The Daily Grind - Chapter 253 (Patreon)

I don't think I like this chapter much, but I'm pretty sure the next one will be better.

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“When I looked at myself, I was somebody else” -Metric, Underline The Black-

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“I” Vadik said, voice rumbling as he watched the preparations, “am going to be fired for this.”

“Oh don’t be dramatic.”  James said, standing next to him with a clipboard and double checking everything coming in.  He didn’t actually need the clipboard; he had an organizational program loaded on a compact little microprocessor that was presently wired into his brain.  It had taken a day to get used to it, but being able to use his skulljack to instantly look at and modify a checklist was actually more powerful memory magic than the purple orb that gave him a straight stat upgrade to his brain.  He added a note that all the water supplies had arrived, and then continued talking to Vad.  “Besides, if you’re actually worried, we can do something about it.  Bribe the night security guy, erase the camera footage, just take that fish tank full of tiny infomorph buzz saws that Momo has and dump it out in your bosses office.  Whatever.”

The librarian gave James a frown that bordered on a scowl.  “Don’t you dare.”  He flatly ordered.  “My boss doesn’t have an office.  Librarians here share a space downstairs for desks and personal effects.  We don’t have offices.”

“We do things the same way, actually.  Sorta.  Sometimes.  Actually, hey, have you visited the Lair?”  James asked suddenly.

Vad snorted.  “Why would I need to?”  He asked, waving a hand at the second floor of the library he worked at.  He’d done a lot of work earlier in the day shelving new intakes, and he was close to certain that someone here was fucking up what he had put his time into.  “You brought the entire fucking thing here.”

That was an exaggeration.

But not by too much.  Over twenty people were packed into the space.  The Order had moved the tables and chairs of the community space out of the way so that they could fit everyone close to the door, and there were actually a couple people here to put everything back after the assembled group began their delve.  But even still, it was packed in here.  People and equipment piled in and rushing to get organized before the door to the Ceaseless Stacks opened.

James had felt pretty smug that he’d managed to get this whole thing put together and planned out with minimal help, too.  For a lot of the people here, it was as simple as telling them to clear their calendars, but that wasn’t a blanket scheduling solution.  There had been backups, understudy delvers, as well as getting what amounted to a non-delver support staff to help get things moving at the right speed when it was time to go in.

And the supplies.  James had a particular fascination with logistics, especially since setting a personal goal of restructuring global ocean shipping within the year.  But that was big picture stuff, and while he’d done delves before, the details here were so much more concerned with weight and capacity.

Part of it reminded him of that first rescue from Officium Mundi what was now years ago.  By the midpoint of that escape, the biggest worry wasn’t the dragons or the staplers, it was feeding everyone.  And not wanting anything like a repeat of that, this delve had a particularly robust inventory.

Food was easy.  They had two copies of the lunchbox of holding lunch, a title that James would never in his live get tired of chuckling at, and that let them bring everything they would need on that end, with a backup just in case.  Water was harder.

A human needed about five liters of water a day, especially when they were performing constant physical activity.  Ratroaches were the same, as was whatever the new mimics were.  Camracondas could go without water and just eat yellow orbs instead, but it wasn’t comfortable for them now that they’d gotten used to it, and they needed a couple liters each.  So James had rounded up for safety, and they’d brought in 30 of those chunky 5 gallon hard plastic jugs.  He’d learned the hard way with the chanters over the last week and a half just how much water that was, and he didn’t like it, but better safe than sorry.  They’d drink it down over the week, and replace the weight with stolen goodies from the dungeon.

And then everything else.  Everything else was a casual dismissal, but it was sort of how James felt about the utter pile of things.  Medical supplies, including a chest of ice for the mountain spell Iced Veins that could replenish lost blood.  Replacement armor plates, replacement clothing so that everyone had clean socks and underwear.  Bedding, ammo, batteries, lights, toiletries.  And a hundred magic items; an amount of arcane wealth so fucking absurd that if you’d even told James that he’d have that much some day, he’d have scoffed, and now he was using it on one delve.  Some of it from other dungeons, some the still-unrenamed Status Quo items, some custom built for this very delve by the Order’s experts.  Fewer full shield bracers than he’d prefer since a lot of them were drained to zero in the last fight, but they’d be here a week, which was ten-plus chances to save a life with each of them.

He’d put so much effort into getting it all right.  Even just the carts they were using to move everything were picked on purpose for being as light as possible since they didn’t have to worry about terrain rougher than ‘stairs’.

Vad finished saying something else, and James glanced over at him, checking off one last thing in his head.  “Hm?”  He grunted.  “Oh, and this isn’t the whole Lair.  This isn’t even close to everyone in the Order.  This is, like… not even most of our knights.  You’re on our chat server, you know this.”

“You parked a dragon in here!”

“Yeah, I did do that.”  James let a dopey grin take over his face.  “Ask me how.  I’m so fucking clever.”  He invited the question as he looked at where Pendragon was currently licking dust off the top shelves of the library, the bus sized beautiful creature towering over everyone and moving carefully.  Well, carefully in the sense that she wasn’t crushing people; she was still licking shelves for some reason.  “You’re not asking.”  James shook his head.  “It was [Move Person], since you aren’t going to ask.  Also she’s smaller than normal, since she ate some shrinking pen or something.”

Vad snorted again.  “You were going to tell me anyway.  How’s she even getting into the… no, same thing, isn’t it?  You don’t have a finite number of uses of that do you?”

“We’ve got about two hundred stockpiled.”  James confirmed.  “Pen’s gonna stay at wherever our camp ends up, probably.  But we know there’s enough room for her to maneuver in there when there aren’t shelves.”

He tuned out Vad quickly as he double checked the roster.  Some of the people weren’t using skulljacks, so James couldn’t just ping everyone, he had to get real confirmation.  Mentally, he poked Zhu, and the navigator flickered against him in confirmation as he bolted away to go make sure the infomorphs who were coming along were accounted for, while James did a quick head count.

“Why are there two dogs?”  Vad asked just as James was getting to the same question himself.

“I… don’t… know.  That one, the kinda rottweiler lab mix, that’s Rho.  He’s supposed to be here.”  James pointed at the inhabitor that was locked into a dog’s form before spotting the other tail in the crowd.  “Oh.  That’s Prince.  They’re a shapeshifter.  I’ve realized that telling them they can’t be a dog is sorta hypocritical of me, but they’ll still probably change later.”

Vadik sighed.  “Sure.”  He checked his watch.  “Three minutes.  Are you sure about this?  I mean, I can cancel my vacation.  It’s not too late.”

“You don’t even have to come along!”  James reminded him.

“Yeah, but I’m gonna.”

“Then stop trying to talk me out of this.”  He did an actual last minute sweep of everyone present.  Zhu flickered back onto his arm, a spear of orange light impacting and splashing out into a feather pattern before telling James everyone was accounted for on both sides of the physical.  “Hang on.  Juan!”  James called into the crowd.

The younger man looked up from where he was talking to Spire-Cast-Behind.  “What’cah need?”  He called back as the people around him quieted down.

“What the fuck?!”  James asked, trying to explain by flailing his hands around his head that he wanted Juan to explain what was going on with the half dozen number two pencils orbiting his skull.

Juan caught on quickly and relaxed as he answered.  “Momo said I had to bring them if she wasn’t allowed to come!”  He said.  “Something about taking them on a walk, or being good luck charms, or… look Momers said I had to.”  He reframed his answer to something James would instantly understand.

Nodding, James checked Vad’s clock again.  “Okay.”  He said.  And then he raised his voice.  “Okay, people!”  He announced.  “In formation!  Vanguard first, clear the door, you know the drill!  Everyone make sure your packs and carts are ready to go!”  He didn’t bother telling them to get to their assigned spots, they were already mostly there.  He felt a little bit of a pang of worry as Alanna got ready to sweep the entrance of the dungeon first without him there, but honestly, if anyone in the world could survive being buried under a swarm of hostile fanged textbooks, it was his girlfriend.  “Pen, stay back, we’ll pluck you through the door last!”  He still needed Dave to pick a name for the two of them when they were combined, so James could stop feeling confused and slightly awkward.  “Remember, non-combatants, stay on the inside of the group until we’ve cleared the space!  Everyone stay quiet until we’re secure!  It’s a library, remember!”

“Ten seconds.”  Vad told him.

James nodded.  Took a deep breath.  And then right on time, called out the most exciting thing everyone here had heard in a while.  “Open the doors!  The Ceaseless Stacks awaits!”

A crack in reality was pulled wide.  And with just a few minutes to use it, the Order of Endless Rooms poured through.

For the last couple nights, James had been feeling an excited panicked tension.  It was hard to sum it up with one word, it was hard to sum it up with fifty, but what it felt like was mostly the simple anxiety that a complex plan that had to work the first time was going to fail.  He got this way before vacations, too.  Plane tickets were non-refundable, and while it was cheaper to just try again next week on a dungeon, it was still a lot of work to sort this all out, and they didn’t have infinite time.

So he’d been worried, fretting without sleep until Alanna and Anesh had made him join their linked gestalt mind and lay down to dream as a single loving and loved person.  And even then, that sensation that something would screw up didn’t go away.

But now, as he watched everyone move side by side through the doors, watched carts of supplies and magic vanish into another world, watched humans and camracondas that glowed with infomorph passengers carry that light forward, watched everyone who trusted him put that trust to work getting the expedition underway…

Right now, he didn’t know what he felt.  He was sure there would be problems, but the biggest front loaded worry was gone.  Now, all that was left, was to simply go forth.  To explore this dungeon to their limits, and to see what was out there.

A little relief.  A little concern.  A little expectation.  And a lot of unashamed excitement for what they might find.

James watched as Dave and Pendragon [Move Personed] themself through the door, popping into place wedged against the close shelves of the dungeon on the other side.  And just like that, he was the last one left.

He stalked forward, bringing up the rear and letting the metal security doors swing shut behind him, ready for anything.

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Long Delve Roadmap - Ceaseless Stacks - Roster

Exploration Team 1:

James (Zhu accompanying)

Arrush

Myles

Simon

Frequency-Of-Sunlight

Exploration Team 2:

Alanna

Smoke-And-Ember (Quoth accompanying)

Kirk (Harriet accompanying)

Rho

Matt

Exploration Team 3:

Vadik

Juan

TQ

Prince

Spire-Cast-Behind

Reserve Threat Response Team:

Camille the Azure

Dave/Pendragon

Support / Base Camp:

Anesh

Keeka

Amelia (Red)

Nikhail (Aidimy accompanying)

Research Group :

Chevoy

Peng

Thermoclese

Richardson

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The vanguard of the expedition, the members most prepared for combat, had moved rapidly to clear the threats out of the area before anyone squishier came in.  Some people, like Amelia, had complained at length about how heavy the Order’s armor was, and… that was fair.  It had sort of been refined with the users in mind being healthy thirty-somethings that kept refining their physical prowess.  Not for older women with old knee injuries, not that this had stopped the alchemist in any way.

Once the books that were planning on trying to kill them were dealt with, and the yellow orbs that were the Library’s take on basic skill ranks were added to the storage sacks they’d brought, the expedition did a quick regroup, made sure everyone and everything had made it through okay, and then split up to start to determine what direction they were going to head in.

Half the expedition stayed at the first landing they found.  Progressing to that point had been almost trivial, even though it felt like every book that could wake up had done so.  But for the vast majority of the expedition, this was their first time in the Stacks, so they stayed on guard.

The landing was the same one that it always was, James realized.  He confirmed it with the others who had been here before; things like the books had changed, the information desk had been restocked and repaired, the ink had been wiped away.  But the layout; the crescent of the librarian’s station, the central table with displayed texts, the creaky oak staircases on either side leading up and down levels, the wrought iron chandelier overhead; all of it was the same.

It almost felt comfortable.  Even with Pendragon taking up half the space available.

But no one wanted to stick around the first ‘room’ of the dungeon forever.  So while some of the experienced delvers stayed back, and the engineers cooed over the boxy computer hardware that worked wirelessly with itself somehow, James and Alanna led their teams in opposite directions to try to find a path forward that suited the group.

James took his people through the shelves, crossing the landing and heading deeper into the library without touching the stairs.  Alanna would be checking around down one floor at first, but ideally they could avoid stairs where possible.  The carts at this point were heavy, and so while the first two days were allocated for travel, they still wanted to get as deep as possible and that meant not taking half an hour to move several hundred gallons of water up and down steps that they still couldn’t prove weren’t sometimes trapped.

“This places’s so fucking cool.”  Myles whispered as the group passed the end cap of the fifth row of wooden shelves they’d gone through so far.  The rogue, finally getting a crack at a real delve since the plan to keep him mundane as a stealth measure had fallen through, was supposed to be watching their left side.

He wasn’t being alert about it.  Not that James could blame him.  The books tended to telegraph their assaults, and the crab things that lived under the step stools were so peaceful that James sort of wondered if the dungeon had made a mistake with them.  “You don’t need to whisper.”  James replied.  “Just keep your voice low.  Standard dungeon noise stuff.”

“Easy!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight cheerfully said as she adjusted the volume on her artificial voice.

Myles shot James a look as he peeled his eyes away from the high ceiling and the wrought iron lines overhead that came together to give the illusion of windows.  “It is a library though, right?”

“Well, no.”  James answered as the group moved.  He let Simon take point, the lanky man entirely at home in his armor as he acted as a lure ahead of them for any snappers.  “It’s a dungeon.  It’s… it’s library adjacent.  But it’s not a real library.  You can talk normally, as long as you don’t disturb anything nearby.”  He jerked a gloved thumb at the sign that hung slightly crooked on the end of the shelf they just passed, helpfully informing anyone that this was the section for ‘red, biological’.  “Like this.  It’s faking being a library, but this doesn’t mean anything.”

“Are we sure?”

“No.  That’s why half the people on the support teams are here explicitly to solve puzzles.”  James answered.  Then he had to stop talking as one of the books high on the shelf made a rattling hiss and launched itself at Simon, while three others started to move like they were waking up.

Simon handled his as Frequency froze it in midair.  James and Arrush rapidly dispatched the others before they could strike, careful not to splash any of the ink on the parts of them that were exposed.  It turned out, the books were venomous, and while it wouldn’t be worth worrying about in the short term, constant skin contact with the ink over the course of a week was ill advised.

“Here.”  James tossed Myles two of the yellow orbs.

“What?”  He got a surprised look in return.  “Am I our packmule now?”

“No, surprisingly, that’s me.”  James said.  “Use ‘em.  It’s tradition for new delvers.  And you are a new delver; whatever armory packages you got don’t count.”

Myles gave him a look James couldn’t decipher, before he looked down at the orbs in his hand, mouth twisting slightly.  Then he took a sharp breath, and crushed both of them with a silent pop and a dusting of golden smoke.  “Wh- man, what the heck am I supposed to do with a rank in an extinct species?”  He instantly asked, the strange tension draining away.

“Bring them back?”  Frequency asked, the camraconda using her surrogate arms to move one of the damaged books onto the bottom shelf and out of the way.  “We can do that, right?”

James didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.

The team kept moving in the closest thing they could to a straight line.  Which was actually a challenge in the Stacks.  James got the impression that when Vad had suggested the name, he had been more than a little prophetic.  The shelves felt like they were akin to the cublices in Officium Mundi; making up a huge part of the core biome of the Library, but subtly warped and changed in ways that made them a challenge to navigate.

They curved, for one thing.  It was hard to tell if you were just looking at a row of shelves, but once you started going down between two of them, it quickly became apparent that the wood and metal structures tilted ever so slightly.  So halfway down, you couldn’t clearly see where you came from or where you were going.  And also, they seemed to be taller than they could possibly fit in the space they were put.  This was an old trick to James, who was used to seeing things that couldn’t fit be somewhere they shouldn’t anyway.  But it was still impressive how the ceiling could be almost claustrophobic over the shelves, and yet have them tower overhead anyway.

After half an hour, they had started to get a rough idea of what they’d find in this direction, and it looked mostly promising.  The team had passed a few hidden seating areas, little pools of softer carpet and sourceless sunlight with a chair or two.  They’d also skirted the edges of what sounded like a water feature, with James and Arrush remembering exactly what tended to dwell around the fountains in here.

The Library folded around them as they moved.  And James realized just how easy it would be to get lost in here, if he wasn’t careful.  They were being careful; Zhu was tracking exactly where they were, and everyone was carrying a pen that would remember where it had been recently and draw a map to let them backtrack.  But those were precautions bought with experience and old lucky breaks.  If the Ceaseless Stacks had been the first dungeon James had found, he wondered if he would have ended up lost in here forever.

He almost had with Anesh, the first time they went into the Office together.  Would the now-ancient plan of taping up paper signs to mark his path work here?  He doubted it.

“Mile mark.”  Zhu’s voice whispered to him, and James had to repress a groan as he informed Zhu that he also did not have to whisper.  The words though were a good indication that the team should turn around.

After all, they weren’t out here to explore, really.  They were looking for an easy path forward.  And with two miles covered, and nothing more dangerous than the fanged books attacking them, this seemed like a good place to start.  What they really needed first, though, was to find a semi open area that they could assemble in.

There was always backtracking to where they’d heard water, and seeing if it contained some kind of massive green-orb creature.  But that was a risk, for obvious reasons.  While it was unclear if this dungeon used green monsters as puppets like the Office did, it was hard to mistake the fact that the one they had encountered was large.  Large, aggressive, and only really taken down because it had tried to keep a vantage point and hadn’t just decided to use its mass to flatten James and his teammates at the time.

The team’s camraconda had something to say to James’ thoughts on that.  “You know I can just stare at things, right?”  Sunny asked.  “I’m magic or something.”

James shook his head.  “You know it isn’t foolproof, and the thing was the size of a truck.”

“I could stop a truck!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight sounded like she was actually planning on trying it just to prove she could.  “Oh, but if we want to find an open area, we should take one of these little paths between the stacks.”  She twisted her cabled body around, bobbing her head to indicate the line of cracked marble floor that cut a line between the rows of shelves.  They’d stopped after coming out of the last one, and a glance behind showed James nothing but shelves and no trace of where they’d started.  “If we keep going, we’re just going to end up with more shelves, I bet.”

“We found that chair.”  Arrush pointed out.

“We’ll need ten or twenty chairs to fit Pen in.”  The camraconda retorted.  “I’ve done the math.”

The team of six had gone quiet as they’d rearranged their formation, with Frequency in the middle so she could see more angles and Arrush and James at the front, and then begun heading down the more open aisle.  Passing row after row after row of shelves, all of them filled with books that were themselves filled with either nothing or gibberish.

James had a perverse fear that if he were a dungeon like this, and he knew he needed to make magic items for some reason, then this is exactly what he’d do: he would make a million books that looked like you fed a dictionary into a random number generator, with titles like Cake Bits or Useless Heat Facts.  And then he would make some of those books not just blank, or filled with equally random words, but hostile.  And then, after all that, he would make one in a million into something useful.  And rest easy knowing that no one would ever find it.

He was pretty sure the Ceaseless Stacks had done that. But he couldn’t prove it.

James stopped thinking and started paying closer attention to his surroundings as an opening came up ahead of them.  The shelves to their sides started getting shorter while the ceiling turned vaulted and swept upward toward… nothing.  There should have been a skylight or visibility on the balconies of higher floors, but instead there were just more arched shelves forming the dome, like an optical illusion that just barely came together, and rings of hanging wrought iron lamps that produced no light and confused the scene even further.

The party slowed, and James felt Zhu fluttering excitedly against his arm.  There was a brighter space coming up, somewhere that wasn’t just lit by the grey-orange light that came from nowhere, somewhere more open.  And then, suddenly, it was there; a few steps and the way the rows of shelves felt like it blocked any distant vision melted away.  And they were looking at where their corridor ran into a wide circle of open space.

Piles of books sat haphazardly around the place, along with a layer of scattered newspaper pages that sat unmoving in the still air.  The heavy scent of dust grew as they approached, and it quickly became clear that this place was more than large enough to hold their whole group.  It also became clear that it was weird.

The stone floor, already cracked and scuffed before, was broken in places here.  Chunks of it held in place by gravity and mass as blocky formations split through it.  Coming up to head height in some places, they looked like tan salt crystal formations; cubes and rectangles almost growing out of the floor.

“Those are the computers.”  Simon stated as he looked over his shoulder.  He was still watching the rows to their sides; they’d seen a lot of the fanged books rustling as they passed, but hadn’t gotten close enough to provoke them.  Next to him, Myles looked like he really wanted to turn and take a peek too, but his survival training demanded that he make sure nothing snuck up on them in this hostile place.  “Aren’t they?”  Simon continued.  “The ones this place uses, they’re just… growing?”

“They look like geological formations.  Which makes sense because silicon-!“ Frequency-Of-Sunlight didn’t get to finish her sentence before there was a loud caw that interrupted them.

James looked up and scanned the shelves that lined the open space.  Many of them curved over it, like protective talons.  Though on the left side there was an open gap, and what looked like a spiral staircase; it might be a balcony that he could see if they moved in and got a better angle.  But he wasn’t looking for that now.  Something cawed again, and he snorted as he kept up his search.

“There.”  He softly said, pointing to where an inky crow was nestled in a pile of shredded newspaper, six shelves up on the right side.  The little bird spread its skeletal pen wings as James pointed at it, and yelled again, before settling down when James pulled his eyes away and tried to not look intimidating to it.  “Hey, uh… I’m noticing something weird.”  He said slowly.

“The bird is speaking?”  Arrush said, the ratroach grabbing the edge of the short shelf they were next to at the mouth of the space and poking his head around to look at the crow.  Caw, it said again, repeatedly, staring down the unfamiliar creature that was looking up at it with a multitude of eyes.  “Yes.  It is.  Birds don’t do that.”

“You don’t know that.  There could be some weird birds.”  Frequency pointed out.

Myles sounded somewhere between already exhausted, and deeply concerned, as he spoke up.  “Earth birds absolutely do not do that.  Why is it doing that?”

What it was doing, James had realized at about the same time as everyone else, was not actually making a noise.  It wasn’t cawing, it was yelling the word caw, pronounced quite crow-like, into their heads.

“Is it mean?  Do we murder it?”  Frequency asked with an overabundance of enthusiasm for her own pun.

James shook his head as he shot the crow an apologetic look.  “The last one wasn’t.  I think they just want to be left alone, so we won’t attack it.  But we are gonna bother it for a while.”  He took a deep breath.  “Let’s move in, and make sure there’s nothing wrong with this place, before we head back and tell the others.”

He took a step forward, enduring a barrage of caws from both the crow he’d spotted and another one somewhere high up in the shelves directly behind the entrance.  He got used to the strange sound easily, since it was actually close to how Zhu spoke to him when the infomorph wasn’t manifested, but he could see Simon and Myles having trouble.  Arrush probably was too, but was pretending he was fine.  Shaking his head, James kept a piece of his attention on the birds and let his boots echo on the stone as he moved forward.

Nothing stopped him.  In fact, once the crows settled down, it almost seemed quieter here than anywhere else.  Even the sound of his boots on the stone was muffled by the layer of dust, though the occasional newspaper sheet did make for a slipping hazard.  The others followed, leaving a trail in the dust and kicking up plumes of the stuff.  Frequency-Of-Sunlight sneezed, a bizarre noise coming from the camraconda as she made a kind of buzzing squeak, dust bursting away from her face as she did.

James cautiously approached one of the formations where the boxy computer hardware the Library used was growing like crystals.  Gently, while the others watched his back, he toed some of the broken stone, and then tapped at the semi-hollow beige shells of the computers.  Nothing happened, though his heart did jump when he turned around to see Arrush struggling to pull one of his knives out of a book.  The ratroach, inky blood dripping down his gloved paws, just gave James a sheepish duck of his head as he rapidly wiggled the knife out and gently placed the dead book back on a stack.

“Okay.”  James said.  “Ignoring that, this place seems pretty safe.”  One of the skeletal crows cawed in his head.  “Exactly, thank you.”  James nodded in its direction.  “I’m sure the engineers will love this shit.”  He gave a small laugh.

“Oh, yeah, the engineers.  Sure.”  Myles said, poking at the metal rim around a glass square growing out of the ground.  “Because no one else would find this so goddamn cool.  Do you listen to yourself sometimes?”  He shot James a look over the dark glass of the screen, his face partially shrouded by the helmet he was wearing.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight slithered by, leaving a serpentine track in the dust as she scanned the spiral staircase that punched a hole through a semicircle of floor surrounded by smooth white drywall where the shelves didn’t crowd in.  “It’s just a computer dude.”  She said.  “You guys make these things.”

“I feel like that’s giving us a lot more credit than you should.”  James countered.  “Anything on the stairs?”

“No, just stairs.”  She shook her head in a bobbing gesture.

Arrush sniffed wetly, a line of blue goo forming on the edge of his snout.  “I don’t like it here.”  He commented.  “But it… seems… safe?”

Caw!  The crow chimed in with its own opinion.

“Alright.  We’ll make sure we deal with the dust.”  James promised him.  “Zhu, we’re, what, a mile and a half in?”

“Yes.  And I can easily get us back here.”  The infomorph said.  “Everything is labeled.  Not in a pattern, but neither are the streets humans build.  So I can find it now that I’ve seen it.”  He gave a smug little flutter, his eye on James’ shoulder narrowing in satisfaction.

James smiled at him.  “Okay, let’s go see how the others are doing, and decide what direction we want to go.”  He said.  “Good work, now I hope no one’s tired, cause we’re doing this hike at least twice more today.”

_____

They got back later than James had wanted, after an unexpected diversion.  It wasn’t even a hostile one, it was just easier to get lost in the stacks than he’d wanted it to be.

There was something about libraries that James loved.  Maybe it was just nostalgia for a simpler time in his youth, when every book felt equally powerful, and the smell of old paper was enough to set his excitement alight.  But even as an adult, he loved what they represented.  Access to knowledge, the ordinary magic of being able to send thoughts and ideas across the sea of time, and the simple love of stories.

He did not share that love with this place.  The Ceaseless Stacks looked like a library, and Simon was quick to realize that the way the shelves towered and curved overhead did a great job of making the humans feel like they were small again.  But no quantity of books with titles James couldn’t understand, no weight of the scent of dust and paper, no endless sea of warm wood tones and ambient light, was ever going to be enough to trick him into thinking this place was a real library.

“…so the idea is that libraries are made to be browsed.”  James was explaining to Arrush as they finally made their way back to the crowd of the rest of the expedition.  “And… oh fucking finally.”  He practically gasped out as they found their people.

“I am, again, very sorry.”  Zhu sighed.

“Ah, not your fault little guy.”  Simon said as the group shrugged off their packs and James looked around for Anesh.   “Getting lost happens.  I used to know a guy who got us lost in tumblefeed territory, just having to walk an extra half mile is nothing.  You pointed us in the right direction!”

James felt his mouth quirk downward as he half-listened to Simon’s words.  He didn’t really know how to feel about the other man talking about his dead partner as someone he ‘used to know’, especially since their memories had ended up blended pretty thoroughly.   Of course, he realized, if Simon was saying it as a hidden joke, it was entirely possible that the grim humor was something both personalities found funny.  Either way, it didn’t feel like the time or place to bring it up, so he located Anesh, and motioned to the others to wait for him as he headed over to talk to their expedition coordinator.

Alanna had gotten to his prey before him, so James just slipped up next to his own partners as they finished their conversation.  “…four or five ‘levels’ maybe.  Whatever that means.  Either way, it’s got a big feckin’ landing a couple levels down.  More than enough space, though the shelves around it are kinda weird.  Dark wood, kinda… uh… organic, maybe?  Like they’re grown, not built.”

“Technically nothing here was ‘built’.”  Anesh mused.  “James, hey.  Welcome back.”  He greeted his boyfriend with a relieved nod and a sigh.  James had known coming in that Anesh was going to fret every time he or Alanna went out to explore, so he just smiled back and accepted it.  “How’d your recce go?”

“Our… yeah, sure.  It went okay.”  James said.  “Had some trouble getting back, but nothing too bad.  We found a spot that’s, mmm, maybe half again as big as this landing.  Not huge, but we could set up there as we progress at least.”

Alanna bopped him on the shoulder that wasn’t wearing Zhu like a feathery cape.  “My spot has this really cool staircase.”  She offered.

“Our spot also has stairs.”  Zhu leapt to their defense.

James laughed and gave the navigator a comforting pat.  “Let’s not get sidetracked and bury the lede here.  Our spot also has, like, mineral formations of computer equipment?”  He gestured at where the engineers were playing with one of the tan metal rectangles.  “Like that, but a ton of it, growing out of the floor.”

“I changed my mind I wanna go to James’ spot!”  Alanna announced.  “That sounds cool, and I’m nothing if not willing to compromise!”

Anesh gave her a suspicious eye.  Like he was planning to say something about that, and the true nature he knew of Alanna as someone who was perfectly willing to compromise on tactics, but never on anything she thought was really important.  What he actually said was more diplomatic.  “Okay.  So, how do we do this?”  He asked.

“Aren’t you supposed to be our coordinator?”  James asked jokingly.

Glowering at his boyfriend, Anesh folded his arms.  “You assigned that to me for some reason.”  He accused James.  “I don’t have some special knowledge, I’m just supposed to make the calls when no one can decide.  So… okay, right now, we need to move mostly as a group.  James, how bout your team goes first and leads us, Alanna, bring up the rear.  Is there room for Pendragon to move or are we going to have to get ‘clever’?”

“There’s a pretty large gap over the shelves in most places.  She can follow us overhead.”  James said.  “Hardest part will be the longer curved shelf sections, but I think we can make it work.  This place has a lot more elbow room for a dragon than I’d have thought.”

“Okay.”  Anesh thought for a second.  “Let’s just move now, no reason to wait.  Can you two tell everyone quietly?”

“On it.”  James said with a nod.

He and Alanna shared an improvised and awkwardly misaligned fist bump before breaking into laughter, and then sandwiching Anesh in a kiss, before the three broke apart and went to get the expedition moving.  It wasn’t a lot of work, they’d basically just parked here for an hour as a temporary stop, so no one had gotten settled in.  Well, almost no one.

Chevoy tried to wave James off as he approached her.  An almost aggressive motion even as she kept her eyes on the computer she and the older man with her were working with.  “We need more time on this.”  She told James.

“You’re gonna say that all week.”  He informed them.  “Why?”

“We still can’t get this stuff to ‘pair’ properly back at the Lair.”  Chevoy said.  “But here, it’s almost… not effortless, but intuitive.  I think it’s the desk.”  She rapped her knuckles on the wood surface, getting a startled squeak from Keeka as he helped Amelia move a cart past them.  “Sorry.”  Chevoy said without sounding really sorry.  “But yeah, this is what I want to work on here.”

James shook his head.  “We can’t leave you here, and we’re not splitting up.  Besides, this is right near the entrance.  You can actually just come back next week for this.  Also, we’re going to check out a place where these things grow, so you’ll have more time with them.”

The middle aged man, partly balding with sandpaper facial hair, slowly turned to look at James.  “Like fruit?”  Their newest programmer hire asked slowly.

“More like mineral formations.”  James answered.

The words were like their own magic spell, getting the two different tech specialists up and moving at a rapid pace.  James wanted to laugh, but kept it in; the group of twenty people were already making enough noise and he didn’t need to add to it any more than was required.  He did genuinely find it amusing that someone they hired to pick up Virgil’s work on skulljack firmware, and someone who was working on a space elevator, were both so excited by hardware that was eclipsed in power by the existence of Bluetooth.  But hey, maybe the fact that it was literal magic made a difference.

James double checked that all their supplies were accounted for, and led them out to the next staging site within the next five minutes, feeling good about things so far.

_____

On every dungeon delve James had been on, injuries had just been something that happened.  Sometimes your attention slipped, or you missed a strike in a fight, or you just got ambushed, or a trap went off at the wrong time.  Up until now, luck and grit and adaptability had meant that no one had died from any of these hits, but they represented a form of attrition.

During a delve, they pushed the exit threshold closer.  The time at which the team turned around, or took the painful shock to the nervous system and teleported out.  Where continuing was a terrible idea.  Actually, this was part of why no one had died; the Order were real people with real instincts, and in situations where James would have gotten hundreds of characters killed if he were playing a roguelike during his downtime, the actual delvers instead would opt to just fuck off.  They didn’t need anything the dungeons had to offer right now, all further exploration was voluntary, and so if the risk mounted, leaving was just the best choice almost every time.

That said, they had planned to be here for a week.  Which meant injuries suddenly got a new context.  If they were light, and happened early, then whoever got hurt would recover before the expedition ended.  If they were too heavy, then they represented a potential loss of a much larger venture.

So they went cautiously.  Not that they didn’t move cautiously normally, but in this case, they had the force strength and the magical backup to cover all the angles and handle anything the dungeon threw at them.  It didn’t hurt either that the Ceaseless Stacks seemed to love the living book full of teeth trick, and used it far more than anything else.

Because that trick, it turned out, was something the Order had a simple and easy counter for.

North Apple Crumb, ———, Swarm Sentry.  The glasses that deduced faction affiliation and job title were, it turned out, excellent at picking out which books were alive.  It even gave their titles, though in place of the bestowed name of the Ceaseless Stacks, there was… not nothing, exactly.  But a sort of nails on the chalkboard scream, a visual icon that screamed in the mind when read.  But softly enough that they were still sweeping the nearby shelves with multiple sets of eyes.

James pointed out the book, ignoring the twitch in the corner of his eye as the noise crested.  Myles sighed and stepped toward it, poking gingerly at the worn paperback with an aluminum baseball bat he’d borrowed from Simon.  “Hey.  I’m legally obliged to tell you we don’t want to fight.”  Myles said for the fiftieth time today.

The book didn’t listen, and Myles swore as it lunged for him, only to be stopped midair by Frequency, and then hit repeatedly with the baseball bat.  The camraconda ability letting the hits still cause damage, even as the rest of the book was frozen.  James had long since filed that away under ‘weird shit he didn’t understand’, and moved on, and right now he was too busy rubbing at his right eye and trying to make the headache go away to really be concerned with how casually Sunny violated the laws of physics.

Then James put the glasses back in place on his nose, took a breath, and kept moving slowly forward.  Behind them, others followed, even Pendragon doing her best to move quietly as they methodically cleared a wide path for the expedition to follow.

Right now, with people to swap out, camracondas for overwatch, glasses for spotting ambushes, and all the time in the week?  There was no reason to start letting injuries build up at all.

_____

They took a break once everyone was moved in amid the crystal formations of library computers.  Not a very long one, but enough for the delvers to catch their breath.

The plan wasn’t to set up camp here.  After all, they were all mostly fresh, even after a few hours in the dungeon, and they wanted to go far deeper.  This spot was just meant to be another place to leapfrog from; scout groups moving out ahead and finding another safe path to their next rest point.  Eventually, they’d need to stop for the ‘night’, but eventually wasn’t now.

Also the Ceaseless Stacks might not even have a night.  The door opened at three AM, after all, and it looked like a constant grey afternoon was just outside somewhere nearby all the time they’d been in.  Its idea of night might just be slightly fewer elusive sources of light from just around corners.

During the rest, James did his best to relax.  He wasn’t feeling bad, by any stretch, and the sensation of comfortable pressure in his muscles without any pain made him wish he’d started exercising more seriously earlier in his life.  But he did know that he couldn’t keep this up all day for a whole week without taking care of himself.

So he claimed a stack of heavier books as a seat, after making sure none of them were going to rip his ankles off, and settled in to watch the others.

To no surprise, half the group that was here to study dungeons up close zeroed in on the parts of the computer formations that had monitors, and started trying to get them to work.  To some surprise, James noticed TQ hanging out with them, but that sorta made sense too.  The camraconda who he’d been getting closer to lately seemed to relish puzzles of all sorts, and that included cracking people’s passwords.

Keeka, taking his assigned job very seriously, moved around the dispersed cluster of Order explorers, making sure everyone was actually drinking water and staying hydrated.  James tried to bite back his smile as he watched Keeka ask Arrush at least three times if he needed a new water bottle, the lithely rebuilt ratroach circling back past his boyfriend repeatedly as he scurried through the rest point.

Most everyone looked pretty alright, with the exception of Amelia.  The woman was the oldest person on the delve, even if the ex-Alchemist wouldn’t actually tell James how old she was.  And she was clearly out of breath from the march here, having pushed herself to stay with the group.  Or at least, she was out of breath until she pulled a pair of small flasks out of her coat and took sips from each.  The transformation was almost immedient as she straightened up, breath coming slower and steadier.  She noticed the golden retriever sitting near her watching as she capped one of the flasks, and sighed dramatically as she offered it out.  Prince declined, but the two started talking about something in quiet voices.

The loudest single noise, briefly, was the sound of Pendragon as she settled down onto the floor.  The paper dragon - though paper was probably only about a third of her body mass at this point - pulled back the tips of her claws that had originally been formed from office chairs to reveal smoothly rolling semi-organic wheels that she used to slide herself down mostly quietly.  Quietly except for the sound of her claws on the cracked marble.  She settled in curled around one of the metal formations, long neck craned upward, her hornless head moving back and forth as she watched the tops of the shelves for anything approaching them.  Dave had stayed connected to her this whole time, the duo planning to only split for actual camps.

James kept a casual eye on Camille, too.  She was around, technically.  Her job was to be the last line of… James crushed that thought halfway through it.  Her job was to make sure the less experienced combatants stayed safe as they ventured deeper.  Right now, there wasn’t anything threatening for her to face, but that didn’t stop her from standing at a kind of parade rest, sweeping the area with as much vigilance as Pendragon was.  Every time one of the crows cawed in their heads, her eyes would flick toward them like she was trying to pick apart the nature of their existence.  Once, she turned her head to look at one directly, and it had shut up for the next ten minutes.

“Hey.”  Anesh’s voice brought him around from watching Kirk taking photos of the optical illusion of a ceiling.  “Don’t get up.”  He added, stopping James from doing exactly that.

“Okay.  Why?”  James asked as he adjusted the Dictionary Of Arboreal Maledictions that his ass was currently resting on, before settling back and resting one of his feet on the helmet he’d taken off and left on the floor.

Anesh ruffled his hair affectionately, ensuring that James was going to have to redo his ponytail shortly.  “I’m sending Alanna and Vadik out to scout.  You get to sit.”

There was a short burst of concern, which James also did his best to set aside.  “Yeah, okay.”  He nodded.  Logically, he understood that he actually could not be the one in danger all the time, and that rotating teams was sort of why they’d brought so many people.  In fact, his group being fresh and ready to respond was how they helped make things safer for the others.  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t worried that Alanna was going off without him.  “Guess I should find something to amuse myself for an hour or two.”  He thought out loud.

Ten minutes later, after Alanna and Vad decided which directions they were going - Vad’s team was going down the corridor through the shelves with more elbow room that led deeper into the dungeon, Alanna had opted to take the spiral staircase up a level and do a looping look around above them - a little under half the expedition split off and left them.

“And if you hear singing, remember your improv lessons!”  James told the delvers as they left.

“Of course.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said, the camraconda twisting to address him as she slithered away with her team.  “I have been training in the crucible of Wednesday night rap battles.”

The words hit James like a mental assault, and it wasn’t until they had moved out of sight that he turned to Arrush who was standing next to him and poking at a spiral of ink on the edge of a shelf.  “Hey, you actually live at the Lair.  Is she… messing with me?  Is there some kind of rap battle league that I don’t know about?”

“Yes.”  Arrush said, nodding his angular muzzle without looking up.

“To which part?”  James asked.

“Both.  What does this say?”  He asked.

“It’s Hebrew.”  A woman’s voice made Arrush jump, but James had seen Amelia approaching like she had a question for him, so he stayed steady.  “It’s something like ‘meevtzah’.  Either a bargain or a sale, or some kind of planned skirmish.”

When the words flowed off the wood and vanished through the air to reappear somewhere on her body, and Amelia started looking for her newest tattoo with an air of panic as she realized what she’d done, James had a question of his own.  “What a weird word.  Do you know the history of that one?  Because I would love to know if it was one of those things first.”

“No, I don’t know the history of a word.”  She snapped at him irately, before composing herself.  Next to James, Arrush made a hissing sound that was his way of trying to hold back a laugh, before he excused himself silently.  Amelia took a breath, and then steadied herself.  “I need to know what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

James smiled at her placatingly.  “This.”  He said, motioning to the now blank section of wood.  “You’re not a fighter, but that’s okay.  You know, someone once told me that the human mind is the most valuable object on the planet, but you can’t stockpile them.  You have to actually use them to get the value.  So that’s why you’re here.  And… you know, because you asked to come.  Obviously.”

It became clear rapidly that Amelia took this the wrong way.  “Good, I can do that.”  She said.  “But I don’t want more tattoos.”  She passed her eyes across the group.  “Can I borrow that girl?”

“Cam?  Uh… you can ask her, and-“

“Excellent.”  The tone made James feel like he was back in third grade again, somehow.  Amelia strode away to address Camille, before taking the armored girl with her as she started scouring the nearby shelves and surfaces for more loose nouns.

James nodded to himself.  “I’m sure that’ll go well.”  He said.  Then, not feeling like sitting down for the hour or two before they moved again, he went to help the irritated Researcher while she tried to use a crowbar to pry apart some of the larger pieces of computer hardware jutting from the floor.

Soon enough, their expedition would start to run into more risks and more problems.  But right now, with a safe zone under their control and people on watch, James felt like making himself useful.

It might not be until tomorrow, but the real fun was still to come.

____

Ceaseless Stacks Expedition Report - Day 1 - Acquisitions

Size 1 yellow orbs (Library) : 366

Living word tattoos (Verb) : 12

Living word tattoos (Noun) : 31

Living word tattoos (Adjective) : 2

Computer components (Various) : 6

Mundane books with titles that amused someone : 2