The Daily Grind - Chapter 259 (Patreon)

“If the hope component is the affective driver of the ideal self, and the core identity is the personal context, then the dream or image of a desired future is the content of the ideal self.  It is the picture of what is hoped to be.”  -R. Boyatzis & K. Akrivou, The Ideal Self As The Driver Of Intentional Change-

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After a couple hours of relaxing and making casual conversation, James was starting to feel restless.  It would be another six hours or so before he was actually tired enough to sleep, unless he forced it.  They did have a bunch of the wisdom coffee with them, and James knew from his own personal experimentation that making a frozen drink out of the stuff would both temporarily eliminate the ability to worry about anything and also knock him out pretty fast.  Which was great, but he felt like using his time.

The lobby of the building that they’d set up in was the cleanest place they could find from poking around the hallways that spread out from where they’d breached the structure, and everyone had cleared enough space and made it pleasant enough with setting up bedding and card tables and camp chairs.  The warmth rising up to acceptable levels was also pleasant, as it offered a chance to strip away the dry suits, parkas, and armor plates.

Sloughing off what felt like thirty pounds of gear and getting to use melted snow and a clean washcloth to wipe down his limbs was the closest James had gotten to nirvana in a while, so that was nice.  But he also wanted to see what else the building they were in had to offer, so that armor had gone right back on as he prepared to leave the mostly secured area.  They still hadn’t seen any new friends here, so everyone was on guard against that eventuality, and no one wanted to take a building this deep into the dungeon lightly.

“You wanna come along?”  James asked Alanna as he made sure his weapons were in the right places.

“Actually I’m not feeling great?  Have fun though.  I’m gonna check on Momo.”

“Oof.  Yeah, make sure she’s doing okay.”  James winced.  “I’ll bring you back a magic hat.”  He offered, probably incorrectly.  Asking around, he found a couple companions who weren’t either exhausted or in the middle of something.  None of the drakes would fit through the halls comfortably, Simon hadn’t wanted to leave Momo either, and Bill had just laughed at him when James had asked, but Spire-Cast-Behind and Ruby had said yes, so James set out with a motley mixed crew to see what was hidden behind the place’s doors.

Pushing past the taped up tarps set up like an airlock that were keeping the heat in, he was glad he’d put the cold gear back on.  It was cold out here, even with their one room warming up part of the building.  His hands and face, comfortably warm a second ago, felt like he’d just dunked them in liquid nitrogen as the below-freezing chill hit him like a slap.

Spire didn’t react, but Ruby started muttering swears as her body rippled and a fluffy coat appeared around her.

“I am incredibly curious,” the camraconda said as they followed just behind James on his left flank, the two experienced delvers tossing scraps of rock forward down the shattered and rotting hallway at anything that looked like a trap as they slowly made their way forward, “does that not leave you as cold as you would be regardless?”

Ruby cocked her head to the side.  “Maybe!”  She settled on.  “I hadn’t really thought about.  I feel warmer, though, so maybe it’s a placebo.”

“…the human musicians?”  Spire-Cast-Behind asked.

“A placebo is when you tell someone that a treatment does something, even though the treatment cannot possibly do anything, and it works anyway.”  James explained.  “The band is named for the phenomena.”

The camraconda gingerly grabbed a piece of broken linoleum off the floor with her manipulator arm, and then winged it forward as fast as the impaired mechanical limb would allow.  It hit half a blackened bulletin board on the left wall, which then cracked further as the wall behind it ‘fell’ sideways, the frame of a janitor’s cart and a swarm of glass shards from a broken window tumbling through the gravity trap as left became down fifteen feet ahead of them.  “Are you sure that your world did not have magic before us?”  She asked James.

“Psh.  No.”  He wasn’t stupid, he knew what he thought of as ‘normal life’ as pretty fucking weird a lot of the time.  “Actually, I have some weird history facts I can share that make me think wizards are real.”

“Later.  I am in line for a Sewer lesson and I might get history.”  Spire-Cast-Behind told him as the trio backtracked to the last intersection.

The hall widened as they stepped off of bare concrete still bearing marks from its construction - James filed that away for later, since no one had ‘built’ here - and it felt suddenly like they’d just stepped out of a maintenance corridor.  James had thought this place was a dormitory, but here, wider halls with walls that bore cracked paint and crumbling drywall made it feel like… he didn’t know what, exactly.

One of the fluorescent lights overhead flickered on, and Ruby yelped in time with a gunshot as she blew a hole in the ceiling next to it.  “Stop that!”  James barked, reaching out to push her gun arm down.  The bar of white light buzzed slightly, but mostly held steady, casting deeper shadows on the already darkened hall but giving them enough light to see by.

Sunken alcoves every fifty feet held sturdy doors, some of them still intact with their brass handles and hinges still holding on against entropy.  Another hall interested this one a hundred feet down, and James could see the floor was covered in dirt from a shattered plant pot that sat next to a toppled wooden bench.  He almost let Ruby shoot the traffic light that looked like it was growing out of the ceiling over the intersection when it flickered to life and displayed a blinking yellow arrow.

A staccato rattling came from the mostly shattered window at the end of the hall at their backs, the storm outside in no way having let up.  James wondered briefly if they would need to brave that weather to progress, and from there if they would progress.  Already, they were higher up than anyone had ever been, and the Climb was reacting with increasing hostility.  Nothing dramatic, just… more.  More traps, more monsters, more times when they had to pick scaling a wall over taking a switchback or a cliffside path.  More ice, more snow, more wind.

How fast would the wind speed get here?  Mars’s instruments already clocked it at over sixty MPH, now that they’d been swallowed up by the blizzard.  Would it get worse?  Probably.

“Why are we standing around?”  Ruby asked in a whisper.  “Wasting time for fun?”

“We’re waiting.”  James and Spire-Cast-Behind said at the same time.  He continued while the camraconda hissed a laugh to herself.  “To see if anything jumps out at us, or if there’s more traps.  Buildings tend to be more trap than monster here, though.”  James crouched down to pick up a pebble of concrete from the hall they’d walked out of, and tossed it down the lit path ahead of them.

Nothing.  He tried again, aiming for a dangling brass plate hanging by one of the sets of doors.

They crept forward, and James indicated the doors on the left side.  When the traffic light at the intersection ahead flicked to red, his heart almost stopped, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of magic associated with the thing.  It was just lingering here, being creepy.

When he placed a hand on the door’s bras shandle, the fluorescent light tube flared up, a line coming out of it like it was a scanner in a sci-fi film.  James, feeling pretty smug at having known something like this would happen, had already grabbed Ruby and was diving back to where Spire-Cast-Behind had lagged behind them as the beam swept from the top corner over the door, down to the floor, around the hallway, and then up to the other side.

“Oh!”  The camraconda exclaimed as James and Ruby picked themselves up off the floor, James feeling like his elbows were going to be bruised for the rest of his life.  “It’s clean here!  Of course!”  She realized what had made her worried even as she clumsily unslung one of her hand crossbows and put a metal bolt through the tube of the light trap.  The light popped easily, going out in a flare of white that thankfully didn’t scorch the hallway around it like the trap itself did.

Kicking glass shards out of the hall, James tried the door again.

“Oh god.”  James gasped, stepping back from the open breach in the dungeon.

“What?  Are you injured?”  Spire-Cast-Behind shoved past James, prepared to freeze anything in its tracks if need be at his reaction.  The camraconda’s bulk and strength almost taking James off his feet as they slammed into his flank while whipping their camera head around the corner of the half of the door still closed.

There was nothing there.  Spire-Cast-Behind was confused.  It was just a room.  Possibly trapped or hiding concealed ambushers, but just a room.  The doors had opened onto an upper layer, which was interesting; soaked and rotting carpet covered small stairs down an aisle, and the doors fifty feet to their right had their own aisle through as well.  Rings of broken seats and small folding desks were set every level down, torn foam padding and marred wood adding to the sense of decay in the room.

At the bottom, it leveled out to a sort of basin, where demolished electronics and a device that looked similar to the ritual object the Order used to duplicate magic sat.  Two and a half towering whiteboards formed a rear wall, all of it illuminated by warm orange overhead lights.

Of course, the hole in the structure, like something had taken a bite out of it, was worrying.  From here, Spire-Cast-Behind couldn’t see anything except grey clouds and the snow coming in and forming a pile over half the room.  But it didn’t seem like there were threats.

“Sorry!”  James said from behind her.  “I just had a flashback to going to a final on the wrong day and then dropping out of college for two years in shame.”

Zhu sleepily fluttered under James’ parka.  “I should go to college.”  The navigator murmured into James’ ear before drifting off again, dreaming while manifested.

“I don’t know what any of that means.”  The camraconda tried to make it sound like she was scowling.

“Nothing import-“ James stopped talking without preamble and shot an arm out in front of Ruby as they clustered at the top of the steps.  One of the lights overhead had swiveled toward them, and he reflexively prioritized protecting the others over his own well being, which turned out to be a terrible idea as the light flared into a brief beam of coherent light that burned away his parka, melted his arm guard, and deformed one of his shield bracers, with the parts that didn’t hit the metal splashing through the sear his flesh and elicit a howl of pain.  James flicked the rest of his bracers to laser bolt which he assumed would count since that had never been an option before, just in time for six other light fixtures to swivel their way.  “Take those out!”  He ordered.

Ruby already had her gun out, and in between the shields flaring around them as they intercepted shots, her heavy revolver barked out retorts.  James joined her as soon as he fumbled his own gun up, the fingers on his left hand not working properly.  But once he had the pistol steadied, he took out the remaining lights and left the lecture hall quiet again, if slightly darker.

“Ow!  Fucking ow!”  James hissed as he kept his pistol out.  “Oh god, it feels…” He didn’t even know how to describe it.  Like that time he’d touched the inside of the oven by accident, except all over his forearm.  Tears welled up in his eyes, pooling in his goggles and soaking into the foam.  “I need to go back, I can’t… I can’t safely explore like this.”  He admitted.

“Okay.  Do we check the room?”  Spire-Cast-Behind asked.

“Yeah, I can do that.”

As they crept down the stairs, weapons out, Ruby cleared her throat.  “I… thank you.”  She said simply.  “I think I was wrong about you.”

Something about that statement made James bark out laughing through the pain.  “No!  I don’t even care what that means!”  He said as he wheezed out laughter.  “That’s fucking hilarious.”

They swept the area, alert for any more still worse traps.  Spire-Cast-Behind found one in the form of an exposed pipe in the floor that burst into super-cooled steam when they neared it, but while it did cut off visibility in an area, no one was hurt even while it kept spewing.  Another gravity trap in the ceiling also threatened to take James into the floor overhead when he neared the projector, but that was dodged neatly as well.

The whiteboards, on inspection, were covered in drawings in red and green marker, and seemed to detail some kind of ritual.  Either worship or magic, it was unclear, but it seemed to focus on a central draconic figure, though it looked like it was made by a college professor too tenured to care about stable handwriting.  They documented the whole thing, and took everything on the desks and tables that wasn’t nailed down.  Pens, a graphing calculator that looked like it still worked, a screwdriver and a box of thumbtacks from out of a drawer.

And the real jackpot; a bookshelf in the corner that had, among the utterly destroyed tomes, a few intact spellbooks.  Pathology, criminal psychology, regional mycology, and a heavily damaged intro to algebra textbook.  From experience, James knew that last one would probably be a bad spell; magic from the Climb cost more and did less the more damaged the spellbooks were.  But it was still a book that gave magic, so who cared?

He really couldn’t keep going though.  His mind was going fuzzy at the mix of burning and freezing pain in his arm, and he needed to go back to get Deb or Nik to check him out.  He hadn’t even pulled his gear down to look at it, internally terrified of what it would look like, or that touching it would just make the injury hurt worse.

The group backtracked, with Ruby offering a grumpier thanks that felt more sincere than the first one, and Spire-Cast-Behind glaring a camraconda scowl at the traffic light sprouting from the hallway as they passed it.

When they made it back to the camp a few minutes later, James made it as far as garbling an explanation of having hurt himself before his Endurance gave out and he collapsed into cool unconsciousness.

_____

Winter’s Climb - Preliminary Report - Icy Climber

Note : Current estimates place us at ~9,000 feet of ascent.  This is the first time this has been encountered, and so is a piece of evidence that dungeons have a limit (artificial or otherwise) on how dangerous they are until explored deeper.

The icy climber is a form of aggressive ivy that is attracted to sources of warmth.  Vines are a dark brown with dark blue highlights barely visible on close examination, leaves are umbrella discs that cling to surfaces with tiny fibers on their edges.  The vines do not grow leaves until exposed to temperatures above freezing, instead slowly extending from where they grow in five to ten foot diameter masses under the snow until they find a heat source.

A team traced back the vines that were attracted to our shelter, and found they had covered almost a quarter mile of distance.  The problem involved with this is both how far they can go - very - and how sensitive they are to heat sources - also very.

The vines do not appear intelligent, but will continue to try different approaches until they can breach areas with above-freezing temperatures.  Once they do, their exterior parts will settle into stillness, and their interior parts will begin growing their leaves.  Observation and timing indicate they can grow one every forty seconds on average.

Each leaf adds to the plant’s overall effect, which is to siphon heat out of the environment.  Unlike many dungeon effects, the icy climber doesn’t seem to completely ignore the laws of thermodynamics, as once it has begun the process, it starts to grow clusters of ‘berries’ that consist of a thick gel membrane around a contained pocket of superheated plasma.

When an area has been frozen again, the vines will continue to grow, seeking new heat sources.  They do not grow or move fast enough to catch anyone who is aware, but could be a serious problem if delve teams drop their guard or are caught sleeping or alone.

Note : No one has tried eating one of the berries.

_____

“Are you… are you okay?”  Keeka’s timid voice snapped Deb out of her current important task, which was staring dead-eyed into the fire.

She looked up at the ratroach standing before her, and reevaluated the thought that he was timid.  He was being socially awkward, but Deb had spent a lot of time with Keeka, teaching him what was needed to reshape his body to his whim.  She knew, from a few things he’d mentioned, that he wasn’t actually helpless.  He was just hurt, and he felt it constantly.

“No.”  Deb answered honestly, swinging her legs off the couch that they’d managed to save and that she’d been left to sit on and watch the fireplace.  “I’m pissed.”

“At James again?”  Keeka asked, and it looked like he had the hint of a grin on his muzzle.

Deb eyed him with suspicion, feeling Mercy in the back of her head making a comforting roil of amusement.  “I’m not… feh.  Fine.  I’m a little pissed at James.”  Deb shot a mental chuckle of acknowledgement back at the assignment she shared her head with.  “But no.  I’m pissed I can’t do more.”

Keeka poked at the fire, adding a few chunks of wood and a stack of loose salvaged papers before he sat on the other side of the couch.  The way he moved made Deb feel like he was uncomfortable somehow, maybe from the fact that he had at least one tail tucked down into the snow pants he was wearing.  He started to pull his digitigrade legs up, but kept slipping against the couch, before glaring down at the offending limbs with a tiny pout.  “You saved James’ life.”  He told Deb simply.

And while coming from him, the words sounded like a religious incantation, Deb shook her head.  “I did some basic treatment.”  She said.  “Nik stopped the venom.  Fuck, the weird computer magic we have running six thousand miles and one dimension away probably did more than I did.  Not that I feel bad about a computer taking my job.”

“You-“ Keeka paused as there was a burst of laughter from another group on the other side of the big stone fireplace that dominated the center of what had once been a common area.  He peered around, and mostly just managed to make out Ethan sitting on his bedroll and reclining against Rudger the drake, sharing pictures he’d taken across the delve with a couple other people sitting with him.  The ratroach made a soft smile, antenna twitching as he leaned back.  “You still helped.”  He told Deb.  “Does it matter who did it, if what needed to happen, happened?”

“I… hm.”  Deb toyed with one of the straps on a piece of armor that had been left leaning against the couch.  “I was gonna say, of course it matters, but that’s pretty American, huh?”

Keeka made a chittering huff at her.  “You know I don’t know about your world that well.”

“Oh, sorry!”  Deb felt an embarrassed flush creeping up her neck.  “Uh… a lot of American culture these days is about how if you aren’t useful, you’re supposed to feel bad, and it’s fucking stupid.  It encourages people to compete to get stuff done, instead of working together.  Though I think a lot of people do know it’s stupid, because people work together all the time.  But the feeling is still there.  Like I feel like a failure for not being able to fix everything, even though I know no one is gonna blame me.  It’s all just pointless guilt.  If that makes sense to you?”   Deb looked up and saw Keeka staring at her.  “I mean, you’re pretty smart, so you probably…”

“Yes.”  Keeka squeaked out.  “I do understand feeling guilty for not being useful.  Thank you.”  Both pairs of his hands pressed together in front of him as he said it, not breaking eye contact with Deb.

Deb sucked in a short breath, nodding slightly for no reason in particular, before she just said “Fuck, right.”  And buried her face in a clammy palm.  “Sorry.”

“Good!”  Keeka replied cheerfully, then he cocked his angular head up to look at Alanna as the woman paused to lean on the back of the couch, eliciting a creak from the wood frame.  “Hello!”

“Hey spinny.”  Alanna greeted him.  “Do you know where the coffee is?  I’m taking a group to scout the roof and check on the storm, and since James has so generously highlighted for us that parts of the building have venomous laser beams…” Alanna trailed off, eyes growing distant as she just stared over their heads.

Keeka and Deb looked at each other before looking back up at Alanna.  “Are you sure you should be doing that if you’re falling asleep on your feet?”  Deb asked.  “Because I don’t think that’s smart, and I should know, I’m the smartest person in this room.”

“Mars came with us.”  Alanna said without thinking.

“Mars is outside with Bill, because he said something about ‘reflexive weather conditions’ and ‘doing experiments’.”  Keeka helpfully told her.  “Also the coffee is stored on the second sled, but you sit, I will get you some and make it hot.”  The ratroach sprang to life as soon as he had a task to focus on, hopping off the couch and ducking past where Camille was standing and staring out the one intact window to get to his goal.

Deb didn’t know what Cam was looking at; it was just solid snow.  She also didn’t comment that Mars being outside at all when they had the option to sit somewhere warm for the first time in three days meant she was still de facto the smartest person here.  “Okay, but you still look beat, girl.”  She told Alanna.

“Nah, I’m fine.”  Alanna said, shaking herself.  “I took a few potions, had dinner, got checked out by an aggressively spiky woman who insisted I make sure I don’t have frostbite.  I’m good to go.”  She stretched her arms over her head with a satisfying series of pops from her joints.

“I refuse to be bullied for making sure you don’t die.”  Deb retorted.

Alanna grinned back, like she was trying to imitate a shark.  “And I appreciate that!”  Her smile faltered slightly.  “I also appreciate you making sure James didn’t die.”  She said.

“That was Nik.”

“Sure, but it was also you.”  Alanna shrugged.  “I… okay, I don’t want this to sound like bragging or some shit, but I got used to having people I was dating around?”  Her smile turned lopsided.  “It’s great, and they’re all so goddamn wholesome, and now most of them are outside being safer than our dumb asses.  So I kinda feel responsible for James, and he got hurt cause I was down here waiting for a potion to kick in and not tagging along.  And maybe I’m rambling and this is stupid, but you did make sure he didn’t die, and that matters to me.”

Deb snorted.  “He wouldn’t have died.”  She said.  “At worst I think he would have lost an arm.  Which, okay, yes, I say that out loud and I realize that is usually lethal.  But we can teleport to any hospital we want.  His condition is very survivable, even if we didn’t have magic.  But we do.  Well, Nik does, again.”

“Hey, soon you will too!”  Alanna clapped a hand on Deb’s shoulder, the friendly gesture feeling more like a titanic strike from orbit to the smaller woman.  “I’ll see if I can find a few more books in this place.  This building is fucking huge, did you notice that?”

Before Deb could answer, Keeka reappeared, the ratroach’s honey dipper antenna bobbing as he flowed like a person shaped river back to where they were talking.  Throwing himself against the couch cushions, his left arms held up a thermos to Alanna like a trophy.  “Coffee!” He announced.  “Ready to go.  Also take these.”  His other hands held out a pair of shield bracers.

“Eh?”  Alanna asked, even as she accepted the gifts.

“The ones James and Spire-Cast-Behind were wearing.”  Keeka explained.  “Set to the traps that he… that… set to those traps.”  He stumbled over his words slightly.  “This way you will be okay!”

Alanna looked down at the bracers, then back up at Keeka, who stared at her with a face full of beady insectile eyes.  “You’re a genius.”  She said softly.  “Thank you.”

“When the… when Arrush came back from here.  The first time?”  Keeka said abruptly, turning to look away from both the women, and ignoring another burst of laughter from the other relaxing delvers.  “He told me something James said.  That we lift each other up.  Has he said that to you?”

“Not… exactly.”  Alanna replied.  “I think he probably assumed I internalized that.  Huh, he actually never stops doing that does he?”

Deb raised a hand.  “To be fair, he does get in a lot of fights with people who… wait, no, I just realized what happens to the people we fight half the time.  Wait.  Did James learn how to recruit staff from watching anime?”

“I don’t know what that means!”  Keeka replied with a cocked grin on his muzzle, small and even teeth poking out.  “But I know a secret.  You can help, or be helped, and they’re both good.  So now I’m helping.”  He pushed off the couch, his lower arms swinging backward in a carefree motion that stabilized him as he landed deftly on the concrete.  “Be careful, and come back safe.”  He told Alanna.  “And be kinder to yourself.”  He told Deb.  And then, seemingly realizing just how much the two were staring at him, a pale green creeping in around his eyes, Keeka bolted away.

Deb sighed deeply, feeling her infomorph friend stir in her thoughts as she glanced over at Alanna.  “That kid is weird.”  She said.

“It’s kinda great.”  Alanna agreed.  “Okay.  I’m gonna go try to disarm a bunch of traps possibly directly overhead.  You wanna come along?  Marlea’s in, and so’re Alice and Charlie, who… I just realized I always think of as a singular unit?  Why do I do that?”  Alanna found her thoughts unfocusing again as she stared off into space.

Deb stood up stiffly, considering grabbing an exercise potion of her own from their supply.  “You know what?  Yeah.”  She said.  “Mercy, you want to join us, and make sure Alanna doesn’t get distracted at the worst possible time?”

A loop of pink and teal scales began to uncoil around Deb’s waist, miles and miles of ethereal creature spiraling up around her body and shoulders to eventually lean a serpentine head on top of the toque she was wearing.  Mercy didn’t say anything, just let out a noise that was either a scream or a yawn and was somehow adorable whichever it was.

“Uh…” Alanna hadn’t met Mercy for long enough to interpret that.

“She means yes.”  Deb translated.  “I’ll get my gear on.”

_____

Bill was a pragmatic man.  That was how he’d always thought of himself, for as long as he could remember thinking of himself in a certain way.

Oh, sure, he’d been a teenager once.  He’d done stupid shit. Had his share of scars from taking dares from his friends on jumping their mountain bikes over… well, various stuff.  But that was pretty far behind him.  For decades, he’d been a pragmatic man.

He’d also only barely managed to get permission to come along on this trip from his wife.  He loved her, really he did, but love and fear weren’t mutually exclusive, and Bill had considered melting into a puddle until his wife’s ire at him even asking had subsided.

Melting into a puddle wasn’t a superpower he had yet, but he worked with Momo pretty often.  He was sure she could come up with something.

Part of what had helped him calm the love of his life down was that he was here in a support role.  No skirmishing with stickbugs or marching into a spike storm with a shield up front for him.   Bill was here to setup and breakdown the machinery they were using to navigate their sleds up surfaces that didn’t have paths or switchbacks available.  And also to help out Mars when the kid needed a hand with something.  And maybe to dig holes.

Bill loved camping, back on Earth.  And when he was done rolling over the phrase ‘back on Earth’ in his mind and grunting out a laugh, he thought about how much magic changed camping.  When you camped, really camped, out in the trees without paying for power hookup, every camp was going to need a hole dug at some point.  Fire pit, tent setup, latrine, something.

Dungeon camping wasn’t even close.  But as he and Lacey, his loyal assistant for this whole affair, worked with Mars to stabilize the mount point for the infrared camera the engineer had brought, Bill finally found his particular skill set called up.

“So, what are you even looking for?”  Lacey asked as they passed by the delvers on guard and back into the sealed off area, finally able to remove their goggles and masks and not feel their skin start to crystalize.  “And why not just do it while we were moving?”

“Because it’s really, really finicky.”  Mars answered, running a hand through his curly red hair as he swept his hood off before continuing to carefully check the cords that trailed out to where they’d left the equipment.  “If it’s moving too much, it gets false readings.”

“So we stuck it out in the storm?”  She asked with that kind of voice Bill mostly heard on teenagers when they thought they knew something and were being clever about it.  He remembered using that voice.  Hell, he still did, mostly when he and Mark were working on something and Bill knew slightly more about magic than the other man.  “That seems…”

“Kid, we just braced that thing perfectly.”  Bill cut her off.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, yes, that.  But also it can account for small movements.”  Mars was almost embarrassed as he interjected.  “Uh… sorry.  I mean, not that it’s not important?   But it’s just easier if the landscape is static, and the software can…”

Bill wiped a hand across his face.  “Sure.”  He tried not to sound annoyed.  If nothing else, it was important that no one go anywhere alone up here, so he wasn’t totally useless.  “So, gonna switch it on?”  He asked.

“Oh!  I did!”  Mars perked up as he stood at the salvaged card table that held a pair of laptops and too many cords for Bill to think this was safe.  “Wanna see?”

“Yes!”  Lacey drew the word out and beat Bill to it.  He maintained his decorum by just offering a shrug, and watching anyway.  He wished he had a beer.  This felt like something you did with a beer.

Mars set one screen to showing the feed, and another to doing… something else.  Bill wasn’t even sure what the engineer actually did on a day to day basis, but he seemed to know what he was doing right up until phrases like “Uh oh” got tossed out.  But that didn’t happen this time.

Not at first anyway.  And this time, it didn’t come from the source anyone was expecting.

“Huh.”  Bill said, the word like a knife in the quiet air as people clustered around to look at the feed.  “Is that… an error?”

“…no…” Mars said, double checking everything, even resetting the whole system.

But it stayed the same.  The camera, pointed out in the direction they were probably heading tomorrow, angled slightly upward, caught flashes of something through the endless clouds and bitter snow.  Just on the left edge of its vision, lines of the palest dusting of yellow, heat just barely above the background temperature of frozen nothing.  They darted through the sky, never descending below the cloud layer.  Whatever they were, though, they moved like twisting snakes, curving and darting around, sometimes slipping out of the camera’s sight, sometimes gliding through it for minutes at a time.

There were at least three of them, that Bill could count.  He started trying to track them when he realized the shapes were slightly different.

“That’s probably not good.”  He settled on as the group watched the screen.

_____

Twelve hours later, the clouds were still thick and grey.  The wind was still howling so loudly that no verbal communication was almost utterly unworkable.  But the snow was no longer falling.  And after they’d found a completely destroyed window on the third floor and dug out what was needed, the Order’s forward scouts began to climb down the massive drift of snow that had threatened to encompass their shelter and move out onto the flatter ground.

They didn’t know what they’d find ahead.  Alanna’s attempt to make it to the roof had failed due to a number of traps.  Gravity shafts, explosive steam, even one that was a pulsing magnetic field in the middle of a hall.  They’d called it off and settled for just searching the building’s lower rooms, and scouting the next day.

And now the next day was here, and with the clearer skies, the shape of things could be checked out.

For James, the shape of things was that he was gonna have an ache in his arm for a long time.  Getting geared up had been an exercise in shooting pain every time he bent at the wrong angle to pull a strap or stick his arm through a sleeve.  It felt like his muscles were hollowed out, and whatever Deb and Nik had used to bind the wound tugged on his skin in tiny ways where it was pressed under the drysuit.  And for some reason he didn’t understand, the gnawing fresh pain in his arm also made him acutely aware of the aches in his back, legs, and neck.  At least he didn’t have it as bad as Momo, who, despite not having a broken bone, had gotten the flesh and skin around her hip and knee absolutely pulverized in a way that would take a long time to heal without magic.  And even with magic, they had to find the right magic for it first.

But he shouldn’t be focusing on that when he was supposed to be on guard against anything approaching around the group.  So he waded through chest deep powdery snow, leaving a trail like he was doing calligraphy on the world itself, and followed Zhu’s directions for where there was a good view of the next place to move.

He also tried to not stare up into the clouds.  Several of the delvers near him were; not because of the dire warning that Mars had provided that something living was absolutely hanging out up there, but because it was possible through the clouds to see ice forming.  Light from a cold sun that no one could see cast the thick clouds in shadows, but without the blizzard obscuring their sight, it was possible with a sharp eye to see swirls where bits of ice were orbiting and coalescing.  Sometimes they could catch glimpses of spiked balls or long needles of ice, just floating up there.  Siege projectiles that seemed to form as naturally as anything in the dungeon did.

“Hey.”  Alanna, sticking close to James’ side and nudging him.  “Check that out.”  She was making a show of being unconcerned with the snowflakes of Damocles hanging overhead, and trying to make less of a show of not being more than three feet away from James at all times.  But what she pointed at was fascinating.

The swells of snow that made the open field around the building look like a wrinkled blanket made seeing where they were headed a little hard until they could get a good vantage point.  But even from here, it was possible to see that there was a long curve of a rock wall surrounding them on both sides.  James was tempted to send up a drone while the air was calm, to confirm his suspicion that they were in a kind of basin.

What Alanna was pointing at though wasn’t the rocks, but something else.  She handed James the binoculars she was holding, and he pulled his goggles down, braving the razor sharp chill to look.

At the base of the cliff, a narrow gap at a harsh angle cut through the rocks; a path for progression that wasn’t just deciding to climb straight up a wall.  James lowered the binoculars and squinted.  “Huh…” He said as he tried to work out what he was seeing, before raising them again.  There was no wind right now, and yet, there was a kind of drifting flurry of snow, dancing in the air, in a near perfect sphere around the base of that gap.  “Zhu, take a look at this.”  He said, handing the binoculars to the navigator.

Zhu held them in an extended feathered limb, his arm unaffected by the cold and extending out from James’ own forearm.  The eye he had manifested on James’ shoulder swiveled to stare at his friend.  “How, exactly, do you see this happening?”

“I’m not sure, I’m thinking some kind of spatial warp.”  James answered the wrong question while Zhu made a huff and tried to manipulate the binoculars to actually be useful for him.  “Do you see any more of these?”  He asked Alanna.

“Yeah, there’s a couple back the way we came, and another over on the other cliff.”  She said.  “Also? I’ve used the word ‘cliff’ too much this week.  It doesn’t sound real anymore.”

“Noted.”  James smiled into his mask, making a mental reminder to kiss her later.  “So, those mark… progression paths?”  He mused out loud.  “We know this place warps space and stuff doesn’t fit together right.  That could be a sign of it happening.”

Alanna nodded.  “It’s been windy this whole time, we’ve never gotten a moment like this to see it.  Might be something like an orange totem there?”

Zhu handed her back her optics while James looked over to where Ethan was waving him down.  The younger man was standing on one of the hills of snow next to Marlea, pointing at something ahead and yelling.  “If this doesn’t kill us, let’s go check.”  He grumbled as he covered his face again and let his skin start to warm up.

“Hey guys!”  Ethan said as they approached, missing James grinning at Zhu’s small pout over having been beaten to the spot by another navigator.  “You’ll never guess what’s up ahead.”

“Something horrible.”  Alanna said instantly.

James elbowed her in the arm, which she probably didn’t even feel through the padding and plate.  “You’re just cranky cause you’re cold.”  He climbed, letting Ethan help him the last couple feet over a small trench in the side of the snow.  “What do we… oh.”

Ahead of them, there was a shimmering blue line cut across the landscape.  Exposed ice from where it looked like a titan had swept a blade across the ground just to carve up and show off what they were all walking on.  Clumps of snow fell into the chasm sporadically, and James realized that they were looking at a breach that was maybe half a mile away, and probably that wide itself.  It was a canyon that they had absolutely no way to bypass, and it looked like it split the whole dungeon.

A single splintered wooden power pole stood on the chasm’s edge, ancient looking wires dangling from it and swaying gently.  On the other side, there was a three story structure of some unknowable purpose, concrete and wood warping and twisting as half of it balanced out over the edge, the whole thing threatening to drop if anyone walked into it.

There was a dragon sitting on the flat concrete roof of the structure.

It was watching them.  It had to be, James figured.  Nestled there among the frozen HVAC units.  Even from this far away, it looked like a lawnmower crossbred with an angrier lawnmower and then grew wings.  Metal plate across hide, wooden roots holding together gears and blades, a sinuous neck that raised up like a heron to stare across at the delvers.

Marlea laid a pair of steadying hands on either side of Rudger as the paper drake shifted nervously, staring to scoot back as they were inspected.

“So that’s an issue.”  James commented.  It was only about half the issue though.  He was pretty sure they could kill that thing before it even got to them with the number of rifles they had in the expedition.  What he was really worried about was that the steep mountain that rose up behind the dragon’s nest and into the clouds also had a translucent blue wound through it.  Exposed ice glowing in the day’s light, except this cut wasn’t in the ground.

It went through the mountain horizontally.

All the way through the mountain.

James wasn’t quite clear on how large that gap was at this distance, but the fact that he could see it at all from miles away meant that it was at least thirty feet thick, he was pretty sure.  And that meant, if they wanted to keep climbing that way, they’d need to both cross a massive chasm, and then get up onto a floating mountainside that was separated from the ground.

“I just had a brilliant idea.”  Marlea said, ignoring the dragon and looking at the mountain itself.

“We’re not climbing that.”  Alanna informed the woman.

“No no!”  Both of Marlea’s bodies shifted excitedly.  “That’s all ice, right?  So that’s, like, a whole mile of solid, perfectly smooth ice?  And it’s flat?  We could host Olympic figure skating here!”

James didn’t have a clue how to respond to that.  “We…” he was going to shoot down the idea out of hand, but then felt suddenly weird about it.  “You know what?  Maybe.  We’ll talk later.”  He took a deep breath, feeling like it wasn’t quite enough air.  “We cannot go that way, regardless.  No fucking way.”

“I hate to agree with pessimism, but I agree with your pessimism.”  Alanna said, grinning under her face covering as she mimicked one of James’ favorite ways to make jokes.  “So, what now?”

“Now we check out the other paths up, I guess.”  James said.  “Ethan, you guys take the right side, we’ll take the left.”

Ethan gave James an uncomfortable look through his goggles.  “You wanna split up now?”  He asked, glancing up at the sky, then at the distant dragon that was still watching them.

“Terrible ideas keep life interesting.”  Zhu said.

“You’re one.”  Ethan said.  “You haven’t been around long enough to get bored!”

“You’re only twenty five and you have?”  Zhu shot back.

James covered up Zhu, crossing his arm over his body and then hissing in pain.  “Children, please.  You’re both very young.”  He got glares from both of them, one he could feel in his head.  “But Ethan’s right.  Let’s go check the distortion, and then go from there.  See if we find anything buried or some weird artifact, and then go back and make a decision.”

They didn’t find anything like a totem.  The closest they got was a tire submerged in the snow, and a handful of spark plugs wedged into the rock.  Digging up the area revealed nothing either.  No weird structures that bent space, no orbs or crystals, certainly no books.

And after consulting with the navigators, it seemed like there wasn’t going to be any meaningful shortcut that would let them skip the icy breaches if they climbed this spatially warped gap either.  Though Zhu did say it felt “one way”, which was a great reason for James to not try it.

James was starting to think this dungeon had a much tighter grip on its internal mechanics than the Office did.  Than most dungeons they’d been in, really.

Heading back to the shelter they’d claimed felt weird.  They were empty handed, and more than that, they only had bad news about their ability to keep going.  They just weren’t prepared for this kind of thing.  And they may never be either; this was the sort of thing that required them to have a whole party of heavily enhanced delvers, not an exploration team that included noncombatants and people who weren’t prepared to do stunts that would get you in trouble with OSHA just for mentioning them.

Following behind Rudger as the drake plowed them a little bit of a helpful trail back toward the window they’d used to get out of the building, James stopped when Ethan and the drake both pulled up short.  Following Alanna’s point as his girlfriend let out a startled “Fuck!”, James looked back at the open field of snow dotted with traffic lights and small dips in the ground that they’d crossed last night to make it to shelter.

There was a snow beast out there.  This one was kinda chunky, with one big tube of an arm ending in a stony claw.  But unlike most of the creatures they saw here, it wasn’t lurking in wait and pretending to be terrain until someone got too close.  Instead, it just stood there.

“It’s not moving.”  James voiced his curiosity.  It looked like it had a kind of ring around it in the snow, too, though the whole thing, beast included, was half concealed by the edge of the building.  He started walking forward to get a better view, and saw why Ethan had stopped and was holding a hand to his sidearm nervously.

There was a creature sculpting the snow beast.   James was tempted to call it a stickbug, because it looked like them a little bit.  But the only similarity was in the material composition.  This thing was ten feet tall, and probably would have been taller if it rose up.  It moved on four delicate limbs while four more gently smoothed the surface of the snow beast, white and black speckled bark covering it all over.  And unlike the other much smaller stickbugs, it had a head.

It had a face, even.  Deep black hollows in place of eyes, wood imitating a skull, with a pair of horns that swept outward and then back together over its head, points only an inch away from each other.  It didn’t look like it had an expression, exactly, but James got a sense of creative joy from the thing as it delicately pressed snow together into another arm for the snow beast.  There were things that looked like pine boughs that ran down the length of its spine, but when it twitched, they splayed out, and showed themselves to be structures more like crystal wings than actual wood.

He felt like he was watching something utterly unique in the world as the creature shuffled backward, and then started rooting around under the snow.  James stared even as he fumbled to get a recording going.  It was almost hilarious how goofy the monstrous skeletal thing looked as it flung itself toward the ground and plowed more snow away in its search.  Then it came back up holding a rough black chunk of rock and a couple sticks.  The sticks it pressed into the snow beast’s new arm before covering them up with sweeps of its foot-long pointed fingers.  The rock, it set into the creature’s face.

Then it let out a series of noises, like fragments of a chant.  Individual syllables sung out as chirps as it circled the snow beast over and over.

And then the snow beast stirred.  Slowly, its arms stiffening as they suddenly had to support its weight.  It leaned forward, its rocky eyes glinting with abrupt life as it looked around curiously, before it slowly yawned, lowered itself to the ground, and curled up, vanishing into the snow like it was just another lump in the landscape.

The massive wooden figure straightened itself up, and it absolutely dwarfed the traffic lights near it.  Twenty feet tall at least, it moved with a gentle and unhurried sweep as it looked around, massive wooden skull and horns twisting while it examined the space around it.  James felt his blood chill as its gaze passed over their party, but it didn’t seem to give a shit that they were there.  But it did take a few steps away, crossing a lot of distance as its legs gingerly lifted and struck out in lightning quick motions, and then bent back down to start scooping up more snow.

“We should get inside.”  Alanna said.  “And get a flamethrower.”

“I dunno, I think it’s kinda cute.”  Marlea said, staring at the behemoth creator.  Everyone else turned to stare at her.  “What?!”  She held her hands up.  “Half the people in the Order wanna fuck a camraconda but I can’t think the big wooden guy who just wants to make snowmen is cute?”

Alanna shrugged.  “No, that’s fair!”  She admitted.  “It didn’t seem to care we were here?”

“It might see movement.  Or it might just not think we’re worth eating.”  James said.  “Zhu, you see anything weird about it?”

The navigator fluttered on James’ armor.  “Nnnno.”  He sounded worried.  “Nothing about it, actually.  It doesn’t interrupt any journey.  Even ones that would ram you straight into it.  It’s doing something.”

“Welp.  I hate that.”  Alanna snorted, and James agreed with her.

“Okay.”  He said, clapping his hands and instantly regretting it.  “I’m calling it.  We’ve dug deep enough, let’s get everyone assembled, and get the hell out of here.”

It wasn’t exactly that simple.  They still wanted to clear as much of the building as they could for more books or other potential magic, Mars wanted to test a few more things, Momo wanted someone to haul her to a hole in the wall so she could look at the thing that was making more snow beasts surrounding their hiding place, and a couple informorphs kept saying they felt like they were forgetting something.

But as another storm started sweeping in, and the sound of ice spears crunching into the ceiling went from the sound of the weather deflecting to the sound of the weather putting holes in their shelter, it started to become clear that they couldn’t keep the expedition going safely.  Everyone agreed it was better to quit now before their injuries started to compound and the threats they’d ended up in the middle of actively killed half of them.

The whole expedition sat around the fireplace, sharing quiet conversation and talking about the things they were gonna do when they got home.  Most of them involved showers and real beds, which James found amusingly familiar to the last one of these expeditions.  He felt like he’d be hearing that a lot in his life from now on.

Interestingly, he realized, he’d never actually left Winter’s Climb by way of a fire.  Every time they’d camped, he’d had to push away the question the dungeon asked, of if he wanted to leave.  Everyone had.  And he knew that someone must have done it before.  But he’d always telepaded out.

Then the fire asked its question, and the expedition double checked that everyone was planning to say yes, before they all did so as close to at once as they could.  James found his eyes drawn to the fireplace, as the orange and red of the flame curled on itself, forming a ring.  And then it pulsed, expanding to a bubble that no longer showed flame, but instead, a small portion of dirt in the Australian Northern Territory.

The fire wobbled a little, and James wondered if maybe they shouldn’t have had everyone do this at once, just in case.  But the forming portal stabilized, expanded again, and then rushed outward, sweeping over everyone and everything, depositing all of them, salvaged couch included, on the edge of a flat red rock on a dusty afternoon that was exceptionally hot to be wearing a parka on.

Not everyone got exactly the same parting words from Winter’s Climb, but they were all pretty close.  For anyone who had been there before, they’d be getting lower numbers, because the Climb cared about your high score, not how often you came in.  But he still felt pretty damn good about it.

[Cowardice, Kine, Tenacity

Ascension : 9,956 ft

Bestowal : +254 Breath Storage, +7 Available Learning]

Okay, he felt a little worse than if they’d gone just another forty four feet.  But still.

He also still hated that it was in feet, in Australia.

But he wasn’t planning to keep complaining until he managed to pull his gear off, and stop suffocating into his mask.

_____

Winter’s Climb Long Delve - Final Acquisition Report - Spellbooks

With twenty people each with a minimum of six new spell slots opening up, knowledge of the newly acquired spellbooks has been processed in record time.  Details are lacking for now, but we’ll be able to fill those in as everyone chooses what they want and we get a clearer picture.  For now, here’s the basics.

Sadly, no custom books were found this time, and to date, we still only have the one.  It’s unclear if that was meant to be a unique encounter, but the Climb doesn’t seem in a hurry to give any hints as to how to replicate it if it’s possible.

Book : Principles Of Acreage Management, Sixth Edition (Minor damage)

Spell Name : Process Procession

Cost : 8 Breath

Duration : One minute / six minutes

Effect : Upon cast, the magic waits for the caster to take an action that could be loosely described as ‘crafting’.  After the first minute, whatever action was taken is looped six times without the caster being involved.  Small deviations like pulling from a depleting supply of materials work without issue.

Book : Urban Botany (Moderate damage)

Spell Name : Harvest Echo

Cost : 22 Breath

Duration : ~2 minutes

Effect : After cast, if a plant or fungus is (not killed, harvested? Still nebulous) by the caster, an exact copy of the target is created out of ice.  If ice is already present, then the ice will instead be transformed into an actual copy of the target.

Book : Human Anatomy - (title indistinct, moderate damage)

Spell Name : Altitude Adapt

Cost : 41 Breath

Duration : Indefinite, but costs 1 breath per ~minute

Effect : Caster grows wings.  The type of wings seem to vary, but are consistent by caster.  (Bird or bat seen so far)  The process of growing them is abrupt, gory, and painful, and the massive breath cost risks lung and brain damage to use without careful medical supervision.  Both testers lost consciousness and dismissed the spell before the wings could be tested for flight.  (Dismissing the spell causes the wings to break from the body, but not vanish.)

Book : The - Mind, Criminal Psychology (light damage)

Spell Name : Tautological Necropocentrism

Cost : 3 Breath

Duration : ~2 minutes

Effect : Causes anyone perceiving the caster to contextualize them as dead.  The fact that they are walking around and talking does not change that they are thought of as dead.  Friends will think of them as having died at the moment the spell was cast, and will experience the emotional impact of that false event.  Because the caster is dead, most suspicious activities do not register to anyone perceiving them, because they are dead, and dead people do not do things.

Book : Guide To Bicycle Repair (moderate damage)

Spell Name : Rot Eyes

Cost : 9 Breath

Duration : Instant

Effect : Gives the caster knowledge of the location, health, and about one good wiki entry worth of information on every fungus within ~20 feet.

Book : Aphotic Studies, Second Printing (mild damage)

Spell Name : Frostwake

Cost : 2 Breath

Duration : Instant

Effect : Seems to work a lot like other dash magic like the SQ greave, only through water, ice, or snow exclusively.  If used while in water, it massively drops the temperature of the liquid moved through, which could be useful on its own.

Book : Modern Construction - (title obscured, heavy damage)

Spell Name : Cathedral Sanctum

Cost : 181 Breath

Duration : Permanent

Effect : Untested, because that would kill someone outright.  From the instinct the spell gives the bearer, it seems like it’s meant to allow for creating some kind of spatial twist inside a structure.  Real effect unknown.

Book : Ars Mathematica -, Principles Of - (title obscured, moderate damage)

Spell Name : Flare Calculation

Cost : 10 breath

Duration : Permanent (?!)

Effect : Makes a single mathematical process easier.  This is… unclear?   For obvious reasons, this is flagrantly unclear.  James is watching me type this and he wants me to say this is utter bullshit, and cannot be trusted.  He’s yelling about how we could use this to talk to aliens if they exist.  We don’t know about this one, and we’re hesitant to test it until we have a really really strict plan to follow.

Book : History Of Balkan Conflicts (mild damage, interestingly this is the only one that namedrops a real place on Earth)

Spell Name : Winter Wroth

Cost : 4 Breath

Duration : Instant

Effect : Inflicts a wound as if from a blade at a range of roughly five feet, but only works on living things that aren’t suspicious or acting to defend themselves.  This one is fucked up.

Book : Experimental Pathology (light damage)

Spell Name : Call To Blood

Cost : 3 Breath / second

Duration : sustained

Effect : Despite the name, what it actually does is sort of act as a dowsing rod for where someone was last injured.  Bleeding, specifically.  You need to know who the person is specifically, not just a category (we tried it with Status Quo agents), but the spell gives you a pull to where the person was last hurt, and if you get there, it jumps to the next most recent spot.  Navigators love this one, and it sounds like it’s going to open up some new options for those that take it.

_____

Winter’s Climb - Preliminary Report - Ambient Infohazard

Post-delve recaps and discussion have quickly identified a massive problem with the expedition.  Tools such as skulljacks, radio, and a variety of common use magics were brought along, but ceased use at various points.

Full debrief and reconstruction of the delve will hopefully allow for an understanding of what happened and when, and we can initially start with a suspicion that the infohazard is tied to height climbed.  But not even the infomorphs noticed that anything was wrong.  The expedition’s members simply stopped using the gear they brought along and didn’t think about it, even though they put effort into continuing to carry and protect it.

Research is looking for volunteers for a mixed assignment/navigator team to attempt a series of tests.  Message Planner for details.