The Daily Grind - Chapter 373 (Patreon)

Just a reminder there's a double chapter today, so make sure to read the other one first.

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"Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine."  -Robert C. Gallagher, Common Man's Plight-

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The camraconda standard body pattern was a fascinating thing to James.

At first glance, it was a snake that someone had removed most of the head of, and replaced it with a security camera.  The rubbery flexibility of electronic cables instead of scales, a wide flat mouth with brass fangs dripping a paralytic venom, and a long tongue that was a little rough in texture but was probably one of the more organic feeling parts of a camraconda if they were properly hydrated.  The average member of their species was somewhere around eight feet long and weighed one to two hundred pounds, which meant that when they were slithering, they came up to human hip level most of the time.

While outliers to most of these traits existed, that was kind of the standard.  The biggest variance came in the form of their camera format, and their coloration.  Most of the first wave of camracondas to join the Order had the kind of boxy rectangle of a stereotypical security cam, often a dusty beige or matte grey in color.  Their singular lens eyes were apparently capable of depth perception vision, but it was an autonomic process, and James still hadn’t ever swapped bodies with a camraconda to see what it was like.  The colors were one of the easier ways to tell camracondas apart; running through the list of basically any color that a CAT5 cable had ever come in, and often mixing in different stripes.

Spire-Cast-Behind, for example, looked like she was a living incarnation of the red-white-yellow video adapter plugs James remembered having to fumble with to get game consoles to work when he was younger.  While someone like Ink-And-Key was just solid milky white, in addition to being seven feet tall.  While slithering.

So they looked like snakes with odd heads, essentially.  And James knew enough nonhumans at this point that he was aware of how fast a person could get used to a bizarre body style like that.  He’d kind of had to force it in the early days, but now, it was so intuitive to treat camracondas as the people they were that if it weren’t for their naming schema he might sometimes forget he was talking to one.

Of course the similarities to normal earth life ended with the broad shape.  Officium Mundi was a lot of things, but apparently, well-versed in wildlife biology wasn’t on the list.  Camraconda internals were a little weird, with a lot of quirks to them.  They could eat, but didn’t really have a stomach; instead they had multiple filter organs and then some kind of matter annihilation engine in their belly.  An absurdly inefficient one, but still.  They needed to breathe, but didn’t have a central heart that pumped their blood.  They could derive sustenance from security footage. They were just weirdly put together, and definitely weren’t actually snakes; actually in terms of DNA - another thing they had for some reason - they were closer to humans.

It was like the Office had just taken what it knew how to work with and kept making absurd macro scale changes until it got something bizarre.  Kinda made James wonder if the tumblefeeds were similar, but they’d never managed to open a dialogue with one of those guys. So they just had camracondas and all their quirks.  Like how they actually did need water for a healthy life, while water was pretty difficult for them to get in the dungeon naturally, or how they were generally intelligent enough to hold a conversation when the dungeon wasn’t controlling them, but they had no built in ability to talk.  

In his position as paladin, James tried to know everything he could about the people under his aegis.  Their origins mattered, their biology mattered, their quirks mattered.  Because it let him understand what they needed, and if he was smart enough and listened enough, he could snipe problems before anyone even knew they were coming.  He also didn’t want to get blindsided by another situation like when camracondas had first started wearing mechanized arm backpacks so they could pick things up.

And yet, that blindsiding seemed to be happening again.

James was one of a large group of people from the Order today who were visiting North Smiths, Utah.  One of those cities that wasn’t really that separate from the cities next door, that felt more like a sprawling added development than a new city, but still got to be called a city anyway.  Currently, North Smith’s had basically no one outside; partly because at least half the population had been sequestered in some kind of dungeon stasis pods as part of the Mormon Church’s hedge against the apocalypse, and partly because it was snowing.

The snow here had a different texture to it than James was used to, and he’d seen a lot of different snows this year.  The Order was taking advantage of the emptied out public spaces to just openly move delvers through one of the local parks where the dual dungeons had an entrance, feet and paws and tails crunching dead and frozen grass as they moved in relatively organized groups.  People smarter than James had brought umbrellas, and partially shielded everyone from the kind of spiky snow that kept coming down, but James felt like his own smart contribution to this of putting them through one of the entrances with stairs instead of an elevator would be worth suffering the snowfall.

Together, the group of thirty delvers, some of them veterans of the Pylon Motoric that would be acting as guides today, left a swath of tracks as they made their way to a locked park maintenance storage shed.  And then opened that lock with the key that they had, because they’d both put the lock there, and had also been kind of the only ones keeping up maintenance on the park anyway, since the place was privately owned by the adjacent strip mall and that place had already lost all its employees to the whole dungeon ark thing.

Once inside and out of the snow and wind, people started to switch from ‘avoiding the terrible weather’ mode into ‘staging for a dungeon’ mode.  Which was when James noticed something about the camraconda that he’d come here with.

Namely, that it wasn’t the one he’d been chatting with as they’d walked.  He’d been kind of making idle conversation with TQ, mostly just saying hi and then complaining about the cold together while they waited to get inside.  But they must have switched relative positions at some point, because when the camraconda next to James removed the heavy coat they were wearing over their arm pack and armor, their coloration was radically different than TQ’s was.

Instead of the blue-grey of James’ friend, this one was completely unrecognized, and might even be new.  Purple and deep red cables, with patterning that wasn’t following the lines of the cables.  Instead, the colors flowed in waves, like it had been painted on; the motion of the camraconda in question making it look like the lines shifted like pooled oil.  And in the dim light of the bigger-on-the-inside dungeon entrances, James could have sworn that their cabling was almost glowing softly.

James paused, and narrowed his eyes at the camraconda, who looked back at him with a gaze that was almost steady, but had tiny little adjustments to their lens that gave away some kind of emotion at play.  He quickly made a mental list; same camera shape, a few specific and recognized tools on the armor rigging within reach of the mechanical arms, same stance that was somehow deeply sassy and showed that they knew it.

”TQ did you dye your entire body?”  James asked.

”Of course not.”  TQ replied with clear amusement.  “That would take an exceptionally long time, and camracondas require a special form of dye that stings to apply.”

”…Okay, so…”

”Clutter Ascent dyed my entire body.”

James nodded knowingly.  “There we go.”  He said with a long exhale of understanding.  “That’s it.  That makes sense.  When did you even find the time to visit?  I thought you and Cheha were relaxing.”

”I am always relaxing.  My presence is soothing.”  TQ asserted.  “And this occurred while you were sleeping last night.”

”…That’s a very specific thing to know.”  James narrowed his eyes at the camraconda, prepared to lose a staring contest as everyone around them was divided into groups, equipment and checklists handed and double checked out for the day.  James’ own checklist was just one thing, because he wasn’t nearly as new to the Pylon as most of the people here, and his own gear was stuff he almost never took off these days.  “Why are you aware of when I was sleeping?”

”Because I was in your apartment, of course.”  TQ replied, winning the staring contest as James blinked, and giving a delighted hiss of satisfaction.  “It was not to rob you.  I was attempting to retrieve the bag I had left in your attic.  I failed.”

”Because the attic has a ladder.”  James nodded.

”Please.”

James huffed a soft laugh, falling into the pattern of consistent joy that he often felt while speaking with this particular camraconda.  ”Okay yeah that’s fair, though I don’t know how you’d defeat a ladder by being silly at it, which is your normal go-to.”  He paused as he had a worrying thought.  “TQ I have a question.”

”I would be delighted to go on a date with you, thank you for asking.”

Hitting one of the traps of the obstacle course that was a conversation with TQ, James stumbled briefly before recovering.  ”No.  Well, okay.  We can do that, sure.”  He took a glance behind them in the excessively sized concrete box, seeing that the mossy and cracked stairs that led up to the Garden dungeon were still in place, which meant they still had some time before the shift to the Pylon.  “I was more thinking that you implied you changed while I was sleeping, and you were in my apartment while I was sleeping, and you said you attempted to get your stuff out of my attic which means you failed to get your stuff out of my attic, so TQ, why the fuck did my attic turn your coloration into a living fireball?”

TQ didn’t pause in going through his routine of adjusting his mechanical arms, getting used to his reach and speed, tapping the manipulators at the various tools clipped on his armor.  “Your attic has been replaced by another attic.”  He informed James.  “I am dismayed.  You acquired another new roommate before me.”

”…Clutter Ascent?”

”Yes.  The ladder into your apartment’s upstairs exits somewhere near the southwestern quadrant of Clutter’s swamp.  Conveniently near a hot spring that changes coloration!”

James had a lot of questions.  But he found that he was suddenly too stupid to say anything except a confused  “Why is Clutter in my attic?  Or… Attic, now, I guess.”

”I assumed it was Sarah.”  TQ arched his head sideways.  “Or a cosmic reward for your service.”

”Safe bet on Sarah, I don’t think the cosmos like me that much.”  James frowned.  “Sarah really should have told me about this.  Like… yesterday.  When it must have happened.  We had a conversation!  We hung out!”

TQ bobbed a nod back at him.  “Conversations with Sarah are often pleasant.”  He said, his words coming at the same time as a grinding rasp of concrete as the stairs up receded into the wall, and a stairway leading down began to appear as the pitted and scratched floor sunk downward in blocky steps.  “Now.  I am going to insist this does not count as a date.”

”Of course not, you have a tour group to take in.  Zhu and I have a speedrun record to set.”  James reached into his own thoughts and started to intentionally push his mood to that of being about to start a trek.  Spinning his thoughts around the vibe of the first steps of an adventure, and using that to essentially dump a bucket of cold water on the navigator sleeping in his motor cortex.  As Zhu began to grow orange feathers and eyes out of James’ body, James patted TQ’s boxy head with the flat of his hand.  “Are you a member of my coterie, by the way?  I’m unclear on this, and we’re going into Vex’s dungeon later tonight if you want.”

”Yes.  And that does not count either.”

James laughed at the camraconda’s insistence. “I know, I know!  But I like dungeons, and I hate to tell you this, but if you wanna hang out with me with any consistency, dungeons are gonna be involved.  But we can absolutely do something more personal and less dangerous later.  I know there’s weird stuff going on in Townton we can go see.”

TQ paused before looking away from James for a moment.  “I worry I have made my feelings sound like a joke.”  He said suddenly.  “I did mean it.  That I love you.”  He told James, looping his camera head back around.

”Yeah, I know.”  James replied with casual reassurance.  “You’re weird, but I actually love how you’re like a conversational shaped charge.  So, like, to reciprocate that, I should say that my average time to realize I was in love with someone is wildly inconsistent, but I do like you, and wanna hang out more at least.  Is that okay?  Probably sounds sort of noncommittal when I say it like that.”

TQ raised his head up, tongue flicking out to taste the frozen air of the concrete room they were in.  His newly colorful body, which still had his blue and grey cables running in shadowy lines in some places, shimmered in the camp lamps that the Order had set up while they’d been talking.  It didn’t take him long to find his own answer; he liked being a camraconda that aggressively did not worry about things, and that was willing to try any of the myriad new experiences the world offered.  So his favorite human didn’t immediately fall in love with him at the first mention of romance.  Well, that was a setback, but TQ was nothing if not determined when it came to solving very specific problems.  ”There is a New Year aerial light show and combat challenge we could observe together.”  TQ stated as he began to slither away.  “Please do not die before then!”  He added.

”…I… uh…” James had no idea if that was a real thing, if TQ was misunderstanding something, if TQ was misrepresenting something, or if he was personally having a stroke and this was a hallucination.  “Yeeeeeah.  Sure!”  He awkwardly settled on.  “Holy shit I need to work on my banter.”  James muttered to himself.  And also kind of Zhu, who was waking up with a rustling feathery laugh at the state of his friend’s mental state.

James took a moment to watch everyone else at work.  Planner had mapped out a pretty solid schedule for getting every member of the Order a respectable 15 AP in a single set of delves, but even the infomorph was aware that reality didn’t always agree with plans, and that people in large groups had a kind of friction to their movement that could slow things down.

The plan itself was pretty simple.  The milestone for a first delve literally just meant going in and out.  For a fast delve, do the same thing again.  Then it was back in, moving in teams, to get to the nearest piece of dungeon graffiti that had been mapped out, and photograph it, then back out again.  Then in and out again to that same graffiti to draw it this time for a slightly different milestone that was opened up by the first do-art-of-art one, before a rapid cycle through the dungeon’s entrance to get the fifth delve milestone.  Then cycling in and out again to get the milestone for multiple milestones in a day.  Then back to get to the closest mapped out dungeon machine disguised as a car (when activated, it converted any materials in the glove box into a functional lightbulb; lifespan and color patterns variable based on what you fed it).

And there you had it.  A lot of jogging - or slithering - but the different values of each milestone netted a total of fifteen AP.  Enough to stop automatically leveling up breathing and blinking quite so aggressively, or glowing for infomorphs, especially since everyone had a plan for what they wanted, with various tools set around the entrance to be grabbed immediately upon gaining the points.  The teams all had experienced guides, both to keep everyone safe and moving, and also so no one got diverted from the plan by picking up combat or discovery milestones that didn’t unlock the right tracks.

But even if they did, it wasn’t like the Order was counting on everything going flawlessly.  The ‘route’ had been drawn up by Planner and Texture-Of-Barkdust working together, and no strategy the two most detail-oriented individuals in the Order put together was going to be sent out without a wealth of contingency plans attached to it.  They had backups for backups, courtesy of the increasingly detailed list of milestones they’d found.  If someone got a combat milestone, they knew how to shift where they were in the delve group.  It someone got an observation milestone, they knew how that changed the path they were taking.  If someone had a birthday, they had it covered.

James wished he’d had something like this so he could have skipped the early uncertainty.  But then, that was just the cost of being a paladin, in a way.  He often got first crack at the magic, which meant he went in blind, while those that followed got to have plans and builds, which they then shared back with him usually after it was too late.  And honestly he’d take that trade.

TQ’s team was a melange of new people, and members of the Order who had just never gotten to the Pylon before.  He saw Karen having a conversation with Ink, the perpetually calm human woman unperturbed by talking to the umbral two feet taller than her about something James was certain he was going to hear about later.  Misha - ratroach Misha not chanter Misha - was fidgeting by themself, not hiding but nervously scratching at bits of chitin underneath their armor, their own reshaping having happened barely a couple weeks ago and this the first real test of their new body.  In contrast, Pia was fidgeting with excitement, and everyone knew it.  The chanter’s empathy field was limited since she was only one of three of the species here, not the mental broadcast tower of hundreds that lived in Townton, but it wasn’t hard to know that they were looking forward to this, their sharpened legs making soft impacts on the concrete, covered in the handmade stockings that let them run on hard surfaces without cracking their own shells.  And on top of all of that, two entirely normal humans.  One survivor of a Status Quo, and a friend of hers from Recovery that she’d convinced to come along.  They almost stood out by virtue of being the only ones that were nervous because of the dungeon.

Across the entryway, five other teams of similar compositions got ready, and went over safety checks with the people who knew more about the threats of this specific dungeon.  And then, there was James and Zhu.

”You ready?”  James asked the navigator, a steady smile creeping onto his face while Zhu’s glowing orange form fully unfurled and the navigator stretched himself out.  “Got a plan for your AP?”

”Assuming this works.”  Zhu said, windmilling his own arm off of James’ own, repeatedly clipping James in the head with the sides of his talons.

”It’ll work.”  James said confidently.  “Either we get the one we’re aiming for, or we get something circumstantial.  Either way, how many AP do you need?  Three?”

”Four, I want Horizon spellcasting.  You have the hard job; at least I know how to do mine better.  You don’t even know what it means to try harder at Climb magic.”  Zhu’s eyes focused on the point of the dungeon’s staircase as the grinding of artificial stone started to slow.  “Path’s open in five.”

James nodded and raised his voice while his off hand got his filter mask ready to snap into place once he was done yelling.  “Alright, everyone have fun today!”  He called to the delvers.  “Remember, safety first!  Listen to your team leads!  If any of you die I’ll be really upset with you!”

”Time.  Gate’s open.”  Zhu told him.

James settled the mask into place, Zhu’s hand helping with the straps on one side as the dual purpose gear fit across the human’s mouth.  The Pylon was often choked with fumes in places, so it was good for combating that local hazard.  But also, the aerosolized potion supply built into James’ custom mask was another range of options for surviving a whole slew of nonsense.

”Then let’s get going.”  James said, stepping through the space between the two groups that were up first after he started his own delve, their steps sounding on the stairway behind him as he began to make his way down into the Pylon Motoric.

He took the stairs easy, because there was no sense tripping here.  But as soon as he and Zhu emerged into the grey concrete expanse of the massive false parking garage, the landscape ahead of them dotted with the dull colors of fake parked cars and the hot glows of uncovered ceiling lights, he started moving.

They had a couple hours before the entrance switched, and James didn’t want to be here for a second cycle.  Also teleporting out of this dungeon sucked, though not as bad as from some others.

So he began jogging, Zhu’s feathers seeming to cut the air resistance around them, as they started their ascent up the tower of the parking structure, seeking the open sky of the rooftop, and the milestone it promised.

And it took a whole fifteen seconds for a traffic cone to try to kill them.

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Running inside a dungeon was generally a bad idea.

Dungeons often had weird and inconsistent threats, with hostile or potentially hostile life sometimes packed in close together but ignoring or avoiding skirmishes happening even a few feet away if there was a wall or something.  Even something like making loud noise wasn’t always a guaranteed problem, whether because of a heavy weather condition or just because the dungeon’s guards couldn’t pinpoint the source.  But there was one ironclad rule about any dungeon.

The faster you went, the more you were rolling on the random encounter table.

Every step in a dungeon was an opportunity for something large and angry to try to eat you.  Or several things that were small and angry to try to eat you.  Or a trap to trigger, or a hallway to shift and get you lost, or for you to get lost under your own power, or just for the environment itself to cause a problem.

The Order’s doctrine was one where delve teams went slow.  Almost painfully so, in some cases.  They knew, for a fact, that a lot the dungeons they had access to continued far deeper than they’d ever been.  But they didn’t reach those depths very often, because they prioritized survival and safety over anything else.  Take it slow, take it steady, and if you did then a lot of the time you’d end up taking problems one at a time in nice manageable chunks.

The only real exception to the rule was Route Horizon, where going slow was kind of stupid.  And maybe Winter’s Climb, where going too slow got you swallowed by a blizzard and added a new problem until the storm passed.  No, unless you were exceptionally dumb, you didn’t run in a dungeon.  Anything faster than a steady sweep, corner by corner, room by room, with a whole team moving together, was foolish unless you were exceptionally durable and cocky in equal measure.  And even then, you didn’t run.

James jogged through Pylon Motoric.

There wasn’t a timer for this milestone, just a window that he didn’t want to miss.  So he’d slow down if it was important.  But the truth was, James was durable, and dangerous, and nothing near this entrance to the dungeon was actually a threat to him.  Especially not with Zhu watching his flank.

The hollow echo of smooth concrete under his boots sounded in a rhythmic cycle.  Every step moved James through the wide central aisle of the mutated parking garage, and his experience in the endless smoggy expanse of this dungeon made sure that he kept in an open position at all times.

The Pylon actually had a lot of open space.  James could see about two hundred feet ahead with pretty decent clarity, and could even see into the central ‘down’ ramp through a lattice of smooth stone and rebar columns.  The pain points for ambushes were the corners where the ramps evened out before beginning their ascent again, and any parked cars.

The cars here weren’t real.  James and Zhu were making a game of it as they jogged, spotting the weirdest mutilation of a brand name.  Soob was winning so far, but only because that one had nearly gotten them killed by prompting both of them into laughing just before a neon orange traffic cone full of teeth had decided to take a flying leap at James’ head.  Some of the cars were, like Officium Mundi cubicles, full of goodies.  Cash, snacks, tools, sometimes even personal electronics.  They hadn’t found any dungeontech from in here yet, but it was always a possibility.  It had taken James and Anesh five delves at first to find a pen that wrote in cursive, and everything had gotten weird from there, after all.

Some of the cars were machines, though.  Not for driving, but for some kind of transmutation.  Their consoles and shifters and radio dials all controlled a process, seemingly unique to each of them, that usually changed around whatever was in the appropriate slot.  Those were hard to find though, and sometimes they had devilishly intricate locks, so James just jogged around cars and didn’t let himself get hit by anything lurking under them.

“Keep left up here.”  Zhu directed.

”Got it.”  James replied, shifting his approach to the top of the ramp they were approaching.  There was a thing that looked like a silvery sedan stopped right on the edge of it, and following the navigator’s advice, James veered around it.  His pace kept steady, all his exercise and upgrades paying off as he didn’t even feel a little winded after six circuits of this place’s spiral ascent.

From the other side of the car, there was a rubbery squeak, followed by an equally rubbery squeaking war cry; a black ribbed shape that looked like a pangolin armored in a heavy duty tire waddling around the edge of the bumper and leveling one of its blunt claws toward James, a few more of the creatures behind it.

He ignored them, not even waving coyly as he kept moving.  Those guys were fast once they got going, but if someone was moving directly away from them and they weren’t angry, they usually didn’t chase.  So he angled himself around the chipped paint of the bollard that marked the corner, passing some kind of emergency phone and fire alarm mounted to the wall, and planted his feet to keep going up.

All James and Zhu had to do was get to the top of the parking structure, then leave.  That was a milestone they knew existed.  It was just that it was a ‘low priority’ one, and so despite having done this two times before, they’d always gotten lower value milestones instead.  Only one per delve after all.

“Hose web coming up.”  James prompted Zhu

The navigator rolled glowing orange eyes.  “I see it.”  He replied, feathers flattened across their light armor.

The pace James was setting meant that the clump of traffic cones that dropped from the pipes running along the sloped concrete ceiling missed entirely.  Which was good; fighting those ran the risk of triggering some other milestone.  So again, he just left them behind as he steadily made his way up the ramp, and took a sharp right past a piece of spray painted graffiti on the wall that looked like a psychedelic fractal skull.

Directly ahead of them, next to a part of the outer wall that looked like it had exploded and left a roughly spherical gap, a red square box that would normally contain a fire hose sat.  James had spotted it through the columns and cars on the way up, but Zhu’s insistence on taking a right and not a left meant they had to run straight at the stupid thing.

It exploded as it heard his footsteps.  Or maybe saw him.  How these things sensed was kind of up in the air.  Either way, the soft white of the hose inside exploded outward like a webbed net, aiming to grab James and drag him back to turn into a snack.  Or maybe to fling him off the mile-long drop over the edge.  That didn’t matter either, Zhu spiked it with a well aimed Pave cast that hit hard enough to bleed off its momentum and leave it flopping loosely to the ground while James just kept jogging.

The fascinating thing about moving through a dungeon quickly like this, he thought to himself as he moved through another cloud of exhaust fumes, was just how much ground you could cover when you weren’t worried about the risk.  Oh, there was risk.  But everything felt like something he’d seen before.  Even if the view of a skyline of grey and white concrete spires through the rectangular holes in the side of the structure he was in was spectacular, with some hidden light source casting rays through the clouds of smoke and fumes.  It wasn’t trying to get him.  The traffic cones and rollers and barracondas were the ones doing that, and they were something he could handle without any fear.  Hell, this building didn’t even have any ratlings in it, since the small tribe of them that had occupied one of these upper levels had already left with the Order, and the dungeon hadn’t spawned more yet.

And as for the things James hadn’t yet sorted out - the graffiti, the machines, the biomes of the other structures, the things that were sometimes caught in glimpses flying through the high smog with silhouetted wings - those things would be here when he came back for a long delve.

”Duck.”  Zhu ordered as they neared a very different kind of change in the environment, and James obeyed, a traffic cone brushing his ponytail as it failed to latch on and slammed into a parked car.  The orange shape went still afterward, like it was ashamed to have missed so obviously, and the duo took their last steps past it and up onto a flat surface.

The roof of the parking structure revealed, more than any of the expansive inside, how big this dungeon made things.  There were a few boxy structures that marked stairwells cutting into the outside edges of the building, a concrete wall in the middle that led to a straight drop that did not exist ‘inside’ the structure, and a few sheet metal coverings that marked off a few dozen parking spaces with protection from whatever elements this dungeon thought it needed to screen its fake cars from.  But aside from that, James could see across the whole stretch, even with some of the bigger chassis blocking line of sight.

And it was huge.  There were easily a thousand vehicles laid out here in neat rows.  If any of these were magical, or even just mundane working cars, then a slightly alternate version of the Order could have sourced its income by targeting logisticor teleports here and stealing hundreds of the things at once.  This was two Costco parking lots worth of space, and it was the roof of one building.  A single narrow finger of concrete in the dungeon that built so many of them that it dwarfed any individual person to an almost terrifying degree.

James took a small moment to catch his breath, dosing himself with exercise potion as he let Zhu highlight low-risk areas that he could lean on the concrete walls blackened by the endless fumes in the air here.  As his muscles began to magically strengthen themselves, James looked up at the sky, taking a closer look at the distortion over the back left corner of the rooftop.  It was another point where this dungeon differed from any other; it was connected.  Linked to its partner, Verdigris Venture, and sometimes you could see the Garden through sliding spaces that popped up in the Pylon.

This one wasn’t on the ground anywhere, which was new.  But it was kind of nice to see a vision of sunlight and fresh air, swinging back and forth like a pendulum across the open air over the edge of the rooftop.  Though James did worry that the Garden was getting a little too much of the smog in return.

”We made good time.”  James commented as he checked the thing that was sort of a HUD running on his skulljack’s braid.  “Nice navigating.”

”Yeah, I’m getting good at this!”  Zhu bragged.  “Helps that we know where we’re going, so I can actually steer around the traps, and not into them.”

”Your species is weird, man.”  James laughed.

Zhu flicked his feathers back into James’ face with his own revving chuckle.  “You have to lay down and wildly hallucinate for a third of the day, don’t say I’m weird.”

”You spend a lot longer than I do asleep!”  James shoved the feathers away, failing miserably in the task as doing so just brought the rest of Zhu’s manifestation up closer to his face.  At least the mask kept him from getting a glowing pinion in his nose.  “Come on, let’s get back, and figure out what we screwed up this time.”

The jog back took just as much time as the one up.  James had paced himself perfectly, and Zhu had steered them in such a way that none of the wildlife was actively out for their blood.  The two got back with a half hour to spare, passing by a team that was in the process of doing sketchbook copies of one of the pieces of warning-sign graffiti hidden on one of those concrete ceiling rectangles.

“Ready?”  This time it was James asking, not Zhu.  They’d been trading prompts the whole delve, and it was his turn, as it was his feet taking them up the steps.  A normal stairwell suddenly losing one of its walls and turning into slabs of cement sticking out from a wall as they just kept going up, rising until it was back to the level floor of the maintenance shed that hid both dungeon entrances.

”Yeah let’s see how we get screwed!  I’m so excited.”  Zhu lied.

(Milestone - Continued Crossings : +3 AP)

The wrong one.  Of course.  But James had done this song and dance before too many times to make any of the usual mistakes.  He had a mental list, even!  Do not complain about the milestone, that was a track to getting levels in talking.  Don’t hesitate, that was how you ended up funneling more AP into breathing or blinking.  Also don’t think about breathing or blinking, which he was mostly doing by instead focusing on what he was supposed to be trying, desperately ignoring the dry feeling in his throat.  He didn’t need another level in swallowing, no matter what jokes Alanna liked to make.

And the thing was, three AP was more than enough for what he needed.

James tapped into the Breath that he had compressed in a ball in his chest somewhere either in or around his lungs.  The mana of Breath wasn’t actually physical like some others, but it sure felt that way when he started casting.  The thing about Pylon levels was, you needed to push your limits for each successive improvement, and no one actually knew what it meant to cast Climb spells “correctly”.  So he was guessing, and trying stuff, and flailing wildly.

But the fact that there was levels in it meant a person could do it better.  So James tried to feel the Breath.  Tried to push it along with the spell’s forced interaction.  Tried to improve and refine what the magic was doing.  He doubled up on that attempt by chaining spell casts quickly, relying on his enhanced anatomy to keep him alive as he burned through Breath.  Rot Eyes, Call to Blood, Reaching Frost, all of them one after the other as he felt for the difference in the texture of their individual magic, like he’d been practicing at home when he had time.

And for once, his plan worked.  Though the heavy gasp for air he gave afterward did its own work too.

(Spellcasting - Winter’s Climb : +2 levels, 6 levels total, link open)

(Breathing : +1 level,  9 levels total, [Charm River Transformation])

(3 AP spent, 0 AP remains)

“Fuck yes.”  James said, panting harder now than he had been after jogging up and down ten miles of ramps.  “Zhu?”

”Dammit, ran out of Velocity!”  Zhu complained.  “I forgot.  I forgot the stupid thing about how it all bleeds away when I demanifest!”  He swept his arm outward and pounded a taloned fist on the wall next to them.  “Oh, and now I have a level in yelling!  Great!”

”Not punching?”  James asked.

”No I still got one in Horizon casting.  And one in glowing.  Again.  Okay, I have the link for glowing, I guess that’s something.”  Zhu sighed and let James give him a reassuring pet along the back of his arm, human fingers deftly avoiding poking navigator eyes.  “I didn’t even realize, I’m sorry.  I wasted this.  Also hey, how come you never get glowing?”

James opened his mouth, and then got caught by the last question.  “I… good question!  Maybe it’s not autonomic like breathing and stuff is, since it’s an orb effect.  Anyway, you didn’t waste shit.  You got levels.  So did I, and now I gotta find time to link Climb casting to… I dunno, fireball?  Is that too cliche?  Anyway, now we know for next time when we actually get the rooftop milestone.”

”I hate that it doesn’t work if we teleport to it.”

”I hate that we didn’t see another ‘X delves completed’ milestone coming.  I wonder how many that was?  We must have been getting higher priority milestones before that.  Ugh.  Gotta update the flowchart.”

Zhu made a sage rumble of a distant vehicle.  “Get Reed to do it.  She likes flowcharts.”

James shook his head as he watched one of the delve teams come moving up the stairs together, stepping himself and Zhu out of their way as they prepared for what might be their last loop of AP and leveling up for the day.  “She likes having flowcharts.  No one in the Order likes making flowcharts.”

”So, there’s a recruitment opportunity, is what you’re saying.”

”…Yeah, sure.  Find me someone who likes flowcharts.”  James told his friend.  “Anyway, it looks like everyone is finishing up.  Let’s go get cleaned up before we’re supposed to meet Vex later.”

Zhu mumbled into James’ neck as he tried not to pout about their failed milestone too much.  “Bet Vex hates flowcharts too.”

James didn’t bother replying.  There wasn’t a universe that existed where Vex liked anything that was remotely shaped like an organizational tool.

_____

There was something weird going on in James’ life.

For as long as he’d known there were dungeons, he’d wanted to be in them.  All of them.  He was quite literally Officium Mundi’s target demographic; that dungeon could have killed him so easily just by existing and slowly pulling James on deeper and deeper adventures.  Hell, if he hadn’t had Anesh and Alanna to anchor him, there was a real chance he might have just gone in one day and started living a nomadic dungeon life, forever.  Or at least, as long as he could last.

But beyond that, he’d taken the time to not just poke his head into, but get good at exploring every dungeon the Order knew.  The Sewer?  James had contagion and contamination protocols locked down, and actually kind of liked the process of identifying new physics-ignoring mushrooms and vats of liquid substances.  The Attic?  Well that was just a vacation disguised as a delve, especially since it apparently had both expanded its swamp area and put that expansion ‘over’ James’ apartment.  The Horizon?  Driving had always been a thing James was pretty okay at, and skill ranks and magical advantages piled that up as he became proficient at spotting threats on the road and navigating the folded space of the highway dungeon.  The Climb?  Once you knew proper climbing technique, there was something kind of delightful about the misery that dungeon produced; it wasn’t fun, but it made for great stories afterward.  The Library?  Improv classes were part of the training for that one, that was just too cool and hilarious to not get into.

Even more recently, James had done multiple delves into the Pylon and Garden.  Hell, he’d done another Pylon delve today.  He loved the planning and routing the Pylon encouraged, and the freeform exploration the Garden rewarded.  He loved taking the time to select magic items and mundane tools to get through a specific delve in a specific dungeon, and the twinned dungeons showed that off clearly.

James loved dungeons.  Maybe not all of them as people, exactly, but as a concept.  The Order was built to turn dungeon magic into real world applications and help, and that started with the dungeon magic.

So it was kind of weird he was going to a dungeon that exactly three people in the Order had ever been in, before he got a shot to set foot in the bank dungeon that Charlie’s scout team had re-located along with the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society.  

The bank dungeon, currently located in a derelict Pizza Hut, which was… sure a thing James had to emotionally contend with… only opened its door once a month.  When it did though, it had some of the heaviest time compression the Order had ever seen.  This meant that teleporting in or out was actually probably lethal, so James was waiting for the next doorway when he’d be one of the short delve teams to slip in and check it out; a forward scout for the month-long expedition that was planned.

But it also meant that there was a dungeon that he knew existed, and it was just sitting there, while he went to a different dungeon.  And that was just how life was going to be from now on; there were going to be too many dungeons for him to closely know and understand all of them and their quirks and magics.  Even if he did nothing but delve all day long, they were finding too many for one person to be good at all of them.  Especially not a paladin who had a real job on the side.

”You just really can’t let yourself enjoy anything, can you?”  Alanna asked, arms folded over her chest as she stared at him with that flat line on her lips that definitely wasn’t a smile, but also didn’t know what it wanted to be.

”He is insane.”  TQ added calmly.  “We are dedicated to someone who is insane.

”It’s my curse.”  James admitted.  “Well.  And, because I was raised in the United States of America.”  He looked over toward the street, the asphalt river that wound through the suburbs and past the dark forested patch of city park that they were standing in.  The place was normal enough now that cars were driving past every now and then, some of them assuredly assuming that James and his company were up to mischief, but no one had called the cops on them yet.  This city had lost a lot of ground to the Underburbs not too long ago, so it was strange to see that life just… kept going.  Strange, but not bad.  Also strange were the collection of hooded figures and also one armored ratroach approaching where he and Alanna were lurking.  “Hey Firefly.”  James greeted Arrush affectionately.

The towering bioweapon flushed such a bright radioactive green around his eyes that James kind of wondered if it was actually casting illumination.  “Y-you can’t call me that now!”  He protested, the softly glowing blue crescent of his mouth highlighting him in the dark.  “That’s cheating!”  He added as Alanna and TQ gave different forms of soft laughter behind the two.

”It’s really cute though.”  Alanna pointed out.  “Okay.  Coterie’s here.  Sinister cabal is here.  Are we doing this?”  She tugged on one of the straps of her armor, tightening the hard shell of the vambrace that had been altered to have a perfect slot for a shield bracer to nest in without having to be poking into her skin.

”We’re more of a coven, really!”  Astra said, the small woman supporting herself on a cane as she gave them a grin from underneath her hood.  “Well, Vex and me are, all your mysterious cultists are… are…” Astra sniffed haughtily.  “Knights.”

”I like knights.”  Arrush insisted at her.  “And I’ve never met a coven yet.”

Astra spread her arms, pivoting so one hand stayed on her cane as she did so.  “First time then!”  She declared as the others caught up to them.  “Okay!  So, this is going to seem weird to you, because it’s sort of witchy.”

”Oh yeah, we don’t have witches.”  Alanna said with a deadpan stare.

”Yes we do, we acquired them.”  TQ pointed his snout toward Astra with a satisfied hiss.

James jabbed his partner with his index finger, failing to find a gap in her armor.  “Be nice!”  He chuckled.

”Pay Attention.”  Astra said, and the words resounded so powerfully that James felt himself listening intently, exactly as he wanted to, with no outside distractions.  “So getting in is hard.  Mags and Vex can’t even talk about it, and even when I do, people forget really fast.”

”Sorry, I missed that, can you…” Alanna looked down at her hand, and the flaring green pattern of her authority that had shielded her from the mental effect Astra had just tried.  “Did you mind control these four?”  She asked, pointing her hands in opposite directions at James and Arrush who were both focused on the small woman’s words, while still trying to indicate TQ with her chin.

Astra sighed.  “Yes, and I need to do it to you, too, unless you trust your boy enough to follow him into a wall.”

”Oh.  I do.  I don’t think you can get through this guy either.”  Alanna said, holding up her wrist.  “Talk to them, I’ll just nod along.”

Astra gave her a confused look, that slowly melted into respectful admiration as she realized Alanna wasn’t kidding.  ”Oh.  Okay…” She turned back to the people from the Order and started pointing at spots in the dark shadows of the trees, arranging them into a circle.  “Still Listening?  Good.”  She continued, voice vibrating.  “The sacred edifice is never closed, and welcomes all to its bridges and towers.  But no one can walk to its door, or ever discover it by chance.  So, how do we make our way inside?”

”I’m more interested in how you found it in the first place.”  Alanna said after a pause when she realized Arrush and James were silently listening and not participating in conversation.

”We craft a rite of some form.”  Astra continued, mouth quirking either in amusement or irritation at Alanna’s words.  Stepping out of the ring of people that she’d already rehearsed this with, she took her own spot in the circle, tugging one hand at the thick cloth of her hood.  “Five of us for the mortals, three for the ghosts.”  At her words, the orange glow of a trio of navigators bled out into the world from their hosts, positioned around the circle, while Zhu himself let his manifestation crawl out of James’ coat, ruefully leaving his hiding place against the freezing air.  “Are You Ready?”  Astra asked.

James blinked like he’d lost focus.  “Always.”  He answered for them, more than prepared to get into a new dungeon.

Astra stared speaking then, a steady chant of soft words echoed by the people to her left and right, who then echoed them further.  The navigators participating too, while James, Arrush, TQ, Alanna, and Zhu stood in the middle of their ring underneath the old trees of the damaged city, about thirty feet from the nearest sidewalk and streetlights.

The words were about going somewhere, seeing something, but it all started to blend together.  The effect of Astra’s domain, her unique set of commands over words and their uses, had made it hard for James and Arrush to actually hear what was clearly a chant as language.  For Arrush, it was especially pronounced; he’d been learning more and more language skills ever since his escape from the Akashic Sewer, but he still wasn’t as fully immersed in the concept of spoken words as even a human teenager would be.  

For Alanna, it was a lot more academic.  She realized, somewhere around the three minute mark of the rite, that Astra had effectively brute-forced a kind of posthypnotic suggestion on their group.  And probably also the people in the robes, two of whom were definitely Daniel and Pathfinder, and she’d be bringing that up later for fun.  What Alanna didn’t really expect, but got anyway, was the exact same tug as her boyfriend and his big ratroach love.

James turned as he felt it, eyes staring into the distance, and also toward the little playground rising out of a layer of old barkchips that was between the forest of the park and the blocky building beyond it.  Something was open.  Something was calling him.  And the ritual was for going somewhere, his thoughts still pinned to paying attention to the words echoing around him.

”Go.”  Astra commanded.  And everyone but Alanna started moving, Zhu even disentangling himself from James’ side and whipping around their feet as a bouncing spear of orange light as he followed more aggressively than just as a passenger.

Alanna blinked, and then realized what she had to do, clamping a hand on James’ shoulder, closing her eyes, and trusting her boyfriend implicitly.

The group walked about a hundred feet toward the playground jungle gym, most of them just barely starting to come to their senses as they walked around the slide, toward the swingset, and through the angular arch of the metal bars that supported the far side of the swings.  A spot that no one ever walked through unless they called out and were called in.

Five people vanished from reality.

Astra watched them go, and then threw her free hand overhead.  “Okay!  Good rite everyone!” She cheered.  “So!  We’ve got about ten minutes before someone calls the cops about the chanting!”

”How do you know that?”  Reed asked as she shifted from foot to foot from her spot on the side of the circle, the robe that had been provided draped over the ratroach body like a tarp. “Doesn’t everyone forget stuff once they leave the dungeon?  Also why are we wearing robes?”

”Oh yeah, absolutely.”  Vex called from her position as one of the chanting ritualists.  She gave Reed a sarcastic grin as she sauntered over and draped herself across her shorter girlfriend.  Vex kept her weight off Astra, but still dragged her hood back so she could plant her chin on her smaller partner’s head, the contrast between their coloration making them both stand out more under the moonlight in the dark park.  “Hey, we all just watched your other paladin walk in, right?  So why not just follow him?”  She asked.

”…Wow this place is weird.” Reed muttered.

”And the robes are for style.”  Vex clarified.

Astra huffed out with loud exasperation, her small size doing nothing to offset her vocal volume.  “The robes are because the ritual works best when it feels like a ritual!  Even if you know about that, the robes still make it feel real, and it feeling real is all that matters!  Not that you’re remember.”  She pouted at her girlfriend, who Astra knew understood, because Vex herself knew a hundred details about the dungeon and could talk to anyone else in the Order about them yet.

Pathfinder’s peacock feathers extended out in a wide orange and red fan.  “I think that I could destroy this confusion.”  She said with a soft voice that she almost never used, drawing a stare from Astra as the girl’s head snapped in the direction of the human and navigator pair.  “But that would be wrong.  This is a work of art.  Memeplexes are structures.  Walls.  Brute force.  But here… it ties into so many things in so many ways.  Tendrils in fractals, patterns in the breeze.  This was crafted with delicacy and care.”

”Right.  Uh… sure thing.”  Vex said with pursed lips.  “Anyway the work of art doesn’t stop us knowing that the cops fucking hate us chanting in the park.”

”So enough banter!  Real world magic is done now, time to get out of here and wait for the people with fake magic to come back so we can chat.”  Astra declared.  Her voice was definitely starting to get strained, and Vex clearly knew that her girlfriend had a limit they were approaching, because she made everyone hurry the hell up on getting out of there.

Path could examine the memeplex later, and Harriet and Reed and Daniel’s protests about what ‘real magic’ meant could wait.  For now, what had been a small trio of delvers and maybe witches finished sealing their bond with the Order of Endless Rooms by opening one of the strangest dungeon doors that either side had ever seen, and sending select people in to gain power they could use to face the oncoming horrors of the world.  And then sneaking out the back side of the park as a state trooper drove by with one of those cop car floodlights on.

And if they were lucky, everyone would come out again before they were needed.