The Daily Grind - Chapter 192 (Patreon)

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard, The Writing Life-

_____

The Red Lion hotel was slightly less of a mess inside than it appeared from the parking lot.

From the front, it looked like a series of a few three story buildings, divided up into hotel rooms, with maybe a few of the ground floor sections set aside for renting out to business conferences or wedding parties.  It also looked like it had been in an active war zone for the last year, and not just a small town in Tennessee.

Holes in the walls, shattered windows, cars in the parking lot with smashed windshields and dented doors when they weren’t just torn in half.  The vegetation around it was dead or dying.  The brass and color of the double doors that led into the front lobby was warped and torn out of its frame.  In a lot of places, sheets of plywood covered up some of the worse holes.

The parking garage was worse.  It looked like a demented porcupine; a hundred spines of concrete and asphalt trailing off it in shapes that looked curved and organic, but were no less solid for their appearances.  The inside was worse; those same spikes piercing vehicle after vehicle, occasionally going into tight corners or straight into walls.  Many of them ended at points where the ground was stained with red and black blood splotches.

The Order members camping out here had done a good job peeling the asphalt spears out of the hotel itself, but that just made it stand out more in a city where no building had escaped undamaged.

Inside, in contrast, was… well, it was a different kind of mess, at least.  Saying it was less of a mess might be a lie.  But the direction of mess was different.  Outside, the mess had already happened, and it was a constant effort to bring everything back to a usable state, even as weather and time continued.  Inside, it had been a more or less empty building, and it was a constant effort by the Order members working here to fill it with a city’s worth of stuff.

Even through the damage that clearly showed on some of the walls and bits of the ceiling, though, it was still a pretty alright place to be.  James wandered past the abandoned front desk to the dining hall where the team here kept a big fireplace roaring, giving the whole building a warm and inviting feeling even as the temperature outside continued to drop as winter wore on.  The building was cluttered, yes; piles of gear and recovered items lined the walls around here, and the majority of the furniture that was still intact had been shifted into a giant stack over in a far corner.  But it wasn’t dirty; a handful of green orbs stacked on the building rapidly eliminating trash, which seemed to include dirt in the carpet too.

There were a couple people here, holding down the fort and also enjoying the warmest room in the building since there was minimal electricity here.  James nodded to Yin, the rogue draped half upside down over the side of a couch not seeming to notice him, and moved over to greet the person he was here to see.

“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”  James asked, standing what one of his etiquette skills told him was exactly the right distance away to be seen as polite but not awkward.  James loved that skill orb.  He didn’t know which one it was, exactly, but he loved it.  It removed a lot of ambiguity; and despite a helpful ongoing dose of antidepressants, James still did have that low-level panic every time he needed to determine exactly how far away someone had to be before it was impolite to hold a door open for them.

“I’m not busy.”  Kirk replied, trying to cover up his worry by sounding casual, closing the book he was reading.  No, not book; manual.  Something highly technical.  James didn’t even try to read the name.

Krik was one of a handful of the Route Horizon cultists who had both survived the Mechanic’s attempted apotheosis, and also chosen not to accept a memory wipe from Planner.  He, along with three others, instead chose to accept the Order’s form of restorative justice.  Working mostly to secure and salvage the ruined city of Townton, the sandy haired and scarred man and his fellow ex-cultists did what they could to balance the scales on the atrocity they’d been part of.

Though in truth, that wasn’t really the point.  If the scales of justice were real, James was sharply aware that there would never be a way to tip them back.  Thousands of people had been killed, from the actions of a dozen.  That wasn’t something you could work off.

Instead, the point was… well, about the same as how the Order treated their student aspirants.  The point was to change the nature of a person.  To bring them to a way of living, through conversation, education, compassion, and practical example, where they would never do again what they had done before.  Where they were still themselves, but also someone else entirely.

You couldn’t undo the past.  And it was all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that punishing people for their transgressions was acceptable.  Because it *felt good*.  It felt good to hurt the people who had hurt you.

But it didn’t build the future they wanted to live in.

James hadn’t actually talked to Kirk since offering him a… job?  Place?  English kind of broke down when you started making common use of new methodology for social structures; they’d have to come up with something for this.  Or find a blue orb that added new words.  That sounded like proper Officium Mundi bullshit.  Regardless, no matter how long had passed, Kirk recognized James right away, and it was clear from how tense he was under the bland look on his face.

“You’re not in trouble, relax.”  James said, looking around for a place to sit and eventually giving up and just planting himself on the edge of the remarkably sturdy coffee table between the couch and the fireplace.  “How’re things going?”

“That could mean so many different things.”  Kirk said with a sigh.  “Do you mean, in the city?”

“Sure.”  James shrugged and offered a smile.

Kirk set the technical manual he’d been reading on the couch arm next to himself.  “It’s still a mess.”  He started.  “Everything is… kinda bad.  Lots of rotting food, so it all smells kinda awful.  A bunch of places where fires took out residential blocks, buildings falling apart when the road spikes give out, that sort of thing.”  Kirk looked away.  “Lots of bloodstains everywhere.”

“You okay?”  James asked softly.

“Nah.”  The mid-forties man snorted.  “Course not.  But who would be, right?  Just a reminder every time we go out of how bad it was.  Seems fair, right?”

“In retrospect,” James said as he realized something, “it might be considered cruel to station you here.  Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“No!”  Kirk answered a little too fast.  “No, no.  This is where…”

James gave a small sad smile.  “This is where Horizon is, right?”

“…Yeah.”  The word held a world of guilt.

“Man, you don’t have to justify yourself to me.”  James almost laughed.  “How’s the dun… the road, anyway?”

“Still sleeping.”  Kirk said, excitement creeping into his voice as he talked about Route Horizon.  “We’ve only been in four times; the necroads like to hang around the entrance so we have to be careful when we do it.  But the inside is… calmer.  And without the old man… without…” His voice cracked, and he clenched a fist, but he met James’ eyes all the same.  “Without going in to sacrifice someone, there’s just more time to explore.  We’ve been collecting map scraps and gears and a bunch of other stuff, and there’s more out there than I ever imagined.”

“Glad to hear you’re enjoying it.”  James said earnestly.  “What was that about the necroads?  They’re still around?”

“Oh, yeah.  There’s a lot of them.  I mean, there’s *thousands* of them.  We used to fight them, when they showed up while we were out searching the city.  But they kinda stopped.  Some of them still watch us, and there’s packs of them that go by the Horizon’s portal, but I think a lot of them are hiding.”

“Well that’s… something.”  James rubbed at his chin.  “Okay.  So, personal question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you get along with everyone here?”  James asked.

Krik gave a sheepish look.  “No?”  He said, and then continued with a sigh.  “No.  I don’t.  I… ah, you probably don’t want to know the specifics, but no.”

It was an honest answer, and James appreciated that.  Which was what he was looking for, really.  “Anything that could be a big problem?”  He asked.

“Oh, no.” Kirk shook his head vehemently.  “Even if someone annoys the fuck out of me, I’m not gonna screw them over on a run.  And we all know that.”  He straightened his back, eyeing James like he was daring the younger man to challenge the small community here.

But that wasn’t what James was asking for.  “Okay.”  He said.  “So, how are *you* doing?  Honestly, how do you think you’re doing, overall?”

Kirk blinked.  “I’m… I’m better.”  He said.  “It’s like… when I was in high school my friend and I stole a bottle of really, *really* bad vodka from a liquor store.  And then drank it in, like, an hour.  And a decade later, I could remember that, and I knew it was me, but all I could think was ‘wow, high school me was a fucking moron’.  And now I’m doing that again.  I was a fucking moron, in so many ways.  And I probably still am!  But I’m trying, man.”

“I feel that in a painfully real way.”  James deadpanned.  “So, last question, with a little bit of a preface.”  He took a long breath.  “The Order now has custody of three individuals responsible for a number of… unethical things.”  A mild understatement.  “They’ve agreed, mostly, to something similar to what you did.”

Kirk nodded.  “Good.  Glad that worked out.”  He said.  When James gave him raised eyebrows, he just shrugged.  “We’re not out of the loop down here.  We get Order news!  Also, half of us were there when you decided on the strategic approach to these twats.”

“Heh.  Well, okay.  This gets to my question.”  James pressed his fingers together and arrowed them at Kirk.  “Would you be interested in being the guide for one of these people?”

“…Like… an AA sponsor?”  Kirk asked slowly.

“I’m not actually sure how Alcoholics Anonymous works, but probably closer to that than a probation officer, which is what someone else compared it to.”  James said.  “So ‘a little yes’, let’s say.”

Kirk tilted his head back, not thinking much before he asked in his firm voice, “Why me?”

“Because you’ve been there.”  James said.  “Because you know.  And also, more personally, because I think you’d resonate with the feeling of wanting to explore something weird this particular person seems to have.”

“Do I get a raise?”  Kirk asked.

James acknowledged that the man was joking, but he had an answer prepared anyway.  “Yes.”  He said.  “We’re gonna be moving to a pay scale *thing* determined by a base income modified by what responsibilities a person takes on.  One of the perks of replicator wealth generation.”

“What, like… universal basic income?”

“I mean, it’s hardly universal.  It’s just anyone who’s part of the Order.  But yes, universal within our tiny sphere of influence.”  James shook his head.  “We’re getting sidetracked.”

“Yeah, that happens around here.”  Kirk said knowingly.

“You don’t need to answer now.”  James said, pushing off the coffee table and standing up, swiping his coat back into a less ruffled position.  “And we’ll be setting up a protocol for guides to meet with each other regularly and work to improve the whole process.  So you’ve got a week or two to-“

“Yes.”  Kirk said, holding out a hand to stop James.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

James glanced around, then shrugged.  “Okay, that was easy.”  He said.  “Good.  Good!  Thanks!”  James shook his hand, added Kirk to the relevant parts of the Order’s discussion server, said goodbye, and made to leave.

“Yeah.”  Kirk said quietly behind him as he left.  “Thanks.”

_____

“Thanks for inviting me for this.”  Momo told James as she joined him in the dedicated experimentation basement.  “Though, you know there’s, like, a party going on upstairs?”

“Yeah, it’s Christmas.”  James answered.  “Or Christmas adjacent.  I dunno, I lost track of the day.  And I’ll go back up in a bit, I’m just kinda taking a break from the noise right now.  Uh…” He looked around the experiment basement. “Merry Christmas, wanna do some magic?”

It wasn’t *really* the dedicated experimentation basement.  They had a pretty hard time dedicating their basements to any one singular task.  The Research basement was also where they kept their spatially folded medical wing, a garden, and their vault.  The Response basement was home to a recording studio, a garden, and their private servers.  There were two different basements set aside for full or part time residents of the Lair, and those… well, okay, those were mostly exactly what they were.  Though one *did* have a cavernous public bathhouse in it.

Compared to that, the basement they hadn’t really done much with yet was *practically* their dedicated experimentation basement.

It also had a mech in it.  A twenty foot tall asphalt construct supported by a collage of different dungeontech items, meant to be piloted by someone in an induced dissociation while a co-pilot kept them on track.  It wasn’t combat ready.  Ideally it never would be. It was meant to be a telepad-enabled forklift.

It also had at this moment, in amongst the various computer engineering projects and the small scale mockup of a space elevator, two long tables where James had piled a bunch of his own experimental nonsense.  And now, in addition to James, it had Momo.

“I get that.”  Momo said.  “It was kinda loud.  Though we should be on the lookout for people sneaking down here to make out.”

“I put up a sign.”  He said.

Momo chuckled.  “I saw.  Well, whatever, thanks anyway for asking me.”

“Yeah, of course!”  James told her easily, looking up as she came in and tried to find a chair.  “This is really more your department than mine anyway.”

“Do you *have* a department?”   Momo asked.  Rapidly giving up on her search for a chair and just dropping heavily to the floor, swishing her bathrobe out around her legs as she sat cross legged.  “I know you don’t hang out around Research much.”

“My brain is… not good at that kind of thinking.”  James admitted.  “I mean, I *could* be I guess.  Like, I know it’s a skill, and not just an innate thing.  But I always get a headache trying to keep a bunch of moving variables in mind while trying to figure out what a random pencil does, you know?”

“I don’t!”  Momo cheerfully replied.

James snorted.  “Sure.  Are you comfortable there?  You can have my chair, I’m probably gonna pace around a lot anyway.”

“Nah, I’m good.  I have magic bones or something.”

“Really?”

“Nah.”

James gave Momo a disappointed sigh and a shake of his head.  “Alright, whatever.  So!  Got any insights for me on this, as our resident witch?  Or should we just dive into making mistakes?”

The ‘this’ that James was talking about was part of his current attempt to try to not be the least magically inclined person in the entire magical organization that was the Order of Endless Rooms.  For the first time in a while, there was no crisis looming; no dungeons out of control, no shadowy groups trying to kill them, the government couldn’t even *find* them, and it was… quiet.  Nice.  And among all of that, James had realized that despite being the one who had probably eaten the most skill orbs, he had possibly the least firm grasp on how to make the best use of half the stuff the Order actually had access to.

Momo, operating just on instinct, could make totems out of red orbs that could do stuff way outside half the actual literal spells James had access to.  Dave could absorb twice as many blues as James could.  And there were a half dozen people who had all found ways to make life of varying types beyond the one that James had the skill to awkwardly manifest.

And he felt like he was falling behind.

There was no other way to really frame it.  He didn’t have some desire to be the literal best at everything, James was keenly aware that he wasn’t some predestined chosen one.  But he acutely felt like he’d spent so long running from crisis to crisis that he hadn’t actually gotten the time a lot of the others had to just sit down and *screw around* with this stuff until he hit upon something cool.

So he’d acquired a pile of blue and yellow orbs, and an equal pile of random stuff that had been lying around in basement storage, and decided to take some time exploring his own understanding of magic item creation.

“I mean, I’m a big fan of making constant mistakes.”  Momo said, flopping back onto the smooth concrete floor, arms over her head.  “Also, I dunno what insights I’d have for you, ya know?  I’m new to this too.”

“You literally make magic items all the time.”  James shook his head at her with a baffled look on his face.

Momo made a sputtering noise.  “Those don’t count.  Red totems are just lines that look good, and then I fuck around with the materials until they work right, and then I make them small.”  She radically oversimplified her process to a useless degree.  “This is different!  This is, like… I dunno, this is weird.”

“Well, I’m with you there.”  James agreed, fiddling with one of the perfectly normal pencils that he’d picked up for this.  “Also, aren’t you *cold* down here?  I’m wearing a sweatshirt and this place is still chilly.”

“Purple!”  Momo said simply.  “I divorce myself from the human feeling of being uncomfortable!”

“Some people might say that’s unhealthy.”

“Not you though, mister ‘I wanna be immortal’.”

“Get your ass up and help me figure out what to do for a pencil.”  James laughed.

Here was where things got kind of tricky.  In theory, both of them knew how this worked; you built an idea of what a thing *could* do, and then told the blue orb to make that happen, using a yellow as a kind of power source.  From reading the notes other people had made, it seemed like it worked better the closer the outcome was to what the object was ‘supposed’ to do, if you didn’t want it to fail.

There weren’t enough completed tests so far to get a good idea of exactly how things ended up when they failed, but that was part of what James and Momo were doing today.

Momo grunted as she pulled herself off the floor, wiping a hand through her determinedly regrowing hair and stealing James’ chair as he stood up to start pacing around the table.  “Okay, well, writing, obviously.  Why not just make one that translates?”

“I am worried that won’t work if I don’t know the other language, honestly.”  James said.  “What about just a font?”

“What, like, writing in Times New Roman?”  Momo asked.  “Sure, go for it.”

“Okay.  Here.”  He handed her a pencil and a pair of orbs for herself.

Momo looked at the objects she’d taken without thinking about it.  “What?”

“Yeah, you too!”  James said.  “We’re testing here!  And I’ve got a *ton* of these things.  So.  Times New Roman.  Let’s go.  We make it work, or don’t, and then compare notes.”  He grinned at Momo, who glanced up at him, and gave an eager smile and a nod back.

Then he looked at the objects in his hands.  And after realizing he didn’t have a good way to balance three things with two hands, James set the pencil on the table, and held the orbs against it, and started trying to think.

Picture what it should do.  Build a model for a power.  What did a pencil do?  How did he want it to change?  James took a deep breath as he started to come up with more and more questions for himself, and realized this was going to be a lot more thorough than just wishing for something to be magic.

He let his mind wander down different paths.  What did a pencil do?  It wrote.  It made marks.  What did he want it to do?  Well, make marks.  But in different patterns.  With the new secondary pattern of a font.  Times New Roman, with its little sarif flourishes and thick-thin letters.  Standardize the marks.  Take what was written, and make it *this*.

He pressed too hard, and a yellow orb popped in his fingers.

[+1 Skill Rank : Agriculture - Soybeans - Soil Conditions]

James opened his eyes, and frowned.  Okay, a different approach.  And a new orb.

He closed his eyes again and took another breath.  The pencil *wrote*.  He wanted it to do that, but with this extra thing on top.  But what if someone wrote badly?  Well, fix it.  What if someone wrote a typo?  Ignore it.  You can make typos in any font.  What if… he let himself go down a trail of different questions, putting together a list of different answers to dumb questions.  And suddenly, something clicked in his head.

Because James had run D&D games for people before, and this was *familiar*.

He grinned idly as he added his growing list of answers to stupid questions to his mental model of what a font was, and his conception of how a pencil worked.  Sometimes, he’d correct or update a way he’d phrased how the object worked, but he kept that core idea in mind.  A pencil *wrote*.  It *marked*.  Everything flowed from that.  And all he needed was for this object to understand that it had a task to do.

His hands tingled with a soft dusting of an ethereal salt, and then a sudden lack of pressure.  He opened his eyes, and saw the last bits of dust from the orbs trailing away.  No notifications in his head, just an innocent looking untouched number two pencil, sitting there proudly.

“You done yet?”  Momo asked with a casual air.  James glanced over at her, to see her with her feet up on the table near the set of mechanical objects he’d stacked up for later.  A pencil twirled in her grip.

“Heh.  See, I *knew* you’d have an insight into this.”  James said.  Part of him felt like he’d felt before; behind.  *Not good enough*.  But… that wasn’t how this worked, was it?  They were a team here, and Momo being good at this just meant fewer points of failure for when something monstrous inevitably ate him.  And also part of him was proud for making a magic item.  “Wanna test these?”  He asked.

“Did you bring a pencil sharpen- okay you did.”  Momo cut her self off as James slid an electric pencil sharpener across the table as much as it would easily move on the bumpy surface.  “You first.”  She said.  “So I can look good!”

“Next time I’m inviting the high schoolers and not you.”  James threatened her with a snarky grin as he ran his pencil into the sharpener with a whirring buzz.  Pulling it out when it was good enough to work, and pulling over a sheet of scrap paper.  He quickly started writing random words on it, and rapidly found himself laughing.  “Okay, so…”

He held up his work.  A few words, written in a certain font.  All of them *much* larger than he’d meant.  But undeniably what he was going for.

“The teacher’s gonna dock you points if you don’t turn in the essay at size twelve.”  Momo told him.

“Oh, god, don’t give me flashbacks.”  James shuddered.  “Alright, let’s try yours.”  He said.

Momo went through the same process.  Sharpening, scribbling, and then looking.  But when she looked up to James her expression was a curious one.  “Uh…” She shifted the paper over to him.  Normal looking handwriting, though Momo’s was obviously different from his and not just because of the font magic.  “That’s weird.   I *know* it’s magic, what did it…” She trailed off, looking at the pencil in her hand.

And then James started laughing.  Because he’d just looked at the pencil sharpener.  And he turned it over so the warning label on the back faced Momo as he tried to get his giggles under control.

The whole thing written in a rather specific font.

“Okay, so, in fairness, mine *did* get the size right.”  Momo defended herself.

“Yes, very good!”  James gasped out, his laughter renewing itself as Momo also cracked, and joined him.  Eventually, the two of them got it out of their system, and refocused.  “Okay.”  James said, wiping at his eyes.  “Okay, so.  That’s a good start.  Now let’s do it again.  And see if we can get better, before we try the really weird stuff.”

They repeated the process four more times, each time trying different mental nudges to how they were approaching it to try to see what would happen.  For James, it was sort of like trying to find the ‘correct’ pattern.  He was looking for the right way to do this, so he could hit that mark on demand.  For Momo, it was more like making art with new materials.  She was looking for the style that fit her best.

Both of them made a few mistakes.  Mostly mistakes, really.  Out of eight more tries, James only got two more pencils working like he wanted, while Momo technically got four.  Some of the failures - the ones that weren’t just accidentally popping an orb - were fun though.  The pencil that would *only* make lines that were within the outline of a letter of the proper font was… almost spitefully without use.  The one that started fires if touched against anything that was Times New Roman also seemed that way.

Until Momo pointed out that James seemed like he was getting irritated with the mental exercise.  And they started to put together that it wasn’t really possible for a person to completely isolate their thoughts and turn them into objects to use.  Emotion bled in, it seemed, as did idle thoughts and distractions.

“You know what this is mostly making me wonder?”  James asked as he swept ashes off the lightly scorched table and into a garbage bag.

“How we have all these blue orbs?”  Momo asked.  “Like, dude, do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get people to bring me reds?  I basically have to source my own.”

James refused to be sidetracked, but he had time for a small answer.  “We find hundreds of magic pencils that are about this useful, and they get turned into size one blues at a constant rate.”  He said.  “But no, I’m wondering… well, actually kind of that.  *Why* do we find so many weird fucking pencils?  Why are there so many dungeontech items just lying around?  This is fun and all, but we did just make a bunch of things that are basically useless except as benign looking smuggling methods to get blue orbs through airport security without anyone asking why they can see color on the x-ray scanner.  How *bored* is the dungeon that it’s churning these things out?”

“It’s *gotta* be something other than boredom.”  Momo spun the chair she was in around, going just fast enough in the swiveling seat that she knew she’d be kinda sick when she stopped.  “Maybe it’s trying to talk to us.”

“Momo half the pens explode in some way.”

“Maybe it’s trying to talk to us but it’s mad.”

“Can’t really argue with that.”  James snorted a laugh.  “Okay.  Actually, this time, let’s see if we *can* make a pencil that explodes.”

“Uh…” Momo dropped her feet, stopping her spinning and causing her to lurch a bit as the dizziness caught up.  “That seems like a terrible idea?”

“Okay, yeah.  But I want to try something that just isn’t pencil behavior.”  James said.  “How about… generating electricity or something?”

Momo dragged her chair over to the table in short bursts.  “How about,” she suggested in a critical tone, “something that can’t kill us if we overdo it?  Like, don’t get me wrong, I know my rep around here for the brain damage and stuff, but come on.  How about a pencil that flies?”

“I can still see that killing us, but in a much more avoidable way, so sure.”  James agreed.

Once again, the two of them went silent as they focused on making something that did what they wanted.  For James, it was almost easier to imagine what flight meant, even accounting for the GM-mindset he was putting himself in; trying to answer expected stupid questions from players about how it worked in orbit and what counted as flying versus hovering.  And when he thought he had a good idea of what a flying pencil would look like, he gave it that little mental push, and…

[+1 Skill Rank : Manufacture - Boxes - Cardboard]

Momo swearing got him to look up, and he saw her holding one less orb having gotten similar results.  “Okay, weird.”  James said.  “Why did that not work, but the other one did?  I thought I was getting kinda good at it.  Is my mental prowess only strong enough for fonts?”

“What were you thinking of?”  Momo asked.  “When yours broke.”

“Answering dumb questions.”  He said simply.  “Why, what about you?”

“I’m mostly just sort of giving it a feeling, I guess?”  Momo said.  “Like, I know what flying is.  So I’m trying to share that vibe.”

James hummed.  “And neither worked.”  He said.  “You know, we’ve actually found a pencil before that… I mean, it didn’t fly, but it did ignore gravity.”  He paused.  “I think Pendragon ate it, actually?  I think.  I can’t prove that, but it would explain a lot.”

“Pen is absolutely impacted by gravity.”  Momo rolled her eyes at him.

“Oh, *right*, we broke that one for an emergency!”  James grinned as he thought back on one of the more straightforward fights for his life he’d had.  “Good times.”

Momo looked like she was going to say something snarky, but then she stopped.  “Hey, yo.”   She tapped at the table rapidly, getting James’ attention.  “What size orb?”

“From… the pencil?  Uh…” He tried to remember more than just the roughest outline of that day, what was now years ago.  “Probably two.  Yeah, I wanna say two.  It wasn’t tiny, I remember that.”

Momo threw up her arms, staring at him with an expectant look on her face that gradually slipped as James just stared at her, waiting for her input.  Eventually, she dropped her arms and groaned.  “That’s what Reed and the rest of the nerds are skirting around!”  Momo declared.  “The farther it is from *being a pencil*, the bigger a blue it requires!”

“That’s conjecture.”  James declared with a dramatic flair.  “I learned that word from hanging around the nerds.”  He added.

“Doesn’t have to be!  We’ve got two of these.”  Momo threw him a slightly larger blue, and the two of them got back to work.

A deep breath.  Visualization.  Minutes ticked by as they silently formed what they wanted in their heads.  James kept his mind as focused as he could, pictured what he wanted, and *pushed* the power he was holding into the pencil.

And then the number two pencil in front of him greedily sucked up the orbs from his hands, and rocketed off the table so hard it nearly knocked the piece of furniture on its side.  A tiny streak of yellowed wood shooting up to the tall ceiling overhead and impacting like a bullet.

James was staring upward, open mouthed, when the orb from the now shattered item fell back and landed in his throat, leaving him sputtering.

[+1 Skill Rank : Athletics - Catching]

[Problem Solved : Spam email removed]

“That’s not a problem that email doesn’t already solve!”  He shouted, rubbing the back of his hand across his tongue that felt weird from either the sensation of the orb bursting in his mouth, or from the spray of ceiling dust that had gotten in with it.

“Uh… so… I take back the thing about it not killing us.”  Momo said.  James glared at her, about to say something, but then noticed the pencil leisurely orbiting her head, turning in a gentle pinwheel motion.  “Yours, obviously.  Mine works fine.”

“That actually looks really cool.”  James grudgingly admitted.  “And yeah, it did feel different, didn’t it?  Like… there’s a little bit more *pull* from the bigger blues.  I didn’t get that that was a feeling from the orb itself.”

Momo shook her head.  “Yeah, it honks, but humans don’t seem to get magic without dungeon stuff.  So anything like that is some kind of… that.”

“Honks?”

“I got it from Sarah!”  Momo cheerfully declared.  “It means it fucking sucks, but I can say it around kids and no one gets mad.”  She spun herself away from James again, spreading her arms to the rest of the stuff on the table.  “So, what’s next?  Because I see you brought down some camraconda arms?”

James perked up.  “I did, yeah.”  He said.  “Though it’s one of the original models that aren’t very good?  I just wanted to… you know.  See if we even *could* do something with this.”

“Because it doesn’t have any kind of socially ingrained conceptual weight, like the abstract idea of ‘a pencil’ does?”  Momo asked in a rapid voice.

The sentence got a long blink and a tilt of James’ head.  “Uh, no, because I wasn’t sure if we could even figure this out.  But it turns out it’s a lot easier than I had expected, *sort of*, once you have the general idea down.  Conceptual weight?”

“Yeah, like… my totems do some weird shit sometimes where they’ll inform you on… not ‘technicalities’, exactly, but like, they can have trouble with new stuff.  Especially dungeon new stuff, like the skulljacks.”  Momo idly lifted and spread out one of the mechanical arms from the camraconda-sized backpack, getting a gentle whirr of the servos inside as she did.  “Like they don’t know things that aren’t available knowledge or something.  I’ve been sort of thinking of it as them tapping into a collective unconscious, because everything else is bullshit, so why not that too?”

“Ah, and if that applies to blue items, then something like this wouldn’t have anything to… I guess ‘hang an effect on’, basically?”  James nodded.  “Okay, I get that.  But also, the idea of prosthetic limbs isn’t new?  So I feel like we can *probably* make it work, even if that is a condition.”

Momo grinned.  “Hey, I’m up for trying!  What do you want it to *do*?”

“…Hm.”  James walked around to the other side of the table, sliding their pile of font experiments to the side.  “Work better?  No, no.  Be… part of the user’s body.  Be more fluid, grab properly, maybe an improved lift strength?”

“Too many things.”  Momo shook her head.

James grunted assent.  “Yeah, yeah.”  They’d tried on one of their early tests to make a pencil that did two different things, and it just hadn’t worked.  Blue orbs could make literal magic, but only one twist of reality at a time, it seemed.  “Okay.  Let’s keep it simple.  Grabbing.”

“Cool.”  Momo held up a tiny sliver of a blue orb.  “You or me?”

“You are objectively better at this so far.  Though, you *did* so far set the most things on fire, so…” James trailed off, leaving Momo to flip him off with one hand, and push the colored spheres in her other down onto the assembly of arms.

James had been closing his eyes, so he hadn’t actually seen Momo’s process.  But now, watching, he noticed that she didn’t seem nearly as meditative about the whole thing as he did.  Momo *scowled* while she worked.  Sort of.  It wasn’t an angry scowl, it was more the look of someone who was making faces while they worked because ‘what shape is my face in’ was so far down their priority list that it got ignored.

A minute ticked by, then another.  Momo shifted a few times, and James started pacing, trying to do anything that wasn’t interrupting.  A few times, he caught small muttered words from her.  And then, Momo clicked her tongue, shoved her hand all the way down to the mechanical device, and let out a yelp of either triumph or shock.  It was hard to tell.

“Was that a good barbarian yawp, or a bad one?”  James asked.

“What?”  Momo glanced up, confused.  Then her mouth solidified into a thin line.  “Oh.  It’s fine.  I just think I screwed something up at the end.”

“Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” James rotated the mechanical backpack slightly, and lifted one of the arms.  “Doesn’t feel any different like this.”  He commented as Momo did the same on her side.  Then he poked at the three pronged gripping apparatus that capped off the arm, and froze.

Or, more accurately, he just poked it, and didn’t pull away.  Because his finger wouldn’t come off it.  “Uh.”  James looked over to Momo, who was holding one of the grippers in her hand.  “James halp.”  She shook her arm furiously, like she was trying to get free, but it didn’t change.

“Okay, well, we’ve learned something today about literalism.”  James nodded calmly, and ducked under the table, pulling the arm he was attached to and also by association Momo over the surface as he grabbed at his trusty problem solving device.

Coming back up, he hefted the crowbar he’d seized, and hammered it four times into the backpack, and the motor and control assembly it held.  On the fourth hit, something cracked enough that the magic considered the item ‘broken’, and like the naturally sourced dungeontech they’d found, the entire object crumbled into dust, leaving behind only the orb on the table.

“Good.  Good.”  James nodded.  “That still works.  Hey, actually!  Do you think we could use this to get rid of highly toxic materials?  Or would that just leave toxic dust?”

Momo rubbed at her palm, opening and closing her hand.  “You can try that one yourself.  Or buy me a hazmat suit.”

“We have hazmat suits.”  James told her as he swept the dust into the garbage bag to mix with the ashes of their earlier failure.  “There’s, like, two in Research.  Momo you *live* on that floor, how do you not know all this?”

“I sleep a lot!”  She defended herself.  “Whatever.  I screwed that one up.  Is there anything else you wanna do?  We’ve got one orb left.”

“I mean, I *wanna* say we should go find a Status Quo item and turn that into something weirder…” James said.  He wasn’t even finished with his sentence before Momo was out of the chair and jogging down the hall yelling over her shoulder that she’d be right back.  “No, no, Momo!  I don’t wanna…. We’re gonna blow something up!”  James stared at the darkened hall that his science buddy had just run down, and sighed.  “We’re gonna blow something up…” he repeated to himself, quieter, but with a resigned laugh anyway.

_____

By the end of the next day, Nate’s team had stripped the Alchemist’s ‘business’ mansion and all of their known stockpiles for everything of value.

The fact that they had a business mansion, and then their own individual personal use mansions, made James a *little* sick at the sheer waste of it all.  But by this point, the knowledge that capitalism was an exponentially unfair system of exploitation wasn’t exactly new, so he shrugged it off.  There were more solvable problems right now.

A lot of the personal wealth of the Alchemists had been lost with the crippling of their organization and the deaths of many of their members.  They had kept their operation an open secret, but they weren’t protected by any informorphs as far as the Order could determine, and so when they’d died, mundane systems had taken over and things like estate lawyers and tax law had kicked into effect.  James was fully prepared to get into a stand up fight with a dragon, but he was less willing to get in the way of the IRS.  Not *now* anyway.

But personal wealth aside, their true power wasn’t money, whether they acknowledged that or not.  No, the thing that made them dangerous, and the thing the Order had more or less fully plundered, was four things.

First, and strangely least worrying, the orrery.  The Alchemists had called it a room, but it wasn’t really.  It was just room-sized.  An assembly of polished iron arms and wires and spheres.  Moving it had been a nightmare, as had finding a space for it in the Lair, though eventually it had settled in the experimental basement near where James and Momo had been running their blue tests the day before.  The problem was… no one knew how to use it.  The orrery was so *flagrantly* magical, and every Alchemist who was currently under their care knew what it did *in abstract*, but none of them knew how to make it work.

In theory, it showed relative strength of different orginizations.  It could, if you knew the way to do it, target geographical locations, filter by policy, focus, or even size of the organizations you wanted to sort through.  And through careful study, you could build a picture of who had influence where, and what they wanted.

No one had a fucking clue how to make it work.  Some people were on it though.

Second was the Alchemist’s stockpiles.  Casks, sometimes *barrels*, of potions that had been produced and stored away for a rainy day.  Or ones that had simply not been taken to market yet.  It was… too much.  And yet not enough.  The logistics of big numbers reared its head again; they had now enough of the exercise potion to give everyone a year of heavy physical conditioning in under a week.  Hell, they could do that for a thousand people, maybe two.  But then… they’d be out.

Stockpiles weren’t production.  And without the ability to rapidly replace the potions, they were useful, but not reliable.  Still, though, the one that could purge lung cancer that they now had forty thousand doses of was something that they were already planning to filter through their growing network of medical contacts.

Third and fourth together were… well, the ability to replace potions.  A tree that grew fruits of golden liquid that could be processed into magical elixers.  And, to go with that, the collective research of the Guild of Alchemists.  *Decade* of notes, test logs, and experiments.  Not to mention the combined understanding and instincts of their pseudo-prisoners.

It was… disappointing.  Their collective knowledge was disappointing, there was no other way to say it.  James had frowned as he’d skimmed through the entires as Research had diligently added them to the Order’s databases.  There wasn’t *enough*.  Decades of notes, and this was all they’d come up with?  Thirty working potions, half of which were barely useful, and the other half of which had taken years of iterating to get to their current potency?  That was it?

The key to the why and how of it was his old nemisis, capitalism.  The Alchemists had, at the end of the day, been a business.  Their research and development was exactly what was needed to stay as a leader in their field.  And when your field was ‘the only provider of arcane elixers’, then it wasn’t hard to stay on top.  Monopolies bred contempt and stagnation.

Why work to make better healing potion?   After all, the health care industry already took the profits from *that* cow.  Instead, just keep selling an exercise supplement to models and athletes, and cash in.  Why make a potion that could actually make someone permanently smarter?  You’ve already got the one that politicians and lawyers pay out the nose for just to read faster for a night.

It was pretty telling that when Alchemists Red and Nile were given a tiny amount of room and resources to experiment, they had developed a cure for lung cancer within three years.  The Alchemists could have done that decades ago, but it… wasn’t profitable.  Not compared to what they already made with the fruit.

The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  Alternately, the Sap of the Tree of Knowledge, though it was still technically fruit, as far as anyone could nail down the taxonomy of something that was obviously not mundane in origin.  It was, on its own, nothing.  Eating one wouldn’t even taste like anything.  But the liquid inside it was an arcane catalyst that could turn *anything* into something wondrous.

Or lethal.  Or just bad.  Their notes were full of failures.

The tree itself had left James laughing for about ten minutes when he’d seen it.  He’d been imagining some kind of proud elm tree, golden light glittering through leafy green branches, towering over some central room in the Alchemist’s headquarters.  And he had, to be fair, been *close*.  It was certainly close to an elm tree in appearance.

It was also a bonsai, and maybe two feet tall.

“I am starting to see,” James commented to Nate, “why they might have had a hard time producing large quantities of their potions.”

“Don’t touch that lamp.”  Nate told him, arms folded, not indicating which of the three grow lamps around the tree he actually meant.  “It likes the lamp.”

James hadn’t been about to touch anything, and now he doubly wasn’t.  “Reed has already given me fifteen requests for fruit to start experimenting with.”  He said quietly.  “Because, you know, we’ve got some *weird* stuff in here.  You wanna be the one to try a potion made out of this, and the Shaper Substance?”

“Fuck off.”  Nate said bluntly.  “I’m going back to work.  Enjoy your tree.”

“There’s a meeting tomorrow!”  James called after him.  “To figure out what we’re doing with this!”

“I know, I’m catering it!”  Nate yelled back.

James shook his head, staring at the green leaves dancing under the warm lights of the sunlamps.  “I don’t think he knows what his actual job is.” He said to no one in particular, getting side looks from a few of the dozen Order members bustling around the area sorting their intake of materials or just looking at the tiny magical tree. His phone beeped, and he looked down to see his alarm going off; he had to go get ready for a sweeper run through the Sewer.  He nodded and pocketed his phone, turning to head to the armory, before he sighed.  “I don’t think I know what *my* job is either.”  James muttered to himself.