The Daily Grind - Chapter 175 (Patreon)

This was originally going to be two segments longer.  But also the segments were originally going to be half as long.  And also this holiday happened and I had to drive through snow and it was just a whole *thing*.  Anyway, here's a chapter!

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“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”  -Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X -

_____

All things considered, Sarah was having a pretty good day.

Currently, she was in the house underneath Clutter Ascent, eating some kind of melted goat cheese on toast.  It was a bizarre flavor, she was pretty sure she didn’t ever want it again, and it was also shockingly compelling to the point that she was also pretty sure she would be having it a few more times before her tongue caught up to what she was doing to it.

The house was occupied now.  Karen had done some money magic and ended up sniping it off the market.  Harvey’s old fraternity brother who used to live here hadn’t wanted a thing to do with it, even after they’d been up front about the nature of his ‘haunted’ attic.  He’d already moved, he was perfectly fine, he’d just take the money and go, thank you very much.

So, the Order owned a house, which was nice.  A house with a dungeon in it.  There were just a couple problems, like how the dungeon was mostly defenseless, and also their friend, and also it was a waste of property taxes to not actually use the house.

Fortunately, Sarah had solved most of those problems all at once by making the house a communal living space for several victims of the Office’s old kidnapping attempt.

Nick, Brian, Suri, and Jose were all members of the support group.  Two of them were competent programmers, *all* of them were scarily good at a lot of esoteric skulljack tricks.  Suri especially, who had learned how to leave an ‘imprint’ of herself when disconnecting from another’s mind, a little ghost that could continue to influence or communicate until it faded away.  Sarah was pretty sure it was one of them who had come up with the trick of having one person listen to her update podcast, and then sharing the direct memory file.

None of them were members of the Order, though.  They were all welcome, obviously.  But they weren’t part of it.  Either because they weren’t ready, or weren’t interested, but whatever the reason, they hadn’t wanted to take up the banner.

But they were still orphans, of a kind.  Cut off from their old lives by overexposure to the grinding infovorous memeplex of Officium Mundi, cut off from their place in the normal world by the modifications to their bodies.  And while they were reclaiming a pattern of normal life, Sarah was well aware that it could be hard to adjust.  Hard to get back to feeling like you were stable, ever again.

So the Order helped.  Because that was kind of just what they did.

The house was just sitting here, and the new residents were more than willing to pay a little rent and deal with maintenance.  Brian had picked up a job as a truck driver, Suri worked as a barista, Jose was - Sarah was pretty sure about this - doing data entry and flagrantly cheating.  The fact that their ‘rent’ was, like, a hundred bucks a month probably helped with the general friendly mood in the house.

The human residents were supplemented with a pair of camracaonds.  Who had arguably either a better, or worse, history of trauma.  Echos-Crashing-Waves and Feeling-Of-Home both lived here as well, and *so far* there hadn’t been any problems with the mixed-species home.  Feeling-Of-Home actually was a member of the Order, recently having become a recognized Knight and having a place on a Response team.  But Echos-Crashing-Waves just… well, he wanted to be somewhere else.

He’d survived years living on the edge of doom within the Office.  And while the colony of liberated camracondas *had* a culture, it wasn’t exactly a strongly rooted set of traditions.  They weren’t a monolith, basically.  Some of them wanted to join the people who’d saved them.  Some of them wanted to take time to discover themselves.  And some, like Echos, just wanted to live away from all the chaos, meet a few new people, and spend their days watching nature documentaries.

Sarah loved all of them.  Especially Jose, who was serving her goat cheese.

She tried to stop in every time she came to visit Clutter Ascent, just to check up on all of them.  And not just because they fed her.  They were all wonderful people, and Sarah loved each of them dearly.

She’d once heard one of the newer members of a Response team, upon hearing about James’ romantic life, complain that humans weren’t meant to love more than one person.  She found that position to be dumb, and cowardly.  Love wasn’t about you. It was about finding things to love in others. Once you had that secret, you had everything you needed.

Sarah was pretty sure Clutter Ascent agreed with her, insofar as a dungeon thought in any similar way to a human.   But it was a confident guess on her part, and as she clambered up the steps into the attic, she felt an aura surround her that reminded her of chocolate chip cookies on a summer afternoon.  The feeling of comfort and safety that she missed painfully out in the real world.

Kelly was out today.  Their newest full time mental health specialist used a part of Clutter as a private area for therapy and counseling.  She had a sign up by the stairs, a little plaque hanging from a string of pink hearts informing everyone that the doctor was out.  Sarah smiled at it.  Kelly was, in addition to acting as a trauma specialist for a lot of the high schooler’s that had survived the attack from the Sewer, doing long term research on the influence of Clutter’s peaceful atmosphere.  She had even supplied her own intern, which was amusing.

He’d been checked out first, obviously.  They weren’t gonna let people just bring random interns in without *some* safety measures.  But for the vast majority of people, there wasn’t a reason to say no.

Sarah followed a path that she *almost* knew, but that changed on a whim sometimes, through distortedly tall chests of drawers and blinking balls of tangled Christmas lights.  At one point, she passed by a dresser with a simple jewelry box sitting on it in plain view, a certain curious vibe to it.  These kinds of things popped up sometimes, and Sarah smiled as she reached out to open it.

Six minutes later, she’d pieced together the scene of standing on a sandy beach staring up at the stars minutes after the sun had set.  The jewelry box held a relationstick, a word that she still internally giggled at, and Sarah pocketed it with a vague intention to pass it off to someone else in the future.

Her hand was already marked with a nebula of circles, over a dozen people she had formed connections with.  Already, she could share intuition with her production assistant as long as the two of them were in the same city, and stamina with the camraconda high priestess if they could hear each other.  The rest, well, she’d unlock them with time.  Time and charm!  That was her secret weapon.

Continuing her pathfinding, Sarah paused briefly to share what was left of her toast and cheese that she’d been holding in her off hand with Umbra and Rufus when the two of them ‘ambushed’ her.  Umbra’s idea of an ambush was making startling noises and then demanding snacks.  Rufus’ idea… Sarah. met Rufus’ eye, and nodded at the supervising stapler.  If Rufus actually wanted to set an ambush, she was pretty sure he could kill a human in the opening five seconds.  But instead, here he was being a kind of dungeon big brother to a growing Umbra.

Rufus nodded back, and Sarah kept moving, the two of them tailing her for a while until Umbra got distracted by a noise in the distance and lit off after it, multitude of limbs unfolding to carry him up over the furniture and across the ceiling, Rufus taking dramatic hops to follow.

Sarah was laughing as she pushed her way through the front entrance of the blanket fort that they’d built last month.  It was different than the first one.  They actually built a new one every few weeks, just for fun, and also so nothing stagnated in the growing dungeon.

This was a bit of a problem.  None of them had a *clue* how dungeons grew or lived or anything at all.  They certainly didn’t know how or why they changed what magic they produced, though they knew that Clutter certainly could, and had once already.  They were taking every note they could about Clutter’s behavior and patterns, but in the end, it was a lot of guessing and a lot of maybes.  At every step, they were making broad assumptions and trying to blindly guess at how to proceed without hurting Clutter in any way.

They had *two* people here who were more or less trained in child development now.  The original preschool teacher that James had hired, and a part time professional nanny who was helping them identify behavior cues.  And, miraculously, it seemed like it was working.  Paying attention to how the dungeon reacted, and acting in good faith, was leading to the continued development of a space that was magical, without being hostile.

Sarah wasn’t going to say that it wasn’t *dangerous*.  But it certainly was different from every other dungeon they’d found.  The life it was creating was more like particularly smart and curious raccoons than dedicated combat forms.

And up in the attic’s own attic, Sarah still had an ongoing project trying to find a way to stabilize the living cloud that Clutter had made.

Right now, though, she was here for a different reason.  It wasn’t anything serious, she really was just here to check up on things.  The placement of the puzzle boxes really did make it seem like Clutter enjoyed sharing the challenges with them, so Sarah did a couple more that had popped up here, experiencing a golden sunset, and a rainy night for another pair of relationsticks.  She read a chapter of the book she was going through with the dungeon out loud from a pile of pillows.  She took notes on the boundaries of the dungeon’s expansion, updating their map to where the borders of space extended far beyond the house’s original floor plan.

And then she tried to make sense of the book.

It had appeared one day out of nowhere, which wasn’t exactly uncommon for this place.  Nested slightly askew between a worn, dog eared copy of The Practice Effect, and a brand new copy of Good Omens, the book had almost instantly caught Sarah’s attention as a creation from Clutter.  She knew that James and Alanna could feel stuff from the Office, and El had a similar vibe check for Horizon, so it made sense that the place she spent most of her time would give her a similar synchronicity.  What had surprised her more was the book itself.

She had no idea what it did.

It was almost comically magical.  The cover was a shifting galaxy of stars, arranging itself into patterns that *suggested* at the presence of great beasts and heroic knights.  The words inside were complex runic arrangements that said nothing, but *felt* like the weight of a story.  And yet, aside from that, it just seemed to be… a book.

A perfectly normal book, that was an inch thick and weighed twenty pounds, bound in void-black leather that came from no living creature on Earth, with stars on the cover.

Sarah had been trying to read the book for weeks.  It was driving her slightly mad.

There was a moment, briefly, where she had *almost* said something that she’d once been told by her mom.  “I don’t understand, but I’m glad you made something you like.”

Sarah had reigned that impulse in, and flipped a page, trying to sort out what story was being told.

One way or another, she’d crack this one.  And then she could maybe talk to her dungeon friend about the book they’d made.

_____

El was having a pretty meh day.

Which was impressive, because two days ago, she’d gotten [+1 Skill Rank : Weapon - Knife - Switchblade], and right now, she was putting that skill to use slitting a paper pusher open from hip to throat.  The spray of ground paper dust and uncomfortably sharp confetti missing her by inches as she pivoted and kicked the stumbling Officium Mundi creature forward with a kick that somehow didn’t unbalance her.

Daniel caught the damaged faceless nightmare person in the head with an aluminum bat, bursting its head open in a cloud of gray particles that slowly dusted down to the floor.

Dropping her leg back to the floor with a sweep and barely keeping her footing steady through the spike of pain in her side, the two of them did a visual sweep of the area, seeing nothing left to threaten them.  Flicking her knife closed and dropping it casually into her pocket, El accepted the soft high five from Daniel as she walked past him to scoop the grapefruit sized greenish-yellow orb into her backpack, while Daniel checked the overturned mail cart - mundane, not alive - that the thing had been pushing for magical cargo.

No matter how many of these things they saw and took apart, the stuffed shirts were still terrifying to El.

Blank faces, that somehow had mouths and eyes.  *Absolutely* inhuman, and you knew it from the moment you laid eyes on one.  They’d run into so many types at this point, El was starting to keep score.  There were the ‘normal’ ones, that just screamed corporate jargon at you and tried to break your bones.  There were the ones that liked to pretend they were bipedal until they noticed you, then they’d drop to all fours and howl like wolves.  There were ones with ‘faces’, which were actually a symbiotic mask thing, and that was gross on its own.  And there were the ones that just delivered the mail, who would often try to hex you with some kind of attack infomorph.

El hated all of them.  But not in an active way.  More of a ‘ugh, one of these things’ kind of way.  And also in a ‘what a twisted mirror of humanity; how could anything see this as the totality of a person, oh right, office jobs do this to people anyway’ kind of way.

“Purple here.”  Daniel said, tossing it into the backpack as she held it open for him, distracting El from her glaring at the shredded paper corpse.

With a fluid motion, she zipped up the pack and whipped it back into a comfortable spot over the armor she was wearing.  They’d given her armor, but El liked her freedom of movement too much to do the whole ensemble.  She wore the arm and leg guards just fine, but she wasn’t cramming herself into that stupid bug looking chestplate.  “Okay, good to go.”  She replied softly, the two of them keeping their voices down.

They were out in the deep dungeon.  Where architecture got weird, and surprises were painful.  Keeping quiet here was a defense mechanism, and they’d stay quiet right up until they swept the cubicle tower they were headed toward and telepaded back to Fort Door Take Two.

Well, *they* would.

“You two are way too good at this shit.”  Theo said, just a little too loudly.

El and Daniel both froze up momentarially, listening sharply for any sudden movements around them over the rustling of the dot matrix paper vines that lined the cubicle walls.  Nothing.  Safe, for now.

“Keep it down, moron.”  El said.  First thing she’d learned in a dungeon, and not this one, was that whispering was *loud*.  You didn’t whisper.  You spoke, quietly.

“You can be less mean.”  Daniel chastised her.  “But, uh… yeah, please be quiet, Theo.”  He looked sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck where a fairly recently grown skulljack sat.  “We don’t know what’s out there.”

Theo rolled her eyes, but did oblige.  “Whatever it is, maybe you can kill that too.”  She grumbled.  “You know, I remember you being a wuss.”  She told Daniel.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Oh it was *not*.”  She snorted.  “I’m just feelin’ useless here.”

Daniel looked around at the tall beige walls around them, a routine sweep for staplers or mice sneaking up on them, but also a good excuse to not say anything.  El took the pause as an opportunity.  “Why’d you even come along, if you aren’t gonna fight?”

“Hey, I’ll fight!”  Theo objected.  “But you’ve got it handled.  And I’m just here as backup, or something.  Maybe some kind of pack mule.  Wait, no.  Ugh, I dunno!”  She winced as her voice got a little too loud, bringing it back under control quickly.  “I hate this place.  But I need the cash, and I’ll try to be less of a bitch about it.”

El sighed, taking her turn at rolling her eyes, but saying “Yeah, alright.  I’ll keep the bitchiness down too.”  Before asking “If you hate this place, why keep coming back in? You know James’d just give you the cash.”

“It’s true.”  Daniel confirmed.  “He’s a giant softie.”

“How do you *not* hate this place?”  Theo asked Daniel.  “It ruined our lives.”

“It… didn’t do that to me.”  Daniel said softly.  He reached out his left hand to the side, and an orange shimmer pulled away from the limb, forming a ghostly echo of a hand.  He turned his own hand, and the glowing shadow turned too, and they intertwined their fingers.  “It gave me something special.”  He said.

They walked as they talked, the low conversation failing to be loud enough to distract from spotting ambushes.  And there *were* ambushes, this far out.  Three, four, maybe five miles from the tower.  El had walked five miles *inside a building*, and her brain still didn’t know how to do anything with that information.

“So, how’s the whole non-corporal romance work?”  She asked Daniel.  “Does she ever ghost you?”

“Corporeal.”  He corrected her, smiling like he couldn’t hold the feeling inside, seeming to just slide over her joke. “And I don’t really know.  Don’t have anything to compare it to.  How about you? Getting along with Speaky?”  Daniel named the infomorph that had been growing in El’s mind ever since James had put it there to kill off whatever the Route had been using to keep her from talking.

They paused as they came to a covered intersection.  The shadows stretched long here, lights overhead making sharp lines where the walls curved over the narrow hallways.  The intersection had a vending machine in it, though, wedged between where two new corridors split off at weird angles.  In the blue-purple light of its front face, Daniel could make out a potted plant that was entirely too suspicious.

Cutting the conversation short, he gave Theo a nod to watch their rear, while he and El circled the plant, lunged together, and snapped it’s trunk near the base.

It dropped a few small orbs.  They split them.

[+1 Skill Rank : Logistics - Shipping - Eastern Canada] for Daniel, and [+1 Skill Rank : Theater - Improv] for El.  Theo saved hers.  They moved on, until they passed out of the dark area and back into the fluorescent day.

“So, the thing is,” El continued their conversation twenty minutes later when they found a patch of safe, non-trapped cubicles to search over and rest in, “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Theo opened her mouth to comment from her seat in front of the computer as she tried to crack its password, but Daniel held out a hand.  “She means about the infomorph.”  He cut off the potential sniped insult.  “And… yep.  Good luck!”

“Oh, come on!”  El griped.  “You’ve gotta know something.  How’d Path get… you know… better?”

“Different species.”  Daniel reminded her.  “Talk to James or something.  Or go find your own cartomorph!  Just ask JP for a venture into the Horizon.  Get Speaky a sibling.”

“Yeah, get more extra people living in your head.  Great idea.”  Theo snorted.  “You people… this is why I didn’t want to join up, you know? You have zero respect for what it means to be human.”

“Oh, fuck *off*.”  El glared back at her pointlessly, Theo still focused on the screen.  “You didn’t seem to mind when we made you immune to cancer, or paid your rent for a decade.”

“That’s different.”  Theo offered.  “With that, I’m…”

Whatever she was going to say was cut off as a glowing red fish-shaped blob of light shot out of the computer screen, darted through her chest, and shot away into the hallway.  El snatched for it, but missed, and the creature was gone in a heartbeat, diving down a dark hall before taking a corner and vanishing.

“Uh oh.”  Daniel said, eyebrows raised.

“What was *that*?!”  Theo said.

“Uh… check your wallet, I guess?”  Daniel said.  “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.  Ops says that they steal personal info, so you might need, like, a new driver’s license or debit card or something.”

“Oh, I don’t use a debit card.”  Theo said, like she was on autopilot.

El and Daniel looked at each other with knowing expressions. “Debit card.” They echoed.

They let it go.  The card was replaceable.  Their lives, chasing a tiny fast dungeon Life through dark cubicle corridors, were not.

A half dozen small moments made up the next two hours.  Picking off striders that got too close, spotting a glittering decision tree in the distance, crossing a burbling river of hot printer ink on a precarious bridge of cubicle walls, El feeding a maul cart some junk mail she’d brought along with a massive grin on her face.  It all flowed together as they kept moving.  Theo even stopped needling her after she realized that she could just ignore the angry woman.

El didn’t get Theo.  El was angry, yeah.  And El realized she was an asshole sometimes, but she was actually working on it.  Theo just seemed mad that the world was different than she’d expected, and hadn't changed to adapt.  At one point, when Theo had rounded a corner ahead of them, taking her turn in the lead to scout quietly, Daniel had set a hand on El’s shoulder and given her a questioning look.  El had taken the second to stop, take a breath, and use the trick her therapist had taught her to push away her annoyance for a minute and look at things clearly.

She’d shrugged at Daniel, and he’d nodded back, and both of them knew they weren’t going to delve with Theo again.

Three hours later, they were standing at the top of a cubicle tower, a trail of defenders cut down behind them.  Mostly 2.0s, which had fucked up her hair style *again*, and one particularly aggressive camraconda that El had felt *super* bad about knifing through the chest.

Camracondas didn’t read as monsters to her anymore.  It felt like killing a kid.

They’d teleported back.  Dropped off the duffel bag full of coffee grounds that was worth more than El’s entire life earnings a dozen times over.  El found a quiet spot to wipe her tears away in, while Daniel passed off the bag of orbs to their quartermaster to be distributed later.  The cluster of eight small greens got a grin from the old guy doing inventory; El was pretty sure he was one of the people doing construction for them, so that checked out.

“You doing okay?”  Daniel asked her, concerned.

“Yeah, leg just hurts.  You know how scars are sexy?”  She asked.

“No?”

“Oh.  Well, good.  Cause they hurt.”  She rubbed at the lines in her flesh where one of the asphalt things had carved into her a couple months back.  “You got Theo’s money stack?”

“Yeah, let’s pay her and get back to doing something useful.”  It was the closest she’d heard Daniel come to being sarcastic, and El snorted a laugh at it.

They gave Theo her money, and she gave them a half-baked apology about being a jerk for the evening.

And then, before leaving, she’d said something that hadn’t left El’s head since.

“You two work way too well as a team.”

They did, El realized.  Which was weird, because she wasn’t really a team player.  She’d always done this alone.  And yeah, she’d had time to learn since really actually joining the Order.  But… she just didn’t have the same experience being on a team that everyone else did.

And yet, she meshed perfectly with Daniel when the two of them ran supply delves like this.  She knew where to stand to be out of the way, knew where to cover to keep her partner safe, and she knew without actually thinking about it.

She mentally poked at the infomorph living in her.  Was he, maybe, doing this?  There was no response, of course.  He was still young.  Couldn’t manifest outside of a particularly deep dream.  So probably not.

So why was she so good at this?

El frowned as she rolled the thought around her mind like a loose tooth.  One way or another, she decided, she’d crack this one.  And then figure out where to go from there.

_____

If you asked him, Dave would say his day was going fine.

Dave didn’t really have a good framework for determining what constituted a bad day. Usually, he just assumed that any day he got through without some kind of emotional screw up was pretty alright, and went from there.

That had gotten a lot easier, as the problems in his life had shifted away from managing the logistics of a chaotic work schedule, and toward fighting monsters and saving the world.  Weirdly.

He was given to understand that for most people, stressful situations like that were somewhat traumatic.  And it wasn’t like he was going to lie and say he didn’t experience stress or something stupid like that.  But fundamentally, it was just that a direct engagement with someone trying to kill him and the people he knew was refreshingly simple.

Right now, he was sitting in the front seat of a panel van next to JP, dealing with a rather non-simple problem, and he wasn’t a huge fan.

“So, why not just ask them?”  He was asking his friend.

“Because, again, if there’s some kind of magical mental parasite that’s replacing people, you can’t trust those people to answer honestly.”  JP explained the same point for the third time.

Dave nodded, mostly just because the gesture was an expected one, and then ruined it by continuing.  “Right, right.  But what I’m saying is, what if you ask the parasite?  Which seems like a rude thing to call it, by the way.”

“We’re not being nice to the thing that kills people.”  JP shot back without thinking.

“I kill people.”  Dave said simply.

JP had been through a lot of turmoil in his life lately, but he still, on a deep and fundamental level, knew that he wasn’t going to let Dave pull that shit with him.  “Self defense is different from eating people’s brains and puppeting their bodies, you dumbass.”  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, not taking his eyes off the car ahead of them.  “Let me know if you and Pen start, I dunno, eating random farmers or something.”

“I don’t think she’d find people very tasty.”  Dave joked, giving a single dry laugh.  “Okay, so, you don’t want to talk to the potion monster.  Why bother spying then?”

Moving the van as the light changed, keeping a few cars behind the one they were currently tailing, JP gave a resigned huff.  “Lots of reasons.  Do you want a list?”

“I mean, you made me come along as backup, and Pen’s *really* uncomfortable back there, so it seems like you owe me?”  Dave half asked half questioned.

Holding up one hand, JP started counting off.  “Because they could spread to more people, because they might try to retaliate against us if they learn that James didn’t get converted property, because the Alchemists have a lot of networking contacts and they could be a threat through that, because we need to know what their actual plans *are*, and no, we can’t just ask them because they might lie, because their existence is a form of lying to begin with.”  He took a deep breath, then kept going, having lost track of how many points he’d made, now counting on his other hand and driving with his knees.  “Also!  Because technically we *tried* to ask them, and it didn’t work! And then on a more pragmatic me-style level, because learning how they make positions would be really valuable, because they probably have a vault somewhere with a bunch of cool stuff in it, and because they’ve personally offended me.”

Dave cleared his throat, and stared at the van’s steering wheel until JP slowly lowered his hands back and took firmer control of the vehicle.

He let the conversation lapse for a bit as his friend drove them through a parking lot, keeping sight of the target vehicle as their quarry’s car stopped at a red light, while not following directly behind them.  It was a clever little move, but Dave didn’t appreciate all the speed bumps, and he knew Pen didn’t either, coiled up in the back of the van.

The van was *far* smaller than Pendragon was.  His good girl would have been uncomfortable in a semi trailer.  But the simplest possible orange totem that Research had managed to build all on their own was currently expanding the space available in the van, and while it was impressive, it also meant that speed bumps had a greater subjective motion for whoever was in the back.

Like, in this case, the aircraft sized aluminum plated dragon, who was, almost certainly, not happy.

“Sooooo…” Dave picked up the conversation as they reentered the flow of traffic a few cars back from their target.  “This is personal for you, eh?”

“Dave, I swear to god, I need you to not psychoanalyze me right now.”  JP bluntly told him.  Then, he abruptly changed the subject.  “Hey, actually, it’s been a while since we’ve really hung out.  How’re you doing? Up to anything fun?”

Against anyone else JP knew, the flagrant attempt to deflect the conversation would have been detected, and shot down.  Against Dave, well…

It wasn’t that Dave didn’t get what JP was doing.  It was more that he was perfectly fine just answering the question and pivoting what they were talking about.

“I’ve been pretty good!”  Dave answered.  “Been staying out with my grandpa, mostly.  He’s got this giant farm down in Grant’s Pass, and there’s basically no one down there, so I spend a lot of time flying with Pen, making sure she’s growing okay, that kinda thing.  Also helping out with the animals.  He’s got a bunch of wildlife rescues, so I get to play with raccoons and foxes and stuff.  It’s nice.”

Closing his eyes firmly, JP tilted his head before replying with “I didn’t think I’d actually be jealous of you today, but here we are.  Can I come play with the raccoons?”

“Oh, sure.  They can’t be released, they’ve been with him since they were tiny.  No idea how to survive in the wild.”  Dave answered easily.

“I am so happy right now.”  JP muttered angrily.  “Also, what’s he grow?”

“Huh?”

“Your grandpa.  On the farm.  What’s he grow on the farm?”  JP inquired, making casual conversation.

Dave didn’t answer right away, instead thumping his head back into the headrest of his seat, and staring at the van’s ceiling in silence, mouth hanging open.

“Uh…” He uttered a confused noise.  “I… have no idea?”

“Comforting.”  JP lied.

“Wheat, probably?”  Dave didn’t look down, tapping at his arms.  “Or… is ‘hay’ a crop?  There’s a lot of grass.  Honestly, being gone half the time doesn’t help me learn, probably.”

JP nodded.  “How’s your uncle with the whole… dragon… thing?”

“I think he thinks Pendragon’s a student project.  But aside from that, he likes her?”  Dave sighed.  “Anyway.  Hey, are we gonna delve the Route anytime soon? Now that we know this truck works-“

“Van.”

“Now that we know this van works, I’d love to get Pen some airtime.  Also… well…” Dave shrugged.  There was something he was missing, in general, from the dungeons.

Now, unlike some members of the Order, Dave didn’t actually have a problem with the mundane world.  He also didn’t like how everyone used ‘real’ and ‘dungeon’ as if they were different types of worlds.  Any world was as real as another.  And being out and about with people and geography that wasn’t formed by a hostile alien mind was just as interesting to Dave as being in an endless office or a demonic sewer.

At a certain point, if everything was equally strange around you, it really didn’t matter if it involved an endless string of weird traps or not.

And yet, Dave actually really liked dungeon delves.  About as equally as he liked hanging out with raccoons.  It was just something cool.

But *also*, the dungeons had stuff in them, and he wanted that stuff.  Because it was magic.  That part seemed self explanatory.

JP made a derisive noise, cutting off Dave’s thought process.  “Nope.  Not going in until we’ve cleared out the city.”

“Oh.”  Dave deflated, looking back out the window to track the Alchemist car they were tailing.  “How long will that take? You need more help?”

“Dude…” JP sighed.  Sometimes he didn’t know what to do with his friend.  “Do you want me to actually explain why that’s a stupid thing to say?”

“Nah, I’m good.”  Dave smirked, ignoring the verbal snipe.  “I mean, I trust you in general.”  He shrugged. “Mostly I’m just sorta interested in the whole resource exploitation thing, you know?  I’ve been sorta curious about it, because with the *road*, the only thing I can really imagine being useful is… uh… road?  And road isn’t exactly a rare resource.”

“Are we actually doing this now?”  JP groaned.  “We’re in the middle of tailing someone who probably has some weird murder-magic, and we’re doing this.”

With a second, and then a third look at the car that was now slightly behind them and one lane over, Dave processed that thought.  On the one hand, JP could be right.  On the other hand, the most dangerous thing they’d seen from this guy so far was that he didn’t signal when changing lanes.

Eventually, he shrugged.  “I’ll take the chance.”  He settled on.  “So, asphalt? Sand, I guess.  Didn’t I hear something about how the plants there were just normal plants from Earth that were hilariously invasive species?”

“Is that what James called them?”  JP snorted.  “Yeah.  Mostly.  Look, I’m not the person to ask about this.  I’m here for the social stuff.  But *yeah, sure*, I guess it doesn’t really help to steal entire strips of asphalt!  I don’t know!  It’s not like we’ve tried digging in the middle of the road-desert or anything.  We’ll get there eventually, probably.”

“There’s got to be better ways to find mineral resources than randomly digging.”  Dave suggested in the voice he used for when he knew he was right.  “But I guess we could use it for making more of the big golem things?  We’ve got the orb that-“

“Hold that thought.”  JP’s voice went hard, and Dave shut up instantly.

The car they were after had just turned.  Off the main road, into one of those connecting veins that strung through suburbia.  They caught a good look at the driver as the car turned, another older gentleman with an angry frown and a salt and pepper beard.

He hadn’t said anything since getting in his car.  The other two had; audio bugs had picked them up quite clearly as they almost *instantly* dialed their fellow Alchemists, and while they spoke in what was obviously coded language, the tension in the voices was enough to let everyone listening from the Order know that it wasn’t just a polite check in.  One of the others had driven home, breaking the speed limit by a *lot*, and hadn’t come out of their mansion since.  The other had gone straight to the old manor house that the Alchemists used as a place for their gatherings and a sort of storefront for anyone who could actually find them.

This one, though?

He had said absolutely nothing.  Just driven, using a few tricks that Nate had shown the Order’s rogues to evade any potential tails.  Dave was mostly here as muscle, and to bother JP, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t been specifically spotted.  Their quarry was just paranoid.  Rightly so, but still paranoid.

And, in total silence, heading to a seemingly random house in the middle of the middle class suburbs.

JP parked the van at the end of the street, just around the corner.  And so he and Dave got a pretty clear view as, all at the same time, three different cars pulled up in the same driveway, their tailed Alchemist pulling in alongside a pickup truck like they’d choreographed it.

Three people got out of three cars, not even acknowledging each other, wordlessly walking up the cobblestone path and into the unlocked front door together.

“Okay.”  JP said, dialing Nate’s number.  “I think we just found our parasite.”

Dave nodded, turning to peak into the back of the van through the tiny little window.

They’d gotten a lucky break, but it was still worth checking to make sure Pendragon was ready to go.  Because one way or another, they were going to crack this one.