The Daily Grind - Chapter 252 (Patreon)

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." -President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to his brother-

_____

The next couple of days were a bit of a blur to James.  He wasn’t in a daze or unaware of what was going on; everything he did was deliberate and with good reason.  It was just that he felt like he was in a constant state of moving from one task to the next, and he didn’t really sit down that often.

He was drained, but not injured.  His feet hurt from endlessly standing, but it wasn’t incapacitating.  Just worth complaining about.

It wasn’t like he was at a shortage of things to do.  So, while beginning to prepare for dungeon delves on a larger scope than normal, James also just ran down his checklist of important tasks.

He continued to give the introductions to the Order for the Status Quo prisoners as Mercy, the hospital’s comforting infomorph, broke them out of their mental cages one by one.  They had a lot of questions, some of which he could easily understand and field.  And once they started getting their voices back and James was able to take names, it was a soothing feeling to reunite people with their friends.  As it turned out, the Order had gotten almost everyone.  Not a perfect score - there were moments where he had to tell people that their companions were probably dead, and those moments were painful on both sides - but better than James had any right to hope for.

While he was down there, he also visited the recovering knights.  A lot of people had gotten hurt in the raid, even if no one from the Order had died.  A lot of the people on the field had their own young authorities, and while it was really taxing to use them to enact change on the world, the quiet infomorphs were definitely responsible for making people just that little bit tougher and quicker.  Harder to kill.  Enough to make the difference.  That, and the toughening potions, and the shield bracers, and the armor, and the camracondas, and a few random passive defenses, all combined to mean that while it was certainly a gauntlet for everyone, it wasn’t lethal.

Not that Deb was treating it that way.  Everyone who had ended up shot, while the small caliber bullets hadn’t been enough to permanently injure them, was still being treated like a baseline human.  A human knight of the Order of Endless Rooms was, mostly, not going to have more than some light bleeding and a mild scar from being repeatedly shot in the stomach, but to hear Deb talk, they were all in critical condition and needed to be tied to the beds.

So James talked to bruised and lightly bloodied humans, camracondas with torn cabling and more uncertain damage to their internal organs, and one particularly irate inhabitor who insisted that having his arm nearly amputated was a mild inconvenience at best.  Morale was high, despite the number of people sent to get stitches.  Everyone liked the way things had gone, and were excited to learn more about the chanters, or to get back out there and strike at Status Quo again.

James wasn’t sure they’d be doing that, but he told the knights who asked that they’d be on the list if it came up.  Ethan specifically had given him an excited outburst, talking about heroism and valor and other stuff that James felt maybe should have been offset by the fact that the kid had a broken leg until the next Office run could copy more anti-broken-bone orbs.

He also got to visit Banana while he was down there, which was a continual delight.  Not for too long, since Amy, the Order’s contracted veterinarian, was coming by to tutor her in bird biology.  But he said hi to her and her stuffed shark, noting that her hospital room was starting to feel a little more like a personal home as the walls slowly covered with Banana’s doodles of sharks and elephants, and the counters gained little touches like extra small stuffed animals, or a few hanging bathrobes for her to wear when she managed to get out of bed and wander the halls curiously.

He’d wanted to check in on Ishah, one of the first ratroaches that had come back with the Order after they made it a policy to strip every person they could out of the Akashic Sewer.  He’d gone through shaper substance treatment yesterday, and was sleeping it off, and James wanted to offer a congratulation even though he wasn’t personally close to the dungeon creation.  But one of the nurses told him that Ishah was sleeping, and he should probably check back later.  Which was, really, fine with James; he was in no hurry, and now neither was their newest example of how a body could be remade to suit its wearer.

Aside from spending chunks of the days downstairs, James also spent chunks of the days downstairs.  The fact that the Lair was iceberg-esque in form, with far more building underground, made it less weird than it otherwise could have been, but he still liked to phrase it that way when he told Anesh what he’d been doing so his boyfriend would give him a level and bemused look.

He was one of the people who was looking over the Order’s growing list of copied purple orbs.  He knew that Karen was pretty strict about the distribution of their precious magical coffee grounds that ran the ritual, but they still put out about a hundred orbs a week to continually upgrade members of the Order.  And in light of the most recent events, it seemed like a good time to make sure they were making the most of it.

James didn’t have any particular insights beyond the others, except for his own combat experience.  But he was happy to add to the discussion, and also that the opportunity to catch up on any purples that had been discovered but he hadn’t learned about.

There weren’t many; a lot of the purples the Order found were… specific.  Worryingly specific.  Well, not worrying.  Most dungeon magic didn’t worry James anymore.  But it wasn’t exactly useful to have a shell upgrade that made you vomit five percent less, or let you type for an extra hundred words before your hands cramped.  But it was still valuable to go over what they could improve that had wide use, and what should be going into the standard armory package.

The most frustrating thing they collectively learned was that they actually had three different purple orbs that prevented broken bones.  Or, conveniently, fixed them.  As with all orbs from Officium Mundi, there were diminishing returns though.  If you took the orb that prevented one break a month, and then took a copy of it, the second iteration would only stop .6 breaks, which was… unclear at best.  It went down further from there.  But if you used a different orb, you could circumvent that problem.  James had known they had an orb for one a month, and an orb for one a year, which stacked just fine.  But they actually had two different purples that prevented one a month.  They were identical in effect, but different iterations of the orb, so they needed to be copied separately.

And they were not labeled correctly.

Sorting that out had been a headache.  The iLipedes with scanning apps didn’t even help, because they showed identical results.  James had eventually just excused himself from the room, leaving the others with distant looks in their eyes as he snuck away from what would probably be an eventual solution of resetting their stockpiles back to one orb each, labeling them A and B, and starting over.

His next task did not help his headache.  The Order had, after doing a thorough sweep for tracking devices, brough in all the stolen records from the Status Quo offices.  And James, as someone who had an unnatural knowledge of cryptography, and a personal idea of the particular brand of awful this Status Quo could be, was on hand to help decipher some of it.

A lot of it was accounting, or logistics.  Payroll, expenses for food or hotels or ammunition.  Some of it was vague or coded language about coercion or blackmail of various parties as Status Quo fought to keep ‘order’ across the world.

A lot of the hard copy was semi-redacted, probably to confuse anyone trying to figure out how many agents exactly they had.  But the digital records, once their sleeper agent infomorph traps were eliminated, yielded better numbers.  And they were good, at least from the Order’s point of view.

As with half the other stuff he’d said, the man James had spoken with on the phone had lied about the scope of their operation.  Unless they were really concealing stuff, Status Quo had at most fifty people, and half of them weren’t exactly combatants.  Or at least, weren’t enhanced.  Which meant that they’d lost a significant chunk of their ability to operate, as well as one of their main ways of empowering their agents.  Their use of contractors and specialists made them flexible, and unaccountable, but that required resources that the Order was homing in on and planned to take away.

On the less good side, they found reports of prisoner executions.  The group churned through their captives at a disgusting rate, often only keeping people around until the dungeons they’d been delving and all their contacts were confirmed eliminated.  Then they were fed to the chanters, the bugs coerced into killing the defenseless prisoners so that when Status Quo in turn killed them, it would be worth more experience points or whatever bile inducing term they used.

James found himself longing for the headache of having too many broken bone solutions, as he scrolled through and matched the names of liberated prisoners they had in their care to the locations of dead dungeons and the dates of upcoming ‘processing’.  On a whim, and to escape the grim reality of the roster of the sacrificed, he cross referenced some of the documentation with the list of potential dungeon zones that Momo’s AI child had been in the process of narrowing down when it had… died?  James didn’t know the term.  But he felt like the AI would have experienced some vindication to know that it was slowly narrowing the targeting circles on at least three correct guesses, even if those dungeons were gone now.

When he could tolerate the basements and the dry lists of the dead no longer, James went to Townton, and helped out however was needed.  Delivering green and blue orbs to bring nearby buildings back to life, helping to feed the chanter population, studying the creatures as they moved and kept a skittish distance from the Order, setting up shelters from the elements for them.  All things that they had plenty of people to do, but that was no reason that James couldn’t be one more set of hands pitching in.  Especially since he was one of the best with his constant blue ability to manipulate asphalt, and he stretched it to the limit clearing streets and pulling spikes of the stuff out of the surrounding structures.

What was odd about the period of time was that he was alone for a lot of it.  There were plenty of other people he worked with, but he didn’t see his partners much.  Just small bits at night when they shared a bed, and also each other’s minds; skulljack connections letting them know how they all felt about the chaotic events of the last few days, and also letting them share their love in a way that was no longer novel, but had become ever deeper the more they did it.  But during his daily activities, James didn’t find much time to talk to people as friends, just as fellow problem solvers.

He did quickly find a time to get Zhu to try insulin, though, which did absolutely nothing for the Underburbs disease that presumably infected the navigator.  Zhu had seemed… resigned to it.  And had gone back to his latest nap, which he was taking more and more of.

He also got a chance to talk to Rufus.  The strider had a new favorite tool; a custom little keyboard he was carrying around with him everywhere slung over his growing flank.  His esoteric inability to use written language somehow not extending to the use of emojis, and one of the engineers had put together for him a way to communicate with the more verbal Ordre population.

They talked about the Order’s outline for their schooling program.  Which was, all things considered, kind of mundane.  Rufus had a budget request, confirmed by Texture-Of-Barkdust, so that they could get started hiring staff and going through ‘adaptation’, which was like training, but for explaining that magic was real and some ratroaches were closer to teenagers than others.  The stapler also had a line on a nearby building that had used to be some kind of youth sports club until the pandemic had annihilated its finances and it turned into a hollow shell, just waiting to be filled with education.

It took a little while to get some details down, because emoji weren’t great for setting dates, but James tentatively agreed to do some interviews in between upcoming dungeon excursions.  He looked forward to that; James was a big fan of inducting people into a weirder world.  He just needed to make sure he was having an okay day when he did it; the last time he’d tried, he’d been kind of a dick to people who were probably legitimately confused, and he wanted to be better this time around.

And the whole time James was doing all of this, there were constant small check-ins with the people who made up the Order of Endless Rooms.  He said hi to Harvey and a dozen different members of the Response program, as well as met a couple more of their civilian oversight board.  He talked to Bill about when he had an actual meeting with a power company scheduled.  He checked up on the inhabitor population; the reclusive group of survivors of their species had been opening up more lately, but it was always good to make sure they had everything they needed.  He had a quick meeting with Jeanne, her daughter Ava, and her semi-daughter Hidden, making sure the girls growing up together weren’t encountering problems as the youngest human-infomorph pairing.  He helped in the kitchens and with keeping the Order’s disperate buildings cleaned, talking to the people who also often handled those tasks and looking for ways to improve or streamline things while he helped.  He called JP or Nate every six minutes to harass them, just in case Status Quo showed any signs of moving against them.

He took a lot of notes.  And asked a lot of questions.

James had been putting a lot of thought into what it meant to be a paladin of the Order of Endless Rooms.  And while he knew with a certainty that his job was to be the person who faced danger and fought problems and protected people, he was starting to feel like what he really liked was the quiet parts, where he just talked to everyone, and tried to put together where their magic could do the most good.

He did one other thing, too.

It had become clear, from the latest Status Quo raid, that if James was going to be the frontline of the Order, he needed more of an advantage.  Unlike their opponents, he wasn’t even bulletproof.  And being slightly better than a normal human in a few different ways wasn’t enough to add up to making him a superhero.  So he made a general request, and got approval from the majority of the Order, and started to plan out how to get better.

_____

James hung up his phone and stared at the technological rectangle in his hand as he and Alanna walked through one of the Lair’s many basement hallways.  “JP says to fuck off.”  He said with a casual voice.

“Aw, tell him I said hi too.”  Alanna replied instantly as she twisted the bracelet form of her authority around her wrist.  She’d been trying to think of a name for the semi-living infomorph for a couple days, and James had been utterly unhelpful.  “Does this mean that Status Quo is thoroughly routed?”

“No, it means I’m supposed to stop harassing him.”  James sighed as they took a corner and passed by a maintenance closet, the hallway narrowing to one of the smaller side paths that no one used that often.  “But also, yeah, from the actual intel that Ben and Planner are making available… it looks like we got away clean on this one.”  He didn’t let himself feel relief.  Not yet.  But he was hopeful that this time there wouldn’t be any kind of retaliation.

Alanna nodded, breathing through her nose as she remembered the last Status Quo incident, and how she hadn’t been too far from this spot in the Lair when she was ambushed and nearly beaten to death by a group of armed thugs.  “Cool.”  She said out loud.  “So.  Dungeon expedition is on then?”  Alanna did what she did best, and bulldozed her emotional memories with all the subtlety of an actual piece of earthmoving equipment.

Not that James didn’t realize what she was doing, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to help, except to offer his little bit of support.  “Yeah, dungeon things.”  He said, leaning over as they walked to lightly bump against his girlfriend.  “We just need to put a team together, and then… pick a target.”

“Well pick a target first, since I assume you don’t want to bring the same twenty people on a roller coaster of delves and oh holy shit you do.  That’s what that face means.  You absolutely do.  You fucking idiot?”  The last bit was said as close to lovingly as Alanna could make it.  “Hell no.”

“Honestly, it seems like a good idea.”  James countered, explaining himself as they passed by one of the hallway intersections that radiated off of the hub of Research’s domain.  They had to wait for someone to wheel by a cart with some kind of heavy machinery on it, which James stared at as it passed, familiarity gnawing at the back of his mind.  “Anyway.  I think that there’s something to be said for the team building potential of that kind of gauntlet.  But also we should take breaks?  I’m not saying we go on a solid two months of delve.  I’m saying we spend a week exploring the Stacks, then a week off, then a week climbing the… Climb… then a week off.  You get it.”

“What if someone gets hurt?”  Alanna asked.  “Or just bows out?”

“Then we find someone else?  I’m not forming a cult or something!  There’s hundreds of people here, and it probably wouldn’t be that hard to put up a flier on the local library bulletin board and get a few hits if we really need more bodies.”  James shrugged, and then smiled to himself as the small motion failed to elicit the ache that the bruise on his shoulder had been giving him.  It always felt nice to heal.  “Anyway.  The only real restriction is no camracondas for Officium Mundi, and probably no ratroaches for the Akashic Sewer.  So there won’t be too much shuffling around required.”

Alanna drummed her fingers against the green band on her wrist and hummed as they walked.  “Camracondas could come to the Office, we just need to get them the earrings, right?”

“The… oh, the Old Squo ones?”  James asked, and got a flat stare back that was Alanna’s way of telling him they needed better names for things.  “Right.  Sure.  Cause they have the power to… I don’t even remember.  I know they do invisibility, what else do they do?  Something about deflecting notice?”  He snapped his fingers, cutting off Alanna as she opened her mouth.  “No, I remember, sorry. Or I remember that they let the camracondas go back into the Office and not get snagged by it.  But there’s the problem of time on those, so no.”

“Right, right.  Charges, cooldowns, and duration.  I know math.”  Alanna snorted.  “I live with Anesh, I can’t not know math.”

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short.  I live with Anesh too and I don’t know anything about math!”

Alanna swatted at his arm.  “You fucking liar, I’ve seen your character sheet.”  James laughed as they passed by a lost looking ratroach.  He and Alanna stopped briefly to help the scared new person get back on track, before they moved on.  “You know,” Alanna said softly, “I can feel my authority sort of soaking in every time I do that?”

“Do what? Give directions?”

“Help people.”  She said.  “Maybe take charge of helping people, no clue how specific it is.  You should get an authority.”

The directive came out of nowhere for James, and before he’d really thought about it, he was opening his mouth to start to say no.  Pushing back on what he saw as power he didn’t need, or on change in general.  But he paused before he spoke.  “I don’t know.”  He said instead, sticking his hands behind his head and looking up at the concrete ceiling and the overhead lights.  “If I do, it should be after we nail down what a paladin does.  And I’m not sure how it’d interact with Zhu, either.”

“Honestly?  I don’t think it would.”  Alanna shrugged.  “From everyone I’ve talked to, and this lil guy, it feels like they’re… sorta quiet?  They’re not even really people, exactly.  More like the infomorph version of dogs.”

“Our dog is in college.”  James stopped.  “I should stop calling Auberdeen our dog.  She’s in college.”

“Fair.  But you know what I mean.”  Alanna smirked at him.  “Sometimes I get feelings from it.  Like, I know what would make it stronger, and what would make it stronger is tied to my ‘job’, but my job is helping people and running a Response team, so it all sort of loops around?  Do what I was doing anyway, and it reinforces and feeds the authority.  Virtuous cycle.  We talked about this a million years ago.  Anyway, get one.  It takes up less headspace than Planner does, and I know you’ve got Planner in there.”  She poked at his forehead, eliciting a weaving dodge from her boyfriend.

“I’ll think about it.”  James said, and when Alanna stopped walking, folded her arms, and glowered at him, he held up his hands in protest.  “I’ll actually think about it!  I promise!  I just… I wanna actually make sure it’ll be okay for Zhu, you know?  I’m cured of my dungeon bullshit disease, but he’s not, and I don’t even know how to start on that.  I don’t want to do anything that might hurt him until I know he’s actually going to be okay.”

Alanna let her arms drop, shaking her head.  “That’s really cute.  Alright, I’ll bug you about it later when your ghost bird boyfriend is safe.”

“He is at most half of one of those nouns.”

“How can someone be half of your boyfriend?”

James smirked as they kept walking toward the upcoming hallway intersection.  “I dunno, ask me and Anesh from three years ago.”  He waited for Alanna to finish her laugh, a smile tugging at his own lips, and then asked something more important.  “So, do you want to come on my dungeon expedition?”

She stared at him.  “Obviously, you dumbass.”

“Okay, just wanted to check.”  He pulled his phone out and slowed down in walking as he started a document and put her name at the top.  “That’s one down.  Now to fill the roster out.  I’m gonna actually try to not put all our knights in a dungeon at the same time, that seems stupid.  Also I really do want to go for a pretty diverse group, so that we can build more ties across the Order.  Hm… maybe…”

He trailed off as Momo came running around the corner, holding one arm out in front of her, her other hand clamped around her wrist.  “Shit, shit, shit, shit!”  She was chanting as she jogged past, blood dripping down her limb.  “Hey guys!  Sorry!  No time!”  Momo called out as she swerved between James and Alanna and kept running, skidding on socked feet as she took a corner too fast and slammed into the concrete basement wall.

James and Alanna stared after her, both of them slowly trying to figure out what the fuck just happened.  “Uh… is that… bad?”  James asked eventually.

“Fuckin’ probably.”  Alanna sighed.  “Do you mind if I go handle that?  I’ll talk to you later.”

“Oh yeah, sure.  You won’t be late for your thing?”

“What thing?”

“The…” James looked back in the direction they were walking and talking.  “The thing you’re going to?”

Alanna stared at him with a dawning realization.  “Buddy, I’ve been following you.”

The two of them met each other's eyes, and then in unspoken unison, took deep breaths and sighed at the same time.  Then they burst out laughing.  “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t!”  James said as Alanna took off after Momo.  She just waved back, and he smiled and shook his head as he went off to find one of their janitor stations so he could deal with all the blood Momo just ruined the basement hallway with.

_____

While he was down in the basement, James checked in on a strange little garden.

The repurposed closet - which he just now realized should have overlapped a bathroom spatially - was a vibrant as ever.  Rufus and a few of his trusted companions maintaining small growths of various different dungeon plants, a miniature greenhouse of Office or Climb flora, mixed with a half dozen weirder things sticking out of magic succulent pots.

Rufus was still upstairs somewhere, probably taking over part of James’ office.  But his most common helper was here.  “Hey Fredrick.”  James greeted the stuff animal, instantly uncertain which of the three names Sarah had given to him was appropriate.  He might also have a proper title, James couldn’t remember, but he felt compelled to add ‘esquire’ to the end of the name for some reason.

Fredrick Umbra Armillary was about two feet tall, with a raccoons snout that blended seamlessly into moist salamander skin in a mix of pale blue and black.  Webbing between his claws and a cunning and intelligence behind his glimmering eyes.  He was also part spider, and had been getting more comfortable at keeping the six extra legs out in the open without worrying about bothering anyone.

Personally, James had no issue with spiders when they were larger than some dogs.  The problem with spiders normally was they were too small for him to see what they were doing.  This little guy was too busy being cute for James to worry about that.  Though he did find it uncomfortable that Clutter Ascent, the dungeon that made the stuff animals in the first place, had stopped making new ones with spider blended in.

All this concerned thought went unnoticed by Fredrick Umbra Armillary, who perked up as James knocked and opened the door.  “Ssssnacks!”  He demanded pointedly.  And then, a short beat later, added a “Pleassse?”

James checked his pockets and came up with one option.  “I’ve got an Office candy… uh… Large Number?  Do you like milk chocolate?”

The stuff animal shrugged and darted forward to grab the snack out of James’ hands.  “Thank thank.”  He chittered happily.  “Want a plantssss?”

“Honestly?  Kinda.”  James looked around the little room with open admiration.  The vines on the back wall that were growing small pods of fluorescent liquid were especially colorful and enticing.  He really, really wanted to eat one, even though he knew it was actually ink of some kind.  “What’re you guys growing down here these days?  Anything new?”

Excitedly clapping his little paws, Fredrick scrambled up over a bench, deftly maneuvering between a set of pots filled with shredded paper and past a longer grow bed with what looked like a perfectly normal tomato vine in it.  He grabbed something off a rack, and brought it back over to James, revealing a tiny struggling cactus looking thing.

“Watchhhh.”  He dipped a claw down and broke off the tip of the plant, pulling it away with a blue goo connecting it in a stretchy line, until eventually the whole thing came away with a slight mess.   Fredrick spun the extra goo onto his paw, and popped the whole limb into his wide mouth while he handed James the other part.

Shrugging, and assuming it wasn’t poison, James squeezed the small stub of cactus until a line of blue goop oozed out, and then licked it.  It tasted… quite bad.  “Eugh.”  He gulped, holding it away from his face.  “That tastes like diluted deodorant.”  Then he paused, and blinked slowly while staring at the far wall.  “Wait, this tastes like exercise potion.”

“Yesss!”  Fredrick exclaimed.  “Very bad, bad bad flavor.”

“I’m missing something.”  James admitted.

The stuff animal nodded, and turned the little cactus around to show James the pot it was planted in.  It was pretty tiny, and looked like a small gift shop curio that had probably been given to Rufus’s little garden as a gift in the near past.  And then, abruptly, James realized why that mattered.

“This isn’t one of the pots that grows anything as a succulent.”  He said slowly, and the stuff animal nodded vigorously back at him.  “You’re growing an exercise potion aloe, without the magic.”  Fredrick nodded faster, enough that James was worried the little guy was gonna dry out his salamander skin with the breeze he was generating.  “This is… uh…”

“No magic!”  Fredrick announced, still just as excited.  “No pooooooshun.  Jussst the tasssste.”

“Okay but like why.”  James asked instantly.  He got no real reply, except the stuff animal pushing himself up on his extra legs to grab the bit of plant matter out of James’ fingers and pop it in his own mouth.  “You cannot possibly enjoy that.”  He said, and got a quizzical look in reply.  “Alright.  Well, that’s… I don’t know what to say to this.  Moving on!  We’re going on a long dungeon delve of a few places, do you want to go on one with us?  It’ll be a bunch of people, but if you’re feeling cooped up here or something, you can-“

Fredrick Umbra Armilary hissed at him, and shooed James out of the greenhouse.  James was laughing by the time the door shut behind him; that sounded like a no, but that was okay.  It seemed like the little guy was having fun with what he had going on here.

_____

Someone from Recovery had given him the phone number a while back, and he’d lost it.  He’d lost it twice, actually, since Cathy hadn’t caught on that he meant that he threw it away.

Anesh and Alanna gave him the number the third time, his girlfriend handing him the folded note card with a hard stare.  “If you lose this one, I’m getting Rufus to help me staple the next one to your forehead.” She’d said while Anesh looked like he wasn’t sure he should dive into this conversation or not.

“Is Rufus into that?”  James asked with a smirk.

But Alanna hadn’t relented, so he’d taken the number.  And then, later, when no one was around and he felt a sudden impulse to do so, he’d dialed it.

Someone answered after three rings.  Just a simple “Hello?”  His sister’s voice was the same as he remembered; high pitched and with just a hint of casual arrogance.

For a tiny second, James considered a million things to say.  Hell, part of him considered asking if she wanted to come into a dungeon next week.  But then he remembered ever lived experience that he had of his sister, and shook his head with a smile.  “Sorry.  Wrong number.”  James said.  “Have a good one.”

“Oh.  Uh… you too?”  Kayle said, confused, but not irate or anything.

James hung up and pocketed his phone.  Then he nodded to himself and got back to what he was working on, feeling like he’d lost a weight he hadn’t noticed adding to the pile.

_____

“So.”  James was sitting in the dining room of the Order, wondering at what point they’d added an extra five tables and a row of private booths, and where the space had come from.  Across from him sat two people who clearly didn’t like each other, but had decided to present him with a unified front.  “How’s life been?”

“Filled with inane questioning.”  Nile snapped.  The old Alchemist wasn’t exactly happy with his transformation from obscenely wealthy murderer to being in the Order’s custody.  Which, as far as James was concerned, was one of the most minor problems possible on his plate.

Red - or Amelia, depending on how she was feeling that day - gave him a better answer.  Though he wasn’t sure if it was only out of spite for Nile.  “My own work has been advancing by leaps and bounds.”  The woman said.  She wasn’t old, by any stretch, but her greying hair pulled back in a stern looking bun made her seem like she’d be perfect as a harsh 1950’s librarian.  “Access to more of the Sap has allowed for more experimentation, and more opportunities to catalog what parts of the ingredients make the potions function.  My focus with Davis and his subordinates has recently been on efficiency; making the methods we use for producing staples more robust, so that more resources can be spent on novel ideas.”

“He didn’t mean that, you bloody damned teacher’s pet.”  Nile muttered as he held his cup up to his mouth.  Despite being older than Amelia, the man sure did come across like someone who really was trapped in a high school world.

James sighed, and rubbed at one of his eyes.  “I mean, it’s relevant.  Though Amelia, we should talk about your work obsession.  But no, I meant how your accommodations are.”

“Petty and insufficient.”  Nile answered, predictably.

“Oh.  Adequate.”  Red said, as if the question hadn’t occurred to her before.

Flipping one his sheets of notes over, James clicked a mechanical pencil.  “Great!  That means we can improve them!  What would you like?”  They stared at him with different levels and styles of disbelief.  “For your… for your lives?   Like, what would make it better?  Guys, you gotta work with me here, I’ve never been rich before.  What do wealthy people actually like?  Bigger living spaces, or better food, or what?”

“Hundred year old scotch.”  Nile said in a tone that was still way too demanding for James to not snipe back at him.

“Doesn’t fifty year old scotch start at something like a million dollars a bottle?”  James asked, unsure if he knew that because of magic or just some half forgotten podcast.  “I mean, I assumed you had taken Davis up on the offer to try making some kind of liquor that was either magical, or made with magic.”  Nile just tried to glower at him, the older man seeming to want to intimidate James into feeling bad about this meeting.  “Right, you didn’t.  Cool.  Amelia?”

The woman looked up like she’d been actually thinking about it.  “The apartments are smaller than I’m used to, but the workspaces are what need the most work.  Your ‘basements’ are being used as full laboratory facilities, and there’s no clear floor plan.  In fact, the floor plan changes every other week, which is not helpful.”

“I… have noticed that.  That’s something I agree with.  But also not a personal comfort thing, even though I’ll talk to Reed about it later.  You’re just fine with how your daily life goes?”  She paused, then flicked her eyes sideways at Nile.  James could almost see the thought process at play; the man hadn’t complained, so if she complained, she’d seem weaker by comparison.  So James abandoned subtly.  “As a reminder, we value emotional openness as a sign of confidence.”  He said casually.

“The baths.”  Amelia said suddenly.

“Oh.  You don’t like them?  I mean, we do have private bathrooms in the apartments, but if you need the water pressure changed or something…”

“No.”  She cut him off.  “They’re too popular.  It used to be convenient.  Now there’s usually a wait for a pool.  And the improvements didn’t help.”  She folded her arms and looked away.  “It was a pleasant amenity, and it’s been… hm… devalued.”

“Huh.  Okay.”  James nodded.  “I get that.  I’ll talk to Bill later and add another thing to his plate.  Might be a while, but thanks for letting me know.”  He sighed.  “So, is there anything the two of you would like to bring up, before we end this check in?”

Nile flicked a fingernail against the rim of his cup, leaning back in the padded booth.  “I’m assuming you have no plans for how to dispose of Euphrates?”  He asked.  “I hear he’s dying.”

James’ expression hardened rapidly, but Red beat him to the punch.  “You bastard.”  The woman ground out the word, looking like she was considering leaving polite society behind and just raining punches down on Nile’s smug face.  “The man deserves more respect than you, and you can’t even get through one lunch without gloating?”  She whipped back to face James.  “This is what you’re getting, keeping him around, you know.  Nothing but empty angry words.”

“Excuse me, just because I don’t brag ceaselessly about my ‘accomplishments’ doesn’t mean that I am not doing more than you to produce something of value!”  Nile snapped back.

James set his pencil down, placed his hands on the table, closed his eyes, and took a steadying breath through his nose.  And both of them shut up, abruptly, which made him a little worried.  He wasn’t trying to be scary or anything.  “I do not care about your accomplishments.”  James said softly.  “I don’t care about your value.  You are here to recover, and to learn, and to grow beyond the limited worldview you had when you arrived.  And, if it makes you feel better to think of it this way, to atone for your numerous crimes.”  He opened his eyes and looked at them.  “Yes.  Euphrates is not… doing well.  I’m sure you know him better than I do, but he’s refused some of our help.”

“The bastard is a lot of things, and prideful is certainly one of them.”  Nile sounded almost grudgingly respectful.  “Though…” He caught Amelia scowling.  “Much as I dislike him, he has been a mentor.  He’s alive?”

“Of course he’s alive you vile man.”  Red snipped.  “You could have visited him at any time!”

“Yeah, he’s still alive.  Not really sure what we can do for him.”  James said.  “Uh… he claimed he was a hundred and six?  I honestly have no idea if he was fucking with me or not, and if not, I’d love to know how.”

Red nodded.  “He’s been a Guild Alchemist since he was thirty years old.  A lifetime of the restorative elixirs, as well as I’m sure at least one secret of his own concoction, can keep someone in excellent health.  Age, as I’m sure you know, is simply a breakdown of bodily systems.  Maintain the systems, maintain the body, and age doesn’t bite quite so hard.”

“He really is that old, if not older.”  Nile nodded.  “Bastard promised me the secret to it and then told me it was eating a lemon a day.  I almost believe him.  He refused you?”

James nodded.  “Yeah.  I’m sure you know we’ve got a few magics that could maybe help.  A couple purple orbs, maybe.  But he said no.”

“Ah.”  Nile nodded.

“Of course.”  Amelia agreed, which was instantly suspicious to James.  He looked at them until she sighed stiffly and explained.  “Your Order has a consent form for what is done with the magic left behind after a death, yes?”  He nodded.  “Well.  Nothing made from the Sap does any such thing.  So, if you were concerned, as some old men are, for the state of their immortal soul…”

“Ah.”  James sighed.  “Well.  That’s probably stupid, but I can’t stop him from following his beliefs.”

“You should.  His beliefs are childish and naive in the face of immortality.”  Nile quipped lightly.

“…anyway.  Anything else?”  James asked.

Amelia spoke rapidly.  “Well.  Now that Nile has thoroughly embarrassed the both of us, and ruined the chance of an easy answer to the request?  We have heard that you are assembling a large group for a prolonged expedition, and wish to be part of it.”

“What, together?”  James asked, incredulous that the two Alchemists would ever want to be confined to the same camp for more than five minutes at a time.  “Seriously?”

Nile nodded once, as stiff as Amelia was looking.  “If that is what it takes to make you take us seriously, then yes.  There is something odd about the way delvers, as you seem to romanticize them, approach the process of true alchemy.  And both of us will accept any advantage we can take.  I have no regard for my soul, immortal or otherwise.”  He said with a haughty sniff.

James glanced back at Amelia, but she simply gave him a steady and waiting look.  He hummed to fill time as he checked the notes that Davis and Cathy had left for him about the two and their progress.  Records of small incidents and how they were handled, any comments from their therapists, the way they seemed to be living.  It was hard to say that they were better people since coming to the Order, but, James couldn’t deny, they sure hadn’t fucking killed anyone since getting here.  And that was counting the test potion that blew up glass.

So he looked back up at them, and undercut whatever arguments they were about to make.  “Sure.”  He said.  “But!  We’re planning for multiple long runs over the course of a month.  You two are doing better, whether you’ll admit it or not, but I don’t wanna put up with both of you at once.  So decide between yourselves which of you is going to which dungeon, and let me know.  And if you can do that peacefully, I’ll gladly have you on the teams.”

He left them sitting next to each other in the booth, looking like they were both preparing for a brawl of an argument as soon as James left the room.  It might not be the best solution, but they were adults, and not literal children, and his King Solomon impression would at least save him a headache.

_____

“Hey Dave!”

“Huh?  Oh.  Hi.  Are you alright?”  Dave asked like he was operating on a script.

James paused in the Lair’s lobby, tilting his head to look down at himself, just in case.  “Yes?  Why?”

“I thought you got shot.”

“Literally everyone that wasn’t me got shot.  Though it does say something that we haven’t talked in days and I didn’t even notice.  We should get a D&D game started up again.”  James thought about all the free time he didn’t have to do that in.  “Anyway.  Speaking of hanging out, do you and Pendragon wanna go on a week long delve as part of a big group?  She might not get to fly a lot.”

“Sure, sounds fun.”  Dave nodded.  “Maybe I can get some yellows to make Pen some sisters.”

“...Sure.  Okay.  I’ll add you to the channel on our server.”

It was the easiest one of these James had done so far.

_____

It wasn’t that James had an actual ranking of awkward situations filed away in his brain to compare any given moment to.  But if you asked him to fake it, he’d probably put ‘standing in a hallway after knocking on an apartment door but before anyone answered’ fairly high on the list.

The Lair had more apartments in it than it used to.  Technically, it was an addition to the previous totem, adding another three ‘floors’, almost doubling their capacity.  They were starting to run into logistical problems; specifically in terms of throughput.  The hallways hadn’t been shifted with James’ newly drafted plans; apparently editing an orange totem in use was something Research was ‘working on’, which James suspected meant ‘causing property damage with somewhere’. And there just weren’t enough elevators or stairs for the actual volume of people who lived here to get around.

Even though a lot of those people weren’t human and didn’t like leaving the Lair, they still wanted to get upstairs for dinner, or to get their mail.  James had been kinda surprised when he’d gone over the resident listings and seen a lot of mixed species roommates.  Human-camraconda was the most common one, for obvious reasons.  There were also more ratroaches here than ever - almost fifty of them now - and many of them lived with someone who was…

James figured it was rude to think ‘stable’ was the adjective he wanted.  But it was pretty accurate.  A human or camraconda who was more emotionally mature, who could help two or three new ratroaches adapt to a life that… that…

Didn’t hurt as much.

He broke off the thought as the door he was standing in front of cracked open.  Keeka’s chitin-banded snout poked out as he looked at James.  “Hello!”  The ratroach cheerily squeaked at him.

“Hey Keeks.”  James said, and then instantly shook his head as he heard himself.  “Mmh, no, maybe not that nickname.”

Keeka gave a chiming laugh, a light green flush taking up around his eyes as he opened the door to let James in.  “This is funny, but I will not tell you why!”  He said.

“Ominous!”  James grinned as he stepped into his friends’ apartment.  Keeka just kept giggling as he shut the door and spun around James, skirt swishing around his streamlined legs.

He really did look like himself, like this.  Changed, yes.  But not into something different.  He was still a ratroach; a lot of people would probably find him creepy or gross.  Dark brown chitin with an opalescent sheen and growing black fur covering his body, too many arms that weren’t quite set at places that looked normal, long antenna on his head over too many multifaceted eyes.  He looked inhuman, and that would probably scare some people.

But he had remade his body to his specifications, not some cruel dungeon’s.  His arms and eyes had a symmetry to them, his antenna weren’t barbed, he could speak through his realigned muzzle without running out of breath or rasping or dripping corrosive drool on the carpet.  And James wasn’t most people anyway.  So he just looked like Keeka was supposed to.

“Is Arrush around?”  James asked as he followed Keeka deeper into the apartment.  Their patio blinds were open, transplanted sunlight streaming through the windows at a high angle and giving a light warmth to the messy living room.  “I had a question for him.”

The laughter trailed off as Keeka stopped at the arm of the long and scarred couch they had here.  Halfway through trying to pick something up off the floor, he opened one of his claws and set a pair of heavy headphones back on the sofa.  “He’s out.”  Keeka said.  “Practicing something.  Maybe hiding from his squire.  Though he’s not good at hiding, I think he might not be trying hard.”

James chuckled.  One of the teenagers, a kid named Brian who was officially not a high school student anymore, had decided that he wanted to be a delver.  James couldn’t even blame him; it was a cool job to have.  But he still felt weird having a kid going into dungeons, so he’d told Brian that if he could get someone to agree to it, James would consider letting him go on an escorted very shallow delve into a safe dungeon.  He’d chosen to interpret this as being a squire, and for what James felt were weird reasons, had sort of zeroed in on Arrush for the role.  “You know, it’s almost funny?  Actually, no, hang on, it is funny.  But if it gets to be too much, tell Arrush to talk to me, okay?”

“He is having fun.”  Keeka sighed.  Even the simple motion of sighing seemed to be something he relished,  though.  A whole breath, his to use as he wanted.  That was still novel!  “He will be back later, for you to ask him.”

“Okay, now, hang on.  You don’t know I have a question for him.”  James folded his arms as he balanced on one foot, braced against the kitchen counter.

Keeka dropped back onto the couch, hands balled up in his lap, his triangular head looking sheepishly at the ground.  “Rumors and things.”  He said.  “And I’m not stupid.  You want to go far into… into a dungeon.  Maybe more.”  Keeka twitched his head sideways, looking out the back window at the growing garden in the courtyard below.  “He’s going to say yes.”

“Hey…” James wasn’t stupid either.  He could see Keeka being upset about it.  “If it’s bothering you…”

“I don’t know what is bothering me.”  Keeka admitted bluntly.  “I don’t think it’s the danger?”

James shrugged weakly.  “I mean, there will be some of that.”  He admitted.

“I still… we changed here, don’t you know?”  Keeka asked, faltering on the words.  James nodded at him, still understanding anyway despite the weird phrasing.  “You changed us.  So much.  But you can’t change the nightmare.  It doesn’t matter if there’s real danger.  I will still be scared to lose him.”

Letting out a long breath, James pushed off the counter, and slowly crossed the living room to settle onto the couch next to Keeka.  He leaned back a lot farther than the ratroach, and reached out to settle a comforting hand on Keeka’s back.  Almost instantly, Keeka flopped backward onto James, half leaning on him, half curling up.  “I get it.”  James said.  “I don’t know how to help, but I get it.  Hell, did you know Anesh has died twice?”  He asked suddenly.  “Both times when I wasn’t there.  When I…” he took a deep breath, trying to keep his fingers from twitching.  “I get it.”  He repeated.

“How do you deal with it?”  Keeka asked quietly as he burrowed into the crook of James’ arm.

“I mean, in this case? I’m bringing Anesh along so he can’t die without me around.”

James had said it partly as a joke, but Keeka perked up slightly.  “Anesh will be there?”

“Well, one of him, yeah.”  James nodded, idly running his fingers across a seam between Keeka’s fur and chitin.  “Oh, right, I forgot about how you two…”

“Can I come?”  The words caught James off guard.

“Buh?”

Keeka pulled away, and looked down at James as he knelt on the edge of his couch.  “I’m not a delver.  I know.  But I can fight.  I won’t die.  Can I come?  Because then, I will be there, if Arrush needs me.”  James thought about it.  Really actually thought about it, long enough that Keeka started to look embarrassed or ashamed for having asked.  When he started to think James was just trying to find a reason to tell him no, he pulled back further.  “I should-“

“Yeah, okay.”  James said, pulling out his phone and adding Keeka’s name to his list.  “You honestly probably could get away with not fighting.  I know you were… well, made to fight, in multiple ways, but we need support for this too.  Searching, puzzles, identifying magic we find, hell even just making camp and helping with food and stuff is valuable.  There’ll be plenty for all of us to do that isn’t combat. And I’m sure Arrush and Anesh will love to have you along.”

Jolting upright, Keeka’s multiple sets of eyes glittered at James as he looked down at his friend.  “You’re saying it that way on purpose.”  He accused.

“I absolutely am.”  James nodded happily as he rolled sideways to dodge a tackle and hopped off the couch with a graceful ease that he couldn’t actually remember acquiring at any specific point, but that had saved his life at least once.  “Anyway!  Tell Arrush to check his messages!  I need a real answer from him before we finalize the first roster!”  James said.

“Waaaaait!”  Keeka tumbled off the end of the couch, bolting after James as he headed for the apartment’s door.  He would have liked to just hang out, but he knew James had things to do.  The paladin always had things to do.  So instead, he just threw himself into a hug that enveloped half of James and got a grunt from him at the impact.  “Thank you.”  Keeka muttered into James’ shirt.  “For everything.”

“Hey, I said it last time, I’m sure, but you don’t need to thank me.  You two deserve everything I can offer and more.  Hell, everyone in your species does.  Life isn’t supposed to suck that bad.”  James declared.  “Anyway.  I do need to…” he patted Keeka on the back, looking down at where the ratroach had interlaced his claws to prevent James from escaping.

“Oh.”  Keeka flushed neon green as he let go and straightened up.  “Yes!  G-good luck!”

James grinned back as he stepped out into the hallway.

______

Frequency-Of-Sunlight accosted James trying to get through the Lair’s lobby and communal area.  She had to flicker her gaze at him for a millisecond to get him to let her catch up, too.

Not that she couldn’t move fast when she wanted; camracondas had a ‘sprint’ speed of close to a human, even if they couldn’t sustain it for nearly as long without a preemptive exercise potion.  But Sunny had been ordered to stop exerting herself after she’d come back from the Status Quo raid with abrasions on her belly cabling and a tiny, insignificant little sliver of shrapnel stuck in her back.  It was so small she hadn’t even noticed, which meant it wasn’t a big deal, no matter what Deb had said.

Buuuuut, it did sort of ache when she slithered too fast.  And she hadn’t healed yet, and it was getting annoying.  So she got James’ attention another way.

James sketched out a small bow to her as she approached.  “Hey Frequency.”  He said.  “What’cha need?”

“I am coming with you.”  She announced.

“Sure.”  James said.  “I mean, yeah, that makes sense.  You’re, like, the fifth camraconda to just declare their interest.  I was gonna ask, but I guess I don’t need to.  What dungeons do you want in on?”

“All of them.”  She said, flicking her papery tongue out briefly, unable to hide the nervous tic as she spoke with her digital voice.

James paused.  “Okay, well, one of them is Officium Mundi, and…”

“I have forced your lover to help me do math!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight announced, maybe a little too loudly for the populated lobby judging by the slight blush James gave.  “For a one week trip, operating full time in the Office, I need one hundred and twenty six charges of the secrecy earring at their highest level available.  We have six of them, which totals one twenty, and if I cycle which one I use, they will all regenerate the extra six charges with extras to spare before we leave.  This leaves room for overlapping the effects for safety”

“…we only have six of the high level earrings?”  James focused on the wrong part of her math.

“The copies don’t shield enough.  Look, I did math, be impressed with me!”  Sunny demanded.  Then she straightened up, and switched abruptly back to what she thought was a more professional tone.  “I mean… I would like recognition for my…”

“You just told me you got Anesh to do this.”  James said, rubbing his forehead.  “Also please stop trying to impress me, I’m not a professional, you can just talk to me like a normal person.  Or… whatever a normal person around here is.”

The camraconda looped her head around in an exasperated gesture at him.  “Alright, fine!  I’ve got permission to use a bunch of earrings and I want to see my home again and maybe bite it or something!  Stop being an obstructionist human and let me come on your stupid adventure!”

“See, that’s much more convincing.”  James nodded, pulling out his phone.  “Okay.  You’re on the list.  But if you want to get in on the Climb, you’ll need to check in with Spire-Cast-Behind for a camraconda slot.”

“…why is there a specific camraconda quota?”  Sunny asked with open suspicion, her lens narrowing to a point as she focused on James’ face.

He shrugged.  “Because on the Climb, you guys need drakes to carry you.  I’d say we just get snowmobiles or something, but they’re way too inflexible.  So there’s a logistical camraconda cap.”

“Oh.  It’s not something weird?”  She relaxed.

James made that motion that humans made when they realized that the context of their lives was spiraling out of their control.  “No, Sunny.”  He sighed.  “It’s not something weird.  It’s just the number of paper dragons we have available for the magical semi-urbanized infinite mountain.”

“Okay.  Good!  I’ll settle for the Office then!  Thank youuuuuu!”  The camraconda offered the tip of her tail to high-five before she slithered away, overjoyed that her research had gotten her exactly what she wanted.  Now, there was just one more obstacle.

Telling her girlfriend.

_____

There were too many reasons to visit the Order’s hospital these days.

Most of them were relatively minor, or works in progress that would slowly be managed.  Injured knights who would be back on their feet or tails soon enough, mostly.  Or long term cases like Banana, where what was needed was near constant medical observation, but for a case that probably wouldn’t turn critical before she was ready to remake herself, or some other answer presented itself.

Some of them were worse.

“I hear you’re leaving for good.”  James had knocked on the opaque glass door and gotten a shaky admittance before sliding it open and stopping in the threshold to the hospital room.

The girl inside was standing stiffly next to her bed, leaning over it with one hand braced as she tugged on a shoe.  Overall, she was looking a lot better than the last unfortunate time James saw her personally; missing a lot of the scrapes, cuts, and dirt that had covered her, and while she might have a limp for a while, she was walking and not in devastating pain.  The Order’s health care package relied a lot on magic, and wasn’t always great for a lot of stuff, but it was free if you were on the list of people who they felt an obligation to.

She froze for a second when James came in; not just like she’d been expecting someone else, but like she wasn’t exactly happy to see him.

“Leave me alone.”  Sienna said with harsh acidity.

The other survivors of the Underburbs incident had left already.  Recovered, and then walked out.  James was pretty sure that Aurelio was one of those people who couldn’t properly mentally engage with magic, and the other guy had just wanted to be silently gone.  James had suspected he was a hitman or something, but JP said he was just a private paranoid jerk.

Sienna, though, had kept coming back.  Mostly just for medical help, checkups and three purple orbs for her leg, therapy for everything else.  Checks for other Underburbs diseases, too.  But she hadn’t wanted to see James, and she’d been getting angrier the whole time.  Or, not angrier, no.  Something more bitter, and without a real outlet.  Angry at the world, maybe.

Either way, he wasn’t here to try to convince her that they should be friends.  “Okay.”  James couldn’t keep the pain out of his own voice.  “I just wanted to say good luck.  Deb will have a key to a locker for you that has some money and… some other stuff you might want… in it, though I know it doesn’t make up for shit.  And I wanted to tell you, personally, that if you ever need anything, the Order is here.  You have my number.”

He turned to leave, and didn’t hesitate to start pulling the door shut again, though it felt heavier this time.

“It should have been me.”  Sienna’s voice was a strained whine, just before the door shut all the way.

James considered just pretending he hadn’t heard, shutting the door, and leaving her like she’d asked.  But really, that wasn’t something he ever wanted to do.  So he took a deep breath, failed to push away how awkward he felt, and slid the door open slightly.  “No.”  He told her flatly.

She snapped up like she hadn’t even considered that he would hear her, much less turn around.  “What?”  Siennas voice was an angry bark.  “Go away!”

“I will.  But you’re wrong.”  James said softly, oddly aware that he was using the same tone he’d use on an injured and panicking animal.  “It shouldn’t have been you.  It shouldn’t have been anyone.”

“I know that!”  Sienna’s scream took James aback.  “I don’t care!  I don’t… care!”  Her words devolved into a rapid series of sobs.  “It should have been me!  I got hurt, and I slowed us down, and Zari’s dead because of me, and it’s my fault, and now you’re being nice to me and I fucking hate you!”

She yelled the last into the blankets of the hospital bed, leaning into the place she’d been getting her leg examined and the last bandage changed before James came to find her.  Her hands found their way behind her head, and as he watched, James was reminded that humans had a wide range of responses to fear, anger, and the feeling of helplessness.   And most of them sucked.

“I’m sorry, Sienna.”  He muttered, loud enough to be heard over her crying.  “I’m sorry I wasn’t faster, or stronger, sorry I wasn’t good enough to save her.  To save everyone.”  He didn’t have anything he felt was worth adding.  Part of him tried to get him to say something about how she should move on, or try to enjoy her life, or something, but all of it sounded condescending and shitty even before the words made it to his tongue.  So he just sighed and stepped back into the hallway.  “I’ll be better next time.”  He promised.  “That’s all I’ve got.  Good luck, Sienna.”

“You’re going back?”  She sounded horrified.

“Not to the Underburbs.”  James shrugged.  “But there’s always more monsters.  And I’m going somewhere else, just to try to improve mostly.  There’s a lot of places that are like that, but… well, maybe not safer.  But kinder.  Softer?”

“Take me with you.”  She demanded, voice still wet from her tears.

“No.”  James said for the third time.  “Goodbye Sienna.”

He shut the door, and pressed his eyes closed as he shook his head, before dropping his hand from the long pull bar and turning to head out to find a few more people.  He got about six steps down the brightly lit and strangely cheerful feeling hospital linoleum before a golden retriever stepped out in front of him.

“The docs say you’re planning something dumb, that’ll make you stronger.”  Prince said.

James sighed and rubbed at his face.  “You can’t fucking go on a dungeon delve as a dog.”  He declared.  “Even I have my limits.”  He said as he walked past, the mimic falling into a trot next to him like a good dog at heel.

“First off, I’m a shapeshifter, so I’ll change.  But I need to come, maybe Ruby too, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t worry our kids with it.  Second of all, maybe ‘dog’ is my natural form.  Ever think of that?  And third…”

“There’s no way in hell I’m helping you keep secrets from your friends like that.”  James said.  “Or did you mean kids literally?  Are they the same species as you?  I assumed they were human.  Oh, one of them had lung cancer by the way, did you know that?”

“…what?”  It was odd to see the human expression of faltering on a dog.

“Don’t worry about it, we took care of it.  Anyway.  How are you in the cold?”  James asked.

“Fine?”

“How big can you get?”

“…Why?”

“Just asking for another reason.  Look, if you want to get in on this, a lot of people do, but I’ll add your names to the list somewhere.   But you’ve gotta stop lying to me about things.”  James told the mimic.

A golden retriever was basically the perfect face to pout at someone, and Prince put it to excellent use as he lagged behind while James walked toward the exit.  “What!  I’m telling the truth about everything!”  Prince put on puppy dog eyes as James gave an exasperated nod to the camraconda nurse on duty at the front desk.

“No you aren’t.”  James said.  “Because I know what a lying dog looks like.”

“How can you possibly know that?!”  Prince demanded as the hospital’s main door closed behind James.   “He can’t actually know that, right?”  He said, hopping his paws up on the edge of the tall desk to ask Spire-Cast-Behind.

“In my experience, he knows many things.”  The camraconda answered the mimic dog who had been asking a million questions of everyone down here ever since his arrival, double checking the clock for when her relief shift was going to arrive.  “I wish you luck finding a spot.”

“Yeah, well, not like you’d know.”  The dog sighed dramatically.  “You don’t need to worry about it, you’ve got a whole thing going on here, right?  You’re safe as houses.”

“I will be on two of the expeditions.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said, twisting to gaze at Prince as her surrogate mechanical arms gently pushed the dog’s paws off her desk and a third one found a paper towel to wipe down the surface.  “I asked first.”

“When!?”

“Humans have invented a technology known as phones.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said, somehow without a trace of sarcasm.  “Perhaps you could ask your companions about it sometime.”  She settled back in her basket seat, bobbing contentedly from side to side as Prince dejectedly moped off to the room that his human friend was in.  She hoped the child would have a swift recovery, for one extra reason than she found for most patients here.

_____

The next time James knocked on an apartment door, it wasn’t one of the really nice ones.  Instead, it was one of the small concrete box rooms that had spawned in one of the basements.  Not even one of the early basements, that the Order had converted to bedrooms back before they’d started to develops orange totem technology.  It was in the fifth or sixth basement, off on the far side too.  Near the shooting range of all places, across from a closet and a dingy bathroom that James made a note to upgrade.

The door opened promptly at his knock, and Camille the Azure greeted him, already in her armor.  Or…

“Cam, you know you can take your platemail off, right?”  James asked, worry in his words.

She just cocked her head.  “Why?”  She asked.

“Personal comfort?”  He looked over her shoulder at the bare concrete room that had a bed in the corner with the covers folded to military precision, and then three unopened cardboard boxes stacked in a pyramid against the wall.  “Are you… still getting set up?”  He asked, fearing he knew the answer.

“I don’t understand.”  She said, worry starting to infect her own voice.  Camille wasn’t stupid, and she picked up on James’ anxiety quickly.  “What am I doing wrong?”  She firmed up her tone and directly approached the problem, like she’d been trained.

James nodded; that at least he could appreciate.  “Okay, so, part of what we want to do here is get you used to enjoying your time.  Because if you don’t care about yourself, and your life, it’s hard to really understand why you should care about anyone else.  This creates a sort of virtuous circle, where we can get you into the mindset of caring about others, and bringing them up to a comfortable standard of living, so that they then will experience the same transformation.”

“I am satisfied with how I look now.”  Camille said.

“Mental transformation.  I guess I actually do need to specify that.”  James admitted.  “Cam why are you in a basement next to our training range?”

She tilted her eyes down to the floor, like she was somehow afraid to meet James’ own.  “I find the sound familiar.”

“Okay, that’s depressing.”  He said without thinking.  “But if you’re okay being here, we can at least make your room feel nice, you know?  Like, I can get you a rug, maybe some stuff for the walls?  A lamp at least so you’re not just sitting in the dark?”

“I… I would like… to not be in the dark.”  Camille admitted slowly, still looking at the floor.

He was about halfway to patting her on the shoulder, but her words made him stop.  Once James realized he was looking at the reactions of an abuse survivor, he pulled back slowly, and just nodded, trying to keep his voice calm even while he was busy thinking of ways to break the knees of the Last Line Of Defense.  “Right.  I’d say we could ask Momo, but she’s gonna give you a bunch of colored rope lights, and unless that’s what you’re looking for…?”  He made it an open, friendly question.

“What colors?”  Cam asked suddenly.

“Uh… I think you can program them for anything?  I actually haven’t ever had any, though I keep thinking they’re cool.”  James answered with a shrug.

She straightened up, her platemail making metal clicks around her shoulders.  “I would like that.”  Cam said.

“Okay.”  James smiled at her.  “I dunno what the hell Momo was thinking here, but let’s get you set up with a little more comfort, yeah?”

The next hour, after he convinced her that she didn’t need to be armored around the population of the Lair, was an exercise in finding spare furniture, finding a spare Sarah to help them out, James sending Momo angry messages about abandoning Camille halfway through moving her in, and helping Cam unpack properly.  Also it was a series of small moments of him finding his heart hurting when he’d say something that felt normal, like asking permission to enter her room, and getting a confused look in reply.

She’d never had a private place to herself.  Never had anything more than what she needed.  Never not been on ready status for a combat operation.

She found the sound of gunfire familiar.  Not even comforting.  Just familiar.

And still, she looked lighter when they were done.  New clothes put away in a new dresser, snacks in a little cupboard, the room lit with stripes of purple light that could be changed to something brighter if she needed it, a stuffed animal and a floor rug adding some softness to the room, and Camille standing in the middle of it, looking around like she didn’t understand exactly what had changed.

“Coming along nicely!”  Sarah tapped her fingertips together in a quiet clap.  “Also, also, now we know who to go to when we need furniture moved!”  The dresser had made its way down here by Camille simply picking it up and walking it, without breaking a sweat or breathing hard.  “But also, how do you like it?”

“I… I don’t know.”  Cam said slowly.

James stopped at the end of the bed that Sarah was sitting on, a bundle of packing plastic rolled up under his arm.  He set one hand on his friend’s shoulder.  “She hasn’t… had something like this.”  He muttered.  “Ever.”

Sarah faltered for a second, but regained her cheerful enthusiasm rapidly. “Well, you have it now.”  She declared.  “Anyway!  I’m gonna get out of here and let you enjoy some time to yourself!  I’ve got a podcast to do!”  Her smile stretched to an almost maddened length.  “I always have a podcast to do.  Did you know it would be this bad, when you stuck me with it?”  She asked James.  “Did you know how many things keep changing?  It’s your fault, James!”

“I just know how much you like keeping busy, and I love you so much I got you exactly what you secretly wanted!”  James countered, getting a peal of laughter from Sarah as she waved goodbye and gave Cam a sudden but uncontested hug on the way out.  “She’s such a fucking nice person.”  He shook his head.

“Yes.”  Camille agreed, rubbing idly at one arm where Sarah had hugged her.  “Why?”

“Kind of hard to answer.”  He sighed.  “But I think the basic truth is that the world is kinder when everyone living in it is kinder, and Sarah just has this unrelenting courage and the willingness to put herself out there.” James smiled.  “Also she’s an extrovert, which I’m intently jealous of, but whatever.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”  Camille replied.  “But I will try.”

“Honestly?  That’s so much better than most people give.”  James laughed softly.  “Alright.  I’ve got some stuff to get to, I’ll leave you to your place for a bit.  But also, please, you’re allowed to leave the room, wander around if you want, talk to people.  I know you weren’t comfortable with the camracondas or the ratroaches, but I swear to you, they’re just people and half of them are nicer than I am.”

Cam nodded, and repeated the secret words that solved every problem.  “I… I will try.”

“Right.”  James smiled as he headed for the heavy door, the concrete box feeling a lot more like a real place to live.  “Oh, and there’s always food upstairs!  It’s kinda random what’s being served, but the kitchen is usually open and you can get a hot meal whenever you want, okay?  Don’t think you need to ration your snack food or whatever.”  She nodded at him stiffly, committing the orders to memory.  James studied Camille’s face, as if sensing that she was contextualizing this in a way he’d find uncomfortable, but eventually just shrugged and stepped into the basement hallway.  “G’night, Cam.”  He said.

“You weren’t here to help me.”  She said behind him.

“Hm?”

Camille spoke up, saying the thing that had been bothering her.  Taking a chance that she wouldn’t be punished for it.  “Before.  You weren’t here to help me.  You were here to ask something.”

“Oh.”  James set his mouth in a thin line.  “I was.  I’ll ask later.”

“No.”  She rebuked him.  “I would prefer if you told me what you need of me.”

He could appreciate that.  “As someone with bad anxiety, I get that.”  James nodded.  “I’m planning a series of long dungeon expeditions.  Looking for new stuff that could advance the Order, things that change the game.  Or just to learn more, grow more.  I’ve got a lot of goals that feed back into the one thing, it’s… it’s a whole planning phase thing.  Don’t worry about that.  My point is, I was going to ask you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re strong enough to help me keep everyone safer while we explore.  Because I think you need something to do.  Because it would be good for everyone if you weren’t isolated.”  James shrugged.  “Like I said.  Lots of goals tied up in one action.  But I’ll talk about it more and ask later when you’re-“

“I will join you.”  Camille said, as blunt as the mace she had leaning in the corner of the room.

James met her eyes, and didn’t know what he was seeing there.  Part of Camille was a scared and abused girl.  And part of her was a soldier.  And part of her was trying.  And maybe people didn’t have discrete parts like that, and the mix of all these things that was a person just wanted to come explore a dungeon for the first time as something other than an exterminator.

“Okay.”  James nodded to her.  “But I’m gonna let you know up front; we try pretty hard to make friends with a lot of the terrifying things we meet.”

“Yes.”  Camille said, the tiniest hint of a smile moving across her face as an unfamiliar emotion took her.  “I have noticed.”

“Touché.”