caught her breath and took a chair, at which point, Karen simply sat back and committed to memory anything that was said between Lua and Anesh as they spoke about their weeks.

It was to Karen’s absolute lack of surprise that James was the last one to arrive.  He didn’t acknowledge his own lateness, and instead took a cookie that he demolished in two bites.

“Alright.  Who wants to go first?”  James asked as he sat down, throwing himself at the chair like it was the last liferaft on the Titanic.

“I can.”  Harvey leaned forward, burying a yawn with a mouthful of coffee.  It wasn’t magical this time, just caffeinated.  “We’re seeing a gradual increase in calls.  And so far, I think because of the nature of our operation, they’ve all been fairly high priority.  Because of how quickly we can respond to most things, we haven’t needed any more bodies, but it’s only a matter of time.”

“Can you explain the ‘nature of operation’ thing?”  Anesh asked.  “Is it because we’re harder to remember than 999?”

“America uses 911.”  Reed corrected him, and Anesh rolled his eyes.  It wasn’t like he hadn’t known, it was just that the number didn’t matter.  He didn’t counter correct, though, and let Harvey explain.

“We’re down to four digits on our number, so no, it’s not that it’s too hard.  We aren’t buried in everyone’s brains yet, though.  Basically, what’s happening is that we’re a… hm.  Call us a last resort.”  Harvey explained.  “If someone calls us, it’s because they’re desperate, and they’re chasing a rumor that *maybe* we can help.  So the people we get calling in are…”

Anesh nodded along.  “Bleeding out, too far from help, or don’t trust the authorities.”

“Exactly.”  Harvey said.  “Now, don’t mistake me.  We’re gonna be ready to expand, soon.  So we should start thinking about who we tell.  If anyone has any ideas, well, shit, I’ve got an office.”

“You are never in your office.”  Karen said, and a couple people laughed.  She frowned lightly.  Had she said something funny?

“Alright, I’ll go.”  Anesh said, stretching in his chair.  “We’re taking the new people into the Office this week.  All of them are… excited.  That said, I have mixed feelings about involving the kids.”

“As do I.”  Lua interjected.

“They are, literally, the future.”  James said, leaning forward and propping himself up on his elbows.  “How are they gonna learn if we don’t teach them?”

“Great logic for trade skills and academia.”  Lua chastised him back.  “Falls apart a bit when you’re talking about fighting monsters for treasure.”

Anesh wavered a hand back and forth,  “Ehhhh.” He grunted.  “I’ve been in academia for a while.  I dunno if it’s that different.  The death is just less metaphorical here.”

“Not helping.”  James stage whispered at his boyfriend.

“They’re traumatized.”  Lua said.  “Whether they acknowledge it or not.  I work with these kids all day now; they are not… okay.  Oh, on that note, we need to have an actual medical staff.  Physical and mental.  And… other?  If that’s an option.”

Anesh sighed.  “We’re expanding too fast.”  He said.  “We’re going to lose cohesion if we aren’t careful.  Like with the kids, actually.  How are we supposed to shape them into good people if we don’t even agree on what good people are?  We’ve got outlines, but no details.”

“Welcome to being a parent, circa forever.”  Harvey snorted a laugh.

“My point is, they’ve seen the danger first hand.  They have to live with that, forever, unless we can find a way to selectively cut the memories away.”  James’ voice was serious as he addressed them.  “They’re already here.  If we ignore them, they don’t get better.  We can either… show them what we know, help them feel safe.  Or we can ignore them, and hope the problem goes away.”  He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a major choice.  “I vote take them in.”

“I vote against.”  Lua said.

“For.”  Harvey added, while at the same time, Anesh said “Against.”  From next to him, Reed made a rude noise and held up his hands. “Abstain!”

Everyone looked over at Karen.  And she took the time to think.  The votes were informal, but they tended to actually mean something anyway.  So she considered before she spoke.  She thought of the need for more hands, the ethics of involving minors in their operation, the extra cost and the added potential.  Then, she thought of her daughter.  Would she survive the same things, without anyone to teach her how?  She almost hadn’t survived just being in this very building.  Exposure to the Order meant exposure to its enemies.

And yet.  Even after being grounded for the transgression, her child had a spark back in her eyes at home.  She spoke about making new friends, about playing tag with the camracondas, about *magic* that she’d seen and experienced.  It was like she was coming back to life.

“For.”  Karen said quietly.

James started in his chair, did a double take, and then looked at her more closely than he had before.  Harvey glanced her way, but he already knew.  That man was more alert than everyone gave him credit for.  There were a few grumbles from around the table, but it was essentially settled.  They’d try it.  Carefully.  But they’d try.

The meeting progressed quickly after that.  They ran through what Research had been working on, heard James complain about some of the failed interviews and suggest tweaks to their recruitment policy, discussed what their policy should be regarding the school dungeon going forward, and started to hammer out how many times they would copy each book from that place.  The problem with the books was, if you copied them, the people who used them each share the same ‘lesson’.  They’d need to learn exactly the same things to advance, and that wasn’t always practical if they applied it to, say, the whole Order.  Lua and Karen each independently estimated it would be about four or five people maximum before the upgrades would stagnate into never advancing, the women basing their thoughts on a lifetime of college courses.  Anesh disagreed, but Anesh was an academic, so his viewpoint was skewed and Karen knew it.

Eventually, they were mostly done, and James said the words that signaled the winddown of their meeting.  “Any last things before I eat the rest of the cookies and run?”  He asked them.

Karen almost shook her head at how unprofessional he was.  But then, no one here was ‘professional’.  And yet, the results kept pouring in, didn’t they?  So she spoke up with consideration, and not malice.  “I have one last thing.”  She said, passing printouts of her report around the table.  “Reed already knows a bit of this, but I’ll sum up.  We don’t have enough of the emeralds that we use for programming.”

“We need dedicated software engineers.”  Reed cut her off a little rudely.  “The problem is that we used a handful of the things for stuff to fill gaps left in Virgil’s work.  And the people with skulljacks in the support group are getting really good at information gathering and security, but they don’t actually know programming languages that we can use.  An orb for that would really help.  Or just hiring people who already know… um… Python?”  He glanced at Anesh.

“No.”  Anesh said.

“C+?”

Anesh shook his head.  “Still no.”

“What are we actually coding in?”  Reed asked.  “I kinda don’t…”

“Before this goes too far,” Karen turned the interruption around, “I have an easier solution.  Task a team of delvers to retrieve more each week.  We should be able to add it to the loop of the expedition to this tower.”  She tapped the map.

“Hm.”  James looked over the paper.  “I don’t mind being part of that.  But what about…”

“I’ve already accounted for the weight.  Also, the standard threats of the cave are manageable, our Research department should have finished countermeasures by Monday.”  She nodded to Reed.  “The report has more details, but we have enough projects to make use of up to fifty chips a week.  Research also has a list of other potential uses, which might be functional income sources.”

“We do?  Uh.  We do, yes!”  Reed cleared his throat.  “I can put a list of that together…”

“It’s on your chat server.”  Karen told him politely.  “Although, if you could prepare the silver that they came from for transport, I’ll be having that smelted and sold this week.”

James hummed as he looked over the report, pursing his lips in consideration.  “You put a lot of thought into this.  Alright, cool.  Consider it done.”  He said, before looking up and meeting Karen’s eyes.  “Will you be joining us in the dungeon this week?”  He asked in a soft voice.

“No.”  Karen had seen more than enough violence for the rest of her life.

Shortly after that, their meeting ended.  The others lingered, except for Harvey, who hurried back to his work.  They would want to socialize, to plan, to hear James ramble about potential housing patterns that maximized sunlight for an arcology.  Karen wasn’t interested; her workday was over, and she was heading home.

It was already dark as she walked out to her car, feeling oddly secure in the quiet winter night under the watchful gaze of the camraconda on the roof behind her.  The building across the street was *still* undergoing a remodel from the damage Daniel had put on it, and she rolled her eyes at the inefficiency.

The drive home, similarly, was quiet.  Sometimes she would listen to the news, or a language lesson, as she drove.  But tonight felt like a good night for comfortable silence.  Nothing interrupted her for the forty minutes it took to cross the city and return to her home.

Her home.  Which almost hadn’t been, anymore.

Karen breathed out as she exited her car in the driveway, breath steaming in the frozen night air.  She looked up at the front of her house, and at the single light on in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and felt a pang of true pain in her chest.

When she walked inside, closing and locking the door behind her, there was a noise from upstairs.  A much lighter door opening, and then footsteps.  Her daughter, Elizabeth, coming around a corner in a little too much of a hurry and standing at the top of the stairs.  “Mom!”  The young girl exclaimed, voice a mixture of relief and concern.  A tone that had become all too common in her life.

Elizabeth, Liz as she preferred, was the last person Karen had in her life.  And her daughter, despite being everything Karen was not, was perfect.

When the nightmare of her imprisonment had ended, her fragmented mind pulled back together into its original shell, Karen had thought that the hard part was over.  Then, James and Alanna had led her and over fifty other starving, broken people through mile after mile of hostile territory to drag them back to reality, and she’d thought *then*, surely, the hard part was over.

And then she’d returned home.

To her house, with an overgrown lawn, and brambles crawling through her garden.  Where there were two cars missing from the garage.  Where half the furniture had been moved away.  And where, inside the cold walls that had long had the power turned off, Karen had not found her husband, had not found her sons, had not been greeted by the family’s overly energetic dog.

Instead, there was just Liz.  Living alone, cold, and terrified.  She hadn’t understood how everyone could have left so easily.  How her siblings and father had *forgotten* her mom.  How everyone had, as if in a daze, packed up and left, without thinking too hard about who they were leaving behind.

She’d struggled, for months, to keep her life normal.  To try to look for signs of her mother while pushing through school, eventually abandoning school to pick up a part time job so she could afford food.

When Karen had come home that first time, Liz had almost fainted from relief.  She’d been *right*.  No matter what anyone else said, she had *not forgotten*.  And as time passed within the Order, Karen had quickly realized something; her daughter had something that no one else came close to.  A near total immunity to memetic intervention.

She’d almost tried to cut her off from all contact when she figured it out.  But by then, Liz was friends with Momo, the girl who styled herself a witch coming by their house for dinner sometimes and bringing a splash of color and life to her daughter.  So she settled for trying to keep her out of the Lair, which hadn’t worked either.  It wasn’t that Karen didn’t trust James, it was just…

She was so afraid.

She’d lost everything.  And as easy as it was to shut off that feeling while she was at work, when she came home, and saw her last family in her empty house, the feeling crept back in so easily.

“I’m home.”  She said to her daughter, instead of voicing any of that fear.  “Are you doing homework?”

Liz nodded as she stomped down the stairs.  “Yeah, math.”  She said.  “Mom, can I… um…”  Karen finally smiled, for the first time today.  A real actual smile, with true warmth behind it, as she wrapped her child in a hug that Liz instantly started trying to wiggle out of.

“Yes, dear.”  Karen answered.  “You can be ungrounded.  And I… am sorry.”  She didn’t say it easily, but something James had said earlier had stuck with her.  “I’m sorry I tried to cut you out.  It wasn’t right.  And if you want to, you can come visit when I’m at work, okay?”

“O… okay!”  Liz brightened up instantly, even if she looked a little suspicious.  “Does that mean that I can…”

“You can apply again, if you like.  I’ll let our… leader… know to reconsider you.”  Karen stumbled over the unfamiliar word.  “Now go wash your hands and come help me make dinner.”

“Yes mom!”  Liz bolted back up the stairs, obvious grin on her face.

Hours and hours later, Karen rolled herself out of the king sized bed she slept in alone.  It was almost four AM; too early for most people to wake up, and certainly late enough that her daughter would still be asleep.  Dressing in light clothes, Karen made her way downstairs as silently as she could, efforts aided by one of the few upgrade orbs she’d taken.

In the basement of the suburban home that reminded her so much of her lost family, Karen pulled a long case out from underneath a side table.  Undoing the clasps on it, she pulled out and spread across the coffee table a bulletproof vest, a belt with holster, a handgun, one of the Status Quo bracers, and a long sword with a razor’s edge.

For the next two hours, she alternated between practicing the motions of donning the armor and weaponry, mentally switching intercept modes on the bracer, honing the speed with which she could draw and level the gun, and moving through a set of swordsman’s forms.  All the while, she controlled her breathing, and did her best to stay alert to any indication that her daughter might be moving down the stairs.

Karen wasn’t lying when she said she’d seen enough violence for a lifetime.  But she understood James so very well earlier, when he’d spoken about giving the victims of the Akashic Sewer the tools they needed to overcome their fear.  To move forward.  To thrive.

No matter what happened, she would be grateful to the Order for that for the rest of her life.

And she would never, ever, be a victim again.