The Daily Grind - Chapter 153 (Patreon)

I dunno if I wanna write narrative anymore.  I think I want to go back to just writing emails and documentation.  Is this how campaign settings get started?

_____

“Those who play with the devil’s toys shall be brought by degrees to wield his sword.” -Buckminster Fuller-

James woke up, and didn’t remember any of his dreams, which was a surprise and a blessing.

He’d woken Anesh up instantly, after making the connection.  And they’d discussed it as best as a groggy mathematician and a sleep deprived professional adventurer could. But at the end of the talk, they were no closer to answers and James could barely keep his eyes open.

So he’d slept, for about four hours, while Anesh kept watch and messaged an unresponsive El.  It wasn’t enough, but they needed to talk to her and sleeping through the day wasn’t a great option, no matter how hot it got.

Their car pulled up at El’s place at around ten AM.  Fears about the worst case scenario were abruptly banished when El’s mom answered the door with a bright smile and an offer of a late breakfast.  An offer both James and Anesh readily accepted.

“Thanks for the bacon, miss Chase.”  James spoke politely as he devoured the fried food on his plate.

“Oh, it’s no problem.  I’m glad to see Eleanor making friends.”  The older woman nodded, toying with one of the curls in her hair as she stood by the stove.  “She’s always been a loner, you know.  And always more interested in her ‘art’ than in the people around her.”  El’s mom sighed and shook her head.  “And now she’s so much twitchier.  And this magician nonsense!  I just don’t understand.”

“Oh, the magic’s real.”  James offhandedly commented.  “I haven’t actually gotten to *see* any of her art, either, which is weird.  What does she work with?”

“Spray paint, I think.”  Anesh said next to him.  “I’ve seen some of it, back when I was checking out that place in California.  It’s good; a big ‘gods and monsters’ kind of vibe.  You’d like it.”

“We should get her to do a mural for the Lair.”

El’s mom frowned as she plated up her own scrambled eggs and stood at the kitchen counter, watching the two boys at the beat up old dining room table while she took a forkful.  “I didn’t realize it was a religious thing, when she talked about ‘magic’.  Have I been being rude to her?”

“Oh, probably.  But she’s earned it.”  James rolled his eyes.  “Also it’s not religious, I’m… I’m being literal.  Did she not show you…?  No, I guess none of El’s spells are actually that flashy, huh?”  James frowned himself.  “Okay, well, we’ve got a dozen ways to resolve this in a bit after I eat.  The magic’s really a thing though.  Your daughter’s probably twitchy because she risked her life helping us, and she ran off without actually talking to a therapist.”

“She doesn’t need *therapy*!”  El’s mom protested. “She just needs to get herself back on track!  Don’t go encouraging her that kind of thinking in my daughter.”  She said it lightly, but Anesh noticed that the woman’s grip on her fork was much more like that of a weapon than a utensil.

James opened his mouth, then closed it.  Shrugged.  “Well, I’d say so far I’ve mostly been discouraging her.”  He said.  “I’ll show you some magic later, if you like.  You don’t have cancer, do you?”  James raised an eyebrow at their host.

“No!  And I-“

“Mom, what the hell.”  El stood in the mouth of the hallway, unbound hair exploding out of the neck of the sky blue bathrobe she was wearing.  It was almost adorable, except for the glare that James was pretty sure would, given enough time to work, kill a person.  “You can’t just invite random strangers in for breakfast.”  She rasped out, stomping into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.

“They’re your friends, honey.”  Her mother’s comment seemed both inoccuous and vaguely threatening all at once, in that exceptionally ‘mom’ way.  “Now sit down and have some eggs.”

El sat, still glaring at James, who returned her look with a smile.  “You woke me up early.”  She informed him with unmoving, hostile eyes.

“I slept for, like, five hours.  And that was only because Anesh made me.”  James replied.  “Hey, why does your town smell like the Danger Zone?”

“You can’t call it that.  I have a name for it.”

James nodded, snapping a crispy piece of bacon in half and letting the meat dissolve on his tongue.  He pointed the other half of it at her accusitorially.  “You can’t-won’t tell us your name for it, so I need to call it *something*.”

“Oh, you showed them your secret hangout spot?  Fun, fun.”  El’s mom cut in, adding a third plate to the table in front of her daughter.

“Mom…” El sighed.  “Whatever. Yes, sure.”  She turned back to James.  “Also stop making fun of me for things I literally am not allowed to talk about.  Also!  What?!”

“You probably didn’t think of it as smelling the same.  Everyone who’s getting the sense seems to feel it differently.  But yeah.  There’s this feeling around this place.  Like we’re still out of bounds.  I think that’s what you were picking up on.”  James reached into his pocket and pulled out a purple orb.  “Also, I think I can fix the compulsion problem.”

“What…” El started to ask, then trailed off with a sigh.  “I mean, I guess go for it.  I don’t-“

“You told me,” El’s mother cut in, “that you wouldn’t encourage her.”

“What? When?”  James asked, feigning surprise.

“Mom, would you fucking *listen* to yourself for once?”  El bit out, the words of an old argument pushing James and Anesh to the sidelines.  “I *know* you’re just pretending so everything can be normal!  I don’t care!  Normal isn’t real!  You-“

And then her words were drowned out, mixed up, and made incomprehnsible, as El’s mom entered the conversation like a verbal tempest.

James and Anesh scooted their chairs backward as the mother and daughter screamed at each other.  “Should we do something about this?”  Anesh whispered.

“Like what?  El’s already shot me once, I don’t need a repeat of that experience.”

“We could explain…” Anesh trailed off as El’s mother shouted something about Eleanor not living up to her potential.  “...yeah, nevermind.”

They waited, both of them trying to find literally anything to focus on aside from the ongoing fight.  James was in the middle of reading the carving on a black and white cat clock hanging on the kitchen wall, flexing his upgraded eyesight to its limit, when El announced “Oh fuck this!”, grabbed the bacon off her plate, and stormed out of the room, her mother in hot pursuit.

“Do we…”

“Wait for it.”  James held up a hand.  “She’s pissed, but still not dressed.  I don’t feel like El’s the kind of person who’s interested in going dungeon delving sans-underpants.”

“You know, I’ve been here for five years now, and I still don’t get why you call them underpants and not just pants?”  Anesh masked his nervousness under light conversation.  “Also ‘shorts’ is a weird word too, now that I think about it.”

“Take it up with Sarah.”  James instructed him.  “Alright, I hear stairs.  Let’s go out the back porch and loop around.”

The two of them slid the old glass patio door open and ducked out, closing it quickly so as not to let what little cool air the AC had provided out of the house.  It was already warming up, even at this hour that James thought of as ‘early’ and everyone else thought of as ‘almost lunch’.  Dry grass crunched underfoot as they circled around the house, James carefully unlatching an old wooden gate that could give someone splinters just by being near it for too long.

They got to the driveway just in time for James’ prediction to be close to perfect.  El, now wearing actual clothing and heavy boots, backpack thrown over one shoulder, practically kicked the front door open and stomped out, still followed by her mother who was doing her best to yell her daughter into agreeing with her.

Which was never going to work.  James and El were barely even at the stage of ‘we can work together I guess’, and he already knew that this was just not a functional way to talk to the girl.  Especially not when she was already extra pissed that she was limited in what she could say when it came to details anyway.

“This is the most awkward thing I’ve ever experienced.”  Anesh muttered in James’ ear, leaning his head onto his partner’s shoulder.  “I am five hundred percent uncomfortable.”

“Is that a mathematical measurement?”  James asked as the mother and daughter continued their verbal brawl.

“Yes.  Are we doing anything here?”  Anesh asked.

“I’m on it.”  James stepped backward into the street, taking a deep breath of hot afternoon air.  He stretched his arms out as his sides, fingers spread wide, and reached something immaterial inside himself.  “Hoy!”  He shouted, commanding voice cutting through the familial fight.  “I’ve got a partial solution to this!”

El and her mother both snapped their eyes around to focus on him, and for a second, James almost hesitated as the anger they’d been pointing at each other was suddenly directed at him, even if El did reign it in after a short period.

“This isn’t-“ El’s mother started to say.

But James didn’t listen.  He had her attention.  And as he grabbed onto the power inside him, he also crouched down and made contact with the asphalt.  And then, he took control of it.

There were a few schools of thought on using the blue orbs’ absorption powers.  Different people in the Order all had different ideas on what the best way to make use of them actually was.  For some, it was a straightforward thing; the orbs did something, and you could do that thing.

But they were unimaginative.  Some people thought that physical contact with your target made it easier, some people found motions helped guide the powers - especially the manipulation ones - and other members believed that every use was an exchange and by offering more of your own health, you could get more done.  The one thing they all seemed to agree on was that the effects molded to thoughts.  And so, focus, and creativity, and the ability to truly picture what you wanted, helped.

All of them were probably partially right. But the Order had some stuff going on, so they hadn’t tested anything.

James wasn’t great at visualizing what he was after.  But thanks to multiple purple orb enhancements, keeping his brain focused on a task wasn’t that hard.

The asphalt under his fingers shifted.  It didn’t liquify, but it flowed like water.  Mentally, he marked out a circle around him, and sliced a thin line through it, separating the local asphalt from the rest of the road - again, they didn’t know if it helped, but James figured if he had to pull on less matter it would be easier - and then, standing up, he brought two twisting spirals of pavement with him under the palms of his hands.

He pivoted, using his hand as a guiding point for where he wanted the material to move, and with the burning charge of the blue power still active, it obeyed.  James moved his arm in a loop, and then again at the elbow, pulling a streamer of pavement up into a large spiral, suspended in the air at heat height by a pair of thin struts still connected to the ground.  With his other hand, he simply pulled up and tried to envision the black material blooming like a flower.  It half worked, but the arrangement of alien spikes coming out in a ball on top of the spire wasn’t like any flower found on Earth.

And then the charge ended, and James was left standing at the end of a driveway with his rapidly assembled art installation and piece of evidence.

“*Magic*.” He stated simply.  “Now can everyone calm the hell down?”  James asked in an irritated tone.

Anesh fished a tissue out of his pocket and passed it over.  “Your nose is bleeding.”  He said.

“Thanks.”

“What… what… how…” El’s mother stood open mouthed, staring at the statuary now blocking her driveway.  “How did you do that?”

El sighed.  “Magic, mom.”  She said, the anger in her voice not completely gone.  “You couldn’t have just opened with that?” She asked James.

“I was having breakfast.”  He defended himself.  “Look.  We’ve got bigger problems than this.  El, we need to talk about actual tactical problems. There’s something wrong in this town, and we need to break that hostile infomorph you’ve got in your head.  And I want to finish my coffee.  So, while it’s clear you and your mom have some issues to work out, can we please deal with the bigger problems first?”

The elder of the Chase women nodded absently.  “Go talk to your friends, Eleanor.”   She said, stepping forward to run a hand over the shaped asphalt still warm in the sun.  “We can talk later.”

“Not even an apology.”  El muttered, stomping into the house, with James following.

Anesh followed as well, but before he did, he addressed El’s mom.  “Uh… I can put that back before we go.”  He said.  “So your car isn’t boxed in.”  Anesh waited, but didn’t get any kind of response from her, so he just nodded politely and followed James and El.

Awkward.  Not impossible, for him.  And he didn’t have the anxiety that James had to cope with.  But still.  Awkward was by its nature not very fun to be in the middle of.

_____

“Emergency Response, are you in immediate danger?”  Marcus recited the words calmly.  As calmly as possible, anyway.  Two years voulenteering at the Suicide Prevention Hotline, and a lifetime living in what other people would call ‘a bad part of town’, had left him capable of faking calm at the worst of times.  And working here certainly wasn’t the worst of times.

He was one of three ‘new’ operators.  New, despite having more experience with this sort of thing than half the people here.  But also new because he wasn’t a mother fucking superhero yet.  And it was the “yet” part that really got him to sign on.  It was the experience, a recommendation from a local activist friend, and already speaking two and a half languages, that got him the invite in the first place.

“Um… I don’t think so?”  The voice on the other end of the line said.  “I don’t know if I called the right place, actually.”

Marcus noted that down in the fresh form on his screen.  This kind of call wasn’t uncommon.  He checked a script he hadn’t fully memorized yet.  “Well ma’am, we provide rapid emergency response options for immediate danger, medical transport, and mental health crisis.”  He wanted to snicker every time he read the word ‘rapid’.  “Are any of those what you were calling for?”

“Oh.  Oh no, I was...calling because I think I found your cat?”  The woman paused.  “The big cat.”  She ‘explained’.

Marcus raised his eyebrows and looked around at the other operators in the room, along with one on call response unit.  Was he being pranked?  And if so, was it by someone in here?  The boss was right over there, taking calls like the rest of them, so it *probably* wasn’t some kind of hazing thing.  “I’m sorry ma’am, I don’t think you have the right number.  No one here has lost a cat.”  Marcus said politely.

Across the room, Harvey’s head pivoted like it was on a swivel.

“Oh.  Damn, sorry.”  The woman sighed nervously.  “I was hoping this was how I could get in touch with Deb.  I never got contact info.  Are you sure you’re not...um…”

“Ah, hang on one second.“ Marcus looked over at Harvey waving at him.  “I think my boss wants to talk to you?  No, he’s busy.  I don’t know why… wait, Deb.  Can you describe her?”  Marcus actually did know there was a Deb who sometimes worked as an on-call member of response, though she was an older member of this weird ‘Order’.

“Oh, short dark hair, kind of a commanding voice.  Um… her girlfriend is kind of a snake?”  The other voice on the phone answered.

Well there weren’t many options for *that*, unless it was a very specific metaphor.  “Okay, you have the right place.”  Marcus confirmed.  “I’ll be honest, I’m new here and don’t have a script for *this*.  And the boss is busy coordinating something.  So this might be weird, but,” He cleared his throat and pitched his voice again to that ‘polite operator’ mode.  “Thank you for calling the Order of Endless Rooms.  What do you need?”

“Well, I found a cat, like I said.  I kind of assumed it was yours, but if not, maybe you could figure out what to do with it? I don’t really have space for it in my clinic.”

“Is your clinic small?”  Marcus asked, wincing as he felt like he already knew the answer.

“No, the cat’s just the size of a truck.  And invisible.”

“Of course it is.”  He nodded, typing in ‘giant cat’ to his form.  “Sorry, what was your name?”  He asked.

“Oh, Dr. Amy Morris.  Veterinary doctor, but I’ve worked on some people before.”  She added, sounding a little self conscious.

Marcus split his attention in half, years of experience reading while on a call letting him pull up and search through the operations manual while he listened.  “Ah, here we go.  I guess this is a thing someone already…” He went silent as he read the entry.  Specifically, the part about the threat assessment.  “Seriously? What?”

“Is everything okay?”  Amy asked.

“I feel like I should be asking you that.  Are you sure you don’t need immediate help?”

“Oh, no, it’s alright.  He’s asleep right now, after I fed him.  He’s been here a few days, I just didn’t know how to get in touch.”  The vet replied.  “I just figured you’d have a better place for him?”

“I… uh…” Marcus floundered.  “Alright, I’m gonna be real with you.  I’ve been helping people get to hospitals and escape abusive partners.  I’m sorta unprepared for this.  Do we have a giant cat tree here or something? I don’t even know how many basements this building has.”

“Oh.”  Dr. Morris’ voice was dejected.  “I just thought…”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong.  You called the right place, apparently.  Let me just get in touch with someone who’s here with more authority than me, and I can get you an actual phone number to call.  Do you mind giving me contact information, and we can call you back in the near future?”  Marcus glanced at the main screen.  There was another call incoming.  “I don’t have much time right now.”

“Oh, right!  Emergency line.”  He could almost feel the woman nodding on the other end.  She rapidly provided him a phone number, which he marked down.  And then, without hesitation, added, “Thank you.  And good luck!”  And hung up.

Marcus didn’t have much time to think about how weird that interaction had been, even by his expanding standard of what counted as ‘weird’.  One click filed the form and brought up a fresh one.  Another click answered the inbound call.

“Emergency response.  Are you in immediate danger?”  He intoned.

“Y-yes.”  The boy’s voice on the other end gasped.  “My leg.  I hurt my leg.”

Marcus projected calm.  No matter how stressful the situation, no matter how panicked the caller, he had to stay calm, or it all just got worse.  So he did.  “What is your location?”  Simple questions.  Keep the kid talking.  What city? What state? Yes, really.  Fill out a telepad while talking.  Double check.  How’d you get hurt?  Check for local hospitals.  No alliances in that area, land in the parking lot.  Fill out the second page.  Is anyone there with you? Signal one of the two-person medical teams.  Pass off the telepad.

“Don’t worry.”  Marcus said as he watched the team vanish out of the operations center.  “Help is on the way.”

“I’m…” The kid gasped out.  “I’m in the middle of nowhere.”  He sounded on the verge of tears, if he wasn’t already crying.

“Yeah.”  Marcus replied.  And then he got to say the line that was his favorite part of this job.  “That’s not a problem for us.  We’re already there.”

There would be two more calls before he *really* had time to sit and be very concerned about the truck sized invisible cat.  And once again, the boundary of what ‘just another day at work’ meant got pushed farther out.

_____

El was buried in her closet when James pushed the half open door to her bedroom the rest of the way open and stepped in.  Anesh just loitered in the doorway.

The place was a mess.  Whatever hard work El’s mom had done in her absence had long since been undone.  El was *not* an organized person, at the best of times.  In times of stress, when she retreated into painting to focus away from whatever was making her nervous or angry, she was certainly not even close to the kind of person who cared about clutter, or making the bed.  Or paint on the walls.

“Here.”  She said, shuffling backward out from under a closet shelf before popping back up on her knees, twisting her torso around to toss a shoebox onto her bed.  The box impacted a half empty gallon jug of raspberry iced tea, and slid to the floor, but the lid didn’t pop off and James politely set it back on a more topographically stable part of the blankets without comment.  “Okay.  Do the voodoo on me so I can explain this shit.”

James rolled the purple orb in his pocket around at the same time he rolled his eyes at El.  “First off, don’t call it that, it’s impolite.”

“No one here cares, or is religious.  Do your Professor X impression.”

“*Second of all*.”  James continued unabated.  “We actually need to talk about what it means to implant an infomorph in a person.”

El sighed, and threw herself onto one of the few clear parts of her bed, flopping with a dramatic thud, boots hitting on the hardwood floor.  “Alright, whatever.  Is this gonna be about how I have to be ‘responsible’ and ‘ethical’ and stuff?”

“Yeah, actually.”  A bite of anger entered James’ voice.  “It is.  Because you do.  El, I’m not gonna fucking leave you with a living creature in your care if you’re going to treat it like a tool.  And if you keep acting like that, I honestly am gonna stop giving a single fuck about your current predicament.”  James glared at her, not flinching away from El raising one arm off the bed to flip him off.  “As of now, Anesh and I are here as advanced scouts to determine if your *entire town is being eaten alive*.  It doesn’t matter how much magic or insider info you can offer us, you are not that important.  So if you want help, maybe act like a goddamn adult, and not an angry teenager.”

It was a little mean.  But James hadn’t slept much.  And what sleep he had gotten was a bit spoiled, for some reason.  And if being angry was what it took to get through to El, then that was just a bonus.  Because James was rapidly running out of the patience it took to keep his anger in check.

It wasn’t much of a secret, but James was angry almost all the time.  The world *disappointed* him.  People could be so much better.  And they either had their opportunities to show that cut away, pushed down by poverty and methods of control, or… or they were the ones with their hands on the controls.

And for most of his life, like everyone else, James accepted that it was too much for him to do anything about, because that was more or less *true*.  So he put on a smile, played games with his friends, cracked jokes, and ignored the ongoing dystopia that was way more boring than the ones he got to fight back against in tabletop RPGs.

Of course, now he could teleport, which sort of made it hard to pretend he couldn’t start improving things.

El sat back up, swinging her arms for leverage to push herself forward and look at James.  She didn’t look happy.  But, something about how he was looking at her made her feel like she was back in elementary school, having a stern teacher who clearly cared explain why it wasn’t kind of her to throw rocks at frogs.

“Yeah, okay.”  She said.  “I don’t wanna be that jerk.  What do I need to know?”

The tension eased.  “Okay.”  James stopped subconsciously gritting his teeth.  “Three things.  First off, a nascent infomorph isn’t alive.  I’ll do exactly what it’s meant to do, and basically nothing else.  If you let it, then it will just fade away after a month or two, never having been alive.  I’m aware this might sound hypocritical, but until that point, it *is* a tool.  The thing here is, this one is going to eat the other one in your head, if it wins.  And it’ll live longer, and it *might* become a person.  What happens then is kind of up to you.  You’ll experience it, in flashes of feelings and dreams.  And if you push yourself, and figure out what language it’s speaking, you can make contact.”

“And then?”  El asked.  She’d pulled her legs up, sitting half off her bed, hands holding her boots by the toes.  SItting like a student, listening and absorbing.

“And then, you can talk.  And help them grow.  Into whoever they’ll be.”  Anesh commented from his place leaning on the doorframe.  “There’s a few infomorphs in the Order.  They like us, for some reason.”

“Ah, that’s just because none of them have gotten hired at Jamba Juice yet and moved out with their friends.”  James waved him off.

El tilted her head.  “Seriously?”

“Yeah, Jamba Juice is always doing interviews, but never hiring.”

“No, you fuckhole.  The thing about them moving out.  They can do that?”  She threw a pillow at him, hard enough to know she meant it, but not so fast that James didn’t duck to the side and snatch it out of the air before it slammed into one of her empty easels.

“Yeah.  Eventually, they’ll be strong enough to do that.  It’ll be between you two.  That’s how relationships work, El.”  He said, almost sadly.  “Now, ready?”

She didn’t hesitate.  “Hit me.”

James nodded, and pulled the orb out, holding it up in the light between his thumb and first two fingers.  He took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of bacon still wafting from downstairs and the excessive number of paint tubes El had scattered across her floor.

It wasn’t hard to dip back into the mindset.  The words were still there, and it wasn’t like using a blue or absorbing any of the orbs.  Some of the power effects from Officium Mundi needed emotions, a feeling, a *vibe*.  Some things, like the totems, needed strict adherence to geometric rules.  And some things, well…

Sometimes you just had to know what to say.

“No interference with freedom of communication.”  James spoke.  Paraphrasing, perhaps, but capturing the essence of a document that had been around since before he was born.

The orb turned in his hand, shifting from a solid object to a starfield of potential.  And with a small mental nudge, flipping a switch that had always been there but he hadn’t been able to see, James shoved it forward, toward El.

The distortion in the air slipped into the girl sitting on the bed without any kind of fanfare or obstacle.  That was just how these infomorphs were; you either got out of the way, or they got in your head.  Humans just didn’t have a natural defense against them.

“Now what?”  El asked.

“Now nothing.  It either works, or it doesn’t.”  James said.  “We’ve got a lot more purple orbs in the trunk, though.  So if it works at all, we can just bury the thing in attempts and go from there.”

“Very Stalingrad.”  Anesh added.  “Try it out.  What’s in the box?”  He inclined his head toward the shoebox on the bed.

“Oh, map scraps from the dungeon.”  El said easily.  “If we’re lucky, one of the ones you two have will line up to something in here.”  She popped the lid off, revealing an inch thick layer of assorted scraps of paper.

James didn’t let anything show on his face as he said, “Why’s that? Some kind of reward?”

“Yup.  It’s where spells come from.”  El nodded.  Then, she froze mid nod, and looked down at her hands.  “Oh shit.”  She said.  “That worked fast.  Holy crap.  It worked!  Yes!”  She hopped off the bed, throwing a punch at an invisible target.  “Take that, you fucking brain worm!  Haha!  Yes!  Now, time for wizard shit!  You got your map chunks?”

James couldn’t help but share an empathetic laugh, letting El’s enthusiasms for her abruptly loosened tongue get to him.  “Yeah, yeah.  So, how do we split these?”

“Oh, easy.  Whoever found the newest one gets it.”  El gave an easy shrug.  “It’s fair, and it balances out over time.  And it’s just a good rule.”

James and Anesh both went quiet, and shared a look between themselves that went unnoticed by El.  The question, shared with sad quirks of eyebrows, was ‘and how would you know it was a rule, without someone to make rules with’.

But El was too happy to notice, or probably give a shit.  She started laying out the map bits, and rambling off random facts about her favorite extradimensional stomping ground as the three of them compared names and geography.  Not even to be helpful, just to experience how nice it was to finally talk about it.

“Sometimes, there’s trains, off in the distance.  I’ve never seen any tracks, but there’s absolutely trains.  I’ve been considering getting something that’s good for off road, and checking it out.  But the place obviously doesn’t want anyone going off the highway, right? You know the caltrops disguised as gravel?  There’s more of that out there.  Just random strips of it in the desert.  I tried walking as far as I could once, but didn’t find anything aside from that and some plants.  The place is kind of stupidly obvious about how it pushes you into driving.”

James and Anesh barely had any control of the conversation.  They were mostly focused on trying to find matches anyway, places where, El openly told them, the maps lined up. Didn’t have to be at the same scale, or even fit together very well.  They just had to overlap where they were showing.  So they let her talk with only occasional prompting while they scanned.

“Those ghost cars can get on the road.  *Real* pain in the ass.  They’ll follow basically forever.  And you might have noticed, but there aren’t a lot of places to hide or make turnoffs, so if one gets on your tail, you’re in it for the long haul until you get to an on-ramp.  Oh!  There’s highways, too!  Or at least, big fucking snarls of road that the on ramps go up to.  I think they’re some kind of long range teleporters, but I’ve never gone too far in one except to dodge a tail.”

Anesh had exactly one question, toward the end of their double checking, and El had an easy answer for it.  “Oh yeah, the pet- the *gas* heals cars.  And don’t infect me with your weird slang.”

“First of all, all slang is weird.”  James addressed her.  “I’ve heard teenagers say ‘fleek’ before, and I’m pretty sure that’s frowned upon by the Bible.  Second of all, so far everything we’ve infected you with has made you pretty happy. Third, related to that, you feeling okay?”

“Bit of a headache, kinda dizzy.”  She admitted.  “Probably because I didn’t eat breakfast.  But I can say anything, so I’m good.  Thanks.”  El paused, then furrowed her eyebrows.  “Wait…”

“Oh, worried I’m being too nice.”  She shrugged.  “It’s fine.  I’m gonna go eat, and then, do you want to go try the road again tonight?”

“Yeah.  I need a better feel for it.”  James said.  “I can tell something’s wrong out here, but I can’t track it down.  Also maybe we can find some map bits that actually match up.”

“Would be cool to be a real wizard.”  Anesh added.

James ruffled his partner’s hair.  “Alright.  I’ll see you outside.  Gonna go put the road back together.  El… eh.  Glad the infomorph worked.”

He strolled off, taking the stairs down two at a time.  Anesh heard him offer a polite farewell to El’s mom who was absolutely eavesdropping at the bottom of the stairs.

“I forgot that he can be angry sometimes.”  She told Anesh, shoveling the bits of random maps back into the box.

“Yeah, well, he probably forgot that you can be a bit of a shit.”  He told her with a dry tone, accent highlighting the last four words.

The look of indignation on her face made it worth it, even if the line of profanity riddled threats she threw after Anesh as he headed down the stairs did come true.

_____

There was a common misconception about the FBI, that they were mostly staffed by some sort of secret agent.  Stealthing around, uncovering secrets and plots, getting into gunfights with foreign spies.  Romancing their rivals, wearing sunglasses, assassinating highly threatening targets, and driving cool cars.  Being glamorous and dangerous in equal measure.

The usual.

It was mostly bullshit.  Partially because it was mostly the CIA that had the assassins.

The myth had been started around the time the FBI had caught a notorious serial killer back in the 70s or 80s, as near as Nate knew the story that got passed around to new recruits.  They’d used modern - for the time - tricks, such as “actually thinking about the killer’s motives” and “following evidence”, and as a result, TV and movies for the last forty years had painted the agents of the bureau as unstoppable super geniuses.

The reality was, Nate empathized more with the half an episode of the X-Files he’d seen once than any other piece of media.

A big chunk of the bureau was analysts.  The people who used the magic of the human brain to make connections between police records, social trends, legal wiretap records, illegal wiretap records, and, yes, people’s Twitter accounts, to keep an eye on whether anyone was planning to blow up any government buildings.  Another big chunk was made up of people way smarter than Nate, who had the unenviable job of taking the processed data from the analysts, and turning it into security reports that congressmen and presidents would fail to read properly before making decisions.

They *had* field agents, yes.  A lot of them were specialists, like hostage crisis negotiators.  Some of them, like Nate, had been actually intel gatherers.  Though that was giving Nate himself a lot of credit he maybe didn’t deserve.

Nate’s job had, largely, been to join Neo-Nazi gangs, and just hang out while he wrote down names and home addresses.  And it was comically easy for him to get membership.  He was a well muscled, inked, bald guy who was ex-navy and had the high qualification of ‘being very white’.  Nate didn’t get offended by much, but he was vaguely insulted by how stupid a lot of the guys he ‘spied on’ were.  His job had mostly been just drinking beer, keeping his mouth shut, and trying to figure out if the cops who came to these meetings were undercover or ‘undercover’, until his superiors had what they considered adequate information, before moving on to the next wannabe insurgency.

And then, the Order happened.

And suddenly, Nate had a job trying to train up people to be intelligence operatives.  A job that he had never really had, and didn’t fully understand.  But that everyone seemed to think he was the most qualified for, and that alarmingly, he almost was.

So he’d started teaching what he could.  It wasn’t like he was an idiot; he’d done two tours of duty in parts of the world that asked people to adapt or die.  And he passed on what he knew best to the aspirants that JP brought to their doorstep.  How to fight, how to run, how to keep calm and figure out which one to do at what time.  How to gather information.  He’d tried to mimic how the Bureau kept information segmented, too, but that was never going to work here, so instead, they started building something new.  Communication protocols, ways to collaborate at the speeds they needed to. They’d been working at it for months, and they were getting better at it.  But a lot of these kids - and Nate did think of them as kids - were mid twenties, too eager, and he felt like they’d never really be ready to be let off on their own.

And yet.  For all that he was complaining in his head, sometimes working for the Order had distinct advantages.  Advantages that felt like, well… cheating.

Nate moved toward the front of the chemical refinery, casually approaching the check in post to the parking lot.  Calling it a guard post would be generous; it was a chain link fence that rolled back to let cars in while a security guard checked people in.

He was on foot, flanked by Bill, the two of them moving about seven feet apart from each other.  The generally accepted range for what one of the shield bracers could cover.  Nate had a skulljack braid clipped to a spot under his collar, running off his phone’s connection to give him a view in the corner of his eye of the overhead angle that the drones that were out could see.  The visual wasn’t really ‘in his eye’, exactly.  But it helped to think of it that way.  Just like it helped to think that he looked cool wearing glasses that didn’t quite fit his head and didn’t have prescription lenses.

The glasses were the part that felt like cheating.

“Yo!”  Nate called out to the two guys who were trying really hard to look like they were casually lounging in the guard shack.

There was a trick to casually lounging in a way that didn’t look fake.  If you ever watched a movie where there were guards ‘relaxing’, it was pretty obvious to a lot of people that they were acting.  Because they were, they were actors.  But you could spoof it well enough that most people couldn’t notice.  These guys were good, but not good enough when someone knew what to look for.

Of course, Nate knew what to look for, because he’d watched these two through a scope while they incapacitated and replaced the actual guards.  And then let a dozen of their friends into the facility.

Nate wasn’t actually that into violence.  He was good at it, but it wasn’t fun.  Which was why their team had no actual interest in starting a fight here, and he’d pulled up in a delivery truck.  There was altogether way too much shit happening at this facility to *ever* make him stick his neck into it.  It didn’t matter that they had a reasonable idea of how to get into its dungeon, or that the Old Gun was poking around the edges, or that it was a big enough deal that some kind of secret army was invading it.

They were here for exactly one reason, and then to bail the entire operation out of this state until things calmed down.  And that was to see who the hell these guys were.

Because the glasses that showed group affiliation didn’t work at long range.

“Got seven packages today.”  Nate said, stepping up to the fence like he owned the place and flipping the clipboard with an irresponsibly fraudulent shipping manifest on it around to the guards.  “You guys wanna-”

“Not taking delivery today.”  One of them said, stepping out of the guard shack.  The accent was hard for Nate to place.  Thick, slow, almost Russian, but with an intimidating tone that any supervillain would be happy to have in a henchman.  It matched the wide frame and polished bald head of the man who’d stepped out.  “Chemical spill.”  He lied.  “Return tomorrow.”

Nate was only half listening.  Because he was processing visual input from a few sources, and one of them was a pair of ill-fitting glasses showing him the words “Harlan’s Wolfpack, Enforcer”.  A glance through the door of the guard shack got a similar tag on the other one too.

“Aw, fuck.”  Nate said out loud, voice more modulated for professional disappointment than secret agent concern.  “Boss’s gonna hate that.  But whatever, not my problem.  You mind signing off?”  He asked, flipping to a separate page they’d prepared for literally this exact situation.

The guard didn’t speak, just silently accepted the pen and scrawled something that wasn’t going to be close to his name on the line at the bottom.  “Leave now.  Not safe.”  He lied again in that same heavy voice.

“Yeah, yeah.  You guys stay safe yourselves, yeah?”  Nate was already walking away, swatting Bill on the shoulder to get him moving too.  Back to the truck, pause for a bit to make it look good poking away at the GPS.  Then pull away.

On a hill a half mile away, Mars saw their truck moving, and recalled the drone swarm from its overhead sentry duty.

Half an hour later, after taking a few deliberately awkward traffic maneuvers they’d planned in advance, and confirming they weren’t being followed, Nate pulled the truck up to a wide field empty of everything except unmowed kentucky bluegrass and weeds.  And about a dozen other members of the Order.  After Mars pulled up in his own rental car, they were all there, even the camracondas.  Nate felt nervous about the snakes being out in the open like this in the middle of the day, but it wasn’t like there was anywhere safer in this city.

“How’d it go?”  Dave asked as Nate and Bill walked up.

“Those guys were *scary*.”  Bill commented.  “Am I wrong here, or did that brother seem like he was ready to kill us both?”  He asked Nate.

“You are not wrong.”  Nate said.  “I get the feeling they had some big guns just out of sight there.  Mars, how’d it look?”  He asked the approaching engineer and their resident drone operator.

“Weren’t you watching?”  The kid asked.  Not in a snarky way, like Nate had come to expect from half of the people he worked with.  Just curious.

“I was busy.  So.  Anything?”

“They’ve got two big trucks pulled up around the back, like we saw go in.  A couple of guys waiting there.  The drones we have don’t have super high zoom yet - I’ll fix that later - but I’m pretty sure they were just openly carrying rifles.  No signs of any of the actual employees inside, or the rest of them.  And the place just doesn’t have enough big buildings that there’s too many places without windows to spot through.”

“Yeah, alright.  I’m calling it.”  Nate said.  “We’re out.  Everyone make sure all our gear is accounted for, we’re porting back in ten.”

“Wait wait wait.”  Dave crossed his arms in an X of denial.  “We’re just gonna let them get away with that?  What if they kill the employees?”

“First off, we are not trained for this.”  Nate reminded him.  “We’ve got three camracondas and five shield bracers here.  They’ve got twenty dudes with assault rifles.  And they are so *obviously* here for the dungeon, that there’s no chance they *only* have guns.  If we go in, trying to be heroes, we’re just going to get the hostages and ourselves shot.”  He shook his head.  “No, this is the one thing a trained SWAT team is good for.  We call it in, make it someone else’s problem, and we stay out of it.  We’ve got a name to go on now, which is more than we had earlier.  We’re not sticking around.”

“I really don’t want to get shot at again.”  Deb offered, hand resting on Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s head.  “Especially not over a dungeon that will probably also try to shoot at us.”

“How do you figure?”  Dave asked.

She shrugged.  “That’s just how today’s been going.”

“Alright.  Get the telepads ready.  Leave the rental cars, I’ll deal with those later.”  Nate gave out commands, and the rest of them moved into position.  The Order didn’t do ranks that well, but they were smart about operations like this; he was in charge, and that meant his call was the one that counted.  “Let’s go home, and worry about one of the other ongoing problems for a while.”  He said.

Two telepads tore off, and twelve people bailed out of a situation that had spiraled well beyond their control.

_____

“Alright, yeah.  This town is messed up.”  James said bitterly.

He was sitting curled in the passenger seat of their car, knees up on the dashboard, as he balanced a laptop on his stomach.  Anesh was trying to take a nap, maximizing the moonless summer night and making up for some of his lost sleep before they ventured into the dungeon again.  It wasn’t working.

“We have spent.”  He said, without opening his eyes.  “All day.  Wandering around.  And *now* you have decided something is wrong.”

“Yeah.  Because I’ve been googling statistics and comparing youtube videos and stuff.”  James answered, popping out one of his headphones.

Anesh sighed.  Half an hour before El showed up, supposedly, and he knew beyond any doubt that he wasn’t going to get any sleep by then.  He reached down and adjusted the driver’s seat, turning his makeshift bed back into a chair.  “What statistics.”  He asked.

“Census stuff, mostly.  But also things like business foot traffic in different population density areas.  I’m trying to figure out, basically, if the number of people we saw in, like, the grocery store, is appropriate for a town like this.”

“And?”

“And it absolutely isn’t.”  James concluded.  “There just flat out aren’t enough people here, even considering the pandemic, even if a third of them moved away.  Which leaves only a few options.”

Anesh took a shot in the dark.  “High murder rate?  Downrange of a nuclear test site?  Homeowners associations?”

“No to all of… no to *at least* most of those!”  James replied.  “I actually checked for environmental factors.  I’ve been flipping through the local newspaper, which is all online now, which is handy.  Nothing really seems to have changed, except that there’s only two people left actually writing articles.  Which might be normal.  No, no.  This is dungeon nonsense.”

“A whole city, though?”  Anesh shivered.  “We’ve seen dungeons, or the things in them, kidnap groups of people before, but not *thousands of people*. And *no one* here has noticed?”

“El’s mom noticed there were fewer people.  She just assumed that meant people were moving away.”  James pointed out.

Anesh hated this.  “I hate this.”  He said.  “How are we supposed to fight something that can eat the population of a whole city?  How’s it even doing it?!  Officium Mundi can send out agents, is that what the road’s doing?  Just dragging people back one by one?”

“Thaaaaat doesn’t actually make sense.”  James wrinkled his forehead.  “Yeah, actually, you raise a good point.  Because there are cities around this size with alarmingly high murder rates, and *they* aren’t losing population like this one is.”

“I know asking this will fill me with regret,” Anesh massaged his temples with his fingertips, “but how many people would a hypothetical dungeon have to kill to actually make the population go down?”

“For a population of twenty thousand people, like here?  Seven to eight hundred a year.”

“That’s a couple people a day.  Someone, *someone*, would notice.  What’s the population actually dropped by?”

James hummed.  “Well, it’s actually hard to say.”  He admitted.  “I’ve been trying to make an educated guess, based on how many people are physically around, hence the marketing stuff.  But the pandemic really messes with estimates, even if it feels like no one here is taking it seriously.  But thanks to the magic of ‘online realtor services’, I’ve got an idea of how many homes are for sale around here, and I’m gonna guess - *guess*, mind you - that this place currently has about five thousand people in it.”

“That’s three quarters of the population, gone.”  Anesh didn’t know how to process that.  “That’s insane.  That… fifteen thousand people?”

“Seventeen thousand, give or take.  Assuming my guess is close.”  James confirmed.

“All dead.  Eaten by the dungeon.”

“Well *that’s the thing*.”  He slapped the laptop shut and sat up, shuffling his feet back into his shoes.  “I feel like that would have attracted *some* notice.  And a lot of the homes for sale around here?  They’re for sale by owner.  El’s mom wasn’t wrong!  People are just leaving.”

“Not dead.”

“Well, I mean, they might be dead.”  James shrugged.  “I haven’t checked everyone.”

Anesh glared at his nominal boyfriend.  “You’re a real downer today, huh?”

“I’m tired, there’s *something* going on here, and I’ve spent all day being kinda mad at El.”  James replied.

“She really got to you, huh?”

James sighed.  “She’s just… ugh.  She doesn’t care.  I’m honestly prepared to accept that the reason she doesn't remember her team is because she just doesn’t make friends cause she’s an abrasive jerk.”

“Harsh.”  Anesh checked the rear view mirror again, looking for any sign of the abrasive jerk they were supposed to be meeting.

“It’s tiring.  Like Sarah levels of energy, but packed into someone I don’t get along with.”  James shrugged.  “And I’m worried that no matter what we get out of this delve, we’re not going to be able to solve this problem.  We just don’t have the tools for it.”

The problem was, there was really only so much they could actually *do* here.  He’d agreed to come out here to help El because she thought something was wrong, and something *was* wrong.  But what was happening was either the most ravenous dungeon ever, chewing through the population of a town - as well as a good chunk of thru-traffic, if the number of abandoned cars at their motel were any indication - with complete disregard for attracting attention, *or*, it was something else that was just encouraging people to fuck off and not come back.

Either way, James wasn’t actually equipped to deal with that kind of thing.  They knew that dungeons were vulnerable to damage, *somehow*, but not how to actually deal that damage.  He was perfectly capable of rescuing survivors, but not changing mass trends on a whim.  He had a couple tricks, a kind of impossibly valuable logistical edge, was planning on picking up a spell or two ‘tonight’, and also owned a *very* not legal gun.  But no matter how high above his weight class he could punch, there wasn’t much of a way to strike at “seemingly legitimate migration patterns.”

“We need some kind of magic detector.”  Anesh suggested offhand, checking his phone.

“Mmh.  Hey, have you checked in with home base lately?”  James changed the subject, shifting around, uncrossing his arms and peering out the window at a passing raccoon.

“Yes.”  Anesh said.  “I’m catching up on some stuff now.  Have you?”

“I’ve been assuming they’d call if they really needed me, so I’m enjoying ‘vacation’.”

“Okay, want a rundown?”

“Hit me.”  James turned back to face his partner.

Anesh cleared his throat and rapidly scrolled through messages.  “There’s an invisible mountain in Australia, Research have been recklessly touching artifacts again and have spawned an authority, the last Office delve went fine, a bunch of the kids and some of the camracondas are trying to invent an inter-species sport, and someone found the giant cat.”

James nodded to all of that, then pressed his fingertips together in front of his face, spread his hands, and asked, “Can you explain any of that?”

“I could, but El’s here.  Oh!  Also Nate just sent us a message that you’ll probably see soon; they pulled out of Texas.  He made the call that it was too dangerous, and apparently there’s a hostile group there.”

“A group… like us?”  James’ breath caught in his throat.

Anesh shook his head.  “Not in a way that we’d want, if Nate’s right.  And I trust him here.”

“Yeah, me too.  Fuck.”

That was really all there was to say.  James would review Nate’s report later; if it was pressing then Nate would have said so.  But it sounded like he’d assessed the other group in play, and decided the situation would turn violent too easily.  Which was the exact opposite of how James wanted contact with others on their side of the veil to go.

Maybe it was a misunderstanding.  Maybe Nate was just being overly cautious. Maybe this could turn around.

But that wasn’t how James’ luck had been going lately.

“Yo!  You cocks ready to go on a *road trip*?”  El’s shout cut through the closed windows of their car, the girl leaning out her window to yell their attention onto her.

“Do you think she knows we took a road trip just to get here?”  James asked.

“Next time let’s go to the beach on vacation.”  Anesh suggested.

“Oregon’s beaches are cold though.”  James gave a comical whine.  When Anesh just stared at him for a second, he flicked his eyes around them.  “What?”  Anesh didn’t answer verbally, opting instead to pull a telepad out of his coat pocket and wave it around.  “Okay, *fine*, we’ll go to the beach.”  James relented with a laugh.  “Let’s go say hi to El before we start this bad idea of a night.”

The two of them pushed their doors open, letting the cold air conditioned air of their car spill out to the still simmering summer night.  James apologizing loudly to the raccoon sent scattering in a panic into the trees by the side of the road.

“Okay, so, can you tell us more about breaching the entrance now?”  James asked her as he and Anesh walked up to her car.

El was propped on her elbows out her window, giving them a dangerous grin.  “Weirdly, I already told you everything about it.”  She shrugged, hitting her head lightly on the roof of her own car.  “Oh!  We’ve gotta watch out for sand goons when we come out.  Sometimes they like to hang out by the entrance, when it’s night.”

“What the hell is…”

“It’s four legs of sand, and that’s it.  They try to bury you, basically.  Easy to outrun though.  But they lurk around sometimes.”  El clarified.

James sighed.  “Okay.  So, our goals are find more maps, get acquainted with the feel of this dungeon so Anesh and I can try to track anything in the real world, don’t die to *sand goons* - good name by the way - and maybe exploit the time dilation to take a nap.  Anything else?”

El nodded, scooting back into her seat and slapping her hands onto the steering wheel.  “Sounds good to me.  Ready to get this show on the-“

“Don’t.”  Anesh cut her off with a roll of his eyes.

“Can I not don’t?”  James asked playfully.  “Because I was gonna make a joke about getting on the highway to the Danger Zone.”

“That’s a terrible name.”  El told him.  “Also, I already named this one, so you can’t call it that!”

James eyes lit up, whatever enmity toward El he had forgotten for a second.  “Oh yeah!  You can tell us what that is now!  What *do* you call this dungeon?”

In her driver’s seat, El flipped a pair of sunglasses down over he eyes and titled her head up to look at James with a wide grin.

“Route Predation.”  She said, before throwing her car into first gear and pulling away with a screech of the tires, shooting toward a line in the ether that her car slipped past effortlessly, vanishing from view in a pale cloud of sand and light.

“Fuck.”  James commented as he and Anesh jogged back to their car to follow, switching sides so he could drive.  “That’s pretty good.  I’m gonna have a hard time being mad at her for an hour or two now.”