The Daily Grind - Bonus Chapter 1 (Patreon)

This chapter is being added in to make book 5 have a proper length, and I've decided it's not exclusive.   It fits between chapter 122 and 123.

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The Lair, a place that had become important enough to everyone to get its own half-joking capital letter name, was the sort of place that contained multitudes.

Sometimes people said that and they meant it as a metaphorical sort of thing.  Something to indicate that there was a hidden complexity to a person or group.  And to be fair, they did have deeper layers to them.  But when the people who hung out or lived in the building said that the Lair contained multitudes, they were usually talking about basements.

At least three different attempts had been made to label the basements, and all of them failed when someone would get B1-A and B1-B mixed up in the elevator, or when a sign would get knocked down and go a few days without being replaced.  Or just when someone would think it was funny to joke about not knowing, and then realize they’d actually gotten it mixed up by failing to properly drill the information into their heads.

So Reed called his basement the Research basement, because that was where the lion’s share of Research did their work.  The other basement was… he didn’t know.  The living basement?

He discarded that name pretty quickly.  If dungeons really were alive, a conclusion that they’d sort of arrived at with a little help from the world’s largest experimental accident, then that meant one of his friends had died in a living basement.  So Reed was kind of averse to the title, even if the other side was the basement people lived in.

People including himself, as of recently.  So really, he couldn’t even say that this was his basement and that was for other people.  Currently he was roommates with three camracondas and an iLipede, though that last one was mostly because the thing kept creeping in when they weren’t looking and trying to eat their lamp.  Possibly because it looked too much like an orb.  Or maybe it just liked their company.  It didn’t matter; living with people was awkward, but Reed didn’t exactly have anywhere else to go unless he wanted to drain their already meager funds to get an apartment somewhere.

Today, carrying on his new tradition of distracting himself with work, Reed was look at a pile of documents with a blank stare and wondering how he’d ever gotten from the guy who just liked figuring out what magic items did, to the guy who people trusted to look at classified documents.

The papers stolen from Status Quo weren’t exactly stacked up on the desk he was using, but he did have a cardboard banker’s box full of what he planned to check today sitting next to him, and another box on the other side that was filling up very slowly as he read over them all and scanned the files into a digital form.

A lot of it was getting sent to some other people, working with Karen, to try to track down where the enigmatic enemy had managed to dump certain families on short notice.  Reed was pretty sure he recognized the document type on first glance at this point, though there was the ever present issue of the black bars covering up keywords and names. Status Quo probably hadn’t thought much of the problem of relocating people within a few days, because they had a lot of experience doing it.

In many cases, it wasn’t even to other unknown delvers.  Just to people who had witnessed something or might have had a connection to someone relevant.  They had the power to uproot lives, fog memories, and shred a lot of records, and they used that combination of magic and mundane force as a liberal solution to almost every person they ever ran into.

Reed didn’t like them much.  Not that anyone down here really did, but he felt like he got to dislike them in a special way, since he was the one combing through their paperwork for any mention of other magic items they might have stockpiled or any dungeons they’d left alive.

His work was cut short by a shadow partially blocking the white light from the overhead tube as Nik slid up to the other side of where he was working.  Nikhail’s look had been steadily changing ever since they’d been broken out of Officium Mundi, but even though they were decidedly more masculine these days, Reed still got exactly the same vibe every time his friend and fellow explorer of the unknown sidled up to wherever he was working.

“So, I’m looking at these magic headphones.”  Nik said, holding up the thin white cord with a pair of archetypical earbuds on the end.  “And I’ve got a question.”

Letting the manilla folder full of redacted documents he was holding drop to the desk, and seizing the opportunity to do literally anything else, Reed looked up at his fellow Researcher.  “You can’t take them, I’m giving them to Momo later.”

Nikhail tilted his head, headphones still dangling from his outstretched fist.  ”…Are you trying to woo her with gifts?”  He asked.

”Don’t… don’t say it like that.  Also no.  Those ones teach you how to break whatever they’re plugged into, and she wants to use them to make a totem to see… well, that.”  Reed waved a hand idly.  “It’s part of our endless plan to stumble into identifying stuff and finding ways to make our own magic.”

”Wait, really?  Aren’t these the ones that translate jazz into spoken poetry?”

”You’re thinking of the black ones with the fuzzy ear things.”  Reed looked around as if the magic item might be easily in sight, but it wasn’t, because they’d sort of learned to keep the objects of power contained in labeled cardboard boxes.

Nik was undeterred.  ”I thought those were the ones that remind you about appointments.”

”No, that’s your phone.”  Reed laughed at his own joke.  “Was there… something about those?”

Raising his eyebrows and holding his closed fist back up, Nik dropped the tangent and remembered what he was going to ask.  “Right!  The headphones!  So, these are… obviously an Apple product, right?  Even though they’re from the dungeon?”

That, at least, Reed knew how to answer.  ”Legally no.  Also, as a piece of hardware, no.”  Despite the signature shape and all-white design, the headphones were technically not the same as the kind you could buy off store shelves.  But only barely.  “Why do you ask?”

”Oh, I was thinking - mostly as a joke - about how it’s kind of impressive they haven’t broken yet.  And then I was wondering about what the threshold for ‘broken’ is for stuff like this that’s more delicate electronic equipment.”  Nik dangled the earbuds from pinched fingers.  “Look, this one already has a knot in it, somehow.  I’ve actually screwed up a pair of these by tugging on something like that too hard, so would that just… vaporize this?”

”Possibly.”  Reed leaned forward, looking at where the headphone cord had bunched up.  “Don’t do that, I guess?  Maybe listen to them, so they can tell you what would break them?  That’s the whole point, right?  Momo won’t care if you use them.”

Nik nodded and started trying to carefully untangle the headphones with one hand while pulling out a phone to plug them into from his pocket with the other.  Setting his phone on the desk as he failed to make headway with the cord, he carefully undid the knot in it, strung it out, and tugged on it slightly to straighten it out of its default coil.

And then the whole thing broke down.

Watching a magic item made from a blue orb break was honestly a really cool thing if you played it back in slow motion, which Reed had done for a bunch of different tests with the various pens that wrote in specific fonts that they tended to find a lot of.  There was a threshold of damage that any given dungeontech item could sustain, and once that was crossed, the whole thing fell apart fast.  Lines would appear across it as the weaker parts were pushed away from each other.  Then the smallest pieces would begin to dissolve, turning from solid matter into a lightly glowing blue glitter that would fade from existence shortly after it showed up.  Often times, the small pieces falling off would mean that larger pieces were no longer connected, but the dissolving effect propagated from the edges of where things had fallen away, and would consume the rest of the object within about a quarter of a second.

That last part was kind of important, because it meant that if you broke an item by accident when no one was looking, you might never know what happened to it unless you found the orb it dropped and deduced what was missing.

The orb itself was also kind of weird.  Lots of things like those aforementioned pens weren’t actually large enough to fully contain even the smallest of the Office’s orbs.  But that didn’t stop them from showing up when the items broke, and on camera, it looked like the item itself had been ‘covering’ the orb, with a tiny bit revealed as the thing broke away, and then an optical illusion slid more of the orb into sight.

Neither Reed nor Nik had magic eyes yet, so they didn’t really have to worry about seeing anything mind bending without recording the accidental destruction of the dungeontech.  But Nik did fumble the orb onto Reed’s desk, sending the small glowing blue ball rolling across the folder he was working with.  On reflex, Reed slapped a hand down on it before it reached him, sending another puff of that vanishing glitter out as it broke.

[+1 Skill Rank : Bureaucracy - Corporate - Shipping - Footwear]

[Problem Solved : Lunch Acquired]

”Aah!”  Nik jerked back as a plate with a sandwich and chips on it appeared next to his head where he had tried to lunge for the orb before Reed broke it.

Reed felt like he could do a little yelling too.  But there was a weird satisfaction that he got from pretending to be calm and collected in the face of the nonsense that was his daily life.  ”Don’t yell at my lunch.”  He told Nik with a steady voice.  “Also Momo’s going to want to have words with you.  Also that was great timing.”

”Aw, fuck.”  Nik sighed.  “Will she accept an apology, cause I’m really sorry?”

”I mean, probably.  She’s not some unhinged lunatic, she’s just weird and frantic.”  Reed said with a sigh.  “And un…rested?  Unslept?  Tired all the time.  Sorry, I’ve been talking to James a lot lately and I’m starting to believe that the way he talks is normal.”

Nik looked almost like he was actually upset.  “I seriously didn’t mean to-“

”Why are you freaking out over this?”  Reed cut him off.

”Because I… broke a magic item?  Why aren’t you freaking out!”  Nik demanded, voice cracking.

Reed shrugged and ate one of the chips that had appeared on his desk.  Ketchup flavor, which was out of the ordinary but not too bad.  “Two weeks ago Anesh and Alanna brought me a prescription bottle that seemed to turn anything in it into ibuprofen, including just… uh… dirt.  Alanna said I should look into ‘increasing throughput’, so we could… do something with that.  She said a lot about it, it was hard to follow.”

”…And?”

“And I ran over it with one of the rolling chairs a half hour later.”  Reed admitted.  “And then one of the camracondas used the blue orb and got a skill rank in break dancing, and solved a problem that was so small I don’t remember it.  And no one cared.”  He ran a hand through his curly hair, soft fingers tugging at the unruly mop as he stared across the open room full of cluttered acquisitions both magical and mundane.  “Most stuff probably isn’t irreplaceable.  I mean, don’t break the Status Quo crown on purpose, but also… it’s fine.  We’ll find something else, and adapt.”

”You’re weirdly chill about this.”  Nik gave him a suspicious stare.

”I’ve been going to therapy.”  Reed said, comfortably using the almost-tangent as an answer.  “Trying to deal with losing my brother.”

Nik jerked back.  “Ryan died?!  When?!  He hasn’t even been on any delves, and I’d know, cause I’ve been on every delve!”

That information was new to Reed, who thought that Nik had just been enjoying the relative freedom that working here brought.  Freedom which he kind of didn’t take advantage of himself; no one was making him stay in a basement and read classified documents about war crimes, after all.  He got paid, he could have gone out and done fun stuff every day or something.

But the basement had magic in it.  And Reed just kind of internally shrugged to himself as he realized that Nik was probably going into Officium Mundi every week for exactly the same reason.  That was where the magic came from.

The approach was a lot more hands-on than Reed wanted for himself.  He liked the process of poking and prodding, taking meticulous notes, thinking up tests that were as useful as possible in a broad context, that sort of thing.  Every time someone brought in a thing and said “This might be magic?” He got a burst of energy unlike anything else.

He did not get that feeling with the dungeon.  Reed wasn’t really interested in ever going back into a dungeon.  For one thing, he couldn’t run fast enough to outpace even a mildly interested strider, much less something like a tumblefeed.  And having a body that was best described as ‘like a marshmallow’ also made him unsuited for fighting back, which was fine, because he didn’t want to fight anyway.

It wasn’t really relevant to what Nik had asked him, but the perspective sort of helped Reed understand his friend a bit better in that moment.  “Oh, right.”  He said, answering the actual question, and not his own thoughts.  “No, Ryan’s not dead.  He just left.”

”When, again?!”  Nik said in that tone that was like a shout but at half the volume so he didn’t bother the handful of other people working down here this afternoon.  “What do you mean left?”

”Uh… it’s…a little personal.”  Reed admitted.  “And I don’t want to talk about it?”

”Yeah but I do.”  Nik ignored the polite attempt to establish boundaries.  “I thought we were friends!”

”Us?”

”No, me and Ryan!”

Well that was a jarring thing to hear.  ”Okay, ow.”  Reed started laughing.  It was too dumb to take personally, and suddenly it was all just hilarious to him.  “Fine.  He… found out our family remembers him.”  Reed pretended to go back to studying the papers he had dropped initially.  “Not me, though.  So he asked that I don’t ’ruin it for him’, and moved back home.  Fun fact, our grandpa is stupidly rich, so he gets to… eh.”  Reed trailed off, not knowing where he was even going with that.

Letting the awkward silence take over, he flipped through four pages of relocation forms, made a note on what part was probably a zip code, and then dumped the folder into the ‘out’ box before grabbing a fresh piece of nightmares.

”…seriously?”  Nik said eventually, after staring open mouthed at his friend and technically boss.  “He said that?”

”Yeah, apparently he doesn’t want them to think he’s weird, so he’s just kind of pretending I’m not real, and going along with it.”  Reed was surprised how easy it was to say.  The whole thing had been eating at him for a while, and it felt exactly as cathartic to tell someone else as his therapist had told him it would.  Which was a bit annoying, honestly, but only because of his own stubborn and cowardly refusal to open up.  “Anyway.  I’ve been thinking about-“

”No!  No, not anyway!”

Nik’s yell was loud enough that it attracted attention from some of the others nearby.  John and Taste-Of-Air, especially, were doing that thing where they silently agreed to drop their own conversation and pretend to still be working as they listened in on the juicy workplace gossip.  It was, if anything, a powerful interspecies bonding moment to learn that both humans and camracondas were dying to know about the small secrets going on in other people’s lives.

Reed just ignored Nik.  “…anyway, now that I’m thinking of people who are gone,” he said with a morose little smile,  “maybe we should clear out Virgi’s desk.”

”No, no, I think I’d rather talk about your asshole brother.”  Nik declared.  “Hey, let’s get Plan to eat his brain.”

”Please don’t be a bad influence on the single stable new infomorph we have here.”  Reed groaned.  “No one can figure out how to make new ones, we can barely manage to feed Plan, and James has made it pretty clear that if we create an unstable infovore again he’s going to… uh…”

Nik raised his bushy eyebrows.  “Murder us?”

”No, he didn’t actually say what he’d do.”  Reed mumbled.  “I don’t think he knows how to threaten people.  But also I feel a strange compulsion to not disappoint him.”

”Magic?”

”Either mind control or respect, and I’m not sure which is less likely.”

Nik scoffed.  ”Hey, I like James.  He’s cool.”

”See, that right there?  That sounds like mind control.”  Reed chuckled to himself.  “I’m serious though.  We should go through Virgil’s files and things.  We can’t just keep leaving his desk there like we’re expecting him back.”

The words made Nik turn his head and stare across the cold concrete of the open room.  “I’m serious too.”  He said bitterly.  “I’d rather find a way to mind wipe Ryan than to… what’s even the term?  Go through someone’s effects?”

Reed snorted a surprised laugh.  “That term might mean something different for us in the future.”

”Yeah, let’s talk about that.”  Nik said with a rapid jerking nod.  “Not… anything else.”

”Virgil’s gone.”  Reed said tersely, suddenly finding a heat in his voice that he wasn’t expecting.  “We can’t just… leave his shit there.  If nothing else, think of how irritated he’d be that we’re wasting floor space.”

Nik’s mouth twitched in a small approximation of a snarl as he paced back and forth on the other side of the desk.  “I just…” he stopped, stared up at the ceiling.  Tried that deep breath thing that he’d seen James do a lot, and found it kind of helped.  “Virgil was a jackass and he was never not a prick to me and even then I don’t think I have the energy to deal with him being dead yet.  Can we just do it later?”

That seemed reasonable enough to Reed.  “Sure.”  He said, and then named his price.  “But you’re going to have to listen to me monologue for a bit.”

”Oh.”  Nik realized he may have made a tactical error.  “It’s not gonna be about something dumb, is it?  The last time you cared about something enough to monologue it was Star Wars and I had to gnaw my own arm off to escape the trap.”

”What is it with everyone and not wanting to talk about Star Wars, anyway?”  Reed seemed genuinely confused.  “I like the movies!  That’s why I want to talk about them!  I’m not gonna be weird about it.”

Nik stole a few of Reed’s chips as he answered.  “I think we’re all too used to the internet, where everything is worse.”

”Well it’s not my surprisingly deep and philosophical analysis of the cultural stability of the Sith.  This time.”  Reed threatened his friend with a pointed finger that was far less menacing than he thought it was.  “I just want to rubber duck about the telepad tests.”

Nik wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

The term ‘rubber duck’ had been in use for about as long as humanity had possessed both computers, and rubber ducks, in the same place at the same time.  The idea went that if you were stuck with a technical problem, and you explained your code to a rubber duck, the solution would come to you a lot easier.  In reality, the duck probably wasn’t required, and it was just that expressing ideas out loud meant a person had to actually think through how to explain something, which led to identifying obvious points that could be worked on.  But the duck was a powerful symbol, and symbols like that tended to stick around in some form.  Programmers were a lot like dungeons in how they latched onto metaphors, really.

And really, it did work.  Nik did it a lot when he was working with people to figure out how to determine if a coffee mug was magical, and how to do it without breaking anything.  He just wasn’t sure how much energy he had to be the duck today.

But Reed was already talking and Nik definitely didn’t have the social battery to escape the conversation now.

”It’s the line of sight thing.”  Reed started with, and Nik groaned inside.  And outside.  “Yeah, I know.  It’s just… okay.  Between how Secret and Planner eat things, and how the Office tends to be all… bureaucratic, I guess… I think we can safely say that the dungeontech objects like to do their work on structured information.”

”You can’t prove that but let’s say so, sure.”  Nik threw Reed a bone.

Reed grimaced as he realized that even accepting that meant that this whole thing could be undermined by one weird test.  “Addresses always work.  Any address, anywhere.  Well, I mean, not any address, we can’t prove that and no one is willing to teleport into the Kremlin just to try.  But every address we’ve tested.”

Nik nodded along.  “Yup.  I helped with those.”

”And if something that has a legal distinction is written down but not a specific address, the telepad defaults to a ‘central’ area of it.  Like, if you put a city, it will put you on Main Street.”

”Yeah, and not the geographic center.”  Nik had been there for those tests too, and had needed to sprint around a corner and teleport away when a bunch of people saw him and wanted to ask if he’d just appeared from nowhere.  James said they weren’t a conspiracy, but being super awkward was a much more powerful motivator.

Reed kept going.  “I even understand how the telepads are… uh… is it okay to call them sassy?”  He asked, and Nik just shrugged at him as he moved out of the way to let someone walk past, the woman wheeling a table on a little hand cart.  Three camracondas followed in her wake, hissing either excitedly, or out of breath.  Reed ignored the normal part of his day.  “If you write down something abstract, the telepads will interpret it as literally as possible, and find a city or building with that name to drop you in.”

”I was thinking about that, actually.”  Nik interrupted.  “That’s mostly put us in English speaking countries, so far.  And of those, mostly not literal England, because their place names are odd.  Do the telepads have a language barrier?”

The headache their most important tool gave Reed intensified.  “Thanks.”  He whined, trying to sound good natured and mostly failing.  “Great.  Thanks.  Love that.  What really bothers me though isn’t that we keep teleporting to the middle of Arkansas for a bunch of tests, it’s that all those rules, all those careful little lines with clean definitions, just vanish if you’re looking at something.”

”Mmh.”  Nik’s noncommittal noise around a mouthful of Reed’s manifested lunch was followed by a quick swallow as he wiped the corner of his mouth.  “So, it’s not about the weird rules, it’s about the rule that breaks the rules?”

”Yes.  Also stop eating my sandwich.”  Reed tried to shift the plate away from Nik, but his friend just went back to pacing in front of the desk, intent on eventually ending next to the food anyway.  It wasn’t like anyone here went hungry, and going upstairs for lunch would be good for Reed anyway, but it was a personal affront to keep stealing his food.  “Everything is structured.  Address in a government system takes top priority, followed by ad hoc address including paired symbols, then broader place name by tiered geographic size and alphabetically within that.  Addresses that don’t exist default to taking names first, then numbers.  You can’t teleport to the moon.”

”That experiment was fuckin’ dumb.”  Nik voiced the opinion everyone had shared instantly upon hearing about it.

Reed felt like he wasn’t getting to monologue so much with all the interruptions.  “And every one of those restrictions is… every one of those restrictions except the moon one vanishes if you’re looking at where you want to go.  Then you go exactly where you wrote!”

”Wait, actually?”  Nik asked.  “So, if you write ‘home’ while looking at your home, you don’t end up in Arkansas again?”

”No, which is good, because I think we’re in danger of having our ‘oops’ budget cut.”  Reed went back to subconsciously tugging at his hair.  Not hard enough to rip it out, yet, but he was building to that.  “I just… we’re supposed to be making sure the telepads are safe, and useful, and finding every corner case so that the whole Order can use them, you know?”  Reed’s voice was strained, almost pitiable.  “And I’m just… feeling like an idiot.  And tired.”

Nik stopped where he was reaching to steal another bite of sandwich, letting out a breath as he dropped his antics and patted Reed on the shoulder.  “Two things.”  He said.  “One, don’t be so hard on yourself, basically everyone is working on that.  Two, why not just say that the line of sight rule takes priority over the others?  It’s still a rule, right?”

”…oh.”  Reed dropped his hand and straightened up.  “Oh.  Yeah, that makes sense.  Also we should see if it works with other senses like hearing.  Thanks, Nik.  You’re a good rubber duck.”

Nik stopped patting him on the shoulder.  “I know what you mean, but that sounds like it’s an insult.”  He laughed.  “So, should we go find a stack of telepads and start adding to the list of rules?”

”No.  I need lunch.  And you need to go apologize to Momo.”

And he needed to put the Status Quo documents away.  And also read over a couple people’s reports on magical coffee mugs.  And send James a request to try to make a yellow totem.  And figure out how many people they had space for down here, since the Order was going to be hiring new people soon, he’d heard.  Oh, and also talk to a couple camracondas about the orb splitting thing that some of them could do.  Plus there was a whole new headache in the form of the Status Quo magic items they had piled up down here.

”You have lunch.”  Nik tried to lie to him.

”I’m not eating six surviving ketchup chips and a sandwich you already ate half of.”  Reed told him, standing up and wishing he hadn’t broken the refilling ibuprofen bottle as his tired body protested the motion.  “I’ll meet up with you here in an hour.”

”Yeah, okay.  Also one of the camracondas stole the chips so you don’t even have those.”

Reed actually was impressed.  ”Wow, they’re pretty sneaky when they want to be.”  He nodded appreciatively as he headed for the stairs.

It was a normal Wednesday in the Research basement.  And he was tired, and had a headache, and felt overwhelmed.  Half his job was reading paperwork from murderers.  But also there was nowhere he would rather be.