The Daily Grind - Chapter 366 (Patreon)

"Lucy, I'm tired of this.  Tired of trying to fix things that shouldn't be broken in the first place. I want to make something new, that doesn't have to be squeezed into an earlier pattern.  Somewhere you can get breakfast without getting shot at." -Samuel Petrovitch, Degrees of Freedom-

_____

The city of Townton had originally held about twenty thousand people.  It was semi-rural, with housing developments stretching out like tendrils into the surrounding area, and as such, it had a ton of mostly unbroken nature surrounding it.  The original seed of the city had actually been a railway stop back a hundred years ago, and then, when the highways became America’s lifelines and the trains shifted tracks, Townton had sort of been one of those places that got passed over a lot.  Connected to an interstate, sure, but without any of the metropolitan area connective tissue in the form of smaller streets that could have taken someone to a neighboring town or city.  Isolated, in other words, especially since the Last Line had blown up the highway connections anyway.  And, apparently, destroyed them thoroughly enough to keep them forgotten.

The city hadn’t been destroyed either.  The mechanic and his cult had depopulated it, for sure, but the structures themselves hadn’t suffered more than just having some holes punched in them.  It was still a nightmare, but it had left the shell of the city more or less still around.  Of course, that was then tested by things like weather, overgrowth, and fire.  The simple fact that a lot of the damaged buildings were still hooked up to the regional power grid had nearly burned down half the city before the Order had gotten that under control.  And by this point, a lot of structures had partially flooded, collapsed, or been taken over by mushrooms that were probably not from the local dungeon.

The scale of a place made for twenty thousand people was both large and small at the same time.  This wasn’t a New York, where you couldn’t go on a walk around the block without tripping over someone’s story.  But it also wasn’t some remote mountain town with a single gas station.  There had been over a thousand standing buildings in Townton, with at least three places where they clustered in dense pockets of commerce and governance.  But most of them were spread out.  Lines of construction that were meant to be filled in as the city waited for developments that weren’t coming, long loops of roads that led to the few factories or warehouses that had kept the city going, a spiderweb of civic life splashed into the wilderness.

The Order occupied maybe forty structures at this point, depending on how the row of recently renovated townhomes counted.  All of them centered around a single park, though in fairness, that ‘park’ was three and a half blocks long, was mostly just uneven land that no one had ever bought to build on, and separated the streets of two larger developments if someone in the original city was traveling by car.

Still, what they had reclaimed was mostly what was around where they’d parked the chanters, after they’d first encountered that refugee population.  Three hundred lives poured into an open space with scrub grass and a few trees and brambles that the city begrudgingly cut back every year, now turned into four hundred lives that lived in magically upgraded tents across a flourishing vibrant green oasis ringed in berry bushes.  But when they’d arrived, there had been a need to be near them to take care of their needs, so the small commercial spaces had been cleared out and rebuilt.

Then people had started living in Townton full time, that weren’t just the salvage crew, and so an apartment building was repaired, and then expanded via orange totem.  And then a second, and third, all of them near either the park or the cleared space that they used for logisticor transfers.  Then things sort of just… kept going.  They needed a place to act as a ‘general store’, so the old big box of a strip mall on the opposite side from the police station that had been one of the Order’s outposts got converted into that.  They needed a place to manage the Horizon delver vehicles, so they moved the whole structures of a pair of mechanic garages into place for that.  They needed utilities, so buildings were repurposed for power and water, taking advantage of pipes and wires already in place.  And they needed precious variety in their lives, so restaurants and hairstylists and bars and cafes and the old minimalist city library sprung up or came back to life.  Or at least one of each of those, anyway.  More camracondas and ratroaches and humans who needed places to live in safe peace for the first time ever meant that more residences were put together.  The umbral arriving in droves would have broken anyone with weaker tools, but the Order had orange totems and safety test logs a hundred miles long, and so they had the space to accommodate everyone.

James was a lot of things, when it came to his ideals and plans for the world.  Some people would, perhaps rightly, call his idea for how a city should look naive at best.  But there was a kind of secret weapon that he had up his sleeve, that James liked to call ‘literally just magic’, and that went a long way toward making the impossible work.

Making use of outdoor spaces as third places or small businesses?  Bit of a problem normally, given how weather worked, but when you had access to a spell that could siphon off heat, you could just create temperate oases in the middle of parking lots.  Of course, you needed the space, but that was easy, when there were so many empty roads and lots from the lack of cars.

Cutting down on the use of cars?  Huge problem normally, when people needed to travel miles and miles just to get to the grocery store.  Oklahoma had been a great example as to the damage that isolation could cause, in that regard.  But in Townton, partly because they could overlap spaces, everything was pretty close together.  And as for what wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, as the city grew?  Well, they already used buses equipped with Horizon parts, and the long term plan also had internal logisticor routes planned out.

Even something like self-sufficiency was within their reach.  There was an amount of farmland - very strongly contained farmland - near the city that they were using to grow the apocalypse beans with the help of some green orbs that sped up planting and reduced pests.  And between that, and the chanters’ plant growth magic that grew stronger and stronger every day as they regained the health they’d never had before, the city of Townton produced enough food to handle the nutritional needs of almost its entire population.  If everyone went vegetarian, that was.  Not a perfect solution, yet, but something that was graspable.

For so many problems, there was either a magical solution, or upgrade, really.  Civil accidents?  The security condors - or camcondors, James didn’t know what the hell they were calling them these days - from the local dungeon seemed to have made a game out of undoing as many as they could.  Trade economics?  The Order could copy the most desired substances on Earth in bulk, and import anything they needed.  Rehabilitation for crimes?  The Priority Earth transplanted camp created an almost ideal environment for objective self reflection and education on harm reduction.  Waste management?  Actually the trickiest part of the entire city; the green orbs that removed trash were a massive boon and were one of the most copied things in the rotation at the moment, but they weren’t enough yet and so the Order had to use mundane methods and the local dump until they could find a better way.

But it was a yet, and an until, not a forever solution.

Even local government was an experiment in using magic to continue to seek ways to improve.  No elected official held the ultimate decision making power, instead just being added to a pool of people that could be called on as needed to create ad hoc councils.  Being elected meant you were respected or a good community leader, but it didn’t mean you were good at things, and that was where the Order stepped in, with .mem files and skill orbs and a lifetime supply of reading potion, to take anyone who had the motivation and make them good at things.

They had stopped short of requiring the oath of office be backed by magical mental alteration.  There had been a long discussion about it though, and the end result was a vote that was probably the closest split in the Order’s history.  A lot of people were uncomfortable with anything that approached what felt like brainwashing, though it probably had more to do with the fact that there was no safe way to test something like the Mindful Reverberation spell without committing to it.

But the point was this.  Over the last year, Townton had gone from an outpost for delvers and a quiet place that a few people were staying in but didn’t live at, into… a city.  A small city, a city that was growing over the scars of something brutal and menacing, a city that had a lot of work ahead of it.  But a real, actual, city.  A place that housed at least fifteen different species, a place that over a thousand people called home, a place that was…

Something special.  Something new.  Something impossible.  Something wonderful.

It was into the streets and open spaces of this new city that the Order of Endless Rooms committed fully to shaping their own culture.  A celebration of something that wasn’t from anyone’s history, or any place on Earth, but instead, entirely their own.

It felt, in part, like everyone in the city had woken up early to see what would happen.  A kind of collective holding of breath, for those who partook of that function.  But a lot of them knew what would happen, because they were already part of it.

A festival, of sorts.  There was a lot of work to bring it all together, but that was fine, because ‘a lot of work’ mostly meant that many people would be putting in an hour or so of help, before swapping out to enjoy the day.  The ideal of the Order made manifest through sharpened logistics and digital communication; a shared burden was a light one.

What some people, including Sarah who was one of the prime architects of their newly built holiday, might possibly have underestimated, was that there might just be a tiny amount of interest in the winter celebration.

Two thousand people didn’t sound like a lot; Sarah and James and Alanna had collectively gone to a high school with more people than that.  But when most of those people, along with even more visitors for the day, were roaming the compact streets of Townton’s restored zone at the same time?

Well.  Maybe they should have buried some orange totems under the street.

_____

It was late afternoon when James, Anesh, and Alanna all arrived in Townton to find things already in progress.

The sky was a cloudy pale grey.  The sort of sky that darkened the world while it seemed like the clouds themselves were glowing ominously.  A late December bout of fortunate weather meant that they wouldn’t have any rain today, but the lightly damp streets were evidence of where that rain had been last night, and the air smelled thickly of the plant life that was soaking in the water.

Disembarking the logisticor platform, the six of them - because James and Alanna had browbeaten every Anesh into attending - were greeted immediately by the sounds of hundreds of excited voices and the strum of distant music.  The platform had a marked off clear space around it, but past that, there were already people out and about.  Walking past, circulating through the festival booths that were set up, enjoying the atmosphere and the deliberate effort to create community bonds.

”You know,” Alanna said as they headed into the street connecting the logisticor arrival plaza to the Main Street of their Townton, the group finding a place to the side of the activity to stand and get their bearings, “I knew in theory that people would be here.  But this kind of ruins my plan to have all of us hold hands and stroll around all day!  We’ll be in everyone’s way!”

”A solid wall of six people would do that, yes.”  James nodded.  Then he raised a finger to his lips, thinking as he looked at his partners carefully.  “How did you see this going down?”  He asked Alanna.  “Because each of us only has two hands.”

Anesh caught on to the practical math exercise pretty quickly. ”Did your version of this date include me holding my own hand?”  He asked their girlfriend.  “James and Alanna each sandwiched by my iterations?”  Another of him questioned.  “Because I’m not holding any hands either of you make out of ice.”

Smiling like a shark, albeit a shark that had just been caught doing something mildly embarrassing, Alanna tilted her chin up to the grey sky overhead, the soft scarf she was wearing shifting as she did so.  “Yeah!”  She declared.  “I mean, there’s another possible formation where it’s double Anesh on the outside?  But it’s not like we can’t shuffle whenever we want!  And I know for a fucking fact that you can hold your own hands.”  She told Anesh, before, after a tiny pause, she coughed out a laugh.

”What’s so fun- oh, she heard what she said.  Fucking fact.  Right.”  Anesh said, turning his eyes on James.  “Help me out here.”

”Personally I think it’s good to practice self love.”  James told his boyfriend with the straightest face he could manage.  “So!  While any formation is still viable, before things get hectic, want to go check out some of what’s going on here?  This is so much more stuff than I expected.”

The stuff in question was two rows of booths and covered tents that surrounded the logisticor plaza in a semicircle.  There didn’t appear to be any on the road toward the core of Townton, but the street did look like it had new additions lining its sidewalks, and the additional colored canvas splotches in the distance meant that there was more of the festival just a short walk, slither, or shuttle ride away.

James knew what exactly one of these things was, because he was signed up to spend a few hours later tonight there, helping out.  He was willing to be Alanna and Anesh knew more, or at least different, information, but all of them were smugly and smilingly keeping their secrets for now.  The main thing that he knew right now was that a lot of these tents that covered the tables and booths looked suspiciously familiar; in fact, they looked an awful lot like what the Order had been quick to set up in the wake of the Chanter’s arrival.  Little spots of shade against the summer sun so that a lost people knew where to go for food or water or medical care, now turned into cover against possible rain and marking off the spots where magic was being shown off just for the fun of it all.

It also looked so much more chaotic than it probably really was.  A lot of people were stopped to talk to friends or get their bearings, so there were currents to the flow of foot traffic.  People of so many shapes and sizes moving at idle speeds, with the occasional person with a mindset like James who had spotted a thing they wanted to see and was angling like a living missile toward their target.

Someone like James, or, apparently, Alanna.

“Ooh, dungeon ice cream!”  Alanna picked their first target with ease.  A tent with a solid looking counter set up and a human and ratroach duo that were enthusiastically serving people waffle cones.  “You know what would make exploring a frozen winter fair better?  Cold food.”

”She says it so convincingly.”  The Anesh that Alanna had grabbed the hand of said to James, the two of them towed along behind their partner and trying not to laugh.

”What makes it dungeon ice cream?!”  James asked, giving up on keeping his good mood inside.  “Did someone convince Clutter to make a freezer biome?”

Alanna rolled her eyes.  “James I have been here as long as you have.  I saw a sign that said dungeon magic and I lost all control of myself.”

The umbral standing in the line in front of them, a shorter expression of the shadow people who was still just as durably wide as most of them, turned just enough so that one of their colored ring eyes could meet Alanna’s own exuberant gaze.  “That happened to me too.”  They said with what almost sounded like a drawl to their static laced voice.  “I just have to know.  Nothing in our dungeon was ever edible.  What kind of ice cream would you find in another one?”

James locked onto that conversation eagerly.  “I don’t think I’ve ever found specifically ice cream, but you could totally make a smoothie using just Climb ingredients.  And some dungeons make food either on purpose or by accident by making edible life forms.”

”Like Arrush.”  Alanna interjected with a wild grin.

”Very funny but this is an all ages ice cream tent so I’m ignoring your joke.”  James tried his damndest to keep a stoic face, which was hard, since Anesh wasn’t.  “Anyway I’m guessing dungeon sourced ingredients?  Do we… do we have dungeon eggs?  Is that a thing?”

The umbral’s tendrils swayed apart.  ”Ice cream has eggs in it?”  He asked.  “I would not have guessed that.  I’ll add it to today’s list.”

”List?”  Several Anesh cocked an eyebrow at once.

The stocky shadow cracked one of his hands off his form, making a rolling gesture.  “I keep a list of basic things I learn every day.  Helps me keep track, since…” he waved around at everything around them.  The people passing by alone would have been enough to fill a notebook.

Alanna nodded appreciatively. ”That’s super cool, but let’s back up.  James how would you make ice cream entirety from dungeon stuff?  What about sugar?”

”Packets from Officium Mundi.”  James said instantly.  “The break rooms spawn them, they’re safe.”

”Uh huh.  And the cream?  The important part of ice cream?”

James had to think more for that one.  And it still didn’t work.  “Okay you’ve got me.  We don’t have a magic solution for that yet.”

The umbral watching them gave an electric hum, inner form brightening and sharpening the edges of his shadow body as he laughed.  “You know this stuff!”  He told James, impressed.  “You must be with the Endless, huh?”

”Oh that’s new, most people say the Order, not any of the other nouns.”  James’ eyebrows crept up for a moment.  “But yeah, I am.  And until Charlie’s team ruined my title a couple weeks ago, I could say I’d been in every dungeon multiple times.”  He shot the umbral a smile and a tip of his head.  “Also while I’d love to chat more sometime, I’m on a date, and you can figure out what dungeon ice cream is now.”

The line had cleared while they’d been chatting, the simple number of options available keeping things moving along at a nice pace for the festival.  And with less of a wall of other curious umbral, James got a peek at the operation while his new acquaintance got a waffle cone filled up.

The ice cream itself appeared to be mundane vanilla.  Instead, it was the toppings that were the dungeon-sourced material, mixed into the ice cream in the portions a given customer wanted.  It reminded James a lot of the ice cream chain that used to be near his apartment, but had vanished one day and never returned.  Well, mostly.  That place had never had a ratroach that knew how to use all her arms at once and was kind of mesmerizing to watch as she reformed scoops of ice cream infused with dungeon candy.

”I cannot believe I never had this idea.”  James said, looking at the hanging menu that offered three different common Office candies, an ‘extra cold’ ice cream that used the frost berry from the Climb, a normal fruit ice cream that used the local very tart blackberry variant, and one at the bottom of the list that was simply titled, The Mistake.  “Out of respect for the classic, one small Baby Things cone please!”

The different Anesh ordered a spread of different things, planning to go through his normal routine of sharing with himself and inevitably figuring out what he liked most through the objective science of which one of him finished his ice cream first.  Alanna, though, had locked onto the worst possible idea.  “One mistake please!”  She said, and got a wince from the human girl behind the booth’s counter.

”Are you sure?”  The girl asked, looking over at her ratroach companion, who was ducking her head in either despair or perhaps prayer, antenna slightly swaying as she shook herself.  “I mean… oooookay!”

“This is the worst possible idea to start the day.”  Anesh told her as the group walked away, finding a clear curb that they could linger on.  There was a bunch of covered seating where they could have gone, but the tables weren’t really set up for groups of six, and when all of them were partially resistant to the cold, it really wasn’t that bad anyway.  “You’re going to lick that, and regret it instantly.”

Alanna looked at the cone in her hand, turning it to catch the light.  There were small thin rings of some kind of gooey fruit thing in there.  Or maybe it was a jelly.  It was hard to tell, and it didn’t smell bad.  ”I don’t even know what this is!”  She said.  “They wouldn’t tell me.  Is that legal?”

”Well, we did do health checks on everything here beforehand.”  James said, his brain latching onto the potential window to talk about something civics related, and ignoring the look Anesh gave Alanna for opening that window in the first place.  “Like, no super spicy food for crocamaws, cause they’ll dissolve.  No non-sophont rats in the kitchens.  No poison.  So I’m confident saying that you can eat that and not die.”  He said.

Alanna looked like she was regretting her Mistake, and she hadn’t even tasted it.  “If this does kill me, avenge me.”  She said.

”And deprive everyone else of their ice cream?”  Anesh asked, getting to the joke before his boyfriend who currently had what seemed like half of a chopped up dungeon candy bar in his mouth.  He heard a muffled mmph of amusement from James, and smiled as he tried his own treat.

It was, each Anesh decided, pretty good.  The ice cream itself was pleasant, even if it was kind of weird to be eating a cold thing outside on a day that already looked like it wanted to experiment with freezing temperatures.  But the dungeon fruit was surprisingly flavorful for something that wasn’t really sweet, and the local fruit was… well, he hesitated to say it was growing on him, but James liked the things enough that Anesh had snacked on a bowl of them often enough to build up a tolerance.

Then he saw Alanna try her ice cream, and he suddenly felt like he could upgrade his own flavor a few steps in comparison.

”Wow that is a face.”  James said, not moving to help their flailing girlfriend.  “Are you dead?  Do I need to get that health code inspector in here?”

”Aguh!”  Alanna’s cry drew the attention of a lot of people walking by, including someone with one of the Response blue orb patches that started moving their direction, but stopped upon seeing Alanna holding an ice cream cone aloft.  “It’s potion flavor!”  She declared with disgusted dismay.

James’ eyes lit up.  Because he suddenly knew what Alanna was eating.  “Oh yeah?”  He said innocently.  “What… uh… what potion?”

Alanna caught his tone and looked up at him with a deadly glower.  “You knew, didn’t you?  You dumbass, warn me!”

”If it’s any consolation,” James told her smoothly, breaking off a bit of his cone with his fingers and popping it in his mouth, “Fredrick tricked me into eating the exercise potion flavored aloe too.  I have no idea how it ended up down here.”

”Oh really?”  Anesh asked, prodding his boyfriend’s side with a free hand.

”Really!”  James protested with a laugh.  “Also you can’t say you weren’t warned!  That was a mistake, and… Alanna.  Alanna no.  Stop eating it.  Alanna!”  He watched with horror as his girlfriend took a bite out of her ice cream.  Sinking teeth into the scoop of frozen ‘treat’ and coming away leaving a crater in her cone.  “It doesn’t have to be this way!”  James pleaded with her.

Alanna shook her head, choking out a reply.  “There’s only one way out of this.”  She said dramatically. “Also it’s kinda not… bad?  I mean, I drink a lot of exercise potion anyway, and this at least has vanilla on top of it.”  She licked at her ice cream and made a slightly less mortified face.  “I could get used to it.  Is what I’m saying.”

”Sometimes you say things and I wonder if the dungeons didn’t need help building monsters.”  Anesh quipped, and got a different iteration of himself unfairly elbowed by Alanna as she barked out a laugh.  “Hey don’t blame me for things I said!”  That Anesh protested.

”Holy shit I love you guys.”  James found himself whispering.  “Hey, so, since Alanna seems set on torturing herself, wanna go check out the other stuff and before we point ourselves toward the rest of Townton?”

”Sounds good to me.”  Anesh said.  “And I outnumber everyone in this democracy of a polycule, so I say we go see what’s going on with the floating cloud of orbs two booths down there.”  He pointed to where the upper part of a vaguely spherical cluster of familiar glowing orbs was visible over the heads of a crowd around it.  “I hear cheering.”

They walked as a group, sometimes holding hands in different combinations, and dodging a few younger kids and teens that were working out their energy by racing high speed through the crowd.  There were a couple other things that caught James’ eye as they moved through the street.  Someone doing temporary tattoos using the leveler gloves.  Someone with a laugh like a delighted witch’s cackle that was handing out empanadas that didn’t seem to be magic.  A brief mental tangent to realize the ‘guardrail’ was actually a walkway around the outside for striders or other small life forms, which was cool.  Someone who looked like their main role was being a polite bodyguard for the vending machine that was standing by itself with buckets of assorted currency on an adjacent table and a sign that said ‘Guess!’

Things he’d seen before.  Kind of.  But not… really.  Not like this.

This wasn’t Research testing stuff, or him training on how to cut a monster in half from twenty feet away with a magic pen and an imbued glove, or the familiar daily life of the Lair.  This was a whole new context for the magic in his life; because it was magic.

This was everything the Order had discovered and explored laid bare and shared with the people that were in their community, even if they weren’t specifically in anyone’s social lives.  A display of the cool stuff, all the little details and oddities that were easy to overlook when what a delver most needed was an extra layer of armor and a double jump.  And judging by the excited pointing and laughter and number of times James overheard someone saying well look at that, it was clearly doing something right.

And it made him feel it too.  All over again.  Here he was, with two-to-five of the people he was deeply, madly in love with, waking through the streets of a city he had helped put back together, looking at civilians having fun with the stuff he had fought so hard to bring into reality and make safe and available.

It wasn’t a particularly long walk to the tent Anesh had wanted them to check out, but by the time they got there, James had a serene grin on his face and felt like this was just the coolest fucking day he’d had in his life.  Partly because he was living vicariously through everyone around him, partly because there were a handful of chanters nearby who definitely felt the same way, and their delight was literally infectious.

The crowd of people around the floating cluster of various colored orbs were definitely just as enthusiastic.  Most of them were human, but only by a slim margin, and a lot of them were people James sort of recognized from Recovery, there with their fosterlings.  The mix of ‘younger’ ratroaches and crocamaws blending in with all the others who were staring up at the colorful orbs dancing like fireflies in the pale grey light of the day.

That wasn’t what James focused on though.  Because he, along with Anesh and Alanna, had all seen who was running this particular booth, and there wasn’t a world that existed where James was going to notice, and file away forever, the memory of JP acting as a fucking carnival barker.

”Oh my god.”  Alanna whispered in awe.

”Well this has been worth it already.”  Anesh said, his curiosity about the gravity defiant orb swarm dwindling.

JP had unfortunately seen them already, so there wasn’t an element of surprise, but he didn’t break from his routine.  The man was wearing a domino mask and a red satin cape that seemed to also be ignoring both gravity and air resistance as it flowed and flapped around him while he moved.  The only thing missing was a top hat and cane, and James wasn’t confident that his friend wasn’t hiding those props somewhere.  “A fine attempt!”  He was orating, projecting his voice to the crowd while what looked like a glittering eel danced around his shoulder and arm.  “Now who was our next challenger?  Someone clever, or quick, or exceptionally kind?”  JP’s voice sounded like he was the ideal of a game show host as he moved effortlessly across the crowd.  “Oh look!”  He said, tone turning ever so slightly teasing.  “Here’s someone who never needs another orb in his life!”  He said, pointing at James with a cocked arm, revealing that he did indeed have classically white gloves on.

“JP you look like an anime character!”  Alanna called over the crowd.

”Insolence doesn’t let you cut in line!”  JP retorted, spinning around with a flourish and a bow, leaning down to motion a spindly nervous ratroach forward to what looked like some kind of cannon sitting at the front of his little one-man stage.  “Now, my good friend.  You know the rules?”  The ratroach nodded in a tiny little motion.  “Then you may begin!”  JP declared, throwing one arm into the air, and disguising what James noticed was a quick moment where he leaned in to whisper something quietly reassuring to the ratroach in question.

”I am enthralled by this bullshit.”  Alanna muttered to James from where they stood at the back of the crowd, watching as JP continued to talk with his voice effortlessly rising over the cheers and conversation.

Anesh was more watching the contraption that the ratroach was in the process of aiming.  Swiveling the cannon shaped thing on two different axes and pointing it up toward the cloud of orbs.  “You know, I’m not a weapons engineer,” he told James, “but I believe that is a repurposed oversized nerf gun.”

”Oh yeah?”  James tilted his head, trying to figure out where this was going.  “What did they repurpose it-“

There was an audible ka-chunk, and a projectile sailed through the cluster of floating orbs, disturbing some and seeming to land a direct hit on another.  Then the tether attached to the giant foam dart stopped it short, and it started drifting in the orb zone, with the unlucky purple orb it had hit stuck to its front.

”That I assume.”  Anesh said appreciatively.  “Some kind of sticky harpoon, what a great idea.  Not sure how they defied gravity but that’s kind of the least weird part of any of this, now isn’t it?”

”Yeah I love this shit.”  Alanna added, watching gleefully as JP yanked the dart back down to Earth, caught it, and offered the ratroach the orb they’d just won with his own little bow.  “Also we’ve seen Office blue absorbs give antigrav fields like this.  They don’t last forever but they’re cool.  Saved our lives once.”  She said, without even a tiny slip of her smile from the reminiscing on old adventures.  “Think JP will let us take a turn?”

JP, unfortunately, heard them.  Somehow.  “Absolutely not!”  He called over the crowd and generating a wave of smiles and laughs.  “These precious bits of magic are only for those who can earn them!  Both by their skill, and also, by waiting in line politely.”  His voice dipped back to a normal tone for a moment before clearing his throat.  “And the line, as you can see, is long.  Now!  Who was next?  Step right up!  No hands are no problem, anyone can take aim!”  He threw his hand upward, tossing a replacement orb into the null-gravity field before bringing a finger back down to point out the next person in the crowd.

James elbowed Alanna.  “This is rad as hell,” he muttered, “but I think JP’s right and we can maybe come back later when there’s less of a crowd of eager kids.”  He stepped aside, letting someone pass between them for a moment.  “Also I feel like I’m in people’s way.”

”Ah, the old crowd anxiety.”  Alanna nodded, and saw Anesh gave her a curious look.  “James hates crowds.”  She clarified.  “Apparently even if they’re magic.”

”Wait, then why are we here?”  Anesh asked with open concern.  “We can just leave!”

”We’re here because look at this.”  James laughed, starting to motion but stopping himself before he accidentally backhanded an umbral that was lingering nearby.  “I can’t miss this, this is too cool.  But also I would not mind if we maybe… went that way.”  He pointed away from the logisticor plaza, toward the more open space of the main road toward Townton’s new core.

Anesh nodded.  “And then when we get to the part where there’s more crowd?”

”I’ll have had a break and will be fine!”  James declared, as if saying it would make it so.

That got a snort from Alanna, but she knew her boyfriend well enough to know he was probably being honest.  James was just like that.  There was a lot of him that had gotten better when he’d had his life completely upended and then also started taking antidepressants, but one thing that remained consistent was that sometimes he’d just declare that he was done socializing and stroll out of a situation.

It was, Alanna figured, kind of cute.  Also, it was refreshing!  Most people, even Anesh, didn’t really just say what they were feeling.  But James literally never bothered to hide anything anymore.  As far as Alanna was concerned, her boyfriend was the most honest person on the planet, and it wasn’t a close race.

She lagged behind James as their group took the quiet walk to the other part of Townton.  Passing by paradoxically straight lines of unconstrained rampant growth, and also the more thorough construction sites where old buildings were being totally demolished so brand new stuff could be built, it was a bit surreal.  This was a place that had died.  Which, Alanna figured, made the Order some kind of organic decomposer but for cities.  Processing the old dead matter into new life and growth.

”You ever think about how we’re like worms?”  She asked the crowd of Anesh that were walking with her.

“I think that ice cream did something to your brain.”  He replied smoothly, the two of him that were at her sides looking at Alanna with loving smiles.  “Okay, I’ll bite.  Worms.  Nnnno.  No, I do not think we’re like worms.  I’ve considered it now though.”

”Alright smart guy, what do you think we’re like?”

Anesh laughed as he was put on the spot, and saw James turn his head from twenty feet ahead of them, the smile on his boyfriend’s face as he watched his partners laugh together warming his heart in a way he hadn’t ever expected to have in his life before all this.  “Well I was going to say humans, but that doesn’t apply so much anymore, does it?”  He asked as they passed by one of the demolition sites, where a pair of camracondas seemed to be hanging out on the sidewalk and just observing the idle heavy machinery.  “You know, I don’t think we’re like anything.”  Anesh decided, most of him nodding appreciatively.  “Yeah.  We’re bloody unique, aren’t we?”

”Okay that’s cute but I was thinking worms because they process dead dirt.”  Alanna said, managing somehow to keep a straight face.

Anesh all stopped nodding.  “Ah.  Well that explains that then.  I’d like to change my answer then, and say that I think we’re the groundskeepers.”  He pointed ahead of them.  “He can be the worm.  The big magic mulching worm.  The rest of us just show up and shuffle around where the rose bushes are.”

Reaching her arms out, Alanna wrapped the two closest Anesh around his shoulders and tugged him close.  “Sometimes I forget that James isn’t the only poetic dumbass I’m dating.”  She said.

”Yes, you’re also dating Sarah.”  Anesh said with a canny grin.

“Dumbass.”  Alanna turned the friendly shoulder hugs into chokeholds, half of Anesh politely letting himself suffer as they escaped her wrath for now.  “Come on, let’s make sure James doesn’t fucking wander off before we see everything else.”

Catching up to their boyfriend, they congealed back into one big group date just before they hit the much more crowded streets and pathways around Townton’s central park.  People of a hundred shapes and colors and sizes flowing past in their own groups as they participated in what James hoped beyond anything would be a yearly celebration.  Friends and families and lovers and just individuals exploring the festival, all out for the afternoon that was quickly sliding into evening as the winter sun passed overhead.

Outside of a tent where you could experience what it was like to be frozen in place in midair by a camraconda and comically posed by your friends for a picture, James spotted most of the rest of his exploratory polycule.  Arrush and Keeka, both of them seeming so enthralled with each other that they completely missed everyone walking past as they occupied a park bench and enjoyed the nearby live music.  Something with a lot of brass, maybe in the park somewhere?  James couldn’t tell.  This whole area had weird lines of sight owing to the occasional stretch of fifteen foot high vegetation that rose like boundary walls around the green space.

“Okay that’s cute.”  Alanna said as she followed James’ line of sight to see Arrush and Keeka’s own little date.  “But you know what else is cute?  That.”  She pointed down the street, to where there was a much larger zone in an old parking lot that appeared to be fenced off.

Not for the first time, James was glad that his vision was enhanced in both eyes in their own ways, so that he not only didn’t need contacts anymore, but also could clearly see what Alanna was now driving their group toward.  The whole segment that had been set aside appeared to have a collection of living dungeon life in it.  And not the sophont kind that was wandering around and sampling the large variety of food people were offering, but the kind that often tried to murder people.  Or at least inconvenience them.

”Alright.  But after that, we veer around the park and see why there’s some kind of bouncy castle.  I am aware that it’s a time honored tradition for this kind of thing, but I wanna see what insane thing people magicked into it.”

Anesh nodded eagerly.  “I’m much more invested in the dangerously risky bounce house than the dangerously risky collection of things that have previously tried to eat me.”  He said, before another him continued with all of his bodies smiling, “And I’m not just saying that because I may have helped with one of them.”

They passed by more rows of tents, and the people attending them.  Laughing, chatting, and though there were some people who looked tired or sullen or suspicious, there was still a bright mood in the air.  Free food and fun would do that to almost anyone, and even the outsider umbral visiting from Saskatoon seemed to find the whole situation somewhat enjoyable.  There were plenty of people, especially among the ratroaches, crocamaws, and human children that had been integrated into local group foster families, that needed close comfort to be in a crowd like this.  But since there wasn’t a lack of space, there were plenty of little areas set aside where people could escape and sit in the quiet for a while.

”Ooh, barebeque.”  James said as they passed by one of the marked off spaces on the side of the road that had no tent at all, showing complete faith in the weather holding.  Or perhaps a total defiance of any attempt by the rain to stop them from grilling.  The smell from it was a delicious mix of garlic, molasses, and meat, but in a casual display of magic, little of the thicker smoke from the grill escaped the confines of the makeshift food stand.  Instead, it was sucked into one of two cardboard boxes, the Winter’s Climb spell that compacted smoke keeping the air clear for everyone else.  “Hey, anyone wanna stop for food before we… no that’s a terrible idea.  Anyone wanna get food after we see what the magical trampoline thing is all about?”

”Sure!  Maybe they have unicorn steak!”  Alanna declared.

Anesh blinked and shared a look with James.  “That… seems unlikely.”

”Yeah we only found the one unicorn and I don’t think it was edible.”  James said sadly.

”Also Anesh is a vegetarian.”  Alanna reminded him.  “Kind of.”

”Mostly.”  Anesh added unhelpfully.  “But also I don’t need to eat the exact same thing as you.  You two enjoy meat that I am assuming isn’t from a dungeon, and I’ll get one of those stuffed peppers from a half block back.”  He gave Alanna a quick hug as they maneuvered through people toward their destination.  “Thank you for remembering though.”  He added as they approached the lot with the surprisingly sturdy looking fence surrounding it.  “Now what’s this!”

This, it turned out, really was a kind of dungeon menagerie.  A miniature little zoo, complete with an area where visitors in ones and twos could interact with the friendlier and less lethal life.  Not specifically a petting zoo, but something close.

It was a little offputting to see a quartet of chanters seemingly enacting some kind of ritual in the empty air while the human woman that James recognized as the veterinarian Amy Morris watched on.  Their motions only looked mystical until spotting the small black furred form of an illusory housecat rolling on the ground nearby and purring, the projection of the true form of the truck sized dungeon cat mirroring its own behavior as it received delicate belly rubs from the group of chanters that literally overflowed with joy.

The other options were significantly less dangerous.  And James did think of the cat as dangerous, which might be unfair.  But the little mini-habitat spaces set up for… well, mostly Library life forms… just seemed a lot safer.  There were a trio of placid and curious stepshells that peeked out at new visitors, and a catalogue that watched everyone and evaluated them carefully before approaching.  A preening paper drake seemed perfectly happy to let smaller people climb onto their back, their fence being more of a formality than anything else.  Across the fence from them, and actually outside the little zoo, the pillboar that seemed to be happy to lurk around Townton had settled down and was watching the whole affair with what appeared to Alanna to be silent content amusement.  There weren’t any Climb creatures specifically, but there were about a dozen snow cats of various sizes and shapes, all having an excellent time playing tag with each other or whoever entered their part of the petting zoo.

James tried to have a short chat with the catalogue, and quickly realized that the things, while perfectly capable of giving directions, weren’t really talkers.  It spoke, but it didn’t seem to be holding a conversation, just using words seemingly on instinct.  It still seemed to like him, and let him scratch behind its folded paper ears.  Alanna meanwhile got a kick out of how interested in Anesh all the stepshells were.  Probably because they recognized him from their normal home in the Research basement.  Either way, it meant that half of his selves got dragged into a pushy pile of hard shelled plastic crab friends who wanted the treats he definitely wasn’t carrying at the moment.

Eventually, their group wandered into the wide canvas tent nearby.  Or tents, rather.  Two of them pushed together to create an internal area that was surprisingly warm against the contrast of the outside winter air.  The interior space was a little crowded, as the people operating the zoo were giving little presentation explanations for the different dungeon life here that was either more securely contained, or small enough to need their own terrariums.

It was actually hilarious to see Bea standing behind her own little row of glass tanks, hands clasped behind her back like she was at parade rest, explaining the snakes she had in front of her to anyone who showed the slightest indication of interest.

Anesh actually hadn’t seen any of her specimens before, and so got somewhat intentionally caught in her clipped lecture about the various creatures she had on display.  A rock serpent from the Climb, dangerously sharp sapphire fangs but a lazy demeanor once it was fed.  A light snake from the Attic, segmented metal and the ability to produce a dazzling flash from its mouth, but almost no bite strength or venom.  An eastern kingsnake, brown scales with black stripes down its whole fluid body, a common variety that was often belligerent until it got used to human handling.

”Bea this is… a snake.”  Anesh said.

”Yes.”  The inhabitor replied, looking down at the heated enclosure.  “They are all snakes.”

”But the kingsnake could have come from anywhere on Earth.”

Bea blinked slowly at him.  “But it did not.  It came from here.”

”No this one is just…” Anesh stopped, all of him realizing that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with this.  “You know?  Thank you for the snake facts.”  He told Bea.

She gave him a stiff nod and looked like she was struggling to figure out what facial expressions were, ending on a small smile for just a moment.  “You are welcome.”  She said, before turning to the older human with a pair of childlike ratroaches following her that were approaching from the side.  “Hello.  Would you like to know about snakes?”

Anesh moved on, sliding back up next to James as his boyfriend was looking at a small pool of water that contained flitting shadowy shapes of crystal slimes in their favored habitat.  “I was actually surprised to see there were no iLipedes here.”  James commented idly, waving toward the other side of the tent where there were much more secure cages.  “Considering we even have some of the stuff from Oklahoma here. iLipede seems way safer.”

Alanna trotted up to them from where she’d been kneeling in front of a scythe rabbit cage, in a staring contest with the creature while it chowed down on a tomato in a way that made it look like it was stained with gore.  “There’s a domestication attempt going on for these guys!  Turns out they’re less angry when you feed them!”

”That doesn’t sound right.  They ate half of northern Oklahoma, they shouldn’t have been hungry when we showed up.”  James laughed.

”Don’t blame me, I’m just reading the signs.”  Alanna retorted.  “Anyway, yeah, where are the iLipeds?”

“I think we passed a booth that was showing off how iLipeds will make red totems earlier.”  Anesh said, not looking away from where a different little pool filled with speckled black ink was forming itself into a dome that seemed to stare at the closest person passing by.  “Maybe they’re just spread out to other places.”  He saw James fidgeting, and bumped into his boyfriend the way he’d grown used to showing affection.  “You okay there?”

”Oh, yeah.”  James said, nodding without thinking.  “Just kinda… feel weird I guess.  This is part of the casual magic that we’re bringing into the world, and I love it.  But I also feel weird?”

Alanna leaned on his shoulder, looking around them.  “Nah, you feel normal.  You just feel the normal way you do on a delve.”

”Oh!”  James blinked as he straightened up.  “Oh, yeah!  That makes sense.  Hey that’s kinda horrifying, thanks!”

His girlfriend ruffled his hair, pulling strands awkwardly out of his ponytail.  “Nah, you think it’s cool, and I can tell.  Still, wanna get out of here and go check out the inflatable castle?  Maybe they’ll even let us in, if we’re not too pointy or heavy.”

Their path took them out of the little zoo, alongside a half dozen other people who suddenly found themselves dunked into the cool winter air again.  James found it fine though, and not for the first time he was glad that purple orbs existed.  Just the casual application of magic that didn’t stop him feeling the world, only being damaged by it.  It was nice.

Winding around the back of the park that was still vibrantly alive even at this time of year, they passed by a section of the festival that seemed to be dungeon-sourced craft projects.  Nothing magical, exactly, but art or jewelry or trinkets that were made out of things brought out of dungeons or perhaps only available there.  There was also a good view into the park through a gap in the vegetation from here, to where an elevated stage had a band playing upbeat brassy music.  The kind of wordless instrumental sound that filled the air and set the mood, but didn’t overwhelm anything.

In the brief window where they passed by, it warmed James’ heart more than any magical cold resistance could to see a cluster of the ratlings from the Pylon sitting nearly in a pile on the damp grass around the stage.  Staring just as enthralled as the chanters and ratroaches scattered around them at the music that they’d never really heard before.

It reminded him that there was so much of his own world still left to explore and share.  And also that he had promised TQ that he’d share with the camraconda his collection of early two thousands techno music at some point.

He also kept seeing flashes of people he recognized in the shifting crowd.  Sarah, mostly.  She seemed like she was somewhere new every time he turned around, but James repeatedly recognized her hair and colorful style from between all the moving bodies.  She wasn’t the only one, either.  Everyone from friends to newer delvers James had talked to once seemed to be out to enjoy the festival.  He was pretty sure at one point he even spotted Terror lurking off to the side of a parked box truck, though in the umbral’s defense, he might have been there to stalk James and not to have fun.  It was hard to tell with Terror.  And James wasn’t above admitting that the challenge the umbral offered was kind of part of why he kept trying to make friends with him.

None of those people were where they were going though.  If they stopped to talk to everyone that one of them recognized, it’d be midnight before they got around the park.

Their true destination, the big inflatable castle, turned out to be something that was specifically for the younger people of Townton.  A simple place to play where a kid could throw themselves at the walls and floor and be bounced around with wild abandon.  Of course, that was how a mundane bouncy castle worked; and for a solstice celebration of magic, the Order was never going to be content leaving something normal.

So there was a copy of an annoyingly unique Climb wand strategically placed nearby.  Diffusing a single spell at great cost into every available ‘normal’ target within its area of effect, the bookbag was barely capable of fitting inside the copier ritual, and was currently being attended by multiple volunteers that kept feeding it Breath.

All so that the dozen young people allowed in the space at a time could experience the mild levitation spell in a place where they were free to catapult themselves against as many walls as they wanted.

Of course, this wouldn’t work if anyone who was sufficiently sharp accidentally put a hole in the inflated walls, so the whole thing was marked over with the pen that made surfaces more durable.  And the volunteers were on standby with lassos of rope that they were suspiciously skilled with to retrieve any youngling that happened to end up floating in the middle of the space with no escape in sight.

James was, admittedly, pretty jealous.  But his attention was drawn to the other big colorful thing just behind the space for the kids.  A more traditional obstacle course, but this one with the front booth containing a seating area, a bucket full of familiar copper coins, and a little library of equally familiar spellbooks.

”Well this looks promising!”  Alanna declared, looking over the five or so individuals all deliberately focused on the Garden spellbooks under the cover of the tent.  “What’s this one?”

”They do have a sign, love.”  Anesh told her, pointing to the rules that were clearly written and yet, perhaps, placed in a way that someone who was almost seven feet tall might miss them.  “Looks like you get half an hour to study any spells you want, and then run the course.”

James’ eyes lit up.  “They have a leaderboard.”  He said with a competitive glint creeping into his thoughts.  “Ooooh, I like this.  We should do this!”

”Do you even need spells for this?”  Anesh asked him.

”Of course not.  But I need them to go faster.”  James reminded his boyfriend, before stepping up to the table where a relaxed looking human man was sitting.  “Hey, quick question.  Are there any rules for pylon links?”

The man looked back at him with a confused expression.  “I’m just filling in, I don’t know what that is.”

”Oh, no worries, none of mine are for what I’d want anyway.  What books do you guys have here for the challenge?” James asked, and got a much more confident answer in the form of a list where he could sign up to check them out if they were in use.  The competition rules even gave a pause if the book you wanted was unavailable.

It was the selection itself that he found a little hilarious.  No stretchy arm spell, because it would go over the half hour limit..  But Appointed Arrival was on there, obviously.  So was God’s Braid, for making rope, Visiting Tongue, for throwing a fireball, and Rat’s Ground, for blocking a strike.  Compared to some of those choices, Brief Contact, the spell that animated a statue, seemed positively normal.

”Okay, I suddenly feel like the hidden areas of this course might have some surprises.”  James told Alanna, who was already doing math through her skulljack to plan out her half hour of time.  “Anesh, you want in on this?”

”I would love to watch you do this.”  Anesh said.  “And I will be enjoying a half hour running to a bathroom, until it’s your turn.”

James laughed and hugged each of his boyfriend’s selves in turn.  “Alright, we’ll be here when you get back!”  He declared.  “Alanna?  Shall we?”

”We shall.  Also I’m gonna win.”  She waggled her eyebrows at him.

”God I love you.”  James said as he found a table for them and settled in to fill up a couple of his spell slots.

A little over half an hour later - they had to wait their turn after all, and other people wanted to run the course too - James and Alanna each got their shot at two hundred feet of obstacle course.  For James, a lot of it felt pretty easy; the kind of fluidity of motion that he’d been steadily working on mixed with developing muscle mass that was only a little magical let him run, jump, roll, and climb his way through the various obstacles with a casual efficiency that he couldn’t help feeling proud of.  What was fascinating though were the places where the course had shortcuts built in if you’d taken the right spell.

There weren’t a lot of places in the extended wood and foam construction to use Appointed Arrival, but the thin bridge with the swinging ‘traps’ that threatened to knock someone off to the mats below was the perfect bit to circumvent in a straight line.  The part where you had to choose to either overhand move yourself down a hanging rope, or else manage a series of drops, a run, and a climb at the other end, could also be managed with a use of God’s Braid and the knowledge that you could improvise a zip line.  Even the fireball was useful for hitting a recessed target plate that would drop a ‘secret door’.  Whoever had made it had even made sure that it was accessible to camracondas and stuff animals that wanted to try their hand, though their version of the course could take advantage of paths that would have been close to impossible for anyone else.

James came out of it with a time that was about a full minute behind Alanna, which was pretty much what he’d expected.  But at the end of it, he’d come away with two things.  Cheers from the people watching their high-level performances, and a burning passion for the game design on display here.

”I’m gonna build a fucking Order-style escape room.”  James declared to Anesh and Alanna, breathing only slightly faster than normal as they met up at the end.  “I quit being a paladin, I have so many ideas now.”

”Ah.”  Anesh said slowly, several of him looking over his shoulders.

James gave a strained exhale.  “There’s already one here, isn’t there?”  He asked blankly.

”I may have passed by one or two.”

”Two?!”  James gave up and started laughing.  “Wow, I‘m so far behind the curve!  I’ve been too busy being normal, I got beaten out to the weird fun stuff!”

The palm of Alanna’s hand impacted the back of his head with just the right perfectly distributed force to make her boyfriend stumble without risking hurting him.  “You fucking dumbass.”  Alanna said, not needing to add the important part, which was that James’ idea of normal was apparently dungeon delves.

James’ laugh was much more boisterous this time.  “Yeah, yeah, I heard it as soon as I said it.”  He admitted.  “Okay!  What now?”

Anesh patted his back as one of his selves directed them.  ”Now, we were gonna get some lunch, and linger at one of the tables, and talk about work while we watch this chaos you’ve unleashed unfold around us.”

”Oh that sounds really nice.”  James nodded.  “If we can get food within half an hour, we can steal a table within view of the obstacle course!   Because I just noticed Morgan in the prep tent, and I really, really wanna know how this is gonna go.”

”Right, because you’re his secret parent.”  Anesh nodded.

”…I wouldn’t put it that way, no.”  James said, as Anesh and Alanna both offered him conciliatory pats on the shoulders.  “Hey!  I’d have noticed!”  He continued to protest, and watched in dismay as Anesh opened his mouth, then closed it again with a shake of his head, one of his boyfriend’s hands coming up to brush dark hair away and settle on his forehead in an exasperated gesture.  “Alanna, you’d tell me if I were a parent, right?”

Alanna cleared her throat.  “No?”  She said teasingly as she took small steps to entice her partners into moving toward the barbeque place.  “Though, about that, I was talking to Sarah the other day…”

The conversation meandered as they did.  Through the ideas of opening their own family up for fostering some of the new dungeon life, to moving into the Lair or even Townton itself.  Past idle gossip about how Auberdeen’s college education was going or what next year was going to look like.  Their chat glanced across the newest dungeon, and whatever was in that bank that Charlie’s scout team had rediscovered, but deflected off as they split to grab food from different booths and never returned to the topic when they reunited at a free park table to eat and watch the show of aspirants to the obstacle course.

They’d all gotten different stuff, but James, because he couldn’t help himself, had gone for a sandwich made with scythe rabbit meat.  He had been getting more vegetarian in his life lately, but… well, they’d desperately needed to reduce the population of the dead dungeon’s flood of creatures into the mass of farmland and small towns.  And if they were already committed to shooting the hyper-aggressive creatures anyway, it would be wasteful to just leave the corpses in a big pile.

He wasn’t gonna get sappy and say that turning them into food was a sign of respect or anything.  But it was better than just pretending they’d despawn if left unattended, and also, this rabbit meat was far less gamey than a normal version of the animal would have been.  It also made James’ voice come out like a TV with the volume set to one, for about fifteen minutes after eating.

”I was not warned about this feature!”  He tried to declare.

”Sorry I can’t hear you over how funny you sound.”  Alanna said, practically chewing on her cheek to keep from laughing.  “That’s cool though, magic meat.  God, how cool are our lives, you guys?”

Anesh answered her with practical consideration, since James was currently hampered and not done eating his sandwich.  ”Decently cool.”  He said.  “Let me know when we find some magical cabbage though.  That I can work with.”

”…we have magic beans?”  Alanna offered.  “No, that’s lame.  Yeah, you’re right.  You do deserve wizard slaw.”  The look on Anesh’s faces made Alanna change tracks.  “Wizard… kimchi?”

”Better, thank you.”  Anesh leaned in and kissed her cheek.  “I appreciate the effort at least.”  He looked over at James with a smile, watching his boyfriend near-silently cheering for a familiar blue-grey camraconda that was currently trying to figure out how to dodge a swinging foam ‘trap’ in the obstacle course.  Anesh’s gaze drifted, looking over everything they could see of the shifting crowd and the dozens of little booths that were all showing off something mystical.  His sight lingered only slightly on the camcondor perched on an old telephone pole, and then on the pair of necroads on the less traveled stretch of road that seemed to be displaying general confusion at the festival itself.

James was right, he thought.  This was nice.  All their hard work shown off and put to work.  Or put to play.

The Order’s form of organization for their growing sliver of a society was, in many ways, grounded in a kind of practicality that severely cut down on the amount of hours any one person needed to actually contribute to the work.  But there was still work to be done, and it wasn’t always easy work either.  So a day like this, a day set aside to share the magic and the dozen different shapes of smile, it was important.  Anesh recognized all of the practical reasons for it.

But he also felt the thrum of what made this special.  This was going to be a formative memory for a lot of the younger people here, human and otherwise.  They were going to grow up with days like this as a signpost.  He was, too.  Anesh had, he knew, a little too much of his British upbringing still left in him.  A little too quick to set aside emotion for stoicism, a little too ready to shut down vulnerable moments.  It was something James - and Keeka, too, really - were both training out of him, but he could feel those old patterns from his parents, his teachers, his childhood friends, all lurking.

Days like this broke that pattern.  They weren’t quiet reassurances, they weren’t small course corrections.  This whole thing, the Order’s style of a winter solstice festival, it was a hammer to the machinery of routine that Anesh never really thought about too hard but often followed anyway.

He kind of liked it.

“Oh good, there’s that done.”  James said out loud, shaking Anesh from his thoughts.  “I wonder if those guys are doing any of the soundshell turtle meat, and what that would do to someone’s voice?  Extra vibration?”

”I’m suddenly invested in this.”  Alanna said with a waggle of her eyebrows as she leaned across the table.  “Hey James how hungry are you right now?”

”Sorry!  I don’t think our date today is gonna last long enough to find that answer.”  He told her with a matched stare.

Anesh chuckled at his two loves.  “Never take a whole break, can you?”  He asked James.

James beamed at him, a smile that set Anesh’s multitude of hearts beating faster.  “Sure can’t!”  He said.  “But that’s sorta the point of today, right?  We all do a little, and everyone gets to enjoy a lot.  Also hey, you’re working one of these little tents too, aren’t you?”

”Well yes, but I’m also going on a mini-date with Keeka, and I’m not a paladin who never takes breaks.”  Anesh said.  “Alanna, help me out here.”

”No can do, buddy.  I’m going off with Sarah to do… something?”  Alanna shrugged, straightening up and stretching languidly in the Tennessee air that was rapidly going from chilly to cold.  “I assume it’s something work related!”  She announced.

James and Anesh both nodded.  “That sounds reasonable.”  James said as he checked his phone.  “Hey, wanna go meet up with her now, before we split up?”  He asked, standing from the park bench they’d been eating at, and looking back at the crowd that seemed like it was getting denser as the afternoon turned to evening.  He knew that there were going to be more people visiting Townton; umbral and their human friends from Saskatoon, a variety of old folks and their families from the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society, something like ninety percent of the population of the Lair, that kind of thing.  But it was one thing to know it and another to watch as every logisticor transfer brought friends and visitors in to celebrate with them.

“Why do you feel smug?”  Alanna asked as she tailed after James and Anesh.  “Hey.  Hey!  Buddies, you guys are planning something, and I can tell you know!”

”Yeah it’s kinda cute.”  James called back over his shoulder as he wove through a bunch of people that were admiring some elaborate Office-weirdified papercraft on display.  “But aren’t you curious?”  He taunted Alanna.

”She’s going to strangle you later.”  Anesh reminded him.

James nodded to his boyfriend.  “But it’s funny now.”  He said as they led Alanna around the edge of the park’s green barrier, and onto the flourishing grass and clover that carpeted large portions of the space.

The band was taking a break, or perhaps rotating out for a different show.  James knew that the punk garage band that had somehow accidentally wandered into Townton way back when right after Banana’s reshaping were around today, so maybe it was them.  He knew that because he’d hired them personally, because it was very funny to his specific style of amusement.  They’d changed their name at some point, but he felt like they maintained the same kind of vibe by choosing to go by the title of Karma Is A Misunderstood Theological Construct.  James planned to buy another teeshirt from them if at all possible.

But the lack of live music didn’t mean the park was empty.  Far from it.  Instead, there were hundreds of chanters intermingling with the people who had been welcomed into their semi-temporary home area.  Smaller stages and a couple decorated gazebos surrounded by benches and other seats created focused spots where people showed off weird magic, or weird poetry, or weird Shakespearean stage performances reinterpreted with an eye toward a fictional history that included ratroaches and camracondas.

And in the middle of the park, standing amid an overly tall and unseasonably alive patch of butterfly weed, was Sarah.

Alanna froze when she saw her girlfriend, the shorter woman turning like she’d been signaled somehow and lighting up the whole world with a smile.  Sarah didn’t have the same magical defense against the cold that the rest of them did, so her outfit was a little less casual in anticipation of the December night, but that had just meant that she was allowed to be extra in her presentation.  A heavy dress of folded cloth, ribbons of bright blues and reds flowing around her like the garment itself was alive and pretending to be caught in the wind.  Sarah had her hair worn in a long braid, dyed into the colors of a sunset, and a scarf around her neck that completed her cover against the chill.

”I…” Alanna stammered out, finding herself at a complete loss.  “Uh…” she looked down at herself, and the jeans and short bomber jacket she’d worn, “I’m so fucking underdressed for this?”  She almost whispered.

James patted his partner on the shoulder.  “No kidding.  Someone should do something about that.”  He mused.  “Anesh?”

”Hello, I’m someone.”  Anesh said, seeing Alanna’s head whip between the two of them as he tapped her on the shoulder and expended a charge of the Change Outfit blue he’d absorbed about a week ago, making use of the bag one of him had been innocuously carrying around with him.

Alanna got to keep a short padded jacket, just one that was a cream color with a fluffy poof of soft material extending around the collar and cuffs.  Her pants swapped out for smooth black dress slacks, and her shirt replaced by silvery long sleeved something that felt like it should have had buttons, but instead just snuggly wrapped around her like it was made just for her.

To complete the look, her own authority uncoiled from her wrist where it normally lived as a bracelet, and slid into place in the form of a lightly radiant green bow tie.  And Alanna wasn’t sure who was more confused about that; her, or the authority themself.

”You absolute goobers.”  She told her boyfriends, doing her best to keep her voice from hitching as she said it.

James set a hand on the side of her face, and pulled her down slightly for a gentle kiss, and Anesh followed his example one by one afterward.  “Gorgeous.  Now.  Have a nice date!”  James told her, turning and making eye contact with Sarah just long enough to wink at her and see her face flush redder than her own dress.  “Love you.”  He added.

”Love you too.”  Alanna replied with a distant voice.  “All of you idiots.”

”And despite that, I also love you.”  Anesh laughed.  “Shall we?”  He asked James, the two of them beginning a relaxing stroll through the field of both grass and broadcast emotional vibrancy from the chanters.  “I hope they have a nice night.”  He mused.

”Same.  Now, much as I’d love to stick around…” James said with a little guilt.

Anesh laughed, the calm satisfaction he was feeling echoing through every note of the sound.  After so long with James and Alanna, and everyone else too, it was so easy to forget that he wasn’t the only one that sometimes felt that anxiety about neglecting the people in his family.  “You have a date shaped like a job, and I have a job shaped like a date.”  He said, arms wrapping around James and also himself in a massed cluster of a hug.  “I don’t know if anyone is going to say this to you today, directly,” Anesh whispered in his boyfriend’s ear from multiple mouths, “but thank you.  For doing this.  And you know what I mean, don’t look at me like that.  Thank you for… for grabbing the magic with both hands, and punting it into our world.”

”…You’re welcome.”  James said, a wellspring of emotion overwhelming him.  “I… need to invent new words.  That’s not what I mean.  I mean… yeah.  Thanks for noticing.  I did it for you guys.”  He smiled weakly.  “And I’m not gonna stop now.”

Anesh kissed him.  “Oh, I know.”  His boyfriend said.  “I gave up on convincing you to play it safe a long time ago.  But please don’t drink just any random potion you stumble across, at least.”  He added with a chuckle as he let James go.

”But the potion booth is my contribution!”  James declared with his hand against his chest, aghast.

”Please don’t make me update the spreadsheet I use for our relationship.”  Anesh sighed.  But he didn’t stop smiling as he did so, the grin he shared with James lingering along with the warmth of his boyfriend’s hands in his own, the feeling sticking around for long after they’d separated.

And then it was just James, on his own now for a bit, and feeling like he could get lost in this festival for a week and still fail to see everything.  It was hilarious, in a way; so much of this magic was stuff that literally was here because of him.  But all of it was turned to uses that only really worked when people who weren’t James thought about how to do something weird with the stuff.

Like the big round table in the middle of one of the open lots, where someone with a megaphone was doing the announcing for an imbuement contest; a whole host of people old and new taking advantage of the mass quantity of blue orbs to goof around with making the world’s silliest paperclip.  Batches of eight people at a time given just enough time to put them under real pressure, judged by a panel pulled from the audience at random.

Or the lost and found booth, which appeared to be split between a normal lost and found staffed by a smiling old human woman, and a more proactive lost and found, staffed by a remote access point for Second, so that the machine intelligence could tell people exactly where they had lost something if it hadn’t been turned in yet.  Second’s coordination with Planner and the other assignments that were more hanging out and less perpetually on the clock allowing the digital life form to create a map of every dropped and forgotten object in the small city.  It was kind of a test of their own skill, and also kind of just hilarious to watch them prompt their human aide to call a random passerby over so they could be told where they’d left their phone.

Or even something a little more mundane.  Like the long wall mural of the year’s history.  Different artists in different ways having expressed a half dozen milestones that had occurred for the Order.  There were always a few people giving it a closer look, though James was aware of the fact that a lot of the younger or newer people maybe didn’t fully get hit with the significance of it.  Many of them still signed their names though.  Tools both mundane and magic used to etch a record of those who wanted to be remembered into the brick, hidden in and around the parts of the year that were most significant for them.  And often times, that meant when they’d made it out of a dungeon and to Earth in the first place.

These were people who had begun living with magic.  And not just magic, but a kind of community that used that magic, and mixed it with ways of doing things that were usually experimental and sometimes weird and potentially unnerving, but were always focused on making a better life for all of them.

It was while he was standing at a distance and trying to figure out who had done the part of the year-mural that looked like a cave painting of ratroaches that James felt someone move up at his side.  A presence that was a little different from the usual close passing of all the bodies - and enthusiastic high speed navigators - that were wandering the aisles and loops of the solstice fair.

”Paladin.”  The camraconda at James’ elbow greeted him pleasantly, her digital voice carrying cleanly to him over the ongoing hubbub.

James took a second to run through his mental list of camracondas and their coloring and patterns.  It took more conscious effort to tell them apart than it did for humans, or even ratroaches or other nonhuman-but-human-ish-shaped people.  The clues were different, the thought process not instinctive.  Still, of the camracondas he did know, only one of them was colored like a creamsicle, off-white and orange cables snaking up to clasp around a camera head with an extended lens.  “Hey Watcher.”  James greeted her, before tipping his gaze to the crocamaw close at her side.  “Hey Lavant.  How’re you liking all this?”

”Loud.”  Lavant said, his maw that stretched almost all the way down to the damp grass cracking open in a small spot on one side to talk.  “And… loud.  And I ate too much.”

”We are learning the limits of one’s stomach often come before the limits of one’s appetite.”  Watcher-Under-Stone told James with a small hiss.  “And that humans have no sense of decorum.”

”It’s true, we don’t.  But how specifically?”  James asked with a nod.

Lavant lugged his head around, one of his pebbled hands coming up to run a claw down the side of his maw.  “The ice cream…” he started to say, before shuddering.

”Oh, yeah, Alanna tried The Mistake too.”  James said, and saw both of them make pitying motions as he did so.  “I feel a little guilty about that one!  Fredrick used me as a test subject for their nightmare creation a long time ago and I didn’t think I’d need to warn anyone.”  He shook his head in a forlorn gesture.  “Alas.  I failed us all.”

Watcher-Under-Stone burst out in a hiss that was somehow sarcastic.  “I am sure you will recover somehow.”  She said, before falling silent, her lens focused on the mural ahead of them, and the quartet of chanters that were being guided through adding their names to a growing arch that was definitely no longer hidden in the curve of a painted camraconda.  “This has been a strange year.”  The camraconda told him, her own gaze drawing James to look along the same line.

”A little good, a little bad.”  James admitted.  “I think I can manage better next time.”

”And yet it was special.”  Watcher-Under-Stone said, pulling herself upward as the end of her tail wrapped around to lay against Lavant’s back.  The crocamaw looked like he was practically bleeding off anxiety as he leaned into the comforting contact.  “I have found that there is an endless supply of beauty in this life.  That is what I wanted to say to you.  That you have made things special.”

At her side, Lavant flicked his hands out of the sleeves of his puffy jacket in the kind of rapid motions that crocamaws seemed to use a lot, especially to get attention.  “M-me too.”  He said, adding in an overlapping voice from another part of his mouth, “Thank you,” the slim scaled boy told James, “for… this.”

James took a deep breath, the vapor of his exhalation visible now in the increasingly cold air.  “I think it’s just as much your doing as mine.”  He mused quietly.  “Everything here that’s fun, that’s unique, that’s special, it’s all… it’s all of us.  This kind of magic is useless without people to share it with.  I might have done a little bit of the groundwork, but this kind of life just doesn’t come together without people living it.”  He smiled over at Lavant.  “So remember to thank yourself too, alright?”  He told the crocamaw, who blinked back nervously at him with his wide eyes.

”We are here for just that.”  Watcher told him happily.  “Because there is a moment in this familiar form of history that is just for him.  And it makes things all the more fascinating to participate in them.”  She leaned her head against her charge’s arm briefly.  “Come, let us find you a proper tool.”  The camraconda bobbed a polite nod at James, who inclined his head back and watched them go with a smile.

As nervous as Lavant was about everything, it was obvious to James that the crocamaw kid was an equal amount excited.  There actually was something deeply cool about putting your name on a brick wall, and he didn’t need Alanna’s Empathy superpower to tell that Lavant was deliberately pushing past his own nervousness to explore alongside his foster parent.

“It is good to see you carry on your tradition.”  A new voice said, jolting James out of his reverie as TQ slid seamlessly into the place that Watcher-Under-Stone had been occupying.

”Is there a line to interrupt my inner monologue?”  James asked.

TQ gave a slow looping nod.  “There is.  But I have created several accounts so that I could monopolize the top slots.”

”…It bothers me that I’m prepared to believe you.”  James said with open suspicion.

”I am conditioning you!”  TQ said happily.

”Now that I’m willing to believe.”  James chuckled, reaching down to lay a hand on the smooth pseudo-metal of TQ’s head, the camraconda leaning into his touch eagerly.  “Oh wait, hang on!  If you’re here-“

The camraconda gave another bob, the mechanical arms he was wearing making precise motions to adjust his cloak.  “Yes, you are late, and so am I.  Now I will be slightly later, but in this, there is balance.” He leaned back, staring up at the darkening clouds overhead and the silhouettes of winged creatures flitting across them.  “And I may not have time before the celebration and the year is past, so I wished to speak with you now.  And tell you, simply, that I love you.” TQ didn’t change his posture, but there was a sense that he was braced for whatever James had to say in reply.

”I…” James trailed off, and employed his favorite conversational tactic of taking time to think before speaking.  Looking up at the sky alongside the cloaked camraconda, he realized, suddenly, that he was overthinking everything.  And a small smile crept onto his face.  “I love you too.”  He said.  “No fucking idea what to do with that, but…”

”But there is going to be another year, and another solstice at the end of it, and I am confident in our abilities.”  TQ filled in.

”There’s actually a solstice in six months, it’s a bi-yearly thing, because it specifically marks the longest and shortest days of… the… year… are you okay?”  James asked.

TQ was busy narrowing his lens at James.  “This world is bizarre.”  He declared.  “You are bizarre.”

”Thank you.”  James said, chewing on his own smile as it forced its way onto his face.  The opportunity to return some of TQ’s conversational judo was too much of a temptation to resist.  “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t linger if we’re both late?  But yeah, later.”

”Yes.  I will find a way to take revenge for planetary alignment.”  TQ said as he slithered away, the rasp of the underbelly plate he was wearing against the asphalt mixing with the echo of a thousand other footsteps and camraconda movements.

James shook his head before snapping to the realization that he did have somewhere to be, and hustling away.  Muttering to himself that there was no way he was responsible for the position of the planet itself.  He refused to accept that one.

Slipping through the crowds on the streets and sidewalks, James headed toward a table where he was supposed to be at the moment.

While he wove through the more difficult to dodge figures of humans and umbral, he spotted Cam and gave the woman an appreciative nod.  Her winged figure was standing on a street corner, arms folded simply on her chest, a blue patch on her arm marking her as someone to come to if anyone had a problem.  A few steps behind her, a necroad floated with what almost felt like amusement coming off its asphalt form as a pair of small ratroaches climbed over its central chunk, pointing out into the crowd and making their own excited noises.

It had been hours since James had arrived, a lot of time spent wandering and talking and seeing everything he could with his partners.  But the press of people hadn’t died down at all; a steady flow of individuals bolstered by hot chocolate to stave off the cold following the same pattern that he had.  Eager to see it all, especially if they were just finishing up their own small shifts helping out with serving food or dealing with trash collection or any of the hundred small chores that kept everything operating smoothly and cleanly.

Honestly it shouldn’t have worked.  Not this well, not for the first time.  But, James was forced to admit, it was actually okay to believe in the ability of people when you gave them the time and resources and motivation to do things right.

He said as much to Arrush when he slid up next to his looming boyfriend at the tent they were taking over for the next few hours.  “Except for me, of course,” he added as he tagged out the person who’d been hanging back until he arrived, “because I’m late!”

”I don’t mind.”  Arrush said, a glowing crescent of a grin on his muzzle.  Then, as James settled in and placed his palms on the horseshoe of folding tables they had set up, Arrush felt a sudden impulse to be proactive.  Bending down slightly, he jutted his snout forward to place a tiny kiss on the side of his human partner’s neck, and felt a deep satisfaction as he watched James shiver slightly.  “There.  Now it’s even.”

”Oh, yeah, that’s definitely a one sided transaction.”  James laughed as he rolled his eyes.  “So?”  He prompted.

”…so?”  Arrush looked back, all his eyes innocently widened.

”So how’s the festival, you goof.”  James clarified as he started rearranging the little bottles that they had sitting in neatly spaced wooden racks on the tables.  Some of the displays needed to be refilled from the stock they had at the back of the tent, evidence that the crowd was interested in what they had to offer, even if there was a quiet moment right now.  So James got busy pulling tiny bottles out of the supply, while he listened to Arrush talk.

The big ratroach shuffled to help, and soon a chain formed with his rear arms accepting items from James kneeling on the ground, passing them forward to his front paws, and then settling them on the racks.  “You know.”  He chittered in amusement.  “It… it’s good.  Keeka and I did everything, and it was… it was…”

There was a pause in their unified motion, and James looked up to see Arrush staring down at him and blinking away luminous tears.  “You okay?”  He asked with sudden worry.

”I am okay.”  Arrush said with a voice that hadn’t hurt for so long he’d almost forgotten what that was like.  “I… don’t know if I can explain it.”  He turned his head and motioned a chitin-banded paw out over the street ahead of them where a dozen different passersby glanced his way in curiosity.  “All of this?  I don’t know how I got here, I just thought.  It’s… loud and fast and excited, and I just walked through it with my boyfriend and loved it.  I got to kiss him and I wasn’t afraid.”

James dusted off his knees and stood up, adding the last cluster of little bottles to their spot and fully refreshing their display.  “And that’s new, huh?”  He asked.

”It is!”  Arrush chittered an almost frantic giggle, that slowly morphed into a beaming smile.  “It is.  This is what you knew the whole time, isn’t it?”

”What, that everyone deserves to have a wizard escape room in their life?” James asked.

Arrush poked him in the cheek with a dulled claw.  “Nooooo.”  He laughed again.  “When you took us, you didn’t see monsters, did you?  You saw this.  You saw us happy, and you broke the world to make it happen.”

”I mildly encouraged a part of the world that was already broken to regrow in a certain way.  Don’t hero worship me.”  James snorted.

”It’s not really worship,” Arrush said, “it’s that I remember being right over there with you” he pointed to the visible edge of the roof of a building that had once been a bank and was now an Indian and Burmese fusion restaurant, “and being in pain.  And you knew the whole time that one day, I wouldn’t be!  That’s…” Arrush struggled for a word, clasping his paw in the air as he searched his thoughts for the right thing to cap off his thought.  “Magic.”  He finally said.

James leaned into Arrush, and quickly found himself wrapped in a hug.  The taller ratroach, for once, not holding back or worrying about anything, and instead just pulling James tightly close in an almost crushing embrace.  “Well that sounds like a perfect revelation to have today.”  James said, face muffled by Arrush’s sweatshirt.  “We should make this a tradition!”

”Learning that you aren’t scared anymore?”  Arrush asked, pushing James back just enough that he could peer down into the human’s mismatched eyes, the tip of his angular snout touching against James’ nose.

”Yeah, it’s a good tradition to have!”

”Sometimes I don’t know if you’re joking.”  Arrush pouted.

James reached a hand up to cup Arrush’s muzzle, smiling placatingly.  “I think I joke too much sometimes.  But not right now.  It’s funny, but it’s not a joke.  I do think we should maybe make a tradition of… of acknowledging our own healing.  That’d be cool.”  He looked away as motion caught his eye, and saw a cluster of human children approaching, maybe seven to nine years old, backed by a few nervous parents and a pair of very smug looking older grandparents that James recognized.

”Are we interrupting anything special?”  Eileen called across the heads of the kids that were perfectly at eye level to see all the colored liquids in the clear bottles on the table.

”Yeah get outta here!”  James called back with a laugh.

Arrush burst out with another clicking chitter of a laugh, pushing James away and straightening back up to his full height.  Some of the kids staring up at him with widening eyes as he peered down at them.  “Hello.”  He said with his even musical voice.  “Would you like to sample a potion?”

He got a chorus of yeses yelled excitedly by kids that were just old enough to recognize what they were being offered, and a smaller series of suspicious looks from the parents.

James handled that, motioning a man in a ballcap and goatee forward and getting another woman’s interest too.  “Now, I know Eileen and Archie probably told you we aren’t gonna randomly poison anyone, but I bet you have questions.”  He said.  

”Oh just a few.”  The man said.

“Perfect.  How can I help?”

”I’m beyond help.”  The other human said as if he’d rehearsed that line, laughing at the end of it and softening considerably as James laughed too.  He was still definitely keeping an eye on where Arrush had knelt down to talk more directly to the group of kids, but he didn’t look suspicious or anything.  “So what do these things do?”

James was tempted to point to the sandwichboard sign with a menu on it, but he was eager to just chat anyway, so he refrained.  “Well, obviously these are some of our safe options.”  He said.  “No mind altering substances or accidental limb explosions here.”

”Was that… an option?”

He continued with just a hint of a grin.  ”Instead, we’ve got four choices, all of them fun.”  He raised his voice so the other parents and kids could hear too.  “This little one will make your eyes glow for about an hour.  Now, it won’t let you see in the dark, so be careful not to bump into anything!  This one here does something similar to fingernails and hair - or chitin too if any of you are secretly bugs! - and it also smooths those bits out nicely.”

The woman who’d stepped up raised a hand.  “It’s a beauty product?”  She questioned curiously.  “And it works?”

”Well, it’s not a replacement for a manicure.”  James answered.  “Except… it kind of is.  So yes!”  He moved on.  “Now this one is funny.  Take a sip of this, and it makes your saliva taste like whipped cream for a while.”

”What kind of whipped cream!”  One of the kids asked eagerly.

Arrush flicked his tongue out over the end of his muzzle before tipping his head to the side.  “Vanilla.”  He answered.

James gave his boyfriend an amused look, before shaking his head and moving to the last one.  “And this one is more for the adults.  It makes you sit properly; no matter what the furniture is, this adjusts your posture to be as perfectly comfortable as possible.”

Elbowing her way in between the two middle aged adults, Eileen gave James a pointed look as she slapped her wrinkled palms onto the table.  “Now I thought we were friends, and you’re telling me you had this the whole time, and didn’t share any of it with the Grandparents Society?!”

”I… am sharing it now?”  James asked with faux meekness.  Then he had a thought.  “Wait, hang on.  Which one are you talking about?  Because I assumed it was the posture potion, but I do feel like we’re at least a little bit friends, and-“

”The whipped cream one obviously!”  Eileen declared to the embarrassment of the younger parents she was with, and the giggles of the children.  “I think we should try that one!  My treat.”  She added quietly to the parents.

Arrush made a slow clicking to draw their attention.  “There isn’t a price.”  He said, having too good of a night to care about the flash of surprise on some of the older human faces that he was talking at all.

”What if someone orders a hundred potions?”  A young girl asked.

”Then they can’t have a hundred potions.”  James answered, raising his index finger like a teacher making a point.

Arrush nodded sagely.  “We would run out.  And then no one would be glowing and that would be boring.”  The little girl nodded along with his words, before pointing to one of the bottles.  “This one?”  Arrush asked, setting it gently on their side of the table.

”These are safe, right?”  The man asked James again.

”Oh, yeah.  These ones are made with nontoxic ingredients, though they do taste pretty bad sometimes.  Do you two want to try any?”  He asked as Arrush rapidly filled requests from the squad of children.

As it turned out, they did.  And while James told Eileen to call them later about supplying an actual quantity of the posture potion, he also handed her a couple little bottles too.  And before too long, the crowd had a few more giggling kids that glowed pale white and brighter green or blue, various little spots tracing luminous lines through the darkening evening.

It was the first ‘sale’ that James was part of at the potion booth, but it wasn’t the last.

He and Arrush stole moments to chat and banter and flirt in between customers to their booth.  This one, James was proud to say, had been his idea.  The Order had been growing their potion production line consistently and professionally, and their experiment lines often ended up stockpiled or as novelties in the allocation counter anyway.  It hadn’t actually detracted from anything critical, to spend a day’s worth of sap production on making more of some of these just for fun.  Four options wasn’t a huge amount after all, and not everyone was going to want to try one.

But a lot of people did.  And James watched the little bottles that he had had participated in filling hundreds and hundreds of in advance slowly be passed out into the crowd.  Many of them returned later to the giant bin of empties, some of them vanished entirely, and James wondered if people were saving the potions for later, or saving the bottles as souvenirs, and either way that was cool.

It was also cool to know that they could still learn new stuff about the effects.  Potions that were safe were, so far, known to be safe across species, so that wasn’t much of a worry.  But it was still surprising when the first umbral had sampled the potion that lit up their eyes, and it had transformed the colored bands that dotted their central form into pools of brilliant liquid neon.

In theory, the Order would have learned that eventually.  Sooner or later, they’d fill every cell on their spreadsheet that referenced how magic interacted with species.  But for something like this?  A potion they weren’t making in bulk, that was just a little party trick and not something that could save a life or empower a knight?

How long would it have been before anyone knew that it made umbral eyes glow with the warmth of lava lamps in dark rooms?

It was a tiny mystery that no one had actively been seeking the answer for.  And yet, that hidden truth had been casually pulled into view and shown off, just because they had opened up their vault of weird magic for everyone to play with.

Together with Arrush, James handed out potions, talked about their effects, and warned everyone about the abjectly nightmarish taste some of them had.  At one point, he realized that Arrush had been hiding a shadowy overcloak in the back of the tent, and since he’d missed Halloween due to extraplanar invasion, James took the opportunity to dress up as a mysterious shopkeeper.  A role he traded off with Arrush when the ratroach decided he would be more mysterious than James, thanks to his glowing saliva making his smile stand out ominously under the hood.

During a lull, Anesh and Keeka dropped by to say hi.  The crowd of a single human around the lithe black and brown ratroach waving as they approached, and Keeka himself giving Arrush a confused smile as his boyfriend poked his muzzle out from under the billowing black cloak he had pulled too far forward.  They chatted for a little while, but soon enough other people were interested in the potion stand, and so the duo took their leave.

But not before Keeka secured a small bottle of the whipped cream saliva potion.  “As a treat!”  He said with a chittering giggle, before grabbing two Anesh’s hands and towing them away from the table and back into the flow of people.  “But not for me!”

”Ahem.”  One of the Anesh left behind flushed darkly.  “Well that could mean any number of…”

”Anesh go make out with your boyfriend.” James told him with a roll of his eyes.

Arrush nodded solemnly.  “Keeka isn’t even the first person to realize that’s what the potion is for.” He stated with his own attempt at a sage tone.  “Everyone knows the true best use.”

”Whaaaaat about for people who just like the taste of vanilla?”  James asked.

”…the best use that isn’t obvious…” Arrush lost his grip on his joking voice as a green flush crept in around his eyes.  Bantering was still hard for him, but the jostling hug James set around his upper body definitely helped him feel like he hadn’t messed anything up.  “The best use that is cooperative.”  He corrected, regaining some energy, partly calling the words after the rest of Anesh who was waving as he made his escape to follow the rest of himself.

James smiled against Arrush’s cloaked head, careful not to crush his boyfriend’s antenna.  “You’re adorable.”  He said as they were set upon by another wave of curious newcomers.

The sky continued to darken, light leaving rapidly under the winter conditions, and James continued to feel the satisfaction of doing a job where he knew he wasn’t trapped in it.  As it got dark enough, the sky overhead was lit in a new way.  Paper drakes and drones that were mostly not alive and a swarm of navigators taking turns to execute maneuvers while lit up with LEDs and sparklers and sometimes the glow of the very potions that James was supplying people for fun.  There had been a conversation in the event’s planning, he’d heard through a rumor, about a fireworks display this year.  And that conversation had stopped pretty quickly as someone who James needed to find and thank had looked at the rest of the group and said are you fucking insane, Townton is 90% people with PTSD, what are you thinking.  Which had apparently led to this version of a display.

James kinda loved it.  He didn’t see the whole thing, but that was okay; it wasn’t a single massive show.  Instead it was an ongoing performance.  A blanket of flying lights laid over the city, as if to tell everyone that someone was keeping an eye on things overhead, and being incredibly extra about it.

Most of those navigators up there, orange spears and lines brightly flashing past, were pretty new to the world.  At least one of them was probably Zhu, too.  And next year, there’d be more of them, partly because of what Zhu was spending his own time on tonight.  James’ friend and nested navigator, when he wasn’t part of the light show, being one of the infomorphs at the little tent where someone could go to talk about cracking a navigator egg.

It was weird to think that Zhu and James were kind of swapped for the places they’d both have expected themselves to be tonight.  But James hadn’t been that surprised by the choice.  Zhu was a lot more caring and thoughtful than he often let on, and while he’d probably be telling at least a few people they were assholes tonight and sending them away empty handed, James suspected that his friend was going to be overseeing a lot more potential new navigators being incepted than Zhu would have guessed.

It probably helped that the other people hanging out over there were Zhu’s friends, which was why he’d originally decided to lurk in that tent, but James knew the truth.  His friend just kind of liked sharing interesting information.  And what, really, was more interesting than the life cycle of a navigator, from egg to map to person?

An hour passed, and then another.  The night became a blur of faces as even James’ enhanced Energy warred with his natural desire to only have so much socialization at a time.  He picked out people he knew passing by, or stopping to say hi, mingled in with the new faces or the unknown new species that James hadn’t had a personal connection to yet.

There was Tylor, seeming like he’d at least stopped beating himself up about the past, comfortable or at least not uncomfortable mingling with the various umbral around the area.  There was Morgan again, along with Liz and Color-Of-Dawn, the three of them moving like they were constantly tripping over each other, but having a great time together anyway.  There was a whole cluster of camracondas, led by Ink-And-Key towering above them, with Scent-Of-Rain and Paper-And-Words standing out beside him as they stopped at the information booth across from the potion stand.

In brief passing, James saw Ishah, the ratroach seemingly being tailed by some of the Mormon kids and looking like he was planning to scale a building to escape, which would be a difficult feat if James correctly remembered what spells Lincon and Emma still probably had equipped.  Another momentary flash of motion had his eye catch on just a pair of wingtips, white and feathered, possibly El taking a corner before James could really see her, but at this point, it could be anyone really, the spell having been tested on for tactical reasons with a few of the Climb wands and wings being a popular fashion statement tonight.  The longest small glimpse he got was from Evans, the shield team captain giving James a sharp two fingered wave, before he kept walking at a brisk pace, seemingly talking to a drone on his shoulder.

People he’d met.  People he knew.  People he’d briefly delved with.  People he’d never known but who felt familiar.

Here were Alanna’s sisters, Erin and Rae mostly used to the magic in their lives at this point but still gawking a little; not enough to stop them from dropping by to call James ‘uncle’ and make him feel so old, though. Here was Banana, in a group with not just her own foster mom, but with a half dozen other adopted kids from both in and out of dungeons.  Here was a chanter walking with a golden retrieve that could have been one of two different types of mimic life, the duo having a conversation that stretched out around them with projected emotion even as the sound of the crowd swallowed the spoken words.  Here was Ink, the umbral’s uncommon shape among her people making it easy for James to identify her as she walked past with ribbons tied in her tendrils.  Here was Azalea, a woman who James might never know the true name of, but who had been curious enough and brave enough to stick with them even after everything a Status Quo had done to her.

Here was a giant dog with a teenager riding it like a horse.  That… that one was new, James was willing to admit that he hadn’t had that on his bingo card.  He also didn’t have the time to ask where the fuck the giant dog came from.  The pillboar giving people rides in a loop around the main festival area made sense to him, he got that, that guy was terminally chill and accepted bribes.  The giant dog though, that was a lot of question marks.

And then others.  Scattered impressions of roles more than names.  A Response dispatcher, a delver that could maybe eat concrete, a grandparent, a ratroach that dreamed of being a doctor, a cancer survivor turned orb distributor, a new camraconda who had only been liberated last week, someone who was James’ deep and close friend up until they turned the corner out of sight.

And sometimes, James would turn and see out of the corner of his eye an impossible thing.  A shape of something massive and overwhelming, caught in its own private maelstrom of the celebration of life and magic that the solstice had been made into for the Order.  Something that was horrifying not because it was evil, but because it was simply too much.  And then he’d turn more fully and see Kiki, standing under one of the no-longer-magical streetlamps they’d had to replace, or lounging on a park bench eating ice cream with a chanter, or laughing as she flung one of the Society’s grandkids into the air to try to catch a passing navigator, or just watching.  Watching the world pass, immersed in it and allowed for a moment to be herself the way she wanted to be.

Of course, one time, he glimpsed that massive impossible shape and turned with a smile to see what Kiki was up to, only to see a different person instead.  They were shaped differently, but The Right Person At The Right Moment had decided to make an appearance and James recognized them anyway.  Though they seemed almost embarrassed to have been noticed, giving James an awkward two finger salute before stepping back behind a battered wooden power pole and not emerging from the other side.  He had no idea what Nick had been doing here, but there was no earth shattering kaboom following or preceding the pillar’s appearance, so… James just shook his head and got back to his ‘job’.

It was a lot.  It was everything.  But it was also, as the night carried on, becoming something incredibly and deeply special.

It was becoming normal.

This was, James realized, normal to him.  And not just to him.  The tension a lot of the visiting humans had when they arrived faded as the umbral and necroads and chanters failed to be anything except regular people enjoying a magical party.  The games and sights that were pulling everyone toward points of mingling slowly caused the formation of new groups, with new patterns of species and role.  And the festival turned into a thing he hadn’t realized he desired.

A thing that was normal.

Oh, he knew that it wasn’t really normal.  Go ten miles down the highway - assuming you could get past the hole in thinking about it that the Last Line had left behind - and you could find a city where most people would find this fucking bizarre and maybe even threatening.  But here, in Townton, right now, this was normal.  This was a party for everyone, and everyone meant everyone.

He didn’t realize he was crying until he felt Arrush slowly touch his arm, and he couldn’t explain why at all.  Not out loud, anyway.  Because saying it out loud would ruin everything.

This was, all of it, beautiful.  And if nothing changed, it was all at risk.  All going to go away.  There was some kind of thing coming that ended the world, and James didn’t even know what it would take to stop it, much less keep his tiny little sliver of wonderful civilization safe.

That was how he knew he was getting too tired from the day’s events.  James had better mental defense against his own morose bullshit when he was awake and alert, and no amount of Endurance seemed to help with moping.

”You know what’s funny?”  Arrush asked him, the big ratroach thankful that the majority of people who had wanted potions had gotten them already, and there wasn’t much interest in their booth for the moment.

James sniffed and cleared his throat, freeing an arm from the hug to wipe at the corner of his eye.  “That my reaction to wonderful moments is consistently ironic?”  James asked.

”No.  Well.  Yes.”  Arrush squeaked out in exasperation.  “What I think is funny is that now I can see your future.”

”Oh yeah?”  James felt a weak smile come back to his face.  “Scry my future, oh oracle of Townton.”

”You’re going to be okay.”  Arrush told him, the ratroach wrapping every arm he could around James and interlinking the blunted claws of his paws.  “We’re all going to be okay.  I can tell.  I know.  Y-you can… trust me.”

It was a fumbling attempt at reassurance, and yet, it was somehow exactly what James needed to hear.  Which, he supposed, made it a perfectly flawed reassurance.  “You’ve got a lot of faith in us.”  He muttered.

”Maybe.”  Arrush said with a cracked grin on his muzzle.  “Watcher-Under-Stone says that… there’s no such thing as faith, like most humans mean it.  She thinks that when people say they have faith, they mean that they want something so badly that they don’t know how to live in a world where it doesn’t happen.”  He shuffled his stance closer to James so he could wrap himself fully around his human, tails flicking behind him on the cold concrete.  “I don’t know if she’s right, but I know whatever comes next, I’ll be there with you.  You, and Keeka.  Alanna and Anesh, and everyone.  All of us can make it better.  Is that faith?  I don’t know!”  He chittered a quick laugh as he spoke.  “I don’t know, but I think it stops being faith once it happens and it turns out I was right.”

James pulled apart the threads of thought in Arrush’s words, and found himself trying to nod.  “Okay.”  He said slowly.  “I think that’s not how faith works, but also that might be exactly how faith works.”

He felt Arrush deflate slightly around him.  ”Humans are confusing.”  Arrush said.

”Don’t I know it.”  James laughed, and checked the time.  “Okay, our replacements are gonna be here soon, and I wanna go collapse on a couch and be actually warm.  Uh… what are we…” he trailed off and looked up at Arrush.  “What’re we doing tonight?  Like, for sleeping arrangements.  Everyone kind of splintered into a mess of date nights, what’s the plan?”

”I thought we’d all end up at your home until everyone was tired enough that no one worried about turning your bed into a shared nest and then we’d all get too hot.”  Arrush said.  “A-and we need to refill the racks before we leave!” He glowered down at the table as he straightened up.  “The people before us didn’t.”

”A, that’s a time honored tradition of every job I think, and B, that’s… that’s a remarkably astute observation about how our polycule works.”

”I’ve learned a lot this year.”  Arrush said with the smuggest possible ratroach grin that had ever been performed in the history of his species.

James snorted an abrupt laugh.  “God I fucking love you.  Okay, let’s do our jobs, and then maybe go get something to eat, since it’s been a while since my lunch.  And then… and then we figure it out from there, huh?”

They always did.  That was the great part about it.  They did figure things out.  They did keep going.  And sometimes, James had the most incredible bout of hubris where he really thought that he always could.

He even said as much to Arrush as they found one of the places that still had food - the festival had depleted a lot of the choices in the half a day it had been going - telling his boyfriend and also Alanna and Sarah that had joined them before they all got a ride home from the logisticor swap that he felt like he could handle anything in that moment.

Everyone had glared at him for that.  For tempting fate in such an obvious stupid way, that practically guaranteed that either his phone would ring or the sky would catch fire or JP would show up in his hilarious cape and domino mask outfit to tell him that he had to run at high speed to save the world.

But nothing happened.  Well, nothing cataclysmic that James had to respond to.  There were probably a dozen small incidents at the festival that someone was handling.  They had medical tents and a lost and found for a reason, after all.

There wasn’t a sudden end to everything that mattered to him, though.  Instead, James got to head home with people he loved, where they all got to just relax together.  Easing into the comfort of a shared home, half-waiting for the rest of their family to trickle back in from where they were still off having a fun night.  Their night stretched on, not ending instantly the second the door closed, with all of them finding they had more they wanted to say or share with each other.

And when they slept, they did so together, in a pile, and Arrush was correct.  It was too hot.

“Happy solstice.”  James whispered to all of them before he fell asleep.  “Let’s do this again next year.”

It was an excellent end to an excellent day.

And the person that needed to call him to tell him that there was a crisis that threatened to end the world at least had the good grace to wait until the next morning.