The Daily Grind - Chapter 399 (Patreon)

"One man's sunset is another man's dawn. I don't know what's out there beyond those hills. But if you ride yonder, head up, eyes steady, heart open... I think one day you'll find that you're the hero you've been looking for."  -Wylie Burp, Fivel Goes West-

_____

And then, the aftermath.

_____

Jake Black, who was actually more than a little grateful to mostly be called Check by his allies, showed up to the scene of alien blood and heavy weapons fire, and ran headfirst into an asshole that he didn’t want to talk to.  It was better than walking off a crash landing, but it didn’t mean he had to like it.

”Well hello to you, beautiful.”  Watcher said with his stupid sarcastic grin as Check disembarked from the troop truck he’d gotten a ride in.  “Took the long way around?”

”You know I don’t like the deployment bubbles.”  Check shot back, looking at the two people Watcher had interrupted his own conversation with and dismissing them as a security threat.  “Too much of a risk that someone forgets you in there.”  Not that landing the hard way wasn’t also a risk.  He’d been delayed by something trying to kill one of their transport flights.  But he could fill Watcher in later.

”I would never!”  Watcher protested with the slimy bastard voice of an older brother who not only would, but already had.

Check didn’t bother arguing that angle.  “You, specifically, lost an entire squad the last time you used one of them, too.  So forgive me if I don’t fucking trust you to carry me around in subspace.”  He looked past, to the parking lot where the Coalition’s contracted troops were dragging hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies, and adding them to a controlled blaze.  “What the fuck did I miss?”

”Alien invasion.”  Watcher said like that was normal, even for them.  Which was to say, like a liar.  “No, I mean that in truth.”  He continued, sensing Check’s displeasure.  “We got beaten to the punch.  Are you the only one that’s answering?”

”Seems like it.  You know Blacksmith’s always busy, and Tally has burnout, bad.”  Check shook his head.  “She’s too young for this.  We need more people our age.”

”Everyone else?”

”Assignments.  So why did you put out a bulletin then?”

Watcher looked back down the road, to where local emergency services were clustering, civilians moving through disorganized clumps of firefighters and EMTs.  The view was obstructed by all the trees and curved suburban terrain, but there was enough activity that it was hard to ignore the presence of non-Coalition units in play.  “Well,” he told Check as one man made eye contact from a long ways off and started sauntering their way, “I’ve got some people I think you should meet.”  A covering lie; he’d put out the call well before this, it just happened to line up.

”Just give me a real answer or I’m getting in the deployment bubble.”  Check grunted.

”I’ll just summon you, don’t think I care about adding a thousand boots to this mess just to fetch your ass back.”  Watcher slyly retorted.  “Look, that guy?  He’s with some kind of what I think is a chivalric order.  They got here first, they know about the saints.  Bloody hell, Check, they have spawn working for them, even.”

”…And they’re still here?”

”I think they’re on our side.”  Watcher said with a hopeful shrug.  “Or at least, I think they’re… usable.  By the time our actual troops showed up, they were at their limit.  If things had gone on any longer, they were going to break.  But until then?”  He motioned with one hand to where something that looked like if a motor home had mated with a goliath beetle had also been really angry at everything was being dragged away by a tow cable, metallic corpse screaming in protest against the street as it was hauled to its pyre.

Looking farther down the street, to the area the Coalition troops had been ordered to not cross into, Check noticed something weird moving on one of the sidewalks under the surviving streetlights.  “What the heck is that?”

”Camraconda.  Or so I am told.”  Watcher answered.  “As it turns out, not everything that isn’t human is hostile to us.  And some things that never were seem to be excellent friends.  Probably because they don’t know us.”  He mused.

”Blacksmith won’t like that.”

”Blacksmith is a child.”  Watcher said the last word with his whole mouth.  “He will grow up, or we’ll see how many iterations it takes him to learn.”  He brushed at the shredded sleeves of his white and grey suit jacket, still unreplaced, still worn like he was clinging to it as a liferaft.  He cycled through a common breathing pattern, and calmed himself.  “Check, these people aren’t going to be afraid of us.  We can’t bully them into what we want, they’ll just fight back and burn out.  I’d appreciate if you’d play nice while you’re here.”

Check didn’t know what to say to that.  “Half the Coalition is better at diplomacy than me.  I’m gonna end up hitting one of them, I can feel it.  Why you didn’t say anything earlier?”

”I think they might have local comm control.  Safer this way.  Heroic?  Oh, to be sure.  But I don’t particularly want them hearing you yap about our teleporter or me gossip about how I want to recruit them.”

”…Recruit how?”

”As… well, maybe recruit is the wrong word.”  Watcher said.  “They’d make the worst of soldiers, probably.  Though we could maybe snare a few of them if we really wanted to, add a special unit to our mix, but it would be a waste.  No, no, though.  Check they saved my life.”  His voice dropped as he actually took this seriously, it seemed.  “I think we give them a deal.  I think they know about the saints, and they run into the saints often enough, that we give them… some backup.  And we let them walk us into better intel.”

There wasn’t much time to mull that over.  Check saw the man approaching them now wasn’t any kind of public servant.  He was in body armor, black padding looking like a tight shell around him.  And yet, it wasn’t quite uniform.  There were little flourishes, like the special plating along the shins that looked like etched metal, or the way the armor gave the appearance of a tailored suit despite clearly being made for a fight, clearly having been in a fight, and bearing no rank insignia.

”Yo.”  The young man said, extending a hand for Check to shake.  “How was your flight?”

Check found himself taking the offered gesture on instinct he didn’t know he had, though he did notice that there was some kind of impossible serpent thing coiled around the other man’s neck.  Watching him with a hundred eyes and a polite wave.  “Well mine wasn’t too bad.  It’s usually smooth when you’re the only ones the tower needs to manage.”  His mouth tugged back in a quick frown.  “Something electrocuted a bunch of pilots though.  Sea-Tac is going to have to fix a runway.”

”I do have questions about that!  The flights, not the lightning, I’m up to date there, sorry about your people.”  The newcomer said, pleasant and sympathetic at the same time.  “Hi.  I’m JP.  I’ve met Watcher here, but you are?”

”Call me Check.”  He figured anyone with a ghost snake was someone who would either be really weird or really normal about his name.

JP paused with a tiny smile.  “How many of you are named after investigation terms?”  He asked.

”Oh he’s right!”  Watcher burst out a laugh after a minute.  “What a pair we make!  Friend, we’re going to need to form a closer partnership!”

”No.” Check sighed.

JP, in excellent control of his face at all times, did not wince at the word ‘friend’.  Not openly anyway.  Though he did try to, without any outward indication, will Ben and Quinn to fuck off now that he was here.  “Well that’s a coincidence of a land mine for me to step in.”  He joked, putting the others at ease around him.  “Now.  I suppose you’ll have some questions, and I’ve got a little time for answers.  Let’s hear it.”

In truth, the reason he wanted their questions was that JP already had his answers.  The Order had been spying on the Coalition since they’d taken the field, after all.

He’d started to put together how some of their magic worked, he was pretty sure he knew what Check and Watcher were talking about with their ‘deployment bubbles’.  He knew that their troops had performed brutally well against their side of the Underburbs breach, but that they were taking a lot of casualties from the still-lingering diseases that hadn’t been purged when the dungeon was kicked out.  And he knew that they were… strange.

In an emotional way, that was.  JP didn’t like mind control.  He found it distasteful.  He understood why things got simpler when people couldn’t make choices, and he also kind of was the sort of weasel that liked manipulating his opponents or sometimes friends into his chosen positions.  But the important thing there was that people could always just say no.  They didn’t, often because they were assholes and he zeroed in on their greed and disdain as weaknesses, but they could.

The Coalition, JP was finding, cared a lot for the soldiers they had.  Watcher tried to pretend he didn’t, but he was worried about the sick.  Check was here late because he’d spent time helping out one of the big aircraft full of dudes unfuck a few problems.  They weren’t bad people, they weren’t focused on efficiency, and they seemed to understand that weaponizing living humans was monstrous.  They just… did it anyway.

So the Order was never going to be close to these people.  But, just like they wanted things out of him, he wanted things out of them.  Like, for example, their questions.  So he could peel back more of their facade and replace the gaps in his intel with facts.

“Yeah, what the fuck did you do?”  Check asked him.

Okay, JP hadn’t really expected something that broad.  He decided to give a lot of information, just to prompt more specific things later.  “Well, our people located this particular dungeon - we call it the Stratified Underburbs, your friend can tell you why later - and, having encountered it before, decided to… take preemptive action.  The Underburbs has a number of humans that work with it to regularly breach our world, eat a big bite of a city, and then run off.  So we killed as many of them as we could, spoiled its ambush, and kicked it out while it was hopefully confused and weakened.”  JP explained, motioning over to the roaring fire a couple hundred feet away.  “You showed up in time to help us keep a lot of this from spilling over…” he winced as a pair of soldiers threw a dog corpse onto the fire and one of them indicated they’d been nicked by one of the rusted nails inside the things, mechanically leaving to receive treatment, “and… well, here we are now.  Cleaning up.  Oh, sorry you didn’t catch your real target.”  JP gave them a sympathetic grin that neither of them knew wasn’t real.  “I don’t think Lloyd likes being around us much.”

”Lloyd.”  Check didn’t know why that was what got him, out of all the words.

”The Last Line of Defense.  A few friends of mine call him Lloyd, because they think it annoys the feral demigod that could kill us all if he was in the same room.  I don’t want to annoy him, but I like the expedience, you know?”  JP shrugged.

The little snake thing around his neck flicked him with a fin.  “You do not, you savor annoying people!”  It said.

”Don’t ruin my moment.”  JP said unflappably.

“He won’t be explaining that.”  Watcher said with his own cheerful sarcasm.

God, JP wanted to like Watcher so much.  The two of them could get up to so much bullshit, if only the man weren’t a literal slave owner.  “I’ll be explaining anything else though.”  He said with an agreeable nod to Check.

”Sure.”  The man shook his head, brushing off Sartori’s presence.  “So it’s safe to assume you all have some artifacts or relics?”

”Oh yes.”  JP said.  “Well, artifacts at any rate.”  He didn’t know if the Order’s term lined up with their term, but ‘relic’ sounded like something tied to what they called saints, and JP didn’t want to affiliate the Order closely with that in their mind.  Especially since he was wearing one of Kiki’s charms right now.

”Look, okay…” Check tried to figure out what was bothering him, and then just plowed forward with being rude to the guy who looked like he was in charge of his own army.  “What do you think you’re doing?”  His voice took on a bite.  “We had a plan.  We had a target.  Do you want some kind of medal for saving a few hundred people, when the whole fucking continent might be on the line of we miss again?”  Now he was properly angry, and JP was the perfect outlet for it.  “The Coalition does.  Not.  Waste.  Lives!  And you baited us into shooting dogs for you?!  What do you think you’re doing?!”

JP let him pant as he finished yelling, just nodding slightly.  “Well, I could tell you it would be about forty thousand people, not a few hundred.  I could tell you that your buddy volunteered your help.  Or I could admit that if things were the other way around, I’d probably be yelling at you too.”  He shook his head sadly, one glove brushing something off his armor that he glared at as it proved to be less cosmetic and more sticky.  “But I think I’ll just tell you that your targeting sucks.  If you’re hunting saints, then I don’t think that’ll go well for you!”  He tried to make that sound positive.  “But also, we were here.  And when this nightmare scenario happens, we’re going to be there more often in the future.  So you can plan around us, if you like.  But don’t blame me because you didn’t look first.”

”Ah.”  Watcher cleared his throat.  “Well, yes, that might have been my job, and…”

”Watcher shut the fuck up.”  Check said bluntly, glaring directly at JP.  “You’re a problem.”  He said.

JP suddenly saw a clear avenue for this conversation that would be a great boon to the Order at this immediate moment.  And he took it, in the most annoying way he could.  ”Why thank you!”

”God dammit, I didn’t wake up today to deal with two copies of this one’s horseshit.”  Check’s eye twitched as he indicated Watcher next to him.  “What’s stopping us just arresting you and making sure there’s no next time?”

”Please.”  JP snorted.  “I think we both know we’d much rather be on each other’s good sides, no matter how annoying this might be.  Besides, we also do have saint-based problems.”  He politely ignored the fact that the Coalition had no legal standing to arrest anyone.  What Check meant was ‘kidnap’.

”Ah.”  Watcher raised a hand.  “I have a solution to that, if you’re willing to hear me out?  Both of you, that is, Check.”  There was enough of a pause that it seemed like an opening, so he took it.  “The Coalition has a large net, in terms of where we can post sentries and send search parties, but it does sound like you have a more… intersecting experience with our mutual enemies.  And it also sounds like your order lacks a certain amount of firepower.  Perhaps, then, a mutual exchange?  We can shore up your ranks, and all we ask is that you use those numbers in any situation a saint is involved in.”

JP looked at Watcher for a moment, and then sighed.  Both as a piece of theater, and in truth.  Because he had kind of hoped that maybe, just maybe, the silver tongued man might surprise him.  But, it was the opportunity he wanted.  Because it let him do three things at once.

The first thing was lie.  “We are… short on membership.”  He told them.  “Fights like this are never easy.”  Well, they hadn’t been in the past.  Zero deaths this time, fucking thank you Kiki, even if JP deliberately did not think her name.  “But don’t think I don’t know what you get out of a situation like that.  If you want an observer attached to us, you should just ask.”  There, make it seem like he’d seen part of the trick, but not the whole thing.

Watcher shrugged casually, as if it were no big deal.  “Well of course we would to hear about saint activity.  And it’s my hope you would do quite a bit to tell us when it happened.”  The man flinched as something in the bonfire behind them popped like a gunshot, before breathing slowly with a hand clutching his chest and Check staring at him with narrow eyes.  “But really, let’s not beat around the bush here.  Can you afford to turn down help, now?”  He asked pointedly, pressing an attack that he didn’t actually understand the value of.

Because the Order could just say no.  Could shrug it off, and leave.  But JP wanted something here.  He wanted a contact, he wanted intel, he wanted access to a group of their soldiers to figure out the best way to break their mind control in a concealed dungeon somewhere as a gift to his friends that hated this shit even more than he did, and, he wanted to be lazy today.

”I’ll…” JP affected a grimace, gritted teeth and an angled head selling his discomfort.  “Tell you what.”  He said, eventually, turning and looking back at where a trio of firetrucks were circled around the half-scorched remains of a home that hadn’t fared very well in the fighting.  “You’re already here.  And we… we need to get our people home.  Can you handle cleanup?”

”You want us on scrub work?”  Check asked.  And then, the man laughed.  “You’re double dipping.  Take the boys and girls for your ranks, and get us to clean up your mess.”

”Well the west side is mostly your mess, if we go by that, but yes.”  JP nodded.

Sartori, playing into his friend’s act, flipped a fin into JP’s face, reedy voice calling out.  “Stop trying to make yourself seem tough!  Just let them help!”

”Bah.”  JP smiled in spite of himself.  “Well, what do you say?”  He asked, offering a hand to Watcher with a hopeful expression.

Watcher rolled his eyes, but took the grip to shake all the same.  “Where should we send your new helpers?”

JP laughed.  “If you’re not sharing why you’re the only ones that get to use airports in this fucking country, I’m not telling you how we got here.”  He said with what he knew would be taken for the barb that it was.  “Let’s trade contact info.  We can set up something later, after I make sure no one died from the airborne infectious cancer.”  He watched as Watcher flinched again from a distant sound.  “Are you alright?”

”Fine, fine.  Let me just go… actually, Check will make sure you know where to get ahold of us.  I think I may need to locate a restroom of some sort.  Assuming you left any standing.”  Watcher faked a laugh and turned to walk off, aiming for nothing in particular.

JP actually did feel some sympathetic concern there.  He turned to look at Check with an actual honest expression this time.  “Is he…?”

”Don’t mind him, he died recently and he’s still jumpy.”  Check said.  Adding a laugh at the end, that JP knew, wasn’t really because it was a joke.

”Right.  Well.  Shall we sort this out?”

”Sure, kid.  But I don’t have to like it.”  Check replied.

JP just sighed.  This was going to be a long conversation, if he didn’t manufacture a good excuse to simply get a phone number and then vanish into thin air.

At least the Order wouldn’t need to be stacking thousands of Underburbs corpses though.

____

“Are you… alright?”  The familiar voice drew Ishah out of his thoughts.  He was sitting on the floor of the quarantine structure next to his assigned sleeping spot.  A book in his paws, but not a single word of it read for some time despite his staring at the pages.

And in front of him, having spotted him during her restless exploration of the place they’d be confined for a few days, stood Shallah.  Wrapped up in a light black shirt and pants, the material loose enough that Ishah could see the bandages still on her, it felt a little ironic that she was asking him if he was okay.

But it took Ishah time to reach that thought.  His world felt foggy, and he didn’t know if it was a lingering Underburbs effect, or just not having slept, or something else that was wrong with him.

”Ishah?”  Her voice, painfully achingly familiar, was the only one that ever said his secret name.  The one that wasn’t a word, but a sound.  A quiet hushed noise that meant ‘you’, the kind of hidden name it turned out a lot of ratroaches actually had.  Shallah said his that way, and he said hers, and everyone else just repeated the echoes.  Which wasn’t bad.  It just meant things had changed.  And Ishah had a hard time feeling that change was in any way bad.  “Ishah, can you hear me?”

”I-I’m tired.”  Ishah snapped to attention, though it was sluggishly difficult to do so.  “You should sit!  Y-you are hurt!” At least he couldn’t smell blood on her, so it couldn’t be too bad.

Shallah took the offer, settling onto his cot, the chitin rings on her tails making zip noises as they were pushed across the thick fabric.  “Are you alright though?”  She asked.

”I don’t know.”  Ishah answered slowly, his long tongue feeling too heavy as he spoke.  “It feels like… a blur.”

”Are you…” Shallah paused, before one of her footpaws inched forward to settle over Ishah’s knee in a tiny bit of physical contact and comfort.  “I don’t know how t-to make sure you’re o-okay anymore.”  She admitted.

Ishah almost laughed.  “You weren’t even supposed to be here.”  He accused her, feeling himself nearly detach from his own body.  It was like he was observing the world, and not there, and he didn’t like it.  “Bandages, from Oklahoma.  Recent.”  His words came out with dead inflection.  “You were…”

”I just helped drive.”  Shallah told him.  “I d-didn’t kill-“ she stopped talking with a horrified squeak, one paw clapping into the side of her muzzle.

An icy clarity came crashing down into Ishah’s skull.  “Oh.”  He said slowly, eyes raising from the book in his lap with almost languid slowness.  “Is that what’s wrong with me?”  He asked.

”Something is wrong?!”  Shallah slid off the cot in a bolt of black-clad chitin, her fingers checking over Ishah’s body with ruthless disregard for his personal space.

It didn’t bother him. Too much. They’d ’grown up’’ together, Shallah could poke him as much as she wanted.  Ishah just let himself be examined.  “I feel like my thoughts are floating.”  He said with a sleepy lilt.  “Mercy said… it was an adrenaline crash.  But maybe it’s punishment for killing people.  That’sssss… stupid.”  He tried to turn to look at Shallah closer, his head lolling around limply.

“Stupid?”  She asked, her paws stilling on his back where the bones of his shoulder blades poked through.  “I… yes, stupid!”  She didn’t know what she was agreeing to.

Ishah laughed, the weak chitter growing in volume as he came back to himself for a moment.  “It’s stupid.”  He confirmed to Shallah, closing his eyes and leaning against her.  “I’ve never killed a human before, but it shouldn’t make me feel worse.  They were monsters.  They were torturing people.  If… if they had surrendered, if we’d disabled them… if things were different then things would be different.  But they weren’t.  They weren’t.  And.  And.  And…” His eyes flooded with glowing blue tears.  “They were like her.”  He hissed out, barely hearing himself over the rushing in his ears.

Shallah caught him as he started gasping for air.  Unfamiliar chitin on the most familiar person in the world holding him tightly as Ishah shook in her grip.  And it only hurt a little as it strained her stitches and glue lines.  “You w-will be o-okay.”  She told him, barely believing it herself.

Ishah struggled to gasp out words through the swell of emotion that the actual adrenaline crash was doing an excellent job of amplifying to unhealthy levels.  ”I want to go home.”  He squeaked out before the clicking sob in his chest took away his ability to speak at all.

”I know.”  Shallah said, pulling Ishah down so he was curled up, head laying in her lap, the antenna so short that she’d thought he’d cut them when she’d seen his transformation poking at her belly.  “I know.”  She repeated.

She didn’t really know.  Knew she didn’t understand.  Of the two of them, Ishah had taken on a role that Shallah didn’t think she could follow him into.  And she didn’t know what it would be like, to kill a person.  She didn’t know what it would really feel like, to fight the Underburbs as more than just an ancillary backup driver.  She didn’t know what Ishah needed from her.

But she sat on the floor of the quarantine structure, and whispered reassurances to him until he fell asleep.  And unlike every time they’d done something like this in their origin dungeon, this time, Shallah knew that it would be okay.

And that was going to have to be enough.

____

Morgan was in the Lair’s basement, in the little arcade that had become a lot less secret since he’d first discovered it, when he heard the news.  The latest attempt he was making to get through the ancient and venerable Time Crisis 3 machine’s nightmare difficulty suddenly derailed as he overheard voices passing by outside, the old light gun pausing for just long enough to get him killed.

That wasn’t important.  Neither was Rudy’s protest next to him.  “Hey!  We were almost…” he stopped, freezing in his own semi-self-inflicted guilt, before firming himself up and deciding that being mad at Morgan was what he wanted to do today.  “What the heck are you doing?!”  The teenager demanded.

Morgan blinked as his gaming partner rapidly joined him in the ‘insert coin to continue’ screen.  Technically, they had unlimited continues, but that wasn’t the point of trying to beat the game in one go, so the timer ticked down, the old secrets of arcade FOMO pressuring them to shove more quarters in before it went to the true game over.  “Sorry.”  He carefully replaced the plastic frame of the light gun in its slot, taking a quiet step back.  “I have to check on something.”

Rudy didn’t seem to notice that Morgan wasn’t as focused as he had been a moment before.  And that was pretty common.  Morgan didn’t hate Rudy or anything, but he did kind of need to have a mental shield up before hanging out with the Mormon kid.  Partly because Rudy was Mormon, which Morgan found… insane?  His religion and the people in it had literally brainwashed him to be a crusading child soldier, and Rudy’s main opinion on that was to lash out at the suggestion that maybe he should distance himself from the kind of mindset that had motivated that.  Rudy did the thing that Morgan did hate, but couldn’t figure out how to explain properly, where he’d say that what had happened wasn’t every worshipper, so it didn’t count.

Personally, Morgan thought that was either denial, or another Mindful Reverberation cast scrambling Rudy’s brain.  Or maybe he was just a sixteen year old kid with no context for the world except where he’d been raised, and a few months living in the Lair.  Which he still talked about like a prison.

So when Morgan heard that the Underburbs had been repelled, and the battle was over, he kind of lost his grip on the face that he put forward when he hung out with Rudy.  It wouldn’t have been a big deal if they were in a group, but even though there were a half dozen other people goofing off in the secret basement arcade, it was just the two of them hanging out.  And Morgan’s Judgment stat points were basically just enough for him to realize that the best way to avoid saying something stupid was to step away for a bit.

”Oh.”  Rudy looked at him like a confused puppy.  “Are you coming back?”

Morgan didn’t know, but he didn’t know what to say either.  Oh, wait.  He was allowed to not know things.  “Dunno.  I have to go look at…” casualty lists “…something important.  It might take a while.”

”But are you coming back?”  Rudy pressed, not seeing that Morgan wasn’t okay.

Morgan stopped trying to be a mature adult.  “Nope.  Later.”  He said with a wave and some thin anger, before dodging around the mostly-salamander stuff animal standing on a stepstool playing Bubble Bobble, and getting out of the room that had too many loud noises all of a sudden.

Two turns in the hallways of the basement later, Morgan was out of the way enough that he felt comfortable slumping against a wall, and starting to sort through the Order’s weird version of the internet with his skulljack braid.  It wasn’t hard to find a quiet spot, this basement was kind of emptied out today for the whole reason of the Underburbs being around anyway.  But Morgan had been trying to play video games and not think about that.

But someone had talked about the whole thing being over, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it.  So instead of doing something normal like talking to people, Morgan instead found himself opening up reports that looked like Planner had written them during an especially picky moment.

It took him a second to decode the timestamps.  1640, third group arrived, 1655, hunter teams deployed into Underburbs, ~1700… did that mean approximately?  Morgan looked it up and learned something from the distraction.  ~1700, multiple Underburbs delvers designated ‘predators’ killed.  1730, Underburbs began attack on a second unexpected location.

Morgan retraced the route of the night in cold words and clinical language.  The whole time, he kept waiting to see the words ‘killed in action’, his stomach twisting in on itself as he read about knight deployments and large scale maneuvers of almost the entirety of the Order’s fighting force.

But it never showed.  So he moved on, checked the public announcement about quarantine procedures that were in place for everyone who had been there and some people who hadn’t, and then found a document about casualty numbers.

The number wasn’t small.  And Morgan again wondered who he knew, that he’d have to start saying had known, among the dead.  The list, another cold and unsympathetic record of names, injuries, treatments, and… something missing.

He had to do another quick dictionary search, and found that the word casualty didn’t mean dead.

”…No one?”  Morgan whispered.

”Oh, here you are!”  A voice he knew really well made Morgan flinch as Liz popped up at his elbow seemingly out of nowhere.  “Are you okay?  Color-Of-Dawn said you ran off and couldn’t find you!” His girlfriend asked.

”I’m… I’m fine.”  Morgan said, blushing as Liz’s bright eyes looked up at him.  “Wait, was it in the arcade?  I didn’t even notice!  Ah fuck, I’m…”

”Hey, hey, it’s okay.  Dawners said you were having a hard day.  It understands.”  Liz’s arm patted Morgan on the head, his fluffy hair bouncing back from the impact to its usual form.  “Wanna talk?”  She asked.

Morgan did.  But even with his partners, he never knew how to start.  “Everyone came back.”  He said.  “Uh… from the Underburbs.  No one died.  But I didn’t expect that, so I was… I mean I freaked out, and assumed that… you know.”

”Like last time.” Liz’s voice was quiet understanding.  And Morgan felt bad that he’d worried she wouldn’t get it.  Of course Liz got it.  She knew, she’d been through the same stuff he had.  “I haven’t even looked.”  She continued.  “I thought, if I didn’t look, it wouldn’t… you know.”

”Wouldn’t be real.”  Morgan gave an unhappy grin.  “Yeah.  Well, I looked.  Forty eight casualties, and, now I know that the word casualty doesn’t mean someone died.  Cause no one died.  Everyone came back.”  He took a deep breath.  “And now we have more magic chairs I guess.”

Liz turned, swinging the big poofy half-finished longcoat she was wearing around like a weapon to slap against Morgan’s side before she let her back slam into the concrete wall next to him, arms folded over her chest.  The two of them standing next to each other and staring across a basement hall in silence for a moment, both of them feeling way too young to feel this old.  “You want one of the magic chairs for our room, don’t you?”  Liz asked with a smirk.

”Our room?”  Morgan smirked back, even if both of them were still looking ahead, the exhausted feeling of relief making it seem like too much effort to do anything else.

”I can live in multiple places!”  Liz countered.  “One of those places happens to be wherever you and Dawn are!”

”And the other is California, and… wait don’t you have class today?”  Morgan checked the notes he kept in his brain.  “Are you skipping class?”  He asked, shocked.

Now Liz figured she should take the effort to turn her head and stare at him.  “Mor, it’s college.  I don’t have to go to class.  But if I did go to this class, it would be studio time to get teacher feedback on what I’m working on, and I didn’t have any progress done so I just emailed her to tell her that, and it’s fine.  Also…” Liz stuck the tip of her tongue through her teeth.  “Also I think this professor really knows about the Order?  Or I think she thinks I’m a mage?”

”Do you need us to do something about that?”  Morgan asked, alertness shooting through him at the possibility of a real problem he could really act on.

”No, no!  She’s cool!  She’s too cool!  I… I accidentally showed her a picture of Dawners and now she keeps hinting about snake shirts.”  Liz scuffed a toe on the concrete.  “It’s weird.  Or is it weird?  I don’t know anymore!”

Morgan wrapped an arm around her shoulders.  “You can’t ask me that.  Also I’m sorry your teacher is too cool I guess?  Also I’m not wasting my stipend buying a chair that’s been in the Underburbs for our room.  It’d probably be cursed.”

”Oooh, the Judgement stat at work!”  Liz said as she nestled into him.

”Hey, I could have figured that one out on my own!”  He protested with a small laugh.  And then, before he let himself get too far from the single thing that had been bothering him, he just said what had been sitting in his head since the day had started.  “I should have been there.”

”There?”  Liz asked, before pushing away from him.  “There, the… the dungeon?” Morgan nodded at her.  “Mor, no.”  Her eyes widened and Liz reached out to grab at his arm.  “That’s not what…”

He wasn’t looking at her as he cut her off.  “They all came back.  So I could have been okay.  And I could have helped.  What’s the point if I’m not helping?  I’m not good at anything, I don’t do anything, I just kind of hang out and fuck around all day.  So why…”

”That isn’t even a little true you dumbass.”  Liz glowered in consternation at him.

”…why is everyone so against me going?  Because I have you and Color-Of-Dawn?  Lots of people have partners.  Or kids!  Is it because I’m young?  I’m nineteen!  I’m not… I know I’m a teenager, I get it, but Evans is twenty!  Rajesh is barely older than him!  And they’re both shield team captains!  Why am I a kid and he’s doing combat drops out of a dragon?  Because my life sucked more before showing up here?”

Liz stepped back from her boyfriend’s outburst.  ”Mor… you’re not a superhero.”

”Yet!”  He tried to make it a joke.  “But I just…” he took a deep breath.  “I feel useless.”

A digital voice carried down the hall, the sound matched with the light rustle of a camraconda’s slither.  “That is not how you usually feel when we are in contact.”  Color-Of-Dawn announced its presence.  “Hello.  Locating you is always such a puzzle.  How are you?”

“Okay hang on, I’m two corners from the arcade.  I’m not hard to find.”  Morgan looked down at the hooded camera lens of his partner, seeing who would blink first.  A losing battle, because Color-Of-Dawn was a biomechanical serpent that used ‘blinking’ as a social gesture, and not as a reflexive function.  “Okay I was hiding.”  He sighed.

”Yes, but you cannot hide from me.”  Color-Of-Dawn informed him.  “Or from Elizebeth.  Who outpaced me in the hunt.  Now.  Explain your turmoil.”

”…I want to go fight monsters and save people and no one wants to let me.”  Morgan summed up for the camraconda, wondering why he sounded so petty with that statement.  “Actually I guess I don’t even want to fight monsters, I just kind of want to be the sort of person that saves everyone that needs it?  Or helps somehow?”

Color-Of-Dawn craned its body around where Morgan was gesturing animatedly with his hands, to gaze at Liz for a moment as if to get verification that its boyfriend was actually making that statement.  “We had,” it said slowly, “planned to spend tonight together, because you are leaving for a several day long delve tomorrow.”  The camraconda stated.

”…Nnnnno?”  Morgan did feel a little embarrassment about being so overtly headbutted with that fact, but Color-Of-Dawn wasn’t actually correct.  “No way.  That delve is gonna be cancelled.  There’s too many people in quarantine from the Underburbs.”  Or so Morgan assumed.

”Oh good, you have already verified this.  Well.  Now we can spend tonight and tomorrow together as well.”  Color-Of-Dawn hissed, the smoothly corded form of its face coming to rest against Morgan’s hip as it set itself up in a similar position to the two humans; leaning against the wall like they were in a police lineup.

Morgan bit his lip and said nothing.

”Heyyyyy Mor…” Liz’s voice lilted with unrestrained amusement. “Did you maybe not…”

”I’m checking now everyone shut up.”  Morgan said, going through the notifications and chat logs that sure made it look like the majority of the Officium Mundi exploration team had simply not been present for the dungeon invasion that had almost two hundred knights sitting in prefab isolation rooms over in Yamhill.  “God dammit!”  He slapped a hand onto his face.

Liz poked him playfully.  “Oooh, don’t let Rudy hear that!”

”Rudy hears me swear all the time, I’m conditioning him.”  Morgan muttered.

”That poor child.”  Color-Of-Dawn didn’t elaborate on what that actually meant.  “But I have good news.  Now that Morgan has realized the value of not sending literally every living member of our collective to every disaster that requires us, we have the remainder of tonight to celebrate together, before Morgan must then leave to receive an object lesson in the nature of subdivided labor.”

Bobbing her head as she chewed through those words, Liz clapped her hands together and tipped her head to the side. “That’s true!  When are you gonna sleep?”  She asked Morgan.  “And don’t say ‘on the delve!”

”On the…” Morgan’s face turned into a comically exaggerated grumpy frown as he tried not to let his emotions overflow on his face.

”Shall we perhaps retire to our shared quarters?”  Color-Of-Dawn asked, hissing gently as it wove between the two humans it found itself in love with.

“Sure, you can help Liz with a project.” Morgan said, oblivious to the serpent trying to seduce him.  “I think she’d get extra credit for her class if she designed a snake shirt, and you’d be perfect for that.”

”Mor!”

”Hum, no.”  Color-Of-Dawn shook its head.  “Stealing your coats is the limit of my rejection of nudity.”

Liz took that comment and pried into it as the three of them pushed off the wall, and started heading down the empty basement hallway toward their home.  “Oh!  But just think, if you were dressed, then we could also undress you!”

”…I will concede that your marketing for snake shirts will work on most of my species.”  Color-Of-Dawn admitted.

Morgan nodded, setting a hand on the head of the camraconda slithering next to him.  “Including you.”  He said.

”Including me.”

_____

“And you are unhurt?”  Ink-And-Key’s voice was clearly strained over the phone call he was on with his brother.

”We have discussed this.”  Paper-And-Words replied.  It was, it would admit, tired.  And that exhaustion was perhaps making it a little meaner than normal.  The left side of its body was also more sore than it had ever felt in its life; the recoil from the assault rifle it had been using with one of the customized armature packs having hammered a bruise into at least a third of its settlement.  “I have told you, repeatedly, that I am not injured.”

Ink-And-Key paused only for a moment.  ”You could have been injured and infected somewhere you did not notice?  No, I am sorry, that is not likely.  I apologize.  I am ignoring you incorrectly.  And also apologizing too much.”

Well.  He had learned that at least.  Paper-And-Words rolled slightly on the cot he was on in the quarantine barracks, hissing a sigh at the sensation of the rough material against its cords.  It wasn’t a comfortable cot, and also Paper-And-Words wasn’t alone here either, which further added to the tense feeling that combined with its muddled thoughts.  But at least it could talk to its brother through the skulljack, since they’d confirmed at least everyone here didn’t have anything that could ruin that particular upgrade.

“I assure you, I have been checked for all manner of Underburbs attack.”  Paper-And-Words hadn’t liked the process either.  “Our procedures this time were stronger.  Almost none of my new skill points come from survivor triggers.”

”But some do.”  Ink-And-Key pointed out over their call.

His brother closed his lens as he completed his roll to the side, so he wasn’t staring at the human or human-shaped-entity one cot over that had taken the same approach to struggling to get comfortable.  “Six of them do, yes.  Out of one hundred and six.  Less than one percent.  You do not need to worry.”

”The ratio was not my concern!”  Ink-And-Key’s voice rose.  He was speaking normally into a microphone, and not simply transmitting via skulljack, so Paper-And-Words got to hear more subconscious infliction from its brother.  “It is no longer surprising you are in quarantine!  Or, no, that is not nice to say.  You are there as a precaution.  I should not assume.”

”A precaution because something tried to melt my lungs, yes.”  Paper-And-Words agreed, knowing damn well that doing so would needle Ink-And-Key.  “Now, how has your less objective-oriented day been?  I ask this, so that you will stop fussing at me.  I find it challenging to emotionally manage at the moment.”

The long pause from Ink-And-Key worried Paper-And-Words as it stretched on, until its brother spoke up like there had been no lag at all.  “I will allow this.”  Ink-And-Key decided, not apologizing for a change, which was nice.  “Our day has been challenging.  One of our supposed orphan rescues has decided to betray us.  Again.”

”Again.”  Paper-And-Words tried to put the kind of question into the word that it knew was possible, though both its own lack of social prowess, and the skulljack medium, made it tricky.

”Well we cannot simply not take in the escaped child soldiers of the religious splinter state.”  Ink-And-Key sounded sarcastic.  What was happening to its brother down in Utah, Paper-And-Words wanted to know.  “And it is inevitable.  Some of them are sent, not stumbling in.  And Alex thinks it is funny to make it my job to manage that.”

”Alex is correct.”  Paper-And-Words agreed, hissing a laugh in the physical space, and hearing the next cot over shift slightly at the noise.  It didn’t open its lens; even the dim and soothing lights that blanketed the barn-sized structure while the majority of quarantined knights rested were too much right now.  “That is very funny.”

”It is not funny it is insane.  I am supposed to chase them!  And I can barely fit in a car!  Operating motor vehicles like this should be entirely beyond me and Alex does not care!  She is a cruel and unrepentant taskmaster!”  There was a brief silence, and Paper-And-Words waited for the followup recrimination from its brother.  “No, that is it.”  Ink-And-Key said eventually.  “Also please wait for several seconds while I navigate a parking lot.”

”I am sorry, you are driving now?”  Paper-And-Words asked, its body folding forward as it sat ‘upright’ in the cot in surprise, lens snapping open.

”Attempting to!  The distraction is an added challenge.”

”Driving while on the phone is unsafe.”

Ink-And-Key answered with actual dismissiveness. ”I am cognitively enhanced to be capable of carrying on a conversation in parallel with other activities.”  He said, and then after a sound of something coming through the phone line that seemed to be an expensive human object breaking, added.  “And I wish to remind you that I have no feet, and operating a human vehicle I do not fit inside without the use of multiple tiers of seating is also unsafe!”

Paper-And-Words pulled its tail up in a resting loop, settling into a position on the cot where it could sag forward.  ”You have changed, I think.”  It said with all the softness the skulljack allowed.

“I wish to change into someone who can operate a motor vehicle.”

”We have shaper substance, that is an option.”

Ink-And-Key have a hiss that he interrupted with some kind of shrill yelp of alarm, before the rueful hissing returned.  “It is not so easy.”  He told his brother.  “Legs require a skeletal structure that our bodies do not support.  The amount of change that it would take for one of our kind to gain legs would be massive and has a high likelihood of failure, possibly lethal, and possibly simply with long term consequences.”

”Life is a long term consequence.”  Paper-And-Words replied idly, lens irising in small flicks of motion as it sleepily watched people who weren’t sleeping mill around the quarantine site, some of them gathering in one of the public corners.  Maybe there was food there.  It kind of wanted food.  “The table then.”

”I believe it would be easier to modify a car for me, than me for a car.”  Ink-And-Key replied.  “Is this presumptuous?  Or selfish?  Oh no, am I overstepping what the universe will allow of me?”

Ah.  So not changed too much.  Paper-And-Words smiled to itself at the righting of the cosmic order of things.  “You could swap to a body with arms.”

”If I am patient someone will build me arms that work for me.”  Ink-And-Key sounded like he had a lot faith in that.  “And that way no one needs to be in this body.”

”I refuse to argue with you over something you know you are foolish about.”

Ink-And-Key had the gall to not sound even a little bothered.  “I do not know what you mean.”  He insisted deceptively.

Overall, Paper-And-Words didn’t have a lot of particular admiration for the form of human bodies.  While it had been getting more and more comfortable with many particular humans, it still found that it thought of the camraconda body as its own default, and had no real desire to change, even if it could easily understand why someone else would want to, in either direction.  However.  If there was one thing that it did desire, one trait that it wished camracondas had without needing to go through magical alteration to get it, it would be the human ability to roll one’s eyes.

Or eye, in its case.  But the point stood.

”All of this is I assume your way of telling me that your time in Utah is going smoothly?”  It asked Ink-And-Key, only half joking.

Its brother took another one of those long pauses before replying.  “Well.”  The other camraconda said.  “The Underburbs might have been safer.”

”What.” Paper-And-Words stopped looking at where someone was moving down the wide aisle at the foot of the row of sleeping spaces it had been assigned, a ratroach in medical scrubs pushing a cart and checking in on people.  The movement from the person next to it made it think it might have said that word out loud, too, so it focused harder on the skulljack connection.  “Explain yourself.”

”There is a large amount of clandestine violence occurring here.  We suspect there is a cadre of ratlings that have been sabotaging vehicles in destructive ways.  There are various human people shooting each other, and us, over perceived differences in belief.  Oh, and I am continually made to drive.  All threats to my health.”

”Stop driving.”

”Oh I cannot do that now, it would cause problems for everyone on the road around me.”

”Stop driving safely.”  Paper-And-Words reiterated.

”I assure you I am not driving safely.”

Its brother was doing this on purpose, Paper-And-Words just knew it.  ”Upon next seeing you I am going to…” it switched to speaking out loud as the ratroach approached it, quietly refreshing the large canister of water Paper-And-Words had by its cot and equally quietly offering a snack.  “Oh, thank you.  Cereal, please.”  It said, getting a smooth nod from the sleekly asymmetrically multilimbed medic.

”Cereal?”  Ink-And-Key asked from the call.

Paper-And-Words continued replying out loud, feeling somehow like it would be rude to have the conversation in its head.  “I am speaking to someone less threatening behind the wheel than you.  While you are a threat to yourself and others, Rivers is nothing but helpful to those of us in quarantine.  Look, I have obtained cereal.”

”I will not look while driving, that is unsafe.”  Ink-And-Key’s voice suddenly spiked in pitch.  “Also would you please tell Rivers I said hello?  I would appreciate that!  Or do not tell him if it would be inappropriate.  Or tell him I am… no, that would be rude.  Yes.  Hello.  Tell him hello?”

”…Yes?”  Paper-And-Words shifted itself, body slinging around to face the ratroach before he left.  “My brother says hello.  I do not know why, but he is being strange.  Is there yet another threat I will need to learn about?”

Rivers paused, and then their butterfly arrangement of eyes widened into soft ovals.  “Oh!”  He chittered a quiet laugh.  “Tell him I said hello back!  And I look forward to seeing him when he returns, and quarantine is over!”

”Yes he can likely hear you.”  Paper-And-Words said, lens narrowing in suspicion.  “This has the feel of interpersonal mystery.”

”Oh, good, you do not like those.”  Ink-And-Key reminded it.

”I am trapped in quarantine for three days.  I have ample time to develop an appreciation for a new hobby.”  It threatened its brother.

Ink-And-Key made a small squeak of panic, followed by a thin excuse.  “I apologize!  I must go!  My prey has driven into a building and I believe I am supposed to be preventing that!”

He hung up on Paper-And-Words.  Which was, if he wasn’t kidding, understandable.  But also Paper-And-Words was now nothing but suspicious, and also Rivers had moved on to the next cots where a few people were sitting together and quietly chatting.

This was going to be a long three days.

But it wasn’t dead.  And also, Paper-And-Words had ample time now to figure out what it was going to do with its skill points when it got out.

And if it closed its lens and slept for a very, very long time, then maybe between those two activities it could stave off boredom for a solid twenty percent of the time it was stuck in this prefab structure in the middle of nowhere.

_____

“Strange.”  Rise spoke and added amused confusion on top.  Light on the confusion, moderate on the amused.  He was not bothered, but he was experiencing something new and did not know how he felt about it, which was why he was communicating confusion even if he did not need an answer specifically.  “Lonely.  Empty!”  The chanter spoke while also adding low-chant of being small amid something quiet.

“Emp-ty…” the young human girl sitting on the desk nearby whispered, kicking her legs and trying to mimic the low-chant with the same inexpert fumbling that the newborn chanters did.

The girl’s informorph companion swirled around her body in a pale manifestation as she did so.  “You’re doing it wrong!”  Hidden told Ava.  “You can’t say things you don’t feel!”

”Then how am I supposed to practice?!”  Ava demanded back, correctly expressing deeply familiar irritation.

Rise folded his small arms together, thick grey skinned fingers of his hands interweaving to cover his mouth and hide his smile from where his face extended from under his shell, even if his chant echoed more amusement.  It was a way of being that he was beginning to truly love; so many different ways of expressing.  So many different kinds of semi-chant.  The spoken, the physical, and of course the one the chanters themselves had begun working from.  He didn’t have to hide a smile, his face didn’t have the same reflexive motions a human did.  But he did it anyway, because it was a fun combination of ways to say something.

He was amused, but made an effort to conceal the slide into that amusement from the girl who might take it personally, thus expressing a consideration for her, while at the same time still keeping the amusement.  Cognizance and compassion.  Words he had learned lately, as his vocabulary had grown in leaps and bounds.

“Place does feel hella weird with no one in it.”  Azalea said, staring up at the overhead metal ventilation tubes, her hair a halo of curls that framed her slim face.  “You think there’s any ghosts in here?”

She spoke without a chant, most of the time.  But Rise didn’t mind, he’d been learning quickly, and spoken language wasn’t actually complex, it was just… emotionally challenging.

”Ghosts aren’t real!”  Hidden tried to say before ducking back into Ava’s clothing.  The spectral infomorph reasserting her shyness as Azalea turned to look at her with an arched eyebrow.

”I’m not writing anything off.”  Azalea said with the quiet dull voice she used sometimes when she was hiding pain she wasn’t sure she was allowed to talk about.

Rise looked up at her through tall oval eyes, and flexed his legs to bob in an understanding full-body nod.  It was a motion he liked making.  It felt like it was only yesterday that his body could barely manage to walk at all, but a steady life of real food and fresh air, followed later by applied training and exercise potion, had brought him to a point when he wasn’t just capable, but athletic.

Now that was a good vocabulary word.  It meant being in possession of a body that could do a lot of things, and a mind that could imagine those things well enough to dare to try them.  Rise wasn’t sure that was actually what he was, yet, as he often failed at the daring part.  But he was getting better at running, climbing, and even fighting in the ways that were being designed for his form.

Fighting was strange.  He didn’t like it.  It felt too much like what he had been… what he was forced to… what…

Fighting was strange.  Rise tried to avoid it.  But Cam’s point that knowing how to defend oneself and others was a useful skill was correct.  Though he didn’t often fully flow with the low-chant of the others in the training classes.  Pia was more clearly devoted to the act than he was.  And to Cam.  Miette, too, was someone who loved the physicality of the motions.  And Bulwark had taken the idea of protection to a deeper form of heart.  Rise wasn’t like them, he was just there to acquire another tool.

Tools were the Order’s real gift to his people.

”I hope we meet ghosts one day.”  Misha whispered from where the ratroach had arrived at some point and settled himself into a chair with his folded legs perched up under his body.  His voice got a startled scream from Ava, though the ratroach didn’t react as the human fell off the desk she was sitting on, taking her sister with her.  “Ghosts would be reassuring.”  Misha explained to the flattened body of the small human now lying face down on the floor.

“Oh yeah?”  The human woman asked, unbothered by their teammate arriving as if from nowhere.

Misha nodded slowly, the longer beard of pale fur around the bottom of their muzzle where their shaper surgery had slightly slipped as they tried to cover their chitin more swaying gently.  “We wouldn’t ever be alone.”  He told Azalea.  “And… are ghosts people who don’t die?  That sounds nice.  To stay, and be in quiet places.”  He turned his gaze around the room, as if looking for those hidden lingering.  “Reassuring.”  He sighed.

”I can see it.”  Azalea said with a shrug.  “I’d rather not be dead tho.  Rise, you got any ghost opinions?”

The chanter tried to think about it, and found his forearms dropping, the grey skin and thick fingers of his limbs pointing down at the floor as he felt his inner self grind to a halt.

What would it be like, Rise wondered, to be followed around by all the ones who had died before this?  All those hundreds of eyes only barely older than him watching as he moved through the world, just out of reach.  Would they touch the chant?  Would he hear them?  Would they be angry?

Rise didn’t think he liked the idea of ghosts.

He answered back to Azalea with a woven burst of guilt and fear, unable to think of what combination of words could possibly contain the thought.

While Misha and Ava shifted, their faces twisting as Rise’s low chant washed over them and they felt what he felt as it changed what they felt, Azalea didn’t react quite the same way.  Instead, she just nodded, her lips puffed out as she sighed and brought one of her hands up to push into her cheek, settling in with a sad expression.  “Yeah man.  I can barely live up to myself, how the f-…” her eyes flicked to Ava, laying on the floor, “…how the heck would I live up to my brother haunting my ass, right?”

Rise’s eyes glittered as he felt himself relax under the weight of his plated shell.  Maybe there were words that could encompass it.  “Yes.”  He replied along with gratitude and regret.  “Ghost would be…” he packaged up the thought as its own ball of turmoil.  The imagined jealousy and irritation and rueful anger, and added it as an addendum.  Emotional punctuation to his spoken words.

The younger human struggled off the floor, eyes dripping slightly, and pointed at Rise challengingly, the translucent form of her sister coiling down her arm in a river of eyes and fins.  “Would you be mad at your friends if you were a ghost?”  Ava demanded, her oh-so-quiet voice in the new chant pushing back against Rise’s own.  Weaker even than the newborns, less practiced than the other non-chanters that were trying to learn and change themselves to have these kind of conversations, but still real.  The pure, determined feeling that wasn’t specifically reassuring or kind or anything as nebulous as that, but more just the direct assuredness that Rise was wrong.

It cracked through his own inner thoughts rather effectively.  Chanters didn’t really laugh the same way that anyone else did, but he flooded the local space with his laughter anyway, the sudden juxtaposed humor washing away the other weaker voices in the chant.

That was one of the strangest things about being the only one of his people in a given place sometimes.  Around the others, it was a constant ebb and flow, push and pull, of feeling and communication.  Not a contest, but a shared sandbox they played in.  When he was the lone chanter, though, it was kind of like Rise was the only person with a computer while the whole group was trying to read things on the internet.  An overwhelming dominance of the local area.

Azalea was the best at shrugging through it, but even she gave a snort as Misha and Ava broke down in their own forms of giggles.  “Alright, enough messing around.”  The human woman said.  “Are we ready for tomorrow?”

”No!”  Misha said happily.

”Unsure.”  Rise said himself, amusement tempered but shifting to very faint caution as he pulled himself back to his more neutral voice for their benefit.  “Okay?”  The question could have meant any number of things, but in this case, context and chant made it clear what he was asking.

”Yeah, yeah.”  Azalea looked around the almost dead-empty briefing warehouse.  “I mean, nothing’s different, right?”  She asked with a shrug, doing that human thing of not actually asking the question even though it had the verbal punctuation of it.  “It’s the same - I mean the same - lineup.  No one coming with us got hurt or sick or even saw the… the…” she struggled with the word ‘Underburbs’, partly just because it felt a little silly to someone not used to it, but also mostly because it was a horrifying concept of a thing.

”It doesn’t feel different to me.”  Misha whispered, one of the ratroach’s paws slowly curling slender clawed fingers through his fur.  “Dangerous and exciting.  Ooh.  Rise, can you say that?”

Rise considered.  Sometimes the ratroach would ask him for this kind of request, and it was, in a way, a very strange challenge.  Hidden was right when she told Ava that you weren’t really supposed to chant things you didn’t feel.  But he had a lifetime - a short and brutal lifetime - of experience in feeling what he made himself feel.  Usually that was nothing, but Misha… Misha pushed him in ways Rise found fascinating.

So he reflected inward.  Pulled apart specific thoughts about tomorrow.  The companionship of meeting up with all those friends and potential friends of their delve team, the thrill of stepping across a threshold, the hypothetical curiosity of meeting yet further new people that weren’t shaped like he was.  The rush of exploration and the panic of battle.  And the sensation of sharing stories after, too, the feeling that he formed and chanted for his own people afterward; the complex mix of ephemeral thoughts that was what was driving dozens of chanters to push themselves to becomes delvers too…

Rise chanted out without speaking this time, and Misha nodded with a happy whine of satisfaction.  “Good!”  The ratroach sighed.

“Okay that’s cool, but you guys are ready, right?”  Azalea pushed through the reinforced sensation to try to get them through their pre-delve check-in.  “Also is this you two flirting?  Stop flirting, there’s a kid here.”

”Gone.”  Rise pointed out where Ava had coerced her sister into helping her vanish at some point, mixing amusement with that experience of saying something that was true and letting it land harder with the simplicity of it.  He liked that sensation.

”Am I the only one here who can’t teleport?”  Azalea asked.

Misha gave her a crooked blink.  “You can’t?”  He asked with open worry.  “We need to prepare you for tomorrow!  That is not safe!  I can go get you the right wizard book!”  He twisted so he was perched over the back of his seat, the long fluffy whip of his tail draping down to the floor through the skirt he was wearing as his claws dug into the chair’s seat.

”No, Misha wait-!” Azalea got out before the ratroach jerked forward and vanished, appearing somewhere about thirty feet away before taking another bounding step to the door of the briefing warehouse and then really disappearing from view.  “Maaaaaan….”

Rise moved closer to her, the sharp porcelain texture of his legs tapping against the hard floor of the warehouse even through the padded leg wraps that he had on.  Approaching the human who didn’t flinch away or lash out at all, he used one of his softer limbs to pat her on the knee with a splayed trio of thick fingers.  ”Helping.”  He told her with reassurance and minute satisfaction.  “Am ready.”

”You’re always ready, you’re the steadiest guy on this team.”  The woman looked at him with eyes that held emotions Rise couldn’t understand yet.  “Sorry about the ghost thing.”  She muttered.

”Accepted.”  Rise shrugged, one of his forelegs crossing over his body to slide its edge against its opposite companion.  The normal rasp of his shell covered up this time by the soft leggings.  “You?”  He chanted questioning curiosity at her but with the promise that escape existed.

Azalea shrugged.  “My brother.”  She said.  Rise knew, they’d talked before.  Their whole team knew so many things about each other, it was like a whole dungeon of information all on its own just between their larger collective.  “I guess I’m thinkin’ about Ava’s thing, right?  It’s cliche, but it’s stupid how true it is.  If I were haunting him I wouldn’t be pissed off, I’d love this shit.  God, I’d be rooting for him so much if I were just floating around in the Lair watching him be his dumbass self.  How could anyone be mad about that?”

”Cruelty?”  Rise suggested, his low chant carrying the threads of memories of where he’d been born and raised for slaughter.

”Yeah, sure, I guess.”  Azalea’s shoulder sagged.  “Look, don’t feel guilty that you’re alive, okay?  You don’t deserve that.”  She let out a long breath before Rise could reply, and then looked around for anyone else that was supposed to be doing the pre-delve check.  But it was literally just the two of them, sitting here in the empty hull of the briefing warehouse.  The fans overhead had more of a voice than they did at the moment.

It wasn’t like everyone else was slacking.  They’d done their gear checks, come through to mark down that they were absolutely committed, a few people had even stuck around to chat about how weird it felt to do this right after the Underburbs knocked out the majority of people who might come rescue them if they fucked up.  But, not to tempt fate or anything, Azalea didn’t think that they’d need the help anyway.  They’d done this a few times.

Just a quick poke into the Office, for a week.  The almost chore of harvesting magic coffee paired with mapping new routes and old areas that had shifted around, pushing a little farther, seeing some weird sights, rolling the dice a few hundred times on an orb that changed it all.  Normal delver stuff.  She got why James had tried to sell her on it, way back when he’d rescued her ass along with Rise’s.

It just felt like there should be something more.

”Hey, you wanna see if we can convince them to give us a bunch of the Underburbs crystals?”  She asked Rise suddenly.

”No?”  The chanter shot back abrupt befuddlement.  “Why?”

”I dunno, just thinking.  Could be neat.  And besides, have you seen what those guys were doing?  Maybe it’d be… some kind of consolation, to whatever ghosts there are, if we took all that dead magic and used it to do something cool.”

Rise had, in fact, heard a few things about the monsters that prowled for the Underburbs.  But he’d also heard the other side of the argument, around the Order, and he hadn’t made a decision himself as to what he thought was right, or even if it was possible for anything to be right in a situation this sorrowful.  “Using, accepting, not okay?”  He paired his voice with the anger he felt at the people who would cause so much pain, but also the roiling fear that his anger was wrong.  Or that it could make him something he didn’t want to be.

”Nah, fuck ‘em.”  Azalea answered as she went through the pile of equipment in her part of the table for the eight time, as if somehow she might have lost one of her potions or something.  “Look, you know why I think it’s okay?”

Rise didn’t, but he was willing to guess.  “Dungeon?”  He inquired curiously.

”Nah.  I respect the dungeon.”  Azalea told him firmly.  “These guys, they’re like… they’re like…” her voice caught, dipping as she had to take a breath and force herself to keep going.  “The people that made all our ghosts, right?  But you know what?  When the Order stole all the magic from those… from them, they didn’t just sit on it.”

That thought was complex, and with his teammate not speaking in the chant herself, it took Rise a substantial amount of time to understand what it was she was using as her context.  What little details her words referenced, that he had to guess at instead of simply feeling and knowing at least the intent.  But when he thought he understood, he pitched backward on his sharpened legs so that his body was angled up at her, eyes glittering as he made the connection.  “Us.”  He voiced, recognition and the enfolding powerful embrace of community wrapping around the whole room and probably a portion of the rest of the Lair too.  At least part of one basement.

”You got it man.”  She nodded.

”Incorrect.”  He waggled one of his grey fingers at her in chastisement.  “Not dead.”

”Well yeah, but you get what I mean.”

”Incorrect!”  He laced the word with laughter.

Azalea pouted at him, her dramatic reveal broken apart.  “Come on, work with me here!  There’s so many potential options!  I think we can convince them to give us at least the knife throwing power!  Don’t you wanna throw knives?”

”Dangerous!”  Rise gave her an affronted gasp, tips of his forelegs sliding against the floor as one hand pressed against the front of his body where it was exposed under his shell.

“Teaching you situational humor was a mistake.”  Azalea said, though even Rise could tell she didn’t mean it.  “Do you think we’ll get anything out of the Underburbs?  Or is this just gonna be another one of those things where we find out a handful of people got maimed and no one even knows the Order saved the world again?”

Rise’s eyes brightened, and he twisted his neck slightly to reach into the pouch on his middle leg, unclasping and rustling fingers through the package before pulling out a small plastic capsule and holding it up to Azalea with his low chant broadcasting overwhelming satisfaction.

”That’s not an Underburbs thing.”  She said, which Rise felt was obvious.

”Potion!”  He told her, rolling the thick sealed container in his fingers.  “Watch.”  He instructed careful observation, compelling attention, and then cast one of his stored charges of Jester’s Sip.

The potion inside the capsule vanished, Rise not even really feeling much of the process of the drinking, but absolutely feeling the refreshing effects of an exercise potion that started to go to work on the parts of his body that needed it.  The little plastic capsule, suddenly full of a vacuum, crunched inward with a pop, and Rise gently replaced it back in a different pouch to later be added to the pile of waste plastic slated for conversion.

”…Alright, yeah, that’s cool.”  Azalea admitted.  “Where’d you get that?  Do we have more?”

Rise nodded, and turned to leave the warehouse in complete silent stillness, motion his human companion to follow.

The Underburbs could take away the noise, and the company.  But it couldn’t really stop them anymore.  And, Rise felt, it was satisfying to take the tools they used to fight it and just keep using them, no innovation or idea truly wasted.

He wasn’t really sure if he would ever be one of the people who fought the Underburbs.  Not like the others.  But he couldn’t help but to feel the ripples of it.  Some far-away behemoth that scattered pieces of life around in strange ways.  Many of them quite bad!

Many, but not all.

And not enough to actually stop tomorrow’s exploration.  Which, even if Misha hadn’t asked for a commissioned emotion, Rise really was looking forward to.

_____

After the storm, a calm.  And for those for whom the shelter had held, it was a calm that appeared only as a shadow.  An extension of an existing peace.  Though for those who were the shelter, it was a little less tranquil.

“I’ve decided I hate quarantine.”

Alanna, already tired, already on edge, and already irate, dropped the hand of cards she was holding onto the cot that sat between herself and Arrush.  “Buddy it has been a day.”  She told James.

“Yeah, and I don’t like it.”  James said, staring up at the ceiling of the prefab structure from his own cot.  One of the perks of being held captive by your own medical team alongside half your polycule was that you could, at least, shove a bunch of cots together and pretend you were sleeping together.  “I’m missing stuff.”

”I-if we knock him out…” Arrush started to suggest.

”No brain damage, he clearly has enough problems already.”  Anesh interrupted.

James didn’t listen to their plots.  “I could be on a delve.”  He moaned.  “I could be doing magic.  I could be helping any of the other paladins.  Who, I’d like to remind everyone, don’t have to be here because of us!”

”I’m sure they appreciate your sacrifice.” An Anesh that wasn’t playing the same game as Arrush and Alanna leaned over and patted James on the leg.

”I could be sleeping, I could-“

”You could be sleeping.”  Alanna said.  “Zhu is sleeping, and Zhu isn’t annoying me!  Also, come on.  You already know why we’re here.  Like, when was your last survivor point?”

The fact that James took a while to answer kind of proved the point to her, but Alanna still stared at him until he admitted it.  “Shortly before I started talking.”  He said, sinking into his cot as deep as he could.

”Everything will be okay.”  Arrush assured him confidently.  “Everyone will take care of things.”

It was nice, James thought, that Arrush had so much faith in them all.  And by ‘them all’ he meant all of them outside of the medically secure facilities the Order had put up to keep them from spreading any Underburbs plagues to the rest of their friends.

And James really did get it.  The Order could manage without him.  He just kind of wanted to do all that magic and delving himself, and not have to worry about the next mass casualty event or whatever.

A nudge from Anesh got him to look up at his boyfriend’s smiling face.  ”Hey, look on the bright side.”  He said.

”You get to technically be out of here already?”  James asked with a smile.

”No!  Well, yes.  That is quite nice.  But no, I was going to say,” Anesh grinned down at him, “at least Deb was nice enough to not put us in quarantine in the same building as Terror.”

James thought about it.  Considered a rebuttal about how he could at least get some spell progress by arguing with the surly umbral.  And then realized Anesh was probably correct.

He’d just gotten out of a life or death situation.  For the next few days, he didn’t need to be living with another one.