The Daily Grind - Chapter 181 (Patreon)

And our next narrative arc begins.  I had fun writing this one, but it's also kind of a lot of setup?  Also some ethics stuff.  So, you know, prepare for that I guess.

_____

“Hatred outlives the hateful.”  -Rancor, Magic the Gathering-

_____

An hour flew by in a real hurry.

James had dropped by their armory to grab some gear before teleporting down to some minuscule town in Utah and bailing JP out of whatever problem he’d caused this time.

A shield bracer, mostly charged with the shield at level four.  Twenty out of its twenty five charges filled, and another one about to tick over.  The cooldowns on these technically scaled down rapidly, but the difference between ten hours and twelve hours wasn’t actually relevant in combat situations, so the Order just kept a bunch of spares and rotated them out.  This one was about halfway to level five, which would again make it faster, and yet somehow, not faster enough to make a difference that a single person not on shield bracer leveling duty would notice.

A pair of dungeontech laser pointers; one of the mapping ones, one of the ones that broadcast your emotional state to the target.  Those, and a pair of the glasses that showed affiliation, were his main Office magic tools.  Useful little tricks it was good to have on hand just in case.  And one telepad, which was a *very* useful trick.

And then, more personal magic.  He’d gotten another one of the blue orbs that dropped from breaking telepads, and restocked his [Manipulate Asphalt] power to a full twenty three uses.  Ethan, who had been helping Rufus organize the armory and was helping James find stuff, had asked if he could absorb a second blue yet, and James had to admit he didn’t know.  They’d tried on an unknown blue, but all that had happened was James had broken it when he’d pushed too hard trying to absorb it.

[+1 Skill Rank : Gardening - Flowers - Peonies]

[Problem Solved : Pets Fed]

James would take time later to interrogate what exactly it meant by ‘pets’.

There were four other orbs waiting specifically for him, too.  He jokingly asked Ethan if any of them would help with how much his chest scar itched, and instantly regretted it as the early twenties kid, still puppy-dog enthusiastic after all this time, scribbled a note to keep an eye out for that.

Ethan had changed a lot, and James hadn’t really noticed, because he’d been busy and also avoiding the guy.  Not that he hated Ethan or anything, but he reminded James a lot of Fred, from the Scooby Doo cartoons.  Just *so* eager to take charge and solve problems, in ways that were funny when they happened to a talking dog, but were a little annoying when they happened in real life.  More annoying when it felt like the person causing them didn’t seem to ever take failures into consideration, just being optimistic and cheerful to the point that the emotions were grating and meaningless.

This version of Ethan was still optimistic, and also so caught up in his own ideas for solutions that he was kinda pushy about them, but he was a lot more bearable.  Maybe because he wasn’t doing it while James was trying to rescue fifty people from a deathtrap.  Either way, the gradual shift toward maturity was appreciated.  Not that a good mood was immature; just that timing was important.  James had to assume it was exposure to Rufus that was doing it.

His first dungeon friend was doing well, judging by how he made content little clicks as he filed stuff away in the drawers and shelves of the armory.  There were a few staple plants growing in one of the corners in small pots, along with a cactus, and the strider would occasionally pass by to poke at them with his pen legs.  James had already promised to come by Rufus’ garden when he got back and see what the strider had mimed out as ‘the good stuff’, which was its own kind of exciting.  But that was for when he wasn’t on a time budget.

Trying to backtrack his statement about his itching wounds to Ethan was of no use. James made his own mental note to be careful what jokes he made around Ethan.  The dude was sometimes more literal than the most isolated camraconda.

He gave up after the second try, and just caught up on the armory package.

[Shell Upgraded : Tensile Strength - Ligaments +19.8 PSI]

[Shell Upgraded : Throw Speed +8 mph]

[Shell Upgraded : Vocal  Precision +/- .4 Octaves]

[+1 Skill Rank : Art - Painting - Impressionist]

[+1 Skill Rank : Animals - Duck]

[+1 Skill Rank : Fabrication - Cookware - Cast Iron]

[+2 Skill Ranks : Logistics - Transport - Large Scale - France - Northern]

Karen had slipped that last, rather specific, skill in specifically for him, James just knew it.  He should never had said that his puny human brain couldn’t comprehend the numbers when talking about the road networks in cities.  This was entirely his fault.

The last thing he added to his person was a weapon.  Grudgingly, though.  He still didn’t like how he felt when he had a sidearm, no matter how adroitly his hands could make it do what he needed.  And he refused to waste one of the SQ gunbangles on it; partially because of the absolute inefficiency of burning a year long cooldown on a weapon he wasn’t going to get attached to, but also partially because he got to say ‘gunbangle’ repeatedly when refusing Ethan’s insistence that he take it.

And with that, he was about as ready as he felt like he could be to tackle whatever JP and Dave needed his help with.  Which was, in all probability, something existentially dangerous.

Counting the pseudo-distraction of Ethan’s insistence he try another blue, James had spent about fifteen minutes on this, and half of that was waiting for an elevator.

His main time sink now was finding extra people to bring with him.

“Alanna!”  James cheerfully threw himself at his girlfriend, interrupting the paperwork she was filling out in the Response break room. “Just the person I was looking for!  Also hi Frequency.”  He nodded to the camraconda on the other side of the small table, who was slumped over the surface, her camera head somehow looking mopey.

“That explains why you texted me two minutes ago asking where I was.”  Alanna tilted back and bonked into James’ chest with her head.  “Sup?”

“Do you wanna come down to Utah with me?”  James asked, cupping her head in his hands and massaging her scalp through her short hair.

Alanna practically melted into him. “What, for a vacation?”  She asked.  “Because you just had a vacation.  Wait, you’re in charge!  You can take all the vacations you want!  It’s the perfect crime!”

“Nnnnno.  No.”  James couldn’t keep the grin off his face or out of his voice.  “It’s to help JP with the people who made the depression potion.  Or people linked to them, or something.  I’m heading out now, but I wanted some backup.  Also I’m not in charge.”

The noise Alanna made was one that evoked an obvious disbelief, but put it off for a future conversation.  “Well, that does sound fun, but I’m on call.  And while Response makes allowances for emergencies and bailing our people out of things, I don’t think that’s what’s happening, is it?”

“Nah.  JP just wants me there to be an ethics person, I think.  He intends to do some diplomacy, and having someone who likes talking to people without tricking or flirting with them is a good idea.”

“Isn’t Dave with him?”

“Think about that sentence.”

“Right.  Right.”  Alanna clicked her tongue, wiggling slightly to motivated James to keep giving her head rubs.  “So why backup?”

“Because I’m tired of getting caught unprepared for disasters every time I leave the state.”  James said, with a blunt frustration in his voice.  “If someone’s gonna try to drop a building on me again, I want my muscly girlfriend there to punch them for me.”

Alanna stuck her tongue out at him.  “Well, much as I’d love to cover your delicate butt, you’ll have to find someone else.  Maybe ask Arrush?  He likes you.  Or Alex, because she’s just eager for adventure, and this absolutely will turn into a disaster on you.”  Alanna thought for a second, looking around the room for anyone who wasn’t on call with Response.  “Or you could… uh…” She cleared her throat and trailed off, just as the camraconda at her table perked up.

“Me!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight exclaimed in her digital voice.  “Me me me!  Take me!”

James shrugged.  “Yeah, sure.  Go find Alex for me, and we’ll meet upstairs in…”

The camraconda was already gone, toppling the chair in her wake as she slithered out of the room at ten miles an hour.

Alanna pivoted around in her chair to look up at James.  “You get that Deb is gonna kill you, right?”

“Jokes on her!  She took an oath!”  James rolled his eyes.  He had a kind of complex feeling about Deb’s desire to keep her girlfriend safe.  On the one hand, he got it.  He himself felt like he’d do just about anything to help if Anesh or Alanna needed it of him.  But Deb had a constant insistence that Frequency-Of-Sunlight not ever *be* in situations where she might need help.  And James could see with a terrible clarity where that was driving a wedge between them.

Also it was just kind of a shitty thing to do to someone. He’d been wanting to talk to Deb about it for days now, ever since he made the realization halfway through his trip, but hadn’t found the time since he got back.  Maybe he’d ask Alex to bring it up; the two of them were friends, it’d probably come across better than James being the one to say anything.

“Okay,” Alanna told him, “but like, Sunny is also *my* friend.  So please don’t get her in too much trouble?  Or hurt?”

“Oh, absolutely.”  James blinked as he came back to the present.  “I mean, she’s new to everything, she needs some protection, right?  But, she also wants to *do stuff*, and she’s adult enough to make her own choices, and am *I* really the right person to tell someone to not follow their dreams of adventure?”

“Fuck no.”  Alanna didn’t hesitate for a second to answer.  “Anyway.  You gonna go or you gonna hang out with me all day?”

“I mean, I could just hang out with you all day, sure.”  James plopped into the vacated camraconda chair, sinking back into it instantly.  “What’cha working on?”

Alanna gave a snort of a laugh.  “Report on the last Response deployment.  Armed robbery, my least favorite thing to deal with.”

“Really? Even less than fights over noise complaints?”  James was surprised.

“Oh yeah.  Noise complaint fights are just negotiation.  Armed robbery, you need to worry about a bystander getting shot or something.”  She sighed, tossing her pen back onto the plastic table.  “The worst part is, there’s an easy fix to the problem; give the guy - it’s always a guy - money.  But that kind of just incentivizes the wrong behavior.”

“Hmm.”  James tried to lean forward to plant his elbows on the table, but found himself sucked farther back into the bowl of the chair.  “Okay, so...” he struggled forward, eventually pulling himself up with a huff.  “Okay!  So, what I’m hearing is that we need to kill poverty.  Again.”

“We killed it once?”  Alanna asked deadpan.

“I heard it once.”  James said.  “Though I think last time I heard it, I was saying it.”

“You were.  And you were right.  And it *sucks*!  Because we don’t have, like, tax income or some massive investment portfolio that we can leverage into generating help!  We can’t actually make social services, you know?”

“I mean, I’ve heard that.  But I’ve heard a lot of things we can’t do in my day.”  James affected an old man voice briefly.  “But yeah, I have this weird suspicion that it would be more cost effective to run a social safety net than to actively stop people robbing banks, you know?”

“Gas stations.”  Alanna said.

“What?”

“It’s never banks.  Four months back doing Response, and I have not once stopped a bank robbery.  My childhood dreams of being a superhero are crumbling around me.  It’s always gas stations, or convenience stores.”

“Wait, childhood?”  James smirked at her.

Alanna made a rude noise at him.  “I mean, they’re *still* my dreams, but also they were from my childhood too.  Also hey!  Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?”

“I should probably get moving, yeah.”  James rolled to the floor and hopped up to his feet.  “Though I suspect JP would have called me repeatedly if there was an actual emergency.  And I’m giving Alex and Sunny time to get their stuff together.”

“If you don’t think *both* those girls have adventuring kit just ready to go, possibly on their persons at all times, you’re kinda dumb.”

‘I *am* kinda dumb!”  James told her, leaning down to plant a kiss on her cheek as he passed.  “That’s why you like me, I assume!”

“Have fun in Utah!”  Alanna yelled after him with a dopey grin on her face as he left the break room, and headed for the stairs.

James stretched his legs on the stairs, passing by a pair of Response members he didn’t recognize coming back with fast food bags.  He nodded politely as they passed each other on the concrete staircase.

A part of him realized now that the organization was too large for him to know everyone all the time.  But that was fine, he realized.  He knew some people, they knew some people, eventually it was all one big chain.  The world had always worked that way; but the modern era had tricked everyone into thinking they were separate, that their communities were too small to matter.

He liked it here.  He liked the Order he’d started, that he was increasingly sure could keep going without him.  He’d just walked past two random people he’d never met, and yet, he knew they wanted to help.  That was a powerful, and comforting, thought.

James added a heavy coat to the light smile he was wearing when he got upstairs to the common room, and found Alex and Frequency-Of-Sunlight waiting for him by the front desk.

“Hey.  You two ready?”  He asked.

“You kept us waiting forever!”  Alex complained.  “It’s been, like…”

“It has been seven minutes.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight said matter of factly.  “Which is still too long.  We are impatient.”

“Well it’s good that you know yourselves.”  James said, pulling out his telepad as he sent a final ‘on the way’ text to JP.  “Hey, Frequency.  With telepads, does it work for you with the mech arms?”  He asked, tilting his phone in a gesture toward the robotic backpack she had wired into her skulljack.  “Or are they not ‘you’?”

“Not me.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight replied, shaking her whole head and upper body side to side in a motion of denial.  The backpack she was wearing was the newest version Mars and his hardware engineer team had put together.  Four manipulator arms, ball joints at the base and wrists, elbow joint in the middle.  The motor was stronger than previous versions, which meant it was heavier. The batteries were heavier, too, but still didn’t provide more than an hour of operational life due to the increased power need.  The whole thing was very impressive, if you were someone without hand who needed some hands.

It still couldn’t outperform or even match human hands, though.  Grip strength couldn’t measure up, and stress testing had found that the arms had trouble when it came to leverage.  They weren’t integrated into the camraconda’s body, after all, and so the straps of the backpack were a weak point that had to be taken into account.

Still, being able to pick stuff up was basically a superpower, and James would never take it for granted again.

“Alright.”  He said, laying a hand on Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s head, and getting Alex to put a hand on his shoulder as he double checked his telepad.  “Let’s go see what kind of mess JP has made.”

Three people blipped out of the common room with a snap of air compressing.

Just in time for Bill to shoulder his way through a different stairwell door, the broad shouldered man rushing into the common room out of breath and looking around frantically.  “Did I miss them?”  He asked, sweeping his gaze over the handful of afternoon visitors to the Order.  “Did anyone see James?!”  He called out, panting and holding his hand to his chest.

“You just missed him.”  Davis said from where he was having a conversation with Planner by the community bulletin board in the middle of the room.  “We can call him if you need something?”

Bill sighed.  “Nah.”  He said, dejected.  “I just keep missing him every time he’s in the building, and I need his particular voodoo.”

“Mmh.”  Davis and Planner nodded in sync with each other, the infomorph’s angular ghostly face bobbing in the air behind the older man’s shoulder.  “Uh, do you want the spell?”  Davis asked.

“What?”

“There is an expedition being planned for fifteen days from now.”  Planner scritched the words.  “You are designated as low priority on the list of potential delvers, due to having a family, but the Climb has so far proven low risk with proper preparation.  Broader distribution of utility magics to utility members is desirable.”

Davis noticed Bill’s flat stare.  “They mean that it’d be good for the guy who needs the spell for air conditioning to have the spell for air conditioning.”

“Oh!  Uh, sure?”  Bill gave a rolling shrug.  “I mean, yes.  Absolutely.  Yes? What kind of fucking idiot would I be if I said no?”

“We most likely would not have hired you if that were a likely outcome.”  Planner scribbled, causing Davis to rub at his forehead in frustration.  This was, really, their own fault for collectively supporting an infomorph who had been incepted in James’ head.

“I’ll put you on the list.”  Davis said, ignoring Planner.  He glanced toward where James and the others had just teleported out.  “Assuming we’re still around in two weeks.”  He muttered.

“Why wouldn’t we be?”  Bill said offhandedly, not really paying attention as he pecked at his phone, texting his wife and trying to be as reassuring as possible about a potential ‘work trip’.

The Researcher just shook his head and waved off the thought.  “Oh, just the constant worry every time someone takes an adventuring party anywhere around here.”

“You will become accustomed.”  Planner stated in a voice like dry scrollwork.

_____

Three bodies snapped into place in the suburbs of a small town in Utah.

The thing about small towns, James figured, was that no one who didn’t grow up in one really understood how their suburbs worked.  Or rather, how their suburbs *felt* more than how they worked.

Suburbs started to happen when cities started to grow.  But suburbs didn’t happen all at once.  They crept out from the city core like fuzzy fractal lines, branches forming and linking up as more developments painted in the blank space between the first and second waves of growth.  The process started slow, and accelerated over time if growth kept up.  But this led to situations where a suburb’s main trunk might have single story ranch houses with creaking floorboards built two decades ago with five acre backyards, and a street and a half away you’d have polished two story copy-pasted family homes with fresh carpet and a secret basement if you knew where to look.  Some parts of the suburbs, jumping a backyard fence would lead you to another, nearly identical backyard, but other places you might find yourself suddenly on the edge of a sprawling wetland.

And no matter where you went, suburbs were going to be half empty, half full of people curious for anything out of the ordinary happening in their neighborhoods.

James was really, really glad that JP had done the legwork of tailing their targets back to this suburban home, because he would have gotten lost after one turn and started screaming about city planning.  Being able to teleport to a known site saved him a lot of headache.

This suburb was one of those long tendrils, stretching away from the core.  Eventually, it would fill in and flesh out, but for now, it was selling itself as ‘quiet’ and with ‘room to grow’.

When he, Alex, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight arrived, they did so into a balmy early December day.  It was overcast, grey, but still warm enough that James knew his coat was going to start feeling too heavy in about ten minutes.  Around them, white painted two story homes that would be described as ‘perfect for new families’ by a real estate agent lined the road, about a third of them with cars in the driveways.  An equal number of the houses had a cactus in their front yard somewhere, and James had a brief moment where he considered seeing if he could swipe one of the big orb shaped ones for Rufus on the way out.

“Oh good, you’re here.”  JP’s voice from behind them got a jolt of shock out of James, who turned to see his friend sitting in the driver’s seat of a panel van labeled as a plumbing company.  “I thought you’d gotten in another thing.”

“Thing?”  James pursed his lips and cocked his head to the side as he waited to hear JP’s almost certainly insulting reply.

“Yeah, you know.  Fight to the death, daring rescue, trapped under a falling vending machine.  Something like that.”

“There it is.”  James nodded.  “Good, good.  So, how ya been?”

From the passenger seat, Dave leaned past to call out the open window.  “He’s been like this for days!  Save me!”

“You could have left whenever you wanted.”  JP pushed Dave back.  “Anyway, hi.  Welcome to the desert.”

James looked around.  “I know a lot of these places have cacti, but you know Utah isn’t all desert, right? I checked, it’s got a lot of trees, actually.”  He paused.  “Although it is almost seventy degrees out in December, so maybe I should shut up on this front.  Also, are we seriously talking about the *weather*?  Come on.  Fill me in on what’s going on.”

Behind him, he heard Alex snicker slightly, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s digital voice quietly add an “I enjoy weather” to the conversation.

JP just leaned on the edge of the van’s window, looking down at James.  “You know, teleporting into the middle of a street is a lifestyle choice you’ve sure decided to make.”  He said in a forced neutral voice.  “Sure would be awkward if one of your good friends was trying to spy on someone in the area.”

“You said you needed me down here!”  James exclaimed.  “Do you want my help or not?”

“Oh, I do, I’m just giving you shit because I’ve been bored.”  JP said.  “Okay.  Here’s the deal.”  He put on his serious voice, and rapidly outlined what had been going on, and what they’d turned up.

After they’d spooked a few of the Alchemists, one of them in particular had completely forgone the process of checking in with his fellows.  They hadn’t spoken at all, actually, for some time.  Even as they’d been traced back to here, through a combination of physically following them, and use of tracking devices.

As far as JP was aware, the occupants were not aware they were under surveillance. There were two other Rogues in the area that they were rotating out with, and between them they had the house under round the clock watch.  No one had left, only people arriving over the last week and a half.  Through carefully planted audio bugs as well as directional microphones, they also knew the house was worryingly quiet.

The Alchemist was not the first person to arrive at this house, nor were they the last.

“There’s three cars in the garage, plus the other three in the driveway and curbside.”  JP said.  “Some of them arrived carpooling, too.  So counting the first one that was already here, there’s nine human shaped living things in the house, ten if you count the dog, and you should count the dog.”

The dog had also been silent this whole time.  Well, almost this whole time.

Earlier today, just before JP had asked for James to drop by, the ninth human had arrived.  Like all the others, they’d been let into the house by someone who appeared to look perfectly normal, a smiling late fifties woman in a black dress adorned in colorful polka dots.  She’d had the same dress on every time she’d answered the door, and it was always perfectly neat.

And then, they’d started getting snippets of conversation.

“On the one hand, I’m appreciative.”  JP told him.  “Because it’s literally all relevant stuff.  But they do *not* waste words.  If they’re talking, it’s never small talk.  It’s always sharing information, a relevant opinion, or making a decision.”

As for what they were talking about? Well, it was the Order.

There was a lot of speculation, since the Alchemist who was spooked didn’t have a big picture view of things themself.  And the conversation regularly lapsed into complete silence.  But when they were talking, they were drawing connections, and making declarations of shared plans for dealing with contact with the Order going forward.

Which led to the big problem.

“They’re not the people who have been making the potions.”  JP told James, face serious.

“...Okay.”  James leaned against the side of the van, watching Alex and Frequency as the two of them watched down one of the streets of the T-intersection, chatting about something.  “So, how are they involved?  Did we spook a different group by accident?”

“He’s gonna hate this.”  Dave said from the passenger seat, headphones over his ears as he listened to the silence of the audio bugs.

“No.”  JP told James.  “They *are* the potions.”

James tensed up briefly, hands clenching on his forearms before he took a breath, and let his hands fall down to his pockets.  “Yeah, that… makes sense.”  He said, eventually.  “Explains the not-very-human silence.  All of them?”  He asked.

“Even the dog.”  JP replied.

He took another deep breath.  A memory of falling into an endless black, of being bricked away from his own mind, crept in on him, and a shot of icy fear rooted its way into James’ lungs.

He shoved it away.  Or at least, tried to ignore it.  Fear wasn’t going to help here.

“Okay.”  James kept his breathing steady.  “What’s their thought on us?”

JP and Dave didn’t have the whole picture, but they had enough of it from what they’d overheard.  The potion people were, in short, terrified of the Order.  And, really, they had good reason to be.  An organized group that knew about them, had almost lost a member to them, and was most likely hostile?  That spelled bad news for their survival prospects.

The potions had gone through a few potential plans, though it was hard to hear all of them clearly, so JP couldn’t give a full report.  But the one that had amused him, in a grim way, was that they’d considered asking for amnesty from a number of organizations.  Some were ruled out, like the WHO, some were still on the table, like certain governmental intelligence agencies, or, hilariously, Response.

They’d heard of the teleporting problem solvers, but hadn’t connected them back to the Order of Endless Rooms.

“So, what’s *your* plan?”  James asked JP.

“Well, I mean, I called you.”  JP said.  James just folded his arms again and tilted his head up to frown at his friend through the van’s window.  “Alright, fine!”  JP admitted.  “I’ve got three more people around here to cut off escape, Pendragon’s in the back, and if you say the word we can get the fireball gun out of storage and torch the place.  There are two more untouched potions out in the world, according to them, but these are all the ‘people’.  If we get rid of them, especially the Alchemist, then problem solved.  Dust off our hands, done by dinner.”  JP shrugged, like he was talking about taking out the recycling and not committing genocide.  But his voice was strained, and he knew what he was saying.  “If you think we need more backup, we’ve *got* more backup.  Just, you know, say the word.”

James suppressed a different form of fear.  “What…” he cleared his throat.  “What’s your *plan*, though?”  He asked quietly.

“I called you.”  JP said, staring through the windshield, hands drumming a staccato beat on the worn steering wheel of the used van.  “Really.  My plan was to call you.”  He muttered.

James got what he was saying.

There had been a fear in him, since he’d taken the potion that JP had brought back.  The one that was supposed to cure his depression.  In a twisted way, it absolutely would have done what it said on the tin.  His depression certainly would have ended.  And, judging by the fact that the people in the house were all seemingly from a fairly mixed set of social circles, no one would have noticed.

It was, to the grim part of James’ brain that thought about these kinds of things, *almost* appealing.  There had been more than one time in his life where he’d just wanted the exhaustion, the panic, and the hurting to *end*, but chose not to in part because there were people he cared about that he didn’t want to hurt.  But actual antidepressants had pushed that feeling farther and farther into the background over the last few months, and the thought of consequence-free suicide now just seemed repulsive.

And also, when faced with the end… he’d flinched.  Not just flinched, he’d screamed and clawed to keep out of that endless abyss, and when Anesh had reached out to help him, he’d grabbed on to the lifeline so hard he imagined he could have kinked the Ethernet cable between them with his thoughts alone.

But the fear hadn’t gone away.  In quiet moments and nightmares, the reminder that something had tried to hollow him out and take over his corpse drifted into his thoughts.  A little nudge to keep in mind the fact that he now knew the world was *full* of out of context problems, and his defenses against them were pure luck.

It always, in James’ life, seemed to come down to fear in some way, didn’t it?

His own fears, of death, of failure, of mundanity.  The more he had the more he risked with each chance he took.  The more pressure he felt to just let a safe routine take over.

The fears of the rest of the Order.  People like Alex, afraid that they’d lose what they’d become part of.  JP, afraid of becoming something he couldn’t take back, of hurting his friends and found family.  Even Morgan, just afraid that his life wasn’t optimized for the way society told him things were supposed to work.

And the fears of his enemies and opponents.  Those had always been too much of an influence.  Frank’s fear of losing his grip on power pushing him to feed more and more people into the dungeon.  Status Quo’s fear of loss of normalcy pushing them to kill children in the name of stability.  The FBI’s fear of losing their national identity pushing them to start targeting the Order for disruption.

And now, the fears of these people.  Worried that *James* was going to be the one swooping in out of nowhere and bringing chaos and death with him.

James shaded his eyes against the afternoon sun and looked down the street, waving Alex and Frequency-Of-Sunlight over.  Quickly filled them in on the situation.

They stood there, James leaning against the van, JP badly disguising his nerves in the front seat, everyone just processing the information in the middle of a small town Utah suburb.

A polished silver sedan rolled by, the grumpy looking driver slowing to give their collected group a glare before turning into a driveway a block away down the road.  A cluster of small red birds flew by close to street level, flitting from one tree to another.  In the distance, a train horn echoed.  James ignored them all.  He was busy thinking.

When he eventually spoke, his voice was tight.  “I’m going to go say hi.”  He said, trying to force a casual grin.

“They tried to kill you.”  JP said.  “Through me, I should add.  Indirectly at least.”

“Yup.”  James said.  “They did.  And I’m gonna go say hi.”  It was easier to say the second time.  “I’d appreciate backup, for when this almost certainly goes wrong.  But this is important.”

JP met his eyes, nodded slowly.  He was about to say something when Dave irreverently elbowed his friend.  “I told you!  You owe me ten bucks.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  JP grumbled.  “Alright, you two hop in.”  He motioned to James’ original backup.  “We’ll park across the street, just in case.”  He rummaged around in the glove box, and came up with a pair of compact pieces of hardware, clipping one into the back of his head, and passing the other to Dave.  “Pendragon’s our router for this one.  You need a spare link?”  He asked James.

James just shook his head, tapping the skulljack hardware he kept in most of the time anyway.  With a slight mental nudge, he accessed local wifi, found the one labeled ‘hashtagdragonthings’, and connected.  A small program running on the firmware of the link finding the other skulljack connections, and staring to easily feed him the ability to access shared audio and visual inputs from his allies.

Just in case.

“I like this plan.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight said, rising up to her full height in front of James, delivering a parting word before jumping into the van.  “I am biased.”  She bobbed her head in a satisfied nod.

James’ smile got a little more real.  “Heh.  Yeah, I can imagine.”  He said.  “Well, we’ll see how it goes.”  He and Alex helped the camraconda up over the edge of the van’s rear compartment, into the larger than expected space next to a napping Pendragon.  “Remember.  If it turns out I’m an idiot, and diplomacy was a mistake, you come save my ass, okay?”  He said, getting a snort and a thumbs up from Alex before he closed the doors with a metal bang, thumping twice on them with the palm of his hand before turning to walk down the sidewalk, like this was something he did every day.

They’d tried to kill him.

At the very least, the Alchemist among their number was likely responsible for the propagation of more of those potions.  The ones that killed someone from the inside, and replaced them.

The kind of potion James had thought would help him.

They’d broken his trust, almost killed him, and as soon as they were threatened they started trying to decide if they should sell their services to murderous intelligence agencies.

James was finding it challenging to find sympathy for them, though.  In fact, he was finding it difficult to feel anything that wasn’t anger, and that lurking residual background fear.

He paused at the end of the driveway for the perfectly normal looking suburban home.  Two stories, really wide, a few weird peaks in the roof marking alcoves in the bedrooms, nice three car garage.  The garden was even kept up, with the kind of lawn that James scowled at for a different reason entirely; lush greenery that was a *tremendous* waste of water.  But he wasn’t here to be annoyed at lawns.

The thing of it was, James had an idea of what a working justice system should look like, and should behave like.

Violence, historically, didn’t work.  It hadn’t worked, and wasn’t working, to actually reduce the *real* problem.  Because the real problem wasn’t that people weren’t obeying the state, the real problem was that people were getting hurt.  Punitive measures didn’t do a damn thing to undo hurt, or to ensure it didn’t happen again.

It was counterintuitive to humans.  Maybe for all life.  Because it felt good to see someone be punished for hurting you.  But that feeling was a lie and a trap; you would never reduce the world’s pain by causing more pain.

And if James wanted to argue for restorative justice, and for an end to the cycle of hurt, then he needed to live that way himself.

So he followed some advice from his ongoing therapy, and looked at his anger, and his fear, and acknowledged them.  His feelings were real, and they weren’t illusions.  He’d been attacked when he should have felt safest, and no one thing would ever take that breach of trust away.  But it wasn’t his goal to slap a revenge bandaid over his inner demons.  It was his goal to make sure no one had to feel like this again.

James took one last deep breath, filling his lungs with the smell of gradually heating dust and a slightly spicy scent that he knew was from something green but had never smelled before.

And then he walked up the small pebbled concrete path, and knocked on the thick wood front door.

The wait was long enough he started to feel that awkward sensation where he wondered if he should knock again.  Which was, itself, a boon, because the realization that he was mentally puzzling over social anxiety while waiting to meet his attempted murderers actually made him laugh to himself at the absurdity.

When the door swung open and a woman in a black polka dot dress greeted him with a perfectly normal, slightly confused but still friendly  “Yes?  Can I help you?” James had an actual smile on.  A bit fragile, but real.

“Hello.”  He said.  “My name is James Lyle.  I’m here to clear up some confusion.”

The woman’s eyes flicked up to the van at the end of the driveway, still bearing the decal from JP’s fake plumbing company.  “We don’t need…”

“Okay, sorry, I should have been less cryptic.”  James held up a hand, forestalling her comment.  “I know what you are, because I have survived one of your people.  I am a representative of the Order of Endless Rooms.  I am not here to fight, and I’d actually rather like to talk.  But I can give you a minute if you need it.”

The woman’s face had gone from worried to shock white as James had spoken.  When he finished, she stood with her back straight, somehow looking very small as she stared down at James on the front steps from the vantage point of the house’s lobby.

From inside the house, there was the sound of sudden, frantic movement.  James caught sight of two people bolting past the hallway, the door to the garage slamming open in their wake out of his sight.

And maybe it was seeing it in person, but there was something about her expression, and the unfolding chaos, that really did bring some context to this.

*They* were afraid of *him*.

“Is this a bad time?”  James asked, holding back a full on explosion of laughter.

And his fear evaporated.