The Daily Grind - Chapter 266 (Patreon)

“Everything’s a threat but we have to act!” -Lance, Dimension 20 : Mentopolis-

_____

“It’s actually good to be back.”  James extended his arms out ahead of him, cracking his knuckles dramatically as delvers moved around him.  A pack of people, off on their own small tasks, or perhaps like him taking a small moment to stare up at the distant artificial horizon of Officium Mundi.

James had been in a few dungeons in his time.  And putting aside just how bizarre of a sentence that was, there was something special about the Office.  Not just because it was his first dungeon, and the spark that lit off the bonfire his life had become, but something in how it looked.  How it smelled and sounded, too.  Just how it felt to be there.

In the Route, there was a clean line at the end of the road.  Sometimes the terrain got weird, and it always looked like it was nowhere in particular rather than mimicking a specific part of a real world landscape, but mostly it was just big and empty.  In the Akashic Sewer, it was twisted and intentionally terrifying, but it was dark and cramped and didn’t leave a lot of room for examination.  Clutter Ascent was the polar opposite in mood, but it lived up to its name and actually had stuff blocking most lines of sight, which left it feeling cozy, but also hard to know the limits of.  And the Climb just kept throwing snowstorms at anyone who thought too hard about visibility.

But here?  Here was a bounty for anyone who wanted to see how weird it got.

Cubicles of differing heights covered the carpeted ground ahead of them, starting about twenty feet in from the wall that the entrance was on, and then never stopping.  Before too long, every potential line of sight was blocked off by the taller walls, except for the straight aisles that drew narrow lines through them until they ran into intersections somewhere between fifty and five thousand feet in.  But that wasn’t the end of what a person could see; if you looked up over where even the tallest walls in the starting field capped out at maybe eight feet, it was possible to see towers of cubicles in the distance.  Massive stacks of layered workstations, occupied only by bizarre life and never once used for a job.  And past those, far in the distance, the clear air made it possible to see where the ground sloped upward in a gentle curve before rising into the sky and vanishing behind the ceiling.

It was a bizarre effect.  The ceiling tiles, which the Order knew to actually be suspended platforms with their own unique ecosystem going on, cut through the vision of the dungeon almost out of nowhere.  And for a moment of watching, James felt like he was seeing two things at once, before he blinked and his eyes could only focus on the white lights overhead, and he had to start back at the bottom and follow the arc upward again.

From here, details were impossible to make out.  It was never clear how far away it was that they were looking; Mars had tried a laser range finder and gotten back mixed results.  Which was not exactly what you wanted from a precision instrument.  But there were thin lines that James was pretty sure were walls; not cubicle walls, but the hefty thick interior walls that sometimes cordoned off chunks of Officium Mundi.  And a dark blot that might be something like the ocean of ink.

If it was, and it was a similar size, that would mean that he was looking ‘down’ on parts of the dungeon that were maybe two hundred miles away, at a guess.

James felt small.  Tiny.  And this was the sensation that Officium Mundi generated.  More even than Route Horizon with its twin stars and eternal roads, which was almost certainly geographically ‘larger’, the Office made him feel like a moth staring up at the inner workings of the Hoover dam, and wondering what made it tick.

For the moment, he was looking up at something he couldn’t understand but could feel in something so deep inside that it couldn’t possibly be as fragile as a biological part.  He was looking at the future, and he was looking at the end, and he was looking at everything he ever wanted and feared all at once.  This place that he’d slipped into by accident, that James planned to turn into a lever by which he could move the world, covered the sky in raw potential.

Then his eyes slipped and he was looking at the ceiling again.  A flock of loose white paper fluttered by in a nonexistent breeze, crumpled and folded edges sharper than they should be, not a care in their minds for the vastness of the weird world that had made them.

James smiled to no one in particular, though a few of the people nearby saw him anyway, and understood.  Then he shook off the sense of being a tiny insect on a vast machine, and went to help double check their supplies before they really started moving.

_____

The team leaders for the expedition held a meeting around the base of the tower near the door.  The stacked cubicles were still ‘safe’ as far as the Order could tell, with the dungeon not touching any of the gear they stored there.  To be safe, though, they’d stopped using it as storage anyway.

“Owning a whole ass building is really convenient.”  Myles commented as he rolled his shoulder, the last of their group to gather.  “How did you guys ever do this before without getting noticed?”

“To be fair, I got noticed multiple times.”  James told him with a nostalgic shrug.  “I have this vague memory of Theo sorta-blackmailing me over ‘stealing’ a coffee machine?  And Frank obviously knew.  And… Daniel, did you ever notice me being weird?  Before the whole-“

Daniel cut him off.  “Before the kidnapping and attempted murder thing, right.”  He said it quickly, like if he went fast enough, it would hurt less.  “Yes.  But not… I mean, I just thought you were a weirdo.”

“Cool.”  James pressed his eyes closed and laughed.  “Okay.  So.  Before Daniel dive kicks my ego by accident, let’s get this started.”  He clapped his hands, the protective gloves hanging off his wrists bouncing in the air.  “Anyone not know anyone else here?”

Frequency-Of-Sunlight tilted her boxy camera head back, rising up to the highest she could get.  “Hello!”  The camraconda said with digital vibrant energy while staring at Myles.  “Frequency-Of Sunlight.  Are you new?”

“…I’ve been here for a year and a half.”  Myles sounded defeated.

“Oh.  What… what were you doing?”  Sunny tried to cover for her social blunder.

Myles couldn’t actually tell if he was being made fun of or not.  “I was learning how to be a spy, I guess.”

The words gave Frequency back a little confidence.  “Oh!  Well you were very good at it!  I had no idea who you were!”

Daniel and Pathfinder nudged a shared elbow into James’ arm.  “And you were worried about your ego.”  He muttered.

“I’m worried I’m gonna die to splash damage from that.”  James whispered back, before raising his voice.  “Okay!  Enough banter!  Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.  And since Anesh has delegated being in charge to me, I get to run this final briefing.”

“Aren’t we just going in a straight line?”  Mars asked, the lanky engineer speaking up for the first time.  “Also Nate made us sit through the whole explanation of protocols and stuff yesterday.”

“Good.”  James replied in a flat voice.  “Because that’s how we do this without casualties.  So far, no one has died on an intentional delve, and we’re gonna keep it that way.”  He shifted his stance on the hard carpet, wishing he had a desk to lean on.  “And no, we aren’t just going straight in.  I’ve got a rough outline, and we’re not married to this, but we have a curving path designed to take us to a few specific points, before we cross the first dividing wall.  After that, we’re going to be going in mostly a straight line, yes.”

The others nodded, since they’d already read the document, but it was good to say it out loud just to make sure no one had missed anything.  “Can I just…” Daniel raised a hand wreathed in glowing orange feathers.  “Can I say that it just seems like a gross idea to say we’re going to ‘raid a bathroom’? Is that okay?”

“Yes.  Any further questions?”  James paused for a brief time that was not enough for anyone to interject.  “Great.  So, as Daniel mentioned, we’re starting with the bathroom we know about.  We have enough navigator support to cut through the antimeme around that one, and I want to take advantage of it.  Especially since now that we’ve been deeper into the Stacks, I think it’s likely the bathroom spire is similar to the super secure vault we found there.  So we’re going in to grab what’s at the bottom, and then moving on.  After that, we curve ‘east’ for about six miles, until we hit the ink ocean.  There’s a bunch of stuff there to check out, including stocking up on purples.”

“How are we handling loot?”  Myles asked as he tapped the toe of a sneaker on the floor in an idle motion.  “Because I remember the Library, and we got overburdened pretty fast there.”

“Well, we’ve got less water on this run for one thing.”  James said, looking over at where the foldable cloth carts they were using were lined up.  “Since we can replenish in the dungeon, and also because I overshot the estimate last time.  But also, telepads.”

Frequency-Of-Sunlight made a hissing gag.  “Teleporting out of this place is horrible though!”  She declared.  “Couldn’t we just give up instead?”

“…no?   No.”  James felt like everyone was being a little too casual about this.  Maybe the Office had become familiar enough to get some good contempt going in everyone’s minds.  “Besides, you can telepad within the dungeon just fine.  As far as we know, you can only go back to the one stable ‘address’, which is the tower here, but that’s fine.  The tentative plan is to recruit friendly dungeon life to act as couriers for us, or send back anyone who’s injured.  It’s also our escape route if things go bad.  Anyway, moving on.”  He checked his list.  “We’ve got three days set aside for those two initial goals, and then we want to be crossing the first wall.  Kirk’s team will be coming through the ceiling entry, and exploring up there, and so we want to be in position to link up with them when that happens.  And from there, it’s a straight line in.  Now are there questions?”

“How many diversions are you okay with?”  Mars asked.  “Because my team is exclusively people from Research, and we’re gonna want to poke everything.”

“Lots.” James said.  “It should be two hours to the first goal even with the large group, and maybe we can make the beach by the end of the day.  After that we have a lot of free time before we need to cross the big wall, and we can use that on anything we want, as long as individual teams are within a close area.  We do want to be checking every tower we find for coffee and rituals, so giving you guys time to map totems or whatever is part of the whole operation.”  Mars nodded as James finished, stroking his chin in thought.  “Alright.  Everyone go get geared up if you aren’t already, and let’s move out.  Sunny, I want you to double check with your team on those earrings just to be safe, okay?  And tell us if you feel like you need to leave.”

The camraconda gave a sibilant sigh.  “I’ll be fine, dad.”

“Nope.”  James shook his head.  “Not doing that.  I can’t keep adopting everyone.”

He took his own advice and followed them to where the larger group was starting to gather.  James didn’t shout orders, but he didn’t really need to; they had a shared objective, and what was really needed was just the right coordination to get things moving.  Making sure everyone was equipped, in the right spots, and heading out in unison.

He took a brief detour to kiss Anesh goodbye, two copies of his boyfriend staying behind at the tower while one came along on the journey.  The fourth Anesh had decided to stay home, utterly drained from a solid week of a hostile road trip, which was fair.

And then James found himself at the vanguard of a caravan of delvers.  He felt light, almost; forgoing at least for now a lot of the heavier equipment that he had been training in for the last couple weeks.  He wasn’t armed with anything more than a pistol and a hatchet, his armor was back to being a half-covering of Kevlar lined shell and not ballistic plates, and he was only wearing two shield bracers under it all.

It had been a while since he’d been somewhere as dangerous as a dungeon that felt as safe as the Office.  But he didn’t let himself get complacent; in his mind he rotated through the host of spells he had access to, and primed himself to use anything he needed in case it came up.

“That feels like someone flipping between radio stations, you know?”  Zhu told him, the navigator unfurling his tail and feathered arms in a kind of casual embrace.  “And then you’re going to settle on your personal playlist anyway.”

“Well, to be fair,” James told his friend with a grin, “my music is really well selected.”

Zhu rustled himself aggressively, proofing up his ethereal orange feathers in indignation.  “You listen almost exclusively to three different bands!”

James let the challenge to his tastes slide off his armor.  “Yeah, well selected bands.”  His smile never wavered.  “You ready?”

“Always.”  Zhu said, the joking fading away, replaced by quiet excitement for the trip ahead and the trials that were sure to meet them.

“Let’s go find some magic.”

_____

Long Delve Roadmap - Officium Mundi - Roster

Exploration Team One :

James (Zhu accompanying)

Arrush

Anesh

-Ganesh

JP

Bea

Exploration Team Two :

Frequency-Of-Sunlight

Alex

Harvey (Chell accompanying)

Simon

-Magneto

Exploration Team Three :

Myles

Tyrone

Marlea

Exploration Team Four :

Daniel (Pathfinder accompanying)

Ben

Vadik

Dave

Camp Support Group :

Keeka

Deb (Mercy accompanying)

Aaron (Mercy accompanying)

Camille

Research Group :

Mars

Nikhail (Aidamy accompanying)

Peng

Davis

Nile

Juan

Thermoclese

Ceiling Exploration Team :

Kirk (Harriet accompanying)

Chevoy

Mark

Home Base Group :

Anesh

Anesh

Matt

Rho

_____

There were about twenty different ways that real world businesses arranged cubicles when they used that kind of workspace.  Many of them were call centers of some kind, and all of them had a kind of inevitable depressive vibe to them.

The most common way was pods of six.  A single central wall, and a few smaller walls through that one that carved it up into individual work stations.  Desk, computer, ready to go.  Slightly less common were pods of four, usually higher walls and with doors facing out to different hallways.  Depending on where the bathroom was, you might never know who it was on the other side of the pod from you, you just wouldn’t run into them.  And of course, there was the rarely used but classic endless hallway; cubicle after cubicle all neatly arranged, long lines of the little close off boxes stretching off for long enough that employees would inevitably start to wonder if it was really that effective a use of space.

Officium Mundi knew all twenty methods, and had twisted permutations of each of them.  Of course, the cubicles never stopped, naturally.  So everywhere sort of looked like an endless line of them, where there were unbroken lines of sight.  But within that, there was ample room for experimentation.

The pod of eight, where it looked like the walls kept getting higher the farther you went, but in reality they were like steps and the only way to even reach the higher ones was to climb the escalating desks.  The enclosure, where what should be a pod of four had a secret fifth cubicle in the center somehow, a cleanly cut bubble of space where the best loot was the orange totem to take notes on.  Clusters of cubicles in arcs around pillars or walls, groups set into recessed parts of the floor for no reason other than to be a tripping hazard, the disconnected pods that didn’t belong to other groups around them but were clearly visible for how they accentuated and guided the halls that delvers walked through, and usually funneled them into potted plants.

Myles knew none of them.  He’d seen the maps, and the pictures.  He knew what they all looked like, and the tactical responses for each of them.  He’d run through two weeks of Nate’s training drills in the Lair’s remodeled parking lot specifically to learn how to react quickly to varied threats in this kind of environment.

But he’d never been here before like this.  Never walked through a landscape that was only grey and beige, lit from overhead by white lights so bright they’d scar your eyes if you stared too long.  Never been this deep in the environment that he knew that no matter what he did, if he got turned around, the only way out would be by telepad.  And if he lost that, he was going to end up Robinson Crusoe-ing his way through building a fort out of salvaged felt padded walls and surviving off of weird vending machine drinks and the inexplicably spawned containers of leftover pasta.

Myles didn’t go too deep on thinking about the dungeons.  He knew they were real, because he’d been inside a few now.  He knew magic was real, because the Order used magic.  But it had become a pretty simple tool for him rather quickly.  Maybe because he’d originally spent so long without it, working alongside people like JP, meeting other species, but staying mundane so that he might have a better chance of actually sneaking up on a pillar if they needed someone to.  By the time he finally got magic, and even then by accident, it just didn’t feel that overwhelming.

So when he walked through the halls of Officium Mundi, his team taking their turn to go first and scout as the others kept up the steady pace that would quickly bring them to their first objective, he didn’t feel like it was a mystical realm full of potential.

It was just a place.  Like walking through an old forest, or a new city, it had a lot of unique things to show him.  But Myles regularly had friends over to his apartment that was a replicated copy of a custom made luxury space, with an air conditioning and electrical system powered by magic, where moving a couch in only took ten steps from the entrance despite being on the third floor.  So he wasn’t really impressed with the Office.

The whole place felt almost organic.  Like individual pieces that weren’t quite as sharply defined as they could be.  Which left him on guard for when Officium Mundi pulled out the actual threats that must surely be waiting in the wings, even as he was almost unimpressed with the geography around them.

He still thought it was cool though.

_____

In a cleared semicircle of hard carpet, a large motley crew settled in to take a rest.  A few cubicles had been pulled apart and moved back, giving a little more space, and chairs and desks swiped from those spaces were being used to relax in for some of the people who weren’t used to three mile hikes.

Ahead of them, a massive spire of blue and white tile rose into the air.  Like a slowly narrowing trapezoid, it pushed aside the ceiling tiles overhead as it just kept going up and up and up, a skyscraper without a sky to reach.  The lights of some of the parts of the ceiling, still working despite being knocked out of place, illuminated the sides of the pillar with a clean white glow.  There had been several hostile potted plants around the area, but nothing grew or pretended to grow on the structure; it was almost aggressively sterile on the outside.

At the base of it, slightly recessed so as to seem more like a cave mouth, two doors announced “men” and “women”.  It had taken them about two hours to get to the bathrooms, as the expedition attracted a lot of attention with its size, and they needed to be careful and quiet to not attract a swarm that could pose a threat to even their large group.  And also periodically get support from their infomorphs, every time something made them forget the bathroom was a thing they were heading toward.  But they were here now, and were starting to prepare for what might actually be the most dangerous part of the whole week, right at the start.

“I instantly feel like this is a terrible way to start this delve.”  James said out loud as Anesh checked his climbing harness, his boyfriend pulling on different straps and asking him questions about tightness and flexibility.  On his shoulder, a small bat-like form perched, Ganesh riding along with his friend for the first time in a long time.  “Just like a very silly plan, now that we’re actually here.”

“We’re three miles deep, you dumbass.  Are you being influenced again?”  JP asked as he shifted his shoulders back and forth to see if his own harness had settled on his armor properly.  There was a tradeoff to be made between protection from being hit and protection from falling to your death, which was unfortunate, and led to them splitting the difference in a way that would hopefully stop both.  “Zhu, poke him.”  JP ordered.

Zhu did so, as James tried to stoically ignore his navigator partner.  Zhu’s arm had its own connection to their shared climbing harness, as did the long feathered tail that extended behind James.  There was another slot in the straps for where James preferenced manifesting the ice limb from his Climb spell when he needed it, just to make sure his weight could be distributed as evenly as possible.  He was ready to go, from the looks of things, but he still wanted to complain lightly.  “I’m just saying.”  James kept talking as Zhu failed to get a reaction from him.  “The last time we went in there, I ended up damp.  I know we all brought spare socks, but no one wants to start a delve damp.”

“I didn’t.”  Arrush’s voice was still a wet rasp, with the occasional click in his words from how his throat worked, but right now, he wasn’t having any problems with airflow.  The purple orb that grew him lung chambers was on the part of its growth cycle where he could breathe freely, not needing to resort to panting or gasping with heavy exercise or even casual conversation.  “I can’t fit in socks.”

“We could make you some socks?”  James offered, wondering if that was an option.  “Or at the very least we could refit some socks for you.  Wait, do you want socks?”

Arrush looked down at himself.  Under his climbing harness and lighter distributed armor pieces, he was just wearing the magically fitted dry suit that he had used for the Winter’s Climb, a few parts of it stitched back together where some holes had been made.  The material hugged his footpaws snugly around the individual claws that poked out, under which a fused velcro strip held a durable rubber sole in place against the bottom of his long chitinous limbs.  “No.”  He decided.  “They would not last long on me.  Not yet.”

“Not yet.”  James echoed, grinning a little at the tall ratroach and getting a nervous shuffle from Arrush.  It had taken Arrush a little time to decide, and it was still kinda funny to James that Arrush would rather face peril in a dungeon than let himself change, but after this delve, his friend was going to be going through with remaking his body to something that wouldn’t hurt all the time, or melt anything he drooled on by accident.  And while James was smiling, there wasn’t a world that existed where he’d even think of making a joke about that kind of big personal step.  “Anyway!  Are we all ready?”

“Yes.”  Bea spoke up for the first time, and James jolted as he realized the potion girl had circled to behind him at some point without him noticing.  She really did just fade from notice when unobserved; not in a magical way, just in a casual shift of body language.

“I’m good to go.”  JP said.  “Though if you wanna take some time to make out with anyone here, I can wait.  I’ve got nowhere to be.”

Anesh snorted and shook his head.  “You know we don’t have to be friends with you anymore.  We’ve got options for the position of rude boy.”

“Yeah, but none of them are as charming as me.”  JP grinned back, winking at Anesh and getting an eye roll in return.  But it was a disarmed one, and he knew it.  “So, glorious leader, what’s the plan?  Any last minute dramatic changes for the purpose of being the giant ham you long to transform into?”

James nodded as they moved toward the doors, other groups shifting around them.  Especially when he raised a hand to wave at Frequency and her team, calling them into motion.  “First of all, if I transform into anything, it’s not gonna be a ham.”  He told JP.  “But yeah, nothing new.  We go first, the others are going to help us sweep the first platform, then cover us as we descend.  Sunny, you doing okay on time?”

“Yep!”  The camraconda leading her own exploration team called back.  “I’ve done the math!  I’m not being noticed very much at all!  I’ll be good for a few hours before I have to swap.”

“Great.”  James nodded.  “Anesh, orb check?”

“What, right here?”  His boyfriend said almost reflexively before a blush stained his cheeks and he tired to pretend he hadn’t just said that.  “Ah, right, yep.  Eight uses of a blue power for [Manipulate Linoleum], if we end up needing it.”  He poked the living drone on his shoulder as they got into position.  “Hey little guy.  You stay up here, okay?”  Ganesh gave him a little buzz of his rotor wings before launching upward, sending Anesh’s short hair fluttering briefly as the drone moved to land on a desk and see them off.

Arrush tilted his head up proudly, adding his own first absorbed blue.  “I have six for [Rearrange Light Source].  I… don’t know when to use it.”  His triangular muzzle dipped back down and all his eyes flicked away from everyone.  “But I have it?”

James ran a gloved hand reassuringly along Arrush’s shoulder.  “And that’s cool, and now we know if it’s relevant.  Alright.”  He raised his voice, not to a yell, but loud enough to be heard by everyone in the area that wasn’t coming with them.  “We’re heading in now.  Hold down the fort here, and we’ll be back with something stupid in no time.”  None of the other delvers did anything as dumb as cheer them on and risk loud noise this deep into a dungeon, but James saw a lot of smiles and limbs raised in either waves or shooing gestures.  “Great.  Okay.  Time for something stupid.”  He took a deep breath, and advanced on the doors, heading for the men’s room without thinking about it.

The door swung open easily, the only resistance to the group filing in was the vague uncomfortable social feeling that you weren’t actually supposed to take a whole party of adventurers into a bathroom together.

A shining linoleum floor and blue and white tile walls greeted them.  To the left, a line of tall urinals sat sunken in the pristine tiles, while the right had a line of sinks with rectangular mirrors on the wall over them.  Overhead, there was a contained fluorescent light every five feet until suddenly there wasn’t, and the ceiling was simply gone, a break like a fault line running through it and shearing it off.  Part of the floor extended past the ceiling, with the weird effect that the most exposed part of the room was cast in shadow from the lack of direct light.  Then the floor ended too, and beyond that, they all knew, was a central column of open space waiting to try to kill them.

They walked carefully.  The floor was shining because it was slick.  The sinks were all on, and water was pouring over their edges, splashing to the floor to form a thin layer before it poured over the far edge.  James guided his team in along the left side, watching the mirrors carefully as Frequency-Of-Sunlight slithered in next and moved aside, focusing on the first mirror in the row.

They got maybe ten steps in before things started pouring out of the mirrors.  Like shards of silver porcelain, two front legs like fangs and a skittering row of smaller limbs propelling them, little mutated hand-sized silverfish started pouring out of the mirrors in a cascade and splashing into the sinks before they filled those too and began to head for the intruders.

“Nope!”  Sunny called at them.  “Not stopping it!”  She announced as she failed to freeze the first mirror from what it was doing.  Not that they were relying on that; it was just a quick test, and this was going to be the easiest part of all this.  As Simon and Harvey followed in behind her in deliberate steps, the two men leveled pistols with highly illegal silencers on them and shot out all three mirrors.

Everyone flinched, because silenced pistols were still fucking loud, but the shattering of the spawning portals also caused a wave of cracks and decay to flow out through the bugs they’d created.  Not all of the ceramic silverfish died, but the ones that were left were easy to mop up.  Myles shook water off the yellow and orange orbs that had fountained out of the broken spawners before putting them in a pouch, while everyone else got to work turning off the sinks and clearing this upper platform of water.

Making sure he wasn’t about to fall, James stepped over to the edge, Arrush right behind him, and looked down, regretting this immensely.

Twenty feet down and mostly offset from them, an open platform of tiny white tiles floated, like a piece of wall turned sideways.  It was at a slight angle, deflecting a waterfall that came from overhead, but it was the closest thing they could probably stand on.  It wasn’t the only platform either; there were dozens of them, a spiral of broken fragments of walls and floors, some of them with their own sinks or toilets spewing more water out, some not part of the chain of waterfalls that filled the air.  Farther down, shapes moved with intention through the open sky contained within the column of space; birds, maybe, or something pretending to be birds.  In places, streamers of water seemed to fall forever with no source or end point.  And on some of the platforms lower on the spiral, other things moved around with inhuman steps.

“Is now a bad time to say I’m afraid of heights?”  James asked.

“…yes?!”  Arrush stared at him.  “Why are you here?”

“I’m kind of an idiot.”  James nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s true.”  Zhu sighed, rustling feathers against the shell of armor James was wearing.  “He’s very good at putting himself in situations no one is going to enjoy, and avoiding the ones everyone would like.”  The navigator’s large eye manifested on James’ shoulder pivoted to look at Arrush.  “Of course, you are also here, standing on the edge, so maybe this is just an Order thing.”

“You are worse to yourself then you would ever let anyone be to me.”  Arrush told James, and then poked lightly at the space under Zhu’s eye.  “You are here too.”  He reminded the navigator.

“I’m stuck with James.”  Zhu sounded almost resigned.

James pushed back on that instantly.  “Okay, hang on!  We know you can leave now!  You’re here on purpose and you know it!  Stop being so dramatic and let me be terrified in peace!”  He tried to take a deep and balancing breath, but all he could smell was the lingering scents of a company bathroom.  Bleach and mildew and humidity and just a little bit of the impression that the place wasn’t actually clean.  “No one get cut anywhere.”  He muttered idly, thinking about infections.  “Alright, let’s do this.”

The last of the water was pushed off the platform, and heavy construction clamps were put into place on the edges of the walls, and then tested with as much weight as they could to make sure they were going to hold.  Climbing ropes were threaded through them, and Harvey showed off his pitching skills from a past life by taking a calm stance and then hurling an attached grappling hook out into the void, landing it perfectly on the nearest platform below.  It still slipped off, and it took him two more tries to get it hooked into the pipes coming off the back of a sink that rose out of the platform from what would be their ‘floor’ when they landed.

James, feeling like an idiot for agreeing to it, clipped his harness to the rope, and held tight as he pulled his full weight up to make sure it wasn’t going to fall.  Before he could consider how monumentally bad an idea this was, his feet were in the air, and he was sliding down at a controlled speed toward the next platform.

He landed awkwardly, pulled one of the heavy screw clamps out of his pack, and affixed it to the slick edge tighter than any grappling hook could ever latch on, before moving the rope over.  His hands shook the whole time, and he nearly fumbled the knots despite having a skill rank in them.  Or maybe he didn’t, it was getting hard to tell where half his knowledge came from.  Maybe, his mind rambled at him as he tried to not think about the drop, it was just repressed memories from being in the Boy Scouts coming back to the fore in his time of need.

JP landed next, sliding slightly in a way that he made look casual but that probably caused a rush of adrenaline as he tipped toward the wet edge, barely avoiding the spout of water from overhead.  Arrush landed by almost crashing into the platform, which mercifully didn’t tilt it at all, and then crawling up seeming unharmed.  Anesh needed to be grabbed, while Bea landed mechanically, and then just stopped like she’d been hit by a camraconda look.

“Okay.  That’s one.”  James said out loud.

“That was actually fun.”  JP rubbed his gloved hands together eagerly.  “I should get some ziplines set up for rogue training.”

“…for real training, or as an excuse to play with ziplines?”  Anesh asked.

JP just gave Anesh a placid smirk.  “Please.”  He said.  “So, next one?”

The next one was a challenge because they had to drop from the upper lip of the slanted piece of floating structure they were on to avoid the waterfall, but they made it down okay, repeating the motion of using construction clamps on the seemingly unmoving platforms to secure their ropes.  They’d brought a lot of rope for this.

After that was a straight line across to a chunk of overturned bathroom stalls, a thirty foot heart stopping shimmy across a rope connecting the two as they got into position to drop farther down the spiral toward the center.  Arrush had gone first that time, being somehow the lightest of them all, and least likely to pry the grappling hook off its catch point on the metal.  He’d gotten about five feet from landing on the door of one of the stalls when one of the tan metal doors had burst open and a domed mass of black sludge had erupted out.  Its surface was studded in thumbtacks, paperclips, and broken pencils, and its front opened up like a maw as it lunged for Arrush, disregarding the drop entirely.

James [Paved] it, burning all his velocity in one shot of the spell to slap the thing aside.  He was pretty sure Anesh did the same thing, while a pair of rifle shots rang out from overhead, and the sludge beast froze anyway from Frequency’s overwatch.  The bullets and spells hit its unmoving mass and cratered it, divots forming that quickly stilled as the camraconda’s magic kept it in place.  Arrush scrambled his paws in the air to find purchase on the rotated stalls, and crawled away from the thing, holding a protective arm up over his face and a pistol facing out through his crouch.  Once he was stable, Sunny let the pile of crap go, and the impacts finished their work, ripping chunks of out of it in disgusting splashes before momentum carried it over the side.

“Well shit.”  JP said, dropping to one knee near the edge of their platform and watching it fall away.

James sighed.  “Just for that, you get to go next.”  He said as he raised a thumbs up to be seen by their cover from the upper level.  He watched cautiously over the low ‘wall’ that formed a lip on their current piece of footing, just to make sure the gunshots weren’t drawing attention, and it was only when he was the last one to head over to the next spot that he started to accept that they were mostly in the clear.

The bathroom stalls he landed on felt unstable under his feet, and James saw Anesh and JP were both half-crawling across them as they kicked down to break open locks and make sure there weren’t any more surprises hiding in the toilets.  Once it was clear, it was a straight drop down to the next point.  Their goal was another chunk of bathroom wall, this one rotating around a fixed point in space, slowly turning while the whir of a hand dryer’s fan started to come into focus over the rushing of water all around them.

A hundred foot straight drop down.  Easy.

“Getting back up is going to be exhausting.”  James groaned.  They were dropping a pair of parallel ropes and they all had climbing hooks to make it easier, but that was still going to be a hell of an effort on the way back.  “Watch your feet when you land.”

“I don’t need to look at my feet to maintain proprioception.”  Bea told him without looking back as she stepped off the ledge and dropped straight down.  James resisted the urge to flinch as she did so.

Over his shoulder, JP made a low whistle.  “Well, she’s got style.”  He commented.  “Hey, actually, is Bea single?”

“Is now really the time for that.”  Anesh asked as James gave him a steadying hand so he could take a step over the broken open door of a sideways toilet stall and clip his own harness to the ropes.  “Really.  Now.”

“If you don’t make time, no one will make it for you.”  Arrush said gently, his rasping voice almost swallowed up by the flowing water around them.  James glanced up at the much more confident ratroach who was standing legs astride two bars of metal, his split tail keeping him from wobbling on the aerial geometry.  “But maybe make time when we are somewhere less wet?”  He added, getting a sudden spike of a laugh from James.

“Maybe a little less sideways, too?  Fewer crap golems?”  James offered JP.

“Bah.  You both lack vision.”  His friend’s retort had no heat to it, though it did get a confused look from Arrush, who blinked all his eyes slowly, counting them off on his claws like he was trying to figure out JP’s ocular math.  “Whatever.  I’ll see you at the bottom.”  JP said, sliding over the edge after Anesh.

James landed last, and immediately twisted as the portion of white and blue tile wall rotated under his feet.  He managed to catch himself, palms sending up splashes of water that he felt droppings of on his face as he landed, but it was a dumb mistake on his part.  Zhu stammered an apology for not helping, the navigator betraying his own anxiety about the height as his normally talkative nature was somewhat subdued.  James didn’t exactly feel stupid, because that feeling was overridden by the vision of the bottomless drop below and the near certain death of falling off, but he still didn’t feel smart.  And now he was damp in multiple spots, as he’d landed in the two inch pool of water that was held on the wall by the ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ it had about a foot of sticking out on one side, and the force of its own rotation.

“Where the fuck did this water come from?”  JP asked, looking around.  There were streams of water pouring down around them, but none hitting this platform.

Bea answered rapidly by pointing at where sinks submerged under the surface were adding more and more water to replace the constant small streams running off the edges, which got a sudden call of alert from Anesh and JP who noticed at the same time that there were mirrors under there too, and ceramic sharpened silverfish starting to crawl upward as they dragged themselves out of the spawning portals.

The others sprang into action, but James had been looking around them when the question was asked, and so he was the one that saw the liquid bird flying her way, a foaming form of wings and a featureless head soaring around one of the columns of water and angling forward with claws out toward her flank.

“Bea!  On your left!”  James yelled, predicting the rotation of the platform and unable to help beyond that as he stomped down on a bug with a crunch that was all at once wet, organic, and earthen.  The next bug behind it lunged out of the water, intent on either avenging its friend or just knifing James’ shin, and he shifted his position back, taking deliberate stomping strikes every time he did to keep killing the things while the others worked to figure out how to kill the mirrors through the water.

Bea turned her head fractionally to see the bird heading her way, its wings flaring outward like it was going to hug her, water flecked with bubbles of some kind plunging straight for her face.  She didn’t look surprised at all, and with an abrupt dip in local temperature, a trio of long arms of ice that sported foot long claws on their tips sprouted from her side.  Bea didn’t move to dodge the bird, just held two of her Breath constructed arms out defensively while the last one moved to rip it apart.

It came apart with a splash, and if it had any solidity to its claws or warped beak, it vanished as she hit it and the liquid poured over her face.  At the same time, the others managed to break one of the mirrors, while Anesh used his blue orb power to punch a hole in the portion of linoleum floor nearby and let the water flood away, carrying corpses and still struggling silverfish with it and opening up the remaining mirror to be more easily stomped into fragments.

“Well that was fun!”  James said before letting out a surprised yelp when one of the bugs that had clung to him started trying to climb into his armor.  He flung it off the edge, almost losing his balance again as he did so, only held steady by Zhu’s own scream and an orange feathered limb slapping one of the bugs away on James’ opposite side.  “Christ I hate those.”

Zhu shivered against James.  “Why does every dungeon have so many bugs?!”  He demanded.  “I mean, terrible bugs.  Not cute bugs.  More sexy bugs, please.”  James gnawed at his lip at the statement, not wanting to get distracted until they’d made sure their position was secure.

“Bea, you alright?”  Anesh said, looking over to where the inhabitor was repeatedly wiping at her face and rubbing her eyes, the icy arms at her side drooping down and melting away as she let them go.

Bea looked back at them, the skin around her eyes bright red.  “I am having difficulty healing.”  She stated.

James hustled over to her, as fast as he could with their current platform still spinning underfoot.  As he got near, the smell of bleach almost overpowered him, and he wished he’d thought to bring a filter mask even though the gear had never really been useful in most parts of the Office.  “Shit, we need to get your eyes washed out.”  He said before realizing his water bottle was about two hundred feet overhead at the moment, and no one would ever suggest using the constant flow from the sinks for something like this.  “Give me your arm.”  He told Bea, taking one of her ice limbs in his own hand as she used her normal limb to snap it off for him.  “Tilt your head back, force your eyes open.  I don’t know if you have a reflex for this, but having bleach in your eyes isn’t good for anyone.”

“I agree, the damage is mounting.”  Bea said, her normally monotone voice crackling with a hint of panic as she followed James’ instructions.  James held the fragment of ice shaped like a clawed hand over her face, and then poured out his own Breath, using the Survival Flare spell for the first time in action not, as he had expected, to screw with an enemy, but actually for a matter of survival, pulling heat from nearby into the ice and letting it melt rapidly, the whole structure turning to water in his grasp over the course of about five seconds and cascading down into Bea’s eyes.

“Don’t rub too much.”  James told her as she blinked methodically, tilting her face down to let the water spill off.  They repeated the process one more time to make sure, leaving James shivering slightly as his body warmed back up after spending about twenty Breath in quick succession.  But by the end of it, the inhabitor simply stepped back and nodded with her usual calm as her internal process for healing the body she was in took back over.  “Alright!”  James told the others.  “Don’t get those in your eyes!  Or any orifice!”

“Don’t tell me what to do with my orifices.”  JP snarked back almost on reflex.  “That doesn’t hurt too badly, right?  We can turn around.”  He spoke to Bea more softly, and James repressed the urge to roll his eyes at his friend.

“I am capable.”  Bea said without looking at JP, instead focusing on the area around them.  “There are more birds below.  Six of them, that I can see.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna need to be alert for those.”  James hummed as he and Arrush moved to opposite sides of the platform to look for their next drop spot.  “Especially since…” he looked upward, craning his neck and getting a sense of vertigo at the towering spire around them that stretched up overhead.  “Yeah, Sunny can’t see us down here.”

Arrush made a surprised noise as they scanned the area, and James looked over at the armored ratroach and contender for driest member of their party as he held one claw out to point to the far wall.  There, sticking out with its own small cascade of crystal clear water pouring off the edge, was a whole room, set into the wall just like where they’d come in.  It even had an exit door they could see the edge of around a corner.

“You know,” Anesh said as he followed Arrush’s point, “we always sort of expected that Officium Mundi had multiple floors.  We’ve seen an elevator before, I think, a long time ago.  And there’s a few times recently delve groups have reported stairs, but they’ve always been more like slopes than actual floor changes.  But that would be fifty meters deep.”

“We’ll put it on the list.”  James sighed, resigned to eternally have more questions than answers about his first dungeon.  “Also I don’t see our next jump spot.  Zhu?”

The navigator hummed in annoyance.  “The turning makes it hard to find where to put a clamp.  Can someone break that hand dryer?  Also how is that not electrocuting all of you?  Isn’t this a trope?  Electrics in the water?”

“It probably isn’t using electricity.  Dungeon nonsense.”  Anesh shrugged as he moved over to examine the device.  “That said, let’s see if this works.”  There was a small flare of blue magic around him as he pointed at the thing that was, at the very least, making a lot of noise and hot air, and the machine fell silent after a short burst of grinding.  “Good.  Are we slowing down?”

Zhu held his feathers up into the air, like he was checking for wind speed.  “…yes.”  He said after a moment.  “Good.  Okay, I have a route down for the next segment, but there is a conflict and a complication on it.”

“We can handle that.”  James said confidently.  “How close are we now?”

“Not as close as you want.”  The navigator replied.

The part of the group that groaned to express frustration did so, and then, after a short break to make sure their hands were working properly, started their descent again.

The conflict ended up being those cleaner birds trying to hit them while they were on a gentle descent.  The group managed to handle them, but learned that individual gunshots didn’t do much to the creatures, and James insisted they wait for several minutes to make sure his shooting hadn’t attracted more attention.  The complication came when they were chaining hops between floating urinals, the mercifully clean white objects floating about five feet apart from each other; just far enough that no one wanted to risk the jump without setting up guide ropes and working through their supply of clamps.  This far down, there were mops bobbing in the air around them like dandelion seeds.  It had startled the shit out of James when he’d first seen one drift into view, but they didn’t seem hostile.  Just like waving cloth sea anemone drifting by on unseen winds.

Watching their patterns was actually how they’d learned that some of the waterfalls that came from nowhere and seemed to vanish into nowhere were actually going through invisible portals; a form of orange totem, surely, but one they couldn’t find no matter how much they wanted it.  Watching the mops was also how the group had learned that they had purple orbs in them in some way, as an unpredicted burst of purple dust had erupted from one of them and struck JP before they could react.

“Well that’s gonna be a problem.”  James had said, watching his friend for any signs of destructive behavior.

“You’re telling me.”  JP said as he casually bent down and started untying his shoes.

“Nope, stop.  What are you doing.”  Anesh caught his hands, and JP looked up with a momentarially confused expression.  “Stop that.”

JP’s response illuminated what had been stuck in his head pretty quickly.  “My boots are dirty, man.  Come on.”  He paused.  “Oh.  That’s weird.  Anyway, still gotta take my shoes off.”  The words were said with a simple glare, like he knew exactly how dumb it was, but didn’t really have a choice.

Fortunately, James’ habit of having one or two purples on hand at all times paid off, and it didn’t take him long to get into the mindset of installing a rule into someone’s brain, and create a countermeme for JP.   “Now, you know the rule.”  He told his friend.  “No-“

“I know, I know.”  JP waved him off.  “I really don’t want a brain child, so if they last, I’ll get them to jump to someone who’s interested.  I’m responsible enough to know I’m not responsible enough, don’t chastise me.”

Their group descended another two hops of increasingly dubious stability, going to an awkwardly angled corner of floor and wall that was slick with moisture and held one of the sludge monsters on its underside lying in wait, and from there to a single toilet stall that was missing its door and stood on a tight circle of tile.

And then their final destination was within reach.  Just below them, a distance that was actually objectively horrifying but felt so close given how James had gotten used to taking twenty foot jumps through open air, was a stable perfect circle of a polished linoleum floor, with incomplete lines of walls around it and small spokes of a ceiling that held their own fluorescent lights.  It was a bright point in the open space that had been dimming as they’d dived farther and farther down.

And it had a phone in it.

It was unclear to James exactly why, half a mile straight down in the Office’s bathrooms, there was an ancient Nokia brick of an electronic sitting on the back of a toilet tank like it was a pedestal.  It was even less clear how it was still here after months of no one interacting with it.  But it was.  And the instinct James had been developing since he’d first stepped in here, whether he knew it or not, made the thing feel like molten salt when he looked at it.  So they’d come back to steal it.

This time, only James and Zhu went down, the others keeping watch overhead and ready to leap in if needed.  The rope vibrated against his gloves as he slid down it, and Zhu helped balance him with a feathered tail as the duo landed.  “Wanna bet on if this magic is deeply silly or not?” He asked his friend as they advanced slowly.

“No.  Also duck.”  Zhu’s manifestation suddenly melted away, turning to a series of orange lines visible only to James showing vectors and dodge paths.  James acted instantly, but didn’t duck enough, and a burst of purple sparkling dust hit the top of his head, and he was abruptly not following the dress code.

The good thing about the curses that the Office laid down was that a lot of them could grow into full people.  The secret good thing was that they were all mental constructs that lived in your own brain, and that meant if you were busy with something, like dodging and rolling the bursts of incoming infomorph curses from the floating mops that danced in the air like a swarm of cloth jellyfish, then you didn’t have time to consider that you needed a suit and tie.

One of the mops dropped suddenly as gunshots started sounding, then another.  James followed Zhu’s dodging advice anyway and kept advancing, right up until he stepped on part of the floor that turned to semi-plastic quicksand under his foot, and he started sinking in, feeling a bright heat in his leg through the armor.

Zhu pulled him out, the navigator firing off a [Move Person] charge from his own absorbed blue, the shock of the magic feeling like a weird sideways echo to James as he ended up three feet forward and still moving.  From overhead, Anesh shouted at him to avoid the spirals in the floor pattern, and Zhu’s guidance snapped to adjust without hesitation.  James ran, before sliding past the toilet that had his target on it, several more curses going past as he did so. But he wasn’t a perfect athlete, and one did end up sinking into him as he didn’t move his arm fast enough.  Later, he’d need to contend with having finite time for lunch.  But not right now.

“Something big, coming up!”  Zhu told him, and James nodded as they both decided it was time to go in harmony.  Zhu suddenly collapsed back into James, a feathered arm snagging the phone as they ran by back in the direction they’d started from, and shoving it into the pocket of James’ armor.  Then James grabbed the rope and kicked the hook away from where it was latched on, using his feet to scale the bit of wall and jump off as a roiling ball of sludge the size of a truck slammed into the underside of the platform with no consideration for gravity and started oozing over to where he’d been standing a second ago.

The others pulled him up while the putrid mass seemed to collect itself and stare after them.  But it didn’t give chase, and there was a weird moment that felt like a respectful standoff as the team looked down at the black gooey mass that watched them from under the various broken spikes in its outer layer.

“Alright.”  James said, wanting desperately to catch his breath, but not when he was near something that smelled like an outhouse had caught fire and then exploded.  “Let’s… get out of here.”

Climbing back out was, he had known, going to be the most exhausting part.  But at least leaving they were more comfortable using their group’s collective [Move Person] charges to make a lot of the smaller hops easier.

When they got back upstairs, stripping off wet armor had been the best feeling in the world.  Second only to finding out that the magical Nokia had Snake on it.

_____

“Check it out.”  Ben said to one of his teammates as they took some time to explore the area while a few expedition members took a much needed break.  “I found an iLipede that likes me.”

Daniel and Dave looked up from where they were methodically combing through a filing cabinet, before going back to their looting.  Vad, though, was happy for a distraction.  “…that’s maybe not as impressive as you think it is?”  He half-asked the mimic.  “I mean, iLipedes are always cool, but for you…”

“Hey, I worked hard to befriend this guy.”  Ben said with a beaming smile, not letting Vad’s comment get him down.  Or even really processing the words all the way.  He was too invested in rotating his arm as the electronic centipede crawled across him with gentle pokes of its brass pin legs.  He gave it a small pat and tried not to make a silly noise as it leaned into his hand.

Vad shook his head.  “No, I mean… Ben, everyone’s your friend.  I was explicitly warned about it, and I still can’t do anything about it, because I’ve known you for years and we’re super close.  I don’t think it’s that big of an accomplishment that you got one of those to like you.”

The way Ben’s smile broke apart was painful for the others to see.  “Rude…” Pathfinder didn’t speak to most of them very often, but when she did, her voice was like the breeze through a dozen types of tree on a long hike, and now it came out in Ben’s defense.

“It’s fine.”  Ben said with a motion that, whatever it actually was meant to be, made the navigator feel absolved for her friend hurting.  He didn’t actually know where most of Pathfinder’s manifestation was; she didn’t have eyes or mouths like some of the other ones, instead just option for an extra set of arms parallel to Daniel’s as they worked together.  “I mean, it’s not fine, but whatever.  The point is, iLipedes don’t like me.”  Ben distracted himself from the others by peering closely at the phone bug on his arm.  “It’s refreshing.”

“How can something not like you?”  Dave asked, innocently reminding Ben of the constant existential dread of his existence.  “Isn’t that your thing?”

“Yes, Dave.  Thank you.”  Ben considered just leaving for a minute.  No one would actually notice, if he really wanted to.  “That’s sort of the problem.”  They nodded along, understanding and paying attention to his words.  And Ben had no idea if they did it because they were his actual friends, or because his nature made them.  “If iLipedes are immune to my bullshit, that means if one of them likes me, then it actually likes me.  So I’m gonna enjoy this, okay?”

“Oh yeah, that makes sense.”  Dave’s comment as he went through a drawer full of loose cables was idly curious, and sometimes Ben wondered if Dave himself wasn’t immune to his effect but just really bad at not being placidly and generally nice to people.

Not that he was going to try to make Dave hate him just to test it.  But the fantasy of being friends for real was nice to dwell on.  Ben had been struggling with the nature of his existence for about as long as he’d been with the Order, and part of him secretly wished that he was some kind of sleeper agent just so things could be simple again.  But that was offset by the fact that, given how the Order of Endless Rooms acted toward basically every species they’d met, he was pretty sure they would have accepted him anyway.

Hell, even Vadik, who was doing a great job of making Ben feel like shit, had still agreed to be on a team with him after knowing what he was and what would happen to his brain from being nearby.  That willingness to accept that things were confusing and weird sometimes made him feel welcome.  Even being made to feel like an outsider paradoxically made him feel welcome, because it did ultimately mean that he wasn’t just straight up mind controlling people to do what he wanted from them.

“So, what’s that one do?”  Vad asked after fighting through the awkward air he’d created.

“Crawl around and look cute?”  Ben suggested.  “Well, as cute as a 13 series can.  But that just means he’s a big chonker.”

“No, I mean… okay, yeah, you’re not wrong.  But don’t they all have one weird app on them that does something unsettling that raises ethical questions?”  Vad pressed.

Ben appreciated the attempt to countermand him.  “Oh!  Yeah, he’s got a social media app that eventually tells me the current thoughts of whoever I select in the form of a post.  I think it kinda leans toward the tumblr aesthetic more than anything else, so, you know.”

“….I know?”

“Yeah, you know.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.  I mean, even if someone is just thinking about lunch or something, this big guy gives me a two paragraph study about the nature of lunch under the cruel and present conditions of capitalism.”  Ben smiled down at the iLipede.  “It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s also not exactly the intelligence tool of the century.  We can just look at someone’s actual social media and probably get more.”

Dave rolled across the oversized cubicle they were looting, a wheeled office chair sliding over carpet with more force than was strictly needed before stopping right next to the pair and getting the iLipede to scramble up Ben’s arm in shock.  “James would probably love that guy.”  He told them.

“Why?”  Ben asked curiously.  “James gets all iffy about anything that’s an invasion of privacy.”

“Sure.  Yeah, I mean, he does do that.  But he’d probably just use it on himself to save time.”  Dave stated.

Ben bent his neck to look back at the iLipede perched behind his shoulder, long antenna made of aux cables waving up next to his neck like it was tasting the sound quality of the air.  “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”  He muttered, wondering what the longer philosophical version of his own thoughts would look like.  Wondering if there would be insights that he wouldn't have otherwise considered unless he took the hypothetical time to write them all out.

He regretted having selected Dave as a target recently, the iLipede now locked on and charging up for a burst of activity where it would give him a snapshot of Dave’s mind as seen through a deeply contextual and somewhat confusing web of lenses.

“Hey, I think we found a file folder of holding.”  Daniel’s voice brought him back to reality and out of his musings.

Everyone looked over at where he and Pathfinder were holding a folder open, one glowing orange arm and one light human one adding page after page to it with no change in size.  They snapped the folder closed, turning it into an almost completely flat line, and the opened it back up again.  “Oh.  Perhaps not.”  Pathfinder sounded almost sheepish as they looked at the empty file.

“Well, that’s like a paper shredder, only less noisy?”  Vad offered.

“Someone would put something important in there within a week and Karen would have all of us grounded.”  Dave patted him on the shoulder.

“Can she do that?”  Ben asked without thinking about it.  He hadn’t really dealt with Karen much.

Dave shrugged.  “I actually don’t know, but she reminds me of my mom, so I just sort of assume she has that power.  Let’s break that one for a blue, and move on.”

Daniel agreed, and the others rose to their feet and stretched as they got ready to move on to the next small spot in this space where the floor was starting to crumble and the cubicle walls were growing vines that sprouted pods of neon ink.  “I don’t think my mom ever grounded me.”  Ben said, casually making conversation as they moved to check in with the main caravan before getting into any trouble with one of the increasingly hostile shellaxies in the area, or something worse lying in wait.

“That’s pretty lucky.”  Vadik said as the two of them brought up the rear.  “My family was… wait, no, Ben.”  He added something rude in Russian that no one else caught.

“I fucking forgot, I’m sorry!”  Ben exclaimed, flushing red as his friend laughed.

And for just a moment as Vad flipped him off in exasperation, he didn’t feel like an outsider at all.

Later, after even more methodical progress through the hostile work environment, they helped set up camp far enough inland from the ink ocean that the smell didn’t bother anyone.  One of the delve teams that didn’t feel tired and didn’t quite yet understand how much long delves like this were marathons and not spirits went out to search for more dungeontech, more small secrets, more magic.  Meanwhile, at their camp, Keeka fussed over making sure they all ate something more than just scrounged up candy bars, while the Research group fussed over the structure of a live orange totem that they’d found nearby.

Ben wasn’t sure if anyone was going to be sleeping a lot that ‘night’ with the lights still burning overhead.  But he was still looking forward to making more progress.  He just wished the iLipede that had decided to try to cuddle up with him in his sleeping bag for warmth was less spiky.

_____

Long Delve Report - Officium Mundi - Day One Acquisitions

Yellow Orbs (Size 1) : 41

Yellow Orbs (Size 2) : 9

Orange Orbs (Size 2) : 8

Orange Orbs (Size 3) : 1

Blue Orbs (Size 1) : 90

Red Orbs (Size 1) : 24

Green Orbs (Size 3) : 2

Green Orbs (Size 4) : 1

Blue Items (Misc, unidentified) 10-30 estimated

Blue Programs : 6, no high utility programs

Ritual Coffee : 22 bags

Expedition Voted Best Candy Name Of The Day : Criminal Chocolate Lava Bar