The Daily Grind - Chapter 139 (Patreon)

Early chapter this week for you guys, because I am mildly busy tomorrow, and mildly impatient right now.

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“You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” - A. A. Milne -

“There’s a wikipedia dungeon!?”  Momo burst into the kitchen like a purple and black tornado.  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?!”  She demanded.

James glanced up from where he was taking the rind off a cantaloupe, helping Nate by making a fruit salad for meals for the next - he checked the stack of melons sitting next to him - month.  “What?”  He asked, kind of lamely.

“A wikipedia dungeon!”  Momo repeated, slightly out of breath.  This was actually the third room she’d burst into so far, though since this one contained the person she planned to complain to, her arduous journey was at an end.  “There’s some kind of digital dungeon out there, and no one thought to tell me!  *Or* poor Simames, who is just a massive nerd now that he’s two people!  That’s just rude!  Also, holy shit, your face!”

James’ face had the look of a splotchy sunburn.  Angry red patches of skin that traced a comical outline around where he’d been wearing a mask when he’d had something vaguely resembling acid sprayed on him.  It didn’t hurt anymore, and most of the worst damage had already flaked off in foul smelling clumps of skin, but it *did* itch, and he was doing his best to ignore that.  So, he ignored Momo’s comment entirely, and moved on to the literally everything else she’d just said.

“First off, Simon has expressly asked us not to call him *any* portmanteau of his and James’ names.”  James stated, tilting the knife he was holding toward Momo, melon seeds flicked off the tip.  “Second of all… Simon already knows.  Because we absolutely made it public knowledge, as soon as Anesh found Virgil’s notes.  We just can’t find the thing, which is *also* open information.  So why are you suddenly bringing this up?”

“I… only just got around to Sarah’s podcast thing.”  Momo admitted, crossing her arms defensively.

James cocked a knowing grin, suddenly aware of the presence of the skulljack on the back of his head.  “You grabbed that comprehension file the support group put together, didn’t you?”

“It’s really convenient!”  Momo threw her arms down and stomped lightly.  “I don’t have time for podcasts normally, I have magic to do!”

“I hear someone… Marcel?  Marco?... I don’t remember the name, but they’re putting one together for Welcome to Nightvale.”  James made casual conversation as he cubed melon.

“Okay rad but that’s not the point!”  Momo said.  “Wait, actually, for something like Nightvale, how do you stop your own perceptions of the art from tainting the memory you spin off into a file to share?  Like, if someone makes a connection that the Glow Cloud is a reference to the Hypno Toad from Futurama, then is anyone who runs their memory gonna get that same vibe?”  She hopped up onto the counter, scrambling a little bit to sit on a corner where she could face James while he worked.  “This is cool shit.”

“Uh… yes.  To everything you said.”  James nodded.  “It’s very transhumanist, it’s very neat, and people’s reactions become part of the media they’re reacting to, in a strange endless spiral of human thoughts, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad or just *is*.  It’s very exciting territory.”

“Hey, are you just trying to distract me from the wikidungeon?”  Momo suddenly exclaimed.

James shot her a long suffering look.  “Yes.”  He flatly stated.  “Also you’re the first person to actually come in here and show an appropriate amount of appreciation for the whole dot-thought file format, and I was hoping we could talk about that.”

“I just… what else is happening around here that I don’t know about?”  Momo glumly demanded.  “I want to be the one making the secrets, not having to find them!”

“Uh… I mean, you listen to the podcast now, so you should be fine?  Momo, you literally attend operational briefings with me.  The only thing I can even remotely think of that you might not be up to speed on is that we tested the blue you get for destroying a telepad”

“What’s it do?!”  She perked up instantly.

“Fixes a flat tire, or something conceptually adjacent.  Or manipulates asphalt if you absorb it.”  James answered.  “It’s very cool.  But it doesn’t give many charges, and the telepads are just more useful anyway, so unless you want to build very middle of the road armor, it’s not that important.  Now, fun as your distraction is, is there anything else you need?”

“Why are you in here, anyway?”  Momo ignored his pun.

“He’s making fruit salad.”  Nate rumbled as he kicked the door of the walk in fridge closed, catching only the last thing Momo had said.

“Nate!  Did you know there’s a wikipedia dungeon!?”  Momo turned her enthusiasm laser on the chef.

He didn’t even glance up as he started unwrapping a package of salmon fillets. “Yes.  And get off the counter.  And *sanitize the counter*.”

“No one appreciates this enough.”  Momo fumed as she wrung excess liquid out of a sanitizer rag.  James didn’t bother to hide a laugh.  “I swear you could be doing something more important, boss.”  Momo shot over at him, a little upset still.

“Making food is perfectly important.”  James answered calmly as he moved on to the next cantaloupe.   He was in a rhythm now.  “There’s a lot of stuff that always needs to be done.  People need to eat, that’s not gonna go away.  I know how to help with that.  So I do.”

“But what about all the magic?”

“What about it?”  James asked.  “There’s so many people here poking and prodding at the arcane. Ya’ll don’t need me helping with that.  Nah, my interacting with ‘all the magic’ is that I love exploring the dungeons… well, one dungeon… and I love finding the cool things, and then dropping them in your lap to put up with.  I’m just not good at the conceptual stuff.  Hell, the first time I slotted a blue, I nearly killed myself.”

“Bullshit!”  Momo accused him, pitching the rag in her hand across the room and into a bucket of sanitizer water.  “You are *stupidly* good at this stuff.  The last time I tried talking to you about totem design, I spent twenty minutes trying to half explain to you, half puzzle out, how and why a certain line made of cotton worked differently if it was made of polyester.  And you listened, then nodded, *once*, said ‘okay, I get it’, and *fixed the totem* without even *trying*.”

“Really?”  Nate asked, glancing up with a worried frown.

“I vaguely remember this.  Didn’t my fixing the totem cause everyone in the building to suddenly understand the stock price of the bottom ten percent of businesses in the state, and then black out?”  James didn’t react to the outburst, just calmly slicing melon.

Momo scowled at him.  “I fixed it better.  That’s not the point!”

“That is the point.  Actually, that’s half of the point.  The other half is that we need to figure out how to make *anything* resembling a ward, or a safety spell, or… fucking… a…wizard Faraday cage?”  James paused to sweep a pile of rind into the garbage can.  “That one got away from me.  Oh, how’s your bizarre scrying system going, anyway?”

“Medium.  Don’t change the subject.”  Momo leaned against the wall next to the counter James was working on.  “Come on.  You don’t wanna do wizard things even a little bit?”

“Sorry.”  James shrugged.  “It doesn’t… speak to me.  Not the way it clearly does for you, or Reed, or anyone else downstairs.  I’d rather do something I know is gonna be useful.  Which means either thiiiiis,” he waved his knife around the kitchen, “or paperwork.  Or talking to people and keeping us all on track.  The point is, the magic ball’s in your court.  Oh!  Or ball!  I could be playing basketball, to upgrade make myself, if I wanted.  But it’s raining and cold out.”

“Wait, you build the totems?”  Nate asked.  “I thought we just found those.”

“I’ve got a podcast you should listen to.”  James smirked.

Momo kicked the stainless steel side of the counter, boot making a thump as she got James’ attention.  “So, what’s the wiki dungeon actually do?”

“Okay, again,” James sighed, “I cannot stress enough that we don’t know if it’s on wikipedia, and assumptions like that are dangerous.  All we know, from Virgil’s notes, is that it doesn’t physically exist anywhere.  And then we know that the reward is a program that generates resistances.  Or at least, the program we have.”  James shrugged.  “He didn’t say anything about how he found it, or his thoughts on it.  Only that his investigation was ongoing.”

“Oh.”  Momo frowned.  “Poor Virg.  Why not just grow a program to find it?”

“Because…” James stopped.  “Good point.  Go do that.”

“What, now?”

“Yes.  I’m busy.”

“You’re literally the leader of over a hundred people, most of whom are very dangerous.  It’s unbecoming that you’re making fruit salad.”  Momo rolled her eyes as she kicked forward off the wall and headed for the door.

“I’m gonna put kiwi’s in it.”  James stated, grinning as the younger girl flipped him off before the door swung shut behind her.

“That kid has problems.”  Nate grumbled.

“That kid has a lot on her plate.”  James replied.  “Also, do we even have kiwis?  I wasn’t kidding.”

“Right side of the walk in, second shelf.”

“Thanks.”

It was twenty minutes later that Nate spoke next.  “So.”  He said, bluntly opening the conversation.  “I hear we have alchemists now.”

James resisted the urge to roll his eyes.  Nate had, for the last while or so, been weirdly evasive about actually offering strategic advice, or even admitting that he knew anything.

It was probably the closest the big man was ever going to get to *moping*.  Nothing about his personality was ever timid or recalcitrant, so this shift into someone who pretended they were easing into conversations was strange.  James didn’t like it.  Nate probably liked it less.

So, instead of actually answering, he instead said “Oh my god, I know you’re in cahoots with JP, you can just say that you’ve got something to say. About the alchemists.  Which we have now, yes.”

“Wanted to make sure you weren’t going to do anything stupid.”  Nate told him.  Ah, that was much more direct.  James appreciated it.

“Stupid how?”  He asked.  “I’m already planning to duplicate the potions JP got for us before testing them.  And since it doesn’t seem like orphan tears is one of the ingredients in their stuff, I don’t see a need to kick their door in and burn their house down.”

“Stupid like trying to ally with them.”  Nate told him.  “Or contacting them at all, honestly.”

“JP already did that?”  James half asked.

Nate shook his head as he dusted the fish in front of him with some kind of herb mixture that would have been right at home in an actual alchemical concoction.  “JP made contact with them.  He didn’t make contact *on behalf of the Order*.  They don’t need to know about us.”

“JP also said they’d heard of us.”  James pointed out.  He set his knife down and turned to talk to Nate; he couldn’t focus on slicing and chatting at the same time.  “He got us a discount!”

“They’d heard of us, because they’d gotten information about Status Quo going down, from one of their customers.  It’s looking like they were a constant worry for some people, and maybe with them gone, we’ll be able to actually link up with other delver groups. And JP didn’t get a discount, he could barely afford their rates.  He just likes to brag.”

“What a smug asshole!”  James laughed.  “But yeah, that all checks out. Okay, so, that sort of implies they have their own intelligence network.  Had they heard of anyone else?”

Nate barked a laugh.  “Hah!  No, they have some kinda weird room that maps relative organizational power.”  He kept rolling the fish in the herb and oil mix he was using.  “JP wanted to steal it.  Because he’s reckless.  And I don’t think we can steal a room, but what do I know?  Anyway, all of this will be in the *actual* intel report later.  I just wanted to check in with you.”

“Appreciate it.” James said.  “So, do you think it’s worth putting aside some cash to get one each of their potions, and then copying them?  We could even undercut their market if we wanted to make some quick cash.”

“First off, no.”  Nate told him.  “But for a couple reasons, and you’ll hate one of them.”

“Give me the one I’ll hate first!”  James cheerfully invoked.

Nate never rolled his eyes, no matter how much James got the feeling from his tone that he really wanted to.  “You’d probably stab at least one of the people you’d be supposed to be selling to.”  Nate said.  James let out a noise of protest, but the chef rolled over him.  “They’re millionaires.  Billionaires.  Trust fund kids and Hollywood stars.  Property moguls and patent trolls.  You would, and I’m only mostly kidding here, probably try to kill one of them before we were a week into the plan.  Getting away from hyperbole, you would *absolutely* mark them and try to commandeer their fortunes.  This is not a sustainable business venture.”

“That’s hardly fair!”  James protested.  “I contain my flagrant disregard for the wealthy all the time when we… um…”

“Yeah?”  Nate asked.  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.  But the real reason, because we could just make JP do it if we decided to - and that kid thrives on having too many plates spinning - is that we don’t know if the Alchemists Guild has any meaningful way to fight back.”

“Guild of Alchemists.”  James corrected, hating himself for it.  “And that’s a fair point.  It’s honestly probably safe to assume that whatever potions they’re selling, they’re keeping the *good* shit for themselves.  Hell, given the name, they’ve either got, or are trying to develop, some kind of immortality serum.  And we know they’ve got artifacts of some sort.  So yeah, retaliation isn’t a good idea.  I don’t wanna start a war.”

“Again.”

“Again, yes.”

“Right.  Also, we need to know that you can copy the potions first.”  Nate told him.  “Sometimes magic shit doesn’t copy right.  But after that, yes, get us the magic juice.  Also, you have a finite number of copy uses every week, right?  How many are we up to?”

“Seven.  On a good week.”  James said.  “Assuming the raiding parties on each tower don’t run into trouble.  And assuming that no one distracts Anesh, or whoever is running the ritual.”

“Have you considered that it might be time to post a permanent force in the Office?”  Nate asked.  “You have enough veteran combatants.  We could do it.”

“We don’t have enough people to do it, safely, and rotate through so that it’s not a permanent lifestyle restriction.”  James replied.  “I’d want… what do you think, ten people?”

“Could do it with six, probably, but ten is safer.”

“Ten people - because we have to assume something weird happens - and they’d be there for a week.  I’d want people to have to only do that one week out of the month, so we’d need forty people for that.”  James shrugged.  “And we just don’t have that kind of force.  Or, I mean, we *do*, but we’re all split up.  Most of us are pulling shifts with Response, some of us are larking off across the country looking for either other delvers or my girlfriend, and a lot of people just aren’t going to want to spend that much time in the dungeon.  Especially the people who were trapped there.”

“So hire more people.”  Nate said.  “Hell, ‘hire’ is the wrong word.  Recruit.  Go find the kids in shithole rural towns who are planning to sign on with the Army because it’s the only choice they have, and give them a better offer.”

James was skeptical.  “I’m not quite sure those people are gonna have the mindset that we’re looking for.”

A snort of derision, mixed with the clattering of a pan as Nate slid the fish into the oven and spun the timer dial.  “So what? The Army’s culture doesn’t exist because that’s who they were going into it.  It exists because that’s what they were made into.  You take some poor kid whose only options in life are soldier, or drunk factory worker just like his dad, and you give him food, magic, and people who *give a shit* about him?  James, that kid is gonna die for you and smile doing it.  Asking them to be mildly socialist is nothing.  Jack shit.”

“That… that’s scary.”  James muttered.  “I don’t want to, I dunno, brainwash people.”

“Being surprised that people want to live in the house you built isn’t brainwashing, you dumbass.”  Nate slapped the counter.  “Now, are you done with that fruit salad?  I’m gonna start serving dinner in thirty, and you’re slacking off.”

James bit his lip, holding in a laugh.  “You’re a mean boss.”  He told Nate.

“That’s why I’m not in charge.”  The chef told him, before ordering James.  “Get chopping.  I’m gonna go smoke.”

_____

“Welcome to Officium Mundi!”  James called out to the assembled group in front of him.  “Some of you are new here!  We have no tutorial!  Good luck!”  Some of the people in the delve team laughed.  None of the laughs were from the newbies, all of whom were staring off toward the bizarre grey and beige horizon.  “Quick review of our objectives tonight!  Deb and Karen, your teams are on the usual tower raid paths, but each of you take two of the new kids along. Nikhail, Reed already had some target for you lot, so you know what to do.  Simon, camraconda trapping, and we’ve got a telepad landing zone prepared in the Lair for you if you need it.  Dave and Daniel, you’re with me as soon as I check in with Anesh, we’re gonna try to map out a faster bike route to the bathrooms, and figure out what sort of climbing gear we’re looking at to explore there.  Any questions?”

“...What the fuck is this place?”  One of the new girls, Chevoy, asked quietly.

“No further questions!”  James clapped his hands.  “Let’s roll.”

“No, no!”  The engineer protested.  “That’s not obeying the laws of physics!  It would take really, *really* specific conditions for the sky to look like that, and… and…”

“Yeah, so, when I said ‘no questions’, I mostly meant no questions to me, right now, because I am busy, and also exhausted.  The teams you’ll be going with will answer your questions, and will be minimally cryptic while doing it.  *Isn’t that right?*” James directed a stern look toward Momo, who was doing a poor job of hiding a manic grin.  “Good.”  He said, not waiting for a response, before turning and beginning to make his way up the ramps of the cubicle tower that was their makeshift home base here.

Ten floors of slanted cubicle walls and dim lighting later, James made it up to where Anesh had already started mixing grounds for the duplication ritual.

They’d put up chicken wire around the windows of the top floor, to keep the sticky note masks out without ruining what light they got.  The effect made the place feel a lot more post apocalyptic than it had previously.  A little less surreal, a little more cobbled together.  Anesh doing his thing with lines of coffee grounds didn’t exactly help the image either way, honestly.

It had been several weeks since they’d sorted out proper workflow for the duplications.  The things that they were going to use them on were planned out ahead of time, and the coffee already stockpiled.  They’d had all week to do that.  Now, it was just a matter of stretching their resources with a liberal application of Starbucks grounds added to the magical stuff, and then firing the rituals.  Later, when the tower teams came back, they’d stash what they’d found, and let Anesh know how many rituals would be possible next week, so the Order had time to plan.

Tonight, they were gonna get five duplications off.  They were slated for one load of human hearts, one box of telepads, two uses on the Order armory - which would net them six total loadouts - and the last one was for a box of ‘miscellaneous junk’.

James was offended on behalf of JP, who never read the duplication reports, and wouldn’t know that his hard acquired potions were tagged as ‘junk’.  They were also copying a couple things for Research, including a pen that wrote on any surface, and a key to a bike lock that *might* be spawning bikes, but no one was sure.  Those things he was okay rolling into the ‘junk’ label.  Oh, and a couple pairs of the affiliation glasses, because they were useful for the spy bullshit that was part of his daily life now.

“Do you ever feel like we’re spoiled?”  James asked Anesh.

His boyfriend, not having heard him come up, jumped just a little bit, a small puff of brown dust spraying out of the bag he was mixing coffee in.  “Faaaah….hello!”  Anesh caught his breath.  “Spoiled how?”

“We get every magic thing we find, in bulk.”  James shrugged.  “It’s crazy useful, but I worry we’re cheating.”

“People keep saying that.”  Anesh frowned.  “I don’t think anyone cares.  Also it’s not ‘in bulk’.  We can’t, for example, replace cars with telepads.  We just don’t have the ability to make enough for the whole world yet.”

“That’s a shame, because that would actually be hugely helpful in fighting global warming.”

“Yeah, well, we have enough to run a secret police force.”  Anesh said.  “Also, now that I’ve said that, I just realized, we have a secret police force, and it’s kinda creepy?  Should we be… doing something about that?”

James bit his lip and hummed.  “You know, you’re not the first person to say something we were doing was creepy today.  One of the new people brought up that the whole plan of trying to create an arcology by duplicating spaces would lead to a ‘dystopian hellscape of corridors’.”

“Have they *been in here* yet?”  Anesh asked.  “Because I think they’re thinking of the weird feeling large hotels give off, and not the actual corridor nightmare carnival that is Officium Mundi.”

“Anyway.  The secret police thing actually is valid, yeah.  Though we’re not claiming responsibility for enforcement or imprisonment, and the majority of what we’re doing is crisis resolution.  Maybe we should get an independent agency to keep an eye on us?”  James shrugged.  “I mean, we’re near Portland.  We’ve probably got a group of highly motivated experts that we can ask to be a checksum on our actions.  I’ll let you know when they email me back.”  He grinned at Anesh as his boyfriend gave him a *look*.

“The fact that you’re starting to anticipate problems before people bring them up is worrying.  Are you an adult now?”

James put on a high pitched nasally voice.  “Fuck off, *dad*.  I’m gonna go vandalize the bathrooms with my *real* friends.”

“Please, please, do not call me dad.”  Anesh said.  “Don’t make this weird.”

Laughing, James wrapped his partner in a hug, before pulling back and rifling through his pockets.  “Look, I’m just here to add a couple small things to the junk box.  Then I gotta get going.  If these work, then it’s gonna be huge, and we also might piss off a bunch of old rich guys.”

“Oh thank god.”  Anesh sighed.  “Here I worried we were going to do something different this week.”

“Leaving now!”  James said through his own laugh.  “Be careful, we’ll radio in every half hour!”

“Have fun storming the castle!”  Anesh called after him.

Getting down the ramps was significantly easier than getting up.  Assisted by gravity, James made good time, and didn’t wear himself out too much as he looped through the strange structure.  On the fifth or sixth floor, he paused for a second as a source of motion caught his eye, and waited motionless until the strider that had been poking its way along a desk edge made itself known.

“Hey.”  James said to it, in a quiet, but firm voice.  The strider instantly froze, pen legs locking in place as the two eyes on its front and top swiveled to look at James.  “You’re fine.”  He told it.  “Just don’t be a jerk, and you can stick around here, okay?”  It didn’t move, except to take a tentative step backward.  “Seriously, it’s fine.  Head upstairs if you want to say hi to Anesh.  He’s nice.”  James told it, before giving the strider a nod, and heading off on his way again.

Sometimes, the little stapler nightmares were instantly hostile.  Or worse, deliberately violent, stringing lines of spiked staples or setting small traps before trying to harm or kill passing delvers.  But sometimes, they were passive.  Or, in this case, afraid.  Skittish, maybe even shy.  And with those, James couldn’t help but think about Rufus, the first friend he’d ever made in this place, still actively trying to turn James’ apartment into a cactus farm.  There was a lot of value to showing a little compassion.

He was still smiling a little to himself as he passed through the ground floor where they kept the armory, and outfitted himself with a light loadout for the night.  No full body armor; they weren’t going out to fight anything after all.  Just some sports pads, a nylon backpack, a relatively hatchet that had replaced his original favorite weapon, and a wrist slingshot with a pouch of ball bearings.  More than enough to handle most threats, even if ‘handle’ didn’t specifically mean ‘overwhelm with violence.’

Oh, and a thermite ball.  For when they needed to overwhelm something with violence.  Just in case.

“Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”  James said to Daniel and Dave as he walked out of the shadowed tower and into the harsh white light of the flurouscents.  The two of them were standing halfway between the tower and the perimeter that several members of the Order were busy establishing against the wilderness of cubicles around them, neither of them seeming to be in any kind of hurry.  Daniel stood gazing slightly upward, an orange cast to the light around his head, while Dave was looking the other direction, staring down at his phone.

Looking up from the game of sudoku he was casually failing to understand, Dave nodded at James.  “I’m fine.  Ready to go?”  He asked.

“Yeah.  Daniel, you and Path with us?”

“Sure.”  Daniel answered in a far away voice.  “Want us to take the lead to the goal?”

“Absolutely not!”  James answered quickly, getting a surprised look from both his companions.  “Danny, you and Path are a great team, don’t get me wrong.  But every time you find a route somewhere, Pathfinder ‘predicts’ an amount of misadventure.  And yes, maybe I’m reading too far into this, but it *appears*, as an outside observer, that she’s trading an abstract currency of problems in exchange for the map.  And I would like to have a smooth, calm trip through the impossible tessellated cubicle maze, without being dunked in a pit of staples, or accidentially getting in a romantic relationship with a tumblefeed, or being comically on fire somehow.  We’ve got maps, we know what direction we’re going, we’re just looking for alternate paths, it should be fine.”

“Oh.”  Daniel said.  But he said it after clearing his throat and not making eye contact.

James pursed his lips in a frown.  “Oh?”  He asked with a sigh.

“We already… um…”

“How many misadventures.”  James asked flatly, taking out a pair of fingerless gloves and pulling them on.  “Am I going to need a helmet?”

“Why don’t you have a helmet?”  Dave asked.  “I have a helmet.  Head protection is important.”

“It gets caught on things when I get kicked around.”  James told him.

Daniel cleared his throat again.  “Just one misadventure.”  He said, meekly.  “In thirty five minutes.  If we leave now.”

“That’s so… argh!”  James pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.  “That’s so much worse!  Now I’m just gonna be waiting the whole time!  Alright, whatever, I don’t care!  Let’s go, before I decide to just sit in the tower all night and avoid everything fun.  Onward!  To mild but non-fatal injuries!”

As Dave and Daniel followed after their leader, heading into the sprawling mass of cubicles that spread out from around the door, Dave leaned over and whispered, “When he says it like that, it doesn’t sound as fun.”

“Nothing sounds fun if you break it down like that.”  Daniel replied.  “But he’s not wrong.  That’s why I’ve got a first aid kit in my bag”

“Good call.”

Twenty minutes later, the three of them were moving single file through a wide corridor, Dave flitting between cubicle doors to make sure there were no large nests or trap clusters, while James occasionally made a mark on their map as they went.

“This is a good one.”  He softly spoke, and got nods from the others.  The idea, after all, was to find a bike route.  The Order had started using bikes in here a lot more recently, and while the office had a tendency to shift around if damaged, and refresh itself if modified, there were still a few major hallways with long straight paths that let them cover sometimes *miles* in a few minutes, instead of in a few hours.

“How far are we from the bathroom spire?”  Dave asked.

“About a mile left.”  Daniel answered.  “I see this hallway ends up ahead, though.  And we’re gonna have to turn right to get back on track.  Still, this would save a lot of time.”

“Why did you want to explore the bathrooms again, anyway?”  Dave asked James.  “They seem… awful.”

“Because every time we think we’ve seen the last of something in this place, it surprises us.”  James answered, peaking into the cubicle on the right, before taking a few careful steps to the next door and checking that one too.  “And maybe we’ve found all the orbs, but it seems like the more defended places have weird, and useful, stuff.  Like the copy projector, or the camraconda nest.”

“That last one…”

Dave’s argument was cut off by a sudden banshee wail, a voice that rose in pitch rapidly, howling about overtime hours.  The noise burst out of the cubicle directly in front of James, a riot of yellows and purples trailing in flapping paper trails as a roughly face-shaped collection of sticky notes flung itself forward through the air.

Despite having no visible means of propulsion, the mask whipped itself around in a rapid right angle turn, and darted forward toward Daniel’s face, spurs of bone extended from its eyes and mouth.  The young man stumbled back, and dodged the snapping strike only by virtue of tripping over his own feet and tumbling down onto his ass.

The mask wheeled around in midair, making a beeline for Dave standing to the side of the hall.  Dave, panicking, flung the water bottle he was drinking from at it, wildly off target with his sudden attempt.  He was trying to get his hands up to guard his face when James seized three of the trailing paper tendrils coming off it in a gloved hand, whipped the paper and bone creature onto the floor, and planted his hatchet through it with a motion that was half swing, half crouch.

He calmly cracked the yellow the mask dropped, before rising back to his feet.

[+2 Skill Ranks : Repair - Laptop]

“Handy.”  He commented.  “You two alright?”

“I missed, but I’m okay.”  Dave said, glossing over the moment of hesitation he’d had.  “Daniel?”

“I fell on my first aid kit.”  The lanky young man groaned from the floor, rolling over off his backpack.  “I think I sprayed burn cream all over the inside of my bag.  Oh, and someone dumped water on me?”  There was a noise of thin plastic crinkling as he rolled onto the water bottle that Dave had hit him with.  “I am damp.  And my head hurts.”

“Alright!”  James declared.  “There’s one misadventure down!”  He offered Daniel a hand and got him back up.  “Let’s keep moving!  I feel a lot better now.”

Neither Daniel nor Dave bothered to correct him on the timing of the event.  Thirteen minutes later, at an intersection in the hall that had one too many right angles, someone asked what was actually inside the vending machines in this place.  Two minutes after that, while trying to pick the lock on a vending machine, James was struck in the leg by a projectile can of Maximum Grape, bowling him over and putting his head at exactly the right spot for the vending machine to spray him down with some kind of cola, dispensed like it was a fire hose and not a slot at the base of a vending machine.

“I!”  James declared as he stood up, wiping carbonated sugar out of his eyes, “Am tired!  Of being dunked in strange liquids!”

“Why are we going to the bathrooms, then?”  Dave asked, *somehow* keeping a straight face.  Behind him, Daniel wasn’t doing such a good job, and was snorting giggles when he thought James wasn’t looking.

“This was entirely my fault, wasn’t it?  *This* is the misadventure!  You lied to me!”  James accused.

“What?”  Daniel tried to look innocent.  “No, I never said anything.  Also, we should go.  We’re almost there, and we can figure out if we need pittons.”  He shouldered his backpack, and started moving again, Dave following after him and moving around the still dripping James.

James glared after then, then glared at the vending machine.  “Okay, I’m not mad at you.”  He told it, calming down a little.  “Sorry for trying to crack you open.”

There was a wet thunk from its dispenser slot, and James looked down to see, in a puddle of soda, a tall, thin silver can.  He picked it up gingerly, letting the liquid drip off it.  ‘No Worries’ read the label.

“Thanks.”  He said.  “I’m setting Daniel on fire.”  He added, mostly to himself, as he set off after the rest of his group.

It was only when he cracked the drink open and took a swallow of it that he got his final surprise.  A light pressure in his mouth, followed by a *pop*, and a mental notification that rang through his whole self.

[Shell Upgraded : Heart +18 Average BPM]

“I’m gonna be so much nicer to the vending machine in the Lair.”  James muttered.  “Wait, have these things been able to dispense purples this whole time?!  Dave!  Wait up!”  The sticky fluid now hardening on his skin was forgotten as he jogged to rejoin the others.

They had work to do, after all.  No time for screwing around.  Well, *more* screwing around.

_____

“Alright, everyone got your goggles? We’re only doing this one more time.”  Reed called out to the assembled Research division.

There were way more people than he ever expected to be in charge of.  Not that he was actually in charge of anything; it was more like he was a beuracratic filter through which paperwork was filed and projects were funded.  Like a very powerful version of an incarnated grant application.

His staff was mixed human and camraconda, and their shared culture was one of flagrantly irresponsible curiosity.  Which fit well with the Order, honestly, so they tried to keep the actual irresponsible nonsense to a comical minimum.  These dozen people, plus a few of the new squires that had come to watch the test, stood at the opposite end of the Lair’s new basement, setting up cameras, spectroscopes, and a dozen other tools.

On the far side of the basement, which had been pretty much entirely cleared out of the light clutter that had spawned in it, was a totem.

It was one of two that they possessed.  Nikhail had led the team to collect it a couple nights ago, a few of Research’s human members and one of the new engineers braving the hallways of Officium Mundi to locate, and wholly extract a totem’s structure.  They’d brought the orange they’d found, too.  And, even better, none of them had gotten seriously hurt in the Penrose loop that the totem had tried to trap them in.

They’d even brought back some small green orbs from the 2.0s that had jumped them.  Nikhail had tried to see if he could upgrade his car.  It hadn’t worked exactly, and now the bushes in the parking lot grew faster.

The real prize was the totem, though.  And the orange to power it.

This was not the first test.  They’d tested it already, from a safe distance.  It worked.  It took a snapshot of a designated relative position, and it extrapolated it out into a loop of right angles.  Once you entered through the targeted position, you were stuck taking turns through the copied segments.  This one wasn’t the most complicated iteration of this trap that Reed was aware of because you could break out of it by moving outward, but it was still powerful.

Because the copied space was *real*.  Oh, sure, it was weird to access it, and there were some absurd limits to how it would have to be set up, but it made a *mass copy*.  The only real downside was that it only copied a ‘structure’ - an intuitive heuristic that everyone kinda knew the definition of, but it was hard to agree on hard limits to.  But that was fine, they hadn’t really started experimenting yet.  They’d bug test that limit out.

This was the first experiment.

They’d unfolded the totem space inside the basement nineteen times now, opening and closing the zone to repeatedly test the limits and potential dangers.  They had a fairly decent grasp on it now, as well as a harvest of concrete chunks and lightbulbs from inside the copied spaces before they were folded back up.  Conservation of matter could get fucked, as far as Reed was concerned.

Now, it was time to see if they could modify it.

They’d made a full blueprint of both the totems in their possession.  They’d gotten Anesh and Momo, with their unique takes on magic and the math thereof, to help generate models for the meanings of the lines and angles.  That, along with examinations of a handful of other totems that hadn’t been brought out of the dungeon, meant that Research had a fairly decent educated guess on what they were doing.

They were still standing across the massive room, behind cover, wearing goggles, and inserting the orb via drone.

“Okay.  Test one.”  Reed said, as Taste-Of-Air puppetted the drone into place, orb held at just the right height to slide into the duel pyramid shape of the waiting empty totem.  “We have added one two inch groove to the bottom left of panel six.  This should either render the totem nonfunctional, or expand the copied area by six feet.  Everyone ready?”

“Hit it, doc!”  Nikhail yelled from behind a low wall of lead and steel.

“I’m not a doctor, nor the one hitting it.”  Reed muttered.

He’d thought he was being quiet, but Nik apparently heard him.  “I was talking about Taste-Of-Air!”  Was the shouted response.

“Our companions aren’t taking this seriously.”  He sighed to the camraconda.  “Would you please begin the process? All monitoring devices are active.”

Taste-Of-Air nodded in a sharp motion, most of his focus on controlling the quadcopter drone through the skulljack link.  Ever so gently, he nudged the remote unit forward, until the orange orb it carried started to slide into place, held by an outside force to hover between the two points of the opposed pyramids.  The green striped camraconda let the drone’s grippers release, and watched through its own eye and multiple networked cameras as the totem activated.

There was the feeling of falling.  There was the memory of flying.

And then, something cracked.

It appeared in an instant, rioting out from where the totem should have taken a copy of local space.  A jutting spike of nonspace, nowhere, cutting through the ceiling, blending the parking lot and a few trees overhead into a frozen whirlwind of matter and vectors.

The air howled as it was pulled in six directions at once, whipping into gale force wind down thin unseen tunnels in the open place overhead.  Chunks of matter, mostly asphalt and dirt, spawned, sat stationary, then fired at high velocity to ricochet off the basement concrete floor.  The drone was *gone*, shredded into toothpicks made of plastic and engine components.  The nearby support pillar joined it shortly thereafter, a rain of concrete needles spraying the ceiling at four hundred miles an hour.

The event lasted for precisely twenty six seconds, before Reed crushed the orange orb in the center of the totem.

[Certification Added : Certified Flight Instructor]

Space righted itself, the ceiling crumbled inward before stabilizing around the rough hole that led through the ground and out to the open night air.  Like a hissing scream of relief, the problematic spire of warped reality undid its grip, and everything was suddenly normal again.

“Fuck, Reed!”  Someone yelled from what felt like miles away.  “Medic!”

Reed took a deep breath.  The crisis was resolved, though his brain was moving sluggishly.  Pulling his hand back from the totem, he itched at the mild pain in his side, which turned it into a very sharp and concerning pain in a hurry.

Looking down, he saw his hand covered in blood, looking down farther, pulling his shirt aside, he saw a spiral chunk carved out of the flesh of his left arm and torso.  The blood was only just starting to spread from where parts of him had been pulled back with the spatial anomaly as it repaired itself.

“Oh.”  He said.  “Ow?”  Reed looked back at the path he’d sprinted to get to the totem, and noticed that there was a worrying slice of his own shin somewhere between himself and the couple members of Research who were racing to reach him with the trauma kit.  “Hey, I think we did it wrong.”  He thought he said to the blurry face and wide worried eyes that swam in his vision.  “Did you see the distortion near the reference point?  We… uh… shoulda put the mark on… the upper pyramid.  Allllso.  We should...do the next one… outside.”  Reed muttered.

Someone caught him as he fell.