The Daily Grind - Chapter 151 (Patreon)

Middle length today!

_____

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon -

Reality was still dark as they drove out into it, despite having spent well over twelve hours in the dungeon.

Once again, they parked by the side of the road, this time after James narrowly avoided hitting an innocent skunk.  The three of them stretching out after the long trip, James and Anesh stripping off armor plates they’d been wearing for a full day of car travel.

“I know I said I liked road trips at the start of this.”  James informed his boyfriend.  “I have decided, in retrospect, that I lied.  My legs are sore, and I’m not supposed to *be* sore anymore!”

“Okay, so, what exactly does your point in endurance *do*?”  Anesh glowered at his partner.  “Because I feel like even you don’t actually know.”

James sheepishly grinned as he sat on the edge of the driver’s seat and shook sand and pebbles out of his boot.  “Guilty.”  He admitted.  “Though, I’m pretty sure that whatever it’s doing, it’s having some kind of amplificitve effect with some of the purple upgrades I have.  Like… okay, I clot faster, right?  But ever since getting endurance, I clot almost *instantly*.  I don’t think I can actually bleed out, it’s kinda rad.”  James slid his boot back on, oblivious to the narrow eyed frown Anesh was giving him.

“Amplificitive is… were you trying to say multiplicative? Or amplifying?”

“Yes.  And I got confused midway through.”

Anesh snorted.  “I love it when you’re self aware.”  He said.  “Hey.”  He greeted El as she got out of her own car and strutted over.  “So, what now?”

“Now, we go home and sleep!”  She declared, stifling a yawn that quickly turned contagious.  “I’m tired.  You’re tired.  The cars are tired.  And I feel odd so I wanna nap it off.”

“Cars don’t get…”

El ignored James.  “So hey, before we go, touch this with me.”  She held out the strange humming gear from earlier.  “I figure… I guess I figure that we should share it now.  So I’m not tempted later, you know?”

“Sure.”  James shrugged and reached out to settle his fingers against the surface of the gear.  Next to him, Anesh did the same.  It was thick metal, not marred by rust or burrs, but it still felt *old*.  “What are we supposed to do?”  James asked.

El made a half shrug as she held the gear by its center with her other arm extended.  “Just think about, um, moving?”  The girl kicked the ground like an angry child.  “Fuck, man, I dunno.  You’re the one who’s good with words.  It’s magic.  Eat it with your mind or some shit.”

“Eloquent.”  James snarked, but smothered the grin when he saw that El really was kind of self conscious about this.  “Okay.”

He focused on moving.  On the feeling of going forward.  He let his brain adapt to the vibration of the gear; it was the hum of the road, he realized, so James fell into that vibe.  He and Anesh didn’t need to be hooked up to each other for their minds to go to the same place on this; they’d had a lot of experience putting themselves in mindsets needed to exploit dungeon goodies.

A second later, the gear was gone.  Their hands were stretched out touching nothing but a ripple of motion, quickly fading away.

This time, there were no words.  Not in the same way as the Office or the Sewer.  Instead, there was a feeling in his chest, of a space where motion could go, if it needed to.  Where momentum could be stockpiled for the future need.

It wasn’t exactly a mana pool, as James understood it.  But he *could* clearly feel what it did, if not what it was for.  He could also feel how much it could hold.

Three.  It could hold three.

Three what? Unclear.  Three something.  Three units of velocity, he supposed.  And he could already feel it ticking up.  If James focused, *really* focused, slipped down into the kind of dream meditation he’d begun learning back at the start, then he could see it ticking up as he moved.  Fractions of fractions of fractions.  If it made it to a whole number, it would be so much easier to feel the increment, James instinctively knew.  But for now, it was just sitting there.  Zero of three.  Waiting to be filled up and used for some magic he hadn’t found yet.

He opened his eyes.  “Neat!”  He proclaimed.  “What’s it *do*?”

“It’s fuel.”  El shrugged.  “Obviously.  Can’t explain much, though you know what all my spells are.  That said, completely unrelated, hang onto the map scraps. I’ve got a shoebox full of them under my bed, we can compare them later.”

“Why?”  Anesh asked.  Then paused.  “You know what? Nevermind.  Let’s preserve the surprise.  And also your sanity.”  He noted, as El practically growled at the thing limiting her answers.

She nodded at him.  “Thanks.”  The word sounded sarcastic, but there was a look of real gratitude in her eyes.  “So yeah.  Meet up tomorrow.  I’m gonna go sleep.  Ya’ll take care.”

She waved them off as she stalked back to her own car.  But before she shut the door, James had one last question for her.

“Hey!  How much velocity do you have?”  He called over.

“Twenty nine!”  El yelled back.  And then, slamming her door shut, she kicked the car out of idle and executed a trecherous looking U-turn to accelerate down the freeway back toward her home town.

“I have a problem with that.”  Anesh said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  Twenty nine?”

“Run the numbers for me, I’m tired.”

“Assuming it was a split of the artifact’s magic that we just did, that one gear was worth nine-ish points, right?”  Anesh posited, and James nodded along.  “Okay.  So, how long did El know about this place?  A year?  And the door isn’t time locked.  She has gotten four of those cogs, counting this one.  She has *three spells*.  But she seemed to know how the parking structures worked pretty closely.”

“Oh fuck.”  James grimaced.

“Tell me something about the road.”  Anesh prompted.

“The convenience stores have a one way exit.  Not a good test.  Let me call…um…” James stared at his phone.  “Let’s test this tomorrow.”

“But you can feel it.  There’s no infomorph there.  There’s no urge to keep it secret.  It’s just on El.  Which means she picked it up on a delve.”  Anesh shook his head, staring down the dark road that El had left by.  “She’s too comfortable here.”

“She’s been doing this longer than she knows.”  James surmised.  “Or, no.  That’s not right.  She knows how long she’s been doing this. She just isn’t seeing it.  Anesh, she *knew she could split the velocity gear with us*.”

“Threes.”  Anesh stated.

“The… mana amount?”

Anesh rolled his eyes.  “No, threes.  It’s a thing the dungeons like.  Groups of three.  You, me, Alanna.  The three kids at the school.  Even now, we have rotations of three people hanging out in the attic, we delve the Sewer with three person teams.  Why? We’ve broken the habit in the Office, but-“

“But that’s not normal.  We’re doing something *different*.”  James jumped in.  “And now here’s El.  El, who was *already* paranoid when Alanna and I came through here the first time.  El, who knows the dungeon so well, but can’t talk about it.  El…”

“Who’s the last one left.”  Anesh finished.  “El, who survived her friends.”

“And forgot.”

“Let’s kill this one.”  Anesh suggested.

“I’m not gonna lie, I had that thought?”  James cleared his throat.  “You do know we don’t actually have a nuke, right?  Nate did talk me out of that.  And this place is… larrrrrrrge.”

“We could tear up the road here.  Get rid of the entrance.”  Anesh suggested.

James shook his head, staring at the dark trees around them as he sagged down to lean his elbows on his knees.  “We don’t know what that’ll do.  And… this is gonna sound bad, but I don’t think that would be fair.”  He sighed.  “We haven’t tried to kill the Office, or even the Sewer, and they’ve killed a lot more people that we’re directly aware of.  Just given how hard this place is to find, how out of the way it is… I doubt it gets a lot of visitors at all.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a higher body count than it does.”

“I don’t like this.”  Anesh muttered after circling around the car and dropping into the passenger seat.  He sat and stared out the window, at the line where the dungeon started, blinking rapidly as another car flew past, high beams blinding in the early morning darkness.  “We’re supposed to be the ones that keep people safe from things like this.”

“Are we?”  James asked, half focusing as he punched in their motel on his phone’s map app, and waited while the thin service out here took its time to give him a route.  “I thought we were… what are we?”  He mused to himself, pulling back onto the freeway in the tailwind of a logging truck.

“Presumably we’re the goodies.”  Anesh offered.

“There’s lots of ways to be good.  Sometimes I worry we’re not doing enough.  Other times, I think we’re doing too much, too fast.”  James countered as they drove.  “I’ve thought a lot about individual goals, since this started.  But never ‘what are we’, if that makes sense.  Like, remember the first couple months?”

Anesh shot a toothy smile out the window.  “Ha!  We couldn’t even decide if we were going into the dungeon every week.”  He thought for a second about it.  “And yeah, I guess I see what you mean.  We were just trying to get on top of rent, or out from under student debt.  Having fun without any responsibility.  Even after Alanna got in on it with us, we already knew we were going to do something *eventually*, but it was far off and we were… I mean, I was… having fun.”  He trailed off, sounding guilty.

“I was having fun too.”  James said.  “Don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  And now, we’re… what?  I mean, we do good things, but how do we define *ourselves*? Not just the Order, but us.  Am I a bad person because I don’t want to kill the dungeons?”  He asked, a pleading note in his voice.  Anesh didn’t give an answer right away, and so James continued.  “I like to think I’m helping to build better systems, but I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing.  So I just sort of recklessly help people that I can, and then those people do the useful things.”

“That’s not fair, I mean…” Anesh stopped, and furrowed his brow.  Turned and looked over at James by leaning his left arm on the center console and cupping his fingers around his chin. “Wait, no, that *is* fair.  That’s… weird.”

James looked like he wanted to say something, so Anesh waited, but his partner just kept opening and closing his mouth, like he couldn’t find the words.  Face scrunched up, eyes narrowed, staring ahead at the road as they took the exit toward where they were staying.  They drove in silence for a few minutes, the car dutifully humming away as they climbed up and around the last hill before the small town’s outskirts started.

It was maybe 2:30 in the morning when James stopped the car on the shoulder of that hillside road.  Time dilation in the dungeon had flagrantly messed with their sense of time; twelve hours in ten minutes or so was a much larger gap than the Office usually gave. He still hadn’t said anything, and Anesh was starting to get worried when he pulled the car over and parked by a dented metal guardrail.  With tired movements, James popped his door open, and stepped back out into the night.

Anesh worriedly followed him over to the guardrail, where James was leaning on one of the wooden posts, staring out from their vantage point.  “Hey?”  Anesh reached out a hand to James’ arm, ignoring the grime and sweat from a half day adventure in body armor to give what comfort he could.

James didn’t flinch back from the gesture, instead leaning into Anesh a little bit.  The two of them sat there for a good five minutes or so, Anesh watching James with concern, James staring down at the twinkling lights of a Tennessee small town.  A handful of suburban neighborhoods, visible by lines of pale orange streetlights strung through the trees.  Bright white patches of strip mall parking lots, dark splotches of parks and wilderness that still hadn’t been built into by the small town determined to stay small.   Reds and greens of traffic intersections.  And all of it on a wobbly street grid where the outlines were occasionally visible through the motions of a few scattered cars, their headlights and turn signals lighting the channels of a city.

“Can I tell you something I’m afraid of?”  James whispered to Anesh, standing there in the dark, over the dome of the city’s glow.

Anesh hesitated, but only for a second.  “If you’re comfortable with that.”  He said.

James snorted.  Of course he wasn’t.  That was the problem.  But still.  “I think I might actually believe in fate, as a concept.”  He said.  “Or something like it.  There are currents, around the dungeons.  Things we’ve seen, things we know, that we can’t ignore.  The three person team is part of that.  But there’s more to it.  The organization.  Did you know what we found in the old Status Quo files? The administrator was like me.”  He said it quietly, and didn’t falter, but the recognition of that truth hurt him almost physically.  “He started the organization with two others.  One of them was dead before we got there.  One of them was dead after.”  James pressed himself into Anesh’s side, not looking at his partner.  “We’re not new, not special.  It’s all patterns.”

“We don’t have to be new to be good.”  Anesh said.  “Also, you’re doing that storyteller thing you do, where you’re mapping narrative onto reality.”  He looked down at the city, taking his eyes off James for a minute.  “Sometime in history - don’t give me that look, I only memorize numbers that do things, not years - sometime in history, a man named Hardy went to visit his friend, Srinivasa Ramanujan.  He took a taxi, and because this happened before smartphones existed, he spent most of his ride reading everything in the interior of the cab.  When he got to his friend, he remarked that he had decided that the taxi’s number was the most boring number ever invented, since he’d had to read it on practically every surface, and it offended him greatly.”

“I cannot imagine being the kind of person who is mad at a number.”  James said.

“That’s because you’re not a bored mathematician in the 1900’s.  Shut up, I’m going somewhere with this.”  Anesh countered.  “Anyway.  Ramanujan asks what the number was, and Hardy tells him it was 1729.  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that’s not a boring number at all.’”  Anesh looked over at James.  “It’s the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubed whole numbers, in two separate ways.  One and twelve, and nine and ten.  The next number like it is a lot bigger.”

“What’s the point of this math story?”  James asked.  Not in a mean way, but curious where Anesh was taking this.

“There are always coincidences.  No matter how big the world is, sometimes, your easily annoyed friend rides in a taxi with a number that you know off the top of your head is a piece of weird math trivia because you spend your life thinking about weird number patterns.  The thing about reality, and yes, I know how stupid this sounds in the context of our lives!  But the thing about reality, is that things don’t have to make sense.  Things are weird.  And maybe there are patterns, but that doesn’t make us trapped by fate.  It just makes us part of the cosmic coincidence.”

“I just worry that we’re going to be stuck in this cycle, until someone like us comes along and breaks what we’ve built.”  James admitted softly.  “That we’re trapped as the progatonists until we die or lose.”

Below them, the city lights sparkled. A car passed by behind.  And Anesh said, “Someone was always going to try. That’s not a coincidence, that’s because you want to change things.  But that doesn’t mean we have to lose.”

“I can see the future.”  James said in a voice that sounded like he was admitting to something, despite how silly the words were.  “Not in a magic way.  Just like someone who feels the way things are going.”  In the distance, a truck added its roar to the yipping calls of coyotes in the trees.  “We’re going to bring in more people.  We’re going to uncover more power, more magic.  We’re going to build something truly awesome.  A city, a community, something the modern world would call a nation and be wrong about.  Something beautiful and new, even if only just to try something different.  And at some point, someone is going to get afraid of us.  Maybe in a small way at first; they won’t just try to have us murdered.  But we’re going to upset things, and people are going to fight back.  So they can keep their wealth, their control, their positions in society.  And when they don’t stop us, people with more guns and less empathy are going to notice.  And then… well.  Then I can’t see any farther.  I can’t see to where we win, and we build great works and solve great problems.  I can’t see past the problems to the world where we have swappable bodies and spaceships and teleporters for everyone.  But I worry.  I worry for the world, and I worry for you, and I worry for myself.  Because I *don’t want to die*, and I don’t want our story to end.”

Anesh didn’t know what to say.  Part of him wanted to say that James couldn’t know any of that was true, but it was the future *he* saw too.  Part of him wanted to say it would all be okay, but he couldn’t know that.  So instead, he did what *James* did.  He cleared his throat, and spoke.  “Well, Sarah’s the real protagonist and we all know it.  So even if we die, it should be fine.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”  James asked, before breaking into a grin and laughing.  His laugh trailed off, and he turned to surprise Anesh with a kiss on the cheek.  “Thanks.”  He said.  “I know I get like this a lot, but… thanks.”

“No problem.  Now let’s go back and sleep.  I look forward to more prophetically dire dreams.”  Anesh said.  “*Not* because of fate, but because that would be a funny coincidence!  Also cause it feels weird out here tonight.”  He leveled a finger at James as he pushed off the guard rail and headed back toward the car.

“Yeah, okay.  I’ll accept that *once*.”  James conceded.  “Also that’s just how this state feels, I think? It’s weird.”  He added as he followed.

_____

“Hey man.”  Harvey stood by Reed’s clutter fortress that most people called a ‘desk’.  He looked less tired than Reed remembered; a lot sturdier, too.  But then, Reed hadn’t really interacted with the leader of the Response program much, aside from going through the mandatory training classes to fully join up.  “You got a second?”

“Yeah.  Yeah!  How’s it going?”  Reed set down the folded stack of Status Quo reports that he was currently working on typing into their database.  “You’re looking less tired.”

“Busy.”  Harvey answered.  “And I’d love to chat, but I gotta thing to get to.  Can you move the mech?”

“What?”  Reed blinked.

Harvey tapped one foot, showing a little impatience, but keeping his voice steady.  “We’re supposed to be using the fourth basement for a training exercise.  But James and Momo left their warbot sitting in the middle of the floor, with a fuckin’ thousand unlabeled magic things all over the place.”  He said, with some annoyance.  “I’m just wondering if you can move the mech.”

“Uh… I cannot.”  Reed stated.  “I don’t really know how.  And our hypnotist is staying with family for a few days.  Also James hasn’t manufactured any more LSD lately.”

Harvey folded his arms and stared at Reed, and suddenly, he looked like all the exhaustion he’d been covering up, all at once.  An exasperated frown cutting a thin line through his salt and pepper goatee.  “Man, I’m mad that I understood all of that.”  He said.  “Also what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

“Doesn’t response *have* a basement?”  Reed asked.  “Use that basement.”

“Our basement is for dispatch, equipment, a rec space for on call responders, and the telepad platforms.”  Harvey stated.  “It is not for training.”

“We should rent you a building for that.”  Reed suggested.

Harvey shook his head.  “Bad idea. We’re already getting noticed by police and civilians.  And a lot of people don’t like what we’re doing.  There’s pushback; light now, but it’ll get worse, mark my words.  Best not to have a building that isn’t cloaked.”

“Mark my words…?”  Reed mouthed silently, shaking his head.  “Well, alright.  How *is* Reponse going, aside from that?”  He asked.

“I really don’t have time to chat.”  Harvey said, checking his phone as it buzzed again.  “We’ll work around the mech.  Unless that’s a problem?”  He asked, glancing up at the younger man slumped over the desk in front of him.

“Yeah, should be fine.”  Reed waved his concerns away.  “The thing’s mostly just asphalt, really.  It’s not alive or explosive.”

“Neither of those were… ah whatever.”  Harvey let it drop.  “You have a good one.”  He said, turning to head back to the elevator.

“You too.”  Reed idly muttered, mind already wandering to a dozen other projects he was supposed to be working on or vetting.

And then, off to whatever he could do to assist Response.  Or, more accurately, to help Harvey with his public image problem.

The main problem with Response, Reed decided, was that to anyone who didn’t fully get what they were, they probably looked pretty scary.  An outside observer was going to see an untrained militia with the power to teleport into private or secure places, essentially appointing themselves to an unelected, unaccountable, position of authority. And that… wasn’t entirely inaccurate, to be fair.  Though they certainly weren’t untrained, and Response teams were unarmed more often than not which probably took them out of the ‘dangerous militia’ category.  But the teleporting was a concern.  A lot of magic was a concern, in a world that didn’t have defenses against it.

The real public image problem, Reed decided, was that people didn’t have an easy way to know that Response was legitimately there to help. Or to have a fallback of reporting any actual problems with Response members.

Reed was halfway through sketching a design for a website for them when he realized this may be something he’d need to seek approval for.  Learning from past mistakes, both his own and Research as a whole, Reed dialed it back a bit, outlined a plan, and made a note to talk to Karen and Harvey when they had time.

Then he had a brilliant idea, completely forgot to stop being reckless, and made a note for the next Office delve to duplicate as many of the laser pointers that broadcast emotion as possible.  Before that idea had even settled, Reed was writing up a proposal for creating some kind of public face infomorph to automagically propagate accurate information.  By the time he’d realized that was probably going to end badly, he was half an hour late to check up on Nikhail.

Reed sheepishly closed his laptop, a score of half baked ideas folded up in a technological blanket.  He’d come back to this later, maybe when Harvey had some extra time.

For now, he needed to go make sure Nik hadn’t turned into some kind of human-wasp hybrid or started irradiating his surroundings or some other bizarre fate.

Though as far as anyone could tell, Nik was fine.  He also wasn’t alone.  There absolutely was a non-physical life living within him, in some way.  According to Planner, who Reed had scheduled some time with to get a second opinion, it wasn’t the same as an Office infomorph.  A different texture, a different function.  It was very likely this was a larval form of the Authorities that Status Quo had used.  But how Nik could communicate with it, what it could do, or even what or if it wanted anything was still unclear.

At this point, all Reed could really do was offer support and update Research’s spotty taxonomic map of weird things.

It wasn’t much.  Sometimes it felt like most of what Reed did running this basement wasn’t much.  And yet.  Over time, they’d accomplished a lot he was happy with.  Scars or no, they’d gotten some cool results.

If only any part of the dungeon magics would help him just focus on something for more than five minutes.  Maybe he’d have remembered to move the mech.

____

“What’s it like?”  Elizebeth timidly asked as their group took a water and rest break.

She, Morgan, and Color-Of-Dawn had been grouped up with Chevoy, the older engineer supposedly supposed to keep the kids from getting into too much trouble as they spent what was turning into several long days combing over the parks and hiking trails around Alice Springs.  It seemed, to the two teenagers, like a bald faced attempt to get them to do the ‘safe’ part of the search that was also, unfortunately, a lot of exercise.

Chevoy seemed entirely unconcerned with the number of miles they had to move.  But then, she’d had about a month of prior notice and access to the Order’s surplus of exercise potions.  Also she was using her skulljack to pilot at least two drones around and also playing Tetris Attack on her phone, which left her less focused on how much her legs ached.

By contrast, Color-Of-Dawn didn’t seem to overheat, or get tired.  Or, if it did, it didn’t *say* anything about it.  Possibly just so as to not make Morgan more exhausted.  Color-Of-Dawn was still uncertain what their friendship… was, really.  And so a lot of their actions played it safe.

The problem was, while it was a beautiful place, the mountainous regions around Alice were mostly covered in scrub brush and rocks.  And while they had reasonable confidence there was a dungeon in the area, specifically the area in the hills east of the city, there were a *lot* of hills east of the city.

And walking through them was kind of boring.

So, while Chevoy perched like some kind of conquering explorer on the edge of a rock outcrop, comparing the terrain to a physical folded paper map, the three kids sat on rocks or coiled up away from the more hostile looking plant life and sipped water and made idle conversation.

“What’s what like?”  Morgan asked, holding a half full water bottle in a tired grip and considering if it would be worth the effort to pour it over himself.

“No, not you.  Color.  What’s it like… you know, in a dungeon?”  Elizebeth had wisely traded in the long skirt she usually wore for cargo shorts and a tee shirt for this trip, but the unhealthily thin girl still maintained the aura of the kid in school who sat by themself at lunch and maintained proper manners even when no one was looking.  Momo was trying to dissuade her of those habits, but even through the shoes full of dust and the sheen of sweat, her quiet politeness came through even when her curiosity pushed her to ask questions.

“Color-Of-Dawn.”  The camraconda replied.  “No first name.”  It told her.

“I’m...I’m sorry!”  Liz started to apologize overenthusiastically.  “I didn’t mean to-“

“No concern.”  The camraconda cut her off.  “I have not been outside long enough to know.”  It answered her original question.

“But… you lived in there for years, right?”  She replied, confused.  “Aren’t there big differences?”

“Existed longer.  Perhaps two or three years alive.”  Color-Of-Dawn said, trying to not react to the flinch Morgan gave sitting next to them.  “You know the large changes already.”  It said.

Morgan picked up the thread of explanation.  “There’s a sky, and sunlight, and more space.”  He pointed out.  “Have you actually been into the Office?”  He asked Elizebeth, now curious himself.

“No, I’ve just heard Momo talk about it.”  The girl admitted.

“I’ve only been in a couple times.”  Morgan shrugged.  “I don’t really want to go back.  But there are some things that are, I guess, interesting there.”

Color-Of-Dawn looked up from where it was scratching patterns in the gritty dirt around itself with the set of mechanical arms it was still getting used to using.  “Also do not wish to return.”  It added.  “But yes.  Interesting.”

“Isn’t it - wasn’t it - your home?”  Liz asked.

“No.  Cage.”  Color-Of-Dawn answered bluntly.  “Trap.  Better out here.  Has food and light.”

“Trap sounds about right.”  Morgan couldn’t help but sound angry.  Though from his body language, it wasn’t directed at the camraconda.

If Color-Of-Dawn was at all put off by mean comments about its origin, it didn’t let that show.  “Free now.”  The camraconda gave an approximation of a shrug, which didn’t work very well with how the artificial arms were jointed.  It decided not to repeat the gesture in the future.  “Better out here.  Mostly.”

“I’m sorry to pry.”  Elizebeth backed off from the conversation.

“No concern.”  Color-Of-Dawn reiterated.  “Others have other thoughts.  See where I was made as… resource.  Threat.  Many things.”

“It *does* endlessly spawn computer parts and bricks of precious metals.”  Morgan conceded.  “That’s… kinda cool?  I guess that’s why we’re out here, huh?  More of that would be pretty worth it.  Especially if it doesn’t try to…” His voice siezed up as he caught up to his own train of thought.  “...eat people.”  He muttered, looking away from the other two.

Liz didn’t ask about that one.  Her etiquette senses were perfectly capable of knowing when to back off when it came to human interactions.

Fortunately for all of them, they were saved from the awkward moment by their field trip guardian dropping into their little conversation circle.

“Alright kiddos.”  Chevoy announced herself with a kind of tired enthusiasm that tended to show up a lot with the newer members of the Order.  Turns out, giving someone magic and biotech and adventure would keep them excited and pushing their limits even when a human probably should be getting way more sleep.  “We’ve got one more climb, and then we’re looping back to the car.  Topography matches the map, and all the maps line up, and no one spotted anything weird, so we’re done in this place for the day.”

The group groaned, half in relief, half in anticipation of *more hiking*.  Even Color-Of-Dawn seemed a little put out, commenting that it would like some sort of camraconda special fit combination shoe-and-pants if it was expected to continue slithering through dirt and rock like this.

“It’s a climb *down* though, right?”  Elizebeth asked, worried that her legs wouldn’t survive.  “We’re not going up the mountain?”

Chevoy and Morgan both shot her the same kind of confused look.  “We’re at the top of the mountain.”  Morgan said, in that voice that teenagers mastered early that clearly added the phrase ‘you moron’ at the end.

“What? No.  There’s a whole… that one.”  Liz turned and pointed east, yet farther away from the city, to where the flat hill they were on rose up further to an imperious double peaked spire of earth so tall it was capped with snow.  “I mean, I know it’s probably Momo and Sarah who will go all the way up, since there’s no official park trails there.”  Elizebeth continued.  “But isn’t that the direction we were going today?”

The other three were all staring at the mountain.  “What the fuck?”  Morgan muttered.

“What the fuck!”  Chevoy yelled.  “Where the fuck did that come from?!”  The woman jabbed an accusatory finger at the landscape.  “How the fucking shit did we get ambushed by *geography*!?”

Color-Of-Dawn pivoted to look at Liz.  And then said, calmly, “I, too, am ready to return.”

“Hang on.”  Chevoy was still muttering.  “I’m just gonna…” She pulled out her map and unfolded it, looking down at the paper, before the tension and anger instantly went out of her shoulders and she said, “So yeah.  No more trails today.  Ya’ll ready to head back?”

“What?”  Liz looked between the two of them, eyes afraid.  “What are… Morgan?”  Her voice trembled.  “What’s going on?”

Morgan glanced back at her, and his own concerned expression vanished.  “Uh… we’re heading back and don’t have to be attacked by bugs anymore?”

“No!  The mountain!”  Liz practically screamed.

“What mountain?”  Morgan and Chevoy said in unison.

Liz pointed, now screaming in earnest.  “*That one!*”

Their guide followed Elizebeth’s finger.  “What the fuck?!”  Chevoy yelled, incredulous.  “Where the fucking shit did *that* come from?”

“It’s been there the whole time!”  Liz burst out, on the verge of tears.  “Take a picture of it!  Don’t look away!  You keep forgetting!”  Her hands scrambled for her own phone, and with shaking fingers she took a series of photos of the… clear blue sky.  The instant her phone was no longer pointed at the mountain, it slipped from view on her saved pictures.  Returning to visibility only when the camera was angled the right direction.  “No no no…”  The girl was panicking now.

“What is wrong?”  Color-Of-Dawn asked her, calm digital voice cutting through her mental state.

“There’s something making you all forget.”  Liz half sobbed to the camraconda.

“Ah.”  The serpent nodded once.  “Antimeme protocols.”  It announced to the group loudly.

“Shit, okay.”  Chevoy said, kneeling down next to them.  “Liz? What do you need from us?”

Liz struggled to breathe properly, but this was specifically something that they’d practiced for.  She tried to remember what she was supposed to say, not out of a memetic effect, but just trying to punch past her panic.  “There’s… there’s a thing you forget when you’re not looking at it.  I think it’s what we’re looking for.  I don’t… don’t...don’t know how to do this!”

“Time check.”  Chevoy ran through the steps for forming memories around a hole in information.  She noted the time, then set a timer for five minutes, but held off on starting it.  “Where’s the thing?”  She asked.  Liz pointed again, and Chevoy turned to face the nearby mountain slopes.  “Fuck, that’s really unsettling.  How did we get ambushed by geography?”  She muttered as she started the timer.  For the next five minutes, while Liz steadied her breathing and calmed down, Chevoy stared at the mountain without looking away, doing her best to not even blink.  When the timer went off, she turned back around.  “So, you guys ready to…” Her phone buzzed.  She checked it; a note about missing time.  It was five minutes later than it was supposed to be.  Something made her lose time.  “Kid?”

“Um… um… do you know it’s the wrong time?”  Elizebeth stumbled over the words.

“Yeah.  Okay.  Location noted.  There’s something wrong here, and we can map around it.  You can see and remember?”  She asked.

Liz nodded.  “I can.”

“Okay.”  Chevoy shook her head.  “Wow, this is… this feels gross.  Like I’m being gaslit by the planet.  Cool.  I hate it.”

“What do we do now?”  Morgan asked, cautiously, making an effort to *not* look in the wrong direction lest the loop start all over again.

“We head back.  We tell everyone else.  And tomorrow, we come back here and check it out directly.”  Chevoy answered.  “Uh… probably.  I’m not in charge of that last part.  Sorry, got carried away.  It’s easy to forget around here.”

“Australia?”  Color-Of-Dawn asked, in a tone where it was almost impossible to tell if it was being witty or not.

“...Sure, Australia.”  Chevoy snorted.  “Alright.  Let’s go.”

_____

Four AM in small town Tennessee found James unable to sleep.

They’d gotten back to their motel safely, though they had to find a spot to part streetside even farther away, since some jackass with a battered pickup truck had stolen theirs.  It was hard to be mad though, when that person was probably just as annoyed at having to walk two blocks to wherever *they* were going, too.

Anesh was snoring already; that cute little whistling noise he made when he rolled awkwardly onto his face during the night.  But James couldn’t find the right way to lay, the right format for the blankets, or the right way to get his brain to shut up for a minute to actually fall asleep.

He considered drinking some of the iced coffee they’d brought, but even though there was really no reason not to just teleport back to Oregon to grab more, in James’ mind he was treating it like a limited supply for this trip.  So he saved it for when he *really* needed it.

Because his thoughts weren’t him having an anxiety attack or an existential crisis.  No, it was just that sleep didn’t feel like the right call.

Part of him was still trying to process the road dungeon.  El still hadn’t shared her name for it for cryptic reasons, and James was increasingly considering overruling her and giving it his own label.  The place was simply too… sparse, maybe?

For a dungeon that large, it didn’t seem ‘fair’ that it got away with so few rewards, so sporadically scattered and so jealously guarded.  Now, maybe James’ idea of what was fair was skewed.  Especially when it came to the world’s dungeon ecology.  But it just didn’t map well to their other experiences.

The Office had rewards literally strewn everywhere.  Granted, a lot of them sucked.  Or, rather, were ‘useless’ in most ways.  But sometimes, you hit upon a matter duplicator, or a power that cured cancer, or an endlessly refilling silver mine.  If their understanding of dungeons was correct, then these things didn’t have to be specifically *used* to be counted toward the amount of stable space a dungeon could manage.  Though that was based off limited evidence so far, and the road really contradicted it.

Was it simply that the rewards were that good? Or was it that they *were* supposed to - ‘supposed to’ was a strange way to contextualize it, James knew, but he didn’t know how to phrase it better in his head - supposed to be actually fighting the creatures there to get the true rewards, like the yellow orbs the Office gave?

It was a lot of questions.  It was also hard to focus on, while being as exhausted as he was.  And it was also, truly, a distraction.

It was also a pretty effective distraction.  That line of thought, along with being frustrated with himself for not employing any of the half dozen arcane methods of combat when faced with the security creature, kept his brain busy for a decent chunk of time.  Oh yeah, James had noticed that he was an idiot.  He had brought charges of [Shape Asphalt] into a dungeon *made of road*, and that wasn’t even the most obvious thing he’d forgotten to try.  He’d reacted, aimed, and pulled the trigger on his gun without even trying to trigger the attack buff on the Status Quo earring.  Or, you know, just using that earring in the first place to *turn fucking invisible* and sneak in.  James was too used to being a mortal human with mortal human solutions to problems.  He needed to get over that.

At a certain point in his musing, one of the motel doors behind him opened and shut.  James shot a glance over his shoulder, and watched as the young girl and her mom that were staying across the courtyard from him and Anesh walked out of their room.  He shot them a friendly wave, but they ignored him.  Which was fine; it was four AM.  Most people didn’t greet strangers at four AM.  He watched out of the corner of his eye as they walked down the sidewalk next to each other, probably heading to their own distant car.

He was trying to distract himself from the fact that he was worried about sleeping again.

The Right Person, At The Right Moment, had not only walked into James’ dream; he had *hijacked* it.  Locked James in his own dreamscape, kicked in the door without asking and just set up shop for the night.  And James had an almost instinctive gut feeling that *the thing could do it again*.

Worse still, now that it was really paying attention to him… he was worried that it *would* do it again.

So he sat here and thought about magic instead.

The summer sun was already starting to lighten the sky in the distance, and James realized that he’d been sitting here on the curb for a while.  He was idly rolling a purple orb over in this fingers, trying to find the way to make the connection that could make an infomorph.  But he wasn’t really putting thought into it.  It was more just fidgeting, distracting his hands, using part of his brain for that instead of for fretting.

How do you make an anti-antimeme?  A memetic countermeasure?  That was the bit question.  It would be something specific, and possibly easier.  Because the thing that was afflicting El wasn’t actually damaging her memory.  If anything, it was worse; she remembered *perfectly*, but just couldn’t share it.  It was similar to…

Something.  James felt a hole in his own memory.  It was similar to something important.

Something he knew he couldn’t remember.  Shouldn’t remember.  He sighed.  The Right Person, At The Right Moment, was an absolute bastard.  But at least he had given James a legitimate warning.  Helped James do what he would have decided to do anyway, if he’d had all the information.

Instead of dwelling, he thought of what infomorphs were.  What the stuffed shirts in the Office always made them into.  *Rules*, more than anything else.  Pathfinder was the odd one out, but she hadn’t come from the Office after all.  All the other ones were… directives.  Don’t use weapons, stick to a schedule, follow a dress code.  Things of that nature.

So James thought of how to make a rule that would be the anthisis to the curse on El.  And his brain caught on some of the first words he’d learned in history class as a kid.

Under his breath, staring at the lightly glimmering purple orb in his fingers, he muttered.  “Congress shall make no law, prohibiting or abridging the freedom of speech, of the press, or of the people to gather.”  The first amendment of the Bill of Rights.  James might disagree with a huge amount of the power structures of the world, but those centuries old words still resonated with him.

And with the orb, too.

He could feel it, suddenly. A connection, sitting there, nascent in its formation, but ready to spark to life.  And suddenly, James knew.  It was exactly like absorbing a blue or yellow, but he could *push*, if he chose to.  Apply it outward, send it to another.  The orb was primed for it.  All it would take would be the mental command.

He jumped a little as the girl and her mother rounded the corner ahead of him and walked silently side by side back to their motel room.  The sudden appearance of people like that jolting him out of his proper frame of reference.  He didn’t bother waving this time, just giving a polite nod as they walked past, which still wasn’t even acknowledged.

James set the orb down, let his thoughts back away.  He had it now.  He could show El tomorrow.  Hopefully, it would work out in the best way possible.

He shook his head and leaned back against the sidewalk, staring up at the brightening sky.  Why didn’t his body want to *sleep*!?  It felt like he was on edge, waiting for a fight that wasn’t coming.  It felt like…

James snapped forward, eyes wide and worried.

It felt like when he and Dave and Alanna had led the escape from the Office.  That odd feeling in the air.  It felt odd, because it didn’t feel *different*.

It felt like he was still in a dungeon.