The Daily Grind - Chapter 374 (Patreon)

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” -Mark Twain-

_____

The dungeon was a playground.

Not metaphorically, either.  Alanna actually often described Route Horizon as her own personal playground, which James found very cute.  He liked driving, sure, and he was pretty good at it.  But Alanna found driving to be a kind of spiritual experience; she never had a problem getting into the dungeon, because the act of being behind a wheel was to her the same as the act of evading the burdens and tribulations of life.  So the highway dungeon was a playground to her, in the same way that Clutter Ascent was a playground for Sarah.  This dungeon though, was a playground in the sense that it was a playground.

Astra had, during the rite that had opened the way for them somehow, described it as being a ‘sacred edifice of bridges and towers’, and James… hadn’t expected anything off of that.  He could have called the Office that and only been half joking.  But he saw now that the young witch had been at her most literal in that one small description, somehow using the vibe of the spiritual language she had used to slip something through the memeplex that had deftly stopped anyone from even thinking of mentioning stuff about the dungeon most of the time.

It was a playground.

They’d emerged onto the rough yet mostly stable surface of barkchips, stepping through the archway of metal to find that this side was also a swingset.  Turning around, James could see through the breach; it wasn’t a door, like many of the others, but it was a portal.  On the other side, it was nighttime in a dark park, which meant that here, in this pleasantly warm twilight, the portal out was a triangle of darkness that blocked the view of the swings on its other side.

The barkchips underfoot spread outward about fifty feet.  There was another swingset forming an obtuse angle, and then past that, a lattice dome of metal pipes for climbing, before a low curb of concrete cut off the edge of the circle they were in.  Farther into the middle of the playground they’d fallen into, there was one of those standing structures that occupied elementary school playgrounds.  A modern example, with smoothly painted metal support pipes that doubled as climbable objects, thick hard plastic used for the walls, steps, and movable parts, and softer rubber for the floor and flexible bridge between two of the standing towers of the play structure.

It was the kind of thing James would have been able to run around for an hour as a kid and still find new nooks and crannies in.  It was also sized for that same kid James had used to be, so as an adult, with his empowered ability to be tall enough to have a vantage point, he could see the majority of it from here.  And he knew that he could cover all of its surface in a few seconds; crossing that little hanging bridge - assuming it took his weight at all with all his gear on - would take three steps.

Of course, while the jungle gym was small, and perfectly ordinary, standing proudly in the silvery-purple light of the twilight dungeon, it wasn’t alone.

Near the swings that they’d entered through, there was a curb, and then a stretch of smooth asphalt, yes.  An hourglass shape of black that appeared to exist just to have a tetherball pole in the middle of itself, before it fell away and another circle of barkchips was placed down.  And then on the other side of that one, another.  To their left, and right, a similar pattern emerged.  Past the modern style colorful plastic playground, too, there was another.  Each of them covered with swings, slides, climbing structures, seesaws, and miniature fake castles.

On, and on, and on.  Until, like with James’ first experience with Officium Mundi, he couldn’t even see the horizon.  Just the blurred wall of playground constructs blocking everything out.

Next to him, TQ hissed with quiet awe, and James glanced at the camraconda to see him staring upward.  He followed his friend’s vision toward the sky, and saw… stars.

Not real ones though.

They glowed with silver light, and the swirl of clouds in the warm air obfuscated the true shape of the sky.  But the stars were too close.  Too… helpful.  Those weren’t the distinct points that denoted astronomical bodies, those were lights in the sky put there by a dungeon that didn’t have billions of kilometers of space to work with but still needed to be outside.

And yet none of that artificial nature made the sky less beautiful.  It was just a work of art instead of an observation of natural wonder.  This dungeon seemed to like its art, whether it was working with stars or memories.

“Smells nice in here.”  Arrush said as he sniffed the air, though he didn’t uncoil from his ready position as he did so.

Of all of them, TQ probably looked the most casual, but none of them had entered a new dungeon and just started gaping as they looked around.  They were on alert for anything, and sweeping the area near their entrance for threats.

Threats that did not emerge.  But then, usually the entrances to dungeons were like that.  Weird, obvious about being weird, but pretty calm.

“This place is cool.”  Alanna said softly.  “Anyone see anything mean?” She rested her hands on the hilts of the shortsword and hammer she was wearing on her belt, ready to pull either of them depending on what the dungeon life in here was like.

James and Arrush pivoted to either side of her, sweeping in opposite directions as their various different forms of eyes looked for any signs of motion.  Zhu, coiling up James’ leg and reforming his manifestation in a flourish of feathers, similarly started watching.

”Looks clear.”  James eventually said with a slight exhale of held breath.  “Okay.  Quick check.  We know nothing about this place, except that there’s a way to get a ‘domain’ and upgrade it.  We don’t know what the challenges are like, or how dangerous it is, but we do know that Astra was one of the delvers, and she’s been struggling with her health. Safe to assume Vex and Mags carried for her, but that means I’m putting our danger level at a tentative three.  Any objections?”

”Make it four.”  Arrush said with his lightly melodious voice.

”…Because?”

Alanna answered for the ratroach.  “Because if you’re wrong it doesn’t matter.”  She rapped her knuckles on Arrush’s armored upper shoulder in friendly acknowledgment.  “Okay.  Pick a direction.”

”I think-!”  Zhu started to say with an excited rev of his voice.

”Not a chance does the person who can summon misadventures get to pick the direction.”  James said with a quiet laugh.  Empty seeming or not, you never made too much noise in a dungeon.  “Let’s start simple.  Alanna, get the remote flare launcher set up on the pavement here, and let’s just keep going that way.”  He said as he unhooked a camera drone from its case and tossed it into the air, skulljack signal letting him puppet it as their softly buzzing overwatch.

It gave him a great view of his eclectic coterie as they moved in a vanguard formation through the dungeon, stepping away from the dark wedge of a gap back to reality, and out into a new place.  Somewhere to explore that smelled like aromatic wood and warm metal, with a fake sky full of silver stars.

And for a long, satisfying moment, James didn’t even think about the need for the power this place had hidden away.

_____

Cam and Nate stood at the base of the wooden steps to an apartment located just east of Townton’s central park.  The place was one of few buildings that had been intact enough to use, but wasn’t currently modified by an orange totem to house a hundred people.  Repairs had been affected, of course; the steps themselves were basically all new wood, and one of the windows had that wobbly look that came from being formed out of a Manipulate Glass blue orb from the broken shards of what it had once been.  But overall, the place was just a normal two floor weathered building.

Granted, the downstairs unit, which had previously been an optometrist's office, had been repurposed into an armory and a small training gym.  And the other upstairs unit was empty, which was weird for Townton with its growing population.  But it was a decent enough place.

The two rogues had been working well into the night at the Lair, sorting through reports from the newly conquered United Kingdom, parsing information from rogues and knights and scouts that were returning to the Lair with strange stories about pillars and loose magic, and generally trying to figure out if the world had actually already ended and the Order was just not aware of that fact.

While their most valuable tool of the world’s bluntest paladin was busy going into a new dungeon, Cam and Nate were working, both of them realizing at roughly the same time that they were way too tired when they found themselves being jointly angry at the sensation of Quinn’s friendship field.  Nate was baseline angry all day, but the two of them snapping at the same time at someone who didn’t do anything on purpose was a bad sign.

So they’d headed home.  And then remembered something at the foot of the outside staircase.

”This is an issue.”  Cam said, her stoic tone laced with mental exhaustion.  Her body might not quickly fail without sleep, but her thoughts certainly fell apart sooner.

”You wanna go in first, or am I getting hit in the head?”  Nate asked gruffly, moving to walk up the stairs first.

Cam followed, folding her wings back in what was now a practiced move.  These stairs had taught her a lot about how to position her extra scaled limbs so she didn’t get splinters.  “You know I will not allow that.”

”You get ambushed then.”

With a sigh, Cam pushed past the human and opened their front door, maneuvering deftly to fit through with her wings not even scraping the edges of the frame.  Her shoes echoing on the wood floor as she stepped into the gap space between the cramped horseshoe of a kitchen on the right, and the semi-furnished living room on the left.  The apartment was dark, but it didn’t matter, both because Cam had better low light vision than most people and also because she knew where every obstacle in her home was.

Her right hand was already rising into the air as the Crimson made her move.  Another copy of Cam’s form, though this one a lot angrier in terms of facial expression, lurching from behind the door to swing a heavy blunt object at her head.

There had been a lot of discussion between Cam, who was supposedly an Azure, and her sister Ami, an Ochre, about whether or not the color classifications for their kind were real.  Cam was less sure now that a given Camille was meaningfully different than any other, except in their attitude, but that did make a difference.  She was, however, very certain that this particular Crimson was not going to be fast enough to hurt her.

The other girl, still struggling to shake off what was probably a very large dose of camraconda paralytic venom, missed Cam with the cast iron pan that she was swinging.  Cam stepped into her opponent’s personal space with her face an unchanging calm mask, and let the spell she’d started pulling up finish casting.  God’s Braid, one of the ones she’d advanced while looking for something meditative to do before bed, let about twenty feet of sturdy rope pool out into the world, with one end grasped in her tight grip.  Cam caught the other end as she coiled it around the Camille’s arm, using one foot to shove as her hands tugged the binding into a quick hogtie.

Nate followed her in through the door, moving at a leisurely pace, just in time to see the cast iron hit the floor.  “Is that my good pan?”  He asked with an absence of anger that made Cam concerned for him.

She looked sideways at it as her sister weakly writhed under where Cam was tying off the surprisingly durable rope into an extra knot, locking the intruder’s hands behind her back.  “No.”  She said.  “That is the one I have already ruined.”

A small lie.  She’d washed it, and empirical evidence showed that Nate’s frustration over that was more superstition than truth.  Then again, they lived in a world with magic, so maybe cast iron pans were somehow magical.

”I’m still gonna fucking kill her.”  Nate grumbled as he picked the cookware up, hefting the object that was heavy enough to beat most anything to death with.

Cam frowned as her sister went still under her grip.  The lack of struggle meant she was no longer trying to fight in the moment, which meant she was taking this seriously and saving her strength for a more explosive escape attempt later.  “Please do not.”  Cam sighed.  “She is clearly having a very hard time.  Don’t make her day worse.”

Nate snorted as he walked around them to drop the pan on the side of the sink, and then open the fridge to pull out a glass bottle of something for himself and two chilled cans of a less alcoholic beverage.  “What kind of asshole do you think I am?”  Nate asked.  “I mean Spire.”

“Yes.  So do I.”

The bark of laughter Nate let slip was enough to draw a weak smile from Cam too.  “Got me there.”  He said, handing one of the cans down to Cam while with his other hand he slapped his own bottlecap on the edge of the counter with expert precision, removing it with a cutting hiss.  “How’s your sister?”

”Unmoving.”  Cam said as she stared at the offered drink, shaking her head and getting Nate to take it back before she stood up and spent some of her strength to pull the Crimson up with her.  “She is wondering how to escape.”

”You cannot keep-“ The other girl started to say, voice almost exactly the same as Cam’s.  Almost.

But not quite.  It lacked something.  It lacked the hope and life Cam had found here with the Order.  For now, anyway.  “-keep you here.  Yes, yes, we are familiar.”  Cam finished her sister’s sentence.  “I am tired.  Both in the short term, and of this routine.  Would you mind if I accelerated us to a conclusion?”

”By killing me?”  The Crimson demanded.

”No.” Cam considered slapping her in the back of the head.  Maybe it would breach her defenses long enough for some kind of thought to sneak in.  She met Nate’s eye, and could almost feel him thinking the same thing.  “I will make this simple.  You are not a prisoner here.  I do not care why Spire-Cast-Behind bit you, or put you here, or how you came to be in her custody.  You will take tonight to rest and recover.  Tomorrow you will either talk to us, or leave, and I do not care which.  If you talk to us we will share what we know of the Last Line’s last known position so your return can be expedited.  If you do not, you will leave this city without harming anyone, or you will become a prisoner.”  Cam clasped her hands on the Crimson’s shoulders, and moved her two steps to the right.  Then she tugged on the knot that the other girl had been trying to weaken, and let most of the ropes fall away.  “I am aware that you do not believe me.  I do not care.  Yes, it is absurd.  No, I will not be returning to the Line with you.  No, I am not compromised, the Last Line and I have an arrangement.”  Now that part was… not a lie exactly, but perhaps a misrepresentation. “Any further questions?”

The Crimson rubbed at her wrists, fingers still numb at the tips from the camraconda venom, and watched as Cam snapped open the tab on her can of juice.  Sipping at the cool drink with her eyes closed, features softening as she went through the minor ritual of returning home.  The newest Daughter looked over at the human man in the room who just shrugged at her and took another pull of his beer.  “You have done this before…” She said slowly.

”Yup.”  Nate informed her.

”If you linger tomorrow you can meet another sister of ours.”  Cam told her, using the edge of one of her wings to slowly push the second can of juice toward the Crimson.  “Here.  You will likely enjoy this.”

The new girl looked at it suspiciously.  “I do not want your…” she glared at the can Cam was drinking from.  “…your food.  I wish to leave.”

”Then go back to bed, and we’ll talk tomorrow.”  Cam shrugged.  “Or leave now and be cold.  Your armor is likely in the armory and I will not be retrieving it for you tonight.  Because I am tired.”

”No kidding.”  Nate said as he walked between them, not flinching as the Crimson tensed up.  The man held his beer out like some kind of delicate relic as he leaned over the couch and grabbed the remote, turning on the TV and flipping through to find… Cam didn’t even know, some kind of sport.  Whatever sport was in season.  “I’m fucking exhausted after the shitshow today has been.”

Cam scowled at him, setting her can down on the counter with a metal tink.  “Go to bed.”  She ordered him.

“I’m fuckin’ trying.”  Nate grunted.  “This is where I sleep, remember?”

”We have beds in this apartment.”

”Yeah, a bed we just loaned out to our latest pickup.”  He jerked a thumb at the Crimson, who was looking between the two of them with minutely elevated eyebrows.

Cam’s own eyebrows dipped.  “No.”  She said.  “You… have a bed.”

”The guest bed.”  Nate stated dismissively.  “You get your own room.  I take the couch every time Mia drags her ass in here.”

That didn’t sound… right.  ”This is a three bedroom… apartmen…” Cam froze as she remembered one of the very first safety briefings she’d gotten in the Order.  The one about antimemetics, and one of the things dungeons did that was a lot more proactive than just slapping a memeplex down.  This was a situation that had come up before.  And it was a situation where, when it did come up, the memetic agents would burn themselves out trying to kill the infected.

”Fuck are you talking about, there’s-“

”Shut up.”  Cam commanded Nate, and this time, her voice was so sudden and hard that even the Crimson took a step back from her.  “Tell me about hockey.”  She told him as she pulled her telepad from the inside pocket of the winter coat she’d stolen from Nate.  They’d used the Lair page and hadn’t rewritten the address.  Foolish.  She needed to waste precious seconds on this.

Neither Cam nor Nate had native infomorphs.  Planner helped them both constantly, but only in the Lair, where they were at their strongest.  And Planner was… not distracted right now, but focused.  Cam needed to get them back.  Just as a precaution.

”Been thinking of taking time off to go see a game sometime, actually.“  Nate’s voice was suspicious.  That was bad.  If he thought too hard around the problem, it could trigger any traps.  “Always a bad time though.”

”You could teleport.”  Cam said offhandedly.  “Leave if you need to.”

”Abusing the telepads sounds like bullshit I don’t want to deal with.”  Nate told her.  “Speaking of.  The fuck are you doing?”

Cam held out a hand to him, the other one bringing the now-filled telepad up to her teeth.  “Nothing.  But this is important.”  She glanced at her sister, and sighed.  “You should come too.  Just in case.”  The Crimson looked like she was about to argue again, but the quiet, “Please.”  Cam added did a lot to push her into a confused acceptance.

”I’m never getting any fucking sleep, am I?”  Nate demanded.  And then understanding flickered across his face.  “Three bedroom apartment.  Fuck me, we-“

Cam ripped the telepad just as Nate started to wince in pain, depositing them inside Planner’s sphere of influence.  Her call to the assignment was answered near instantly, and the attempt on Nate’s life was deftly cut off before it could do any damage.

Planner checked over Cam and her sister, too, finding nothing embedded.  Nothing living anyway.  There was the remains of something in Cam’s thoughts.  A scrap of a dead infomorph, an undeveloped non-sapient one apparently.

And it didn’t come from any source they’d seen before.

Cam and Nate knew what that probably meant.  Something had tried to block out their knowledge of part of their home.  That had only ever shown up before in one case.  Sarah’s case.  Before the Order was the Order, when she’d been taken by a dungeon and firmly blanked from everyone’s memory so no one would ever go looking for her.

And now something very similar had happened again, and they didn’t even know who they were looking for.  The third bedroom was just Nate’s room.  There was no one missing.  Or at least, no one they could find hide or hair of.

It was just one final thing to make the day as hostile as possible.  And the worst part was, they knew they couldn’t do anything about it until they’d gotten some sleep.  Though Cam would be lying if she said she didn’t feel some mild unease trying to close her eyes in her bed.

Of all the times for James to be in a dungeon, it was when the paladin’s unique life experience would have been most relevant.  Cam hoped that delve was at least going well, so they’d be back when she woke up.

_____

There was something about the dungeon that made it feel like they were wandering.

James hadn’t been on a delve where he’d just wandered in a long time.  It was kind of nice, actually.  The playgrounds that dotted the landscape didn’t really repeat themselves, but they did keep going without mutating into new biomes like he often saw in Officium Mundi.  The new positioning of jungle gyms and slides and swings didn’t really change what they were.

So the group just kept moving under the sparkling warm twilight.

They weren’t just walking from structure to structure, of course.  This was a dungeon, and even if it was quiet and seemed lifeless, it was still something they planned to investigate every corner of.  In fact, they had a pretty detailed list of things to check out, built on the fly as they’d started exploring based off the collected knowledge the Order had of dungeons past.  All that time spent writing the Operations Manual finally paying off for James, at least in a small way.

They checked the different playgrounds.  They moved across wooden slats and recycled rubber bridges.  They looked in the shadows underneath, the hiding places and nooks.  They checked distances moved and relative perspectives to make sure they weren’t walking through spatial warps.  At one point, they even played a game of tic-tac-toe on a set of thick plastic cylinders that could spin around the dowels they were stuck to.  A simple game set into the side of a wooden wall that they tried just to see if it was something.

It was something.  It was a child’s board game made manifest on an extradimensional playground.  But it didn’t give anyone magic.

Their path wasn’t meandering, either.  They moved in a direct line, leaving markers behind.   Though not chalk ones.  Dungeons usually weren’t actually metaphorical, but there was no sense giving a playground sidewalk chalk.

Especially not when it already had some.  They passed by a few sets of hopscotch squares marked out on the pavement, after all.  And James remembered all too well that while the styles differed in toxicity, both the Horizon and the Underburbs had a firm control on their own material.  Giving the dungeon more chalk drawings to manipulate seemed like a great way to get sent back in the wrong direction.

“This place is so quiet.”  Arrush said after the eighth structure.  The playgrounds didn’t seem to be changing in any way, aside from mundane variance, but the ratroach had a hard time understanding that these weren’t dungeon objects.  He’d only seen a few playgrounds, mostly in Townton, and a lot of them had been… damaged.  These were ready to be explored.  Played on.  “It’s nice.”  He whispered, voice steady in his quiet expression.

“I do not feel suspicious at all.”  TQ said from the other side of the party.

Arrush leaned forward to crane his neck and see around Alanna, his antenna shifting with gravity as he looked at the camraconda.  “That’s… bad.”  He said slowly, not wanting to offend the serpent.

”Oh, yes.  I am aware!”  TQ continued cheerfully.  “The absence of suspicion is suspicious!  I have created recursion.”

”Don’t encourage him.”  James grumbled, though he couldn’t hide a smile as he stepped down over the lip of the curb they’d just gotten to.  Boots crunching softly into bark chips, the smell of cut wood filling the air, he started a slow circuit of this next structure.  “Okay, who’s on watch?”

”I require no encouragement.”  TQ said almost sullenly, getting an amused snort from Alanna.

Patting the camraconda on the head with a gloved hand, Alanna consoled the sunset-painted snake.  “So you’re good on guard duty with me?  Cause I can encourage you to that if you need.”

”Yes.  I believe we are in the shell still.”  TQ replied.  “I will explore when it is more perilous.”

”The shell?”  Arrush asked as he took up his own position.  His position was resting, their rotation giving people regular downtime to specifically trust the others, drop their guard, and maybe sip some water or close their eyes.

TQ bobbed back a composed nod while Alanna circled to the midway point of the ring of barkchips.  “It is likely the wrong word.  But you have seen dungeons!  They enjoy having a layer that is unmistakably a dungeon, but is not spicy.”

”Spicy.”  Arrush echoed, his muzzle cracking into a glowing arc of a smile as he closed most of his eyes for a moment.

”And then within the shell, there is the meat…”

Arrush kept his eyes closed.  ”That is not-“

”And then the reliquary, factory, and coliseum segments contained within that meat…”

Arrush felt like he had lost control of this conversation.  “You are meant to be guarding.”  He tried to deflect.  Which did not work.

Smiling to himself at their chatter as his boots clomped up the steps of the playground structure, James just let himself enjoy the moment.  Yeah, they weren’t finding anything, but the dungeon was weird in its casual silence and emptiness.  And weird things were fun to explore.  The repeating structures were all kind of different, and James was waiting for them to start getting strange and twisted, which added a lot of his own kind of spice to climbing up to the upper platform in the faux castle’s tower so he could get a slightly farther view.  Though the view was easily overtaken by the drones he had overhead.

He was also waiting for something to move.  There was a lingering delver anxiety that he was going to be attacked.  But… maybe not.  James was holding out hope.  Clutter Ascent was kind, so why not this place too?

The structure revealed no new secrets, except the potential for splinters on some of the rough wood that was used in its construction.  So he hopped back down and did a quick loop of the ups and downs and monkey bars it offered.

”Check the slide.”  Zhu prompted him.

James nodded.  “Right.”  He’d almost forgotten, which meant it might be something odd.  Antimemes were part of a long running arms race that the Order was constantly losing, as this dungeon itself showed off.  So following the navigator’s prompt, James let himself drop to an only marginally tense seated position, and gave gravity the ok to take him down the smoothed plastic of the slide.  “Okay, nothing killed us, or gave us magic.  You didn’t feel anything from the slide, did you?”

”Nah, just wanted to go down a slide.  Never done that before.”  Zhu said.

James tried not to laugh at the fact that the dungeon was so peaceful that even the partner that kind of relied on James not dying to a trap was fucking around.   Standing up and shifting his armor half an inch back into position, he walked back to the others. ”You think Vex’s coven has a name for this place?”  He asked, not even bothering to say that he’d found nothing.

”Isn’t it Astra’s coven, and Vex’s polycule?”  Alanna questioned him.

”It is Mags’ polycule.”  Arrush answered confidently.

”What part is Vex’s then?”  Alanna asked, staring up at the silvery purple sky and tracking the dots of James’ drones.

Arrush smiled slyly.  “The problem part.”  He said, and got a bark of laughter from Alanna in reply.  “But maybe that isn’t fair.  She healed Zhu.”  He said while the party lingered, not yet moving on.  “I think she likes being a problem though.  As a hobby.  Like Momo, but older, and with less pain.”

”Your understanding of human behavior keeps impressing me.”  James said, bumping his non-Zhu’d shoulder into Arrush as he double checked his drone feeds.  “Okay, anyone tired, or do we keep going?  There’s nothing moving but it looks like there’s an environmental shift up ahead.”

”Hell yeah.”  Alanna said.  “I’m here to tackle big creatures and carry heavy things and I’m not getting to do either of those.  I think we can probably stop sweeping every one of these.”  She motioned through the bars of the swingset they were positioned near, to the wood and hard plastic construction.

Pressing on, it almost physically pained James to skip the next three playgrounds.  Staying on the hourglass shaped splashes of asphalt, they moved past the colorful bits of wood and plastic without investigating.  Even as much as James felt like he must be missing something.

Zhu had no such problem.  The navigator’s feathers were almost buzzing on James’ armor and skin as he got excited about seeing a new thing in this dungeon.

So it was with mild disappointment that they encountered the first new thing, and found it was a drinking fountain.

A concrete column that was about four feet high, pebbles set into it to give the appearance of something almost natural, and a chrome basin capping it off.  It was a bubbler style fountain, constantly producing a small geyser of clear water, and it had two more of those polished silvery basins sticking out lower down, one clearly for kids - or camracondas - and one for dogs.

“This is considerate!”  TQ said to the lower fountain.

”Don’t drink that.”  Arrush and James said at the same time, just before the camraconda’s tongue made contact with the cool crystal water.

TQ did not stop his tongue, either.  He had a metal straw in his kit for drinking, but camracondas just weren’t shaped to sip from a fountain.  Still, lapping at the water was pleasant, and refreshing, and he didn’t die, which meant he was correct in his assessment that the fountain wasn’t a trap.  No one appreciated that commentary though.

No matter how nice the dungeon seemed, they had to be careful.

A couple more fountains showed up as they proceeded, with Alanna taking samples of the water to test later.  Their sudden presence though caused the delve team to analyze what else would normally be around a playground that had been notably absent.

Sports fields, maybe, or running tracks.  Portable toilets, perhaps.  Objects were also definitely not present; no balls or backpacks or anything like that.

And of course, no people.  No children.

That one was more of a relief than anything else.  After the Underburbs, none of them wanted to shoot a child in the head again.

But there was no sign of life.  And also, there was no sign of one other critically important thing.

Whatever it was that gave someone a domain.

Not that James wasn’t really enjoying what was turning into a fun outing with the people he loved in his coterie, but he had come in here for a reason.

But he wasn’t deterred.  There was a lot of dungeon to search.  A lot of ground to cover, just going by how far to the horizon his drones could see when they had some altitude.  This was the kind of dungeon where bringing a vehicle in might be the secret technique for smoother delves.

For now, though, they were approaching the next big change, and James wanted to focus on that, and not what they weren’t finding.

Ahead of the group, the blacktop dropped away again.  But this time, the curb was a bit more pronounced.  It wasn’t a straight three foot drop, but only because there was a slope of barkchips that had formed like a snowdrift.  A much deeper depression in the ground, and one that was wider too.  The playground inside of it was, finally, something different; or at least something bigger.  It didn’t seem like it had any warped and twisted architecture from an overhead look, but it was definitely a sign that the dungeon did get stranger farther in.

Instead of a few sets of wooden steps and platforms, with a few spots meant for climbing or crawling through, this one had several.  It looked like it even had a second ‘floor’, with platforms that were in slightly odd positions and a tower in one corner that rose well above what anyone concerned with child safety would ever allow.  And yet, it had a blue painted metal spiral next to it that led to the woodchip ground.  Perfect for climbing, incredibly awkward for trying to slide down even as a kid, but whimsical and designed for fun.  Just… scaled up here.  Fifteen feet instead of five.

Whether or not it was going to have anything magical in it was besides the point.  By now, they were all just kind of excited to see a hint of what they’d be running into when they got farther in.

This time, they drew straws to see who had to be on watch.

_____

“So in a perfect experiment, you control for every variable possible.”  Reed lectured the two younger girls in the basement workspace with her.  “Um… anyone want to guess why we can’t do that?”

One of them, Emma, raised her hand, and Reed and Erin looked at her with blank stares until she eventually answered despite not being called on.  “Because dungeons are crazy?”

”Close.”  Reed nodded the angular chitinous form that was her head now.  But not too much.  The new body - new to her, anyway - was fantastic, but it wasn’t reshaped yet, and rapid motions hurt like hell.  “The big thing is we don’t know what the variables even are.”

The redheaded other girl sucked air through her teeth.  “So you’re guessing?”  She asked.

Reed gave the teenager a toothy apology smile.  Alanna’s younger sister - she’d almost thought daughter for a second before catapulting that thought out of her head at high speed - was hilariously very little like the knight Reed knew.  A big part of that, she figured, was that Erin was still a kid, and a kid that came from a shitty situation too.  And also, obviously being family didn’t make people the same, or even recognizable to each other.  Reed could attest to that herself on a personally painful level.

It was still kind of funny how the Order’s newest recruit to the position of Research intern would have been unrecognizable if Reed didn’t have a habit of forcing herself to memorize people’s last names.

“No, because that would imply that we’re experimenting.”  Reed answered the question.

”You just told us about experiments.”  Emma pointed out, and Reed couldn’t help a sliver of pride at the simple defiance of one of the proper behavior directives the younger human had been forced to implant in her own head by an oppressive cult.

Reed made a clicking in her chest, the reflexive sound not really having a parallel to her old human form, but generally being something she used for some kind of amusement.  “I did that so I could explain something about what we’re doing.”  She told them, one of her small offset arms tapping the keyboard of the computer she was standing next to; old experience and a new body making the motion almost natural.  “So we don’t know the variables, right?  Uh… so we… well, we need to figure them out.  And that means collecting what information we can, and then looking for patterns.”

”Like apophenia?”  Erin asked.

Emma gave her puzzled stare.  “What?  What are you talking about?”

”It’s when humans see coincidental patterns!”  Erin said with the kind of voice humans used when they were really smug about knowing something.  “Isn’t this that?”

”No.” Reed said, closing most of her mismatched eyes and letting the world’s colors dim for a moment.  “We’re looking for real patterns, please.  Which we call ‘researching’, if you’re curious.  And that’s why we have this spreadsheet.”  She finally got to her point.

The point was that they had a process, and now Reed had two new interns to attach to that process.

”Why does the spreadsheet have two hundred tabs at the bottom?”  Erin asked with the kind of dread someone got when they already knew they weren’t going to like the answer.

Reed was so glad she had interns to give this task to.  “So!  Each folder in this directory here has, uh, I guess you could call it a whole delve?  All the video from bodycams and drones from one Compiled Waste run.  And then a list of the slips and demiplane additions they got.  Don’t panic!  We’ve already gone over the longer delves James did like an idiot.  These are advance delve teams going one floor at a time so we can gather data, or they’re footage we got donated by local delvers.  So nothing too confusing.”

This time, it was Erin who raised a hand, though she didn’t wait to talk.  “Wait so you want us to watch other people have cool adventures?”

”And catalogue every detail in two hundred spreadsheet tabs, yes.”  Reed answered, doing her best to not make it sound like she was laughing at them.  That was an inside thought.

Emma smiled, her round face softening as she relaxed minutely.  “I’m okay with this.”  She said.  “Better than having to try to study Underburbs chair side effects.”

Reed shared a small shudder with the younger girl.  They’d sort of learned a general rule in studying all the magical furniture from the Underburbs.  The stuff was definitely beneficial, with effects that spread to whole rooms if the furniture was actually used, but… well, it was from the Underburbs.  So if anyone could think of a convenient side effect, it was easier to stop thinking of a convenient side effect.  It didn’t work the way the Order wanted.  Ever.  The Sewer’s weird symbiote things had more beneficial cornercases.  It was like the Underburbs had cauterized the edges of its magic somehow, and that was weird in how it was unique among dungeon magic.

Also the furniture sometimes smelled weird, so Reed definitely understood not wanting to study it.  Though that might be her new ratroach senses.

Reed spent another twenty minutes going through some of the basics with them.  The list of things Research was currently tracking or trying to track was large enough to actually need a lot of different tabs and sheets, after all, and the process of studying what occurred on a delve and comparing it to what the reward was took a lot of repeat viewings of delver footage.

”Also sometimes it gets… weird?  Uh, when we find easy patterns, it’s weird.”  She tabbed over to a specific page as an example.  “Like this.  We have three different data points from the second floor now where someone got a box in their demiplane that can respawn lost tools.  All paired with different slips, though.  But those people are the only ones that went through the floor without killing anything.  So what’s that tell us?”  She prompted.

”That… a pacifist run has different…” Erin stopped talking, and shook her head.  “No wait…”

”Does it mean nothing?”  Emma asked with quiet curiosity.  “Or does it mean that the portals and the other rewards aren’t… aren’t the same variables?”

”Excellent questions.”  Reed nodded deliberately.  “So these things get tagged and put on the list, and then we ask delve teams to check the list, and then we learn that we’re super wrong about what’s on the list.”  She smiled, just enough to show her teeth without causing any pain.  “So…  any questions before I go?”  She had an Officium Mundi delve to go prep for.

Erin had one.  “How long are we supposed to do this for?  And, like, does anyone down here ever sleep?”

”Oh.”  Reed assumed that they’d already been brought up to speed on the Research special methods of ‘never having a consistent schedule unless there was group work that needed it’.  “Well, you don’t need to do it more than you want to?  There’s a lot more footage than we have time.  Maybe if you could get through a delve a week together?  But no pressure, we’ll have more people working on it when we finish with a few other things.”  That was a lie and Reed knew it.  Research never finished with things, projects just evolved into new and terrible forms.  Like pokemon but magical.  So like pokemon.  “Things are always active in our basement.  You can always use a workspace down here as long as it’s not booked, if you want.  Some people just download it off the servers and do this in their apartments, but I like actually being able to talk to people.”

”Really?”  Emma asked.  “I thought James said you were an introvert.”

”I am an introvert.  Which is why I hate sending emails.  Having people conveniently positioned to talk to them while walking past is less stressful.”  Reed explained, coughing lightly as the excessive talking started to scrape and burn her throat.  “And I have to go.  John or Chevoy are here if you need anything, okay?”

”Thanks.”  Erin said, sounding like she actually meant it.

Reed cocked her head, feeling her tails twitch as she nervously tried to figure out what she was being thanked for.  But there wasn’t much time for that, so she just gave them a gentle wave and headed out.

There was a pile of stuff to collect to be copied, including a certain mystical crystal that JP had stolen from a regicide.  There was also a bunch of medicine to imbibe, including the distressingly powerful stuff used to stop organ rejections that kept the ratroach body from going to war with itself, and also, throat lozenges, which were less medicine and more just a casual convenience.

And there was an email to reply to.

Well, less an email, and more a series of messages.  Phone calls Reed had sent to voice mail.  Voicemails Reed had no idea what to do with.

Her brother kept calling.

Her brother, who had left her here.  Back when the Order was just getting started.  When Ryan had dropped the absolutely disgusting line of dialogue about how just because their family had forgotten Reed, didn’t mean he should be punished or lose out on their grandpa’s inheritance.  And also that Reed should really stop trying to show up to family things.

Leaning hard on the cinderblock wall of the Research basement’s main west hallway, she realized she was going to break her claws trying to dig into the stone.  Reed had a lot of trouble with the ratroach body she’d traded into, but wow if it didn’t have near-identical anxiety attacks to her old one.

Ryan had been calling, was the point.  And Reed didn’t really know why, because after the first confused message, Ryan had figured out that her new missed call message wasn’t a joke and Reed’s voice was different, and then the messages had turned pretty evil pretty fast.  A lot of stuff about betraying their family, betraying God, and ‘turning himself into a monster’.  The fact that Ryan just thought that Reed was trans and didn’t know she was actually a bug-rat dungeon construct almost made that funny!

It came at a terrible time.  There were some problems in the mundane world, and Reed didn’t really have time to be this distracted or hurt or to feel like she needed to throw up all the time beyond what Kyoo’s old body normally felt.  She needed to get her shaper surgery done, and get back to managing the Research division at full focus, and do the onboarding for the hardware engineers joining their prosthetics project, and update the Order’s list of orbs, and update her own magic, and also in all that find some time to hang out with John and Kyoo in what was certainly not a weird experience talking to her old body with a different texture to the voice…

Reed was too busy for this shit.

But the part of her that understood that wasn’t the same as the part of her that was still trying to grow past childhood trauma and a family that hid a lot of dark behavior.  So she had to take a moment to get the paws trying to rip holes in the wall under control, and make her breathing normal enough that no one would ask questions.  Not that she didn’t appreciate the concern, but she was busy right now, and there really was a delve in a bit that Reed wanted to be part of, hopefully so she could deliver their paladin some good news when he got back from his own nonsense.

The vault opened under her inhuman biometrics as she got through the main room of Research, meeting up with Nikhail who was helping pack and secure the targets for the duplication ritual tonight.  “Wow, you look…”  Nik cleared his throat, looking away with an embarrassed blush.  “Nevermind.”  He decided against saying out loud that it was pretty obvious when a ratroach had spent the last few minutes crying in a corner somewhere.  The glowing bodily fluids didn’t make it subtle.

”S-ssuspicious.”  Reed grimaced as her voice caught.  She sighed, deciding to get this over with.  “New interns are settled.  And my brother called me.”

”Ryan?”  Nik’s awkward embarrassment vanished, replaced by a hard frown and a clenched fist that a dull green glove slowly crept up the fingers of.  “Want me to kill him?”  He asked.

”That’s a jump.”  Reed tried to comment idly as he helped stack the carefully prepared copy crates.  “You didn’t recklessly staple a Sewer parasite to yourself did you?”

Nik rolled his eyes.  “How?  That one’s on lockdown and I’m an idiot but I’m not a quarantine breaking idiot.”  He didn’t let Reed distract though.  “I’m serious.  I’ll break his knees if you want.”

”Excessively violent.”  Reed said, but her heart wasn’t in the protest.

”Nose?  Fingers?  I can tone it down until we hit the sweet spot.”

While she didn’t actually think breaking someone’s fingers was toning it down, Reed found that the instant support was actually doing more than she’d ever expected.  Taking the deepest breath she safely could, she felt herself actually calm down.  “I think I’m just going to block him.”  She said as her paws stopped shaking and she used all of them at once to lug a double-checked crate onto the hand cart they were using.  “Or get Planner to block him.”  Reed said slowly, having a very rude idea herself.  “Do you think Planner would be okay annihilating someone’s phone number for me?”

”Are you serious?”  Nik asked with a surprised laugh as he strapped all the hard plastic boxes full of the most valuable objects on the planet down to the mundane metal cart they were going to use to move them to the most dangerous place on the planet.  “Girl.  Please.”

Reed hadn’t been expecting that turn of phrase, and felt every bit of her body that wasn’t covered in fur or chitin light up neon green in her own embarrassed blush at the reaction she had to it.  “So no then?”

Nik gave her a baffled stare.  ”Planner would actually murder someone for you.”  He said slowly.

”Oh.  Uh.  Okay.”  Reed decided she needed to escape this conversation, though without the earlier urgency at least.  “Well, this is ready to go.  Want to go tell physics to shut up?”

”You fucking know it.”  Nik said with a grin.  “And while we do that… you might have implied that I could get away with getting a Sewer parasite?”

”Don’t push it.”

_____

The sands stretched on away from them, not perfectly flat, but lacking dunes in a way that made them smooth and calm.  Up until one of the delvers passed by, leaving divots and canyons in their wake, the marks slowly being refilled by the warm evening wind.

“If I’d know we were gonna do a Lawrence of Arabia arc I’d have worn shorts!”  Alanna declared as they neared the northern edge of the mile wide sandbox.

“If I had known there would be sand I would have worn the scarf that destroys sand.”  TQ chimed in.

James shook his head with a confused smile that wasn’t aimed at anyone as they all continued taking a measured pace out of the artificial desert.  “Didn’t you come to the beach with us last year?”  He asked.

”I was a different person then.”  TQ reminisced, as if that explained anything.

Arrush puffed out a sharp breath, blowing sand off the fur around his muzzle before speaking; he’d learned his lesson on what the ground here tasted like already.  “Who is Lawrence?”

”Oh, it’s a movie.”  Alanna explained as she checked her water bottle and found it running low.  They had more in the supply pack, but the while the faux desert wasn’t arid, it was still thirsty work to hike across it.  “Auberdeen has a litany of complicated opinions about it.  I kinda didn’t get it, and also I’m totally not answering your question am I?  It’s a movie that involves a guy in a desert.”

“I would have gone for a The Mummy reference.”  Zhu said happily.  “That’s a good movie!”

”God it’s been forever since I’ve watched The Mummy.”  James muttered.  “We should watch that when we get back, if the world is still there.”  He wiped his forehead as he saw the edge of the sandbox ahead of them.  A wood wall, a few feet high.  Nothing insurmountable, for them, but if someone was unprepared then the only way out of here might have been piling sand up to make a ramp, which would have been a nightmare of hard work.

And yet that was the most dangerous part of this.

The dungeon, even after miles of hiking and an increasing scale of playground equipment, had yet to produce a threat that wasn’t just a high place to fall off of, or a wall that was difficult to climb over.  James was pretty sure the swingset that was five feet taller than anything he’d seen on Earth was the closest the dungeon was going to get to actively trying to get someone to kill themselves.

There was nothing alive in here.  Or if there was, they were missing it entirely.  There was also no sign of whatever it was that gave the others who had discovered this dungeon their domain magic.

The first set of the bigger structures had been empty.  The circular depressions of barkchips had only contained swings and benches and see-saws.  The asphalt stretched between them had fountains and chalk markings and sometimes basketball hoops.  But none of that had been tied to any magic in any way.

James had even tried some kind of basketball-based ritual poem, just in case the more naturalistic magic of Astra’s witchcraft style was the key.  But all it had gotten him was a point in his basketball Lesson.  For some reason.  He was pretty sure that wasn’t magic though.

It was at the point that they were prepared to give up and leave empty handed.  At least now they might have a better chance of actually talking to Vex about how exactly to pick up the local flavor of arcana.  The plan was just to check out the towering playground structure on the other side of the sandbox, and then when that was empty too, head back.  

Reaching the wall of the sandbox, James and Alanna effortlessly pulled a trick to get the party moving.  Using their Attic bond, Alanna passed off basically all of whatever the dungeon classified as ‘strength’ to James.  Her boyfriend, finding himself suddenly capable of a level of physicality that had previously been beyond either of them individually, took the opportunity to bodily fling Alanna upward and over the edge.  Once at the top, she rolled to her stomach and extended a hand down, letting James jump up and grab hold, and in doing so, passing all her strength and most of his too back to her, and getting hauled up like he was made of tissue paper.

They left that strength with her long enough to get the others up, Arrush holding TQ in a bridal carry with half his arms while he let Alanna pull him over the edge.  It was kind of an unnecessary application of the magic, but he and Alanna had been practicing, and a good field application went a long way to solidifying instincts on when to use it and when to shy away.  Also, this left both of them a lot less tired than they would have been if they’d had to navigate the obstacle with just their own muscles.  Though James maintained that he could have jumped up himself with his orb boosts helping.

Ahead of them was the last stop of their trip.  But James had a feeling they’d be back in here eventually, even if just to see places like this again, because what he was looking at was actually starting to look like someone was trying to build a castle.

It was still rough untreated wood slats and hard bright yellow plastic, with metal bars and spongy rubber padding on corners and some of the floors.  It was a place clearly following in the principle design that kids should get to run around on it and have fun, possibly - if not likely - while screaming and flailing.  But it was also huge.

By the time they’d hit the sandbox’s edge on the other side, the delve team had been finding play structures that had multiple levels and sometimes wholly separate pieces of building that were connected by swaying bridges or elevated monkey bars.  But this took it one step farther.

The construction ahead of them was thirty feet tall, and while it was clear that the layers and levels of wood platforms and roughly outlined halls within it weren’t anywhere near adult height, it still looked like an imposing three story manor in a way.  There were towers at two offset corners of it, that had conical roofs and a kind of obviously fake stone exterior, but were clearly places that could be climbed up into.

It had no front gate or main doorway, of course, because it was still a playground.  Just one that was intricate and dense and quickly moving up the hazard ranks at least for Alanna who was going to have to duck a lot to fit through some of the gaps.  But shockingly, this one had something special for at least one of their party.

”Ramps.”  TQ said with a delighted hiss.  “I am exploring now!”

”You’ve been exploring this whole time?”  Arrush said with a questioning tapping of his rear paw against his flank.  “You keep climbing things!”  He added in the muted voice he always used in dungeons.

James shook his head.  “Don’t let him get away with this.”  He encouraged Arrush.  “TQ loves to rearrange reality like Lego.  Don’t fall into his trap.”

”I am very powerful.”  TQ gave a bobbing nod, the fitted armor wrapped around his serpent body shifting like overlapping scales.  “May I go first?”  He asked more seriously.

He was allowed.  Alanna and Arrush got put on sentry duty as James and Zhu followed TQ into the playground structure, the two of them looping around the outside.  The barkchips were, by this point, a familiar sight.  Pale wood fragments that filled the air with a pungent but not unpleasant scent, small mounds of them accrued around the spots where the makeshift child’s castle met the ground with support posts and slides.

While she was out here, Alanna checked out the rest of the area.  There was probably nothing inside, and probably nothing planning to kill them, but she’d been super wrong about things like that before so she was careful not to drop her guard completely.  But this dungeon was weird, and the peace was starting to lull her into complacency.

It meant she had a little more time to explore.  And there was more and more to explore, too.  Like a hardened foam dome shaped to look like a rocky cave, that Alanna took a moment to duck down and peek in.  She didn’t crawl inside, but the smooth tunnel came out in three places and would have made for a great escape route in a game of tag if she could have fit.

A lot of the time Alanna liked her body, but sometimes she was reminded that a good chunk of the world wasn’t built for someone her height or shoulder width.  Though it didn’t sting as bad when it was literally a playground for children.  Or at least, a dungeon disguised as one.

It was cool, but it wasn’t the coolest thing.  The coolest thing was a park bench.  And not just because the benches in here all completely lacked the shit anti-homeless design elements that Alanna kept seeing in the normal world.  No, the bench was cool for a totally different reason.

The bench had a lunchbox on it.

So far they’d found basically nothing in here like it.  No small objects, enchanted or not.  So the presence of the metal rectangle with a colorful raised imprint of a dog on it made Alanna’s face light up.  It was probably nothing, but while it could be something, that wasn’t what got her excited.  No, what was cool was the fact that, if this was here, then it meant that going deeper and deeper into the dungeon did yield more of what they found familiar about these places.  Getting domain magic might just be a case of coming in with bikes and a week’s worth of food.

Alanna still checked it carefully.  It seemed mundane, but if it was going to detonate or something, she wanted to not die to it like an idiot.  Careful prodding from a distance got no reaction though, so she stepped up to the bench and picked it up, turning it over in her hands.  Thin metal, solid latches, cute dog motif, just a classic style of school lunchbox from before the more common form of the things had become the more flexible insulated padding shaped in a soft cube.

”I mean… I gotta know.”  She said, thumbs flicking the metal clasps open, and raising the lid of the box.  Not toward herself, she wasn’t stupid.  But still, she wanted to know.

Inside was an almost idyllic lunch.  Two triangles of peanut butter and jelly sandwich were cradled in perfectly shaped indents.  Next to them, an apple had been sliced and laid out as a mandala, with perfect squares of alternating cracker and cheese underneath in a row like some kind of an archetypal lunchable.

”Can I eat that?”  Arrush asked from over her shoulder.

”Probably.”  Alanna said, feeling a little hungry herself.  The ratroach’s approach didn’t startle her, they were too in tune to how the other moved for that, especially in a dungeon.  “Actually no, it could be poison or something, sorry man.”  She sighed and shut the lid, before opening it again with a sudden thought.  “Hey, how long do you think this has been here?” She asked him, gnawing on her cheek.

Arrush gave his own chittering sigh.  “Forever.”  He said dejectedly.  “A month at least.”

”That’s not…”

”Or longer than forever.  A year.”

”Okay now you’re fucking with me.”

”Sorry.”  Arrush sounded sheepish, but it was hard to hide a smile when your mouth glowed.  “But the food looks okay?”  He’d admit, for a lot of his life he’d had lower standards for food quality.  But the stuff in the box looked not just safe, but lovingly arranged and tasty.  And he knew apple didn’t stay looking crisp and fresh like that for longer than a minute.  “Maybe it left it here for us.”

”The dungeon?”  Alanna raised an eyebrow, but instead of arguing, just gave a concerned grunt.  “Maybe.  Or maybe we’re about to find out that we’ve got a new method of food preservation.  That’d be exactly the kind of bullsh-“

”Hey!”  Zhu’s voice carried down to them, the navigator yelling from one of the upper parapets of the oversized jungle gym.  “Hey, get up here!”  His orange feathered form demanded, peeking over from his perch on James’ shoulder.

Alanna and Arrush were already moving, heads down, hands or paws both slapping onto the wood and foam edges of the platforms they were climbing through as guides as they made haste up the tower.  The lunchbox got left on the bench, it could wait for later, they had a problem.

It was a little silly that all Alanna could think was ‘finally’.  Which was why it was disappointing when she arrived to the spot where James and TQ had made their way to, a little alcove just before a dancing bridge across the top of the structure made of rope and wood slats.  Scuffed yellow plastic forming a little box around a circular window with a mostly see through pane of some kind of similar plastic.

”Y-you m-made us run.”  Arrush gasped out.

”Yeah, that’s my bad, I was unclear in my instructions.”  James said, flicking a finger at one of Zhu’s talons.  “But here.  Check this out.”  He rapped his knuckles on the clear plastic, stepping back and letting Alanna lean in.

She ducked her head and peered, and instantly saw what James was seeing.  A great view of the sandbox behind them, yes, but also a glow.  There was a blob of something glowing and ethereal out there, looking like moss pulled in the wind, and it was just… sitting there over the sand.  Shining.  Waiting.  Alanna raised her head and peeked through the slit in the plastic  over the top of the alcove.  And of course, saw nothing, just sand.  “Now.”  She said to James.  “I remember something like this before.”

”The binoculars were cursed, we established this.”  James said with a laugh.  “Look, I know we’re kind of running into the issue where we can’t stay in here forever.  But I think at least one of us should go touch the thing.”

”You.”  Arrush said.

James pursed his lips.  He hadn’t actually wanted to volunteer himself, but… that was kind of the point of being here.  “Fine.”  He agreed, deciding to not fight this one.  “But we’re coming back in for everyone else if we don’t find more!”  He said

”As far as we know, domains suck when you first get them anyway, so you’ll need to come back anyway.”  Zhu reminded him.  “But let’s go poke it, and then reevaluate if we wanna go poke more.”

Multiple delvers met eyes and then rolled or sarcastically irised those eyes at each other, but Zhu wasn’t wrong exactly.

The process was pretty simple, once they’d spotted the otherwise invisible blob.  Alanna and TQ stayed up in the tower, peering out the window and radioing directions to James and Arrush.  The invisible glowing blob was in a spot where they never would have had a reason to intersect it while crossing the sand, which was why they hadn’t run into it on the way in, but it wasn’t like it was a million miles away either.  So once the other half of the team was in position near it, having marked a line in the sand around the area, Alanna had grabbed TQ and followed the camraconda happy to sacrifice momentary dignity for a quicker journey.

“Okay, if I die, tell everyone it was exceptionally stupid.  But also don’t get mad at Vex or her meddling polycule.”  James said when they were gathered on the smooth sands, letting Zhu jump to Arrush and splash uneven feathers across the ratroach’s collarbone.

Then he stopped stalling and reached out, hand intersecting where the unmoving floating blob had been in the view from the tower’s looking glass.

The funny thing was, James had been looking this whole time for whatever triggered giving a person a domain.  But that wasn’t how it worked, he suddenly realized.  He had possessed a domain the whole time; either from the moment they’d stepped inside, or maybe even as an intrinsic part of being alive.  Probably that first one, magic wasn’t that common outside of dungeons.

As soon as he touched the spot though, he became aware of his domain.  Sort of.  He was aware now that he had a domain, and that it reached around him in roughly an eight inch diameter sphere centered somewhere in his chest, which meant it didn’t reach ‘around’ him much at all.  He was also aware that he could sense his domain’s attunement, but only where it intersected the outer edge of his domain sphere, and only one percent of that outer edge where James set its focus.

”Well that’s silly.”  He said out loud, a little put out that he didn’t even know what the fuck his domain was, because whatever it was, it wasn’t one of the four or five things he could potentially be feeling right now.  “Who else wants to try?”  He asked with a snort, wondering if this was going to be as bad as he expected and they’d need to find a huge number of these spots for anyone they wanted to empower.

TQ gave a camraconda iteration of a shrug, sticking one of his mechanical arms up into the spot, but it did nothing.  “Oh.  Of course.”  He stated with a frustrated stuttering hiss.  Not to be discouraged, he slithered across the circular line in the sand, and raised up to his full height, sticking his head into the zone.  “Oh.  Oh!”  His hiss turned amused, and then delighted.  “I can see!”

”Wait, it worked?”  James was startled, but also delighted.  “Okay!  Everyone touch that mysterious blob!”

Thirty seconds later, the five of them all had their own understandings of the existence of their domains.  TQ reported that his sense was more specific, indicating that it was to feel people ‘being affected by’ his domain’s attunement, but everyone else got the same thing.  Even Arrush and Zhu, which meant that it wasn’t species-specific.  What was more likely was they all had different domains with different needs, and like with purple orbs, this reward had matched to what was possible for them.

None of them knew what the hell they were attuned to.

”Okay, this has been productive.”  James decided.  “But it’s time to get out of here.  I wish this had been more of a power spike for all of us, but we can come back, and we know at least one trick now.  And shit, maybe we can work around the memeplex and talk to the others in more detail.  Get some better intel.”

”I like that plan.  Also, I want to see if this sandwich is poison before I eat it.”  Alanna said, holding up the lunchbox.

James opened his mouth to say something about that, and the slowly closed it.  He was looking at a long walk across the sand, and that was before they had to get back through the weaving path to the dungeon’s entrance.  He decided to save his energy for a conversation that he had a hope in hell of coming out of mentally unscathed.

He also definitely didn’t want to debate the edibility of the sandwich Alanna had showed him, because James found that he was starving, and the mystery PB&J looked way too good, and he didn’t want to give in to that temptation.  They definitely needed to get dinner once they got back to base reality, because while James was kind of the forerunner of eating weird food from dungeons, he at least wanted to wait until he knew he wasn’t being magically compelled before he dove into that again.

And who knew.  Maybe his domain would be pizza.  That would be…

Well, bad.  That would be a mild disaster.

But he’d cherish the magic anyway.