The Daily Grind - Chapter 147 (Patreon)

I am very tired.

_____

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.  - Antoine de Saint-Exupery -

“Do we have everything?”  Anesh asked, for the eight time.

“For the tenth time,” James lied, “yes, we have everything.  Probably.”  He rolled his shoulder, loosening up the muscle as he looked at the loaded trunk of their new car.

Well.  “New” was a bit of a lie, too.  With James’ car currently busy being a piece of sculpture, and Anesh’s vehicle busy being a cramped sedan that no one wanted to actually road trip across the country in, James had tasked Karen with purchasing him a new car.

Then the woman, hoarding wealth like a draconian accountant, had both assigned a high schooler to find something on a budget, and budgeted not a whole lot to the purchase.

Which is why James was looking at a ‘new’ car that was, functionally, his old car, but five years newer, and with the wrong texture of seats.  Also it had been bought at a police auction, and they had needed to have a window that had been smashed in replaced.  Also it was the wrong color.

But it passed mechanical inspection, it had windows like a goddamn fishbowl, and trunk space that was roughly enough for two small orgies concurrently.

“Why do you need to describe it that way.”  Anesh had flatly asked James, shoulders slumping.

“In case it’s relevant!”  James beamed at him, eliciting a laugh in return.

Crammed into that trunk at present were two bags of clothing, one empty duffel bag for laundry, a standard delver loadout kit, two grocery bags full of mostly granola bars and chips, a cooler full of drinks, and a single small blue nylon lunch container that currently held roughly twenty days worth of food for the two of them.  There were weapons in the car, but they were under the back seat, out of sight until needed.  No sense looking for trouble.

The backseat also contained both Ganesh and Rufus.  And a small cactus Rufus insisted on bringing along.  James was currently unsure if the cactus was alive.

“This feels like old times.”  James grinned at his partner as he plugged his phone into the car’s stereo and queued up something jazzy.

It was a beautiful day to start a trip.  Early spring air, sunlight that was better than freezing grey gloom, but wasn’t too bright or too hot.  It wasn’t early enough to really be early morning anymore, but the world felt a little quiet, a little crisp.  Just the right time to roll the dice, and hope for sun instead of approaching thunderstorms.

“Wait, shit, the dog!”  Anesh unbuckled the seatbelt he’d just put on and made to get out of the car.

“Sarah will be walking Auberdeen, and I already gave today’s good doggo some pets and sent her on her way.  It was one of those long dogs.  Like, with the weird triangular faces.  I can never remember the name.  O-something? Orboi?  Anyway.  Sarah also has a backup arranged in case she dies or gets mind wiped or captured again.”

Anesh rebuckled his seatbelt.  “I hate that our lives contain that caveat.”

“I mean, to be fair, the backup is *you*.  How’s it feel, by the way?  Being this spread out?”  James asked honestly.

It was a fair question; Anesh currently had three iterations of himself active, with one across the country, and another about to embark on a road trip where wifi would be spotty at best and syncing up would be basically impossible without abusing the telepads.  And it wasn’t like they couldn’t do that, but it was meant to be a *vacation*.  Time off, not time worrying.  “It feels pretty fine, honestly.”  Anesh said.  “Closest I’ve felt to normal in a while, though I don’t know if that makes it good or bad.  Bloody confusing is what it is, if I think about it too hard.”

“I’ll still trade you powers.”  James said as he started the engine.  “You want some mortar skills?  Maybe a few dozen points of emotional resonance?  I’ve got a wide selection of things I’ll part with!”

“I am ninety percent sure that’s not how it works.”  Anesh commented as they got underway.  “And I should know.  I know math.  Also isn’t your power attracting trouble?”

“Yeah, I multiclassed into bard when no one was looking.”

The two of them laughed, joined by excited noises from the two life forms in their back seat, as James pulled out of their apartment’s parking lot and onto the main road.  A good start to a casual, relaxing adventure.

_____

“So, how’ve ya been?”  James asked Anesh casually after the got on the highway.

He’d waited until the highway because it was ten AM on a Wednesday, which meant that driving around here was kind of awful until you got a certain distance away from a city and onto the impossibly long roads that connected those islands of humanity.  James had grown up in this town, knew it fairly well, and it jarred him to see it change from a small suburb of Portland with barely twenty thousand people in it, to a small city in its own right with over a hundred thousand souls living in honestly not that much more space than the original borders had marked out.

It made traffic awful, was the point.  So, the trick was to save the conversation for when you could see trees on the sides of the road again, and then you knew you were basically safe.

“I’ve been okay.  Honestly, I’ve just kinda been coasting.  The duplication ritual doesn’t need me there to supervise anymore, so I’ve got personal time on delves.  And outside of that, I guess I’m mostly just relaxing.  Talking to people at the Lair, working with the camracondas, whatever seems interesting.  Napping a lot!”  Anesh grinned sheepishly.  “I feel a bit lazy, honestly.  Compared to you.”

“Not worried about forgetting all the numbers you learned?”  James ribbed him.

Anesh grinned and sunk back into his seat, before trying again to adjust it to something that was comfortable for a long drive.  “Nah.  At least one of me is using the knowledge.  Besides, I just finished a masters degree in three years.  I deserve a rest.  Even if I did cheat a little.”

“A little.”  James made air quotes, holding the wheel with his knees for the second it took.  “Anesh, how smart *are* you?  If we get you one of the sewer books and it ups your intelligence, would anyone notice?”

“I’ve got some chops.”  Anesh wore a smug little self satisfied smile.

“Hey, speaking of your math degree, what ever happened with that girl you were dating?”  James casually asked.

Anesh coughed, turned dark red through the natural tone of his skin, and found some *very* interesting trees to look at out the window.  “We weren’t dating!”  He protested.  “I was tutoring her!”

“Over coffee.  Once a week.”  James was smiling as he teased his partner.

“That is how tutoring works, James!  You have to schedule it!”  Anesh riposted.  “But… uh…” He glanced back at James, looking for something in his face before turning to stare awkwardly out the window again.  “I dunno.  Maybe she wanted to date. It felt weird.  I know you and Alanna are full-speed-ahead on being polyamorous, but I still don’t know how I feel about it, and I didn’t want to upset either of you.”

“Aw!”  James reached over and laid a hand on Anesh’s arm.  It was, admittedly, a little awkward to try to comfort someone when you were going eighty miles an hour.  But it helped that Anesh was dumping most of his speed, whatever that was, into James at the moment.  “We never wanted to make you feel actually bad!  And I’ll stop teasing you, if it’s really a problem.”  James promised.  “Thing is, both of us thought you were really cute about it. And… upset us?  I honestly don’t think Alanna knows how to be jealous.  And I’m not perfect, I admit.  I don’t have a good hold on my feelings all the time.  But fuck’s sake, you can just make more of yourself.  You, of everyone on Earth, get to skip the biggest logistical hurdle of being poly.  You *always have enough time for everyone*.”

“...I honestly hadn’t thought of that.”  Anesh said, perking up, eyes wide.  “I… was more or less focused on whether or not you’d be mad that I liked someone else.”

“Anesh…” James tried to think of how to phrase this.  “I love *you*.  I don’t love owning you.”  He paused, then cleared his throat.  “That might have been too sappy.”

“Posh.  I’ll take it.”  Anesh said with a goofy grin on his face.  “But we can go back to talking about work if you want.”

James had to resist the urge to throw his hands up.  “I was trying to talk about something other than work!”  He exclaimed.

“Well, it doesn’t help that our work is honestly pretty great.”  Anesh noted.  “When it’s not terrifying, obviously.”

“There’s been a lot of terrifying lately.”  James quietly muttered.

“Oof.”  Anesh vocalized an agreement.  “That said, how’ve *you* been?  We haven’t really talked about the… thing.”

“What, the thing that tried to eat my personality and replace me with a puppet?  Yeah, not doing great ‘bout that!”  James heard his voice crack as he spoke.  “Yikes!  There’s so many problems with that thing, and I am not comfortable with it existing!”

“Yes, that thing.  Are you planning to just ignore it?”  Anesh quietly asked, sounding a little nervous.

“Pretty much!”  James tried to sound chipper, but it came out strained.  “I’ve decided to not sleep anymore, and to distract myself with projects.”

“Like stealing part of our parking lot.”

“I own the parking lot regardless of where it is!”  James declared.  “It doesn’t matter if it’s flat, or formed into frictionless ball joints meant to puppet an asphalt mecha!”

“The real estate company is not going to agree with you.”  Anesh quipped.

“They can fight my giant robot.”  James grumbled.

Anesh held up a series of fingers and started ticking off points.  “A, that’s unethical.  B, they’re not going to have their own giant robot to make it a fair fight.  C, it’s not a robot, it’s a… I mean, it’s really more of a bipedal tank…”

“I wanted to make it quadrupedal, but it makes it harder to disassociate into it.”  James noted.

“And *D*,” Anesh finished, “you really need to actually sleep.  Please?”  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, glancing out at the the greenery and the other cars flowing past.  “It can’t be good for you.”

“No side effects so far.”  James glibly replied.  But then, more seriously, “But… I’ll try.  Also Sarah isn’t here to help me cover me with bonus naps, so… I’ll try.  I just worry.”

“Nightmares?”  Anesh asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been through a lot.”  He said.  “You really should talk to one of our therapists.”

“I do.”  James told him.  “It helps.  It’s not perfect, though.  Also, not to derail this serious talk, but can you check maps and see if I need to take that exit?  Because we have two minutes to figure it out, and if I remember wrong, we’re going to end up in California again.”

“A most dire fate.”  Anesh noted, turning to look in the back seat where Ganesh and Rufus had tilted up a tablet screen for him, and Ganesh was pointing with a curved leg at the direction listed at the top.  “Yes.”  Anesh said, twisting back to his seat.  “Take that exit, or we’re going south.”

James did so, easily as the traffic was really starting to thin ou here.  “So, the big thing that annoys me, more than scares me?  Is that I honestly spent a lot of time trying to mentally separate myself from my depression.  Trying to really, really *know*, that it wasn’t what made me unique, wasn’t what made me who I am.  And my reward for that is to be proven absolutely wrong.”

“Wait what?!  No!”  Anesh looked alarmed.  “Wrong!  Wrong lesson to learn!”

“You sure?”  James raised sarcastic eyebrows, even though Anesh probably couldn’t see from that angle.  “Because it seems like the takeaway.”

“Just because something *tried to kill you* doesn’t mean that learning about yourself is invalid!”

“But I didn’t learn anything real.”  James pointed out.  “I just learned, in the end, that getting rid of my depression legitimately would make me someone else.”

Anesh looked furious, and sounded that way too. “Sure, if you use the *cursed potion of living death*, you bloody idiot!”  He yelled.  “That’s like saying that surgery is a failed medical field because amputating your arm with lawn shears didn’t go well for you!  Also, *actual antidepressants* exist, and we have more than enough wealth to get you an endless supply!”  He let his voice drift back to a normal level.  “Honestly not sure why we didn’t do that earlier.”

“Sometimes I honestly forget that non-magic solutions exist.”  James told him with a guilty wince.  “Also I’m… bad at taking care of myself.”

His boyfriend frowned menacingly back at him from across the car’s center console.  “This is why we need Alanna back.  To bully you into being healthier.”

“Alright.  So, anyway…!” James started, a small trickle of laughter in his voice, along with a desire to change the subject and fully break the tension.

“Ah.  Uh… can you hold that thought?”  Anesh asked him.  “Momo has just texted me eight time asking about fractals.”

“We have been gone” James said with a very disappointed tone, “for two hours.  Tops.”

“I know.”  Anesh said.  “I’m just gonna tell her to message the other me.”

“Nah, it’s fine.  Go ahead and answer.”  James flapped a hand, deciding on amusement over annoyance for his mood today.  “We’ve got four or five days on the road.  We’ve got *time* to chat.  I don’t mind distractions.”  He said.

“Alright, but I’m coming back to this eldritch horror in a bottle thing.”  Anesh said, already typing back to Momo on his phone.

“It’s cool, I’ve got a series of deflections lined up.”  James joked.

“What?”

“Nothing!”  James shifted his grip on the wheel, adjusted his posture a little, and relaxed.  There was a long drive ahead, no sense burning too much mental energy so early.

_____

There was a rhythm to road trips that James remembered fondly and that Anesh found bizarre.  Rufus and Ganesh didn’t seem to notice the pattern, but then, they mostly seemed enraptured just staring out the back window.  A whole enormous world opening up for the two of them.

For Anesh, who wasn’t native to the US, and had spent most of his time in the states in or around one city for college and one suburb for sleeping when not at college, the process was almost divine madness. By the time they’d crossed Oregon’s eastern border, they’d covered enough distance to have gone through half of his entire country.  The road wound on, and on, and *on*, over the horizon, through mountains and valleys, thin forests and thick grasslands, so much open space that it boggled the mind why anyone would put a road there at all in the first place.

But for James?  He’d never taken *this* trip, but he knew the pattern.

Drive, watch the sky, watch the clouds drift and the colors shift.  Become lost in the music, until the music was too loud all of a sudden.  Then, become lost in the silence.  When the silence became deafening, have a conversation.  Loop as needed.

They weren’t in the pattern yet.  They were still talking too much.  It took a while to get there, though.  To that deeper feeling of time that lived on the road and in the big empty spaces between the towns and gas station off ramps.  And there was no rush.  They had two thousand miles of road to become familiar with it.

The car, which James was becoming increasingly happy with the more he drove, climbed a winding switchback without complaint.  Anesh had the window down, letting in dust and bugs, the latter of which Ganesh danced after, burning off excited drone energy.  He had the stereo playing Highway to Hell.  It was the first of many road trip songs James had prepared.

It would not be the first time it was played on this trip.

_____

“The mountains around here are beautiful.”  Anesh noted.  Outside his window, over a sheer drop that the car would not survive no matter how much magic they poured into it if James were to drive off the edge, a carpet of trees stretched away.  This was logging territory, and they could see from their rising vantage point, small bald patches where logs had been cleared away and saplings had yet to regrow.  The rest of the area, though, was the confident dark green of pine or fir trees, growing in an artificial grid which became instantly unnoticeable by any human observer once they got large enough and merged into a single tree-mass that the eye could no longer track.

Well, James could track it.  He could look deeper and see the patterns.  But it would give him a headache, so he kept that purple orb dialed down.

“You know what’s really amusing is, a while back, someone planted a bunch of deciduous trees up here in a smiley face pattern.”  James laughed a little.  “So it looked normal from a distance, until fall rolled around, and then there was a bright orange smiley face on the side of the mountain.”

“What, here?”  Anesh looked out again, trying to find it.

James shrugged.  “Probably not literally here, that would be a huge coincidence.  But somewhere around here!  In this biome, anyway!”

“This biome is the size of New Zealand.”  Anesh complained.

“Objectively untrue, but I’m sure it appreciates the comparison.”

“You know, a coincidence like that wouldn’t be out of place for us, right?”  Anesh asked.  “We run into a lot of coincidences.”

“Oh, yeah.  We’re cursed.”  James said, with a tone of voice that suggested utter conviction in his words to the point that he was almost bored by them.

“Beg pardon?”

“Cursed.  Or something curse-adjacent.”  James ‘clarified’.  “I’m just… okay, look at the trajectory of our lives.  I stumble into working for a company that houses a dungeon.  Then discover the dungeon itself.  Then it turns out there’s not only more dungeons in our area, but also a hostile agency that hunts delvers.  And then, we learn that everything we know about dungeons is at odds with what that agency believes?  Nah.  That’s some kinda cosmic fate, right there.  So, we must be cursed, because the outcome is that I don’t sleep anymore and never have time to play video games.”

“Okay, so, I’ve actually been wanting to talk about Status Quo.”  Anesh caught onto one specific point James had brought up.  “I don’t think they were real.”  He said.

James felt his hands clench into claws on the steering wheel.  “Wanna take that again?”  He asked.

“I mean, I don’t think they were what they thought they were.”  Anesh wasn’t blind to the suddenly tense atmosphere in the car.  “I think… I think they were someone else’s tool.  The agents and their leadership obviously thought they were doing the right thing, but I think they were tricked into it.  Someone was using them.  Otherwise, it doesn’t make any fucking sense how they could be so blind to what the dungeons were.  Are.”

“Status Quo was generational, though.”  James muttered.  Then he thought about that for a second, and the concern at Anesh’s theory got a lot worse.  “Wait, so, who’s using them, then?”

“Something like the Old Gun, maybe.  Or maybe a part of the government.  A person or institution that’s a hundred years old at least.”  Anesh reached out and turned the cold air coming through the car’s vents up by just a hair, seeking an equilibrium of comfort that road trips never provided.  “Hell, it could be another dungeon.  But if you look at what Status Quo was doing… well, the administration *said* they were keeping the world stable.  But you know what keeps the world stable? Killing off dungeons.”

“And we know dungeons need delvers, in some way.”  James nodded.  “Or some form of food, anyway.  You ever wonder if dungeons just straight up kidnap and eat people sometimes? I know the Office had something like that going on, but that wasn’t the dungeon itself, right?”

Anesh shuddered.  “I think about that constantly, yes, thank you.”  He said.

“Actually, it being another dungeon pulling the strings makes sense.”  James said.  “Remember, Officium Mundi proactively tried to kill a lot of people.  And we know at least one of them had alarmingly synergistic powers with the orbs.  Maybe dungeons have an ecosystem, and this is a form of competition?”

“Or maybe I’m wrong, and Status Quo were just powerfully stupid while being stupidly powerful.”  Anesh hummed a bit.  “We can’t really know, and all our investigations into their documentation gives us nothing.”

“We could just… hm.”  James trailed off.  “You know, we have an alarming number of world shaking tools, and yet, almost none of them make us good investigators?”

“It’s frustrating, yes.”  Anesh sighed.  “And there’s so many things we don’t know.”

“Oh!”  James snapped his fingers as he remembered something.  “You know what I wanna know?  How did Momo make a red item?”

“What?”

“Well, okay, so, we have a long standing theory that the copier is an ‘item’, like a lot of the dungeontech, but made with a red orb, right?“

Anesh rolled his eyes at James.  “Please,” he said, “give me the courtesy of knowing everything about that damn overhead projector.”  He tilted his head back, and noticed Ganesh crawling up the side of his seat.  Offering a hand to the little drone, Anesh settled back and gave his friend some wing pets.

“Okay, well, before we first went to go fight Status Quo, Momo gave me a padlock, and instructions on how to use it.  And I got the implication that it was a red item she’d *made*.  Mostly because it was one-use, but she still knew how it worked.  But I keep forgetting to ask her about it, and part of that is that I haven’t seen her make any more, so I never remember.”  James grumbled.  “Fuckin’ short term memory upgrade is great and all, but I am still scatterbrained as hell.”

“James…” Anesh narrowed his eyes, speaking slowly.

“Yo.”

“When could you possibly have talked to Momo that day?  The day you and Nate saved Lua and the two kids, right?”

“Right before we left for the school.”  James said.  “Momo grabbed some people and followed us, got there just at the end.  Why?”  He felt something, creeping in on the edges of his skin.  Something cold, and worrying.  “Why?”  He repeated, harder this time.

“Okay, I don’t want to worry you, but I don’t *think* that timeline matches up.”  Anesh said.  “And we can ask Momo when we get back, but I don’t think she’s ever made a red item.”

There was an oppressive quiet in the car.  Just the engine and the tires on the road fading to white noise, and a badly timed pause in the quiet music, and James realizing that he hadn’t been paying attention enough.  Again.

“Well.”  He said, eventually.  “Fuck.”

“We should turn around.  Telepad back, right now.”  Anesh said.

“Nah.”  James sighed, a certain tension weirdly draining away rather than building up.  “It’s fine.”  He said.

“What?!”

“Okay, think about this.  Whoever, whatever that was, that wasn’t Momo, was giving us material aid.  If they were hostile, then they’re someone that can warp time as a weapon, and we’re fucked anyway.  Unless our defenses on the Lair are enough now.  EIther way, they’re either not against us, can’t find us, or it doesn’t matter.”  James laughed.  A bitter, dark laugh.  The kind that could end with tears, if it went too far.  But it didn’t, this time.  Instead, he just added, “You know, it’s about fucking time we had a god on *our* side.”

“I sincerely doubt they’re ‘on our side’.”  Anesh grimly reminded him.

“Oh, me too.  But I like to fantasize.”

“Should we even tell anyone?”

“Yes.  We should blip back when we pull over for food, tell a few people, including Momo, and just check in.  But aside from that, I’m not letting something from six months ago ruin my vacation!”

“You’re really determined to enjoy this, huh?”

“I want to feel the wind in my hair, dammit!”

“Doesn’t that just… like, your hair’s pretty long.  Won’t that just mess it up and get it in your eyes?”

James dramatically deflated.  “Yeah, movies lied to me.”  He said.

“Also, when *are* we pulling over for food?”

“Well, there’s a sign for a diner up ahead.  Why not now?  You can teleport from the bathrooms.”  James suggested.

Anesh crossed his arms, and on his shoulder, Ganesh mimicked the gesture.  “This is the kind of coincidence I’m talking about.”  He grumbled.  “I don’t want to go to a cursed diner.”

There was a moment.  A moment where James almost, *almost*, reassured his boyfriend that there was *no way* some random diner on a forested mountain road would be cursed, or haunted, or secretly a front for a shadowy cult, or any other nonsense they dealt with on a daily basis.

Then James realized what he was about to do, and he shut his mouth, nodded, and made the turn into the gravel parking lot in silence.

_____

The diner was actually half restaurant, half camping supply store, for the people who were on their way to get lost in the mountains and realized last minute that they could do with an extra pair of clean thermal socks.  The experience of walking through the shop side to the food side was a little strange, passing through a room that seemed paradoxically smaller on the inside than the facade of the building made it seem.  Shouldering past carved wooden bears and trying not to knock over bushels of fishing rods that looked like they came from every decade of the last century.

The restaurant side actually had a door, as the grinning man polishing the counter looked like he was almost unhealthily excited to tell them.  But if he did have that impulse, he held it in, greeted the two, and told them to take any table they liked.

As James got settled and started looking over the menu, which was, he realized, the same menu as every small town diner he’d ever been in, Anesh made a covert trip to the restroom and, via magical teleporting notepad, the Lair.  When he finally came back, James had already gotten himself a milkshake, and ordered Anesh a sweet tea.

Anesh sat down, plopping a three ring binder full of papers onto the table next to his drink.  “You know, it’s a little weird that you know what my drink of choice is.”  He commented.

“Well, we *are* dating.”  James said with a happy note in his voice.  “Besides that, we spend a probably worrying amount of our time together at places like this.  I think I know more about your eating habits than I do about your childhood.”  He paused.  “Actually, that’s… probably legitimately true.  Dang.  Do we not talk enough?”

“I dunno.”  Anesh admitted quietly.  “I’ve never actually been in a relationship before.  How much are we supposed to talk?”  He asked.

“We should ask Sarah.  She’ll know.”

“Good call.”

The smiling proprietor chose that moment to wander to their table.  “What can I get for you boys tonight?”  He asked in a cheerful voice.

“Burger and fries, well done please.”  James asked.  “Anesh?”

“Same, but a veggie burger.”  He said.  “And not well done, because that would be silly.”

The man laughed, a big belly laugh that would have turned heads if anyone else had been here.  “You got it!”  He wandered back to the kitchen, not bothering to write down their orders.

“I wonder what it would be like?”  James mused.  “Working a job like this.  Maybe owning a place like this.  One person, relying on the highway and a string of other people’s vacations to make a living.  Quiet days and characters like us.”

“We’re not characters yet to him.”  Anesh pointed out, flipping open his binder and turning to the second page.  “He hasn’t had time to know how weird we are yet.”

James shrugged, and shifted back into the worn fake leather padding of the booth’s bench.  “So, light reading?”  He asked.

“JP’s reports.  Well, the rogue division reports.”  Anesh replied.  “Hey, have you noticed that all our divisions are r-words?”

“I’ve really been trying not to.”  James answered, leaning his head back with his eyes closed.  It was nice to just sit and relax for a bit; driving for hours was more work than people thought.

Anesh chuckled as he turned a page.  “Well, I figured it’d be good to catch up on some stuff.  I’m almost positive Nate is the reason everyone has to write these, not JP, too.  Because the ones JP wrote are *very* sarcastic.”

“I’m shocked.”

“That said, hey, here’s something weird that’s been bothering me.”  Anesh looked up from the book, taking a sip of his drink from the long straw.  “You know how the Lair has… some basements?”

“Some basements is the most understated term I’ve ever-“

“So what happens if the building is demolished? Or if the elevator and stairs were removed?”  Anesh rolled over James’ snark.  “What happens to our extra closet if our apartment remodels, or gets converted into a warehouse or something?”

“Um… probably transfers over.”  James thought about it.  “Like how the value-added orbs seem to set a floor to the value of a space.  Maybe?  Wait, but yeah.  What if all the stairs are gone?  How would anyone build new stairs to the basements?”

“Exactly.”  Anesh cocked a finger at him.  “So, JP and DeKay were at this little yacht town-“

“What.”

“-a town where the main tourist attraction is boating, please let me finish.  Anyway, missing persons case, our kind of antimemetics stuff, all that.  But the place they found the people was in a lighthouse.  Not even kidnapped or anything.  Just inside a lighthouse, that no longer connected to the outside.”

“What the fuck?”  James opened his eyes and leaned forward, forgoing his nap to engage with the conversation.  “How’d they get in?”

“Oh, it’s a place that’s hard to remember, but the records of it exist.  They just kinda fumbled through it, and then telepaded out with the survivors.”

“What about the lighthouse itself?”  James asked.  “Did they get rid of it? Is it a dungeon?”

“Not a dungeon.  It seems like it’s something akin to what the green orbs do.  Someone made a space special, or added an outside effect onto a place, and then it got… lost.  Forgotten.  It’s a little pocket of weirdness, and people probably loved it at some point.  But now it’s just a Venus flytrap for humans.”

“Grim.”  James frowned.  “So… what do we do with this?”

“I mean, we should be on the lookout for hidden spaces, I guess.”  Anesh shrugged.  “Not much else we can do.  Even Momo’s AI can’t make sense of this thing.  But then, they weren’t made for it.  But we don’t have a way to find these places.  All we can really do is check in every week or so, make sure no one is trapped in there.  I guess we *could* demolish it, but…”

“But that would be a travesty.”  James sighed.  “Remember when Alanna describes Officium Mundi as like the Grand Canyon? Dangerous to screw around with, but beautiful, and valuable to everyone.”

“You ever think we’re being selfish, keeping the dungeons to ourselves?”  Anesh asked, not looking up from his reading.

“Name one person or group you trust to use them better than we’re trying to.”  James countered

Without pause, Anesh just replied, “No.”

Their eyes met, and they both cracked smiles.  Which is how the cook found them when he came out of the kitchen with their food.  “Ah!  Thank you!”  James enthusiastically crammed a fry into his mouth, ignoring the heat.

“You boys yell if you need anything.”  The man wandered back behind the counter to clean something, probably for the tenth time today.

“So, anything in there about the depression monster?”  James asked Anesh as they both dug into their food.  “Or are we just ignoring that and hoping it goes away.”

“There’s a worst case scenario analysis, yes.”  Anesh frowned.  “It’s not good.”  He spoke around a mouthful of tomato and lettuce.  “But it’s also unlikely that we’re dealing with an exponential crisis.  The potion didn’t duplicate.  But it did refill.  So it seems like what it’s meant to do is take over one person, and then be passed on.  Unless it just refilled because it didn’t take on you?  But that would be the good option, and you know how that’s been for us lately.  Nate has people watching the Alchemists, but there is legitimately no way to know who’s been… um…”

“Hollowed out and filled up with someone else.”  James whispered.

“Yes, that.  Thanks for that mental image.”

“S’what I’m here for.  Welcome to Sad Hour.”

“Yeah.  Well.”  Anesh sighed.  Flipped through a few more pages.  “Honestly not a lot we can do except keep an eye on the situation, and intercept any more attempts.  Which seems to be a lot of what we do now?”

“I’m cool with that.”  James admitted.  “Feels very clean that way.  Compared to, like, raiding Status Quo, or whatever.  Self defense just seems more ethical.  And *yes*,” he pointed at Anesh with a fry, dripping ketchup onto one of the pages of the binder of reports, “I am aware that what we did was probably necessary and saved lives long term.  I don’t think it was wrong.  I just think it’s nice to have some stand up fights from time to time.  Because I like being unambiguously heroic.  It’s a personal fantasy.”

“James, everyone within a hundred mile radius is aware of that.”  Anesh told him.  “The guy behind the counter knows that, and he’s only been listening in on our conversation for ten minutes.”

“What.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay… so, anything else fun in that book of joy?”  James asked, trying not to instantly turn and lock eyes with the diner’s one cook and server who was, now that he thought about it, really trying to be just inside of earshot.

“We’re not doing a good job tracking the Old Gun.  Or finding other organizations in our line of work.  Though, that said, it’s not like we’re hiring spies out of the intelligence community.  We’re recruiting people who’re more or less in our ideological wheelhouse, and then training them into spies.  So they’re all still kinda new, and we’re not going to have experts for a while.  Oh, that said, Nate has a request in here somewhere…” Anesh flipped through the pages until he found the one that wasn’t a report.  “Yeah, he wants us to build another AI, or an infomorph, to do data analysis.”

James wasn’t happy with that, but he could understand the logic behind the thought. “That makes sense.”  He said.  “Modern intelligence communities are really more about following money and filtering out what’s important and what’s not, than actually sending one James Bond in to stop the problem.  But…” He trailed off.

“Ah, the but.”

“...but we don’t make life to be tools.  We make tools, to be tools.  We make life to… to be our descendents.  Our children.  Our friends.  You know, we could have saved so much time on that dumb asphalt mech idea if we’d just crammed some yellow orbs into it, instead of working to make a pilot system?  But then… what are we bringing life to? Creating a person, just to tell them they’re purpose in the world is to be a glorified forklift?  Fuck that.”

“And less importantly, but I still *must* know,” Anesh added, “what would you name a golem like that?”

“Anton.”  James snapped off the answer.

“...Why?”

“Because it’s Checkov’s Gundam, and I’ve been holding onto that pun for a week, so thanks for helping me out there.”  James laughed.  Then he put his serious face back on.  “But really.  No making task based life like that.  Hell, I’m iffy on Momo’s AI.  It seems *super* creepy to create a living creature that’s driven by desires that you chose for it.  Like… oh, what’s the term.  Personality stapling?”

“Wow that sounds awful.”  Anesh shuddered.  “I don’t even know what you’re referencing, but I hate it.”

“Anyway.  I’m about done eating.  Gonna go let Rufus and Ganesh run around for a bit in the parking lot before we move on.  Want me to bring back an orb or two to tip with?”  James asked.

“They do need to eat those, you know.  How many yellows are in the trunk?”

“Oh, like, a hundred or something.”  James shrugged.  “Besides, you’re right, he looks *so* curious.  And I think I have an addiction to being a cryptic mystery.”

“This right here is how you end up being internet famous.”  Anesh told him.  “By the way, have you seen the video of us being action movie heroes?  It’s really awkward and I hate it.”

“I have not.”  James said, standing up.  “Because then I would have to read Youtube comments, and I would rather drink anything out of the Akashic Sewer than do that.”

_____

Eighty miles later, pulled over at a small rest area and viewing point that had a magnificent line of sight to the seemingly eternal mountain highway winding into the distance, James and Anesh watched their two companions scramble around in the gravel, exploring the local vegetation with aplomb.

“Rufus, I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t track mud into the car!”  James called to them.  Anesh didn’t say anything, just leaned against the stone railing and smiled lightly. He was enjoying the fresh air and the breeze, and he knew Ganesh wasn’t gonna dive into a marsh unless told not to.

“Ugh.”  He uttered as James came over to join him, leaning in the opposite direction so he could keep an eye on the two dungeon lifeforms.  Both for their safety, and in case another car decided to pull up next to them.  “Why am I so tired?” Anesh asked.  “You’ve been the one driving, what the hell.”

“Road trips are an endurance test!”  James informed him, still enthusiastic but certainly feeling more drained than when the day started.  “We should probably stop at the next place with a cheap hotel.”  He suggested.

“Yeah.”  Anesh agreed, turning to glance back at Rufus and Ganesh swatting at a fern.  “Okay, weird question for you.”

“Impossible.  Weirdness is relative.”

“Has Rufus gotten bigger?”  Anesh asked.

James raised his eyebrows and looked again.  Actually trying to remember what his little stapler buddy had looked like when they’d first met.  “Uh… yes.  Yes?  Yes.”  He decided.  “Okay, I lied, that is weird.  Damn!  I wonder why striders in the Office aren’t bigger, then?”  He mused.

After a moment of thinking about it, Anesh shrugged.  “Food chain, maybe? It’s not really what I’m an expert in, but I guess no one really is an expert in dungeon ecology.”

“We should get some people to do that.”  James decided.

“You do get that we’re already way over budget, and it’s only JP extorting the FBI’s contractor fund that is keeping us solvent, right?”

James pursed his lips, a guilty look in his eyes.  “I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know how money works on larger scales like this.”  He admitted.  “We really need to just get an emerald to generate a hit video game for us and add that as an income stream.”

“First of all, the chips don’t work that way.”  Anesh corrected him.  And then, seeing the startled look on James’ face, cleared his throat.  “Oh, sorry, thought you knew that.  Um… yeah, it turns out, they can accept inputs while growing?  And there’s limits to what they can do without certain things filled in.  Like, one of them couldn’t make a game with graphics, unless you gave it 3D models to work with.  I think? I’ll be honest, I didn’t fully understand what Mars was talking about when he told me.”

“I’m envious of his name.”  James remarked.  “Okay, but, these things would still be great for, like, business software?  Specialized analytical tools? We’ve got a *ton* of them now to work with.  Hell, call yourself, see if NASA wants to buy custom grown programs for a space station.”

“I… yes.  Yeah, I think that could be arranged.”  Anesh nodded.  “Actually, we should probably make a shell company and put them on the international market.  Every major space agency is part of a government that spies on every other major space agency; if these things turn up here and nowhere else, it could draw attention to us in a way that we probably don’t want.”

“How so?”

“International sabotage attempts, mostly.”  Anesh sighed.  “Apparently that’s a real thing, that happens *regularly*.  And it’s everyone, doing it to everyone, too.  Do you have any idea how far back we set our own progress?”  He sounded like he was torn between wanting to growl, or sigh, and so the words came out in a strange middle ground of angry and sad.

“Maybe we just make a self-driving car.”  James diverted the topic.  “We could clean up on that.  Oh!  A kit to *convert* any vehicle to a self-driving car!”

“Put it in the server.  Someone’ll have it done before we get back.”  Anesh suggested.

James pulled out his phone, looked at it for a few seconds, then put it away.  “Right.  Mountains.  No service out here.”  He chuckled.  “Though it is a nice thought that I don’t have to do any of the hard work anymore.”  James mentioned.

“Right.  Like, you do all the easy stuff.  Scouting potentially lethal situations, engineering cargo mechs, being an AI ethicist, dueling gods, the simple things.”

“Exactly!”  James nodded.  “Things I can handle!”

“You are so bloody odd sometimes.”  Anesh smiled as he leaned his shoulder into James, suppressing a yawn.

“We should get you some coffee.”  James said with a smile, pressing back into Anesh.

“Do we have any of the stuff from the Lair?”

“The magical stuff or the Kona roast that I bought for myself and then you stole and turned into part of your mana blend?”  James asked with a mock glower.

Anesh ignored the jab.  “The magical stuff.”

“Nah.  Not hot, anyway.  Just some iced coffee, which, uh…”

“Wait, I never thought about that!  What does the reflex coffee do when it’s iced?”  Anesh perked up like he’d just downed some caffeine himself.  “Does it change how it works? Normally it needs to be over a certain tempature, right?  Does making it iced coffee mean it has to be *below* a certain tempature?  Have we been missing out on a whole suite of potential effects?”

“Well, *two* effects.”  James tried to hold back a laugh.  “We only have two coffee machines.  And yes, it does change it.  It-“

“I knew it!”

“-yes very good.  It does the reverse.”  He finished.

Anesh was silent for a second, narrowing his eyes at James like he was trying to figure out if this was a joke.  “As in, the reflex coffee would make you slower?”

“Yeah.  And you’re right that it does need to be cold enough.  But, it works in blended drinks!”  James grinned.

“Why.”

“Why what?”  James asked, turning to watch as Ganesh, bored with trying to show Rufus how to climb a tree, traced an arc through the sky over the edge of their little cliff.

“Why would you bring iced coffee then?”  Anesh looked annoyed, and then just regular confused.  “Is it… a trap of some kind?”

“Nah.  It’s just that iced wisdom coffee is a really good sleep aid.  Makes it possible for me to stop panicking about death for a while and close my eyes.  Also it’s cheaper than weed, which is illegal once we cross into Idaho anyway.”  James replied, leaning down to let Rufus scurry up his arm, the tips of his pen legs stinging against skin that was starting to get cold in the mountain wind.

“Oh.  That’s… good.”  Anesh turned a small bob of agreement into a full nod.  “Yes.  Good!  Honestly, I find it a little weird how easily everyone at the Lair seems to be okay with drug use?  So this is probably better?”

“I call it ‘getting frapped’.”  James told him, shattering the illusion.  “Also, in general, you’ll find we’ve kind of half-accidentally cultivated a group of people who are really, *really* into expert opinion and verified data.  Which has a side effect of people who are totally fine with certain things that society at large probably isn’t, because a lot of our legal system is sort of puritanical and based on an abstract morality from Ye Olden Times, and not on any kind of evidence.”

“Okay, *yes*, but…” Anesh stopped himself.  He’d been about to say something about it not being normal.  Not in exactly those words, but he realized rapidly that it was that core belief that was the root of his argument.  Then, as he was still halfway through the thought, his dungeon exploration partner and autonomous drone Ganesh swept in on a gust of wind, slightly off course by the strengthening gust, and Anesh had to reach out and catch his small friend and pull him into a perch on his shoulder.  And he realized, for the fiftieth time this week, that maybe his life wasn’t normal, and maybe normal was an illusion itself.  “Yeah, alright.  Makes sense.  Now, I’m tired. Let’s go find a hotel with a really comfy bed.”  He kept a hand shielding Ganesh from the wind, and turned away from the view of the valley below.

“Alright.  What do you want for dinner?”  James asked.

“Nothing.  I had a burger the size of my head for lunch.”  Anesh replied as the two of them walked back to the car, carrying the two smaller creatures with them.

Behind them, *around* them, the sky painted itself the color of fire as the sun began to set.

_____

There was a feeling at the end of the first day of a road trip.

James had grown up with his family going on lots of long trips for vacations.  For him, this feeling was something very specific.  It was the moment when the sunset slipped away for the last time and it was, all of a sudden, night. It was the realization that you felt a little car sick, that the air conditioning was too annoying but also necessary, that you couldn’t be in the car for another five minutes but your destination was ten minutes away.

It was reaching a small town, seeing other cars for the first time in a while.  Watching the too-bright lights zip by outside while Dire Straits played on the radio and your parents quietly argued in the front seat about how much they wanted to spend on the hotel for the night.  It was knowing you were getting your favorite fast food for dinner, because it was a little too late, and everything else was closed.

As an adult - or something that filled the role well enough - some of this experience had changed for James.  Now he and his partner tried to find a motel that had more than three stars on google’s review page, he lamented the lack of a restaurant that served real vegetables, and he spent less time being amazed by the streets of a new city and more time being annoyed that he’d missed his turn.

But he still captured the feeling of lights in the dark, and Brothers In Arms as background music.  Also they had enough dinners in the back seat that he wasn’t too worried about everything in this town being closed.

He and Anesh had lapsed into a companionable silence for the last while.  They’d spent maybe an hour talking about their best and worse case fantasy dungeons, coming up with things that honestly James hoped they’d never encounter - even the good ones still had a kind of existential terror to them, in that way that all dungeons did.  That feeling that the world had far too many cracks in it to remain a whole object for too much longer.

It was a lot easier to feel that way the more tired he got.  So, they’d set that conversation aside, and found a place to stay for the night.  Smuggled Rufus and Ganesh inside in a duffel bag.  Abused the hell out of the hotel’s supply of hot water.  Shared a small meal.  And then, exhausted from the day, had snuggled into the fresh sheets of the bed together, and fallen asleep almost instantly.

One day, and about four hundred miles down.  Not the fastest pace they could have set.  But then, they weren’t here to rush.

They were on vacation.  A vacation that just happened to end at another dungeon and another possible crisis.

No hurry.  No pressure.