The Daily Grind - Chapter 368 (Patreon)

“‘Wailing sirens’ the newspapers say.  As if all we hear is a desolate cry keening above the streets… rather than a protective call of reassurance, a community chorus of ‘we are running your way’.” -Thomas Sharp, The Running Towards-

_____

There were still a lot of people in the physical audience when James took his seat at one of the tables arranged in a horseshoe shape at the front of the once-again-rearranged briefing warehouse.  Not an overwhelming crowd, but there were at least a couple hundred in attendance, and for the first time, humanity wasn’t an overwhelming majority.

Humans were still the largest single species by numbers, yes.  But the quantity of camracondas and ratroaches, as well as additions from umbral, chanters, inhabitors, and even stuff animals, meant that humanity wasn’t quite so dominant.  They had become what James had always hoped for, at least locally; just another part of a community, and not the ocean that everyone else was expected to submerge themselves into.

That wasn’t the case for the people at the tables, though.  They weren’t all human, but there simply hadn’t been enough time for education and specialization for the nonhuman populations the way there had been for humans that had decades of lead time on the dungeon life.  One day, these forums would have more ratroaches representing specialist departments, or any chanters representing task committees.  But not yet.  And in a way, James was glad of that.  Wanting to contribute, wanting to give back, that was good.  But he wanted them to have their own chance to grow up and fuck around for a while, not just jump straight into helping run a small government.

James sat down between Ishah’s chitin-heavy form, and the more human shape of Rajesh, captain of one of the shield teams.  They both gave him different forms of nods, and the people around the tables who had watched him approach all slowly went quiet as James filled the last seat they had.

He wasn’t late.  That was impossible with Planner operating as the Lair’s benevolent schedule overlord.  He was just deliberately the last person to walk in and take their spot.

”All in attendance.”  Planner’s voice wasn’t raised, because the assignment didn’t ever need to raise their voice to be heard within the Lair, not with this many of their bonded around.  “We can begin.  Introductions, begin from this end, please.”

Two people stood, one of them the man next to James.  “Captains Rajesh and Evans, representing the Order’s shield teams.”

James got his own turn rapidly.  “James Lyle.  Paladins.” He said simply.  It wasn’t really the whole answer, but it was the one that most accurately described his role for this.

”Ishah.”  The chitinous ratroach next to him said.  “For Response’s dungeon emergency division.”

Next to him, one person stood while another straightened up.  “Max and Smoke-And-Ember, Response’s non-dungeon reps.”

The winged figure that stood next moved with military precision.  “Cam… Marselli.”  She said, causing James to raise an eyebrow.  “Townton.”

The next ratroach to stand up moved like she was still getting used to her limbs, which was actually just literally correct.  “Uh, hi.  Reed Moshofsky, head of Research.  This is Chevoy, Martha, and Mars, skulljack, infomorph, and robotics specialists.”  She sat back down having indicated the Research underlings with a filed claw.

The next man who stood was older but somehow seemed like the healthiest person in the room.  “Davis Sinclair, potions.”  He said, before smoothly retaking his seat.

”Karen Ward.  Business development.” Was the next voice.  Prim and concise.

”Deb, representing our medical teams.”  Deb said, looking up but not standing as she introduced herself and then went right back to memorizing whatever was on the pages she was reading.

The infomorph that was next to her, curled in one of the camraconda chairs in an endless series of pink and white coils, did actually rise out of their seat to drift in plain sight.  “And I am Mercy, also medical.”

“Um…” the next woman in the line was someone James had met, but who wasn’t typically someone he saw around the Lair.  And her own hesitant introduction mostly explained why.  “My name is Linda Barker, this is Pete Hawke.  We represent the Order of Endless Room’s education project.”

The human next to them was much more cheerful.  “Hi.  Juan here.  Fostering and developmental understanding.  Scent-Of-Rain is my counterpart.”  The camraconda next to him inclined her head.

The human woman past them had a simpler introduction.  “Cathy, general Recovery representative.”  She said with a calm intonation.

Almost to the end was a human and a golden retriever, one of them looking a lot more out of place than the other all of a sudden.  “Nate Marselli.”  Nate said slowly, looking across the row of tables toward where Cam was sitting like an unmoving statue.  “And Rho.  Rogues.”

The actual last person was one of those familiar faces that had somehow become a staple of the Lair for James.  Standing up, clearly a little more nervous to be in front of an audience than he’d expected, the young human looked like he’d shed a lot of the puppy dog vibe that James remembered, but not all of it.  “Ethan!”  He said his name a little too quickly, looking like he was debating if he should salute.  “Representing the delver teams!”  He added.

Planner’s ethereal glowing tentacles and manifested eyes shifted in the air over the central focus of the tables.  “This scheduled general assembly can now begin.”  They said calmly.  “Our agenda is to determine changes to the Order of Endless Room’s long term course of action regarding rapidly degrading conditions on Earth, including the collective sensation of dread that began earlier this morning.”

One of the education people raised their hand.  “Um…” she looked around expectantly.

“Oh, please speak.  I will keep conversation ordered.  It will save time.”  Planner said.  James had actually really come to appreciate Planner’s influence, especially since they’d chilled out about casual aspects of life and instead focused on streamlining the professional side of the Order even further.

”Right, right.”  Linda lowered her hand, fidgeting with her blouse, clearly feeling like she was out of place with this specific group.  “I know that the Order likes to solve problems itself, and… forgetting happens a lot with the worse troubles.”  Where many of the assembled members nodded, a few of them shuddered, Linda included.  “But shouldn’t we tell someone?”

James fielded that question.  “So, you’re right.” He said with the kind of voice that invited worry about what was coming next.  “There’s just a couple problems.  One is that ‘everything feels spooky’ isn’t really a good enough starting point, especially not the way the world looks right now to most normal people.  High political tensions and higher rates of poverty mean that everyone sorta feels a looming sense of dread.  It’s not really actionable, you know?”  James tried to give a sympathetic smile, and found it challenging.  “The other thing is, tell who?”

”The government?”  Linda asked, almost incredulous that James wouldn’t have thought of that already.

Near her, Nate gave an irate sigh.  “Tried that.”  He rapped his knuckles on the table.  “The closest thing the government has to a good answer is currently a broken group of four idiots doing their own independent investigation because they stopped getting paychecks because their whole department got blanked.”  He shook his head, tugging at the collar of his shirt even though he was still missing the tie he’d thrown on a chair somewhere hours ago.

”Also not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think any of us actually trust any current world superpowers.”  James said with a smile.

”Bigger organizations appear to suffer more from ambient memeplexes.”  Planner added the information to the room.  “The United States government is one such organization.  Small antimemes that might not even be problems for the majority of people seem to all impact a government that covers their area.  Though this is supposition.”

Reed nodded her angular head, idly scratching at her chitin.  “Yeah, we’re working on it.  Studying memeplexes is hard!  But the safest tests we’ve done do kinda look like there’s a reverse-authority problem?  Like, if something is your ‘job’ then a memeplex can latch onto that even if you aren’t personally ‘in range.’”  She made air quotes with more claws than was necessary.

”So,” James clarified, “the bigger a government is, the less they can do.  Not because of, like, opinions on politics or whatever, but specifically because they’re getting hit from every angle by things that mess with their organizational ability, and they have no defenses.  The Order might not be huge, but we’ve got multiple different kinds of defense against the stuff that would keep the army from reacting to a dungeon attack.”

Ishah made a small clicking sound as he shook his head in frustration.  “Also there is less army than people think.  We saw that.  In Missouri.”

”Right, that.”  James puffed up his cheeks as he exhaled as much anxiety as he could.  “That’s part of what I’m talking about.  Part of why I called this assembly.”

”Not just for fun?”  Mars asked, though his little quip didn’t interrupt anything or slow down James’ commentary.

James didn’t have a presentation prepared or anything, but he had two things going for him at the moment.  A unique perspective, and also, both Planner and the skulljacks to shore up his lack of notes to hand out.  “We don’t know a lot about the whole world.  We’re pretty focused in the US, mostly.  But we do know that on multiple occasions, the US military has been…”

”MIA.”  Nate supplied.  “AWOL.”

”Yes, those acronyms.”  James couldn’t help a small joke as Planner created a glowing projection with numerical estimates for him.  “Not everyone, but enough that it’s really hard to tell how much of the army even exists.  How much of the government exists.  Beginning active diplomatic contact was on our short list of things to do, yeah, but if you want to know why ‘tell someone’ isn’t going to be a quick fix…”

Evans leaned forward, the proficient and blooded combatant doing his best to not think about how many people were in the room.  “Now, I know the feeling you mean.”  He said slowly.  “The dread.  Yeah.  But what do we actually know about things ‘getting worse’?  That isn’t… actionable?”  He cleared his throat as he went still, as if trying to blend into his seat.

The scribbling pen voice of Planner added context for those who didn’t know.  “Seven months ago, during our first paladin initiation ceremony, paladin Lyle made contact with the Right Person At The Right Moment.  During that conversation, it was revealed that the organization known as the Pillars believed that complex civilization as it currently exists on Earth would fail in under two years.”  They paused, tentacles stilling, some of their manfisted form folding over itself almost nervously.  “This leaves us with a window of seventeen months to find the tools to resist this outcome.”

“Maximum.”  Ishah said, sitting straighter as eyes turned on him.  “It didn’t sound… flexible.”  He clarified.

”No it did not.”  James grimaced.  “Now, we’ve been seeing… let’s say problems… for a while.  Dungeons aren’t just dangerous, sometimes they’re actively predatory, and whether that’s on the scale of an office buying a couple hundred people to use as brain slaves, or an aggressive suburb trying to eat ten square miles of city, I can see how that could be what has them scared.  But it’s not just that.  It’s what the people who have the magic from those dungeons do with it.”  He stood up as he kept speaking, looking around at the assembled group of knowledgeable and skilled leaders within the Order.  “How many people are going to try to set themselves up as warlords?  Or worse?  How many people are just going to oops into a weather control spell, or unleash a wizard plague?”

Deb huffed.  “We almost did that, and we’re generally careful about contagions.  Could be more careful though.”  She commented idly.

Cam folded her arms tightly over her chest.  “The pillar that created me,” that casual statement drew a couple surprised looks, but not that many, “never spoke about it directly.  But it was clear that he was losing ground over time.  Statistically, more and more threats arose as time passed.  I don’t know if he had, or has, a plan for it.  But often his response to any perceived threat is to crack down on it with excessive force.”

”Yeah, I was gonna say.”  Juan said with a furrowed brow.  “This all sounds… Status Quo coded.”

”It does.”  James admitted.  “That’s part of what I want to lay out here.  We need… not ‘a plan’.  There can’t be A plan.”  He didn’t make a joke about their resident assignment.  “But we need to figure out, now, before it really starts, how we’re going to react to stuff, and what we’re gonna do it with.”

Karen gave a tiny yet powerful nod that drew attention almost without Planner needing to alter anything.  “At what scale, and… hm… level of the arcane?”

”Oh, like, do we think the Order should intervene if a country becomes a dictatorship?”  Juan asked from near her, seeming to legitimately contemplate the question.

”Yes.”  Smoke-And-Ember didn’t think that hard.  “Of course.  Are you fools?”

”Oh good we’re getting to this part early.”  James muttered to himself, trying not to laugh as he saw the splash of motion that the comment drew from the seated crowd that was almost completely silently watching the assembly.

The camraconda continued, making a point that James found suspiciously familiar.  “If we found a malevolent dictatorship inside a dungeon, we would not hesitate to remove it.  It is understandable that many humans will default to thinking it is not their place to change the world.  Understandable.  But not correct.  We change worlds constantly.  Why is this one exempt?”

”Scale and logistics.”  Karen answered with something James was not expecting.  “It is the same reason we did not simply dismantle the bureaucracy of the Mormon Church.  They outnumber us, extensively, and despite their violations of basic rights, that is not a fight we could win.”  She pensively tapped the table with an extended finger.  “Though our treaty with them, even if they are violating it in some ways, is already a different form of influence.  So there is the answer.  You are incorrect, we are affecting the global landscape.”

”We could do more.”  Smoke-And-Ember stated.

”We could.  I believe that is our paladin’s point.”  Karen answered.

Max made a show of raising their hand even though that was made utterly pointless by Planner’s smoothing of the social flow.  “Also we run Response?”  They said, side-eyeing the camraconda they were sitting with.  “Ember, you’re in Response.  What do you think we’re doing?”

James cut that off, steering the discussion toward something more productive than mild bickering.  “I think I’d like to answer Karen’s question first.”  He said.  “And I wanna be clear, at no point should the Order of Endless Rooms ever look like another iteration of Status Quo.  But I do think we should be ready to respond to crises that are already starting to pop up more and more.  Hell, today there have been at least two, and one of them we can’t even connect to a dungeon.”

Rajesh, more composed than the other shield team captain when it came to public speaking, raised his eyebrows.  “I understood that the Order did not want a conventional military.”  He said.

”We don’t.”  Nate said.  “He means preparing for everything.  Because every time the Order helps out, you turn it into more strength.”  He jerked his chin toward Ishah, who was the most conveniently placed example.

”Magic does help us be ready for that kind of thing.”  Cathy said with a small smile in Karen’s direction.  “Recovery could use more staff, but… if we’re doing disaster planning, the Order already has the tools to start putting together mobile relief posts.”  Planner plucked the idea she focused on from her thoughts and organized it, displaying the statistics on the growing efficiency of the Thermodynamic Tunnel powerplant setup.  “Just being able to get electricity to places in the wake of an event could save lives.”

”Relatively inexpensive, as well.”  Planner added.  “Though this brings us to an important question.”  They met James’ eyes with their own manifested ones, before looking at everyone around the room.  “Do we continue to plan to intervene?  If there is a large scale disaster - or even simply enough small scale problems - coming, should we not prepare to protect ourselves?”

James winced, but it was Karen who spoke first.  “It doesn’t work.”  She told the assignment.  “For the same reason that Smoke-And-Ember can’t effectively conquer a country.  We are not self sufficient, and anything that poses a threat to eight billion humans poses a threat to us as well.”

”Townton is close to self sufficiency.”  Cam said, surprising a lot of them.  “There are issues we don’t have good solutions for yet, like garbage collection, but with the dungeon as a source of fuel…”

”That isn’t the point.”  Rho said, the golden retriever’s completely normal if somewhat emotionless voice still a strange juxtaposition.  “Our objective is to keep as many people as possible safe.  We cannot do that if we focus on our own defense.”  The rogue paused, then added, “Though if our defenses fail, our ability to operate… falters.”  It was said with the most anxiety James had ever heard from an inhabitor, and that counted his conversations with Bea.

James took a deep breath.  “And that’s my answer to half of Karen’s question.  Our objectives are, in order of priority, protecting ourselves, stopping mass casualty events, stopping the abuse of magic.  I think… that’s something we can all broadly agree on?”  No one disputed him, though not everyone nodded along.  It was more that there wasn’t an opposing plan for anyone to latch onto, just some doubts about this one.  “So the question then that matters is, how big do we go?”

”How big can we go?”  Chevoy asked coyly.

”There’s a problem with a lot of our magic.” James said.  “Not a dangerous one, like whatever is going on with Velocity mana being a new and exciting organ.  No, I mean that, most of our magic is… convenient?  Small scale.  Our biggest area spells require days of spellbook study, and our biggest impact spells take team efforts to pool Breath.  This is, ironically, what’s probably keeping the planet intact.  A ton of dungeon magic is person-scale, and that means everyone else’s is too.”

Cam made a noise that it took a second for James to identify as a chuckle.  “Your strength, our strength, is in organization.”  She said bluntly.  “Skulljacks for rapid training, Pylon levels for enhancement, Climb spells for flexibility.  Even without using any of our valuable ritual space, we can produce higher quality field operatives, faster than we have any right to.  If you want to expand our scope, our focus should be on recruitment.”

The other man from the education duo, Pete, raised his voice.  “I know a few good people.”  He said eagerly.  “Was talking to someone about this the other day at Greenway, actually.  I think a lot of us know a few people.  If Ms. Marselli is right, then… you don’t need to get people who are already trained.  Right?  You can just get people who fit in and then train them.  I know I helped out with that, even!  So why not?”

”It would help.”  Karen admitted.  “The budget is the issue.  As mentioned, we are not self sufficient.  Money does matter, and we do not have an infinite supply.  And society hasn’t collapsed.  A dollar is a dollar, and it has value.  Besides that, ideological recruitment is valid, but the Order’s commitment to guaranteeing food and shelter means we need to make more money.”

”Also I doubt your good people would make good rogues.”  Nate grumbled.  “But it’d help everyone else.”

Rho gave his nominal boss a look that somehow came across as annoyed and baffled, despite being on a canine face that didn’t really do either of those expressions that well.  “That is not my experience with our division.”  He said.  “We do need more help though.”

James had a thought about that, but he wanted to solidify something first.  “Okay, unless anyone has concerns to voice, let’s do a quick vote here.  All in favor of expanding recruitment?”  Hands of varying style went up.  “Great.  Now, two follow-ups.  One, what do we think about recruiting from dungeons?  The Pylons specifically have a sophont species that we might be able to just hire.”

”We already steal more of my species when possible.”  Scent-Of-Rain said with a bob.

Linda winced, the teacher wobbling a hand in the air.  “Most camracondas aren’t recruits though.”  She said with more authority than her original uncertain questioning.  “They’re new-maturity dependents.  That’s why they mesh so well with other students, there isn’t much mental difference between a freshly absconded camraconda and an eleven to thirteen year old human.”

”If, and it’s an if, there are dungeon species that want to join, isn’t…” Cathy twirled a pen around, trying to figure out how to phrase her thought, “…isn’t the point of the Order that we accept that?  So if there is a sophont species, we shouldn’t hesitate to actively recruit from them.  Speaking of which, the umbral.”

Before James could say anything, Cam spoke up.  “The umbral are in a similar category to ratroaches, in terms of trauma.  Like most dungeon life, they were implanted with structured knowledge and have supplemented that with their own learning over the last several years.  I believe we should make the option clear, but not make specific invitations at this time, as many of them are still recovering and need time.  Time that we can, currently, afford.”

“Both at home in Townton, and in Saskatoon.”  James added.  “Though I disagree with Cam a bit.  We should specifically talk to the active Compiled Wastes delvers.  Human and otherwise.”

”What’s our target?”  Max asked suddenly.  “For recruitment, I mean.  I love the Order.  I know things are going to change over time.  But… how many people can we absorb and not be warped?”

”I’d like another thousand people.”  Nate said.  “Not just for the rogues, in general.”

Karen seemed to almost physically take damage from that.  “We can’t.  We just cannot afford that.  Not yet.”

”We’ve done this before.”  Ishah of all people spoke, his voice clearly annoyed.  “We have tools that people want.  Sell them.  Find a rich human with cancer and offer them a solution in exchange for everything they have.  We already believe that no one should have cancer, and no one should hoard wealth, it is perfect.”

”God I hate how much sense that makes.”  Evans muttered to himself, before raising his voice.  “I hate the idea of letting people skip the line for being rich, but if we can turn their money into more help, is this some new ethics problem I need to learn?  Or is that okay?”

James wished there was a clear answer to that one.  “It’s complicated.”  He said.  “But that said… we can do that with lung cancer, at least.  Our supply of that cure is going through the roof.  I think?”

Davis nodded as his area of expertise came up.  “Potion production is doing good, and still growing.  We can easily handle the Order’s need for exercise and toughness potions, as well as keeping up a production line for pretty much everything we’ve got a safe recipe for.  The lung restoration option isn’t the easiest to make, and it is pretty bad for you because no one should drink gasoline.  But!  We can make a lot of it.  We’re shipping six thousand doses a week at this point.”

”Thousand?”  Scent-Of-Rain had missed the scale of the operation, apparently.

Davis nodded, brushing something off his collar.  “Getting the vials takes more effort than getting the potion materials at this point.  Justine and Hilbert handle the distribution, we just make the stuff.  Though I know through conversation that there’s a lot of grateful people there.”

”Yes,” Planner flourished a tentacle and showed off an income report.  “The operation is self-funded.  Some insurance companies now pay us, having accepted the reduced cost.”  The assignment paused.  “I do not know how either of the operational directors have managed that.  That is impressive.”

”Okay, let me outline this in specific concrete terms that we can make a decision on, right now.”  James said firmly.  It was a little strange to say something like that, and have people listen.  It was strange to think that he’d intentionally done the research and legwork to even have an idea to present.  But it wasn’t strange enough for him to stop talking.  “We need more people.  That means more currency, and also, more groundwork for the contingency of that currency no longer being worth anything.  That means work.  Specific work, that we can actively start on.  We need to turn our resources into money, and that money into people.  Does anyone disagree?”

No one did, though Karen did have one thing to add.  “We can’t operate at a loss forever.”  She reminded them.  “But it isn’t impossible.  And we are at a point where we have an industry contact, duplicated valuable materials could do a lot.  We would just be sacrificing magic for them.”

”We’ll put that in the details pile to work out later.”  James hated the details.  “So.  A thousand people.  Can we do that in a month?”  They stared at him, varying levels of aghast and baffled.  “I’m serious.  It’s like Pete said, everyone knows at least a couple people.  And we can recruit from the umbral, camraconda, ratroach, even chanter civilian populations.  They are people who can make that choice, and a lot of them trust us.”

Ishah, staring at James almost defiantly, also chose to add his own words.  “And some of them have special powers.”  He said.

”…I don’t like to think of things that way.”  James replied.

”But they do.”  Ishah pressed, glancing with smooth flicks of his angular muzzle at the rest of the group.  “We don’t have to exploit people!  But be honest.”

Evans shrugged.  “It’s fair.”  He said.  “Also if no umbral want to join, you can always just find people like you found us.”  He jerked a thumb at Rajesh.  “Just camp outside military recruiters and snap up anyone desperate enough to sign up.  A thousand is a lot, but I vote yes on it.”

“I’m gonna regret the hell out of this, but I’m in.” Nate said.  “Might need to have actual assignments for a while, the freeform way won’t work if the newbies outnumber us.”

Other voices joined in.  Yesses, but not all enthusiastic.  It was one thing to gradually expand the Order, it was another to spike their roster quite so rapidly, and especially with the intention of finding people who would be trained as knights.

The old words all of them had read at least once still held.  No one in the Order was ever expendable.  But a thousand was a big number, and it felt like they were preparing to take losses, even if no one wanted that.

“It is agreed.”  Planner announced.  “There are three submissions or nominations already from members willing to manage the effort.”

”We’ll need to reach out to the umbral.”  Nate told them.  “Everyone else basically lives in Townton, they’re not hard to talk to.  But, what, half the umbral are all up in Saskatchewan?”

”Simon’s there.”  James said, actually acting as the paladin representative.  “He’s… actually no this isn’t the place for jokes.  Yeah, he’s there right now, and he’s been acting as a mediator.  I already messaged him, I’ll follow up with him later and make sure the information is compiled.” He frowned as he checked his own messages.  “Actually kind of surprised he hasn’t replied already.”  James said it and instantly realized that was probably a bad sign.

But Simon was probably more capable than he was.  And yet, James still forced himself to stop thinking before he even thought the words “I’m sure he’s fine.”

_____

Saskatoon was, in Simon’s opinion, one step away from counting as having an apocalypse already.

Which was to say, it was snowing.  Again.  Or maybe it was better to say it had never stopped snowing.  Either snow or rain, not constantly, but on and off to the point that going outside felt like a gamble with the endless wind and freezing temperatures.  And at least part of Simon was from California.  So this entire place felt like some kind of grand scale mistake.  No one, unless they were being held at gunpoint, would build a city here.

But he was here.  Lately he’d been here on and off pretty often.  At first it was just dropping in to help specific umbral with problems, but then it turned into being one of the Order’s representatives here, and then into acting as a kind of intermediary for when the umbral needed to deal with humans.

That was going weirdly well, in his opinion.  Not perfectly; there were a lot of umbral who rightly resented the cops and oligarchs that had been happy to use them as magical batteries, and there were more than a few humans both in those groups and just on the street that thought the umbral were scary, weird, threatening, or worse, useless.  And unfortunately Simon was trying to stop solving problems by shooting people in the head, so those people got to keep talking for now.

But a lot of his work really was just helping new people integrate.  Acting as a very effective middleman to secure housing or jobs, meeting with the local government to assure them that the Order was competent and worth meeting with, and also, sometimes, sometimes, handling the other problem.

Because there being two different dungeons, one of them more or less public, meant that sometimes shitty people were going to get their hands on magic.  And the demiplanes the Compiled Wastes offered very often came with surprises that could be absurdly dangerous.

“Can’t believe you dragged me out here for this.”  Silverson complained from where he was sitting across the restaurant table from Simon.

”We’re inside, stop complaining.”  Simon told the man, politely ignoring how Silverson looked drenched to the bone.  Maybe he’d never needed to hold his own umbrella before.

Wedged uncomfortably against the outer wall the booth was up against, tendrils pushed down so they were at least pretending to be a little out of sight through the plate glass window that showed off the parking lot, Mark took one of his colored eyes off the outside and focused on the dumber human.  “You have a spell for staying dry, you bizarre idiot.”  He said.

“…I may have given it away.”  Silverson said, eyes focused on the black slush that the pavement outside was covered in.

”If we’re talking about bad ideas, Mark, why are you even trying to hide?”  Simon asked, honestly curious.  “Barely anyone can recognize umbral by silhouette.”

”And if this one can?”  The shadow questioned.  “Even your dog has the good sense to hide.”

Simon looked under the table to where Magneto was curled up on their feet, the mongausse happily draping himself over everyone’s physical forms with his mildly incorporeal body.  “He’s not hiding.”

”He’s also more recognizable than Mark.”  Silverson pointed out.  “I don’t even think most umbral would recognize you.  Especially since everyone who might be… shall we say, upset… moved to the Order’s home.”

Mark flicked a serrated tendril in the air over the basket of fries they were supposedly sharing, but actually was mostly going to Simon, neither of the others comfortable eating at the moment.  “You would be surprised.”  He said with a breezy sigh.  “It isn’t often, but… I don’t stray into public for a reason.”

”I’m kind of enjoying being out in the open, honestly.”  Simon said, wincing as he realized how much that sounded like bragging when Mark had just expressed his opposite feeling.  “I mean, I could do this at home.  But it’s different here.  Everyone got used to this.”

“Good.”  Silverson said bluntly.  “Maybe next time…” he trailed off.

None of them spoke.  There was nothing to say.  Not about that.  Everything that was important, they’d already discussed, and anything else would be a waste of breath.

“So how’s civilian life going?”  Simon asked to fill the dead air. 

Mark and Silverson looked at each other.  “Which of us?”  The umbral asked.  “Wait.  It doesn’t matter.  Neither of us count, because we’re here, with you.”

“Well now let’s not get hasty.”  Silverson said, raising a hand over their drinks.  “I’m a consultant. That counts, certainly.”

“And how’s that going then.”  Simon was starting to unfortunately realize why he saw James sigh so often. 

Silverson gave him a pleasant smile.  “It’s the worst paying job I’ve ever had.  But at least Bob still returns my calls.  I think that old dragon got a taste for danger, and I might blame you a bit for it.”

“I wasn’t even here for that.”  Simon muttered, checking out the window again, as well as through his networked camera feed.  Still no sign of anyone.

Tendrils drifting like an anemone, Mark settled his compressed form against the booth’s bench, and laughed lightly.  “That man finally found something that he can buy that excites him.  And he still wants us to let him into the caverns.”

“So do I.”  Simon bluntly reminded the umbral.

Mark’s tendrils split, half of them drooping, a movement Simon had started seeing as a shrug of sorts.  “Trust is challenging.”

“I’m trying out being direct.”  Simon told him.  “It works irritatingly well for James.  I want more magic, and I also want to see what your home is like.”

Mark was one of many umbral that lived in the dungeon still, though he ‘worked’ outside it. The fact that the dungeon’s main door couldn’t be opened from the inside by its own creations did make mobility a challenge and a half, but there was a rotating roster of paid volunteers that held the entrance for at least eight hours a day.  Mark also, Simon knew, was one of the umbral that appreciated their reward being treated with honesty.

Which was how Simon had ended up on his third advancement already.  But a few more wouldn’t hurt.

“My home is mostly just dark.  Not many seats.”  Mark commented.

Clearing his throat, the other human coyly interjected. “I’ve got a whole building full of furniture I’m replacing.”  Silverson offered.

Simon rolled his eyes.  The man never stopped bringing up the cost of the remodel to his house.  To one house.  Simon had obviously met James and their paladin’s penchant for property damage, but it couldn’t honestly be that bad.  He assumed.  “I’ll take you to IKEA.”  He told Mark.  “Or you could just move to Townton.”

“I… want to see how it can go.  Here.  At least for now.”  Mark said quietly.  “Sometimes I feel unforgivable.”  He started to say, before cutting off his own words and shifting to stare out the window he was next to without speaking.

“We did what we needed to.”  Silverson tried to reassure him, voice caught between anger and denial and maybe just being incredibly tired.

Simon wasn’t so sure.  But he also didn’t know how he could have done any better.  So he sipped his juice, and went back to waiting and watching without conversation.

The voice of the waitress broke the silence.  “Can I get you boys anything?”  The human woman asked the question as if having them here was perfectly normal.  And that was a kind of magic that Simon would never be able to cast on his own.  The people of Saskatoon weren’t perfect.  But for a lot of them, the arrival of the umbral had galvanized something.  Maybe it was easy to accept differences when someone was exceptionally different, but whatever was happening, it felt like things were getting just a little kinder.

“No thanks, we’re just-“ Simon stopped talking as Mark tapped him, one of the umbral’s massive fingers splitting off as he started to unfold his hands.  “Shoot.  Scuse us.”  The woman got out of the way quickly as Simon slid from the booth and stood, Magneto falling in next to him with precision that the magnetic dog seemed smug about having mastered.

The person they were trying to meet was here.

Now, that person didn’t know that Simon was trying to meet him.  In fact, the Wastes delver was here because their demiplane had two entrances that Simon had been able to map, and one of them was “parking lot of the nearest open sports bar”.  He didn’t know where the delver lived, and might actually have been wrong about the slip itself, but process of elimination had put them here, and it had worked.

Which was good, because the person Simon was trying to talk to was, in fact, not guilty of anything at all.  They were just a normal umbral, who appeared to mostly use their demiplane for benign stuff, which meant it was none of Simon’s business.  But they were someone who had been on the target list for the psycho going around murdering people with demiplanes.

Getting that list had been mostly just random chance.  Figuring out what it was had cost too much time.  And Simon was not feeling especially calm as he moved toward the front door.  He didn’t expect to catch the person right now, just to wait for them to come back out and have a chat.  So his coat got zipped up, and his boots splashed into the slush as he moved at a wide angle in the general direction of where the person was in the process of stepping out of reality, but he didn’t rush.

He was about to settle in to wait, grateful that the snow wasn’t bad at the moment, when someone else hopped out of a parked car, and started walking straight for the slip point.

Not inherently suspicious; the umbral were one thing, but the knowledge of the local dungeon and the demiplanes was relatively uncommon.  Someone might just be curious.  But curious people didn’t tend to move like they were stalking someone, nor did they wear Halloween masks as part of their daily routine.

Simon was almost insulted by how obvious the guy was.  But not really.  The reality was, he was mostly just focused on not looking like he was paying attention, while he kept a sharp eye on the other party that he might be about to cross paths with at the slip point.  He didn’t think too much about how he felt when he was operating as a paladin, he saved that for between the dangerous bits.  The borrowed umbral spell Blend In also helped him out a little; the magic didn’t seem to do mental effects, which was good, but it did make Magneto look like a normal dog for a bit and that was kind of enough.

The other guy got there first, because Simon was moving slow, and instead of just waiting, he held out a silvery object in his hand toward the air itself.

And the slip opened up.

”Oh shit.”  Simon’s voice was unfortunately audible over a lull in the wind, and the ironic serial killer mask turned his way as the person he was pretty sure was their killer ripped open someone else’s demiplane.  He was already moving forward, abandoning subtlety and far faster than the other human.

The masked dumbass standing at the yawning portal entrance that shouldn’t even be visible to anyone but the demiplane owner took too much time staring at Simon, before he frantically turned and raised his other arm like he was going to pitch whatever he was holding into the breach in reality.  He didn’t make it though, Simon shouldering into him and snagging his wrist in an unyielding vice grip before the ball he had could be flung.  “Son of a bitch, let me go!”  The voice came through the plastic mask muffled.

”No.” Simon pulled them farther from the slip, a quick hand signal to Silverson getting the man to call one of his slightly more trusted detectives to the scene.  “We’re going to talk, and-“

The person he was holding suddenly felt different, and Simon had only a split second to shift his authority’s reinforcement as he was kicked in the gut and sent flying back thirty feet, skidding and tumbling across the brackish slush of the parking lot.

Now he was angry.

Magneto’s howl and snapped electromagnetic jaws on the enemy human’s hip drew attention, and Simon saw Mark and Silverson running out of the restaurant to help, but he was already on his feet and sprinting forward.  Pylon levels, purple orbs, Sewer parasite, a bunch of things all at once let Simon close the gap in under two seconds, and once again snag the attacker’s wrist before he could fling whatever the clay ball was into the slip.  But this time, Simon applied pressure, and felt even strengthened flesh crush under his fingers.  “Put that down.”  He said with a displeased voice.

The masked man screamed, and tried to kick Simon again, but this time Simon caught the leg and yanked.  Magneto rolled away as the person who was their murder suspect slid on the slick ground and then slammed onto their back on the pavement.  The clay ball they were gripping also went rolling, but that object cracked almost as soon as it tapped the parking lot.

The scream intensified as soon as the assailant lost his grip on the ball, which was how Simon knew it was bad.  “Go!”  He ordered Magneto, pointing back at the other two and halting their own approach.  He hunched to grab the masked man’s leg, assuming that the now-glowing ball was going to explode and intending to not let it just kill someone, no matter how shitty they were.  But whatever Simon planned, he didn’t have time for it.

The ball didn’t explode.  Quite the opposite really.  There was a momentary feeling of pressure, and then pain; the failure of his authority, his armor, and his internal organs all at once.  And for just a moment, nothing.  Simon kind of wondered if he’d just died, and then wondered how that was possible when he was wearing one of Kiki’s charms.

Then the darkness was gone, and he was left listening to the ping of the metal charm shattering, the noise rising over the sound of traffic and snow alike, with Simon falling down several feet to impact the smoothed out spherical crater that was left of the parking lot.

Of the murderer, there was only one sign, and it was currently rushing toward his face.  A clay brick tower that was falling over from ten feet overhead.  Simon snapped an arm out to grab the lip of the crater and found a pile of hot sand there, shifting under his grip.  No, not shifting, expanding; already starting to fill the crater that was left.  Other stuff too; shelves, a golden metal basin ten feet across that nearly crushed him as he dove out of the depression and started rolling to the side, a boat.  A wall across the parking lot that hadn’t been there a moment ago had a door in it that Simon threw himself through, finding a bedroom with a whole pond surrounded by cattails on the other side of, the water spilling out of the mud and dirt that no longer held its shape, the plants mostly fallen over.

Car alarms were going off.  A lot of them.  The crater from the explosion was buried under a dozen different chunks of demiplane.

This was new.

Simon had kind of thought the killer was collecting demiplanes from the kills.  But this looked like upon his death, he’d just spilled his whole inner world into… well… the outer world.

”Paladin!”  Mark’s voice crackled with more static than Magneto usually did as his form crashed through a door and grabbed Simon, hauling him away from the still-collapsing demiplane constructs.  “You’re alive!  How are you alive?!”

Simon was having a hard time forming sentences.  Slowly, he used one hand to pat himself down, and found that his shirt was mostly gone, his kevlar vest was half charred embers, and a good amount of his skin was smouldering.  Also his skulljack braid seemed like it had melted, so that sucked.  “Ow.”  He hissed.  “That wasn’t…”

That wasn’t supposed to happen.  This was the worst outcome.  No answers, just someone who had been killing people for an unknown reason.  A reason that they might never know now.

All they had to show for it was a charm that might take a month to recover, an amount of property damage that no one had prepared for, and the new knowledge that if someone died outside of their demiplane, the demiplane went with them.

”He was killing them when they went in.”  Simon said as he sat with his back against the bar’s outer wall, sipping water that Silverson had handed him.  “So this didn’t… happen.”

”A conscientious serial killer then.”  The ex-mayor said, standing almost at ease as he watched the fire department swarm the site, making sure nothing was going to explode or fall on anyone.  “Are we certain he wasn’t just farming umbral?”  The word ‘farming’ rolled off his tongue like a foreign object, the slang both unfamiliar and awkward to him.

”No.” Simon sighed.  “But he had their magic.”

”This target was umbral.”  Mark pointed out.  “How many of the others?”

”No idea.”  Simon groaned as one of his bones protested something he’d done, though he had no idea what he’d done to annoy it.  “He had a tattoo.”  He said suddenly, mind scouring the whole encounter.  “On his wrist.  I only saw half of it, kind of the Da Vinci human model thing, maybe?  Could be nothing.”

”This is going to happen again.”  Mark said quietly.

Simon stared at the ruin of the parking lot.  Multiple layers of dungeon reward in the process of collapsing, an absolute mess of material, some of which was probably still magic  Though this time, Simon thought the word ‘magic’ in the same intonation he’d think ‘radioactive’.  “This is going to… be a problem.”  He admitted.  “This guy had way too big of a demiplane.”

”This can’t be normal.”  Silverson said, shaking his head.  “Two years.  At least.  It should have happened before.” He blinked and stood straighter, dusting off his pants.  “We need to at least warn people.  A shame we can’t test this.  It would be nice to know how exactly not to kill someone if you don’t want to block traffic.”

“Sometimes you need to shut the hell up, man.”  Simon told the other human, letting Mark give him a hand up, his limb swallowed by the umbral’s own hand.  “Come on.  The target just came out, and probably has some questions.  Mark, make me look friendly.”

”…You don’t ask for much, do you?”  The umbral gave a summer’s sky laugh as he followed the paladin toward the powerfully confused member of his species who had walked out of a demiplane to find someone had piled eight thousand pounds of clay where there used to be a few parked cars.

Simon shrugged.  “I never ask anything I wouldn’t do.”

”Yes, your heroism addiction is unhealthy.”

When he made his daily check in with the Order, after a long shower and putting enough antiseptic on his skin to make himself want to die, Simon learned that they wanted to open up recruiting.  Not only that, but to form a formal alliance with Saskatoon’s government; the whole thing, human and umbral as a civic unit.

And because they were short on everyone, until that recruiting thing happened, he had a new long term job.

”I’m going back to Utah.”  He told Silverson blandly.  “It was easier than this.”

But he knew he was lying.  Twice.

_____

“Personnel is one part of proper preparation.”  Cam said after the vote.  “But only part.  We need additional real advantages if the Order is going to thrive during a time of chaos.”

“Clarify please.”  Planner prompted.

She rose to her own feet as Planner indicated that she should take the floor.  “We are aware of a wide range of potential threats, and despite our plan to expand, we are small.  Losses are not easily replaceable, so instead we should focus on not losing.  Which means maximizing our magical advantages on the largest scale we can, something that I am aware was the main directive of the Order from the general forum before I… arrived.”  She only paused for a moment.  “We have options, and the resources to make use of them.  So we should.  For everyone.”

”Question.”  Smoke-And-Ember made the vocal prompt the equivalent of a raised hand.  “Everyone everyone?  Because many of our people are noncombatants.”

”Like us.”  Linda said motioning to her fellow representative, the woman not entirely comfortable about the fact that her job had a high ratio of combatants in the first place.  “The worst we ever need to do is calm down a kid that happens to have claws!”

Juan gave her a confused look.  “That… seems like something that it would be useful to have better tools for?”  He asked.  “Though I hear you.  I think what Cam’s suggesting though is more… uh… what, broadly applicable upgrades?”

”Essentially.”  Cam said.  “We have a number of things that are widely applicable, especially with our new discovery of Climb wand making techniques.  And while we are discussing this, I want to remind everyone that we may not have access to every dungeon forever.  The pillars, especially Blitzkrieg, have a habit of killing them, as do the statuses quos.  I would like us to discuss planning for both stockpiling magic, and properly imbuing everyone we possibly can with what is available.”

Clearing his throat, Evans tried to shrug casually.  “I know a lot of the shield teams would like that.”  He said.  “We’re trained mostly without the extras, because of supply issues, but…”

”It’s also a trust thing.”  Nate told him bluntly.  “Potions?  Not much there you couldn’t do on your own.  Relationsticks?  Let’s us pull the power back if someone goes buck wild.  But if we give someone a Route spell and they decide to be a problem…”

”And we were new, and unknown.”  Rajesh nodded sympathetically.  “Though I would hope we are past that phase.”

”Sure.  Just letting you know.”  Nate said.

James drummed his fingers on the table as Cam sat.  “Okay.  So, it should surprise no one we have a list specifically for this.  Pylon, Venture, and Climb we can get scalable value from without the copier ritual, which is our main bottleneck.”

”And a grim bottleneck it is.”  Karen scowled.  “Please find another way to copy things.  That should be our highest priority.”

Everyone went quiet for a second, before James slowly voiced what he was pretty sure they were thinking.  “Okay, discussion on prioritizing a copy method over everything else.  Any thoughts?”

Rho minutely tipped his canine muzzle up as he spoke over the table.  ”Our best lead on a magic copier so far is that there may be something that duplicates books within Pylon Motoric.  Beyond that we have no options, except to continue delving.”

“That is something we could focus on, though!”  Ethan enthusiastically said.  “Remember, we had huge success on our long delves, right guys?  But we only ever did those on four dungeons, and only once.  We could do that again, now that we have more options!”  He spoke with his hands as much as his words, gesturing with quick motions as he talked.  “Especially if we do it for the Pylon to find that book duplicator.  Or the Office, cause we know it can make things that copy things anyway.”

”Th-there is a problem with that.”  Ishah said with stuttering frustration.  “Longer delves n-need good delvers.  Not new ones.  Not escorts.  Dungeons are d-dangerous!”

”Much as I hate to admit that, Ishah’s right.”  James said with a grimace.  “And we loop back around to ‘we need more people’.  Because every time there’s a crisis, our best delvers become our best protectors, our best rescuers, our best… knights, really.  And then half of them get hurt in ways that take them out of action for weeks or months.”

Juan’s voice, normally warm and jovial, took on a hard edge as he leaned forward.  “Or indefinitely, if someone gets unlucky.  I don’t mean dead, either, but I’m friends with Momo, and she doesn’t do much delving since the Climb expedition.”

”Oh.”  Ethan’s enthusiasm sputtered out like a punctured balloon.  “Right…”

“That doesn’t make it a bad idea.”  James said calmly.  “Just that we need a better way of doing things.  Heavier training before a delve, maybe.  Actually maybe the shield teams can be a template for future delvers, even.”

Cam sighed.  “Valuable, but not immediately.”  She said.  “And this does not answer the question.  Do we prioritize a duplication method?”

Deb, looking over that list James had mentioned with her skulljack, looked up with a sharp motion.  “Our best, fastest upgrades to a human… or anyone really… is repeatable without the ritual.”  She told them.  “Purple orbs are a loss, and they are our best source of healing at present.  But we don’t need a device that can copy books, we need to be finding new game changers.”

”I agree.”  Reed said, her voice carrying farther than she’d expected.  “Especially when we can make the duplication ritual go farther, with better methods.  Orange totems, blue orb compression, pre-copy uses of the other ritual that upgrades things… we can get more for the same amount.  It’s not enough, but Research can keep working in that area without having to compromise.”

No one else seemed to have any thoughts, so James made the vote official.  And this time, only a few people voted yes.  A new way to copy things would be amazing if they found it, but prioritizing one would be kind of a pointless cost without a clear reward at the end.  Even Karen didn’t really seem disappointed by the choice.

”This doesn’t change my own point.”  Cam told them.  “We should be making wider use of every opportunity.”

”Like the Pylon.”  Ethan said, almost cutting her off.  “Linda’s right, sort of.”  He gave the school staff a sheepish smile.  “You guys aren’t fighters.  But that’s cool, because the Pylon doesn’t care.  It’s got levels for all sorts of stuff, you don’t need to fight anything to get between nine and fifteen AP depending on how deep you’re willing to go and how well you can draw, and being better at… I dunno, typing?… is still a buff that makes you better at what you are good at.”

The juxtaposition between Ethan’s seeming carefree attitude, and the reminder that the young man spent a shocking amount of time familiarizing himself with dungeon magic, almost caught James off guard.  “Right.”  He said.  “And the Garden spell links are valuable too, because we’re getting more and more books that are useful for civilian applications, and you don’t need a resource for those except a spell coin.  And those are fairly easy to copy.”

Scent-Of-Rain hissed softly.  “And copying is not needed.”  She said.  A few people gave her curious looks, and the camraconda clarified.  “The Garden’s life carries its reward structure into our world.”  She told them.  “Crocamaws, yes, but also the goat… demon… things… in Townton.  And the pillboar which is much more pleasant.”

”Meaning?”  Nate didn’t follow her logic.

”Oh.”  Cam said, wondering when exactly she’d forgotten to tell Nate something.  “Resolving a dispute, or long term peaceful relationships, both have chances to spawn coins.”  She informed him.  “It is the best argument for not throwing the demons into the sea.”

”…it would be bad for the sea?”  Pete asked hopefully.

”Not as bad as it would be for the self-destructive screaming terrors we call dungeon wildlife.”  Cam editorialized.

James tried not to laugh.  “Well, Cam’s hilariously personal opinion on the goat swans aside, she’s right that we can do more.  We have a flowchart of milestones for the Pylon, we’re always finding more, and a ton of them are actually non-hostile.  So.  How long would it take us to get the whole Order to ten-plus AP?”

”Three weeks.”  Planner stated instantly.

That was suspiciously fast.  “Everyone?”  Evans asked.  “Even the shield teams?  Even the chanters?”

”I am counting only active duty Order members, not civilians.”  Planner clarified.  “Scheduling varies, but given that we know that delving on one’s birthday offers a unique milestone, I can currently promise three weeks.  Interference depending.”

”There is minimal interference.”  Rho said with too much certainty.

Karen pursed her lips.  “Why is that?”  She asked.  “Our arrangement with the local Mormon groups is not exactly ironclad.”

”No.  But there are almost none of them left.”  Rho said, the inhabitor who had just been down in North Smiths for a scouting operation having firsthand - first paw? - information.  “The city has been drained of upwards of forty percent of its population.  Many of those left are not affiliated with either church or dungeon.  The rest are in the dungeon.”  The golden retriever tilted his head by a few degrees.  “They have vastly accelerated their exodus.  They are using our ethics guidelines however.”

”That’s… ominous.”  James said.  “But also good for them?  Consent is important, especially for dungeons.  But also does that mean we have a window to start doing this now?”

”Yes.”

”Okay.  I have a proposal, based on Cam’s comment.”  James said.  “Ten AP, two Climb spells, and if we can swing it, a demiplane layer, because those are also free and I want to map that reward structure sooner rather than later.  For everyone.”  He took a slow breath.  “Other stuff, like Garden spells, we don’t have a uniform solution for, but we’ve got a big stockpile of coins we can use right now.”

Cam nodded.  “I would vote for that.  But I would like to add that we should discuss with our umbral residents ways to maximize their own latent power.  Yes, I know, exploitation is unacceptable.  I am certain that Terror is watching this meeting right now and planning to murder you,” she nodded to James, who looked toward the nearest camera that was focused on the tables and gave a small wave, “but there are structured ways to manage that which are indistinguishable from having a job, something that many of us in the Order already manage.”

”Okay that’s maybe a little needlessly hostile…” Juan chuckled nervously.

“There are a lot of concerns.  A lot of raw nerves.”  Scent-Of-Rain said, hissing sadly.  “It is not unreasonable to ask.  But we are asking people who have been hurt.  Hurt almost exclusively by humans.  This is different from my species, who were the ones that did the hurting, and who had time to volunteer intentionally.  Asking is not neutral.”

Cathy nodded along.  “We can ask, but we need to make it clear it’s cooperative.”  The woman hummed with more energy than she usually put into her voice.  “Which is actually very easy now!  Because thanks to James over there, we know that we can use that trick of ‘loaning’ their style of magic back to them.  And since we’re planning to invite umbral to join as members, that just makes it easier than ever to figure out how to arrange things so that they’re always splitting the reward for being… well… the ones that gave us the reward.”

”This is also getting sidetracked from James’ proposal.”  Evans said, not really trying to hide what he thought of it.  “Putting everyone through a couple dungeons is… a lot.  Especially since I know I’ll be doing a lot of that work.”  He chuckled.  “But seriously.  We can… maybe do it without anyone getting hurt.  Definitely do it without casualties, if we’re careful.”

”Yeah, big agree.”  Ethan added with his own nod.  “Two Climb spells for everyone?  Yeah.  We can do that.”

A vote occurred.  A vote passed.  It was the quickest one so far, and the one that would spark the most immediate action once the meeting ended.

The Order would ensure that literally every one of its members had access to those magics, as well as advice on if they wanted to steer them in more defensive directions.  It wouldn’t be mandatory, but given that the escorted Pylon delves were a hot commodity at the allocation counter, it was likely that most people already wanted it.

After that, Deb refocused on a different kind of preparation.  “We need,” she said, “stockpiles.  If we’re preparing for some kind of collapse, we need to be ready for, like she said, when we lose access to our dungeons.”  She motioned at Cam.  “We just voted to accelerate our plans for the dungeons we can’t stockpile easily, but there’s plenty that we can.  Potions, many of which can keep for decades.  Climb wands, especially if we can make and charge them in quantity.  Relationsticks, to keep the avatar option available for as long as possible.  And especially orange orbs.”

”I would have expected you to go for medical tools.”  Reed commented.

Mercy flicked a row of fins her way, coiling loosely around Deb as the assignment answered.  “We have work to do there as well, but it is already being done, dear.”  She said with soft comfort.  “Magics for medicine are few and far between, even simply for storage.  As with the duplication method, we will find them, or we will not.”

”Shaper substance, though.”  Reed pointed out.

Pete chuckled.  “A lot of the Greenway students talk about that stuff.”  He said.  “You’d be surprised how many of them have ‘perfect bodies’ planned out.”

”Noooooo I wouldn’t.”  James replied with a smile.  “Okay.  So.  Davis, you were talking about potion surplus earlier.  What can we prepare a lot of, that might save lives when we need it?”

Davis sat forward, calmly clasping his hands on the table.  “Some stuff doesn’t keep.”  He said plainly.  “But of what does… hardening, oxygenation, sprinting, the one that makes a body heat up and explode, and… the one that makes inhabitors.”

”You kept the recipe.”  Rho’s voice was the closest thing he’d ever gotten to either accusatory or infuriated.

From the Research cluster, Chevoy spoke up before Rho could say anything more hostile.  “We live in a world with magic!”  She reminded the inhabitor.  “There’s always a chance we find something that breaks the rules!  Hell, Mars can just build you robot bodies to take over!”

”I cannot do that.”  Mars clarified.  He looked like he really wanted to start going into detail about what he could do, but restrained himself, fingers tapping against his mouth.

”That… is fair.”  Rho conceded.  “But our species does not wish to be the end of the world.  Please do not make more.”

Davis nodded.  “We aren’t.  I’m just telling you we can.”  He didn’t say anything about the conversation he’d had with Amelia and Bea the day before.  About how if the Order was prepared to kill someone anyway, giving them a long range injection of an inhabitor potion would accomplish functionally the same thing while also preserving that person’s knowledge.  It was in that ethical territory that James got touchy about.  “Now, you should know, we’re not slacking off.”  He smirked, seeing indignant expressions around the tables.  “What I mean is, our production is already at its peak.  New succulent pots every week, Climb wands with Harvest Echo to extend the output, and almost no waste on our production runs.  We allocate a chunk to Research, yeah, but we produce a lot of potions.  So as far as stockpiling goes, we’re doing it.”

Evans and Nate almost started talking at the same time, but since they were saying the same thing, Evans shut up and let Nate finish.  “Where are we storing that?”  The chef asked.  “And can we split it up?”  He clarified.  “Having a stockpile is a good backup.  But it’s useless shit if there’s an emergency that cuts it off.  Eggs, basket, all that.  We can put some in the rogue safehouses, but it would be better if we could divide up the production too.”

”…We are running out of room for pots.”  Davis admitted.  “Having more production sites would be helpful.  And we can do that if we’re going to have more help.”  He sighed and shook his head. “Potions are a bad example though.  We might lose access, but if we do, we’re past needing a backup plan.  I think Deb is talking about making more of things that we can’t ever replace if we lose the Office?”

”We could steal a car.”  Smoke-And-Ember suggested.

James slowly turned on the camraconda.  “What.”  He voiced what everyone was thinking.

”From the Pylons.  The ‘cars’ there are often bizarre, but could be useful.  We should steal them.” He irised his lens, flicking his head upward in a sarcastic motion.  “Or loot them if you prefer.”

”Every step we can skip in a supply chain is one less point of failure.”  Cam pointed out.  “But it doesn’t change that stockpiles are already a failure point.  Smoke-And-Ember is the closest to a real solution.  We need tools to make tools.  An emergency supply of anything is valuable, especially food or medical supplies, but those stashes are meant to be used for emergencies only, and then replenished.  It won’t save lives in the long term if we can’t replenish it.  We should focus on acquiring more long term dungeontech, or finding ways to grow more shaper substance.”

“That one is possible.”  James grimaced.  “We know it because of how the Sewer had the Beautiful One modify herself.  But who would want to… okay, no, I know some of the people in the Order, nevermind.”  He sighed.  The idea of someone modifying themselves to be not just useful, but a resource, didn’t sit well with him. No matter how much some people would be into that.  “Maybe the Order should be doing more overt support for body modification.”  He considered.

”I have a question again!”  Ethan spoke up. “Not about body mods, sorry!  Um… if we’re worried about not having production tools, why not just get some now, and then have them in the future if we need them?”

Cathy looked at the younger human.  “No, Ethan, no.  Things like factory machinery.”

”Yeah, I know.”  He replied like it was obvious, waiting for everyone else to see his point.  “Uh… right, sorry.  We can copy stuff that isn’t magical.  And a ton of parts in production lines are standard bases that get modified for specific uses.  Like presses, or conveyer belts.  We can get a single piece of something, and put it in an orange totem storage space, and copy that if we need to make our own factory but no one is around to sell us parts, right?”

”…Why do you know so much about factory assembly lines?”  Nate asked, feeling like he already knew the answer and should have kept his stupid mouth shut.

”I watch a lot of How It’s Made.”  Ethan said happily.  “Oh, also, like, twelve skill ranks in different things.”  That was more like the standard answer.  “Anyway, what do we think about that?”

”It’s forward looking.”  Cathy said appreciatively.  “Not knowing what the price would be makes it difficult to decide.  Karen?”

Karen frowned in contemplation, face framed by her softly greying hair.  “Commercial manufacturing might be modular enough for that to work.  Industrial processes aren’t.”  She drew on the stacked six skill ranks in metallurgy that would have qualified her to run any foundry in the world if she wanted.  “The cost would be high, but…” her pause wasn’t long, but when she continued, it was clear that Karen was hoping for a specific answer, “…how confident are we that ‘the world will end’, exactly?”

Knowing what she wanted to hear, James shook his head sadly.  “Earlier today, I heard about someone putting up possibly permanent small area weather modifications.  And then I had to make Ben go deal with that because Alanna and I needed to go fight the weekly respawn of a bunch of bloodthirsty mannequins, a thing that appears to have nothing to do with a dungeon.”  James met her eyes, then looked away, his gaze drifting down to the floor in the middle of their table, the murmurs of the crowd that was here to observe rising to his ears.  “Maybe… maybe it’s just a bad week.  Maybe.  But honestly?  I don’t think so.  I think The Right Person At The Right Moment wasn’t lying.  Wrong, maybe; off by a month or two, probably, but not lying.”

Karen’s gaze, staring at James with eyes that looked like they had far too much fear behind them for such a stern woman, nearly got him to apologize and try lying instead.  But she blinked it away and turned back toward Cathy.  “These things aren’t paid for up front.  I’ll begin making a list of what we might need, and securing it through loans.  Actually, if we are certain there will be a collapse, especially of structured information, then lines of credit suddenly become a much more aggressive option to take.”  She glanced toward the audience, and one of the cameras filming their session.  “Anyone in the Order with suggestions or relevant knowledge on manufacturing should contact my office afterward.”

There was a rapid vote.  Some of them abstained, but no one went against the plan.  One more thing for the Order to add to their plate, though at least this one wasn’t an excessive burden.

”Whhhat about the mannequins?”  Ishah asked afterward.  “We need a plan.  Seven days, we can be ready, but… but we are short on fresh knights.”  He said, muzzle twisting back to reveal his neat row of teeth.

Evans looked up from where he had an up to date copy of the Operations Manual on the table.  “Teleport it.”  He said.

”What?”  Ishah was so perplexed by the response that the ratroach’s response didn’t stutter even slightly.

”We don’t know what kind of locational magic it is.”  He told them.  “So get a logisticor and teleport the chunk where it happened to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where we can build a bunker or something.”  The man’s direct solution wasn’t malicious, just incredibly blunt.  “If that works, then teleport it into a volcano.”

James hummed in thought.  ”People would notice.”

”Let them notice!”  Ishah said with a burst of chittered laughter.  “The building is condemned already, no one will care if we rip it apart.  And if they do, they can argue with the monsters.”

”Point of order.”  Ethan raised a finger sagely.  “If this doesn’t move the spawn point, then we have a weekly batch of monsters and also no walls?”

Cam’s answer stilled the debate.  “If their numbers grow each week, the walls won’t matter within a month anyway.”  She said, dragging a grim silence over them.

”I was also thinking we could contact the Last Line.”  James said, watching as Cam made a face at his comment.  “Because if anyone can shut off the mannequin faucet, it’s probably him?”

The winged woman shook her head and spoke firmly, almost angrily.  “As the expert on that pillar, I am using my right to veto.”  She intoned.  “Do not.  There is no situation where his presence would make the situation better.  Not by our standards.”

”Noted.”  James said.  “Okay, show of hands then.”

The vote on the teleport plan passed too.  That was one thing they could at least do quickly.  

It was a small thing.  Literally just the flick of a brass switch on the side of a logisticor.  And yet… it wasn’t.  It was a tipping point.  Something that was a signal flare to the whole Order, and beyond.  Recruiting, preparing, stockpiling, delving, those were things the Order of Endless Rooms did.  They had done them the whole time they’d existed, and even before.  They were normal.  Same thing with showing up once a problem had already begun.  The Order might do stuff in broad daylight, but it was often when there was a dungeon breathing down everyone’s necks.

They didn’t just ctrl-x ctrl-v a building.  Or at least, they hadn’t.

And James put it in blunt terms for everyone who had doubts.  “If we don’t do everything we can, because we’re worried someone might get upset, then we’re saying that people pretending things are normal is more important than actual lives.”  He let the edge of his hand hit the table with a thud.  “And fuck that.”  He concluded.  “Now.  Speaking of public problems.  Nate, why are all our rogues occupied?”

”Oh, that.  JP’s off on a snipe hunt.”  Nate shook his head, flicking his thumb through his slowly recovering beard.  “Training exercises for the rest of the new kids.  So, who wants to talk about our shoddy command structure?  I’ve got some thoughts…”

_____

JP ducked his head back down behind a glass and metal display case that was probably worth more than he’d made in his life, and was also the gaudiest fucking thing he’d ever seen.  Actually, he had opinions on this building’s interior design.  Everything was white and gold, with barely any color that wasn’t red accents or whatever flowers happened to be in the various vases that were probably priceless antiques.  Everything felt like it was from another era; barely meant to be seen, much less touched.  This was a building in stasis, a symbol of a time that humanity was supposed to have passed by, but was being clung to with desperate fingers of wealth and power.

Pretty much what he’d expected from Buckingham Palace.

Now, he considered himself a good rogue.  He was a smooth talker, and a quick thinker, and even before he had magic he had been able to weasel his way both in and out of most situations.  But JP wasn’t a ‘stealth into a palace’ kind of guy.  Not usually.

He’d felt like this was a good shakedown run for some of the new rogues.  Especially Quinn, who was… shockingly bad at being stealthy, for someone that was the same species as Ben.  But the others too, needed something to cut their teeth on.  An investigation, a high society party, a hint about something weird going on… it was all the sort of thing that a rogue needed to learn to thrive in, because if they couldn’t, then they wouldn’t ever be up to his standards.  And it was also probably just nothing.  JP never thought that thought too strongly, but… the thread of curiosity he’d heard secondhand through a friend of a friend who happened to know someone in British intelligence was probably nothing.

This, of course, had been wrong.

And now he was halfway to being by himself, sneaking through Buckingham Palace.

”You’re not alone, stop whining!”  Sartori’s reedy voice whispered in his ear.

JP didn’t dignify that with a response, just kept creeping forward.  He had a leveler earring on, one of eight he kept on himself just in case, but as it turned out, the fucking palace that the king was sometimes in had a little survailance in it, and that drained the charges that prevented notice pretty fast.  And it wasn’t like he could replace them if he ran out.

Because he was sealed in here.  Along with everyone else that was still alive.

JP triggered an invisibility charge, and started waking with brisk steps.  As he passed by a door, one finger tapped it and Sartori whispered to him again.  “Sitting room, two exits, empty.”  He gave the infomorph a mental nod and kept going.

Not what he was looking for.

Now, JP would admit he wasn’t very good at heroics.  But he was good at coming up with a plan.  And right now his plan was pretty straightforward.  Find the person that had magically trapped the place, shoot them, and then run.  Hopefully via teleportation.

Because JP had realized pretty quickly that they were maybe the third most dangerous person here.

Ahead of them, a pair of ornate double doors hung open, one of them with a broken hinge.  The blood splatter was, in JP’s expert opinion, only a little more gaudy than the gilding on the old wood.

He was, he knew, doing the thing where he was trying to be performatively casual, to stave off panic.  The problem was that it wasn’t working without anyone listening, and Sartori was a bad audience.

”No offense.”  JP told the little assignment.

”Some offense.”  Sartori whispered back in his head.  “And this is a bad idea… I can feel… authorities?  Something like authorities in there.”

JP clicked his tongue.  “Of course it’s a bad idea.  I’m not nearly bulletproof enough for this.”  He replied quietly, creeping past a suit of armor that was probably older than his entire lineage.  There was a body by the door, the smartly suited man that was part of a security detail either bleeding or bled out.  JP would feel bad about not being a medic later.  For now, he inched forward, into range of his enhanced hearing.

”-ready to go.”  A woman was saying.  American midwest accent, JP found that interesting.   “Spell’ll be up for three minutes, just give the word.”

The man that replied sounded about his age, and definitely more British.  JP fucking wished he’d studied accents more, because aside from ‘the continent of Europe probably’ he couldn’t place exactly where, but he sure sounded like he was covering up being nervous.  “Yeah, just… just get everyone in position.  You idiots all ready?”

There were a number of voices in reply to that, though while many of them were the kind of nervous-yet-determined tone their apparently leader had, a lot of them were the kind of muffled sounds someone made when they were trying to yell through a gag.  JP recognized the cadence of fear that came from someone bound and gagged without proper consent.

“Ready boss.  Bosses.”

”Don’t call me that.”

A new woman spoke up.  “Not yet anyway.”  Now she sounded eager.

Using another bit of invisibility, JP slipped through the door and around the side, taking in the ballroom scene and making sure he was in cover if anyone could see through his guise.  About two hundred people, ranging from bigwigs to staff to a lot of the security detail, were herded into the middle of the gold and marble patterned floor.  All of them had their hands bound, gags in too. Around them, though, were… cameras.

Good ones.  Like, professional TV station cameras, with people behind them that looked like they knew what they were doing, and who weren’t worried about the rest of the armed men and women around the room.

Seventeen people, JP noted rapidly.  Five more on tech, and another three at the front where all the cameras were pointed toward the cleared area, almost like a performance being set up.  The attackers had some guns, but a lot of them had esoteric shit that was probably dungeontech.  A few swords was normal enough, though the naginata was a new one.  One guy was fiddling with a needle and thread, and that was intimidating enough, but the punk rocker looking chick with the electric guitar slung low actually made JP wonder if he was getting out of this alive.

Getting recklessly close to one, he checked the human over.  No special armor, though their clothing veered toward anarchist chic.  The one he’d gotten near did have a pair of finger-length quartz crystals hanging from their belt though, and once JP was looking, he saw something similar on all of them.  A lot of different colors, but trending toward rough cut and pink.  No one had more than two, either.

Sartori sighed in his thoughts, speaking inside JP’s head.  “I can’t feed on their fashion sense.”  He said.  “It’s personal, no patterns.  But if you’re going to do this anyway, I can misdirect.  The authority-thing isn’t looking.”  JP thought back acknowledgement, and reached out to deftly apply nimble fingers to removing one of the crystals from the chain on the belt and pocketing it.  That could be a problem for James.  Later.  Once JP was out of here.

While he was up close, he checked the weaponry too.  It looked like almost all their guns seemed like they were taken from the local security; which meant that these particular party crashes had come in armed with 

Security that was mostly for the man that was currently being pulled out of the crowd, to the gasps of some and pained attempts to stop it from his bodyguards.  JP was almost excited about it.  It wasn’t every day you got to meet the king of England.

The attackers - JP hesitated to call them ‘terrorists’, he’d been burned by that word before - dragged the literal king out to the edge of the crowd, then stopped.  The trio in the open space arranged themselves, and then, the one of them that had spoken before nodded toward the woman behind one of the cameras.  “Alright Ky.  Got our good side?”

”All set!”

“Cast it.”  He said.

JP wanted very much to groan as his fucking phone turned on in his pocket as the woman cast some kind of spell.  But fortunately, he wasn’t the only one.  Their tech kept one hand on her laptop with cables running to the TV cameras, while the other spread fingers into the air, and broadcast their improv act to every device in the room.

The trio stood in the spotlight, two of the mid-thirties group stiffly standing behind the first, while the man who’d spoken before stepped forward.  “People of London!”  He said, voice rising to be caught and echoed by the various phones in the room.

The woman to his left spoke up next.  “People of England!”  She said, only barely managing to keep her voice from cracking.

Then the other man on his right, “People of the British Empire!”  His own words had enough fervor to cover for his nerves, but JP still noticed.

”I don’t like this.”  JP whisper-thought to Sartori.

”Something is happening.”  The assignment whispered back.  “Their authorities are… moving?”

JP really didn’t like that now.  He refreshed his invisibility and hunkered down near the door, ready to make a quick escape.  The problem was, he had no clue who was doing the interdiction, and the view out the windows showed that there were a whole lot of very unhappy locals trying to break in anyway.  His best bet might actually be riding this out then teleporting.  So for now, he listened, and watched the show.

He wasn’t the only one, either.  The crowd, despite straining against their bindings, was stilled and listening to their captors.  In a way that was almost eerie, and spoke of mind control, but that didn’t seem to be hitting him specifically.

The lead of the trio continued.  “Today is an important day for many of you.  Because today is when our world changes!”

The next picked up the speech, gaining momentum.  “Today, a throne changes hands!”

Then the last.  “Today, your allegiance shifts!”

Two of the people who’d taken the party hostage shoved the king - JP couldn’t get over that part, it was the literal actual king - forward, and to his knees.  The man looked like he’d already been hit in the head, and his eyes were unfocused, nose bloody.  But as he was pushed down to the floor, JP felt a kind of looming pressure building overhead, the sensation of oppression smothering him.

”From this day on,” the leader declared as he and the others pulled very long knives from belt sheaths, “the people of this nation will address us as the Three Tyrannies!  Our motivations are unimportant!  Our goals are unimportant!  Your opinions are likewise unimportant!  All that matters…”

The trio stepped forward into position around the king of England, who was now weakly straining against his bindings.  “Is that all of you…” the woman in the group continued.

”…Obey.”  The last one finished, as all three raised their blades.

At which point, an older woman in the forced audience managed to spit out her gag, and screamed.  “Wait!”  Her wail actual gave them pause.  “You can’t!  He’s done nothing to you!”

The oppressive feeling in the room almost lessened for a second.  The leader of the trio, blade raised in the air, actually blinked and gave a very normal human look of puzzlement at the woman, before looking back down at the monarch in front of him.  “…are you fucking taking the piss?”  He asked slowly.  “This guy?”  His voice was so normal in the wake of the dramatic bullshit that JP almost laughed.  It was actually good he was the one here, because if James was in his shoes, that fucker would have laughed.  The protesting woman started to say something, but the Tyrant just waved a hand at her.  “Silence.”  He said, and the oppression clasped back down, slamming her mouth shut.

Then the knives came down.  Blood, too much blood for someone to survive losing, splashed across the ornate ballroom floor, across the clothes of the trio of Tyrants, and across the slowly dying struggles of the king as he was left to slump forward and splash into the pool that had come from him.

And the magic that was causing the oppression began to solidify.

The trio, as one, looked up from their murder and locked eyes with the crowd of nobles and government employees and place staff and security that was now staring at them with vibrating eyes.  And all at the same time, the three of them spoke.

”KNEEL”

They knelt.  Not out of fear, but because disobedience was no longer an option.  JP almost did the same, but somehow, he’d been missed by the worst of the effect.  Maybe he just wasn’t British enough.

The Tyrannies didn’t nod, didn’t shift at all.  Just threw their knives onto the dead body, and began giving orders.  It was hard to tell which of them was speaking now, though their words didn’t actually overlap or blend.  “Those who wish to take Titles from us, start now.  Open up our palace.  Let anyone who wishes to try to strike us try now, and learn how it won’t work.”  Each of them turned to face one of the cameras, and JP, hiding near one of them, felt like he could see something deeply broken behind the eyes of that man that stared his way.  “You will obey, or you will be swept aside.  Love us, hate us, it no longer matters.”  They intoned.  “This city is ours.  This nation is ours.  This continent is ours.  You remain at our pleasure.”

Then the one looking JP’s direction ignored that he was invisible and looked at him, and Sartori started making some kind of panicked yelling noise in his cerebral cortex, and he figured that maybe now was the right time to get out of here.

JP teleported out of Buckingham Palace, and hopefully to a continent that the new self-declared overlords of Europe couldn’t reach.

God damn, his friends were gonna be pissed about this one.

_____

The questions that the Order had, in general, were numerous.  The general forum was good for setting broad directives, and maintaining public support, but it could take a while to check off everything that needed to be discussed.

For some things, like their anti-cancer distribution project, it was simple.  The program was working, the cost in time and sap was low, the cost in money was actually profit, and there were tens of thousands of people out there that knew who the Order were, and owed them a lot.  So they kind of just… heard the report, decided to keep doing that, and moved on.

For other things, like their delving strategies and discussion of dungeon stewardship, it was so complex that it wouldn’t be solved in a day, if ever.  Who owned a dungeon, really, when the places were kind of alive?  That was actually pretty easy to answer; the dungeons were alive.  But they were also semi-unkillable antagonists a lot of the time.  Not every dungeon was Clutter Ascent.  So the real question was more about how the Order was going to share and regulate access, now that they were expanding, and also making allies.

For some things, it was simple for other reasons.  Townton was a refuge, but it wasn’t exactly protected by anything that wasn’t just being forgotten and in the middle of nowhere.  That needed to change, especially as it was growing.  And that was where the discussion led after they had taken a short break, and then run through answering the concerns that had been compiled from those watching the day’s work.

”Our main weaknesses,” Cam told them, “in terms of tactical defense, are air superiority, and infomorph superiority.  Strategically, the best way to avoid long range strikes is to not provoke them.  Though we cannot trust that nation states with that capability won’t employ it out of fear if global stability worsens.”

”How effective are AA guns?”  James asked.  “Like, in a modern context.  And can we steal some more.”  The mental image of someone calling in an airstrike on the place he’d just been walking around last night for a festival, where the cleanup from that would still be happening right this moment, made his stomach twist.  “We have one of those close intercept guns, from Priority Earth, but those are meant to cover, like… a boat.”

Nate scowled at him. “Ship.”

”I will tell you right now those are not on the market so long as Townton remains in the borders of the United States.”  Karen told them.

Pete, the most normal human present, looked uncomfortable by the whole conversation.  “Are we really talking about arming the place like we’re a backwoods militia?”  He asked sternly.

”Yes.”  Ishah answered authoritatively, the ratroach only thinking for a second before adding a short nod.

Chuckling lightly and rubbing a hand on the ratroach’s back, Max shook his head and followed up on that.  “I was gonna say that no random militias have AA weaponry, but we did kind of steal ours from one.”  Their normally smiling face looked starkly unpleasant as they looked across at Pete.  “People get twitchy when populations in the US start doing things the government doesn’t want.  Or looking like demographics the government doesn’t like.  We’re not even talking about formally seceding, but neither were the other people that have been bombed in their homes.  You’re a school administrator, you must know some of the history.”

”…enough of it.”  Pete answered, looking like he was swallowing a lemon.  “I want to say… that people wouldn’t just bomb a city for being different.  But that’s literally happening right now, isn’t it?”

”So how do we keep it from happening to us?  And anyone else if possible!”  James steered the conversation back to an actionable question.  “I know the Order isn’t prepared for any kind of military action, even defensively.  Not really.  And Nate has… dissuaded me… from using any form of teleportation to either steal or disrupt… uh…”

”Nukes.  Don’t steal nukes.  Moron.”  Nate muttered the last word but Planner made sure it was heard.

”Right.  So unless we have a way to make the Horizon restoration gas work on jet engines, and the gall to steal decommissioned aircraft from that boneyard in Arizona so we can make our own air force… how do we make our home safe?”

Smoke-And-Ember made a sharply excited hiss.  “I vote for refurbishing fighter craft.”  He said.  “I wish to have my own.”

”…your own… jet fighter?”  James asked, already knowing the answer.

”Correct.  It fits my image.”

”Man you’re here to advocate for Response.”  Max said with a sigh.  “Speaking of… infomorphs?”

Planner’s tentacles folded in a fractal pattern as they turned to regard Max.  “Yes?”  They asked.

Mercy intercepted the other assignment’s question.  “Max is referring to using infomorphs defensively, as you protect this building.”  She said, constricting together in her seat next to Deb.  “I would like to speak to that, please?”

”Go for it.”  James said, everyone else already focusing on the pink and white serpent form manifestation.

”There is,” Mercy said slowly with her warm echoing voice, “often a distaste when we talk about actually using the capabilities of those with us.”  Her opened starburst patterns of eyes looked around at them.  “We’ve been doing it here again, with the umbral.  I disagree.”  Mercy said firmly, but not unkindly.  “Especially for myself.  I am different than you.  I have different options, and different potentials, and it is good that we have not ignored that because ignoring this simple fact would have hurt all of us.”  Her body expanded and contracted in a long ripple as she took a breath that she didn’t really need.  “We do not make life expecting it to be put to work, and I think all of us approve of that. If anyone does not, perhaps we can formalize a dueling culture afterward so I might fight you in the parking lot?”

Deb snorted at the calmly delivered words.  “Mercy.”  She prodded the infomorph.

”And yet,” Mercy continued undeterred, “we wish to contribute, when we can.  And is it not in keeping with our philosophy that we contribute according to what we can, not what is written on a spreadsheet?  Our collective places are determined by our abilities, and… yes, I believe that our species should be considered.  I do not think it is wrong, then, to say that we should create a role for an assignment or even navigator to take up the mantle of obfuscating Townton.  Or perhaps even several.  And I want us to do so without feeling as if we are harming anyone for that acknowledgment.”

”Are you worried that having a quota for assignment population might be a perverse incentive?”  Cathy asked with open honesty.

”No.” Mercy replied.  “And I can feel James about to protest.  But no.  I think we will never have a stable population, because of our nature, but the more assignments and navigators there are, the more confident we can be that we will have advocates.  I do not say that we should incept more of my people for the sake of putting us to work, I say that we should do so because it will make all of us, the newforms included, safer and happier.”

There was a soft pause as she settled back into her seat, before Cam slowly leaned forward.  “I agree that… that our strength comes in large part from our variety.”  She said.  “But this doesn’t protect Townton now.”  Then she took a deep breath.  “But we have a potential option that could.”  She turned toward James, sharp features of her face seeming softened by the briefing warehouse’s overhead light setup.  “Curious.”  She said.

”What is?”

”No.” Cam corrected.  “The entity known as Curious.  I’ve been reading about the incident again recently.  One of the last things the she… the entity…  told you, was to remake her when we were ready.”  Her eyes, these days more calm and less empty, met James’ own.  “Are we?”

Before James could say anything, one of the Research group stood up.  Martha was someone he didn’t know personally, but had her name on a lot of infomorph work; the bigger woman being something of a team leader for that particular niche.  The focal point that different experiments and conclusions all went through.  “Hi.  Yes.  Uh… no.  No we do not.”  She said with a decisive nod.

”We do have permission though?”  Scent-Of-Rain clarified.  “To try?”

James’ mouth curled.  ”Not really how continuity of consciousness works...” he said.

Martha nodded along.  “Even for infomorphs!”  She told them.  “Though our sample size there is low.  One, actually.  Anyway.”  She tapped her fingers together without any real meaning behind the motion.  “We do know more than we did before I got hired, I can say that much!  From pieces of evidence that Research has managed to uncover, I can say wiiiiith… let’s say eighty percent certainty… that Curious was from incepting an assignment into a purple totem.  Now, we can make safer purple totems.  Memeplexes, geographically located antimemes!”  James appreciated that her explanation came with annotations.  “But we don’t know how to make an assignment in something that isn’t alive?  And testing on any kind of totem runs into the same problem as Curious.  We don’t know how to make something like that stable.”

”I’m new here.”  Linda said slowly.  “Well, I’m new to the magic that uses big words.  But… Greenway uses totems with a different orb type for our building and classrooms, yes?”

”Orange totems, right.”  Reed bobbed her pointed muzzle.

Linda pursed her lips for a second.  “We have some infomorph students.”  She said.  “They’re living ideas, and while that isn’t exactly correct or as literal as some people think, I can’t imagine putting something made out of thoughts into an object that deletes thoughts would be… healthy for them?  But what about a different type of totem?”

Martha gave a thoughtful glance at the older human.  ”It’s possible that the only reason it worked on a memeplex totem in the first place is because it’s thought related.”  She said, almost like she felt compelled to be contrary for a moment.  “But you might be right.  It’s certainly been proposed!  We just can’t test it, without… well, you know.”

“Hey, let’s not lose sight of what we’re talking about here.”  Nate spoke.  “I’m not the same kind of anarchist James is, but I agree that we don’t make life because we want something.  Fuck knows I got enough of that from my old man.”  He looked like he wanted to spit on something, but refrained.  James had actually never once heard Nate say a single thing about his family, so this was kind of weird, but… didn’t really feel like it changed anything he knew about him, either.  “Even if it works out, you wanna put a kid in an orange totem.  Who the hell would want that?  Living as a place?”

James closed his eyes in a guilty wince as he raised his hand.  “Yeah, hi, sorry Nate, I’d be into that.”  He looked at the others and saw more than a few contemplative expressions.  “I’m gonna guessss… Rajesh you look like you’re into the idea.  And Pete’s thinking about it!”

”I could get so much more done…” Pete muttered, a faraway look in his eyes.

”Right.  Anyway it’s not that much different than Second, and they’re working out pretty well.  But.  I get what you mean.  And Cam, I think he’s right.  Whether we can remake something - someone - like Curious, doesn’t really matter if we’re not in a place where we can give them an adequate amount of agency in their own life.”  James smiled as he had a stray thought.  “Now, personally, I’d love to be a living part of Townton.  But I have the luxury of making that choice now.  I don’t think we want to be bringing people to life there, possibly unable to ever move, and then… what, tying their safety to helping us keep the place safe?  That seems coercive.”

Scent-Of-Rain gave him an exhausted hiss.  “You need to admit that at a certain point, people agreeing with you is not the same as coercion.”  She said with her digital voice turned up in volume slightly.  “All of this is fascinating.  Now.  How do we keep Townton safe?”

”Mutually assured destruction?”  Evans suggested, and then slowly withered as everyone gave him varying looks that communicated the word no across the room.  “I’m out of ideas.”  He said.

”I will talk to our navigator population tomorrow and see if we can excise ourselves from the maps.”  Cam said decidedly.  “That will offer at least some of a buffer.  Continuing to grow our assignment population and having a protocol for their roles will let us transition to that in the future with… mmh… minimal… chaos.”

James finally got to laugh without feeling like he was interrupting.  “Now see, Cam, even you don’t sound like you believe that.”

”Because I’ve met all of you.”  Cam said bluntly.  And then, in a smaller voice that she probably didn’t mean anyone to hear, but that Planner still made part of the conversation, added, “Thankfully.”

Cathy tried to politely brush past the vulnerable moment.  “We could also try being direct?”  She prompted.  “I know some of us like that.”  She smiled through Karen’s small scoffing noise.  “Tennessee has a state government.  We could call them, tell them we’re there, and seek refuge in audacity like the umbral in Saskatoon have been doing.”

”I do love that strategy.”  James admitted.  “But it doesn’t solve half the problem.  Which is that we need active defense, not just soft power.  If someone gets too afraid, or if some kind of magical beast shows up like in Ophiem, we need either a shield or a cloak or something on that scale.”

Planner’s tentacles and eyes shifted again as they made an agreeing noise.  “To that end, our infomorph population is our only current option.  Though the Garden spell Tether Together could be a possible substitute.  And there are those who are already beginning to specialize in the magic.  The Verdigris Venture could provide a further solution that can apply at the proper scale.”  They made a note, and then paused.  “What is the other half of the problem?”  Planner asked James.

James shrugged.  “That Townton is going to need to expand.”  He said.  “And Karen I’m really sorry-“

”I doubt that.”

”-but we need to budget aggressively for development there.  Townton needs hardened power and sewer networks, and the space to accommodate a lot more people.  Orange totems are great, but at a certain point, we do need more than one building.  Homes, and logistical support, for as many people as possible, is important to get done as fast as possible.”

Karen sighed with resignation.  “I suppose if we are already committing to that, adding civilian shelters won’t sufficiently add to the expense either.”  She suggested, and saw slow nods from the people who were most paranoid about long range missile strikes.  “Though if I may ask, why do you believe Townton specifically will need the space sooner rather than later?  We have time.”

Before James could answer, Rho started listing off words.  “Umbral.”  The inhabitor said.  “Chanters.  Ratroaches.  Human refugees displaced by war or disaster.”

”Rho’s right.”  Cam said, shifting one wing that was getting stiff, carefully avoiding clipping the people around her.  “The population of Townton isn’t going to shrink, and we’re an active refuge for a lot of people.  We need to be prepared to be a city, and the stronger we make the systems now, the easier that transition will be.” She took a deep breath, and then added one more thought.  “Also… just because there’s time before the worst, doesn’t mean the initial shift is going to be easy.”

”Okay.”  James tapped at the table.  “We have multiple things to vote on here really quick.  Let’s hash out some harder numbers, and make clear choices, alright?”

In the end, there was a lot of detail to discuss.  They were already investing in Townton, and James’ desire to pour more resources into it was constrained by the simple fact that they weren’t actually in possession of infinite resources.

Similarly, it wasn’t like they could just make raising an assignment into a full person a mandatory task.  That was fucked up for a lot of reasons, and James was pretty sure it qualified as eugenics somehow.  Though they could institute an addendum that expanded their current plan that applied to parents within the Order - foster or otherwise - that made resources and help available.  Infomorphs were kind of an unknown for a lot of people who didn’t work with them on a daily basis, and so education, and making it an easy transition for anyone who was interested in the process, was the plan they nailed down for expanding that particular demographic.

The suggestion to steal more military hardware got shot down though.  Apparently not everyone had gotten a taste for high stakes heists of heavy ordinance.

But they did take the time to shift the priority list for the replication ritual.  Now that they could sell more valuable materials, especially in bulk, it was worth making them so that the resource problem stopped existing for at least a little while.  For now, some of the armory skill orbs would be bumped down the list, because their absence wouldn’t be felt as keenly now that the Order was making more extensive use of .mem files for skills.  And also, those same .mem files would allow for quickly getting aspiring delvers up to speed so they could maybe have a permanent station in Officium Mundi, and scale up their replication quota like they’d been able to during the expeditionary delve.

Ultimately, Townton was important to the Order.  And the longer they survived, the more that was going to be true.  So if anywhere needed to be protected, it was the growing cluster of homes and shops and restaurants and uncannily specific mechanic garages.

Because sooner or later, they were going to need that space for even more people that needed help.

_____

Spire-Cast-Behind had a lot of important questions in her life.

On a day to day basis she often had inquiries into almost everything that some of her coterie took for granted.  Food, fashion, transport, religion, language, technology, culture.  Humanity had thousands of years to come up with some ridiculous stuff, and by this point, every living human had just… grown up buried in all of it.  They thought it was normal.  They often didn’t understand why she, a person who was a qualified physician, accountant, and electrician, needed them to explain to her how a microwave worked.  She could explain the timetable for a logistics center, but she couldn’t explain how a manual transmission worked.

So she had a lot of stuff she needed to ask.

It wasn’t discouraging though.  Unlike most human children that would probably be asking the same questions, Spire had the advantage of a much more powerful mind, and also access to context.  Being able to double check with the internet - another hallucinatory mess that humanity just lived with - was helpful as well.

But every now and then, there were questions that were… complicated.

Sometimes deeply personal questions.  Like what, exactly, Tyrone was planning to do with his own death drop.  Her coterier had tried to make it her problem, and like a game of high stakes ping pong, Spire had dropped the orb back in his own lap.  They’d talked about the mechanics of it a few times since; how it represented the opportunity to test a used Sewer Lesson, as well as all those Horizon spells, either overlapping or not with ones the user already had.  How there were so many corner cases that arose that it would probably be a challenge to record it all.  But Tyrone always seemed to dodge the question of how he actually felt about his memento mori.  Or what he actually wanted to do with it.

Sometimes deeply technical questions.  Like how, exactly, electricity powered a society.  The workings of a human power grid were immense, and it was a small miracle that anyone got anything done at all.  Humanity had, as far as she could tell, shortcutted needing anyone to understand the whole thing by instead making a series of modular parts that more or less added up to a functioning network.  It was likely that there were facilities and machines out there with much more finely tuned and monitored outputs and inputs, but Spire’s .mem and orb acquired knowledge didn’t extend to them yet.

Sometimes deeply awkward questions.  Well, awkward for other people.  Spire had realized fairly early on that she didn’t experience shame the way a lot of humans seemed to.  It wasn’t a camraconda trait, plenty of camracondas were capable of feeling flustered or embarrassed.  It was just that, for her, as well as many of the survivors from that old nest she’d come from, it felt like a waste of time.  So she had nothing stopping her from bluntly interrogating Karl about whether the teenager had ever gotten proper sexual education classes in his small town school, and then equally bluntly filling in the blanks for him.

Sometimes… sometimes the questions were full of self doubt.  Like every day, when she asked herself, and only herself, why she was the paladin in Uruguay.  Why it wasn’t a human, who would have been more accepted.  Why it wasn’t someone who was a better speaker.  Why it wasn’t someone who was a better diplomat.

That was hard to answer.  It was hard to understand why she was a paladin, sometimes.  What it was that set her just slightly ahead of many others in terms of solving the widest variety of problems.  Because Spire-Cast-Behind, ever the analytical mind behind the mostly red and white cables of her head, had done the math, had compiled the reports, had checked.  And she was better at this than a lot of other people, both in the Order and not.  Which made her self doubt annoyingly inaccurate, but didn’t get rid of it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Uruguay, either.  There were a non-zero number of people here who had gotten used to her.  The coastal towns and cities looked beautifully rugged with all the cobblestone they incorporated, even if she felt like she needed some kind of shock absorber for slithering around.  The weather was pleasant, though she loved high winds so she was mildly biased.  And even the diplomacy part of things was going smoothly, with meetings where she was introduced to progressively more of the government’s members, re-explained her existence, and then directly told them what the Order would and would not offer them in exchange for open acknowledgement and citizenship for their various species.

At one point, someone had asked her a question, and had gotten a hissing laugh back.  Why, the representative from a bizarre minority political party had asked Spire, did the Order thing Uruguay was a good place to ask?  What secrets were they planning to inflict on them, when cheap power and inter-city transport would make them beloved by any other nation?

Spire had answered honestly, though the politician had clearly not believed her, that the reason was simple.  When they had asked while they had nothing to offer, Uruguay’s ministers had listened and considered.  Despite their eventual ‘no’ at the time, that was far more than anyone else had offered, even cities in the US that she knew had nothing better to do with their time.

She wasn’t sure what she was doing, aside from being an honest conduit for information.  But her ‘diplomacy’ appeared to be working.  And public acknowledgement of the most vulnerable people who needed a collective shield the most was within sight.

Which was, naturally, when she had to ask the last kind of question.

Personal or awkward, she could handle.  Spire actually liked people, despite her sometimes sharp attitude.  Complicated or obfuscated were annoying, but not impossible.  There was a surprising amount you could get done by simply calling someone and asking for an email of technical specs, even when it was probably illegal to send them to her.  Internal was harder.  But Spire had weekly check-ins with her therapist, only sometimes postponed due to combat conditions, and she was working on it.

The kind of question that she didn’t know how to ask was the kind with no answer.  Or, worse, the kind that had a single answer, and Spire didn’t like what it was.

In this case, resting her corded form on a carved path high up in the northern mountains, able to look forward to a rough plain and the branch of a river that it surrounded, or backward to the village she had come up from, Spire could see the shape of the question clearly.

How do I fight a storm?

Behind her were people.  Rural people, many of them who had been dismissive of her and her coterie alike.  But not stupid or evil people, as a whole.  Farmers, mechanics, makers, humans who worked with their hands and knew more than they let on.  Some of them had been kind.  The woman who had given her a bit of a local candy, the pair of rough looking old men who looked like they’d been in a fight with time itself who had openly flirted with her, the human that was perhaps exactly Karl’s age who had been a font of curious questions.  Behind her were homes, businesses, gardens, schools, churches, buildings enough for a couple thousand people.  The population of Townton, spread out over the shadow of a mountain slope, and without the magic.

Ahead of her was the storm.

On the other side of the river, it billowed forth.  White-grey clouds that rolled forward like they were grinding gears, laced with lightning that moved far too slow to be natural.  Spire had witnessed thunderstorms for the first time while she was here in Uruguay, and they had elicited the same question; how did a person fight a storm like that?  Her only answer then had been to ask to use the 3% lightning immunity program, and to trust in the statistics that said people barely ever got hit by the stuff.  Now, she looked at lightning that wasn’t following the rules, and wondered what was going to happen when it closed in.

The storm had been approaching for at least a week, and the locals knew.  A few of them had tried to ask questions; they weren’t cut off out here, they had phones and TV with the news, and they knew that the weather was doing something wrong.  But no one had answered the questions.  Not because of a memeplex, just because of the lack of a protocol for dealing with something like this.

Which was how Spire had ended up here, looking at slowly advancing clouds.  An almost complete occlusion of the land that they’d claimed, and a dreadful feeling in her throat that came from seeing the crawling lightning as it crept along with the vapor.

”Drone view?”  She asked.

Next to her, Tyrone cracked one eye open.  “My dude, you know I am working on it.”

”Apologies.  Work faster.”  She told the knight, lens focusing on the distant riverbank and the tiny shapes she could barely make out moving on the edge of the storm.

Closing his eye again, Tyrone kept talking.  “Looks like there’s holes in it if you’re looking down.  Cameras on these things aren’t exactly telescopes, sooooo… can’t see the far edge.  But I’m seeing patterns.”

”Patterns that give us an attack vector, or patterns that mean we need to begin an evacuation two hours ago?”  Spire asked with an angry hiss.  The experience she’d gotten using her mechanical limbs translated now into fidgeting, idly turning over one of the ‘bolts’ that had been imbued for her.  The blue orbs, ever allergic to actual useful weaponry, had instead just been put into a pencil that was already properly fletched.  The range was lower than Spire would have liked, but she didn’t need pinpoint accuracy with these.  “I feel useless.”

Tyrone ignored that part.  “Oh hey.”  He said, in the tone one normally used when discussing mundane and non-urgent topics.  “I think they’re decoys.  Oh, yeah, okay, the gaps are definitely a smokescreen.”

”The fog is a smokescreen.”  Spire replied.

”Nah, dude, the clouds are the problem.  The gaps in it are to throw us off from finding the dungeon.”

Spire-Cast-Behind bobbed a nod.  The ground around the area had been checked over by their small team, and there had been, up until recently, no dungeon.  But the drones out over the storm, each of them equipped with one of Reed’s bizarre little dungeon detectors, were all now clicking like the region was radioactive.  This was not a natural event, nor was it something that was a unique and worrying phenomena.  This was a dungeon, expanding.

“That thought is comforting.”  Spire said.

”Oh yeah?”

”Yeah.”  She shot back.  “Because dungeons can be fought.  Can be stopped.”

Tyrone nodded.  “So how’re we stopping this o- okay rude.”  His words coincided with a flicker of white light so bright it felt like it seared Spire’s lens and left her momentarily blind. It was distant, but the lightning flash had been close to the ground she was looking at, a tongue of electricity licking up and baking one of Tyrone’s drones until it popped.  “Dude.  I was using that.  And those are expensive!”

”Oh, we care about expenses now?”  Spire hissed as she spoke.  The two of them had been talking about their group’s costs for days now, and it was unclear if either of them thought they had a side in the argument.  “What hit it?”  She said more seriously.  “Part of the storm?”

”Tesla tower.”  Tyrone said casually, prompting a slow tilt of Spire’s head to lock onto him.  “Something on the ground, some kind of tower.  Check the feed, the whole place is undergoing a steady transmutation into metallic or machinery-based shapes.  It’s trippy.”

Spire had been checking the feed the whole time.  Underneath the gaps in the clouds, it was clear what Tyrone was talking about.  The ground, once soft loam and rich earth, was now bristling steel and chunks of copper.  Trees now hung wires from dull metal branches like isolated transmission stations, while the stubbier plants of the plains were now glittering razors with no sign of their previous life.  Of the wildlife, there was no sign, but Spire did see a glimpse of at least one of the quadrupedal canine-esque woodchippers that Simon had brought back a corpse of months ago.

”The dungeon appears to be making more of itself, but external and not internal.”

”Wonder why.”  Tyrone lazily questioned, wincing as one of his other drone flock was sniped out of the sky by a flare of lightning, and then biting down on his lip as he piloted the others farther out of range.  “So when’re we risking our butts on-“

He was cut off as footsteps on the cobblestone signaled someone sprinting up behind them.  “Spire!”  Karl’s voice, that of a young human man with a lot of anxiety at almost all times, was easily heard over the quiet atmosphere here in the middle of nowhere without any noise around that wasn’t birdsong or distant thunder.  “Spire she’s here!”

The camraconda twisted and met the youngest member of her coterie’s eyes.  “Who is here?”  She asked, and then twitched with her whole body as she realized she likely knew the answer.  “No.”

”Aw shit.”  Tyrone breathed out.  “Makes sense though, if…” he motioned to the storm that had reached the riverbank, and seemed to be deciding if it was going to continue.

Karl reached them, slumping forward with his hands on his knees as he panted for breath.  “Th-the one… you said to tell you… if anyone that looked like Cam showed up.”  He gasped out.

”How many.”  Spire asked sharply.

”Two? I think?”  Karl didn’t actually know, but he’d seen at least two.

Spire’s fangs glinted with the crawling amorphous lightning, miles off but still brightly contrasting with the overcast and windy day.  “Then the Last Line is either here, or will be here soon.”  She said.  “And we need to… find an answer.  Before that happens.”

”My dude I do not think any of us are lightning resistant enough.”  Tyrone told her quietly.

Spire-Cast-Behind looked back at the town, spread behind them, the roofs of houses and the canvas flaps of market stalls visible among old streets and older trees.  Humans on foot, on bikes, on cars, all moved around like they had lives to live.  Like they had errands to run or friends to see or places to get to.  Some from here, some from out of town, some just passing through by coincidence.

She looked back at the eight mile wide storm wall.  A sea of clouds below that would, before the day was over, crash against the mountainside and reveal if it would be stopped by something as mundane as an elevation change like most natural clouds would.

Spire made a decision.

”Fighting right now is a mistake.”  She said, voice building as she realized that she didn’t have to fight the storm, either alone, or at all.  “We need to prioritize evacuation, if needed.  Either from the dungeon or the pillar that is soon to arrive.  I am placing a call now; here we will need to plan for emergency logisticor swaps.  Find open spaces.  Tell the residents.  We have limited time but not no time.”  She looked at her coterie.  “We are few.  But we are not helpless.  Shall we begin?”

Staring at her, still short of breath, Karl gave a shaking but acknowledging nod.  Tyrone just shot her a grin and a thumbs up.

And Spire began to slither back down the bumpy cobblestone path, to go tell a large number of humans that they may need to run like hell.  Very soon.  

How do you fight a storm?

Sometimes you didn’t.

But Spire-Cast-Behind had learned from her preciously secured years of life that sometimes, if you were fast enough, smart enough, and lucky enough…

You could survive it.

_____

There was more to talk about, but that was never going to not be true.  Still, James found he had a pretty easy time enduring the meeting.  And not even needing to capital-E-Endure either.

Partly it was his various upgrades, every new crisis, every week of casual use, every extra dungeon delve he picked up, every training exercise, all of it brought him closer to fully integrating everything that he’d gained through magic into himself.  It wasn’t a secret exactly, that you didn’t get the most out of a purple orb or a Pylon level right away; you actually needed to know how to move and react and think in concert with your upgrades.

It was a little bit like going through growing up again.  And much like growing up, you couldn’t just count on your body perfecting itself without oversight.  Which was why James was pretty happy with how he’d taken the magic and made it his life.

But that was just how he was staying comfortable and keeping a dozen different things sorted clearly in his thoughts.  The big thing that kept him going at full strength as the hours of discussions, question and answer sessions, and decisions, was just that he kind of liked it.

It was hard work.  It was mentally taxing.  It was draining.  And it was also incredibly important, and he got to be useful.  Useful to himself, sure, but mostly useful to the members and citizens of the Order of Endless Rooms.

Like he’d told Sarah sometime probably in the last few days, James got to be someone who helped, and who built things, and who had magic to share, and that took him a long way.  He wanted to be here.  This was a job, but it was also his calling, and that was probably why he’d ended up as a paladin and not, like, working for Harlan, or just getting independently wealthy and powerful off the Office.

Still, there were limits to exactly how long he wanted to be doing the job in one stretch, especially while on camera for the whole Order to review and with Planner keeping him from making too many jokes just to save time.  It wasn’t really mind control, exactly.  It was more like someone politely clearing their throat to keep him on his best professional behavior.  But in his head.  James could have shoved past it, but really, what was the point of having Planner in charge of a meeting if he wasn’t going to let Planner do that job?

And speaking of that ghostly dark blue presence of tentacles and timetables. ”This concludes our agenda.”  Planner’s voice heralded small sighs of relief from more than a few people.  And James did want to ask the people seated in rings of chairs in their audience if someone was holding them hostage here for this high stakes council meeting, because they could have left at any time.  “Before we conclude, are there any final thoughts, concerns, or reports from those in attendance?”  A tentacle twisted, and Planner’s eyes landed on the same people they’d started the meeting on.

Evans and Rajesh shook their heads, with only Evans talking.  “Our actual work as security is going smoothly.  Things might get hairy soon, but right now, it’s all quiet.”

Clasping his hands on the table, Rajesh added, “Yes, though I am more looking forward to the dragonslayer practice than training our upcoming new recruits.”

James rolled his eyes at the dramatic wording as he voiced his own thoughts.  “I’m sure that the moment I walk out of here, Alex is gonna call me about getting in a brawl with a sea monster again.  But overall, having paladins has been working out for us exceptionally well.  I know this isn’t a status check on that whole idea but… Simon, Spire, and Alex are doing really well at both recklessly doing good, and expanding the Order’s knowledge and scope.  I’m not trying to self-justify for its own sake or anything, but I do actually believe that focusing resources into our paladins was a good idea.”  It wasn’t exactly a new thought, but James felt like it was important to say it, out loud and in front of people.  And to acknowledge the good work his new paladins were doing, too, because they deserved that.

Next, Ishah stood, smoothing out one of the sleeves of his extra-limbed button up shirt.  “W-we aren’t ready.”  The ratroach said with a nervous edge to his voice.  “For the next dungeon attack.  But w-we are ready to do the best we can.”  He promised.

When Max followed that up, it looked like the long haired human was kind of embarrassed to not have the same level of drama.  “I mean, yeah, Response is doing good.  There wasn’t a place to talk about this earlier but we’ve got the approval of our oversight committee, and a super low rate of actual problems.  Between the skulljacks, some drones, a few Climb spells, and maybe sometimes the avatar plan for vital emergencies, we can solve a ton of problems almost too easily.”  They shrugged.  “General worry about how we ‘be the police’ for Townton, since that’s kind of our responsibility, but it’s a good time to learn!  Doing it without teleporting and totally in the open will be a good whetstone.”

”And we need better uniforms.”  Smoke-And-Ember added.  Possibly joking.

Cam nodded at him.  “Everything Townton needs has been covered.  I have nothing to add.”

”Same here.”  Davis said, the older human skipping the turn order.  “Wish I could tell you we had a new potion that fixed everything.  Maybe I’ll get my own call when we’re done here.”

Pulling the order back, Reed cleared her throat and nudged one of her extra people forward.  Mars looking like he didn’t want to talk at all, but compelled by his boss.  “Right, we’re working on effective prosthetics for basically everything, all it’ll take is unleashing the skulljacks on the world, we’re cool with that, right?”

Chevoy looked like she was prepared to suplex her coworker.  “I’m working on that.”  She said instead.  “Hey, anyone who wants to help test skulljack security measures, maybe drop by Research in the next week.  We need test subjects.  Oh, also, I know no one cares about this, but we got an extra hundred feet of altitude out of our space elevator attempt!  Just wanted to cram that in here!  Progress!”

”Chevoy, I can assure you, there are people who care.”  Karen said with the same smooth professionalism that hadn’t even cracked the entire time.  “If for no other reason than it would be, to quote my daughter, ‘incredibly cool’.  But also because it would be of some scientific and economic interest.”  She said that with the tone of someone who would describe a clustered nuke strike as having some destructive properties.  “Regardless.  Despite my advocating for frugality this entire time, our budget is doing better.  We are no longer hemorrhaging funds, our assets are being developed, and the commercial and industrial value that our magic can offer the world will soon be made very clear.  We joke… well, some of you joke… about world domination from time to time.  I don’t think we’re quite poised to enact a master plan of any kind, but I do know that you’re going to need to stop making those jokes when it starts sounding plausible.”

“How the hell am I supposed to follow that?”  Deb muttered irately, before Mercy gave her a friendly nudge.  “Fine.  We’re going to run into problems if we last more than a couple years.  Nonhuman biology is… well, nonhuman.  We don’t know what problems we’re looking for, what kind of chronic diseases or treatments.  Things like the Climb wands or anti-cancer orbs are useful tools, but it took a lot of years and a lot of blood to learn what we know now about human bodies.  And we still don’t know most of it!”  She shook her head, almost like her focus was distant.  “If we’re gonna die of old age, we need solutions for when the magic runs out.”

It took Linda and Pete a moment to regain their train of thought when their own turn was next after that.  Though to be fair, Deb’s comment could have rattled anyone.  “Well!”  Linda said with enforced cheer.  “I don’t think we really have much to say, aside from that it’s all working well so far?”  She looked at Pete.

The other mostly normal school administrator nodded slowly.  “We’ve got the resources we need to make Greenway a good place.  If you plan on sinking this much into every one of these schools… well hell, I think we can give you a pretty good next generation, if you can hold it all together for a decade or two.”

“Same thing with the fostering program.”  Juan said confidently.  “I think… I think a lot of people know that bigger ‘blended’ families can be more stable and better for the kids, but it’s not easy to set that up.”

”We set that up.”  Scent-Of-Rain followed his sentence with matching smug confidence.  “We organize, and remove obstacles, and families grow from that.  This is a way that works, and we will prove that it is worth the effort.”

Cathy gave a small shrug once the camraconda was done.  “Recovery has a million jobs, you all know that.  Nothing serious to add!  I’ll tell you if something goes horribly wrong, I’ve got everyone on speed dial.”

Compared to that somewhat optimistic approach, Nate’s closing words left something to be desired.  “If anyone wants to gamble, I’m taking three to one that the next clusterfuck doesn’t kill us all.”

”In our favor?”  Rho asked from his side, the inhabitor almost seeming to come alive as his mannerisms stopped mimicking a normal golden retriever and instead started being just… Rho.  “That’s the best odds you’ve offered so far.”

Ethan just ignored them, and James got the sudden impression that the young man was actually way more socially astute than he’d suspected.  Personal growth came for everyone, eventually, apparently.  “Delves are ready to start up again tomorrow.”  He said happily, breaking Nate and Rho’s byplay.  “We’re still a little thin, but if anyone wants to help to start mapping the Compiled Wastes reward structure, we can get a jump on that before Planner’s schedule takes over!  Also I’m kinda hoping that I get to go up, and not down, when my team goes in?  Maybe that’s just me being boring, but I’m kinda used to going up.”

”Also we’ll get to know if there’s different stuff.”  James pointed out.

”Oh that too!”  Ethan agreed happily.

”Sign me up for that.”  James said cheerfully.  “Actually, maybe.  I still need to check in on my demiplane, and see what that snowball is doing.”  He shook his head.

Planner’s tentacles came together, folding over themself as they rose off the central table.  “James’ personal comments aside, I believe that is everything we needed to discuss and vote on today.”  The assignment said.  “As always, there will be more work to follow.  Second and I will create and manage the various committee groups we have discussed here today, and begin filling them with those that volunteer or are tasked with the initiatives.  Cathy, your help will be invaluable in the organization of this effort, as it will be… substantial.”

”Of course Plan.”  The woman nodded.  “The only major obligation I have is talking to Sarah tomorrow, to give a more personal account for our records.  I think a few of us are doing that?”

”I know I am.”  James nodded.  “Not everyone wants to spend eight hours tuning in to Order C-SPAN, even if we are talking about dungeon delves.”  He leaned back in his chair, finally letting himself relax and feeling his Endurance begin to betray him ever so slightly.  “Honestly, kinda thought Sarah would be here.”  He said, as a few people stood and began stretching, the universal signal that a meeting wasn’t just winding down, but was done, and this was just the aftermath.

Ishah looked at James as he stood himself and flipped his suit coat off his chair and onto his frame with a perfectly practiced flourish.  “I’m… sure she’s having fun.”  He offered with a chitter.

”Oh, I know!”  James laughed.  “I’m just worried that I’m gonna get home and find out that my apartment is gonna have even less of a chance of ever getting the security deposit back.”  He stood himself and shook his head before quietly talking just to Ishah.  “Hey, thanks by the way.  I dunno if anyone’s told you this, but I appreciate the work you’re doing.”

”I know.”  Ishah tried to be stoic, but still found himself smiling broadly, a neon flush around where his chitin didn’t cover the edges of his eyes.  “G-go home, before I distract you.”  He said, turning away with embarrassment.

James chuckled, patting the ratroach on the shoulder, before he took a deep breath of the repurposed warehouse’s air, and turned to step off the stage.

He did hope he was joking about Sarah doing something to his apartment though.

_____

Kiki sat on an unfamiliar couch, next to a dog that was only unfamiliar to her human half, and was deeply known to the part of her that was an incarnation.

She and Auberdeen were watching Sarah.  Nominally, Kiki was here as backup for in case something went wrong.  But the truth was, this was the third try, and Kiki mostly just figured that she’d go out for a mixed lunch and therapy session with the girl overflowing with kindness after it didn’t work.

There had been a little bit of chatting earlier, about old movies.  Kiki remembered a lot of films from dates or family outings in her youth that had not survived the test of time.  Still around, still in archives, but definitely not classics, and so she had some hidden gems to share with Auberdeen.  Well.  She thought they were gems.  Maybe ‘cultural land mines’ was a better term.

Now, though, the two were quiet.  Observing, but not interfering.  There was even some caution tape over the door that Sarah had put up, to dissuade interruptions.

Interruptions to the ritual.

From up the wooden ladder that led to the apartment’s attic - of course it had an attic - Sarah’s voice carried clearly.  Her happiness was a little bit pushed, but her kindness, Kiki knew, came from a place of pure intent.  If Kiki ever died, actually died, she figured Sarah could be one of the candidates to pick up her banner.  Storming through the world and reshaping things around her, through friendship and firepower in unequal measure.

”A quiet place.”  Sarah was saying, her voice speaking with the cadence of poetry, even if it did not rhyme.  “Of sunsets and dust.  New stories and old memories.  A gentle place.  Of bonds and mazes.  Eager life and unexpected changes.”  Her voice rose, slightly.  “A place for a friend.  A place as a friend.  A friend, as this place!”  There was a thunk of something tapping into the wooden floorboard of the attic space.  “An anchor, for you to see and follow.  And an invitation, to move in.  The oldest newest ritual!  The induction of a roommate!”  Sarah’s attempt held good humor, like she knew that she’d kind of fumbled the ending, and lost the thread, but was still willing to hold out for it working anyway.  “Come on in, Clutter!”  She finished with a cry, and then, in a small whisper that even Kiki only barely heard and yet thundered against the world, added four little words.  “Third time’s the charm…”

And the whisper became a storm.  But a storm Kiki recognized.

This wasn’t thunder and lightning.  It wasn’t a hurricane, except as a metaphor.  Instead, it was the storm of small feet trampling up basement stairs.  It was the storm of a few too many guests pouring through the kitchen to fill their plates.  It was the storm of long nights kept at bay by hot chocolate and game show marathons and soft conversations about the most important things in the world.

And then the apartment didn’t have an attic anymore.

It had an Attic.

Kiki, invincible and unshakable in so many ways, found herself gasping for breath as the pressure waxed and waned like a tide.  It was actually very easy to tell where a dungeon was when she was right on top of it.  Or it was on top of her, in this case.  And there was definitely a dungeon there.

A dungeon that she could hear laughing.  A child’s untempered glee, spilling past the boundary.  A blazing excitement that called to her to get up, climb that ladder, and come say hi to the home’s newest visitor.

”Oh no!”  Was the first thing Kiki heard from Sarah as she rose to her feet and flipped Auberdeen a secret biscuit treat that she’d been hiding.  An older version of Kiki might have worried, but this version of her knew Sarah, and also could feel everything important through the bond of kindness, so she already knew there was no problem.  Sarah, however, found one anyway.  “James is going to talk about security deposits againnnnnnn!” She lamented

Kiki’s extraordinarily powerful senses swept that statement, and found it to be obnoxiously true.  She really needed to smack some sense into that little paladin, and return the favor he’d done for her.

But right now, she had something more important to do.

Clutter Ascent wasn’t related to Kiki, exactly, as far as she knew.  The dungeon wasn’t even a human.  Wasn’t anyone’s real descendent.

But when kids came to visit, it was a grandmother’s sacred job to try to spoil them.  And Kiki wanted to see if she’d found a way to make a cookie that a dungeon could enjoy.

The fallout of that would be, naturally, Sarah’s problem.

_____

James took the back exit around the big metal rolling door for the loading dock.  He wasn’t the only one, but it was a small group that was willing to step out into the bitter freezing night, with air so dry it felt like his lungs were at war with themselves.

For a moment, though, the cold was refreshing.  The air was a soothing balm.  And the relative quiet, with only the cars over the edge of the little slope that bordered the Lair’s parking lot acting as a distant whir of noise, was a plunge into a comforting cocoon.

Then his phone rang.

Multiple times.

And it didn’t stop, no matter how much he glared at it.

But at least the chaos had been polite enough to wait for the general forum to come to a close first.  And right now, there was a building confidence in his chest, as he prepared to answer the first person frantically trying to get in touch with him.  Because James didn’t have to do it all himself.  There were friends and allies, plans and preparations, weapons and tools and magic.

He didn’t have to save the world.

He just had to put out fires, until the Order was too sturdy to burn.

James Lyle, paladin of the Order of Endless Rooms and happy with that title, answered his phone, and went to meet the flames head on.

_____

END BOOK FIVE.