The Daily Grind - Chapter 364 (Patreon)

"It's kind of like doing an escape room while the staff throw knives at you.  And the building's on fire."  -MadmanEpic, I Made A Destiny Raid (In Halo)-

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For someone who was getting something approaching downtime, James sure had a lot of stuff he was keeping an eye on.

The first week and a half of December, though, brought him into a kind of flow state that was only achievable through a combination of personal satisfaction, measurable results, and antidepressants.  It wasn’t that he stopped doing anything, it was more that, when the things he was doing felt meaningful, it just felt effortless to find the energy to throw himself at them.  Maybe that was because of his stat point in Energy, maybe it was because his mental health was getting steadily better, maybe it was due to the delightful situation of getting to fall asleep every night with at least one person he loved in bed with him.  It didn’t really matter, it was just a kind of fascinating place for James to be in.

He was busy, but because it didn’t feel like he was being slowly sucked into an emotional bog, it was easier than it had ever been to tackle that busyness with his best effort.  And because of that, he got to keep from being overwhelmed by slashing things off his checklist like he was casually reaping wheat.

Some stuff was simple, and almost routine.  Training was becoming an almost static part of James’ life.  A minimum of one day a week was devoted to it, and it had surprised him that the most important thing to practice was not any specific skill, but instead, just the practiced ability to make a choice and act, even under immense pressure.  Though some people were definitely training for specific skills, too.  James actually felt kind of jealous that he wasn’t on shield team three, which had been the first group in the rotation for learning aerial team maneuvers.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t use a Climb wand to hit himself with Altitude Adept and get some kind of wings of his own, just to have fun with.  That was, after all, a key part of the squad’s current training routine.  But James felt like he didn’t have the time to go through the medical part of the process right now, and his fear of heights was powerful enough that while he theoretically wanted to go flying, he didn’t actually think he’d enjoy it that much if he were being serious with himself.

Instead, he checked off another box and went through a handful of interviews to find people to bring the third shield team back up to a full roster.  The Order was starting to hit a point where what they really needed were dedicated training units to get new people up to speed, before filtering them into groups like the shield teams that experienced attrition from one source or another.  It was a bit of a dark thought, but the world was getting more hostile, and James knew it wasn’t a great idea to expect squads of knights to train their own new companions on the fly.  At least for team three, the majority of their missing members were just people who quit, and not people who died.  But still.

Training for James wasn’t just learning to be suitably heroic while under fire, though.  It was also learning about the processes the Order had in place.  They had plenty of temporary ones that were designed to be replaced later if they grew, and also a few that were kind of hammered into place and meant to be durable institutions, and he wanted to know about all of them so that he could be on the lookout for flaws.  Destroying cherished institutions to create more net good was James’ general hobby; the systems the Order was making weren’t exempt from that either.  That was basically what a paladin was for.

So he spent a couple days with Recovery, learning the ways that they handled check-ins with the various fosterlings throughout the Order, learning how they handled scheduling for critical tasks, learning how they handled budget access, learning how they managed the prices for the magic stipend everyone got, and a bunch of other little things that were woven into all of the streamlined bureaucracy that operated out of the office building he used to work in.  It was fun, in a way, because he’d helped design a lot of these systems.  Helped do research for them, been the one to set up ground rules, and been in the big Order-wide forums where they discussed setting some of these things in motion.  And now he got to see them, refined, with changes and evolutions that he’d never thought of on his own put into action.

It was fun.  Not really relaxing - James still got a stress headache from looking at forms without someone within arm’s reach that he could ask a million questions of - but overall still fun.

Some of what he was handing was also simple, but so distant from the concept of routine that James didn’t know where to file it.

Organizing .mem files, and giving the introduction to skulljacks speech to a few hundred different groups, both fell into the same broad category.  The Order generally took a slow approach to the organic mind-machine interface, which had so far kept it from spreading to the general public like a kind of invasive species of cybernetic.  But it also meant that they had a lot of safe and steady ways to make use of the things, which was cool.

James’ own work recently included a lot of getting individuals to add their own lifetime of skills to the growing library.  Because it was important to have different perspectives on things, even if it meant that for some things you might need to download and unpack multiple .mems to get the full well-rounded information package.  It was still a way to spread practical ability without needing skill orbs.  Which meant a massive savings on replicator space.

None of James’ work involved the copy ritual.  Unless you counted the small amount of troubleshooting he did for the anti-cancer department, since they practically only existed because of the ritual in the first place.

Normally he’d expect JP to be the one doing this kind of thing, since that was the role James had mentally filed his friend under.  But when Hilbert had informed him - frantically, in the middle of a skill formatting session - that one of the group’s distribution members had been kidnapped, James had just decided to cut to the part where he got involved directly.

It wasn’t routine, but it was simple.  Call to Blood got him an exact location, a telepad got him in, and the trouble got shot.  Nonlethally, even.  James was getting consistently less comfortable with killing people, even people who kidnapped the Order’s aid workers.  He did still effectively counter-kidnap the two idiots who had thought this was a good idea, and added them to the list of people who were undergoing rehabilitation within the Order’s care.

Some things weren’t problems at all, just part of being alive that he decided to enjoy.  James got to spend time with all his partners, sure, but he also had friends within the Order that he enjoyed being able to passively harass in the quiet moments as the days ticked by.  Catching people while they were coming back from delves, or working around the Lair, just saying hi and checking in with how their lives were going.

He got to meet Banana’s growing friend group this way, too.  The crow-wasp having found herself an endless source of her own energy after she’d been reshaped and healed, throwing herself into school, social situations, and trouble with equal joy at all of them.  The cadre of other kids that Banana was close with was a hilariously mixed group in terms of both species and demeanor, and James especially appreciated that Ava was both in it, and not acting like a stereotypical teenager.  Banana’s primary foster mother was more Alanna’s friend than his, but it was still cool to see Ann taking to the girl with obvious love.

Sometimes, James knew, people just needed a nudge and an option, and they could rewrite their whole life into something they’d like more than what they’d been doing.  And if they were like Ann, they’d complain the whole way, which was often hilarious.

And then there was the stuff that was neither simple nor routine, that wasn’t easy or fast or particularly effortless.  But was, instead, incredibly fun.

The magic.

And not just the dungeon delves!  Though James did go on a few very short runs with some of their newer people, almost incidentally picking up a skill rank in llama ranching and a material rank in plastic.  Though that one was the specific subtype of US-produced high-density polyethylene.  But still.

The delves were fun.  Joyous little explorations of weird spaces that still hadn’t gotten old to him.  It was nice to see the Office again for a couple hours, and the Stacks for a little less.  And visiting Clutter was always great.

But what James most enjoyed about this calm time in his life was that he was putting the magic that the Order had to work.

With the discovery of storm orbs from the Climb, and efforts from Momo, Zhu, and even James to learn more tricks to put them to use making ‘wands’, the options for practical application of some Climb spells had gone through the roof.  Previously, there were three limiting factors to any of them.  You needed a caster who had survived enough of the Climb, which was not an insignificant challenge.  You needed that caster to not die casting the spell.  And you needed the side effects to not undo the effect.

The wands, or at least some of them, solved at least one of those problems.

The wands they actually found in Winter’s Climb often had multiple vectors for weirdness.  Different capacity for spells, sometimes even limited kinds of spells using an unknown metric.   Different trigger conditions.  Different modifiers.  They were also usually too big to copy.  But the wands the Order was slowly learning to make, while still generally bulky, were at least something they could produce in a higher quantity, even if they didn’t get quite as bizarre.

The latest breakthrough had been finding a way to get a wand - a personal compact mirror in this case - to cast a spell based on a deliberate non-violent trigger.  It could store about seventy Breath, and it solved all the problems that had stopped them from applying a certain magic to one of their other sources of weirdness.

Harvest Echo was a Climb spell that was perfect for doubling the amount of potion sap that the Order grew.  They already kept increasing that supply by copying the succulent pots on the regular, but each plant required care and time, and being able to selectively double the harvest from the successful ones would be a valuable boost to their supply until they reached a critical threshold of having too much.  Originally Harvest Echo had been shelved, because it took a lot of Breath, and it also dropped the temperature in the area enough to damage the finicky sap succulents.

With a supply of wands like this, though?  All it took was a little sudden reorganization of the process that the potion department already used.  The wands, if made right, could be filled up slowly over time.  Allowing anyone with the spell to donate two or three Breath at a time filled one to a usable supply really fast, and was barely noticeable by the Climb casters.  There was no burst of cold in the grow area either, since that was part of what was chipped up and distributed while the wand was being filled.  And with the sap succulents growing on offset timers, there was almost always one that was ready to use the wand on.

Potions were already one of the things that the Order had started to break through the scarcity ceiling on, so this wasn’t game changing.  But each wand was worth roughly thirty or forty imbued pots, if they were used right, and that was a significant boost.  More sap meant more accessibility for everyone of the more useful potions, as well as more research into new ones.

That wasn’t the only place they were useful either.  The Order’s medical side, which was now serving Townton as well and was in a constant chase to learn more about the nonhuman people there as fast as possible, could always use better tools.

The lack of a health potion had so far failed to deter Deb from shotgunning out new ideas for how magic could amplify or enhance her staff’s ability to provide aid. And midway into December, she got an early solstice gift in the form of James showing up with another hundred wands made out of pocket watches and an already filled ‘donation’ chart for people to fill those wands with Iced Veins and Mesa Oasis aspected Breath.

When questioned, he told Deb that there had been some kind of mistake with an online order, and he’d ended up with all these hefty engraved metal pocket watches, and he wanted to at least do something with them.   When questioned why they were all specifically engraved with a caduceus, James had just shrugged and made a comment about how weird eBay was, even in this far future year.

Deb still took the wands.  Because an on demand supply of tools to perform instant blood transfusions or addiction purges was beyond useful.  It was miraculous.  If they hadn’t relied on recharging them from people who knew the spells, then she would have pushed to distribute these to hospitals across the world.

Sadly, there was no wand that generated its own Breath supply yet, or could be charged in an alternate way.  Even the ones that were imbued didn’t work like that.  Though imbuing a storm wand with a blue orb did work.  Sometimes.  It was just harder than normal for no good reason, and unlike with the leveler items where one type of magic sort of ‘ate’ the other, the wands just ended up with two separate magical effects on them.  Which tended to make them more of a pain in the ass, though at least it slightly alleviated the one hit point rule; not entirely, but enough to not feel like one wrong bump would annihilate a priceless relic.

A smaller amount of James’ effort went into organizing collaboration between a Research team and a reconstruction crew down in townton.  Or, more accurately, the building crews in general.

With the growing field of dungeon linguistics allowing for a wider range of totems to be constructed, along with straight up blueprints from the Stacks tablet artifact, there was a fascinating interaction that was possible that no one had noticed yet.  And James wasn’t wasting time putting it into action.

Green orbs from the Ceaseless Stacks gave material ranks.  Stacks totems - or generators, as they were being called now - produced what their inserted orb was for as long as they were tuned to the right color and type of thing.  So, a generator that could make stone could be given a material rank green orb for, say, concrete, and it would start making that.  Which was a lot less unnerving than the yellow orb ones that made facsimiles of living animals but that was a whole other can of worms.  Especially if it was a generator for bugs.

The point was, the material it made came out in… shapes.  As with the Office totems, especially the orange ones that the Order thrived on, there was a lot of room for calibration and modification.  But a weird quirk of the generators was that if the shape didn’t fit somewhere, it would just fill whatever space it could and pretend that was good enough.  Also, if you removed stuff from the generator’s field without turning the generator off, it could stick around.  This worked either by putting geographic distance between it and its productions, or by altering the output - ‘killing’ the animals worked for this, which was further unnerving.  Any given orb had a finite amount of matter it could produce, just like an orange totem pulling a similar trick, but it was a lot.

What no one had seemed to realize was, this meant you could just… get a generator to fill a mold.

The construction applications were insane.  Sealed brackets could be arcanely formed into materially uniform walls, foundations, or supports.  The actual detail work, this was crap for, but the heavy lifting creation of the skeleton of a building?  That could be done in minutes if you set it up right.  And even better, you could do it with materials that were otherwise impractical or impossible to work with.

Though it did mean that they needed to do structural analysis and earthquake testing on things that no architect had ever considered looking into in the history of humanity.   But that wasn’t James’ job.  James’ job was to get these people talking, give them a budget to test it out, and see what fell out of the tree he’d started shaking.

He had high hopes for that one.

The rest of James’ work putting magic into rotation went toward Response.

With the new influx of blue orbs for imbuing, and the general trend that if a person could make an enchantment a certain way once, they could probably do it again, there was a lot of room for making bespoke tools.  There was also a weird quirk that emerged that someone who watched the imbuement process and listened to the reasoning of the original creator could often remake the same imbuement easier, at least at first, but that was just a bonus.

Blue imbuements followed rules that were obfuscated and often stupid.  James regularly thought about the process as ‘thinking like someone running a game’.  Not just answering specific questions, but finding the mindset that would most consistently give stupid and fun answers to those questions, and putting that into the magic.  Which meant that the tools he helped make in bulk for Response weren’t instant fix-the-problem buttons, but they were powerful as multipliers for the skills and abilities already at play.

A stress ball that ate stressful emotions when squeezed and returned them when relaxed.  Great for calming a room, and in a pinch, could be just gripped until you could throw it into an open field.  A pad of sticky notes that could have a phone number written on them and enabled what was basically telepathy to anyone who touched them.  Single use per note, with them crumbling afterward, but still great.  A laser pointer that immediately drew attention to where its dot was pointed.  Little things like that.

Response was also bolstered by a wave of living drones that had been made.  They weren’t specifically made for Response, and were more of a result of curiosity about what exactly Ganesh’s species really was.  It turned out that the little guy really was more than a physical life form; his kind of bat-esque quadcopters were both the body and the signal that paired them to a device.  Not a specific device, which was good because James was pretty sure not even his compulsively protective boyfriend had kept his phone intact this whole time, but it took them a little bit to shift over what particular electronic they were tethered to.

The creatures were, in short, high energy.  Much like Ganesh when he’d first met James and Anesh, they rapidly formed bonds with larger people who happened to have phones and could give a drone good adventures.  They were clever, but like with Ganesh their complex social intelligence developed quickly to a certain point, and then proceeded slowly if at all.  James, obviously, had worried about exploitation.  But only about half of the thirty or so new creatures ended up with Response partners; the rest rapidly becoming personal companions or even just local figures as they paired themselves to Research laptops or the screens behind the allocation counter in the Lair.  Like bodega cats, except capable of flight, and basic tool use.  And the ones that did effectively join Response teams quickly became relied on as independent scouts and assistants.

Also, and James couldn’t take credit for this but he wholeheartedly endorsed it, someone had gotten one of the Order’s better imbuers to put a very simple thing on all of the blue orb patches that Responders wore on their sleeves.  It didn’t do much, it just told anyone who wanted to know what the name and rank of the person wearing the patch was.

Responders weren’t masked heroes or cloaked vigilantes.  Despite the very clear dislike that a lot of US police were building for them, they operated openly.  They had names and faces, and an accountability and ethics oversight committee that anyone could call if there was an issue.  This was, James had learned almost incidentally through third hand information, apparently infuriating to the local police.  They fucking knew the Order was based around here somewhere, they just couldn’t find them, and while they were one of a dozen going through this process they still resented that the city government was legitimately discussing cutting their budget.

Personally, James felt like it was time for the Order to ask for that budget.  He’d poked his head into Harvey’s office to ask but the man was on a deeply needed vacation right now, so James figured it could wait a week or two.  But seriously, his hometown of a hundred thousand people put more money into their local police department than Interpol got.  Not just ‘a little’ more, but ‘an order of magnitude’ more.  That was… insane.  He’d known it was insane at the start, he just hadn’t understood the scope of the numbers.

Magic let the Order cheat a lot of stuff, but if someone just wanted to give them three hundred million dollars a year, James was pretty fucking sure he could put it to good use.  Actually he could put it to a way better use, because he could amplify the effects with the magic.  As they already knew, because the Order was doing that anyway, with a yearly budget that was admittedly pretty fucking huge, but still not that much.

Money was something they needed to keep an eye on.  But James wasn’t super worried about it.  The Order had a whole professional accounting team now, thanks to a different flavor of the same nonsense that let them rapidly train up a medical staff.  So they had a close - and publicly checkable - view of what they were spending money on and why.  They were operating at a loss, but the collective assets they’d stockpiled meant that they had at least a year or so before they needed to start worrying.  Platinum still sold, after all, and they could always make more if they needed to.  Or just sell what they’d already piled up in the basement.

Part of what James wasn’t worried about though was something else he was involved in.  Something that was rapidly approaching, as the days ticked by.

Not the Order’s upcoming winter solstice celebration.  That wasn’t going to make them money, no.  But instead, early January of next year would see the first test shipments for their logisticor shipping company.  A company, James was horrified to learn, Karen and Texture-Of-Barkdust had legitimately named Rapid Relocation Enterprises.

He had thought he’d escaped from it when the potion department was just called the potion department and not, as Momo had gleefully tried to make stick, reagent.  Knights, shield teams, normal teachers at a less than normal school, the Order had been making steady progress in not naming every branch some kind of r-word.  And it was Karen, Karen of all people, who decided to share that company name with him while wearing a smile that made her look half her age while her camraconda girlfriend smothered an endless hiss of laughter in the corner of the conference room.

Anyway James looked forward to everyone calling it ‘relocation’ from now until the end of time.  That was cool.  He liked every part of that.

What he actually legitimately liked was his role setting up stuff for the trial run.  His true role was surprisingly non-magical, with his main wizard-based contribution being making the heavy traffic light ‘wand’ that was securing the logisticor rooms themselves.

That was important on its own, though.  Security was being seen to with a level of precision and granularity the Order didn’t normally use.  But it was important to meet reality on its own terms sometimes, and the logisticors could be weapons of mass destruction if they were misused.  Every engine was an equally powerful gun, as Niven once wrote.  So there were magical and mundane layers to it, but the most important one was Cathedral Sanctum casts that made the rooms the logisticors were used from accessible by only a single ‘pilot’.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was tight security, and it was just the foundation.

James’ job was unfortunately not to find new and innovative ways to be a wizard at the problem.  Because that problem was basically solved.  Instead, his job was to be a paladin to the newly hired employees.

The one thing that was most important for the people who would be working there was loyalty.  Expertise could be earned, attitude could be managed, but loyalty was the glue that would hold the whole operation together.  So with that in mind, James - and Zhu, when he felt like speaking up - were the ones who managed the first collective meeting of everyone employed by the startup company.

The objectives were twofold.  First, get them used to magic.  That was easy; the company had three legally above board sites around the world and so sixty percent of their staff had teleported to the meeting at one of them.  Also Zhu was pretty convincing, and when he wasn’t quite enough to hit a hundred percent, James had a few more of his own tricks.

Second, explain the company structure.  It had been partially covered when they’d been hired, but James was there to field more complex questions, and to confirm that yes, when they said they had a profit sharing plan, what they meant was that the profits from the company went back to its employees.  Not all of them, because this was still a branch of the Order, but while there was an allocation of funds for expansion and funneling back to the Order’s other operations, it still meant a lot of money going to the people who worked here.

Six hundred employees, from security guards to administrators to dockworkers, suddenly learned that their yearly bonus would be four or five times what they’d previously had as a yearly salary.

You couldn’t buy loyalty.  Not really.  But for people who were used to being fucked over by their bosses, James’ blunt explanation that the workers here had value and would be paid well and taken care of was refreshing.  The company was effectively an employee co-op, but he also made sure the employees themselves had a working knowledge of their own pseudo-union representation, and the trust being placed in them.

It wasn’t that James was naive enough to think that telling people he trusted them would make them incorruptible.  But it was true that real trust, along with an actual sharing of the value produced, mixed with extensive practical security measures, would see the logisticor operations staying safe for a while.  Assuming they got through the first week.  That was when every prediction said would be a salvo of interference to contend with.

Technically, everything was legal.  Surprisingly, there weren’t really laws that covered teleportation.  And why file a patent when that would be actively fraud and no one could copy the devices anyway?  But still, James figured there’d be everyone from regulatory bodies to national espionage agencies to try bothering their employees.  And he told them that too.

A surprising number of them seemed surprised by that fact, and James sent out a standing order to everyone to be on the lookout for signs of a memeplex that made people not consider larger implications of new technologies.  Maybe that was the shadow Uber hid in.

Aside from a lot of questions, though, it was productive.  And it meant he didn’t have to do it again for a while, so he was free to get back to other conversations.

Talking to Nate about the Order’s mundane armory, and how close to the really illegal stuff they wanted to get.  He and James mutually agreed to stop at the mortar shells that could level multi-story buildings, for now.

Talking to Rise about chanter life cycles, and how the mixed species upbringing of their new generation was going.  Which was well, it turned out; the new chanters were growing slowly but steadily, healthier than any of the previous ones ever had been.  Their shells should start coming in sometime next year.

Talking to Morgan about his whole wanting to be a knight thing, and how James felt like the kid was going too fast.  Learning pretty quickly that James himself was the one being a dumbass here, and that while Morgan was definitely rushing into things, he’d spent the last year and a half of his life in an environment helping him grow into the kind of person that would always rush to help people if he could.  James was torn between a sense of anxiety, and a wellspring of pride for the young human.  He split the difference and offered to bring Morgan on more dungeon delves.

Talking to Vex and Astra about dungeon delves.  Specifically the ladies’ own hometown dungeon, that had survived the Underburbs assault.  It was apparently becoming a whole side study for half the memetics team, because the memeplex it used to protect itself was both oddly limited and unusually powerful; anyone could just walk up to the park playground that held the entrance, but no one ever would.  There was a time-based gap to get in, but it was also impossible to talk about even with infomorph support.  So the conversation with the pair was mostly about their own domains - which they could talk about - scheduling a large scale navigator ritual to breach the dungeon ‘off season’ - which they could talk about but only obliquely - and seeing how they liked Townton so far.  In that regard, they thought it was cool, but needed more stuff to do.  Vex suggested a movie theater.  Astra suggested a gladiatorial combat arena.  James had no fucking idea how these two had ever met each other and started dating, much less their third partner, who he was pretty sure was avoiding him. He didn’t veto either idea though.

Talking to Alex, also about dungeons.  Or more specifically, about the umbral in Saskatoon, and how they planned to handle access to their own dungeon’s entrance.  The rapid outpouring of their population into both Townton and Saskatoon itself meant that there wasn’t really a cohesive social or government structure representing the umbral in the dungeon.  And with their creation a mystery even to themselves, it was kind of a mess to put together a working negotiation.  But Alex said she had it handled, until Simon was done doing his own thing and they swapped again.  And she’d see if she could get the Order permission to at least visit, if not actively delve, the parts of the dungeon that weren’t umbral towns in the near future.

Talking to Dorothy about local Townton needs was comparatively easy.  People there used bikes a lot, but ‘people’ didn’t account for those that had non-bipedal leg structures, or tails, or were smoll, or were mostly tail.  James took that information, ran a quick vote, and got permission to dip into the Order’s fund for long term civics projects so he could hire some people to design around the problem.  Bicycles were already kind of optimized, so the result would be a less effective object, but less effective and configurable to be used by more people was a preference.  And there were always mechanics and tinkerers who appreciated a challenge.

Talking to Cam about Townton’s security was comparatively easier.  The umbral were integrating almost seamlessly, with the skills everyone had developed to make the chanters and ratroaches feel welcome being almost overkill for the shadow people.  The city was coming alive, and conflict mostly existed at an interpersonal level, not a civic one.  And Cam herself appeared to be healthier than James had ever seen her; eating actual meals on a daily basis was slowly filling out her malnourished shock trooper body.

And finally, talking to Sarah.  About… everything.  His best friend in multiple worlds, and James found it took about two minutes before the conversation turned against him.

“You are,” Sarah told him as they sat in the Lair’s restaurant at one of the small tables that was far too much in the middle of the floor for James’ liking, “the worst at vacations.”

”I’m not on a vacation.”  James reminded her.

”See?  Someone good at vacation would understand the depths of their folly!”  Sarah told him, brandishing the spoon she was holding in his direction.  “You just told me that you spent the last week working.  On cool stuff, I agree!  But what did you do for fun?”

”…Anesh?”  James offered with a coy little smile and a mildly embarrassed blush.

Sarah stuck her tongue out at him.  “And I’m sure that’s great!”  She conceded.  “Just like I’m sure you’re only sleeping four hours a night, and pretending that’s enough!”

”Wait hang on, that is enough for me!”  James protested.  “Also I get extra time because of the apartment’s time thingy.  Wait, do you need more sleep?  I could probably give you some extra through the bond if you want; Energy makes it extra effective for me if you want a free nap.”

”Jaaaaames.”  His friend pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose, soup spoon jutting out to the side as a splash of silver metal.  “Why are you like this?  I’m actually asking!  You used to hate working!”

James snorted gently, a more confident smile forming on his lips.  “It was never about working.”  He told Sarah.  “It was that the job was shit.  From top to bottom, my job was bad.  The company treated people as expendable tools to the point that turnover was planned for to keep from having to spend too much on raises.  The management was almost exclusively petty tyrants, or, at best, people like Theo who were just kind of funny and chill about how they abused their power.  And the actual task of tech support, while useful, was only there to be a buffer for a corporation that built shitty products and wanted to create a walled garden where no one could repair their phone or get a refund when something went wrong.”  James had opinions about his old work.  “And the punishment for not complying with the demands of people who seemed almost maliciously stupid would have been homelessness and starvation.  Wait!  You also worked there!  You know this!”

”Well yeah.”  Sarah laughed along with him.  “We were both willing to go into an actual dungeon to escape work, I get it.  But that doesn’t mean you have to dive into trying to burn yourself out again, dummy!”

”Okay, I love that you’re concerned.  I actually do.”  James told her.  “But hey, Sarah?  What have you been up to?”

”…Stuff…”

”Stuff like, for example:” James cleared his throat as he pulled up a list of things through his skulljack that he’d been compiling.  It wasn’t actually a targeted social attack, it was just that he’d wanted to talk to Sarah about some things and had been making notes for himself.  “Starting a newspaper for the Order, or perhaps-“

“Oh!”  Sarah’s joyous interruption stopped James cold.  “I kinda want to talk about that!”

”…I had a whole list…”

”Sure sure we can get into my hypocrisy later.  So!  Do you know how hard it is to put out a print publication?”  Sarah asked him.  James, already resigned to being stunlocked by her enthusiasm, just blinked frantically before she answered her own question.  “It’s pretty hard!  But also, I’m sort of learning a lot about the damage that’s been done to everyone by moving stuff online.”

James cocked an eyebrow.  “That seems like it would have made information more accessible.  Explain.”

“Paywalls.  Ads.  No archives.”  Sarah almost scowled.  “All the problems that we were running into with me doing the Order’s news as a podcast?  It’s that but worse.  And it’s everywhere, and I didn’t even really notice.”  She sighed.  “Anyway!  Publishing?”

”That… is what you were going to talk about.”  He told her with a smile over his mostly empty plate, enjoying the moment with his friend while a cluster of camracondas passed by their table.

Sarah nodded.  “Right.  The really weird thing is, once you start thinking about news locally, you realize there’s so many stories.  I kind of noticed it with the podcast, but here, it’s really on display.  New developments or discoveries, sure, but also little happenings or new people or changes in schedules or patterns or politics.  The politics!”

”You do love the politics.”  James was fully smiling now.

”I do!  But it’s so hard to keep up on all our votes and forums!  I just have a whole section titled Democracy! in there now, right between Sports! and Entertainment!”

That gave James pause. ”Do the sections come with exclamation points?”  He had to know.

”Yes.”

”Great.  Carry on.”

”I just… I don’’t know what I’m doing?”  Sarah suddenly admitted with a nervous laugh.  “What if I screw it up?  This isn’t a millennial thing like an internet talk show, James, this is real.  Newspapers are… are real things, and it’s important, and…” she exhaled.  “Anyway can I interview you?”  She said with renewed enthusiasm.

The words shattered James’ carefully built social defense.  “What, right now?”  He laughed.

”No!  Well maybe!”  Sarah suddenly had a pad of paper and a pen in her hands.  “Do you have some time?”

”We were talking about burnout.”  James reminded her.  “And you’re bringing work to a nice pleasant lunch.  Also I never even got to the solstice celebration, which I am aware you’re involved in.”

”Lunch is over, we’re just hogging a table.”  Sarah told him.  “Like good members of the Order!”  She swept an arm across the dining room, and as James followed it, he spotted people doing homework, or playing card games, or just hanging out, at the various seats.  This wasn’t a busy time, and there was plenty of space in here, so it was fine, but it was kind of a good example.  “Also of course I’m involved with our solstice celebration!  Aren’t you?”

James shrugged.  “Presumably!  But you’re involved in the ‘planning and doing’ way, I’m just ‘around’.”

With a roll of her eyes that was the closest Sarah ever got to real sarcasm, she chided James.  “You’re more than just around, you’re important to a lot of stuff.”

”Surprisingly not so much.”  James said cheerfully.  “Tons of stuff is moving forward without me, I just help out in small ways.  I’m not saying I’m not important!"  He quickly defended against Sarah’s friendship beam of a glower.  “I’m just saying that… okay, so, at the end of the year, we’re officially codifying what the Order of Endless Rooms believes is the responsibilities of a government, right?  Just as… guidelines.”

”Hypothetically, let’s lie to ourselves.”  Sarah agreed.

Avoiding thinking about that for the moment, James just nodded.  ”Right.  And I helped with that.  Am helping.  But if I weren’’t helping, I… I trust us to do it right.  I’m not required, I’m just adding to what’s already there.  And that’s a powerful feeling.”

Sarah tilted her head to the side like an owl.  “Is this you joking about being expendable again?”  She asked, a buried and polished edge to her words, something old but familiar, a reminder of how James had been for a lot of their lives.

”This time?  No.”  James didn’t give her time to be upset with him.  “I think this actually loops back around to the burnout thing!  I hated my old job, and most jobs, because I got treated like crap to do something that wasn’t important.  Now, I’m… adding.  Contributing.  I might not always see exactly what the effect is, but I do legitimately believe that everything I do goes into the pool.  It’s the opposite of feeling expendable.  It’s… I’m not alone I guess?  Yeah.  I’m doing important work but I’m not doing it alone, so it’s not as heavy.  I can go forever like this because it’s practically effortless when it doesn’t feel like being crushed to death by society.”

”Was this a roundabout way to say that you’re communist?”  Sarah asked him.  “Wait!  Is this why you’re poly?!  I never put this together before!  This is why you’re so into my girlfriend!”

”Our girlfriend, comrade.”  James gave her a lopsided smile, while Sarah started giggling.  “Also thanks for the setup.”

”What’re friends for?”  She leaned her elbows on the table, shifting around in her seat.  “That’s cool though.  Everything you said.  I guess… I didn’t really think about it, but I haven’t really worked at all since… since…” Sarah took a deep breath, and James fought his urge to interrupt by trying to be nice.  “Since you guys pulled me out of the Office.”  She said after steadying herself, voice dull but still firm.  “I just kinda goof around.”

James stared at her.  “No?”

”What?”

”No that’s not true?  I can just… check.  We have public records and even if you’re not counting stuff like the support groups you mediate I can juuuust…” James held up a finger as he closed his eyes and sorted through stuff with his skulljack.  He loved having his brain plugged into things.  It was ironic that, as he got better at it, he found himself spending less and less time on what would previously distract him on his phone.  Not that he didn’t love scrolling through art blogs or reading about new indie games or whatever, but it was too easy to get caught in a loop, and using the skulljack sort of kept him focused.  Like when he needed to see how many hours Sarah was putting into stuff.

Sarah, for her part, looked like she was happy to tell him that wasn’t required.  “Oh, you don’t need to do that!  I don’t need to know!  Haha!”

“First off, no one says ‘ha ha’, that’s weird.”  James told her, knowing damn well that both of them were exactly that weird.  “Also you worked at least forty hours last week?!  Sarah!  I know this is lowballing it!”

”It barely counts, and I’m using your excuse!  I’m contributing and it feels good and I love my friends and community!”  She crossed her arms and scrunched up her nose at him.  “Also being less goofy, a lot of it is because I am helping to plan out Townton’s solstice celebration.  Are you excited for that?”

Whatever James felt, he was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly excitement.  Actually it reminded him a lot of the paladin initiation ceremony, where he had this lingering sense that he was being an idiot and people weren’t going to buy into the ‘ritual’ of it.  What he said out loud, though, was “So, what are we doing for it?  My suggestion got shot down.”

”Your suggestion was ‘pizza party’, with no punctuation or capital letters, which is how I know it was submitted by a pod person and not my James.”  Sarah declared.

”Yeah!  Pizza is what I did for Christmas that first year when everyone was hanging around the Lair and it was… a thing.  Kind of.”  James felt like that part of his life was largely a blur, but he remembered that.  He also had a vague recollection of threatening JP with a pizza cutter, but not why.  JP had probably deserved it.  “Anyway, ignore my nonsense, what’s the general plan?”

Sarah leaned back, straightening her back and looking like she had a million ideas humming around her head like energetic and friendly wasps.  “So.  Everyone generally likes the idea of tethering it to the solstice, since it’s not ‘for’ any existing human groups.  The idea of it as a community event means that a big fun feast-slash-festival is in play too.  We’re stealing a bit from Japanese festivals and American fairs.”

”That’s cool.  Townton’s growing population density will help with that too.  So, food and games and prizes and stuff?  Actually, who runs the event?  Like, staffing?”

”Volunteers on short shifts so they can swap out and enjoy the goings on, obviously.”  Sarah said, polishing her nails on her sleeve smugly.  “You think a girl got this far in your messy Order without knowing how to organize a schedule?  Think again!”

“I feel like Alanna’s corrupting you somehow.”  James smiled.

Using a purple orb ability to smother a blush, Sarah pressed on. “Aaaaanyway!  The big thing is, we needed a focus.  Something that people can lock onto, and that defines boundary conditions for the future.  You know, all that anthropology stuff you like!  So what the whole thing is going to be is both a ‘we made it through the year’ party, and also a celebration of magic.”

”Oh very cool.”  James took a second to process that.  “Very cool.  I like that.  Is it all our magic, or, like… stuff we’ve discovered over the last year?”

”Only time will tell!”  Sarah, deprived of a time machine, didn’t have a good answer for him yet.  “This year is a mix of both, but the biggest thing is that it’s about stuff we can… make available?  Things that we can share, that are sort of harmless but flashy.  Like sips of the potion that makes your eyes glow, that everyone can have just to goof around.”

”Goofing around is your style.”

”Please James!  My style is goofing around powerfully.”

”There isn’t a world that exists where I’d dispute that.”  James said, smiling placidly as he leaned back in his seat and watched a pair of relatively new stuff animals follow the dim orange glow of a navigator through the entrance hallway.  “So any specific plans I need to know about?”

Sarah shook her head in great arcs that tossed her hair around.  “Nope!”  She enthusiastically told him.  “I mean, you can volunteer at a booth if you want!  And there’s gonna be a thing where a lot of the Lair’s residents go hang out down there for the day.  But no big speeches, no dramatic gestures, just fun.  And isn’t that…” Sarah trailed off, looking up at the ceiling.

James finished the sentence for her.  “Distressingly novel?”  He asked, and got a tiny nod in reply.  “Yeah.”  He exhaled as softly as he could these days.  “I mean… okay, we’re doing our best.  We’re helping a lot of people.  Human and otherwise.  And our people - and isn’t that a phrase to use unironically - have pretty good lives!  We’ve got housing and food handled and it means everyone has time for themselves between saving the world, and I love that.  But yeah, I think it’d be cool to have a dedicated day of magical whimsy.”

”Good phrase!  Stealing it!”  Sarah declared, making a grabbing motion in the air over their table.  “Yoink!”

James quirked a quick smile before his face stilled in thought.  “So what kind of stuff do we have that’s openly available to play with?  I know, I know, I’m not gonna make you spoil the surprise, I’m just brainstorming, don’t give me that look.”  Sarah kept giving him that look, but James pressed on regardless.  “Weird potions, obviously, especially since our sap production is taking off to the point that we need to consider a separate facility for it.  Garden spells?  The coins are easy to copy, maybe some kind of field games with a couple level one spells I haven’t thought of.  Climb Wands are only good if we can charge them enough.  Hm… maybe some kind of performance?  Magic talent show?  This is tricky.”

”I’ve got ideas, don’t worry!”  Sarah told him.  “Also stop trying to sneak in on my secrets.  You can wait a week, you nerd.”  She was definitely going to steal the magical talent show thing though.  Not exactly, but just a little bit.  Some kind of performance would be a good addition.  A message interrupted her thoughts.  “Okay, I gotta go.  I’m on youth group duty today and all our perfect and untroublesome communal children are just so happy that it’s too cold and wet to go outside!”  She stood smoothly, stretching in a way that made her look almost like she was a robot in perfect precise control of her body.

”I love having communal children.”  James said with a distant look and complete honesty.  “I should involve myself in that more.  Also just teleport to Australia or something, it’s warm down there right now.”

“No, they have enough snakes already.”  Sarah shook her head with a coy little grin.  “Hey, I know you think you’re doing okay, I know you’re feeling good about it, but please take a little time to yourself, yeah?  Just so I won’t worry about you?  And sleep some more!”  She said, leaning down when she stood next to James’ chair to wrap her arms around his shoulders in a hug.

James leaned into the warmth of his friend’s gesture, letting Sarah settle on him like a blanket.  “I’m serious when I say I’m sleeping enough.  The Attic’s naps also help, I think they’re magic.”  He said.  “But yes, fine, I promise that I’ll do something fun with my afternoon.”

Sarah let him go, giving him a suspicious look before nodding deliberately.  “Good!  See that you do.”  She declared before breaking away and heading for the exit.  “Thanks for lunch!”  She called back over her shoulder, her voice mixing with the dozens of others in the space before she was gone, and James was left by himself for a little bit.

It was strange, in a way, just how much he’d gotten used to not being alone.  He almost didn’t know what to do with himself when he was on his own now.  Alanna and half of the Anesh collective were on Response shifts, another Anesh was sleeping, and a fourth one was visiting his parents in London - this time with far more defenses than last time, just in case.  Arrush and Keeka were somewhere, James didn’t even know.  TQ was on a date.  JP was hanging out with Dave down on Dave’s uncle’s farm along with what felt like half the Order’s dragon-invested membership.  Rufus was gardening and demanded isolation for reasons James was comfortable saying were ominous.  Even people James was only a little bit friends with like Smoke-And-Ember or Ann were doing their own stuff and not casually available to inflict new stuff to do upon him.

It wasn’t like he didn’t like being alone sometimes, he’d just built up a list of companions that were always in his life, and suddenly having nothing happening felt a little bit like he was the coyote running off a cliff and maintaining momentum.  Hell, even Zhu was somewhere else today.

So James really could do whatever he wanted.  His paladin jobs were done, the things that needed him to risk his life were either waiting for later or already handled, it was time, as Sarah had commanded him, to do something fun.

He was pretty sure that she didn’t think equipping Verdigris Venture spells was legally classified as fun.  But whatever, James was an anarchist, that meant he rejected laws that didn’t make sense.

James already had most of his spell slots filled, and wasn’t really planning to get more. Twenty level one slots and sixteen level two was plenty; he already kept a skulljack list of his spells just so he could reference options like counting ammo when he was in a crisis.  But there were some new books and a little extra utility was always a good idea.

God’s Braid took seven minutes and let him spawn an eight foot braid of rope.  Every advancement added three feet or so.  Informal Pagoda spawned a newsletter with local gossip, taking fifteen minutes to cover about a city block, and stacking that much additional space for every advancement, though it leveled up every three advancements and that meant it couldn’t be pushed too far or it would melt James’ brain out of his nose.

The interesting thing was, one of those spells the Order had only in audiospellbook form.  So for half an hour, plus the time it took to stumble through a few false starts, James set out to try to prove that you could absolutely equip two spells at the same time.

And, in a shocking turn of events for the normally strict magic system of that particular dungeon, it worked.  It gave him a stress headache after about two minutes of his half hour long quest, it required that you actively focus on two things at once, both of which were just mental noise, and it only worked if you actually had two different formats for the spells you wanted anyway.  But it did work.

Of course, James was the first person to make it work, but he wasn’t the first person to try.  No one else had managed it yet, and he really didn’t think his brain was especially powerful.  Which meant it was probably a product of something like his Endurance, or maybe his cognitive shell upgrade.  Things that were replicable, but not always reliably, and that were sometimes more trouble than they were worth.

Still, it was kind of cool.  And if he could master it, then he’d always be able to add in a copy of God’s Braid or Smoke Salt alongside whatever he was working on, and having extra magic was sort of free value.  It wasn’t like they couldn’t just make more spell coins if he ran out of slots.  If he learned braille, he could even get Jester’s Sip in the rotation.

Maybe for his next fun activity, he could track down a braille skill orb.  The allocation counter might have one.  Or maybe he really would just go take a nap somewhere, like Sarah suggested.  It was sort of nice, having the option.

But honestly… this was what James did for fun.  Magic was fun.  It didn’t feel like work to test stuff like this.  It might if he had to specifically devote a precise number of hours a day to keeping an industrial application’s worth of a single spell ready for a manufacturing job or something.  But he didn’t.  He could just pick up new tricks and tactics without pressure.

Two weeks into December, and James was finding that his life had become relaxing.  Nothing had changed, he was doing more than ever, but every step forward he took felt like building momentum toward the future.

There was, he knew, going to be a wall ahead.  An obstacle, or a series of them.  Something that the pillars thought was the end of the world.

And James found he no longer fully believed them.  Instead, he realized, he was beginning to believe in himself.  And in the Order as well.  Believe in their ability, believe in their culture, believe in their collective momentum.

The wall was probably still there, likely.

But so what?  James was planning to just go straight through it.

And that thought gave him more energy than any nap ever could.