The Daily Grind - Chapter 385 (Patreon)

“I wasted time and now time wastes me!” -Loki, Loki-

_____

James had a list that it uplifted his soul to actually need. 

“Flashlights.”

Alanna brandished one of said flashlights, holding it like a more literal torch over her head. ”Check.”

”Medkit.”

Anesh triple checked with himself that all his bodies had the requisite red satchels, the little white symbol on them further marked by a purple orb patch in the middle.  “Check.”  One of him - the one with Ganesh sitting perched quietly on his shoulder - said.

”Lunch.”

Sarah zipped up the bag that was on Alanna’s back, before shifting the strap over her own shoulder to a more comfortable position.  “Check!”  She declared happily.

”An excessive amount of firepower.”

Zhu’s feathers, currently draped over Auberdeen like a dusty orange cloak while the fluffy white furred mass of dog sat patiently among the group, rustled as his arm started to reach for the fitted harness Auberdeen was wearing.  Then he paused.  “No?”  The navigator asked.

Auberdeen’s authority glinted in its form as a dog collar as it spoke for her.  “No!  No fighting!”  She told them.

Reaching over her head and stretching like she’d been freed from a serious weight worth of shackles, Alanna gave a happy grunt.  ”Yeah, it’s kinda great to not be hauling around fifty pounds worth of threat devices.”  She admitted.

“Right.”  James rubbed his fingers into his forehead, sudden exhaustion catching up to him.  He’d been, perhaps unwisely, abusing the shit out of his Endurance when he was supposed to be recharging whatever it was that powered a human body.  And it didn’t help that he’d kind of just skipped sleeping, instead spending an hour talking to an unequally sleep-deprived JP about how he might have managed to arrange a meeting with someone that called themself a Tyrant, and another couple hours continuing to restock his Garden spells, and then an unknown amount of time sort of stumbling around his apartment while everyone else was asleep so that he could do a variety of shockingly mundane tasks that made their living space look like it wasn’t a war zone.  After that he’d slept.  A little.  But he’d been so excited to wake up and go into a dungeon that he hadn’t really been that slowed down as he’d rolled out of bed.  It was only now that he was feeling it, and he knew that the exhaustion would fade when they got to the Recesses.  “I… forgot!”  He concluded his rambling internal train of thought.

”You forgot that you don’t need a gun in the playground full of missing children?”  Alanna asked him with arched eyebrows, leaning back against the most stable chair she could get her hands on as the group got their stuff together in the briefing warehouse.

”Are you doing alright love?”  Anesh asked James, a worried hand settling on his boyfriend’s shoulder.  “If you’re tired, we can…”

”No, no, I’m good.”  James said, yawning at the worst moment possible and pressing his palms into the heavy table.  “Shaddup.”  He laughed as Anesh slid closer to him, arms wrapping around his chest.

One of his boyfriend shook his head.  “I think if this were anywhere else, we’d all be telling you that you needed to stay home, if you’re like this.”  He said, and Alanna and Sarah nodded with alternately irate and concerned expressions on their faces.  “Aren’t you just so lucky, then, that we’re waking into the safest space since Clutter came along?”  Anesh finished, tightening his grip on James before letting go.

”I am.”  James agreed.  “So.  Is our experimental group ready to go?”

They were.  Or at least, the people who weren’t ritualistically catapulting the experimental group toward a dungeon entrance were.  Those other people had a little prep work to do.

The idea for the delve today, which was really more of an excuse for people who liked each other to spend some time together in a liminal playground, was that they wanted to know a few things about the Orphaned Recesses’ domain magic.  The Order as a whole was currently going through a pretty intensive process of funneling everyone through the Pylons, which James was also going to be part of tomorrow sometime, so they weren’t exactly operating with everyone available to be thrown into a new dungeon too.  But every fact that they discovered now was a point of data they could use to set up that funneling in the future.

So they had questions.  Questions like, do authorities get domains?  Do dogs get domains, specifically very smart dogs?  What about the species of living drone that Ganesh was?  What happens if copies of a person go in, do they each get different things?  Actually that last question wasn’t quite what they were answering; Anesh was going to be networked with himself for this test, because his normal case of being four Anesh was actually not something they needed to know.  But they did need to know how linked minds worked, if only for Marlea’s sake, and Anesh had declared that he was okay with the outcome if this changed what would have happened.

They also wanted to know about the kids that were apparently in there.  That part was kind of important in a different way.  Less tactical, more ethically high priority.

“So.  Everyone ready?”  James asked.  It was weird going in without TQ this time, he’d gotten used to the camraconda’s reliable presence on delves.  But his maybe-just-friend-but-probably-not was currently in Townton regrowing a chunk of his head and being fussed over.  “Because I’m ready.”

The series of coiling tentacles that was surrounding their group paused in the consistent fidgeting motion that Planner was making so that the assignment could turn a hundred eyes inward on the circle of their own manifestation.  “I will inform you when we are ready.”  They said.

Added to their voice, Pathfinder’s own soaring birdsong echoed as her limited manifestation shot around and between coiled tentacles in a racing spear of orange light.  “And you shall be informed soon.”  The normally reserved and almost shy navigator called out.  “As we believe we have found a key for the lock.”

”I will believe it when it works.”  Planner said with almost grumpy energy.  “This masking… work of art is not the term I would choose.”

”But it is the term I have chosen and I saw it first.”  Pathfinder’s musical laugh sounded, the Order’s oldest and strongest navigator zipping past the group.  “Now!  Reach upward, and take direction!”  She called down as she shot overhead.

Zhu’s eyes, currently bristling along Auberdeen’s back like a second spine, pivoted to stare at James.  “No one is ever allowed to say we talk like fantasy paperback characters again.”

”Oh this won’t stop them.”  James said, while Zhu rolled his line of eyes and unfurled his feathered arm to raise it over Auberdeen’s head, the dog helpfully perching her front paws on a chair to get him extra height.  James, meanwhile, stuck out a hand to Alanna, who grasped it before linking up with Sarah by pulling the smaller girl into a swooning hug, only for a row of Anesh to make a chain of themselves to end with a certain furball.  “All set!  You two think you-?”

”Please.  We are experts and this is delicate work.”  Planner informed the paladin.  “Related, how attached are you to your sense of chronological progression?”

James sucked in a hiss of air.  “I use that for my anxiety.”

”You may need to go without!  Now, what better way to twist through the empty spaces of a masterpiece than to create art of my own?”  Pathfinder insisted, her rapidly moving form shooting across the space overhead one more time, and this time, intersecting Zhu’s extended hand.  Something sparked, a live direction passing between them  “Now go!”  She ordered.  “And see new frontiers!”

Zhu left his talons held up as Auberdeen barked excitedly, her growing mind and alloyed thoughts letting her understand this was something fun and impressive, but not quite getting her to something so pedestrian as decorum for the moment.  “Oh, that’s easy!”  Zhu exclaimed.  “Okay, go!”  He called.

James yanked at the telepad page.  And a few seconds later, the party appeared in a mostly abandoned exurban park in the middle of a weird part of Missouri.  And then Zhu yanked at their sense of motion, and twenty seconds later, an Order delve team was inside the Orphaned Recesses.

It was, technically, still one of James’ days off.

And he was prepared to enjoy it to its fullest here, on a pleasant hike with his companions.

_____

The Orphaned Recesses welcomed them with eternal purple-silver twilight sky and the endless smell of cut grass and sun-baked asphalt.

The party picked a different direction than last time, though James and Anesh did send out drones to verify if the geography from last time had changed.

Dungeons liked changing stuff up when no one was looking.  A fun habit, James agreed as someone who used to compulsively rearrange his apartment, but one that messed with maps a little.  So he flung one of his own camera quadcopters into the sky to match the terrain to the images he’d taken the first time in, while Anesh did the same with Ganesh, the little guy excitedly flaring his wings out, rotors sending him shooting upward as he got to be back on an adventure again.

Ganesh was, short of Rufus, the dungeon life form that they had known for the longest.  Technically they’d known him his whole life, even.  And while he was definitely smarter than anything that size normally would be, it was unclear if Ganesh and his species actually kept getting more intelligent over time.  With that in mind, Anesh hadn’t really been bringing the little living drone on many adventures or delves, just because… well, they were dangerous, and the Order could do the job with skulljacks now.  His friend was vulnerable to high winds and return fire, and inanimate drones were a lot more expendable than a living creature with thoughts and feelings.  Especially if that creature wasn’t smart enough to do risk assessment.

But here?  Here he was safe, and free to fly and poke around in odd corners and small nooks, to just enjoy having fun in a dungeon.

Through his overhead eyes, James watched the Recesses stretch out below.  On and on and on, blacktop dotted with pools of barkchips, oddly skeletal structures every few hundred feet, tiny little spots of drinking fountains and benches, just an endless playground to explore and run and hide in.

”All the same.”  James confirmed.  They’d all gotten the impression from Vex’s shared memories that the place was consistent, but she hadn’t really looked at this place with an eye toward cartography, somehow.  “Shall we?”  He asked, holding up his hand and letting his puppeted drone thock into his palm as he piloted it back.

Sarah, eyes shining as she spun to look around them, turned back to James and Alanna and pointed in a seemingly random direction.  “I’ve got a good feeling about that way!”  She said.

”Because of some kind of special sense tied to nice dungeons?”  Alanna asked with thin hope.

”Becuase Auberdeen already took off that way.”  Sarah laughed.

James was really, really glad this place wasn’t inherently dangerous.  Though even if it wasn’t, he was still at risk of further concussive trauma if he kept slapping his palm across his face.  “Let’s go.”  He grumbled, following after the dog that was definitely smart enough to have listened to the briefing, but not patient enough to have followed standard procedure.

The pace their group set was different from any other dungeon delve.  Not in a hurry, but also, steady in a way that never really happened when they had to be alert for threats.  They were still alert anyway; you didn’t survive dungeons by dropping your guard, after all.  But it was different than normal.

The blacktop was an open, even surface with almost no hiding spots.  Ambushes that could come from behind a tetherball pole or a burbling drinking fountain were ambushes that were either too small to matter, or were capable of ambushing someone in an empty room.  And the playground castles and jungle gyms and increasingly towering slides were easy enough to steer clear of anyway.

An hour passed as they walked.  They weren’t quiet for most of it, either.  Sometimes the whole group lapsed into silence, but they were here to be together in a peaceful place as a group.  So they chattered amongst themselves as they walked past wooden platforms and low hanging rope bridges over barkchip seas.

Anesh and Sarah started talking about the ritual to insert Clutter Ascent into their apartment, but got sidetracked talking about new restaurants they’d ended up at for different reasons over the last week.  Alanna and Zhu had a long debate that was really more of a petty argument about phone touchscreens that James deftly avoided getting dragged into.  Even Auberdeen, once she burned off about eighty percent of her energy, eventually hung back with their group and had a lot to say about an essay she was writing for college about tracking social climate through adaptations of Seven Samurai.

Sometimes they stopped for people to sit on benches or curbs and take breaks.  When they did, the people who weren’t feeling like resting would explore the constructed parts of the playground nearest to the spot.  Climbing up the slats and thin gaps between the steps of the towers to get to vantage points and look out on the rest of the dungeon, searching for any of those points like glowing mossy wind that would grant a domain.

They didn’t find any, at least, not right away.  But approximately six miles of hiking into the dungeon, where the structures were starting to get up to twenty foot tall amalgamations of climbing bars and rickety spiral stairs, they found something interesting.  A baseball field.  Well, a field anyway.  Grass that had gone uncut for just long enough that the thick blades of it came up to tickle at ankles, a cloudy sky overhead, and the sensation in James’ gut that he was somehow involved in a baseball game just by stepping onto it.

They checked with a drone before crossing the expanse.  Much like the ‘sandbox’ from the first delve, this one went on for well over a mile on its own.  And it did have powdery white lines chalked onto it in places, though they formed no field for a sport any of them knew.

And while rushing away and eating some of the dandelions, Auberdeen clipped the edge of one of those invisible fields.  A few hours of a pleasant hike together turning up more results than any of their deliberate attempts to empower themselves, which James had laughed at for so long that Anesh had started to worry his boyfriend was going to pass out.

Auberdeen had come racing back their direction, the scene of her white form bounding across the thick grass almost perfectly idyllic.  The navigator still riding along on her body yelling out profanity as he tried to get her to turn around so he could touch the zone was a little less idyllic in a classical sense, but to the other humans it was kind of their sort of perfect.

When they were led back over to the spot, they learned a few things in quick succession.  First, authorities could not get a domain.  Disappointing to both Auberdeen and Alanna, but their respective authorities didn’t really care so that was a wash.  Second, well, dogs definitely could.  What Auberdeen got wasn’t known, but that also wasn’t strange, since they still had no idea what Alanna’s was either, but she definitely got something.  Third, the domain that Ganesh got was real, but smaller than anyone else’s.  Whether that was because of his actual size or some other condition wasn’t known yet, but James wanted to drag Ink-And-Key in here now to test.

Fourth, Anesh did not get a math domain.

Alanna, Sarah, and James had all jeered as Anesh had sadly informed them that he had a domain for either plants in general or grass in specific.  But more interesting than that, each of him had the domain.  Each body having its own orb of space centered on itself, each one far smaller than anyone else had gotten.

As he’d explained that, James had realized with what felt like a bolt of a eureka moment that Ganesh’s was probably also smaller because the living drones were dual entities, and while they couldn’t test it yet, it was possible that Ganesh’s linked program was emanating half his domain field.

Fifth, they’d learned - well, confirmed really - that these points in dungeon space tried their best to give everyone the same domain upgrade if possible.  James and Zhu both suddenly had the experience of their domain growing by about a half-inch of diameter, and the knowledge that they could apply roughly 20psi of compressing force to anything appropriate in the ‘forward’ third of their domains.  Which was odd, and for James mostly meant that he could crumple paper.  Into… fairly solid pieces, really.  And he seemed able to hold it indefinitely.

Alanna, meanwhile, got the same zone of control addition, but the ability to set whatever was supposed to be in her domain to reverse itself along its own timeline.

So.

”That is monumentally unfair.”  James told her pointedly.  “I mean, that is bullshit.  I can fold paper and you can undo causality?!”

Anesh patted him on the shoulders.  “I don’t think that’s what it means, but I do agree with you that we should be rather jealous of our unfairly lucky love.”

“I don’t even know what I can squeeze!”  Sarah reminded them.  “Which… is… ooooh I just thought of something very silly.”  She said with the closest thing James had ever heard his friend have to frustrated annoyance.

Clicking his tongue, James gave her a pitying “Ah” as he realized this problem pretty quickly too.  “You can’t actually figure out your domain if you can’t sense things.”  He said, before pressing one finger to the lips of the closest Anesh.  “Unless you’re horribly lucky, yes.”  James cut his partner off, refusing to move his hand even as Anesh glowered at him and started trying to playfully eat his finger.  “Well, there’s only one thing to do then.”  He said.

”Get to the other end of this lawn?”  Alanna asked.

Auberdeen barked in excitement at the offer, her authority flaring to life as she spoke up.  “And find more hands!”  She told them, before turning and dashing thirty feet away and hauling Zhu with her, only stopping to turn again and stare back at the humans.

“Hands and eyes.”  James said with a smile as he took Anesh’s hand and adjusted his bag, starting to walk with less urgency.  “What more do we need?”  He asked.

It felt like he had all the time he needed in here, to find more of those points.

The delve was so relaxing that he didn’t even worry too much about that thing Pathfinder and Planner had said about some kind of chronological confusion.

_____

The Pylon was in a bad mood as James shadowed one of the Order’s groups that was going through their tempering delves.

It was fascinating how quickly a dungeon adventure - which would be an adventure for the ten people being escorted - could turn into something routine for those escorts.  Not tedious, no, probably never tedious.  The elongated concrete expanses and ramps hid too many real dangers, and there was always the chance that something might migrate through this area that would be a threat.  The life in the Pylon seemed localized only out of convenience, not by any strict rules, and sometimes a caribou would pop out of a random parking spot and start throwing a delve team’s fireballs back at them.  So alertness was required, as was tradition for dungeons.

Still, James felt good as he and Zhu broke off on their own journey, mostly just sweeping whole floors of the gigantic pillar of concrete and blazing white lights for cars.

A lot of the cars in this place seemed to be fake cars, that were more like boring treasure chests.  Containers for loose change, grocery bags full of canned food, battered old tools in the trunks, and the occasional piece of remarkably specific documentation.  Like a three thousand dollar gift card to a Starbucks, or a seemingly valid German passport.

A larger number of the cars seemed to be fake in that they weren’t really anything at all.  More like dead lumps of metal than actual machinery.  Those ones were boring.

But the smaller subset was where things got good.  Cars that were tools.  They weren’t cars, to be sure, but they were mystical engines of transformation and creation, and that was pretty cool too.  They often had working doors and a driver’s seat at least, but everything beyond that was… well, like if someone took every dial and knob and pedal from a car, and rearranged them in a random pattern, and then used that to connect to a random effect.  Figuring out what they did was often the hardest part, though all of them so far had been safe.  At least, if you had a friend nearby to drag you out, just in case.

Safe enough.

James and Zhu had been looking for new ones for the whole time that the other delves were going on, only occasionally drifting back to reconvene with the other Order members and remind everyone that they were alive.  There was, James realized, a strange feeling on this delve.  Like he was swimming through time as thick as jello.  Comfortable with being focused on the task for far longer than he might have been otherwise.

Most of the magical engines weren’t that helpful, even when they did figure them out.  And they were sparse, too.  They had so far, across six whole floors of this garage that contained about two thousand car-shaped objects to search, found five of the things.

Two they hadn’t been able to figure out.  One had taken any food left in the glove box when activated and added meat to it, which was… actually kind of cool.  Technically vegan meat wasn’t nothing, so James had marked it on the map.  One of them had shrunk anything in the trunk by about twenty percent, an effect that wore off over the course of an hour at a steady rate.  They marked that one too, because they were actually marking all of them, but Zhu had specifically insisted that it probably had ‘kink applications’.  That last one they had also spent a lot more time trying to understand, and James was pretty sure that the effect could be modulated somewhat.

James had tried to explain to his friend that literally every magic the Order had contained kink applications, but Zhu had yanked them off toward the next destination, determined not to listen.

They’d left the dungeon once, so far, just to check for milestones, and had been surprised to get a really good one, though for what exactly was unclear.

(Milestone - Learning Machine Attunement : +4 AP)

James had been surprised at the amount of AP more than anything, but he’d had plans for at least one of them.  The others… well, they got put into a variety of things, which he refused to feel bad about anymore.

(Breathing : +1 level, 10 levels total, [Charm River Transformation], new link open)

(Swallowing : +1 level, 2 levels total)

(Boxing : +1 level, 7 levels total, [Breaking Forge])

(Limb Manipulation - Winter’s Climb : +1 level, 1 levels total)

(4 AP spent, 0 AP remains)

His attempt to garner more Winter’s Climb spellcasting levels hadn’t quite worked.  Instead, the extra ice arm he had sprouted had given him something else new, to continue to filter points into.  What was fascinating, and what he wanted to spend the next patch of forever studying, was why it said Winter’s Climb and not the specific spell.  Reaching Frost had a name, it was a discrete effect that made that icy arm and hand.  But this skill was more.  Would this make James better with the Altitude Adept wings?  He hoped so, that would be the first time this dungeon had decided to tilt toward nonsense in their favor.

At some point, James needed to prepare some kind of hands on craft to do when he came out of this place.  But for now, he was most interested in what the second threshold of Breathing would do for him.

Zhu, meanwhile, had focused, and actually prepared for this eventuality, and had unleashed enough of his Velocity to shunt three of his own four new points into Route Horizon casting, making him the first member of the Order over that skill’s level five threshold.  The last point went into cheering, because of that thing with the first three points.

And then they’d gone back in.

Which was where they’d found the last creation engine, actually.  After finding a nest of the pangolin shaped rolling tires, a part of the garage that had been twisted in a way that made it feel like it took ten miles of walking to get past a single concrete column, and a pipe running overhead that dripped a thick black sludge into a puddle on the ground that never seemed to grow bigger and that neither delver wanted to get anywhere near.  But they did find the magic car eventually, after that.

It looked like a pickup truck, but the covered back half was its own special puzzlebox.  Opening the trunk flap had revealed more small doors to open, each one leading progressively deeper into the vehicle, getting harder to reach in order to manipulate, and requiring someone in the ‘cab’ to be messing with the center console that would have controlled the windows on a normal truck.  The fact that Zhu was now strong enough to detach from him and sort of apply force on his own was the only reason they bothered struggling through the puzzle that neither delver had the brainpower for.

Though the fact that they felt like they had plenty of time to do it also helped.

When they did eventually get in, there was just a tiny facsimile of a pickup bed waiting in the middle of the enclosed space.  Running through their normal tests, they’d left something in there, and then tried to activate the machine.  This led to two discoveries.  One, the output came out of the glove box with a sound like a hissing iron pressing down; and two, the trunk re-locked after, so they had to be irritated at fumbling through the process again to get the orb they’d used back out.

But what came out of the glove box was worth it.

It was a fact sheet.  An FAQ, of sorts.  Or maybe not quite that, more like it was a folded up hand-sized page printed in small text, like an insert in a car’s user manual.  And on it, there were tips and tricks for the thing they’d left in the trunk.

The yellow Officium Mundi orb.

James actually already knew what it was, it was a copied orb with a rank in butterfly husbandry.  A fact that the page identified three bullet points in, with perfect accuracy.  It also had helpful advice on how much pressure was required to break the orb, how to absorb it for extra energy, and also where similar orbs were most likely to be located.

Not just “in Officium Mundi” or “at the Order’s allocation desks”.  But three specific parts of the Office dungeon where orbs that were conceptually similar in a recognizable way were likely to be found within the next few days.

Which was… insane.  Absolutely mad.

Three, maybe four years of living with at most limited versions of  the three core pillars of the RPG, and suddenly, James was presented with something that printed off scrolls of identify.

The next time they went out of the dungeon, it was to alert the waiting retrieval team that they had a target.  And then, to go in with winches, jacks, rolling platforms, a lot of exercise potion,  and every strength boost they could find.  So they could walk that whole truck back up the concrete stairs to the dungeon’s entry point.

As a bonus - and it was a bonus at this point, the truck was worth more than enough - from those two leavings, James got two more milestones.

(Milestone - Persistent Machine Attunement : +1 AP)

(Milestone - Preliminary Acquisition : +1 AP)

(Talking : +1 level, 1 level total)

(Running : +1 level, 4 levels total)

Small ones, but every point counted.  And, even better, it was more data for the future.  Every single thing they learned meant it was easier to take a totally normal person, and make them ten levels better in jogging, or hammering, or typing, or whatever verb meant being a barista.  Something to make daily life sharper, cleaner, smoother, and better.

And to James, that future felt more important than any present gains.  Though, also, that future felt suspiciously placed anyway.  Both comfortably far away while also being closer than he had expected.

It was probably fine.

After all, they had a new car now, which had to count for something.

_____

The quiet peace of the Recesses felt like it was at odds with the structure that spanned over the canyon in front of the group.

A canyon this big, James figured, should have… something, anything to break up the stillness of the dungeon twilight.  There should be wind, at least, shouldn’t there?  Or motion of some kind, either down below in the plant-filled trench, or from something swaying on the playground structure.  But there was no wind, there was no motion, and even the bowed arcs of the bridges that ran between the towers sat as if they were frozen.

”I wanna climb that.”  Alanna pointed over Anesh’s shoulder at one of the tallest parts of the untreated wood and colorful plastic castle.

Anesh raised his arm to clasp his hand around hers and tried to pull Alanna’s pointing finger down away from what was starting to look like a bad idea.  “What happens if the worst case comes true, and you fall?”  He asked.  Not saying no, exactly, Anesh wouldn’t ever think he could just give Alanna orders.  But he did want to know if she had a plan.

Alanna slipped past and went to stand near James and Sarah where they were looking down into the U-shaped canyon.  “Oh it’s a massive drainage ditch!”  Alanna said with a snap of her fingers.  “Yeah, there’s plants down there, I’d probably live if I fell!”

”There’s no water, you goof.”  Sarah, pressed on her belly and looking over the lip of the canyon, pointed out.  “You would go splat not splash!  And I’d be sad!”

”…Compelling argument.”  Alanna grumbled.  She didn’t like being told that she couldn’t do things, but, much as it sucked, Sarah was right.  She’d probably be fine, but she might get hurt, and that was kind of a dumb risk to take here.  “Alright, well, how do we cross?”

James stretched languidly, enjoying how all the walking had left him feeling energized instead of tired.  Theoretically he could have gotten his body to something close to this state well before becoming a paladin or anything like it, but… he hadn’t.  He didn’t really want to dwell on the why - it was because he didn’t believe he mattered, simple really - but now that he was here, he did have some regret for not doing more jogging earlier in his life.  Shrugging off that oddly close thought of yesterday, he pointed himself.  “We just take the bridge, right?  And then carefully work through the playground, and out the other side.”

”Could also climb up one of these slides.”  Alanna offered unhelpfully.

The slides in question were slightly scuffed plastic, and there were about twenty of them on each idea of the giant structure that connected to the edges of the canyon.  Physics should have disagreed, but they seemed to be holding the otherwise suspended playground construct in place.

James and Sarah gave each other looks as they also eyed the slides suspiciously.  In unison, the two of them looked over to the perfectly normal looking bridge with both rope and planks made of some kind of plastic that looked like it would outlast at least two apocalypses.

”No?”  James ventured.  “Yeah, no.  I’m using my veto power.”

”Fiiiiine.”  Alanna groaned.  At least when it came to dungeons, James had definitely earned a veto power.

Crossing the bridge wasn’t the hard part.  Getting Auberdeen to cross the bridge that her paws slipped on constantly wasn’t even the hard part; Alanna was happy to carry her.  Learning that Anesh had a very specific and dramatically worse fear of heights than any of them and all of him needed to be led carefully across wasn’t the hard part either.

The hard part was that the inside of the make-believe castle was a maze.

James had kind of been waiting for this, for… well, it was hard to tell how long right now, but probably since they first entered the dungeon.

The structure had multiple walkways that overlapped each other, not in a spatial fold way but more in the sense that you never really knew if you’d gone up a floor.  The layers of wooden slats held a whole lot of arched ‘doors’ between platforms, offset steps to climb up, twists and turns in the shadowy interior, the occasional tube that was one of the slides leading back outside, and, of course, monkey bars.

The first time they’d come to a point near the middle of the structure, not quite at its pinnacle, and been presented with the climbing bars as the only way across a small gap, it had been worrying.  Searching around the area for alternate routes was also a challenge, just because so many ways were blocked off.  But the dungeon had, at least, embraced the spirit of the jungle gym, and didn’t actually stop any of the more dexterous delvers from climbing up and over walls or using the thick metal pipes that anchored sections together as ladders.

It was ironic that, in circumventing the intended obstacle that would have them trying to carry a dog over the open air of a fifty foot drop, the group ran into another domain point.

Well, they didn’t just stumble into it.  But Alanna had climbed one of those pipes up to a higher level, scouting for an alternate path, and run into one of those ‘yelling tubes’ that she remembered from her own childhood of the school playground.  Just a metal tube that connected to another one somewhere else in the area, she still found it funny, and had tried calling back to the others through it.

Only to hear her voice emanate from somewhere else.  Somewhere that wasn’t even close to where the pipe led.  Because the pipe didn’t actually lead anywhere, Alanna realized.

It took a little organization between James, Zhu, and Sarah, while Anesh hung back with Auberdeen and both of them enjoyed sitting on a stable disc shaped platform that was kind of a little extended tree fort.  Somewhere they didn’t have to slip on the smooth plastic or look down at the fall.

Eventually, after more yelling into the void, they found where Alanna’s voice was coming out of the tube.  A point in the air, halfway up the tower she had wanted to climb anyway, though fortunately before the wood platforms ran out and it was just a lattice of metal bars and a few ropes.

Finding a domain point the ‘correct’ way felt satisfying in a way that wasn’t quite the same as stumbling into one, too.  This one extended James’ domain by about an inch of diameter, which was always welcome.  Every little bit toward being big enough to be really useful.  Beyond that, it created a second marble of space inside the domain that he could slowly move around, that was another sensory power.  It seemed like a straightforward one, just ‘is the thing my domain is for inside this space’.  According to Vex and Mags, there were weirder ones in here, but they were comparatively rare, and their weirdness usually came with more of a kick in terms of effect.

It was a trick to get Auberdeen to the point.  Anesh, they could coax into it.  Ganesh just flew through, his own smugness on display.  Auberdeen, they eventually broke down and used a couple Move Person casts on.

And after that point, it was so much easier to justify using more Move Person charges to cross the rest of the canyon.

Their hike continued on the other side.  Farther in, looking for people who had been ‘lost’ in here for so long that James wondered if they’d even want to leave.

He’d been here for what felt like years at this point, and he kind of wasn’t sure himself.

_____

The bank dungeon was stored inside a place that had once been a Pizza Hut.

James was slowly becoming aware that his perception of the passage of time, and where his recollections felt within it, was messed up.  He would blame Pathfinder later, or possibly already had blamed her earlier.  But right now, it meant that he felt bizarrely nostalgic for something that he had never actually experienced.

He just hadn’t been someone who’d gone to Pizza Hut.  His parents had made him play sports as a kid, but all the pizza parties had either been at other places, or hadn’t included him for various reasons.  He’d certainly eaten his share of pizza in his life, but it hadn’t come from this particular evolutionary strain of the pizzeria.

And yet.  He knew the shape of the building.  Implicitly, without question, this place had been a Pizza Hut.

Why in the world anyone would choose to buy this location and make it into a bank of all things, without even remodeling it, was beyond him.  But it must have been a bank for longer than it had been a Pizza Hut, and so that was what the dungeon had emerged as.

”You are,” Charlie had told him as they’d stood shoulder to shoulder with full delver loadouts at the head of a column of adventurers prepared to take steps into a new dungeon, “very wrong about everything you just said.”

”What?”  James asked curiously, looking sideways and catching sight of the thirty other people of a half dozen species that were armed and armored in rows behind them, all waiting tensely as the timer ticked down.  “No!  I can tell what the building was!”

”You’re right it was a Pizza Hut!”  Dance called from behind him.  “You’re wrong about everything else!  You’ll hurt Charlie’s feelings, he put a lot of work into that report you can’t remember at all!”  There was a delighted hissing as Charlie closed his eyes and tipped his head back to look at nothing in particular.  “Charlie!  Tell him how long writing it took!  Make James feel awkward!”

”…Was it an especially long time?”  James asked guiltily.

Charlie didn’t open his eyes.  Or answer that question.  “This structure started as a bank.”  He said without much displayed emotion.  “After eight years it was purchased by a pizza franchise-“

”Pizza Hut.”  James was positive.

Though his insistence got at least one camraconda to give a hissing snicker, Charlie continued unfettered. ”-at which point the franchise owner was promptly arrested on human trafficking charges, and the property was sold at police auction.”

”That’s a thing?”  James would have figured it was being leased or something.

”It was then used as a laundromat, a model train supply store, a vegan bakery, and a video production studio, before it was purchased by its current owners.”

James nodded, looking around at the crowded and odd-smelling aisle that everyone was lined up in.  “Which is why it’s a fish store.”  He said.

”There’s more than fish here!”  Dance claimed.  “I’ve checked!”

”That’s… ominous.”  James turned to Charlie.  “You’re gonna end up with a lot of cats.”

”Dance strikes me as a dog person.”  Charlie replied evenly, taking a breath of the air that smelled strongly of fur and fishtanks.  “Two minutes now.  I assume everyone is ready.”

He didn’t really phrase it as a question.  Of course they were ready.  Though the pet supply store was cramped, with the aisles of product having been rather limited to make sure the animals themselves had more room, that wasn’t a serious issue.  The group was going to be going into the dungeon through the interior door that supposedly led to the kennel in the back, but, for their purposes, would go elsewhere.  And they weren’t concerned about making it back out in time for the very limited window; this was an expedition, after all.  Only a handful of people who would be sticking near the entrance, James and Zhu included, would be leaving before the window closed.

There were no newbies here.  Everyone was a practiced delver, and over half of them had been on one of the long expeditions the Order had previously embarked on.  They were skilled and as prepared as they could be for the hostile bank-shaped wilderness ahead.

“What do you think the odds are you get attacked by a stapler again?”  Zhu asked James as the seconds counted down.

”High.”  James sighed, before brightening up.  “But that’s why I’ve got gloves!”

Zhu gave a revving sound of amusement.  ”You’re gonna get bit on your ankles.”

”Jokes on them I’ve got socks too.”  James said. “Ready for an adventure?”  He asked his companion.  Zhu just gave him a stare from the big eye on James’ shoulder, as if to question why James even felt like he had to ask.

Shaking his head, James let the timer hit zero, and promptly moved forward one step behind Charlie, the man pushing open the door and opening up a wholly different world than the one they’d just been standing in.

A big part of James wanted to stop and gawk at the scenery, but that was also newbie behavior.  Dungeons looked cool, yes.  Oftentimes dungeons looked impossibly rad.  But right now, James needed to keep moving to let the other people flow in and get their own view.

His position was at the front, so he and Zhu moved with rapid steps, ready for anything as the rest of the delvers poured in behind and formed a crescent around the entryway, securing it in the almost silent maneuver they’d drilled in.

And then he took a good look at the area.

It was a bank.  Trapped somewhere between a place that had been overtaken by a grey professionalism, and a place that harkened back to an old kind of glorified wealth.  The floor was a speckled and smoothed stone that so polished it was almost slick, the kind of stone that footfalls practically echoed on.  A pair of meter-wide plant pots stood just on the edge of their formation, the artificial green fronds arranged so as to imply a pathway in the otherwise open space.  To the left - fifty feet to the left, this place felt like everything was very far apart - there was a heavy rug laid down on the floor and a collection of upholstered chairs dotted around it in a little waiting area.

And then, ahead, past an information desk made of chest-high darkly stained wood, there was a long counter.  A half dozen booths for tellers that had never and would never work here, drawers that might contain actual cash or abstract magic.  Modern security glass cutting off smooth stone counters where elegant looking pens were held in place by gold link chains.

Normal.  A little more of a hike than it would be in his own bank, but normal.  At least, that was James’ first impression.

Of course then he looked farther.  And saw that the brass stanchons and their black padded leather ropes, sectioning off what seemed like a row of more of those big fake plants, actually didn’t signal the end of the space at all.  No, if he approached the counters, and then took a right, well… he’d have to walk a few hundred feet, and pass by a side hallway with a bathroom sign up, but then he’d be able to approach another long row of counters head on.

And when James looked up, as he had learned to do in dungeons, he saw the ceiling so far up it almost made him dizzy.  The intricate artistic design on it depicting a cascade of coins not distracting James from the fact that he could see balconies along the wall that rose up over the teller booths, and those balconies had their own waiting areas or desks or roped off lines that led to yet more banking counters.  One of them, three stories up, had what looked like a two hundred gallon aquarium against the silver metal railing.

“Oh excellent!” James said, without a trace of irony.  “It’s one of these kinds of dungeon!”

”You already ready my reports, you know what kind of dungeon it is.”  Charlie said with an almost defeated downward quirk of the corner of his mouth as he took a knee at the edge of formation, the crossbow he was holding not wavering as he assessed the space.  When nothing attacked them immediately, he gave James a sideways look.  “What kind of dungeon?”  He asked.

James really wanted to immediately go get a closer look at everything, but he refrained as the expedition finished breaching through into the unreality of the dungeon, chatting casually as they did so.  “This isn’t an official taxonomy or anything,” he said, dashing Charlie’s hopes, “but there’s a type of dungeon that does… well, this.”  He waved a hand around.  “Where the entrance is the thing it’s mimicking, but it’s already huge.  Where you know the dungeon is going to be a massive place to explore and map.  Where there isn’t an immediate hazard or a sudden requirement to get anything done.  I’m thinking places like the Office, the Stacks, even kind of the Pylon.  You know.  Big weird dungeons.”

Fluffing his feathers out over top of James’ armor, Zhu happily added his own voice.  “And they’re always the coolest ones!  I bet there’s so many weird destinations in here.  And you just know we’re gonna learn about six ways the magic is obtuse while we make friends with a whole new species.”

”Okay well hang on.”  James raised his arm to look Zhu in the eye.  “That happens everywhere.  That happened with Clutter, even.”

”Oh yeah.”  Zhu paused.  “Okay, well, this place is big and humans like big things.  Can we go poke it now?”

James wanted to.  So badly.  But no.  They took it slow, and careful, and methodical.  Because while the thousand foot wide echoing marble cavern of the front waiting room was silent and empty, the dangers of this dungeon started immediately upon leaving its embrace.

The Order almost had the process of checking out new dungeons down to a planned action at this point.  They took samples of various materials - the plants weren’t plastic like James had assumed, which was surprising - they took pictures of everything, they mapped every angle of the floors and walls because you never knew when something was going to end up being longer in one direction than the other.

But dungeons were, often, very dangerous.  And they were always unpredictable.  So people like James and Zhu were here to make sure things didn’t get bad.

The first teller counter was so mundane it almost stung.  This would be the mirror to Officium Mundi’s first row of cubicles; insane, by virtue of being here and being part of an endless static hum of repeating and iterating geometry, but also normal.  Getting around behind it was actually the trickiest part, because it stretched forty feet in each direction and then each side fused with a wall at a forty five degree angle, marking places where hallways led deeper into the bank.  There was no way in, if you were playing by the rules of society, unless you happened to go through one of those halls and found your way back out through one of the doors behind the counter.

James jumped over.  One hand on the cool stone, Zhu’s talons gripping the bar that held up the safety glass as the two climbed up onto the lip of the counter, and then over that second barrier.  For a lot of people, even experienced delvers, it would be tricky.  And if they’d been under pressure James wouldn’t have tried.  But they had time and space, so this was an easy way into this secured space.

The doors, he noted, were all locked.  He and Zhu took the time to unlock them, just in case that came up.  And then, started poking around at the sheafs of documents, the sleakly angular computers that looked like they’d fallen out of a fictional version of the nineties, and of course, the tills.

One of the tills had been left open, and it had cash in it.  Not a lot of intact cash; there was a nest of shredded green bills in the black plastic of the drawer, looking like a crater that something small napped in sometimes.  But a few bills were still whole, and James didn’t know how he felt about the fact that the dungeon just handed over three hundred bucks in the first five minutes.

That wasn’t the only till though. There were dozens of miniature curved desks back here, tall swivel chairs waiting for bodies that would never fill them.  And some of them were locked tight, waiting to be uncovered.

That would have to wait though because James and Zhu had been there for less than a minute before a stapler tried to kill them.  Which really was nostalgic, in an honest way that was separate from James’ fractured sense of time.

The staplers here were not like the striders of Officium Mundi.  They weren’t even really staplers, really.  Striders were still shaped like they were expected to staple things, their ‘jaws’ making their motions stiff and their bites limited.  The things here?  They were like if someone started with a stapler as a vibe, and then figured out how to make it hurt someone.

They were also spiders.  Much more so than striders were, even.  Eight pen legs, black domed bodies, and tiny eyes on either side of their form in curved lines like dark garnets.  

When one lunged out from under the counter at James, it didn’t unhinge itself to bite down.  It instead snapped forward with a pneumatic hiss of air and a metallic click as staple fangs punched out from the front curve of its body and into James’ shin.

Or at least, the armor plate there.

The failure of the first attack didn’t deter the stapler at all, or the two that were hot on its pen cap heels to join in.  Continuing to pursue James’ feet and ankles as he jerked backward, the three little forms of hostile dungeon life just kept trying to dig metal fangs into undefended flesh, and failing to do so.  Because it would be absolutely moronic to come into this place without body armor on, and James was well past his idiot phase.

When he got good footing and stomped on one of them, he found these particular office supply nightmares were actually a lot more fragile than their Office counterparts too.  The elongated black plastic domes of their bodies were brittle, and the one he hit was almost flattened with a wet splat and a burst of inky sludge from its corpse.  This did nothing to deter the other two, and James dispatched each of them one by one, keeping calm and not letting himself get driven into a trap, another fight, or just bad positioning.

By the time two other delvers made it over to join James, he’d cleaned up six of the arachnid staplers, and the counters around their entry point seemed quiet.  It wasn’t a hard fight, exactly, but it wasn’t hard because he was relying on his gear, on Zhu’s dodge guidance if things got bad, and on not panicking.  James could easily see a new delver getting ripped apart by these things if they weren’t careful.

There were no loot drops from the staplers.  This wasn’t that kind of dungeon.  But, behind the extensive row of counters and desks, there were plenty of locked drawers.  The dungeon didn’t care how they ended up open - the Order went with a series of people with decent lockpicking ability, as opposed to hunting for keys - all it cared was that a secure container was breached.  Not all of them had something inside, but a few did, and from that, they harvested their first bits of magic.

Gleaming white diamonds that caught the light and sparkled from any angle.  They weighed almost nothing, and if too much pressure was applied they’d break and give someone an errand to run.  Which was, James chuckled internally, less horrible than it sounded.

But this was just the start.  The first few minutes of what would for him be hours of exploring.  And he was eager to continue in the vanguard.

So James and Zhu, along with three other delvers, kept going deeper.  Into the hallways that led to… more counters.  More waiting areas with twenty foot long benches and too many chairs, more bronze stanchons with their black leather or faded red velvet ropes, more stretched counters that cut off wide chunks of the spaces and herded delvers toward the halls, more ceilings like glamorous hotel lobbies with dizzying heights overhead.

They mapped out the spaces, using drones to scout ahead for safety, making a chart of the different lobbies.  The hallways were long enough that the cavernous spaces didn’t actually intersect, there was no spatial warping going on, just the trickery of overly large buildings that left human minds - and ratroach minds too apparently - wondering how they hadn’t ended up back where they started, or fallen off the edge of the world by now.

Even with the scouting, things still surprised them at odd times.  It was when the team backtracked to the first lobby and followed the space farther down to the next intersecting set of counters, this one a different color of stone and a different shape of the desks, that James got attacked by a bird.

“This is practically a tradition!”  Zhu declared as the four-winged thing shaped like a swan tried to rip James’ face off.  “This is why I hang out with you!  For this kind of thing!” He added as he gave James a clean dodge so that his human could take off one of the bird’s wings and finish it off without too much suffering.

The wing was made of a heavy material that felt a little bit like currency, not feathers.  The feathers that splayed out from it weren’t currency themselves, but the patterns on them sure looked like it; blotches that mimicked faces or symbols, small circled spots that had almost-text in them of number values, the busy anti-counterfeit linework.  The one that had tried to kill James had been mostly green, but there were blues and pinkish reds mixed in with its tail feathers.

It also had antlers.  Not large ones, but the long neck bore them like a crown, and James could attest that they were really solid, a headbutt he’d taken on the back of his hand having left a bruise even through the glove.  Why it had antlers was anyone’s guess, but James felt like it made sense somehow.

What also made sense was the next it was keeping, a shredded bowl of paperwork and discarded bill-feathers, sitting concealed under the central part of the teller counter.  It was on top of a small safe, which appeared to have some kind of timed release lock on it - Zhu hit it with his daily use of Check Container and confirmed there was a dungeon diamond inside, and they filed that information away for the expedition that would be sticking around - and the nest itself had an egg in it.

”Oh.”  James said, gently picking up the oval shape of silver metal that was ridged like a coin.  “I wonder… if the dungeon started from the joke, and worked backward?”

”What?”  One of the other delvers asked.  “Because it’s an egg?”  The guy paused, and then made a noise of realization that James always loved to hear from people in the Order.  “It’s a damn nest egg, isn’t it?”

”Well that’s what I’m calling it.”  James laughed, before handing the egg to the ratroach member of the group.  “Let’s scour this place, then drop stuff off at camp before we check out that next hall, yeah?”

As they did just that, Zhu asked a question that had been on his mind for a while, percolating in the deep dreams he lived in inside James’ head.  “Do dungeons get puns?”  He questioned his partner.

”I have no fucking idea.  I might just like words too much so I see puns everywhere.”  James told him.  “Or maybe I’d make a good dungeon.”

”I’ll let Anesh know when we get back.”  Zhu casually said.

”…wwwwwhy?”

”You’ll see.”

With that ominously in the back of his head, James got back to trying to figure out if there was any extra stuff to check out around the area, while the rest of his team cracked open drawers and made an attempt at one of the password protected sleek computers.  There wasn’t much, which was very strange to him.  Aside from a smooth chrome clock on the wall, there was barely any clutter here at all.  The whole place was… not empty, exactly; it was a dungeon full of all kinds of things after all.  But it was like it wasn’t lived in.  There were no travel mugs under desks, no pictures of pets on walls, no dog-eared romance novels waiting for slow moments.

Again James found himself comparing it to the Office, and how that dungeon could make even the most meaningless cubicles feel like they belonged to someone.  A weird someone, sure, but someone.

They still found a few more diamonds, before dropping everything off at the initial camp that was going up, adding the area to the map on the table that had been confiscated by Charlie and his command team.

And then it was time to go a little deeper.

Through a fluorescent lit hallway that snaked past frosted glass office doors and back stairways, past where it opened up into another lobby that had a fountain choked with coins that dominated the rotunda, past a part of the hall that had windows looking out on a garden courtyard of all things.

James and Zhu stopped at everything they could.  Moving carefully, but still with excitement, wanting to see everything they could in their own limited time window.

They fought a centipede made out of half-open checkbooks, the creature dripping red ink and hellbent on making a new problem for James’ face, and then they cracked one of the office computer passwords in that room only to find access details for some kind of account containing a currency that definitely wasn’t real.  

They triggered a trap by flicking something through a pale laser beam coming from a security camera - triggered it intentionally from a distance - that detonated a roll of dimes and sent razor-sharp coins whizzing into walls and potted plants, and then while the coins gradually yanked themselves back into a pile, took the opportunity to slip past and grab a diamond out of an open desk safe that had far too many stapler corpses around it that hadn’t seen the trap.

They walked past a long chest high window at one point, showing a scene of a darker rectangular room with a pair of marble columns blocking line of sight to anything interesting, a long bench between them.  Zhu had commented about getting Cam to knock one down just to see what would happen, but James, eternally amused that he knew this off the top of his head, had sadly informed the navigator that there was no way those columns were load bearing while they moved on.

They scooped armfuls of wet coins out of the fountain, only to get blindsided by a coppery skinned salamander thing lurking in one of the upper basins that screamed at them in a silent tone that left James bleeding from the ears and Zhu blind in two eyes.  The duo simultaneously hit that thing with Paves, sending it splashing back and scattering more metal coins across the floor while they just made an exit.  It wasn’t worth the fight.

They got attacked frequently, actually.  The creatures here were absolutely attracted to the containers that semi-regularly spawned the diamonds.  Their food source being renewable, but limited enough to fight over, made for a weird ecosystem.  But despite that, they were almost all attack-on-sight, instead of having any of the muted chill that other dungeons had.  Even the Compiled Wastes had something that wouldn’t just try to kill you.  But here it was far more combative than James had expected, even with the scout team’s warning about why they hadn’t gone deeper than reception.

They found a gated room, full of safety deposit boxes on the inside, with metal bars over doors on all four sides.  Though James couldn’t see how the hall they were in connected to any of those exits.  Nor could he see how the family of those four-winged birds had fit inside, since he was pretty sure they were too thick for the narrow gaps in the bars, and he doubted they had keys.  The dungeon creatures were a different coloration than the one that had tried to murder him earlier, as well as having more falconish wings and sharper beaks. One of them, larger than all the others, even had two heads each on its own long curved neck, glaring menacingly at James and Zhu with silent focus until they backed around the corner again.

And then they got attacked by a statue.  And that was a hell of an escalation.

The thing was huge even for the spacious hallway.  A bull’s head and a bear’s body shaped in rough lines out of copper that had long oxidized to a dull green, it stood on two legs at twelve feet tall if it had the room to straighten up, and it announced its presence by slamming through one of the office doors with enough force to splinter the wood and shatter the glass.

James was already moving as it came through, Zhu having given barely a second’s warning, but a second was enough for his enhanced Agility, especially with all the times he’d practiced almost this exact situation with Cam doing her best Kool-Aid Man impression.  He still had glass rain down on his head as he threw himself backward, rolling onto his side and doubling up shoving on the ground with Zhu so they could right themselves and see what was trying to kill them.

The copper minotaur variant creaked with metal stress as it moved, heavy and forceful, but not exactly maneuverable.  But it didn’t need to do much more than just grab James once, really.  As he got his arm off the ground, he already had his trusty delver hatchet out, and planted a very solid strike against the beast’s thigh.  But an attack that would have done potentially lethal damage to a human, even a lightly armored one, turned out to be an attack that just went clang and scraped some of the patina off this particular enemy.

”Ah.”  James and Zhu said together.

And then the thousand-pound paw of the monster came scything toward James’ head.  Ripping a gouge in the far wall, knocking aside what was left of the door the thing had come through, and almost killing him on the spot.

A cast of heavily advanced Rat’s Ground got James’ arm in position to deflect the strike off his vambrace without serious damage.  Burning another spell, James took a step backward and fired off an Appointed Arrival to put himself twenty feet back down the hall, almost hitting the wall with his shoulder as he misjudged the curve, but buying space to work with.

“Fight, item, or run?”  Zhu asked.

”Let’s try fuck.”

James was not actually suggesting anything lewd, just swearing as he realized that their enemy was way faster than either of them had anticipated, and had reacted to the teleport almost instantly too.  A charge that tore up the smooth green carpet and ripped lines in the drywall where it passed too close bringing it close to them even as James backpedaled and set a shield bracer to claw strike.

The dome of light deflected the bearish attack for a moment, and then another five strikes in rapid hammering succession as the monster just kept going, draining the bracer of charges rapidly.  James and Zhu didn’t sit idle though, they hit back.  Pave didn’t do shit except use up some Velocity, Visiting Tongue splashed thick flame onto the copper skin but didn’t get a reaction, and a second try with the fireball after hitting it with a Survival Flare to force all the nearby heat into its body didn’t do much either.  James liked having a fireball finally, but it didn’t actually produce enough heat to get even a magical heat magnet up to the two thousand degree requirement to melt copper.

”Dammit!”  Zhu declared loudly as James jumped them backward again twice in rapid succession and bought maybe five seconds.  “It’s not an alloy!”

James didn’t bother to wish that the Office had seen fit to give them some kind of Sublimate Copper blue orb power at some point.  Hell, it probably had and the Order had just forgotten it or never thought it would be useful.  Instead, he went to his fallback plan.

Shooting the thing in its bull head before its horns made contact with his face.

Which also didn’t work.  The gunshot cracked in the confines of the hall, followed by several more as James unloaded Cluster Shots into the minotaur that gave a roar like a bell ringing as it advanced into his gunfire without seeming bothered.  Its over overwhelmed his pistol, and then without warning it grabbed the edge of one of the office doors, ripped the whole thing off, and threw it like a scythe down the hall at them.

Zhu didn’t bother to give James a dodge path, he did it himself.  Move Person was the other blue orb he had, and he planted them back by the ruin of the first doorway on the other side of their opponent.  James wished he could say he managed to stay casual, but he’d admit he fucking flinched when the splintered wood edge of the door was sailing at his face.  But he still continued the motion he’d started, pulling a single bullet from a pocket he kept on his armor, deftly slapping it into his pistol’s magazine with the help of Zhu’s extra hand, reloading, aiming, and then putting someone’s childhood memory through the confused minotaur’s back like a molten railgun slug.

He and Zhu stood there, gun still up, unmoving, until they were absolutely sure that the memory bullet had killed it and it had scattered about fifty newly spawned rounds onto the floor.

”Alright, I hate that!” James decided as he lowered his Walther.  “What the hell is up with the difficulty curve in this place?!”

”So, you think that comes from it being a pet store now, or from being a Pizza Hut twenty years ago?”  Zhu asked.

”I think this comes from the bank.”  James said, entirely missing that the navigator was joking and defaulting to an adrenaline-fueled pedantic reply.  “It’s… it’s the stock market thing.  Bull, bear, together at last.”

”Wanna call it a stocker?”  Zhu asked, less biologically affected but still feeling the shivering tremor of residual fear in James’ mind as his friend experienced post-combat shakes.  “Cause it definitely wasn’t willing to let us back off!”

James snorted at the pun.  “I’m good with that.  Want to see if it was protecting something good?”  He pointed back at the smashed doorframe that they’d been ambushed through.  Zhu’s excitement at the prospect of a bonus reward for the fight urging them both inside, and almost making them miss the next coin mine.

There also wasn’t anything in the room.  It was… an office.  Just an office.  A standard corporate issue desk, a computer with a pair of heavy monitors on gimbal mounts, an unopened pack of pens and a sorting tray full of blank forms.  There was a hidden compartment in the desk drawer, which they knew because the desk had been ripped practically in half by the copper statue of a life form that had been living here, and James suspected that the secret drawer would have served the function as a ‘secure spawn point’ for a diamond.  But it had been broken into and eaten recently enough that it hadn’t come back.  Also the whole office being a ruin made it pretty clear that whatever kept this place in working order could only work so fast.

So instead, they made do with the new memory bullets, and also, the corpse of the creature that James insisted they drag back.  His new favorite spell, and most useful magic for this encounter, being the ability to make rope so he could rig up one of the doors as a sled that he could drag the thing on.  Getting back was a hell of a workout, but it was worth it to be able to very openly brag about this particular hunt, and also to show the people who were planning to spend an extended amount of time in here that they needed to be extra careful.

It almost made James want to stay too.  It wasn’t like he felt any particular urgency to leave, after all.

But, as Planner pointedly reminded him, he was needed for something else before the expedition would be over.  So James had to promise himself he’d be back later, and left the other delvers to their own devices, taking with him a cart full of new toys for Research as he headed back to reality.

Exactly on schedule.  Probably.

_____

Reports came in.

Not slowly, not quickly, just at the steady pace of the Order making a team effort on a scale that they previously wouldn’t have been close to capable of.

Delves completed.  Treasures acquired.  Personal upgrades solidified.  Dungeontech identified.

In bits and pieces, the organization collectively reached for a handhold on the situation the world felt like it was spinning toward.  Global effects both political and arcane were feeling even farther out of hand, and so, it was with a determined and directed energy that they tried to carve out something from their dungeons that could let them not just survive, but play the game.

While some of them worked to establish contacts, to meet the right people and get the right information, and others worked to build the systems that their own controlled part of the world operated by, many of them worked at bolstering both sides of the coin by going into incredibly dangerous places and hauling out whatever wasn’t nailed down.

A developing delve team - experienced, but new to one dungeon in particular - walked into Winter’s Climb and walked out with a broken leg, two missing antennae, a concussion, and a blank spellbook transported with painstaking care.  Along with a bag of heavy coins that turned out to be surprisingly pure iron, two ‘normal’ spellbooks, and a collection of random items that their bundled iLipede had helped flag as interesting.

The blank spellbook didn’t copy, because life was either unfair or all too fair.  And so there was a vigorous debate going on as to what it should become.  James personally was intrigued by the seemingly insane suggestion to put a different Climb spell back into the blank book, just to see what would happen.

The other two spellbooks were a strange mix of practical and amusing.  Mist Watch took three Breath, and gave a technically accurate but very pedantic snapshot of what the weather where the caster was standing would be in twenty hours.  Pale Hoar Lurker took four Breath and another one every hour you maintained it, and in exchange it made a tree out of ice.  That one followed similar rules to Cloud Prowler, where the tree could be bigger or tougher if you supplied the ice, but unlike the attitude that the snow cats all had, the person who tested out the Pale Hoar Lurker described the tree as ‘obedient’.  Not as a joke, either; they were insistent that it would follow commands.

Of course it was a tree, and so the commands it was capable of following were definitely a finite list.  But still, no one believed that wouldn’t be useful in short order.

Of their other loot, it didn’t take long to identify a few different wands that triggered only when the holder was standing still for long enough, that added ‘static’ to the physical elements of a spell, and that increased the Breath cost of the spell for no discernible reason.  It was strange, to have a cluster of dungeontech be the least interesting thing to come out of a delver’s backpack.

Another team, this one on a fairly routine delve into the Ceaseless Stacks to collect computer hardware for study and orbs for copying, accomplished one of those goals a little more than expected.  In addition to a handful of yellows and greens, the latter of which was always appreciated, they came back with a single small red orb too.

A couple of their delvers had found it as a puzzle solution.  Acting almost on a whim, they had reconstructed a scene of a study room table that had been knocked over, finding an amount of amused relaxation in spending their break putting everything back where it was ‘supposed’ to be.  But once they’d done that to at least some degree of success, and then sat for a while to actually rest, they had found before leaving the room that the orb had simply appeared on the table.  Like it had always been there, just waiting to be uncovered by reversing the mess.

It was duplicated repeatedly and shared around, and so, the Order ended up with their first of a very, very vindicating notification.

[+1 Career Rank : Dentist - Periodontist]

Research was currently falling over themselves trying to determine if they should build a Stacks generator to produce dentists, and if a world even existed where that was ethical.

A Horizon delve turned up a dozen map scraps, a Venture delve brought back some modified spell coins, and the dedicated and impressively competent Office delvers took all of it and filtered it through the replication ritual.  Feeding the machine with coffee from increasingly distant towers all while they hunted their own dungeontech and purple orbs and new totem designs.

A hundred people finished their Pylon bootstrap runs.  Over a thousand AP spread out among a variety of skills, some basic, some targetedly specific with Order members choosing hobbies or experimental ideas to work on.  Then another hundred people, then another.  The map of the dungeon’s milestones only really expanded when they pushed farther, but the map they had now let them infuse a huge amount of power into everyone just working on collective volume.  And while they weren’t finding milestones, what they were finding was links.

Every five levels of a Pylon skill, a delver could pair it with a Garden spell.  This process was unwilling, it just attached to the next spell you studied, but it did give a permanent bonus to the studying of that spell.  Some of them, the earliest ones the Order had found, made sense.  Breathing let you study with less need for oxygen, walking let you do it without your body feeling the need to move quite as much, things of that nature.  But some skills added conditions that let you skip the more tedious repeat staring at a spellbook that was required to advance a spell farther.  Running turned a morning jog into a spell advancement, and weightlifting gave a bonus advancement for completing a set.  

And as more and more people hit level five in their chosen focuses, the Order got to map out more of those links, and actually judge their potential in a more informed way.

Talking reduced thirst, jumping reduced muscle tension, blinking reduced eye strain, glowing reduced the cognitive load required to manifest.  Simple things, but huge for anyone who wanted to work with the Garden spells.  Carving, flower arranging, and drawing all joined knitting in the list of skills that gave an extra buffer time while equipping a spell, allowing the caster to take a break as long as that break was of the appropriate skill.  Eating - a seemingly hilarious skill at first until it was made clear that the passive effect of it was a massive help to someone with a serious eating disorder - gave the most flexible break of all, allowing for someone to physically get up and leave the spellbook behind as long as they were taking a walk to go get food.

And then there were the advancing skills.  Cycling, digging, hammerworking, all of them offered new ways to advance spells.  Bike three miles, get a plus to your highest equipped version of the bound spell.  Displace a ton of ground-based material with a shovel, get five advancements, but scattered randomly, and, of course, the shoveling had to actually be for something, not just because you were pointlessly moving dirt back and forth.  Make a hundred good hammer blows, get an advancement, no complications or intent required.

Planning the skill acquisitions out let them get away with a lot more than normal.  Just knowing they should have a bike by the door for someone allowed them to get skills they might not have found for a while otherwise.  But the most fun one came from someone’s request to have a bunch of spray paint at hand for their own attempt at a skill.

Spray painting - distinct enough from normal painting apparently - gave a level five bonus of equipping the bound spell when a work was complete that the artist was satisfied with.  The first of its kind, but it also meant that there were more like that out there.

Stacking skill bonds was difficult, but possible, and this was the kind of thing that could potentially reduce the need for spellbooks in the first place.  Not eliminate, no, but make it manageable and more accessible.  All it took was patience; waiting until all the links you wanted were open before equipping any spell.  Because once a spell was linked to something, it could never get more, but it could take any number of links all at once.

And then, finally, there was the Officium Mundi spellcasting skill.  Which was, after all that fanfare, almost mundane.  A thirty percent reduction in eye strain and the need to use the bathroom while equipping the spell.  Not nothing, but not exactly groundbreaking.

Of course, the fact that it copied the spell into every available spell slot was a little important.  The restriction that the spell couldn’t be advanced afterward was almost an afterthought, and it also saying the spell was ‘modified’ seemed ominous, though it would have been a devastating one if the person who had tried it had used anything other than Appointed Arrival. And the modification didn’t actually make itself clear either, which was more of a boon than anything else.  Now that it was a known factor…

The Order’s capacity to prepare its knights, all things considered, was starting to become more than just ‘we can get through this’, and approaching ‘we will handle this, don’t worry’.

And it wasn’t even the end of the week yet.  Or so James assumed.

_____

It was as James was staring up at a set of metal climbing bars under a silver purple twilight sky, that he realized it might be a good idea to turn around.

It wasn’t just because it had been an indistinct and fuzzy amount of time since they’d deliberately found a domain site.  Peering through one of those play telescopes high atop a wooden balustrade, finding the flicker of mossy light almost hidden inside another structure across five hundred feet of warm asphalt, tracking it down, and getting the ability to impart force onto their domain subject at a right angle to a single static radius.  Even Alanna, this time.  The extra domain size was welcome, but James wasn’t sure what he’d do with this yet.

It also wasn’t because they were bored.  None of them actually seemed capable of boredom in here, either because of the dungeon or because of Pathfinder’s method of mentally gearing them up to enter.  But James didn’t think he’d be bored anyway; there was just too much to explore here, to climb and scamper through, to remind him of a childhood whimsy that he had never lost but certainly wanted to find again.

It also wasn’t the company.  James had caught himself smiling happily as he watched Anesh methodically and academically check over playground puzzles, as he watched Alanna hoist Sarah up to drag herself over the edge of a wood platform, as he watched Auberdeen race in uninhibited circles around one of the large fountains that were clearly more for splashing in than drinking.  As he watched his friends, and loves, and companions, just be themselves.  And he knew that he was being watched too, and couldn’t find any reason to feel bad about that.

They had journeyed over ten miles through the dungeon, setting a comfortable pace that was made a little snappier by virtue of ‘comfort’ being different for the healthy forms of a group of delvers.  And their dog friend.

Actually Auberdeen was the one who got tired first.  And she was also the hardest to carry, so they made the choice to rest up and head back about at the time they reached the climbing bar forest.

It had started out sporadic.  They’d seen simple monkey bar setups already, dotting the blacktop.  Small steps leading up to a horizontal row of bars to swing across, a classic of the playground.  But a mile or so after they’d crossed the field, they’d started seeing more of them.  And then ones that went up higher, or had turns in them.  Then ones with slopes.  Layers.  Pylons in their cores with extended bars that connected to nothing but open air, clusters of handholds that linked to each other by that simple pattern of a basic horizontal row of metal beams.

”Trees.”  James said as they’d passed under one of those connecting bridges, already ten feet up and giving them plenty of headroom.  “These are trees, kind of.”

”Hey, check that out.”  Alanna pointed out a more colorful bit of metal, balanced on one of the bars against the tree-pillar it was attached to.  “Lunchbox.”

”Okay, now see, I’ve been quiet about the dungeon having children in it this whole time, but this feels like an actual problem.”   Anesh spoke with a frown.  “Is it trying to kill them or not?”

”We did see lunchboxes on benches and stuff on the way here.”  James mused.  “And we still haven’t found the kids that supposedly live in here.  I don’t think we will today, either, which sucks.  I… feel compelled to know the answer to that.  But also, look closer at these things.  Look at how the bars are spaced out.  It’s almost like it’s designed to make it hard to use your feet at all.”

Alanna looked down at herself, then back up.  “I could do it.”  She asserted.

Sarah hugged her around the waist, though only briefly because they were both too warm from the very long hike.  “You’re tall.”  She told Alanna.  “Think you could do it if you were half your height?”

”Nnnnno.  No.  You know I kinda expected a rope swing in here somewhere?”  Alanna looked deeper down into the jungle gym, where more and more climbing trees grew thicker and taller, though still with right angles and unpadded metal.  “Or some sort of tree fort.”  She added.

”Robinson Crusoe style?”  James asked, and got a slow nod in reply.  “I’m gonna tell you I think that would be cool, but I can think of about five reasons off the top of my head why it’s not here.”  He told his partner with an apologetic grin.  Then after a moment of all of the taking sips of water and admiring the strange growth of the terrain ahead of them, he changed tracks.  “Hey Ganesh,” the little drone perked up at his name, “you’ve been up pretty far today.  Any sign of movement that isn’t us?’

There hadn’t been, and the buzzing chirp the drone made confirmed what he’d been reporting the whole time.  But James had wanted to be sure.

It was with a strange sense of melancholy that their group turned to begin the trek back.  This place had been a beautiful diversion, even if it was hard to tell how long they’d been in here under the endlessly twilight sky.  They’d seen a lot, grown a little, and had hours together to just hang out, which was something James valued a tremendous amount.

But there were people in here that might need their help, and they hadn’t found them.  Now, the odds were good they didn’t have some kind of emergency that required a paladin to swoop in at the last second.  The wide eyed face of the kids had consistently run from Vex and her polycule when they’d been in here, after all.  So they probably weren’t doing too badly for themselves.

And yet.  It stung to think that they were leaving someone too young to be able to make a whole choice, alone in a dungeon.  Even if it was a dungeon that wrapped the world in the smell of fresh cut grass and left surprisingly high quality lunchables lying around.

They’d have to come back sometime.  Whenever that time happened to be.

And in the meantime, James was pretty sure there was a dungeon with differently shaped kids that needed attention much more sharply.

_____

The bladed edge of James’ tertiary ice arm bit into the flesh of the oversized rat that was trying to eat him, stuck for a moment and then slid through, opening a wider gash to emerge with a spray of molten blood.  The rat, about the size of a malnourished great dane, screamed through the lungs that were as exposed as the rest of its muscle and organs, and swung its bulk around to try to snap jagged fangs over whatever part of him was open.

It didn’t make it that far.  Dave took advantage of the opening to swing the baseball bat he had like he was aiming for a home run, shattering the rat’s exposed skull with a wet crunch.  And also, at the same time, casting the Climb spell infused in the bat, an altered Survival Flare suddenly pulling all the heat in a close radius into the point of contact.

The orange glow of the now dead rat started to intensify, its bulbous stomach starting to go from luminous to eye-searing.  But then, instead of exploding, the patch of wet muscle and smashed brain matter where Dave had hit it hissed as the moisture in it was burned away, and then lit up with a small puff of flame, before the knight stomped the fire out.  All the heat drained fast enough that the explosion of blood and bone that the glow precipitated just… didn’t happen.

”Hey it works!”  Dave said, way too happily.

Momo, looking over the edge of the riot shield she had used to screen the blast from the other two rats in the narrow tunnel of uneven pipes and pitch black tripping hazards, gave Dave an annoyed look.  “Of course it works!”  She said, the bruised ache in her arm making her a little irritated.  “Next time trust me!”

”Also give me the bat for a second.”  James said.  He was breathing a little hard, but he let his Climb magic limb fall away and start melting so he had an easier time reinfusing Breath into the melee weapon wand.  “Alright, there.  Now.  How’re our new friends?”  He asked, turning to look back at the trio of terrified ratroaches, who Mercy and Deb were keeping separate from the snarling labratoad, and the pair of crow-wasps that were gently tied up and being moved on a cart.

There was a new policy with the Sewer.  If someone in here was alive, then the Order of Endless Rooms would be removing them from this place.  Was it perfectly ethical?  Probably not.  But the Sewer was, hands down, the worst possible place to live.  And abuse victims who had never known anything else couldn’t really consent to their own abuse.  So especially in light of how things had gone with the Beautiful One, they’d instituted a policy of evacuating anyone and everyone, no exceptions, so that any memetic attacks were easier to notice and circumvent.

Currently their new friends-in-potentia were doing okay.  Not happy, but they weren’t hurt, and between Deb, Amy, and Shallah all screening for them, the pack of giant explosive rats hadn’t even gotten close, even when one had slipped past the front line of the delvers.

James kinda felt good with the giant explosive rats.  They were simple.  Everyone deserved a normal dungeon monster every now and then.  Though he was kind of waiting for one of them to be sophont just so the Sewer could try to throw another fucking wrench into things.  Joke was on the Sewer, though, the Order already had a plan outlined for that.

They kept going.  Slower, with the requirement to escort the denizens they were exfiltrating.  Normally James would have had someone telepad out, but while the Sewer hadn’t grown too much, it had stuck some kind of anti-easy-exit effect into play.  It felt more personal than the other dungeons where it was probably just an effect of the time dilation, though the Sewer wasn’t any worse.  It just made people sick if they teleported out, and that could be a big problem for the unhealthy states of people like new ratroaches.

So the Order team fought through the giant rats, the mushrooms that spat teeth, the chalkboard golem, the writhing masses of grey arms, and the razorblade eels in the one room they found where it was impossible to avoid wading through the knee-high pool of liquid Axe body spray.

And as they did, James noted the changes.

There was no straight line to the exit anymore.  Instead, the tunnels curved and intersected repeatedly, marking off a honeycomb of rooms and caverns.  Sometimes, ‘arenas’ like the one that used to mark the escape route showed up, but they seemed to just be larger stockpiles of the lockers that held Lesson books.  And also of more mundane ‘loot’, too, if piles of shredded backpacks and their contents counted.  James was sure the Sewer wasn’t killing more kids, so this must be generated somehow, but no one wanted to poke through it for anything of value.

The dungeon wasn’t bigger, exactly.  But it was more dense.  Definitely more vertical, with every other room having some kind of climbing puzzle to work through.  That verticality was used against them a lot, with swarms of crow-wasps dive bombing the Order on suicide charges, only about half of them actually mindless puppets according to the team Empath.  Those injured got teleported out immediately, but… well, the species was fragile, and designed to die, and James hated this dungeon so much.

And while they found an exit, it was at a weird out-of-the-way location.  It did cost relatively few red sparks to get through; enough that anyone who survived to get there would probably have killed enough small bugs to open it.  This was in contrast to the other door they’d checked, which was the first one.  The entrance wasn’t sealed against all attempts anymore; it had a red spark cost.  It was just... very high.  But it pointed to the Sewer becoming more like a ‘traditional’ dungeon delve.  It was now possible to sortie in, and retreat the way they came.

They also used the green orb for adding an emergency exit.  Three times, actually.  Retracing their steps confirmed one newly placed door, but it was also red spark locked.  Not as high a cost as the entry door, though, so it was adding options that were tactically meaningful.  And no one cared if it pissed off the Sewer.

When they finally did complete the delve, after what James was pretty sure was three hours, they’d collected twenty new Lesson books, and three of the ‘symbiotes’ that took purple sparks to hatch out of their various sportsballs.  Those were being kept in heavy sealed terrariums.  Because Deb said so, and she was very powerful.

James stood outside the high school, slightly after hours but still with students and staff around that he fundamentally did not give a shit about, using a hose hooked up to the back of the building to spray down a pile of everyone’s armor.  “I am exhausted.”  He told Deb and an anxiously shifting Shallah.  “I feel like I’ve been doing stuff for a whole week, but… I don’t… it can’t have been a week, can it?”

Deb’s eyebrows shot up, and she gave James an examining stare.  “Oh good, you’re finally snapping out of it.”  She said.

”I’m wat.”  James didn’t like the sound of that.

”You’re the lasssst one.”  Shallah said, seeming to relax slightly as she spoke.  It was easier to not be so tense now that the other Sewer residents had been moved back to the Lair for medical checks.  “Everyone else… ah…”

Deb took over.  “Pathfinder threw your sense of linear time in a blender.”  She said bluntly.  “You’ve been impossible to deal with all week.  Alanna was worse.”  The Order’s doctor grumbled, almost good naturedly.  “Any kind of planning, or time management, or even a lot of memory formation?  Toast.  Planner couldn’t even get you to show up for meetings.  We were worried it wasn’t going to wear off.  Mercy was very concerned.”

”I… what?”  James was aghast.  “Wait, a week?  What the fuck happened with Alex and Simon?!  I was supposed to help them with their thing!”

Shallah bit down on the chitin of her muzzle.  ”Spire is down there now.  Alllllso you missed JP being very loud.  And mad.  And then saying you were ‘going to pay for thisss’.”  The ratroach laughed softly, like she wasn’t sure if that was true or not.  “Are… are you?”

”Probably!”  James threw his hands up, tossing the hose he was using onto the pile of enfilthened armor.  “It wears off?  You said I was last?”

”Everyone else is good, yeah.  We can work in your absence."  Deb rolled her eyes sarcastically.  “On your own orders, in fact.”

James nodded, slowly breathing as he fought back panic.  There was… there was so much he was supposed to be planning for, or taking care of, or helping with, or even just being on hand to shoot if things got out of control.  And he’d… been… just drifting?

James scratched at his side and winced.  “Ow?  Why does my torso hurt?”  He asked, tugging at his shirt with a confused scowl.

Deb sighed again.  “You have stitches from where you got shot by a ratling.”

”I what?  I thought that was last month, or… when did that… okay stupid question, thanks.”  He flushed red and tried to not poke his wound.  But James had one more very important question, before he decided if he was going to have a complete breakdown or not.

”Deb.”  He asked.  “What day is it?”

He was going to have to do a lot of scrambling.