The Daily Grind - Chapter 254 (Patreon)

In rereading older chapters, I've been reminded that the inhabitor dog is actually also a golden retriever.  I guess I just like that kind of dog.  I'll fix that later

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“I grew up reading Redwall. The opening pages were full of lavish descriptions of playful merriment. I loved those pages. But they always gave way to chapters about war, pillaging, and slaughter. So let’s ask: what if the meadow gets to stay safe and happy this time? What if those opening pages last forever?”  -Avery Alder, Wanderhome-

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Settling down to camp for the night had been so close to restful.  The Ceaseless Stacks had failed to manifest a nighttime yet, but the pale werelight of the dungeon hadn’t gotten in the way of sleep.  Being in a dungeon had though, for James and for a lot of others.  Even with a watch set up, the day had been long and tiring and everyone was aware of the potential danger that surrounded them.

Especially after the incident with the chair.

Their final campsite, two more leaps and maybe five miles farther into the dungeon, had ended up being a reading space of sorts.  In the middle of a small maze of shelves, ring after ring of curved wood hiding it away, it sat empty.  Long tables growing from the floor, the cool oak stacked with books and the occasional reading lamp, ringed in equally hard wooden chairs.  There were also a few smaller tables with pairs of more comfortable armchairs at the back of the shelves from where the maze had deposited them.

And after the second sweep of the place to make sure no more of the books were going to attack, that the lamps weren’t going to explode, and that the crows nesting high overhead weren’t actually angry enough to attack, it had only been natural for the more exhausted members of the expedition to take a seat in the most comfortable spots.

Amelia had settled into the chair with a sigh like she was twenty years older and her bones were about to fragment to dust.  And in the moment, it had seemed to her like it was the perfect seat for a human being.  She had settled her head back, and considered a brief nap before buckling down to try to understand what it was about the dungeons that gave people their strange instincts in using the Sap of Knowledge.

Then she had screamed, as she realized she was halfway sunk into the chair, her forearms entirely engulfed in the plush material of the seat’s own arms.  The luxuriously soft padding diffusing where her body touched it into something like sand, pulling her deeper in with every second.

Juan and Simon had been at her side in an instant, since they were the two who were closest to stealing the comfy chairs themselves.  But even working together, neither of the two men could pull Red out of the padded seat she was sinking into.  In fact, pulling seemed to make it worse.  Then Camille had appeared a beat later, ready to kill whatever the problem was, but before she could exacerbate the problem, James and Alanna had both had the same thought and yelled for her to stop, and instructed the unnaturally strong woman to pull Amelia out slowly.

Once the initial shock had worn off and everyone could calm down, it didn’t take much effort at all to extract the older Alchemist.  When she stopped struggling so much, her rate of sinking slowed dramatically, and when light but consistent pressure was applied, it was possible to hold her in place while James got the others to use nearby books to scoop away the dissolved chair and relieve the pressure that was holding her in place.

“Cool.  So some chairs are quicksand.  Love it.”  James tried to sound sarcastic, but he was actually grinning like an idiot when he’d said it.  It was hard to not be excited when the thing that saturday morning cartoons had prepared him for his whole childhood to face was real now.

And then, attracted by the scream and the yells afterward, a tide of toothy books had hit their camp.  James counted them lucky that it wasn’t anything worse, and everyone already being alert meant that the fight was frenetic, but not overly dangerous.  But it was a reminder that they weren’t safe here, not really.  So no one had slept easy on the first night.

James had stayed up a bit later than he needed to.  Keeping watch, and then consuming the food and water that Keeka made sure to bring him.  While the others had eventually settled down on the sleeping mats and bags they’d brought, or taken their own watch shifts, somewhat awkwardly getting into the routine of camping with so many others nearby, James had stayed restless.  And not just because he felt deeply uncomfortable using the bathroom in the blue-enchanted buckets they’d brought that turned waste into dirt.  Though he did silently admit to himself that he owed Momo a lot for those.

He just had a hell of a time shaking the feeling that there should have been more resistance than a pile of paperbacks.  And when he did eventually sleep, pressed up against Anesh’s back as he traded places with Alanna, he couldn’t help but doze off wondering if they were missing something.

_____

The next day, James woke up sore, and kinda regretted the idea of a week long delve right away.  Sleeping under a table was something he hadn’t done since high school LAN parties, and the sleeping bag he’d been sharing had been mostly confiscated by Alanna.  Though she’d been kind enough to layer it back over him when she’d gotten up first.

James rose and stretched, feeling a strange sense of comfort at being in his boxers around a group of people.  Residual immunity to embarrassment from having gotten used to the open baths, maybe.  Or maybe he was still a little groggy and didn’t have time to think about it.  Either way, he took the time to dress and buckle on his armor before he grabbed a banana for breakfast and got ready for their start of day meeting.

“Alright.  Welcome to the briefing James has incomprehensibly put me in charge of.”  Anesh told the group of five people.  Three delve team leads, one Researcher, and one… whatever Keeka was.  Support teammate.  Their job was to sort out the day, then pass it back to everyone else, and get moving.  “Today we’re going to search around our immediate area for anything of interest, and then spend the back half of the day moving deeper.  Priorities are finding a computer with a map, or asking a catalog for a good place to move the group to.  James, I want your group to scout around us in an arc this way…” Anesh indicated on a quickly sketched map.  “…and then come back around, and trade off with Vad.  Alanna, can your group head out and see if you can find us our next staging point?”

“Yeah, we can do that.”  She nodded, listening while she fidgeted with her armor’s chestplate and tried to make it sit where it was supposed to.  “You guys gonna be okay here?”

Juan nodded, stifling a yawn and sending the pencils orbiting his head bobbing in the air.  “We’ve got the most dangerous thing here.”  He jutted a thumb over his shoulder at Camille.  “And also Pendragon in second place.”

“She can hear you, you know.”  James said.

“I stand by what I said.”  Juan doubled down, but he didn’t look in Cam’s direction.

“Okay banter later.”  Anesh snorted.  “Just an easy day.  If you find something really dangerous, call it in and fall back, and we’ll prepare a plan of attack, okay?”

“Yes boss.”  Vadik sounded less sarcastic than James would have expected.

When he leaned in to kiss his boyfriend on the cheek, he was exactly as sarcastic as he meant to be.  “Yes boss.”  James said with a wild grin.

“I’m going back to sleep.”  Zhu said, threatening to sink back into James’ shoulder.

The team captains started to head back to assemble their people, some of them still asleep from longer watch shifts.  Which left Anesh with two people.  “Keeka, I don’t have anything special for you today.  You’re doing good.  Juan… I dunno, anything Research wants to poke around at?”

“Peng wants to dissect a couple of the books.”  Juan said casually.  “We’ll probably use one of the back tables for it.  Chevoy is still trying to dissect the computer chunks we brought.  I’m trying to map the ceilings.  We’ve got stuff to do.”

“The… what?”

Juan made a small hum as he looked back at Anesh.  “Hm? Oh.  Something Arrush said about the ceilings.  They’re all sort of optical illusions.  I’m looking for any kind of pattern in them.  Anyway.  If you need something specific, let me know.  But yeah, the rest of us are good just doing our own thing.”

“Got it.  Keeka, you alright?”  Anesh asked, and the black furred ratroach nodded back vigorously, already fine having been told he was doing good.  “Okay.  We’ll check back in eight hours from now or when Alanna pokes something dangerous.”  He rose from his crouch and avoided clapping his hands as he sent them on their way.

James liked the efficiency.  He also liked having a clear task to accomplish, especially one that might lead them to finding something cool.  And already dressed and armored, he felt like he was the kid who was too excited for summer camp again as half his team was still finishing their mundane coffee.  So rather than be restless, or be like Alanna and bully his teammates into going faster, he sat on a throne of textbooks and tried to improve his ability to read pdfs through his skulljack.  He had one saved on a USB drive connected to his braid that was a beginner’s guide to building your own PC, and he’d thought he could snag a few points for his computer science lesson during the downtime in here.  But it turned out, there wasn’t much downtime, and also James didn’t really know how to open files with his mind when he didn’t have an intermediate program to help.

So he ended up just sitting next to Smoke-And-Ember, while the two of them waited for their respective teammates.

“Why don’t we all have the nerf gun that both looks and behaves like something improbably dangerous from Destiny 2?”  Smoke-And-Ember asked James as the camraconda focused his camera eye on a silently judgemental ink crow perched above them.  James hadn’t spoken much with this particular camraconda, but it had quickly become apparent that he had a hobby in gaming.  “I could fire six at once.  Look.”  His mechanical arms splayed out, the ones that were on standby unfurling with a soft whirr from his backpack.  “I could be the protagonist.”

“First off, you’re right, we should name the Nerf gun something absurd.”  James agreed to an unspoken comment.  “But also it just doesn’t fit in the copier envelope.  And even if it did, it’s the gun bracelet that really makes it useful, and we have a pretty limited number of those.  I mean, we have sixty of them, but half of them are bound to things we use and the other half are bound to things we don’t have and still haven’t regenerated a new charge.”  He shrugged.  “Maybe we’ll find a magic book gun in here or something.”

The camraconda hissed a laugh, suddenly shaking with amusement as he fought to make his digital voice say the words that he had thought.  “It would… it would… load a magazine.”

“I feel like our greatest gift to your people is that someone taught you puns.”  James said with a smile.  “Oh, I thought of another also!  Also, we’re in the Ceaseless Stacks where I don’t think I’ve seen anything that isn’t incredibly flammable!  So maybe don’t live up to your name that much.”

“My… oh!  Yes, that would be bad.”  Smoke-And-Ember replied with a nod.

James found himself smiling when he caught sight of a few others heading their way.  “Hey.  Looks like you’re up.  Um…”

Smoke-And-Ember twisted his corded body to look at the approaching group of humans and one inhabitor dog, Alanna grinning as she cracked her neck, ready to throw them into the unknown.  “Heh.”  The camraconda spoke the word through his digital voice.  “Yes.  I will keep your partner safe.”  He said.

“I would never phrase it that way.”  James said, holding up a gloved hand.

“Yes.”  Smoke-And-Ember replied as he let his authority scarf unfurl slightly to float around his neck.  “That is how we know you are smarter than you let on.”

“What’s this about James being smart?”  Alanna asked with a gleeful look as she ruffled his hair on the way past.

“I’ll tell you later.”  James said in the low tone he’d gotten used to using on every dungeon delve.  “Have fun!  I’ll be right behind you guys through the maze, so just know that if you get lost I’ll know!”

Alanna hummed out a laugh.  “Oh, good motivation!”  She said.  “Alright boys, let’s get moving.”  She stepped off the flat carpet of their campsite, boot making a hollow thunk on the cracked and scuffed stone of the path through the towering shelves that twisted back and forth to create a little labrinth around them.  All it took was one turn, and she was out of his sight, waving to James over her shoulder.

He smiled to himself as Frequency-Of-Sunlight excitedly took the other camraconda’s place, and a sharp eyed Simon added himself to their rally point, watching the shelves like he expected the wood itself to attack them.  Myles joined them shortly after, which just left one person, though a quick glance around showed that Arrush was slightly occupied by Keeka fussing over his armor, adding a refilled water bottle to his bag, and pulling his boyfriend down to his level for a long and passionate kiss.  James stopped glancing, and resigned himself to waiting another few minutes.

The Library would be there when they were ready.

_____

Half an hour later, midway through the rough arc that James and his team were tracing around the campsite, something changed.

It wasn’t abrupt.  The wood of the surrounding shelves had been getting darker, and when they walked through the stone corridor, it was easy to see that the shelves themselves weren’t nearly as long as they had been.  It was like they were being split apart, gaps forming between them that weren’t quite pathways, but weren’t quite nothing either.  The shelves getting narrower and narrower, the gaps more common, but not themselves wider.

Arrush pointed out the ceiling overhead.  Right now, it was a smooth dark brown surface.  Not natural wood color, some kind of paint that mimicked it.  Or maybe the dungeon didn’t need to bother with that sort of illusion, and just made a material that looked like painted wood without being either wood or paint.  That wasn’t important.  What was important was that ahead of them, the ceiling came to a sort of end.  Like it tapered off, and what was past it wasn’t visible, just open air.

They’d seen this before.  It was what it looked like around the landings; where the Library offered up a much more open area.  But before James could start to think that they might have found a nearby spot to explore, Zhu tapped him on the neck.  “Look.”  The navigator directed the group’s vision with an orange line of light.

The shelves didn’t stop.  Progress was still slow, and it was easy to lose track of just how little they’d moved when they had to stop and check for hostile books every ten steps, but it started to become clear as they approached what the problem was.

What had looked like a simple change of direction in the hallway they were walking was anything but.  Instead, the stone floor simply came to an end at the foot of a tall shelf, and didn’t turn or start again.  As they stepped out underneath the taller ceiling, Myles and Frequency stared upward at the patterns in the dark wood high overhead.  It went so far up that they lost sight of it; the light dimming around the team, leaving them not in darkness, but certainly with thicker shadows.

“Do we turn back?”  Simon asked the important question as he shifted his stance to face whatever might be ahead of them.

“I think we can take a look a little further.  Zhu, anything?”  James asked his mostly incorporeal friend.

The navigator splayed his taloned hand against the back of James’ own.  “It’s weird, but not… it’s one of those places designed to make you lost.  I don’t think it will work on me, but I said that yesterday.”

James stepped up to the end of the dirty marble hall, and set his hand on the side of the wood shelf there.  It wasn’t small, certainly.  But it was the thinnest shelf he’d seen so far.  Three feet across, and about as deep, too.  It curved backward almost organically farther up, dodging away from the last bit of the lower ceiling before it was fully free to grow.

As soon as James thought the word ‘grow’, he realized what he was looking at.

Dozens, maybe hundreds of shelves like this one lay ahead of them.  The semi-orderly pattern of rows and hallways breaking down into something more like living chaos.  He looked past the shelf, and could see three or four more layers deep, to where some of them were thinner, some had rougher or different colored wood paneling, where the light truly did seem to be more shadow than anything else.

“It’s a forest.”  James whispered.

“Well we can’t not check that out.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight stated.  And as if that broke the spell of concern, everyone agreed with her.  The camraconda slithered past James, her armored form taking point as they started to slowly make their way in amid the shelves.

They walked deeper and deeper into the shelves that grew tall around them like tree trunks.  Quickly, it became clear that they had a kind of rough bark texture to them.  And also, they had barely any actual books on them.  Sometimes there was one or two tattered old text, but the place was mostly empty of paper.

The floor underfoot was mostly carpet, but every now and then, James would take a step and feel it squish like it was wet paper.  Nothing tried to grab them from it, and they didn’t sink down into the spots they found, but it added a moisture and a swampy quality to the air.  The carpet was getting a little more plush, too.

They were in the process of switching formation when they heard the first caw.  Arrush’s claw tightened on Simon’s shoulder, threatening to shear through the armor there as the ratroach tensed for a fight.  The word yelled into their head by the skeletal pen crow poking its head out of one of the shelves ahead caught them all of guard.

Then another one joined it.  And another, and another.  From all around them, the screaming of caws and squawks and other avian words filled their heads so much they couldn’t hear each other.  James settled his hand on his gun as the group circled up, keeping a shelf to their backs as they watched for anything approaching.

Then it went quiet again.  And when their hearts or camraconda equivalents stopped racing, they moved on.  A little slower.

“Hold up.”  Simon said eventually, the quiet words calling them to a stop.  “What is that?”  They’d gotten even deeper, and the air was starting to feel chilly.

Ahead of them, barely visible through the shadows, something was clinging to the side of a thin oak shelf.  “I can’t… tell.”  James muttered.  “Anyone have better dark vision than me?”

“Yes.”  Arrush hissed out.  “It’s a white ball of paper.”

“…just clinging to the side of the shelf?”  Myles didn’t sound happy with that at all.  “Why?”

“Standard approach.”  James ordered.  “Sunny, show us line of sight, Myles, Simon, fan out.”  He verified Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s angle of view through their skulljack connection, as he and Arrush started creeping forward.  When he got closer, James got a better look at the object.  About the size of a softball, glistening where the dim light touched it.  It looked a lot like… “…paper mache?”  He frowned, and reached down to his waist to draw the long blade that doubled as a stick for poking foreign objects.

“James.”  Arrush’s voice sounded weird saying his name.  James had never thought about it before, but he’d never actually heard the big ratroach call him anything directly.  This time, though, he froze and looked up to match where Arrush was looking.

There were more of the little balls on the next few trunks of the shelf forest.  But they stopped being little really quickly.  Two trees ahead, past this outer line where they’d found the first one, there was a slimy shell of paper that was so heavy it drooped down to the floor, looking way too much like a cocoon for comfort.

“That one looks different.”  Myles commented, twenty feet to the side, comparing the big one to all the smaller balls of paper around it.  “Do we want to approach?”  He frowned and repositioned as his foot made the floor sink a half foot when he stepped on one of the wet parts.

“Let’s back off before-“

One of the wads of paper exploded.  Not the one in front of James, thankfully, but one slightly farther in.  The burst of paper mache splattered across the floor and shelves around it, as a black blob flopped out before shaking itself and lunging up into the air.  The blob itself flapping out into slimy wings, twisting itself around and revealing a body that was like a single fluid and morphing eyeball.  It didn’t sit still for very long, but James was pretty sure it had a single big claw dangling underneath it as it shot up to the higher reaches.

“That was not one of the crows.”  Frequency commented.

“That was not even close to okay.”  Zhu added.  “I know I’m not in a position to call things weird, but that was too much eyeball.”  James pursed his lips, the comment drawing a snort of laughter from him as he slowly jerked his head down to look at Zhu’s single large manifested eye on his shoulder.  “I know what I said.”  Zhu answered the unspoken question.

Another muffled splat sounded nearby, followed by the sound of flapping.  “I think we woke them up!”  Simon called as another of the blobs unfolded.  James saw the one in front of him start to wobble, and made a snap decision.  Expending a little Breath and feeling the cold seep into his skin, he shot out a roughly constructed arm of ice.  Not caring to make it anything elegant or useful, it was just a single jointed limb with a flat ‘hand’ that he curled around the ball in front of him.

Unfortunately right now, the Mountain spell still “let” him feel through the limb, so the gooey slime of the paper mache cocoon exploding and the sudden writhing of the creature struggling against his unexpected grasp was viscerally unpleasant to James.  He hadn’t actually meant to hold onto the sticky bat eyeball thing at all, but apparently, it didn’t want to wait for him to react.  Which meant he also felt it when it cracked itself in half and its rows of teeth shattered his flat ice fingers, carving through his limb even as he stifled a scream and dropped the magic into a puddle of water.

“They bite!”  He called out to the others.  And then Zhu’s own arm shot off his own to slice a rapidly moving ball out of the air before it hit them, the semi corporeal talons imparting enough force to cut and knock the eyeball off course.  “They are biting!”  James added.

“Fight or run?”  Myles asked the important question.  “Cause I could go for some running!  I could jog, is what I’m saying!”

Suddenly, the noise of explosive splatters was everywhere, filling the silent shelves with wet sounds.  “I don’t think we can outrun that many.”  James said grimly.

“They squish.”  Arrush said helpfully as he slid one of the creatures off the knife he’d plunged into it when it tried to plunge dripping teeth into his eyes.

The next minute became a sudden and frantic series of moments as more and more of the things joined their fellows in the air around the team.  James got a better look at a few of them, and regretted it intently.  Their core was a sticky blob that defaulted to an ink-shot orb of an eyeball, but whatever it was made of had no problem flexing into wide batlike wings that flapped in gusts to keep them moving.  And, as he noticed when one grabbed the armguard of his gear after being deflected by a block, they did have something like a single claw to perch on.

Except it wasn’t a claw.  It was a perfectly normal human hand.  This one belonging to someone dark skinned who had built up a lot of calluses, a hand that had seen a lot of hard work.

James had put his fist through the eyeball part with a snarl, regretting it slightly as the fluid clung to him even as the rest of the creature collapsed into an oozing puddle.  The others were moving closer to him, the flow of battle tipping in their favor as they covered each other, and repeatedly pulled the trick of Frequency stopping one at perfect striking range.

Then Myles had to go and be observant.  “They’re trying to eat the other cocoon!”  He announced, drawing attention to where ten or twenty of the eyebats were descending on the larger drooping shape.

Sucking in a breath, James shared a glance with Arrush, the ratroach looking to him for direction right away.  “You know what?  I don’t feel like letting them have what they want.” He said.  “Let’s deal with that.”  Next to him, Simon nodded once and fell in with James and Arrush as they rushed the small flock that were tearing into the outer layer of the far more stable cocoon with their split forms.

Pulling on one of his manipulate asphalt charges as his boot squelched into the floor, James formed the small piece of the material he was carrying on himself into a spike, and killed two of the bats as they approached.  Which mostly failed to get their attention, as they didn’t react as a group until Arrush got closer, at which point they fluttered upward into a spiraling mass that tried to envelop the ratroach.

It didn’t work.  With Simon and James still hitting them, and Arrush’s knives skewering any that tried to land on him, half the bats were dead within a minute, and the other half made the oddly intelligent decision to leave.  They did so in a sudden explosion of motion, driving past James and Simon in their toothless forms, wings slapping against armor and exposed faces as they did so.  James heard Simon let out a grunt as he tumbled backward, and then suddenly, it was quiet around them again.

“So!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight said as she approached the group with Myles, rotating one of her mechanical arms in a motor test to make sure it wasn’t broken.  “Should we wait around for that one to explode too?”

James looked at the big cocoon, then back to Simon who was lying in the floor where he’d been knocked into one of the marshy parts.  He offered the armored man a hand up, though Simon took a couple tries to catch James’ hand, moving like he was distracted.  “I think we maybe don’t want to see what comes out of it right now.”  James said.  “Anyone hurt?”

“My pride.”  Simon said, wincing at the wet sucking sound of his ass being hauled out of the damp paper that looked like the rest of the floor.

“I’ve got holes in my armor.”  Myles didn’t sound happy about how easily the things had bitten through the Order’s gear, though James felt like if the armor had holes and not the person, they were doing something right.  “Also… hm.”  He knelt next to where Simon had fallen and slung his backpack off.

“I’m fine!”  Frequency said.  “I am invincible.”

Arrush shook his head at her, drops of blue saliva glowing brightly in the dim forest of shelves.  “Don’t say that.  They don’t like that.  But I am also fine.”

“Okay.”  James said.  “Let’s grab the yellows these things dropped and… Myles, what are you doing?”  He paused as the rogue settled the blade of a folding shovel against the floor, and kicked it down with a gritty shunk.

“I saw something when you pulled Simon up.”  Myles said, glaring at the floor as the material he shoveled away filled back in quickly.  “Help me here.  There’s absolutely something down there.”

With Simon and Arrush standing watch, Sunny glaring the ground into immobility, and James reaching down into the hole before it refilled itself, it didn’t take long to find what Myles had spotted.  Maybe a foot or two under the floor, a golf ball sized purple orb waited for them.  James plucked it out and held it up, looking at the others with a wide grin.

“You think I can get a sibling out of this one?”  Zhu asked curiously.  “I’d be okay with a younger brother.  I can be the wise sage that guides them to greatness or something.”

“Actually, Alanna’s pushing me to get an authority.”  James told his friend with a shake of his head.  “Also you absolutely would not do that.”

“No, I would not.”  Zhu readily agreed.  “I’d make him a proper terror, which is what you’d deserve, but also think would be hilarious.”

“Stop knowing me too well.”  James laughed.

Myles interrupted them, holding up his shovel.  “Uh… sorry, I don’t want to interrupt your moment, but now that Simon has literally fallen ass backward into success, do we want to backtrack and see if the other spots have these too?  And get away from the terrifying throbbing cocoon thing?”

James looked at the long and glistening paper mache mass, small divots in it where the bats had gotten their fill.  Part of him wanted to see what would come out of it, and if it would be a potential friend.  But his shoulder hurt where he’d overextended it on a hit, and he was breathing a little heavily, so maybe discretion was best for now.

“Yeah.”  He said.  “Let’s get at least a hundred feet away before we start digging more, though.”

_____

Amelia took the offered paper plate of food from Keeka without protest.  She had gotten familiar with the way the people of the Order of Endless Rooms kept trying to make her ‘eat properly’, and so tamped down her annoyance at being interrupted.  It was also easy enough to not become annoyed when she had an opportunity to look at the normally reclusive species up close.

Though Keeka was hardly a standard member of his kind anymore, which was disappointing.  But he was at least a polite creature toward her, in sharp contrast to James and his closer circle who treated her like she was a peer.

It stung a little more to realize that it was charity on their part to do so. She wasn’t their equal.  She was, no matter how you sliced it, their prisoner.  It just so happened that she liked the gilded cage well enough to stay in it.

“You have to actually eat it.”  Keeka told her as he passed by again, nervously pacing the campsite and helping Anesh with repacking to move again.

Amelia looked down at her plate and sighed.  It wasn’t even unpalatable, which was all the more insulting.  She should never have gotten used to relying on that stash of old potion she had found in her forties that replaced her need for most nutrition.  She had rather been banking on dying before it ran out, and look where that got her.  Needing to get used to eating solid food again.

Following the ratroach’s directive, she stabbed a chunk of fruit with her plastic fork and resumed trying to watch the Researchers disassemble a book.

“Cut here.”  The newer man, Peng, said.  He spoke like someone who had learned most of his English from the same person, and that person hadn’t really known how to speak English, and then he’d filled in the gaps himself.  Which was exactly how Amelia had felt herself when she’d purchased a knowledge orb for French.  “No, Juan, here.  On the… on the line.  Please.”

“Right.”  Juan pressed down with the entirely mundane box cutter he was wielding, as the two tried to peel off a single sheet of paper from the paperback.  The table and the tarp on it already contained the dead creature’s removed teeth, tongue, and two things that were some form of organ.  As the young Cuban man pulled back with the stained sheet in hand, the two of them peered closer at the edge, Amelia watching closely from her seat.

“Look here.”  Peng said as he traced a gloved finger through the air near the edge.  “We would need a microscope to see properly, but look.  These lines, these are not ink, they are something else.”

Juan clicked his tongue, the idiotic pencils around his head snapping to attention as he did.  “Veins, maybe?  Or a muscle analog?”

“I would guess the latter.  Slice here, let us see.”  Another thin cut was made, and no ink bubbled up.  “Likely not blood vessels then.  Ink vessels.  Ah, see here, with light shining through, we can see them tracing to the tips of the page.”

“Explains why they can bite so damn hard.”  Juan pulled back his hand and almost smeared ink on his hip as he reflexively went to rub an old injury.  “But… why?”

“Why what?”  Their newest Researcher asked.

“Why have muscles at all?  Why not just… magic?”

“Hm.”

Spire-Cast-Behind, currently rotated off watch duty with the delve team that had stayed with the camp, commented from nearby.  “Why can I eat?”  The snake asked.

“Hm?”  Juan looked over at her, like it was normal for him to ask clarifying questions to a giant artificial snake.  “Because food is how… oh, no, I see what you mean.”

“None of the documentation in the Order’s servers actually says much about camraconda biology.”  Peng added.  “You have something like a digestive system.  Though that does raise the same question, doesn’t it?”

“Why not just do it with magic?”  Juan asked.  “Okay.  Well, working backward, we can see a  repeated pattern in a lot of dungeon life where they have more… organics?… than they probably need to.  Even stapler crabs have a miniature biomass engine thing and extra ‘jaw muscles’.”  He pulled his gloves off so he could run a hand across his short beard.  “Is it as simple as just saying it’s less of a cost?”

“It could be a mimicry attempt.  Dungeons trying to copy ecosystems?”  Peng suggested.

Spire-Cast-Behind slithered closer, shaking her bulky head.  “No, I have seen Earth ecosystems now.  There are loops within dungeons, but they are… accidents, I believe.  Or only one part is ever intentional.”

“To be fair, a lot of Earth is like that too.”  Juan sighed.  “So maybe the reason for why you can eat, Spire, is that if you eat, the dungeon doesn’t have to do it for you.”

“Mmh.  And then the yellow orbs being ‘food’ for my kind is a secondary interaction that led to an ecosystem?”  The camraconda mused.  “So you believe the books have muscles, so that less ‘magic’ is needed as a resource to move them.”

Peng sighed and held up one of the teeth to the lamp they were using.  It was a bitterly sharp thing, with a slight channel in it for some kind of venom.  “We know nothing of how the dungeons think or build.”  He said, his accent coming through strong.  “But it does not make sense to me, to think that building this fine network of false organic motors would be less of a burden than… anything.  Anything else.  This is beyond anything humanity can do at the moment.  And it is used as cannon fodder.”  He looked down sadly at the dead book.

Amelia glanced toward the center of the camp, where Pendragon sat napping.  Maybe, she thought, not quite so far distant from what humans could do.

Silently excusing herself from the conversation, Amelia finished what was left on her plate, and rose simply so she could feel herself move.  She felt restless, even here in the depths of this place.  By no means was she an idle person, but the amount of walking and cautious near-battle it took to make it just five miles into the dungeon had consumed a whole day and quite a lot of energy.  And even still, she needed to walk.  To do something.

There was nothing here for her to do, though.  No work to distract her.  Nothing to focus on at all, except to worry over her own inadequacy.

Amelia finds herself trailing her hand across one of the bookshelves that surrounds their camp.  Ignoring the irate cawing of the crow over where she is walking, she stepped gently around, thumbing across book after book, nonsense titles filling her vision.  The Walls Of Oswald.  Big Chair.  Are These Things.  The old alchemist pauses as she tilts her head to read one, and then mutters to herself.  “What mad logic is it that led this place to name a text ‘Baby Things’.” She hisses to herself.  Her eyes flicker to the others, farther away from her now in where her walking is taking her, leaving her alone enough to grumble out loud without anyone thinking she’s talking to them.  “Logic.  Pah.  There’s none of that here.  How do they not see it?  At least the Lyle boy knows this place is no real library.”

She glares at the next shelf.  It’s offset by a half an inch; poking out just a tiny bit from the other, in a way that would mark a real place as being just a little bit patchwork.  The kind of thing that showed up when you were working with what you had, or what you could get at a thrift store.  Amelia hadn’t known that feeling for decades; not since she’d started selling magic to Hollywood actors and clocked a net worth of over ten million.

But here, the shelves being offset meant nothing.  It was… noise.  Static.  Geographical error codes.  And everyone else, all these people who were supposed to be professionals, who had done this before, looked at it as if it were normal.  They had answers for things, and even if those answers were guesses they were still guesses that felt weighty.

“Why do they know anything about you?”  Amelia whispered as she pushed a wrinkled hand forward and sunk a nail into the side of the shelf.  It wasn’t even real lacquer, it was wood that mimicked the look, and it was like that all the way down.  God, it might not even be wood at all.

“They are changing.”  A voice sent a spike of adrenaline into Amelia’s heart.  Old stockpiles of forgotten potions have made her internal organs resilient beyond human baseline, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t worry briefly about a heart attack as Camille spoke up.

“Good God, girl, don’t sneak up on your elders!”  She snapped at the armored worman, who was, notably, sitting in front of her.

Cam looks confused, but took the rebuke as if it is gospel.  “I am sorry.”  She said, looking as if she was torn between keeping a watch on the back half of the camp in case anything climbed over the shelves, or staring at the floor in shame.

Amelia noticed the odd behavior, and shook her head with a small huff.  “Well.  No harm came of it.  What did you say?  Were you answering me?”

“Yes.  They are changing somehow.  I don’t know how, yet, and I don’t know why.  But the Chain Breaker saw it in James and TQ.  She said… she said they were something new.”  Camille answered like she had been ordered to dispense information by a superior office, only faltering as it occurred to her that maybe Amelia wasn’t someone who was supposed to have open access.

The alchemist sighed and looked around for something to sit on.  Cam wasn’t even sitting, she was standing at attention in her armor.  The girl probably didn’t ever rest, did she?  There was a plush armchair nearby, and Amelia glared at it as if she could kill it with her mind, which so far, alchemy had not given her the ability to do.  “I know they’re changing.”  She told Camille.  “That’s why I’m here.”  There was a long silence as she waited for the girl in plate mail to say anything, but no reply came.  “You seem to know something about what’s happening.  If you tell me, it will save us time in this uncomfortable conversation.”

That, at least, Cam could appreciate.  And asked a direct question, she responded quickly.  “My sisters and I, we are pushed to fight.  Often.”  She still didn’t meet Amelia’s eyes, though her gaze did flick to the woman’s face.  “The ones that live longest are the ones who develop… an instinct.”

“For what?”

“For combat.  For survival.  No, that’s not right.”  Cam pulled her hand off the pommel of the mace at her side and clenched it into a fist, slowly unfurling the fingers.  “It’s not for anything.  It just is.  They become better.  That’s all.  If we survive, we learn to keep surviving, without knowing quite how.”

Amelia surprised Camille by simply nodding, and not giving her the horrified look that everyone else at the Order did when she said things like that.  “Ah, confirmation bias.”  She said.  “You lived, so you must have lived for a reason.”

“No, you don’t… understand.”  Camille shook her head, now looking more closely at Amelia.  “Something changes.  You can’t go back, once you have it.  And having it doesn’t make you invincible.”  Amelia barely caught the whispered words afterward.  “Nothing makes you invincible.”

Still, she nodded like she was following.  Because that thing, that intangible X factor Camille was talking about… that was what Amelia was here for.

She wanted it.  More than she’d ever wanted anything.  She wanted to be able to look at three things in a blender and pick out which one would make the potion kill a human.  She wanted to be able to walk through the grocery store and let a stray thought push her to bring a bag of apples back to the lab that would start them down the path of refining the dream draught.  She wanted to be better dammit.

And now here was a girl who knew what she meant.  So Amelia asked the question she had wanted an answer to since setting foot here and being confused by every strange choice the dungeon ‘made’.  “How do I get it?”  She spoke aloud.

Camille gave her a look that was part exhaustion, part fear, and part pity, and even as distant and closed off as Amelia was she couldn’t help but clearly feel every part of that stare as their eyes met.  “You almost die.”  Cam said, her voice cracking.  “And then you don’t.  And then you do it again, until you have it.”

“Hm.”  Amelia let go of the protruding edge of the shelf she was holding onto.  And then she dismissed the idea that Camille’s way was the only way.  “That sounds ineffective.  If the… I’m sorry, did you say ‘Chain Breaker’?… well, if that thinks the others are changing, it can’t be that.  None of them have died in here.  So there must be another way.  Perhaps when we get deeper I will see.”

“Perhaps.”  The small fire left Cam’s eyes, as she turned back to keeping watch.  “Please stay safe.  I am not as fast as James thinks I am.”

Amelia wandered on, scanning book titles looking for a pattern that she knew wasn’t there.

_____

Order Of Endless Rooms Operations Manual (Ceaseless Stacks, Section TBD)

Ink Slimes

First encounters with ink slimes occurred well over three miles into the dungeon, but in contrast to the depth of their appearance, the creatures appear to be docile.  Not harmless, but not malicious either.

The average ink slime is two feet in diameter, and defaults to a pliant sphere shape.  This means that they will usually end up looking like dark colored domes.  Despite existing in a very dry environment, ink slimes stay moist seemingly indefinitely, and are noticeable because their glistening membrane is easy to spot even if it blends into shadows.  Ink slimes are capable of exerting roughly five pounds of pressure by moving, though they cannot seem to change their shape in complex ways.  They slowly convert dead matter they envelop into more ink.  While this won’t kill a delver, it can destroy equipment, and the OM items are especially vulnerable to being rendered inert within seconds of contact.  If left uncontested, ink slimes will follow living delvers indefinitely and attempt to get as close to them as possible.

Ink slimes form when large amounts of (name for the books that are mostly teeth)  blood mixes with the blood of any other species, and is left to sit.  This was discovered by accident with human blood, but was later tested with camraconda and ratroach blood and found to form identical ink slimes.  The formation requires an additional component that is currently unknown, and does not always happen, or if it does, it doesn’t happen right away.

Ink slimes do not have a loot drop.  (Investigation pending)

Ink slimes are easy to disrupt, but take significant effort to actually kill.  They don’t have a core, their membrane reforms almost instantly, and if too much of one is scooped out, the removed portion simply becomes another ink slime.  Pouring other liquids into them will stall them for longer than anything else, and blunt impacts that splatter their bodies can take significant time to reform.  But the only way to actually stop one once it has formed and locked onto a delver is to separate it into pieces too small to be an ink slime and wait for all of them to dry out.

_____

Alanna looked upward at the stack of books.  It had stood out from the moment the team had caught sight of it, mostly because it was rising up from a landing that they’d have to descend two staircases to get to, and it continued upward for potentially just as far.  It was hard to tell exactly, since it interlaced with some of the weird iron bands that messed with perspective.

The phrase ‘stack of books’ didn’t really do it justice.  It was a column the size of something built to hold up a courthouse.  The books that made it up were so tightly crammed together, pressed down by their own weight, that it would be impossible to slip a single page in.  Spines bearing nonsensical titles stuck out every few feet like almost intentional handholds, and small flicks of motion drew the eye where errant words waited to be collected.  And in places, there were marks like someone had taken a line of knives to the whole structure, though not enough damage to destabilize it.

There was a little empty nest of shredded paper and loose pencils maybe five feet overhead, hanging onto one of the protruding hardbacks at just the right spot to be visible from the angle the team was at.  And Alanna could see something akin to it farther up, though much larger, if she understood the perspective correctly.

“I want to climb that.”  She heard herself saying.

“Absolutely not.”  Smoke-And-Ember is answering her already by the time the words are out of her mouth.  “James was very clear that he would be displeased if you died.”

“First off, he’s not the boss of me.”  Alanna held up a finger.

Ten feet away, looking down over the edge of the wooden railing to the landing below, Kirk pulled back and snorted at her.  “He’s the boss of all of us.”

“First off part two,” Alanna continued undeterred, “he’s not the boss of us, second off to that first off, he’s not the boss of me differently than he’s not the boss of you all.  Second of all to the first first of all, I think there’s something up there, and our whole point here is to find stuff like that.”

“Oh.  She’s. Insane.”  Harriet, the pale orange navigator hanging around Kirk’s shoulders as a cloak of peacock feathers and an animal eye, commented with anxiety.

Smoke-And-Ember spoke up while using long copper fangs to overturn a dictionary laying open on the hardwood floor.  “She’s not insane, she’s been drinking coffee.”  The camraconda was silent for a short moment, and then added, “Magical coffee.  In case that needed to be made clear.”

“Coffee doesn’t make humans insa… coffee doesn’t make me insane, Harriet, don’t worry.  Also I said I want to climb that.  Not that I’m going to.”  Alanna folded her arms over the breastplate of her delver armor, feeling weirdly exposed with just the shell and Kevlar, and not the extra thirty pounds of ballistic plate.  She stared upward, wondering what exactly nested in these places, before turning back to the others with a grin.  “No, I’m gonna make Matt do it.”

The human looked up from where he was pouring water into a dish for Rho.  The inhabitor might not actually be a dog, but that didn’t magically gift him with thumbs.  And since the duo had been relentless in their quest to fight every book that moved funny in this place, Rho’s muzzle was stained with inky blood, and while Matt might have been overly violent to be an actual knight of the Order, he was still a good enough guy to care that his battle partner wasn’t running around tasting book all day.  “Sorry, what?”  He roughly asked as he caught up to Alanna’s words.

“It’ll be fun, and also you’re the best climber in the group.”  Alanna said.  “Since Kirk’s afraid of heights, and no one else has thumbs.”

“I could have thumbs.”  Smoke-And-Ember said quietly, not really intending to be heard.  Then, speaking up, said, “If you fall, I will catch you.”

Before anyone could work out how exactly the camraconda expected that to work, Kirk strode back over to them, tugging on the flashlight attached to his armor as Harriet flowed behind him.  “Harriet says something’s choosing this as a destination.  We shouldn’t stick around.”

“Why?”  Rho asked, the dead tone coming from the dog form still not something anyone was used to.  “We are an effective fireteam.”

“We are.”  Alanna said.  “But we don’t need to kill everything.  But, we also don’t need to leave.  I will bet anyone my share of orbs from this whole trip that if Harriet can feel it, it’s big enough and weird enough that it’s probably whatever’s nesting up there.  So let’s take some cover, double check that we’ve got two exits, and hunker down to just… see what shows up.”

“I like that plan.”  Kirk nodded as he moved away from the railing and started looking for a hiding spot.

The others agreed too, and the team started moving books out into piles that would offer some low cover around the edges of the shelves and in one case an ancient wooden filing cabinet that they were crouching behind.  They uncovered a couple small moving shapes made out of living words while doing so, but as it turned out, while Alanna could recognize kanji, neither she nor anyone else could read it.

Hunkering down was an odd experience.  Yes, they were on a long expedition, and Alanna was going to have to get used to waiting while they were here.  More than a few times already she’d found herself getting bored sitting around the camp when she was supposed to be resting.  But this was different.  They were a team on a scouting excursion, and they were specifically waiting for something potentially dangerous to come by just so they could look at it, and until then, all there was to do was sit and look at the dungeon.

Not that the dungeon wasn’t absolutely worth looking at.  The sweeping lines of wood and metal that made up the shelves and ceiling were just slightly inhuman enough that Alanna never actually got tired of seeing this sort of thing.  And playing the game of ‘where is that light coming from’ was a decent distraction that could be valuable tactical information too if they needed it.  The fact that light sources always seemed to be from around corners, with none of the lamps or torches ever lit, was weird.  The fact that the light sources kind of went away if you ever rounded the corner to look at them was just annoying.

They didn’t have to wait long, thankfully.  Rho prodded Alanna with a paw as the dog’s finer hearing caught motion coming their way.  Another rapid prod indicated a pretty bad scenario; the thing was approaching from the same way the team had gotten to this little open balcony, and their cover was facing the wrong way.

A rapid series of hand motions and a pulse of intent from Smoke’s authority sent the split group shuffling around to either reposition what side they were hiding from, or simply moving deeper into the stacks so they were out of sight entirely.

And just in time, too.  Because almost the instant Kirk and Smoke-And-Ember were gone, and Alanna pushed Rho back behind her, a thing stalked into view from around the corner of a shelf behind them.

First glance almost made Alanna ask out loud what the fuck was going on.  It was a lion.  A big cat, prowling forward quietly, some kind of furred corpse hanging from its mouth and leaking dust into the air.  But then as soon as she started focusing on it, it was obvious this was no normal animal.

The thing’s mane fluttered as it moved, and what Alanna had thought was fur turned out to be the corded ends of a thousand bookmarks.  It was too pale, its pelt folding in patterns as it walked, flanks sometimes opening up like gills, and it was hard to tell if it was supposed to be made of paper, or if it was just capable of casually unfolding itself.  When it passed by, it paused for a split second, and Alanna’s breath caught in her throat.  The thing was huge.  There was something about seeing a creature that outmassed you four times over up close that made a person acutely aware of the fact that you were in danger, but while Alanna had fought dungeon monsters before, she’d never fought one that looked so much like an Earth animal.  Alanna knew about lions, she knew just how much damage a wild animal could do in the opening seconds of a fight, and she didn’t really feel like testing this one.

Then it kept moving, its shape thinning as it actually did compress so it could slip underneath the book display table.  And then it leapt over the wooden railing, claws raking fresh lines down the stack of books as its rear legs scrambled to find purchase.  The big cat rapidly found its momentum, and ascended the towering pillar in seconds, rising out of sight to perch up in the nest it had built for itself overseeing several floors of its domain.

In its wake, one of its pale claws shredded the crow’s nest on the way past.  And among the sheared apart pencils and scraps of drifting paper that floated down, something small, shiny, and blue, bounced off the railing and rolled a foot toward where the team was hiding, coming to a stop perilously out in the open.

“Okay.”  Alanna spoke in the softest voice she could.  “You wouldn’t let me climb the book tower.  I get that.  But everyone form up and pull back, start making our exit path, and be ready to run.  Because I am grabbing that blue orb.”

_____

“I am so fucking tired.”  James said as he sat down on a sleeping bag, the cool material feeling good against his skin.

They’ve been active for almost sixteen hours.  Searching, fighting, looting, witnessing new wonders, and then escorting everyone to the next staging point before they repeated the process again.  James has been resting, of course, and the deep supply of exercise potion has been helping.  He did wish he’d rationed more water though, just so he could drown the flavor of the stuff after each swig.  It really did taste like liquified deodorant.  Mostly because it was.

But rest and potions didn’t account for mental exhaustion.  And while James had long since gotten used to it, he did have to remember that his brain actually physically worked faster than most people’s.  That usually translated to more information processed, not actually ‘faster thought’.  But it meant that when he spent an hour being alert, it felt like the strain of three hours.

James got results.  But it cost him.  And now he got the reward for hard work; the ability to complain to his lovers and close his eyes.

“Aw, poor baby.”  Alanna’s sweaty arms wrapped around James shoulders and he didn’t even have the energy to shake her off.  “I had to pull a dog out of quicksand carpet.”

“You’re not special, Vad and TQ had to do that too.”  Anesh said as he joined them, pulling off his boots and laying across James’ lap before deciding that it was too warm down here for physical contact and rolling off onto the unoccupied part of the sleeping bag.  “Bloody hell, I’m tired and I know I was doing less than both of you.”

“Hey, you did a scout!”  James reassured his boyfriend.

Anesh cracked an eye to look up at him.  “I spent twenty minutes filling in for one person.  That’s nothing by our standards.  I’m losing my touch.”

“You have two masters degrees in mathematics, your touch isn’t supposed to be as a delver.”  James laughed.  And then, when he saw Anesh’s uncomfortable look, quickly tried to backtrack.  “Not that you aren’t good at it.  But seriously, we brought people to use people.  The whole point is that we can all do a little, and not be too exhausted.”

“And yet, here you are.”  Anesh motioned at James and Alanna.  Their armor piled nearby, their eyes already falling shut after a quick meal.  They barely had time to talk to anyone else.  Around them, the new camp was winding down, but there was an excited energy in the air.  Others talked in quiet voices, sharing experiences from the day, eagerly looking forward to seeing what the new orbs did once they could be copied or found in greater volume, or just discussing their newest campsite.

A pair of camracondas dragged their own sleeping bags to form an improvised nest underneath the stairs the expedition had taken to get down here.  Keeka and Arrush sat near a camp lantern leaning against a napping Pendragon, staring into each other’s eyes like it was the end of the world.  Camille weathered a barrage of personal questions from a golden retriever with no sense of boundaries.  Tired delvers chased potion doses with relieved sighs and food that mostly banished the horrible taste.

And on the other side of the safety line that they’d drawn, the door waited for them.

It had been random chance that Vad’s team had chosen to go down just one more level before coming back to the last staging point.  And what they’d found had been - in addition to a hard fight with a storyteller - something different.  Stone floors, but not the kind of old marble of the rest of the Ceaseless Stacks.  And stone walls, too.  Smoothed out bricks and tiles that made up the whole place, a kind of sunken cave that seamlessly replaced the normal sights of books and stacks and papers.  The floor here had newspapers and magazines scattered across it like fallen leaves, and unlit chandeliers hung overhead far closer than anywhere else.

And at the far end of it, a door.  Despite having recently had a bad experience with huge doors, James loved it.  It was a tall rectangle with a clear seam down the middle and an arched top.  All across the pale stone that was lit only by the electric lights the Order had brought with them, there were markings.  Lines of empty squares, occasionally adorned with a single small icon in the corner.  The lines intersected each other repeatedly, making a maze of an obvious puzzle.

TQ had been delighted that the dungeon had just handed him a crossword puzzle.  Even if the clues carved into the rock around the door weren’t in common languages and might take some work.

“Maybe we take it easy tomorrow.”  James said, dozing off while still sitting up.

“Mmhph.”  Alanna agreed, already sleeping on top of James’ sleeping bag.

Anesh gave his boyfriend a small kiss on his cheek, ignoring the prickle from where James hadn’t shaved in a couple days.  “Maybe you take it easy now, and I’ll got make sure our guard rotation is in order.”

“I love you.”  James heard himself say, as if from a great distance.  Alanna tiredly echoing his thought as she threw one arm into the air next to him, already mostly asleep.

“Love you too.  Go to bed.  If you’re lucky then the research team won’t sleep tonight and the door will be open before you wake up.”  Anesh failed to mention that he was also fascinated in the door’s puzzle lock, and might be stealing time with it between keeping watch and doing an inventory check.

James was already out though.  So Anesh just smiled at his lovers and stood up gently, planning to make himself useful before more distractions made themselves known.