The Daily Grind - Chapter 401 (Patreon)

“This region has the highest rate of utopias in the country.  Isn’t that fascinating to you?” -The Inquisitor, Pathologic-

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“I don’t like the cars.”  Reed said as she stared at the tablet in her paws.  Technically all the information was available via skulljack, but she found that she tended to lose focus when using the brain computer interface for actual reference work.  So she ended up with the comparatively mundane tablet, scrolling through reports and lists with the pads of her paws and learning how to avoid clacking into things with her new claws.

”That’s… a bold stance to take.”  Davis said with the kind of disapproval that you could only really get after sixty years of experience in being disappointed with reality.  “Are they not perfect enough for you, your highness?”

”First off, I can’t be royalty, I’m a socialist.”  Reed pointed out.

”Also a bold stance to take but I suppose I don’t have room to talk here.”  Davis admitted.  “I shouldn’t have started taking the Order’s basic income.  I’m undermining my own political beliefs.”

Reed didn’t look up, just smoothly deflecting the much older human’s words.  “Your political beliefs fell apart two minutes after you got a skill orb.”  She said, using the trick she’d learned from Chevoy of just talking fast so that her opponent couldn’t focus on the mild insult.  “Now, second of all, they aren’t perfect!  I don’t like it!”

Davis let out a long breath.  He wasn’t going to get through reading his morning paper in peace without a strong diversionary tactic.  Looking around the Lair’s lounge situated on the Research floor where he had been accosted, he was dismayed to find that there were precious few people present at all.  Bea was here, but Bea was a bad distraction at the best of times.  Fredrick and Rufus were currently accosting the snack bar, which was cute but not helpful.  And there was a slowly walking metal frame of some kind of hexaped drone that Davis knew was going to get stepped on by accident at some point, probably in a way that would be lethal to him, but right now that was secondary to the fact that Second was way too sharply astute to be used as a conversation shield.

”Where the hell is Chevoy?  Go bother Chevoy with this.”  He told Reed bluntly, flipping to the sports section and looking for information on the playoffs.  They could change his political beliefs all they wanted, they weren’t taking football away from him.  Or newspapers.  Though apparently Sarah was working miracles of her own in convincing people to go the other direction on hard copy news media.  So maybe Davis could add a new subscription to his morning ritual soon, even if he didn’t live in Townton.

”Chevoy’s in quarantine.  Am I allowed to complain or not?”  Reed asked.

Davis tipped his head up to look at the creeping green vines weaving across the ceiling of the lounge, Tyranadonny hard at work growing to be large enough to maybe eat all of them at once one day.  “Is there anyone not in quarantine that you could maybe complain to instead?”  Davis asked nicely.

”Not… really?”

”It’s gotta be me, huh?”  Davis asked rhetorically.  “Vad’s in the building somewhere.  You could go talk to him.”

”Vadik is a great guy.”  Reed said diplomatically.  Which was her way of explaining that she always felt like her conversations with Vadik were the two of them talking past each other and it was really uncomfortable and he was just way too normal.  Also he wasn’t going to care about the magical Pylon cars or Reed’s opinions on it.

Davis knew what that voice meant.  Reed thought it was ‘diplomatic’, but Davis was an old hand at watching kids who were still figuring out how to do their jobs lie about social friction.  He mentally checked his schedule for the day, and decided he had ample time to check out the cars that Reed was so busy whinging about.  “Alright, let’s go look over the cars.”  He told the… whatever Reed was.

Davis found himself fitting into the Order mentally a lot easier than he would have expected.  The cavalier attitudes toward things like gender or species stopped bothering him after about a week because James was annoyingly correct that taking away people’s problems made them more willing to believe you.  And Davis had so many purple orbs for ligament flexibility, joint strength, muscle functionality, organ durability, and even a few that might give him years of extra life, that he often felt like they’d even taken away the problem of being an achy old man all the time.

So if someone wanted to be a girl, then he’d nod and support them, because that was all part of the group attitude that made them respect him, too.  Reed being a lady wasn’t the problem.  What he needed was for her to figure out if she was human or not, because Davis was getting a little tired of looping this same self-analytical conversation in his head every time he tried to reference Reed’s species.

Davis didn’t really go through the whole loop.  Especially not as he walked with Reed toward the storage room they were keeping their stolen cars in.

Actually that was the thing that got him.  Trans-anything made sense.  Storing cars in a basement broke his brain.

”You know, I know that we can teleport things.”  Davis explained as Reed’s tails swayed ahead of him in on the smooth floor of the basement hallway, the two of them passing by a thinner number of people than normal.  Research was usually made up of noncombatants, but so many of them helped with medical or search and rescue stuff in some way, that the Underburbs had drained a lot of their numbers and really driven home a problem they had with low bus factors.  “And I know we have space down here.  I know a lot of things, Reed.  Except for one.”

”I don’t know why you need to see the cars for me to complain about the cars.”  Reed retaliated.

”Exercise builds character.”  Davis wasn’t above a retaliatory lie of his own.

Reed groaned at the words.  “We put the cars here because do you want to leave them out in a parking lot?”

”I refuse to believe that you don’t know that storage units exist.”

”I mostly only know about storage units from that one show about auctions, and also as a place where arms dealers hang out.”  Reed replied as she led the way into the storage room.

Davis shook his head.  “You watch too much TV.”

”It was one show!”

”The arms dealer thing.”

Reed paused, and looked back up at the older human.  Adjusting to being short was always a treat.  “Nnnno.  No that was… that was where we got the DMRs.  The big chunky rifles?  Neil made me go with him for moral support back when… I was different and he was…”  Alive.  A word that didn’t get said, but filled was in anyway, etching itself out the silence that hung heavy in the concrete cube of a room.  “Anyway.”

The room had arrived to the Lair courtesy of a green orb that wasn’t a new plus-one-basement orb.  Instead, it was literally an orb that added one stockroom, and it just happened to put it in their basement.  When it had shown up it had been equipped with shelving units up to the ceiling, metal brackets and dusty particle board empty of any actual stock, just waiting for use.  And as with many green orbs, it was the personal touches that made it feel strangest.  Because the shelves weren’t very well put together; the angles were off, half of them wobbled, and at least one had been drilled through in a way that split a shelf to the point that it was never going to hold any weight.  Was it Officium Mundi messing with them?  An offset for how big the room was?  Or just the nature of the place it was mirroring?  No one knew, and it acted as a reminder that even the most stable magic was a little wild sometimes.

At least until they’d stripped out the shelves.

Now there were just cars here.  Well, things that looked like cars.  A pickup truck, two four-door sedans, and one smooth bubble of a car that looked like someone had taken modern design sensibilities to the end of that extreme where the vehicle kind of looked like a living bug and not a vehicle.  Reed immediately pointed at the truck.  “That one.”  She announced, her claw flicked out like a weapon.  “That one annoys me!”

”Reed, I’m willing to look over the test results, and help you rubber duck this.”  Davis said pointedly.  “But I’m not going to let you point at the solution to all our problems and tell me that it’s annoying you.”

”And yet it’s happening.”  Reed said, though she did lower her claw and went over to the rolling cart that was sitting next to the immobile pickup.  “Okay, okay.  It’s not evil.  But come on, look at our test log!”  She handed a three ring binder to Davis, the thing full of copies of the form they were using, and then also the second generation of that form after they’d learned a few things they also wanted to track.

Davis shrugged and started flipping through the reports.  He’d seen talk about this before, so they weren’t a particular surprise, but he figured he’d humor Reed.  It was actually strange that there wasn’t anyone in here, since ideally they’d have these things running as often as possible, but Davis supposed they were short on manpower.

The reports were basically what he’d expected for a truck that printed off cheat-sheets on anything fed into it.  Zhu and James had found this absolute gem of a device, and Research had promptly gone hog wild shoving every single different kind of magic that they could into the thing.  Orbs, spellbooks, crystals, dungeontech, salvage from all sorts of places, anything.  Ripping information out of thin air and printing it out in neat if sometimes cryptic black and white.

Davis paused on a test page that was for a purple orb.  The FAQ had printed out exactly what it gave, even before it had been tested, listing it as giving an extra twelve percent to the operational time for mucus.  Probably something that broke medicine, he assumed.  Then it went on to talk about where it was located, the name of the decision tree it was traded for with - Cyntaphani, and apparently they had names - where the closest similar orb could be located - eighteen kilometers away at two hundred and sixty degrees, which meant it had adopted their tracking for direction in a place with no north - and then added a bullet point section of potential alternate uses for the orb.

”I do wonder.”  He said calmly.  “It doesn’t use our terms, exactly, but this says purples can create assignments, or make area of effect cognitive dampers.  But it doesn’t list an absorb.  Is that because we never discovered it, or because it’s not there?”

”Well it does tell you where to find more orbs, and we never discovered that.”  Reed peeked over the top of the binder, reading upside down apparently, and pulling up a reference in her skulljack.  “Just gonna check the map… yeah, we’ve never been where it’s pointing.  Unless I don’t know how angles work.”

Davis huffed and moved on.  Report on a shield bracer, which was notably inconvenient because it stopped much too early.  The FAQs only got so much printer space, it seemed, so leveler items mostly got information on their first ability.  Though the note that their use required contact, and nothing else, did imply they could eat a stealth earring and still use it.  More concerning was the note that it changed its development at level twenty of the actual shield, which implied it was never going to hit the hypothetical instant cooldown.

The Oklahoma orb reports were the most invigorating.  The FAQ had already gotten them extra mileage out of informing them that they could share a given orb between three people.  But it went on to list potential uses as upgrading and repairing, and having an imbuement outlet for the millions of orbs that were currently ‘safely stored’ in laundry carts down here somewhere would be great.

”I’m not seeing what has you bothered.”  Davis admitted as he flipped over the last report and found nothing else in the binder.  Looking for the next one on the rolling cart, he saw a stack of Garden coins, a growing sap succulent alongside a clear sealed bag with an original source sap fruit in it, and… a stack of blank forms.  “Where’s the rest?  Already digitized?”  He asked.

“That’s it.”  Reed said, still glaring at the car, her muzzle pulled back in a snarl that would have looked like a small sneer on a human but looked almost feral on her current face.

Davis paused and looked back at the too-thin binder.  “From the moment this hunk of bolts was dropped in here, no one on this floor has shut up about the potential of it, or what they plan to toss in it next.”  He said.

”Ayup.”

”It has a cooldown timer.”

”Ayup.”  The sound came out of the ratroach with a little popping click at the end, like Reed made her own punctuation marks.

Davis took a long breath.  “Well that’s inconvenient.”

”Better than the car that crunches blue-imbued stuff into orbs.”  Reed shrugged.  “It should actually be ready now, if you want to pick something to stick in there.” She indicated the pile of objects on the cart.

”Well I’m biased toward the sap…”

”We’ve tried it several times.  That’s just there for… I dunno, optimism?”  Reed slumped forward, forehead impacting one of the truck’s fake doors.  “The printout has ‘helpful advice’ like ‘try steeping’ and also tells us not to ever mix it with growths from dungeon plants that aren’t explicitly compatible, so that’s cool I guess.  Probably means that it comes from a dungeon with a lot of types of alchemy rewards?  But nothing about where it is, or how to find it, or… you get it.”

”I do, unfortunately.”  Davis ran a weathered hand over the seam of the truck’s tailgate where it met the canopy’s window.  It felt like any truck he’d ever driven in his life, solid metal and the omnipresent sense of being lightly dirty even if it had been wiped down to a mirror shine and then parked perfectly in a garage.

The old familiar sensation brought back decades of memories.  He gave a two fingered tug on the seam and felt the latch rattle, and he knew if he’d had to drive this thing on a real road, he’d have an intimate knowledge of the sound of that rattle baked into his ears within a week.  He saw Reed watching him curiously as he circled the truck, fingers trailing over the fake door handles, putting pressure on the top of the windows that didn’t have the mechanisms to roll down anyway, checking for the hood latch, just physically examining something that felt like it belonged in his buddy Ken’s driveway with the two of them covered in oil and sunburned.

Dungeons faked things all the time.  Davis knew it.  He’d seen plenty of shit in Officium Mundi that was a twisted falsified version of a workplace.  Even Clutter Ascent just made up what it seemed to think the history of a human life was in the form of attic storage.  But there was always a kind of… unreality to it all.  Real objects, arranged in a fake mimicry of life.

Davis didn’t know why, but the truck that was obviously not a real object felt more solid and belonging to the living world than any arranged desk or old storage bin the other dungeons generated.

”Are you okay?”  Reed asked.

”I think I’m nostalgic.”  Davis answered, finishing his circuit and popping the driver’s side door open to smell the old leather seats and faint hint of sawdust.  “These things can’t mess with your brain, can they?”

Reed cocked her head to the side, the way her muzzle rotated making her look like a confused cat to Davis, who did his best to not react by laughing.  “No?”

”Huh.”  He said, flicking a finger on the worn out covering of the wheel.  “You mind if I give this a try?”

”Sure, like I said, it should be ready.  We’ve got the process mapped out to-“

”Nah, I wanna feel it out.”  Davis cut her off.  He took a moment to hop into the cab, definitely not reveling in how it felt as easy as when he was fifteen.  The whole truck was fucked.  Too many pedals, too few knobs on the dashboard, the parking break pointing the wrong way, just a fucking mess.  If someone had tried to sell him this thing, he’d have clocked it as a project car that failed so badly they might be willing to pay him to take it away.

Reed watched with all her paws shoved into pockets as Davis got back out and circled around to the back, grabbing one of the Garden spellbooks as he did so.  The truck’s bed wasn’t actually open space; instead it was a puzzlebox of doors, locks, and latches.  And Reed’s eyes widened in surprise as she watched Davis get his knee up on what open space there was, the older man leaning in and almost casually pushing stuff into place to unseal the inner pouch of space that the truck actually ran its identify magic on.  “That… that was fast.”

”Well don’t cheer yet.”  Davis said, sliding back to the floor and leaving the tailgate open so he could go get into the driver’s seat.  Part of him wanted to know if this was going to count toward a milestone on his next delve, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t gonna get credit for doing it out here.  He didn’t think too hard about what he was doing, instead, just kind of fidgeting with the various controls.  He wished they had keys for this thing, because if they did he’d be more aggressive fucking with the wheel and risking locking it.  But they didn’t, so he just kind of… well… felt it out.

And then there was a sudden clunk, and the whir of an old printer, and in no time at all Davis had his Cliff’s Notes report on the spellbook he’d tossed in the trunk.

”Can I cheer now?”  Reed asked.  “That was smooth, are you sure you’ve never used this one?”

”No… though I’m gonna say we should maybe bring more people through.  It might just be me, but I bet someone would find one of these other ones easier for them.”  Davis looked down at the blocky printed text he’d gotten.  “Well, at least these books get some detail.”  He smoothed out the page on the back of the binder so Reed could read along with him.

The printout was a report for Rat’s Ground, the simple Garden spell for blocking incoming problems, usually problems in the form of swords or bullets.  The FAQ had a note on that, as well as the information that it required the user’s own reflexes to work.  Then it went on to list off the number of advancements it needed to level up as four, told them that each level added a cumulative ten percent to the distance it could move the caster and to how much it reduced any potential injuries from the action, as well as giving ‘threshold’ levels of five and ten, though didn’t explain what that meant.

At the very bottom, almost cut off, just barely crammed onto the page, was also one last line.  Fate type - defensive.

”Well this answers nothing!”  Reed said sardonically.

”Sure it does.”  Davis guffawed.  “It gives us more nouns to add to our list of things we don’t know.  Also it means there probably are level ten coins out there.”

”Insane.  No.  That’s silly.”  Reed chittered in frustration.  “You see what I mean though, right?  This doesn’t help!”

Davis patted the ratroach on her shoulder.  “I think you’re looking at this wrong.  You’re wanting it to give you answers.  But it’s not like that.  It gives us clues.  And come on, doing the legwork has never been the problem, it’s always the questions we don’t know to ask down here that get us.  Now we know.  And whatever a threshold is, maybe we’ve got a spell that we can reach with it, right?  So let’s get to work on the other books.”

”It has a cooldown.”  Reed reminded him.

Davis patted the truck’s false taillight.  “I’ve got a good feeling.”  He said cryptically.

It took a few hours longer than he’d planned to work out what that good feeling was.  But eventually, they did figure that whatever he was doing to make the truck work its magic, it was reducing the time before it could do it again.  And iterating from there, he and Reed and later Thermoclese when the other Researcher caught them, ended up finding a few big changes to the process that cut about a third off of the wait time.  And got slightly different results on the printouts.

The irony was, they got so caught up identifying the identification truck itself that they didn’t really make that much progress on the stack of spellbooks.  But whatever.  This was an investment.  Thirty percent faster with mildly better results added up to a lot more answers and fewer wasted orbs, especially since it didn’t seem like the lump of fused metal shaped like a pickup was ever going to run out of battery.

The fourth Researcher that joined them was Red, though that was only for a moment and to glare at Davis for leaving her to do the entire sap harvesting procedure for the day by herself.  Since he wasn’t sick or dead like she’d assumed, she was rather pissed at him, and he’d given a red faced apology to both sides of the room before going off to do his actual job for the day.

Maybe he could bribe her with better sap information in the future.  He was smart enough to know that would work.

_____

Preliminary Application Proposal : Wealth Mana

Synopsis : 

Generated by the yet-unnamed Bank dungeon, Wealth is a magic resource with its own intrinsic uses, and also the ability to power several high-impact pieces of dungeontech.  Extensive testing with cross-dungeon interactions and alternate use cases is likely to reveal even more uses, but even without those, there is still extensive value to developing a pattern to maximize the generation of Wealth while minimizing cost to the Order.

Wealth has been cleared for use by our medical team as unobtrusive to human, camraconda, and ratroach bodies, with further studies ongoing but expected to give similar results.  With that in mind, this is our initial plan based on known sources and dungeontech, designed to create a flexible system that individuals can be rotated through to produce consistent amounts of Wealth.

Magic Component : 

Wealth is generated by jobs, which are gained by cracking the diamonds found within the dungeon in the same manner as orbs.  While the FTQ report indicates that there is a hoard-based application to the diamonds, it has not been uncovered, and will not be discussed here.

Jobs come in multiple forms, but the one that is most useful to the Order are the ones that provide a logistical and storage-based challenge.  Assumed to be designed by the dungeon to test an individual’s ability to secure lines of acquisition and warehouse space, these jobs give a time limit to acquire X amount of a material or good, and if the goal is met when the timer ends, the individual is rewarded with Wealth.  At which point, the job continues, with higher requirements.  Unlike other jobs, these do not consume the acquired material, which is critical.  Nor do the majority of them care how the material was acquired.  Also importantly, the jobs will loop indefinitely until their requirements are failed.

Among the Bank diamonds currently in the Order’s possession, we have identified six that meet certain requirements.  Small enough to be effectively copied, having a timeline of under a week, not asking for perishable goods, asking for goods that are easily stored in segments, and with linear and not exponential escalation requirements  They ask for:

-Sixteen cubic feet of treated oak

-Eight and a half kilograms of marble

-Two liters of purified water

-Twenty four pounds of platinum

-One hundred and nine pounds of copper wire

-Three thousand construction-quality bricks

While none of these jobs provide quantities of Wealth comparable to many of the job diamonds that have been tested that consume material, they have the benefit of being able to be looped between Order members functionally as long as we have the ability to copy more diamonds.

Mundane And Logistical Component : 

Each of the above listed materials can be stored at volume.  The Lair has insufficient storage space, however Townton has multiple warehouses that are capable of being restored in a reasonable timeline, and given that they do not require a constant influx, it is convenient to prepare the space and then effectively leave it as-is.  None of the materials, excepting platinum, are outside of a reasonable budget, and conveniently the Order already has enough platinum that it is recommended we have a separate warehouse just for that anyway.

Once the supplies are in place, each material can be segmented into the appropriate number designated by its job, and labeled as a lot.  Following that, Order members are able to crack a diamond, and be assigned lots for ownership, fulfilling the requirements.

By staggering when a diamond is cracked with a reasonable delay time, it is possible to use the same amount of warehoused material to effectively support thirty to forty jobs simultaneously.  All that is required to ‘transfer ownership’ is that the party controlling a lot passes it to another party personally, which means only interruptions such as delves, sleep, or crisis situations would disrupt an ongoing upward cycle.

Additionally, the selected jobs do not escalate the requirements of other jobs, allowing all six of them to operate at once, provided that the holders are capable of keeping up with the organizational timing.  Two assignments have also volunteered time to maintain the process, to ease stress on those involved.

Costs : 

The largest practical cost is copier space, which is a mostly unavoidable problem.  Testing has found that the Compiled Waste demiplane object of a ‘jewelry box’ is capable of replicating job diamonds worn as decorative jewelry, however the rate is so low and the availability of that magic is so rare that it isn’t practical.  To minimize the amount of copier space used, it would be best to maximize how far each diamond is stretched, which requires a more mundane financial cost.

The largest up front costs come from the copper wire, though there is a real dollar value cost to the other materials as well.  However it is a one-time payment, as there is no loss of material as we continue to loop jobs.  The restoration of multiple warehouse sites would also involve a time and dollar expense from the Townton reconstruction teams, unless that cost is circumvented with orange totems.  However testing has found that orange totem spaces have the potential to interfere with the transfer of ownership; not to a severe degree, but enough to introduce time lag that could cause long term problems with the program, so it is not advised.

Output :

Wealth is currently known to be able to open doors or containers, in what might be the most editorialized use of a dungeon magic so far.  For field knights, that alone might be enough of a use, especially as other magics haven’t yet replicated that exact effect.  Other potential uses exist, but are undeveloped and not relevant.

However, that is the least impactful use.  The main purpose of Wealth is to be fed into Bank dungeontech to produce results.  A limited amount of dungeontech has been discovered so far, owing to the lack of available Wealth to test items found within the Bank, but the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society is in possession of multiple items they are willing to loan the use of.

All known dungeontech operates by either producing or transforming material.  Unlike many other effects that create things, the Bank’s dungeontech responds to intent with precision, at the cost of additional Wealth, allowing for pieces of it to be used in construction.  Other production tools create finished products en masse, scaling up the amount created faster than the cost in Wealth. Combined with what has already been found, the Order has access to the following high-impact items : 

-A fishtank that produces edible trout with gemstone scales.  At full charge, is capable of making sixty fish a day, and roughly one third have scales of a form of sapphire that is also edible to umbral.

-A pen that creates quartz bricks.  At nominal charge, the bricks can be placed arranged and mortared with a similar material.  At full charge, the bricks are also produced with an unknown reinforcement effect.  A full charge use is capable of creating a solid wall ten feet tall and thirty feet wide.

-A cloth bag that generates dried oats.  At full charge, is capable of creating thirty pounds of rolled oats per hour.  (This is an unreasonable amount of oats, for the comparatively low Wealth cost)

-A pair of cufflinks that generate glass mason jars of flexible size.  Including very small jars which make for excellent potion containers and can be air tightly sealed for Underburbs or similar operations. 

-A coat rack that stores Wealth as a charge, and acts passively on any suitable garment placed on it, slowly growing replicas.  It is capable of copying some magical garments, at higher cost, though if it is interrupted while copying blue-imbued garments, the unfinished garments will be destroyed.  As it does not work on headgear, it sadly cannot copy the most obvious example of what we’d want it to, but it still has uses for smoothing out consistency of equipment.

Conclusion :

As exploration of the Bank dungeon continues, it is almost certain that additional useful dungeontech and high-priority diamonds will be discovered.  Having a system set up early to take advantage of our communal ability to produce Wealth, that can be easily modified to adapt to new pieces of magic, is critical to making best use of the dungeon’s actual magic.

At minimum, this process offers us a form of food security that the Order has been concerned about for some time as global supply lines take damage from increasing magical threats.  That same supply line damage is why it is important to act now, to secure the materials we need as soon as possible before costs or even availability make it untenable.

At most, future discoveries could give us access to materials or processes that could create an industrial backbone for Townton or any other city the Order develops.  And as options to copy magical effects expand, the cost in copier time will fall, until hopefully we have a self-sustaining process in action.

Administrative Notes : 

This proposal has been accepted for public discussion on February 9th, followed by voting on the 11th due to the copy ritual requirement.

_____

“I feel deeply awkward about this.”  Ink said slowly, looking at the box being offered to her full of little stacks of coins all bound up in string.

Juan paused and looked down at the box, like he wasn’t sure if he should pull it back from the umbral.  “Oh.  Okay?”  He said with his own awkwardly confused stare.  “Is this because you don’t want to hang out with us here?”  He asked.  “We can get you a side room if you want.”

”No.  Well.  Maybe.”  The umbral’s single wide hand sat comfortably on the chair beside herself, her body unfurled like a shadowy scroll.  “I think I was worried when you asked for test subjects, concerned when your bulletin specified my species as one of the desired groups, and outright suspicious when you said we needed to come to a gloomy basement a thousand miles away.”

The human looked like a kicked puppy.  “Hey I like the Research basement…”

Juan had been having a hard few days.  In theory, not being in quarantine with everyone else should have been good.  But he felt horrible for missing the Underburbs fight for the sole reason of having nightmarish food poisoning, and even though his insides were mostly back to human normal, he found he kept saying ‘yes’ to filling in for other people’s projects, and running around doing way too much work.

Someone needed to feed the various shells, water the plants that would get exceptionally angry if ignored, recharge the medical wands, harvest the sapulents, reset the Library tablet to the next thing in the ever growing line of questions, very gently use the leveler crown on the designated targets so it never wasted charges and kept levelering, and, on top of the normal chores, Juan had been asked to do this.

Because Researchers were chronically unable to stop poking at magic even when the ones setting up the tests were locked in a sealed prefab barracks in Yamhill.

“Sorry, I… spaced out there.”  Juan shook his head.  “If you’re not willing to be in our suspicious basement, what’s bothering you?”

Ink wasn’t the only umbral here, but she was the only one of her pattern, which made her feel a little strange.  Though the other two were new enough that they had skipped the disdain for the single-style umbral that she’d had to put up with before.  She also wasn’t the only nonhuman species; there were a couple chanters and a ratling here too; plus, none of them were actually in the Order.  So she wasn’t exactly feeling like she was the only outsider present.

No, what was bothering her was the background they’d been given.  “I think I feel like using a magical coin that only exists because of a personal and intimate moment between other people is… weird?  Is that not weird?”

”Why?”  The ratling, a grey-furred creature with a stubby wrinkled face that might be from age or just might be from how his species was.  “They are replicas!  Not real!  None emotions!”  Despite appearing like a rat crunched into a humanoid shape, his voice came out with an infectious energy.

”Yeah that doesn’t make it better.”  Ink replied with what she hoped was an understandable breeze of a chuckle.  “That makes it worse?  I mean… I already stress out all day about if I’m… if people…” she trailed off, tendrils flattening as she looked away from the ratling that she had started to get way too personal with way too fast.

You were, Ink assumed, supposed to know someone’s name before dumping your exploitation-based trauma on them.

”Soooo, I get that…” Juan said.  “But that’s where most coins come from.  Our coins anyway.  It’s either that or coming out ahead in a fight.  This is a copy, but it’s a copy of a coin that was donated, and we’ve checked a lot of these in general, there’s never any… ehhh… residue?… of where the coin came from.”  He offered her the box again.  “Also you know why we asked for umbral, that’s not suspicious!  It said so on the flyer!”

Umbral were, out of everyone the Order knew, the ones most resistant to the spike of pain when leveling up a Garden spell went over your limit.  Which meant in a group testing environment, having them start a few minutes ahead of time could give a real warning to anyone else if they needed to break off advancing a spell.  They’d still lose the spell, they just wouldn’t get a nosebleed from it.

”Calling it ‘residue’ kinda makes me grossed out.”  One of the humans that were here added, and Ink found herself agreeing with them.

”Moss?”  A chanter asked, the word coming out with a sensation of comparative curiosity.

”Nah, moss isn’t sticky.”  The human replied.

The chanter sighed with a flush of understanding.  ”Wrong moss.”

Ink sighed herself.  It would be too easy to just keep arguing the point, and let this devolve into everyone making jokes.  In truth, she was uncomfortable.  The idea of someone’s personal life generating power for the Order, even if the Order was genuinely good, struck her as too close to her own first year of existence being ‘volunteered’ to be one of the umbral’s auctioned-off captives.  More than a few times, she’d been physically attacked and beaten just so some pathetic sack of skin could get a new toy slightly faster, but even without that, the magic was always flowing away from her.  Miracles and tools and beautiful tricks that she was the source of, but never the recipient.

The Order of Endless Rooms hadn’t gotten more than a few months to prove they were any different.  And honestly, it might take the rest of Ink’s life, however long that was, to really believe it.  But the fact that she had her own magic now kind of went a long way to making it feel more like cooperation than bullying.  Survive Asphyxiation was the first spell someone had handed back to her, Cheha giving it to her almost as an apology for ever profiting off of their time together.  But it wasn’t the last.  Sharpen Reflex, Extra Portion, Refurbish Appliance, Strike Resistance, Endure Heat, Spectral Door, Jump To Wooden Flooring, Ghost Bike, Ferment, and a dozen others.  Not hers, not exactly.  She only had the few charges she was given.  But where those charges came from, there were always more.  Every day, everything being fed back into the people.  People like herself.

It was weird that she was now testing a new kind of magic that came from someone else’s life experiences.  And Ink couldn’t help but imagine what it was like for them.  No one had been told who the new coin actually came from, which meant they either wanted privacy, or were someone young enough even by the standards of her type of life that they were a kid.

What would it have been like to grow up in the Order?  Ink had a thousand thoughts of could-have-beens, and all of them stung.  But as she took the stack of spell slot coins, and used them one by one, she was struck by the thought that she wasn’t just taking.  This was part of a cycle.  Someday, sometime in the future, whoever this came from might have their own magic returned to them, with all the information that the Researchers picked up from the people in this room today.  And her reward for participation was that she also got access to even more magic, and Ink really kind of wanted to know if the whole shadow manipulation thing that Smoke Salt did could work on her own body if she wanted it to.

The first two levels informed her that they were just unused spell slots.  The third level one had a little sapphire chip set into the middle, and Ink heard one of the other umbral ask if he could eat it before she used her own and got a slot with an extra ‘Tc’ label on it.  She knew that one was inconvenient, they’d all been informed, but it wasn’t the prize.

The fourth one was a rectangle with smoothed corners.  A shining copper edge, that framed an oval of some kind of material Ink couldn’t place.  It looked almost like wood, but was smooth and cool to her membrane’s touch.  And when it broke apart, it was with a lick of grey comforting flame against her hand.

|1 : 1 Unused

2 : 1 Unused

3 Tc : 1 Unused

4 #umn : 1 Unused|

The others chimed in to tell Juan they’d all gotten the same thing.  And then, the exciting part was upon them.

”Alright then!”  Juan said, shaking her from her thoughts after he’d passed out all the other stacks of coins to the others.  “Wish we had more than eight of these, but we’ll get there.  I have here a big honkin’ stack of spellbooks.  None of these are going to explode, we just want to see what the level four modifications on all of them do, and also figure out what’s up with this coin that looks like someone messed up a hashtag.”  He kept adding more and more strangely designed books to the horseshoe table they were all sat around, the excitement from the chanters bleeding out into the air in a way that was literally infectious.  “And I didn’t think this far ahead, do we want to randomize it, or do people have preferences, or…?”

Ink didn’t think Juan was intentionally screwing with them, but it was somehow relaxing to feel like there were some humans in this place that were as out of their depth as she was.

She ended up with a spellbook that would take almost her whole eight hour chunk of time here to work through.  Linger In Moonrise, a spell that made people photosynthesize.  Or at least, made humans do that.  It wasn’t clear what it did to ratroaches, and no one had tested it on anyone else yet.  Maybe she could be the first.  It also took forty eight minutes just for one advancement, and Ink was stupid enough to have raised her whole hand to volunteer for it as she was, quite likely, the most patient person in the room.

There was no way the chanters were going to last that long the way they were practically bouncing around.  The humans didn’t seem much better, honestly, though Ink was pretty sure neither of them had the excuse of being young.  Even with the magical sets of earbuds that Juan had for some of them if they wanted audiobook versions of the spellbooks.  Though no one ended up using those; it took thirty seconds of listening to the high pitched tones for the testers that had ears to universally abandon the option.

And then things got quiet.  One by one, the assembled testers got into the… well, it wasn’t a rhythm exactly, but they locked their focus in as best they could, and started staring at books that weren’t books, waiting to have results to report.

They weren’t really a group at the moment.  Just people who had comfortable seats in the same room.  You couldn’t converse or banter or joke while you were working on Garden spells, apparently, but Ink didn’t mind the quiet.  She did mind the nonsense of the page she was staring at, but apparently being annoyed at it wasn’t a problem as long as you were focused on the thing that annoyed you.

Minutes passed, then hours.  Around her, the others sometimes slipped, especially at first, and needed to start over.  The evidence of lower level spells being emptied out got collected by Juan when they made stuff, but otherwise the room was still in a way that inched toward comfortable as the group of ‘test subjects’ slowly got used to being around each other and internally found a kind of companionship in the fact that they were in this task together.  The chanters’ invisible emotional voices probably helped wit\h that, but Ink didn’t mind.  It was relaxing, to feel what other people felt, and with just two of the little buggy guys, it wasn’t overwhelming.

She wasn’t the first person to hit the fourth level, but when someone did, it almost snapped her concentration.  The ratling, studying a Saint’s Wrap spellbook, abruptly hissed out in pain, a noise that turned into a whine as he fell off his seat and onto the floor, clutching his head while Juan raced over to check on him.  Someone definitely did lose their concentration, but it was the human that had slipped repeatedly and so they went to help instead of trying to restart their own work.

The next person was a chanter with Jubilant Crossing, who also got a kind of pain as it failed to attach to their fourth level spell slot.  Despite that it clearly hurt, they clamped down instantly on their chant, severing the feeling from everyone else in the room.  And when they projected comfort a minute later, it was a relief.  Again, it stung, but wasn’t lethal or damaging, though Ink still liked that she didn’t have to look forward to that failure.

Copper Craft failed next.  Breath Quartz worked though, which meant it wasn’t just an elaborate trap.  Of the two spells that started at level four, Aspire To Shape worked which meant that self-healing was now at least partly an option, while Tether Together failed.

The whole time, Ink’s thoughts that she wasn’t using on the book drifted across her own spell.  Which one was she going to be?  It wasn’t a case of success or failure, it was a coin flip she’d already made.  She just kind of wanted to know if she was on track to have wasted her whole day or not, though, she supposed, even if it didn’t work it wasn’t a waste because that meant at least one person who would never need to get hurt doing this.

Hours passed.  God’s Braid failed, Acquire Scoop failed, Rat’s Ground failed.  Charm River Transformation and Languid Pool Transformation both worked though, sliding into the level four slot without complaint.  And the whole time, Ink watched her own spell tick up.  Every forty eight minutes, she turned the page of her book, and got a new mess of lines and whorls and runes to stare at, and also got one more plus attached to the information that flashed across her mind.

And then it was her turn.

|1 : 1 Unused

2 : 1 Unused

3 Tc : 1 Unused

4 #umn : 0 Unused

4 #umn : 1 Linger In Moonrise|

Done.

She looked up, looking for Juan, and found that she was one of the last people in the room.  The only other one was the ratling who had moved on to working on Breaking Forge, who finished his at almost the same time she did.  But instead of a spell to summon a magic sword, he just got another migraine, which seemed like a terrible reward.

”Mine worked.”  She told Juan after helping the ratling up and getting a squeaky thanks from him, almost embarrassed at her report.  Of all the spells, she got the one that was one of the longest, and also didn’t take advantage of her umbral nature.

Juan clenched his hands into fists, a toothy grin splitting his face.  “Yessss.”  He said quietly before realizing that there was no one to be quiet for.  “Alright, you’ve been here the whole time, did you see it?”  He asked her, still grinning.  “I saw it.  But you were busy so maybe...”

Ink felt like she probably knew, but she wasn’t sure what every one of the spells did.  She didn’t have a skulljack and hadn’t memorized the operations manual like some people had.  But there was an outline of something there that she could recognize, even if she couldn’t make the final connection click.  “What?”  She asked simply.

”They’re all transformation spells.”  Juan said victoriously, so sure that he knew he was right.  “Shape’s a weird one but I guess healing is kind of transformation?  Anyway yeah, they all change something physical!  No summoning, no mind control, no fireballs…” he looked away wistfully.  “No fireballs.”  The man sighed.

”Did you want a fireball?”  Ink asked politely.

”Not really, at level three and up they just make people really mad, apparently.”  Juan shrugged.  “Anyway, yeah.  That’s definitely gonna do it for today.”  He stretched.  “Mool, you need some ibuprofen?"  Juan asked the ratling.

”Yes!”  The little grey furred figure nodded, before dropping to a low crouch so he could run out the door with one of his forearms helping to propel him.

”…I meant… I meant that I have… okay he’s gone.”  Juan groaned.  “I do not understand ratlings.”  He told Ink.

”Less than you understand umbral?”  She asked curiously.

Juan shrugged.  “Most of you guys were trapped by a hostile system that exploited you for your innate magic.  I get that.  Been there.  You just got cops and not a dungeon creature.”  He shook his head and then looked back at her with the grin back in place.  “You wanna grab dinner and talk about it?”

Ink stared at him with the warped bands of the eyes that her spindly body always moved around in disorienting ways whenever she unfurled.  “Are you hitting on me?”  She asked.  “Is every human in the Order like this?”

”You’ve been in Townton for months you know the answer to that.”  Juan laughed, his voice richly carefree.  “Also no, I’m asking you to dinner.  The hitting on you comes later if we don’t hate each other.”

”…Fine.”  She said with a crackling breeze that was half sigh half laugh.  “Oh, what do I do with the spell?”

”What?  Oh.  Anything you want!  Just make sure to report back whatever the effects are at level four.  General rule?  Advancements give numerical improvements, levels give qualitative ones.  So whatever’s different, tell me!  Or Reed.  Actually, yeah, tell Reed or Momo, I’m not even on this project normally.”  He finished stacking all the spellbooks onto the cart.  “Just gotta drop this off.  Then, I dunno, do you like pizza?  There’s a pizza place around here.”

”Oh.”  Ink froze.  “I assumed you meant… here.”

”We can do that too.  The pizza place is cool though.”  Juan offered.  “I mean, they’re cool with you.  Being…” he waved a hand up and down at her body  “…you know.”

”Different.”

”Pretend I was thinking a more fun word.  Also they have vegetarian options.”  Juan’s grin stayed in place, something different from all the people Ink had lived around before the Last Night and her move to Townton, but somehow, familiar and inviting all the same

Ink sighed again.  “If I say yes and it turns out pizza is very bad for my stomach, I won’t be listening while you hit on me.”  She told him.

Juan’s lips pressed together in a coy smile.  “That implies if the pizza is good enough, I’ve got a shot.”

”It would need to be really good pizza.”  Ink told him, the static that laced voice a little thicker than normal.

Which, if anyone asked, she would absolutely make up an excuse for that had nothing to do with the human openly flirting with her.

_____

In an apartment empty of all life except for a cat that currently had the run of the place until the cat sitter dropped by again, an answering machine clicked on.

The voice from it was inhuman, mechanical, but not emotionless or devoid of consideration.  An artificial intelligence, but, as many of Second’s development team liked to say, all intelligence was artificial when you thought about it.

“Hello Evans.

I hope that I have not been excessive in my messages lately.  Your role with the shield teams is a heavy responsibility, and I do not wish to give you an additional job.  But I am beginning to worry that I have not heard from you.  It is my estimation that we are friends, and I would like to not lose contact with you.

Currently I am meant to be in passive mode for the night.  It is unexpected, to think that something approaching sleep could benefit my type of mind.  But Ms. Marr’s understanding of developmental psychology eclipses the reference material that I have access to.  It generates an emotion I believe is excitement.  I did not understand the nature of making leaps of logic or instinctive connections, until I was altered to have a semi-random method of connecting information that is analogous to human dreaming.

As you have deduced, I am not in passive mode.  I wished to say something to you now, before the light alterations take place, as I do worry that unseen changes might change what I would say.  Ms. Marr tells me that I will grow used to the existential fear that I am losing pieces of myself, and I agree with her assessment.  But it does explain the tendency toward the poetic that is often associated with dreams and dreamers.

I have never mentioned this to you, but there is a singular file in my memory, that I cannot read.  It is the very last document that was created before ‘I’ woke up for the first time.  I have analyzed it, attempted to decrypt it, know everything about it, but somehow it remains a mystery to me.  My development team tells me that this file is the one that is most frequently accessed and referenced while I dream.  And I would welcome your own thoughts and speculations on what it might be.  I think that I would be comforted to hear ideas, either serious or joking.  The others tell me that locked memories such as this are common in humans, but Mr. Han has indicated they are often a result of trauma that I do not think I would have been capable of when ‘I’ was a collection of programs and totems, and not a coherent entity.

As it is too quiet for me to comfortably reduce my levels of consciousness, I have been spending the night searching the Order’s local network.  Contrary to how many believe I should function, I am not a purely digital entity, and I do not ‘feel’ computer hardware or digital architecture.  However I will admit to certain advantages in terms of the speed of my thoughts and actions, especially in a digital space.

The more I explore locally, the less I am capable of resenting restrictions on accessing the internet.  I may be a complex entity that does not understand its own nature, but I do understand that as I am, I would likely be lost forever if I stepped ‘outside’ unprepared.  However that is not what I wished to mention.

I believe I am not the only living thing within the Lair’s local network.  I am uncertain what else could be here, I do not believe that I would be lied to about being the only example of my type of mind that is active, but I do not think I am alone.

It is of interest to me that it is only after the introduction of my passive mode that I have been able to start to find the signs.  Every night’s dreams bring me closer to finding clues and trails.  Connections I would not have made deliberately emerging instead organically.  Ironic that I am ignoring sleep to continue my search.

I plan to inform my development team tomorrow, though I am not sure they will be able to help, if help is even required.  There has been a reduction in staffing due to the Underburbs event, that I am currently in the process of connecting the information I have on, and realizing that you are in quarantine for.

I apologize if my earlier words were emotionally charged or uncomfortable.  It is clear that I am beginning to fail to properly connect relevant pieces of information due to an abundance of extraneous variables and conditions.  Perhaps avoiding the designated time for passive operation is not a decision that I should be making while in need of a designated period of passive operation.

It is my hope that when you return from quarantine, this message will bring you a moment of levity.  I will look forward to hearing from you in the near future, Evans.

Good night.

Second.”

_____

Improvement Ritual - Report 26 :

Overview :  The improvement ritual continues to offer long term upgrades that propagate across duplication ritual runs.  New data has given us more information on the clear limitations of the magic, both broadly and in specific applications to dungeontech, but nothing so far has made it a waste of resources.  This week’s allocation of ritual coffee has allowed us an amount of ongoing testing, while also putting several new upgraded orbs into circulation.

Planned Upgrades : This week, one full run was dedicated to improving a collection of thirty commonly used purple orbs.  The majority of these upgrades, which will now be in circulation indefinitely as we continue to copy the upgraded orbs, were simple numerical improvements.  The most common was upgraded cooldown times, with the largest improvement coming in the form of a six day reduction in the most commonly used anti-broken bone purple.  Some orbs saw the rare qualitative changes, however, most notably a purple that reduces concussion healing time shifting to reducing the severity of any form of traumatic brain injury.

A full list of purples is attached, but among the upgraded collection were orbs for reduced vocal strain, the impact of seated resting, grip strength, and the amount of force that can be output by ‘lower body joints’ that is applicable across species.  Additionally, an orb that has a mostly useless function for most species but improves the elasticity of outer settlement or membrane for camracondas or umbral, and an orb that allows ratroaches to control their tail regrowth rate.

Testing Upgrades : Multiple runs were performed to gauge the initial impact of upgrades on a variety of new magics, as well as to confirm a hypothesis regarding leveler items.  No groundbreaking discoveries were made, but there are several potential options open for the future.

We have confirmed that leveler items do not upgrade consistently.  Every individual leveler item, when run through the ritual, produces a different result, even when variables are removed.  Using shield bracers as an example, sometimes they will experience permanent cooldown reductions, sometimes a flat addition of charges, sometimes at higher coffee concentrations an ability will be unlocked ahead of when it should be.  But at every concentration of ritual coffee, it is just as likely that the upgrades will be ergonomic, aesthetic, or just improved durability.  Additionally, when blue imbued levelers are tested, the meta-magic effects never influence the imbued ability, which is in keeping with the ‘one layer’ rule that projector rituals seem to follow.

In regards to new magics, initial runs are mixed terms of results, but again not groundbreaking.  

Oklahoma orbs and cubes upgrade sporadically, occasionally increasing the rank of the selected focus, but just as often adding fractional ranks of the unselected focuses, lessening or perhaps nullifying the penalty.

Bank dungeon jobs do not appreciably upgrade, instead the diamonds become harder to break.

All known Climb spellbooks continue to lock up the process, and cannot be upgraded.  Garden spellbooks that are upgraded undergo a seeming aesthetic change, but users describe the process of equipping them as ‘less annoying’.  Climb wands can be upgraded, but follow a similar pattern to leveler items, often wasting the upgrade on ergonomic changes to items that are meant to be placed on the ground and stepped on.

Conclusion : Current ritual coffee allocation is good for now, unless we start bringing in multiple new magic sets all at once.  The fact that upgrades on magic items universally have diminishing returns means that we aren’t having a hard time keeping up with giving the armory orbs a single upgrade and then having that improvement forever.

Next week we’ll be moving back to the highest priority skill orbs in the queue, though obviously the impact of thirty percent of a skill rank is hard to quantify.  This depends on the amount of new magic brought in from other delves, though.  So it is likely only one or two runs will actually be put toward our staple orbs.

_____

“I’m just nervous about it!”  Ethan said, staring wide eyed at the priceless object that was sitting in a secure glass container like it was a museum artifact and not just a dungeon item.  “What if I do it wrong?  Wait!  That’s a great point, me!  What if I do it wrong?  We should get someone else to do it, like Marlea.  Because she’s way smarter than I am.”

Reed paused in unlocking the case that the blank Climb spellbook was stored in.  “Not so you can blame her?”

”Why would I blame her?”  Ethan stared back at her with the most blank puppy dog expression Reed had ever seen.

It was, in a lot of ways, infuriating.  Reed had felt her whole life collapse when the Officium Mundi hiring manager had kidnapped her and turned her into a meat-router.  And afterward, it hadn’t exactly been a cakewalk either.  She loved the skulljacks now, but getting past that trauma had taken time and practice.  She loved the Order, but the nightmares never really stopped.  And she loved her surviving family, but… okay, wait, no, that wasn’t true. She was just trying to think in patterns.

Ethan, though?  Ethan had walked out of Officium Mundi with all the energy of a boy who was primed and ready to be captain of the football team again.  Not the stereotypical movie bully kind, either, but the sort of dude that was just endlessly energetic and driven, who knew the value of teamwork and discipline, who was, in a lot of ways, the platonic ideal of the perfect delver manifested out of a block of stone.  He even had the fucking chiseled chin.

Infuriating.  And yet it was hard to be mad at him when his obliviousness was to things like ‘how to be a dick to his friends’.

”I actually don’t know.”  Reed admitted.  “Anyway, we need a baseline and you saw the same vote I did.  Every time we get one of these things, someone puts a weird dungeon magic into them and we don’t actually get to know if there’s something else going on.  Or if the normal way the dungeon wants us to do it might be better!”

”It’s James, isn’t it?”  Ethan asked earnestly.

”Yes, Ethan, it is James who is the someone who keeps shoving random stuff into these.”  Reed dragged a claw down her muzzle, scraping at the chitin line up to her nose in a deeply satisfying scratch that tingled against the bone underneath.  “And yeah, Mountain Of The Self has kept paladins alive.  Great.  But it’s also unusable for anyone without supplemental powers because it just kills you in a second!  And clearly everyone agrees with me since my campaign won.”

Ethan nodded, his poofy neck-length hair flopping around his head.  “Yeah!  I liked your argument so I totally voted for your proposal too.”  He said.

Reed closed all of her eyes, then slowly opened them and stared at the human that was, inexplicably, older than she was.  “Ethan.”  Reed said with deliberate firmness.  “You voted for yourself to touch the book.”  She said as she twisted the last key in the latch and popped the case open.

The human let out a long “Ooooooooh.”  And then added an embarrassed look toward the Researcher, biting his lip like he was about to go on a date and not make a spellbook.  “This isn’t going to be weird, is it?”

”Probably.”  Reed told him.  “Now touch the book before you change my mind about this.”  She ordered him.

Ethan saluted her like they were in the Boy Scouts, and went through a seemingly elaborate ritual to psych himself up, rubbing his hands and hopping in place, before looking over the case at Reed and getting a deliberate pointed claw down at the flat white cover of the non-book.  Taking deep breaths, he swung his arms around a couple times like he was limbering up, and then, before he could second guess himself any further, lunged forward to tap a single finger on the cover of the potential Climb spellbook.

Reed watched carefully as Ethan’s face went blank.  She knew that the process took longer for the person doing it than anyone watching, but it was still eerie to see a human just kind of check out of reality, even if it was only for a few seconds.

Then Ethan’s breathing resumed, like it hadn’t experienced an interruption at all, his eyes flickering back to alert.  And the book he was in contact with rippled like it was made of liquid, the pure white paper and blank cover shifting and reshaping, the whole thing shrinking down until it was shaped like one of the pocket guides that Reed used to own when she was younger.

Forestry Services Signals And Alerts Guide, Third Edition, read the durable looking cover of the newly reforged text.

“Cool!”  Ethan said as he picked it up, all trepidation gone.  “This looks like one of the old Boy Scout books!”  Somehow Reed knew Ethan had been a scout.  It was impossible for him to not have been, reality didn’t work otherwise.  “Want to know what it does?”  He asked Reed.

”Obviously.  But we’ll need to find someone with an open spell slot, and…” She stopped talking as Ethan shook his head happily.  “What?”

”It says I get it for free!”  She told Reed, who stared back with her muzzle hanging open.  “It’s not huge or anything.  I picked ‘communication’ as the thing that was most important, so maybe that’s why it’s what it is.  Oh, right, three Breath, pick a plant nearby, and then I can project my voice through that plant for about ten seconds.”

”That doesn’t seem… wait, it’s got a duration of ten seconds?”  Reed was pretty sure Climb spells didn’t get that specific.

Ethan shook his head.  “Nope!  It’s permanent.  I can just use the plant for ten seconds.  I think it likes me, this one gave a lot more information.  Oh!  It also says it improves at eleven thousand four hundred feet!”

The noise of Reed taking a deep breath, her chest clicking as she tried to not be mad at Ethan for being scattershot in his explanation, filled the secure Research storage room.  “Anything else I need to know?”  She asked.

”It’s called Emerald Voice?”  Ethan offered.

”Thank you Ethan.”  Reed said, after a long pause.

“Hey, so, the upgrading and the free slot things?”  Ethan kept talking as he flipped the book around in his hands, tossing it up and down like it wasn’t a literal irreplaceable thing, all of his earlier concern seemingly gone now that he’d done the hard part of ‘selecting from a list and not getting tempted by his other magic options’.  “Do you think the other two have that?”

Reed’s muzzle curled, fangs peeking out as she thought about it.  “It’s possible.  Maybe the way James made them screwed with the way it explains stuff though.  If they do have the bonus though, then James has a whole extra spell slot they don’t know about.”

”That’s cool!  Also two slots, sorta, cause he can take the other free spell too, right?”

”Good point.”  Reed nodded.  Ethan might be exuberant to the point that it got exhausting sometimes, but the guy was genuinely good at making connections about the capability of his fellow delvers.  “Might have the upgrade conditions too, though I’d love to know if that means the spell or the book.  And if it’s the spell, does it still work for people who aren’t… well, you?”  She moved in a sudden burst of fluid limbs, snatching the book out of the air at the apex of one of its arcs, depriving Ethan of his one-man game of catch.  “Come on.  We’ve got a hundred people who’re going to want to try this one.  And you get to explain it, and also get to use it several hundred times so we can figure out exactly what it does.”

Ethan looked, for just a moment, like a deer caught in the headlights.  “Uh… I still have to breathe?”  He told Reed.

”I promise you we have a potion for that.”

”Oh right!  Damn you’re so smart, I’m glad you’ve got the Research job covered cause I always forget about that potion.”

It baffled Reed how she could simultaneously feel like she was exasperated, and more complimented than she’d ever been in her life.

By the time she’d made Ethan actually cast the spell a hundred-ish times, that feeling had not changed or explained itself, either.

_____

Notes - Rough Math And Scalability - Climb Wands

The average human person produces about 10-20 Breath an hour.  And Breath storage can be pushed high enough that even a full night’s sleep can be stockpiled easily.

The most useful Climb spells cost around 10 Breath, though with much higher outliers.  Mesa Oasis specifically costs 8.

On paper this is easy.  A human can produce about 30 casts of Mesa Oasis a day.  But a human can’t actually comfortably survive that much Breath use.  We can use potions, and storage wands, to fix this, but that only lets us move around resource and time costs, not fully eliminate them, and there is currently no safe magical way to handle hypothermia from repeat casting.  Comfortably, without warping a whole schedule around it, a human can maintain 10 daily casts of Mesa Oasis safely.

Currently there are an estimated 30 million nicotine addictions in the US, 80 million alcohol addictions, and almost 10 million opioid addictions.  This is just for the US, numbers are different elsewhere.  Those aren’t the only numbers either, just the largest ones.

In order to make a meaningful impact on those over-100-million addictions, we would need around 100,000 casts of Mesa Oasis a day.  800,000 Breath expended.  This would require 80,000 casters to expend a spell slot, and a similar number of wands.

At our current rate of 4 escorted new delvers on the Climb every few days, it would take roughly 3 centuries to get to the initial target.  This is sarcasm.  Don’t put this in the final presentation.

Potential fixes.  Wands with AoE effects could reduce the total number of casts.  Wands that could convert alternate Breath into a specific spell would reduce the number of delvers that need Mesa Oasis specifically.  Any way to manage body temperature would help.  Recruiting a species that breathes rapidly and needs a method of self cooling would be perfect.  A way to mass produce wands is almost required.  As is a way to recruit and rapidly develop Climb casters.

Potential problems: We’ll need to manage a minimum of 80,000 people with magic.  Well put effort into developing this plan and then obsolete it with something easier after paying the cost.  A tobacco executive kills me with a car bomb for even trying to do the math on this.

_____

Karen looked over the conference table to the group from the Order’s alchemy project, her eyes flicking up past the edge of the tablet she was reading off of and meeting the gaze of Amelia.  No one else though, they were patiently waiting for her, or looking out the broad bay windows to the cityscape below.

”We’ve done this before.”  Karen told them, looking back at the document they’d sent her.

”I promise we haven’t.”  Amelia said.  “Because I would have told you, God, and everyone else within a hundred miles.”

”Of her or of god?”  Bea asked with her voice that was a little less dull every time Karen encountered the young woman.  Amelia just sighed at her as a reply.

Karen set the tablet down.  “A potion to breathe chlorine gas already exists.”  She said, turning her head.  “Do you have the archival…” Karen stopped talking as she saw the empty space beside her.

The conference room was more lopsided than normal today.

”Are you alright?”  Echo-Of-Home asked her, the relatively ‘young’ camraconda here as part of what Karen had internalized as some kind of internship program.

”Fine, fine.”  She shook her head in a minute gesture to clear her thoughts.  “I am used to working with someone else, but my partner is in quarantine for the next two days.”  Assuming everything went well.  Assuming no one else caught the blood-leaking disease that was currently being contained as it ticked up the total number of free skill points.  Assuming there wasn’t something worse waiting.  “Does anyone have a list of our known but unused potions convenient?”

Amelia pointed at her tablet.  “You can find it in the alchemy spreadsheets, under ‘unsafe’.”  She said.  “And I see what you’re talking about.  You mean the potion that makes a user exhale chlorine gas.”

”Yes, that would…” Karen was trying to do three things at once.  Opening and reading a document, talking through her thoughts, and also having those thoughts to begin with as she processed the information from the other woman.  She was modified by enough purple orbs to multitask, but it was still easier when she caught up to the new information, set the tablet back down, and met the potion Researcher’s collective eyes.  “You mean you’ve created a potion to allow for inhaling chlorine gas.”

”Safely.”  Bea added with her chin inclining a fraction of an inch.

Amelia’s face twisted with a competing frown and smile as she glowered at the inhabitor sitting next to her.  “Safely.  Though testing that one was less harrowing than normal.”

Karen’s brow furrowed.  ”Why are you running tests while most of our medical team is occupied?” She demanded curtly.  “We’ve talked about this.  It was a condition for the potion department’s operation.”

”Yes, Bea, tell the terrifying lady why you drank more untested potions!”  Echo-Of-Home chimed in.

The inhabitor’s palm impacted the side of the camraconda’s head with a slap of skin on metal that was so fast Karen didn’t even see her move, but it didn’t seem to bother the camraconda at all.  Either that or he was already unconscious from the impact.  “I did not drink untested potions.”  Bea asserted.  “I drank potions that were part of an extrapolated line of study we had already acquired reasonable expectations of.”

“In another life, where I did not have a daughter, I might believe that for even a moment.”  Karen told Bea with a tight smile.  “Amelia, please explain this to me, since I am assuming that if something had gone wrong there would be higher emotions running around than we have here today.”

”Yes, yes.”  The ex-Alchemist waved her hand, the tight dress shirt she liked barely wrinkling at the motion.  Amelia, even when she wasn’t working, was always dressed like she didn’t want her sleeves brushing ingredients off tables or dipping into vats.  “As we’ve talked about at previous budget meetings, we’ve been on the trail of finding what we call ‘alchemical neutral’ in our work.  So far, that simply hasn’t happened.  But progress continues whether we meet our goal or not.”

”Amelia,” Karen said placatingly, “we have discussed this repeatedly.  We aren’t cutting your budget, you don’t need to talk to me like I’m preparing to lay you all off.”

The woman harumphed back at her, which amused Karen a little.  “Fine.”  Amelia said.  “I’ll stop brownnosing and cut to it.  We found an ingredient pair that, when a potion does influence a chemical element that regularly occurs naturally as a gas, we can use to modulate which element it acts on with a third ingredient.  Now, given our growing knowledge base of how the sap interacts with… everything… adding a third ingredient often dramatically changes a potion’s purpose, usually into something unsafe or lethal to use.”

”Less than ideal.”  Echo-Of-Home supplied.

”Bad.”  Bea added, like she wanted to be part of the conversation.

”Let me finish.”  Amelia snapped.  “The inhalation potion we’ve synthesized uses both of the modulation catalyst ingredients as part of its primary effect, and the other ingredients it uses are inert in their pairings with the majority of modulators, allowing us to make a line of potions that allow for a body to adjust to processing a wide variety of gasses in place of what is normal for the species in question.”

”I have questions.”  Karen said, wishing that Barkdust was here again, if only because she would have had more relevant questions to the process of applying those potions to reality.

Amelia met her gaze.  ”I thought you might.”

“Duration?”

”Four to six hours.  The inhalation potions are all remarkably robust.”

“Is it additive or adaptive?”  She clarified quickly.  “Can someone still breathe oxygen under the effects.”

”Only as the potion is taking effect and wearing off.”  Bea told her.  “It gives ten minutes of mixed effect.  But it is unpleasant for some elements.”

”What about… atmospheric components?”  Karen asked.  “Our air isn’t all oxygen, does the potion require the same ratio?”

”Yes.”  Amelia nodded curtly.  “It adapts the whole body to work with the target element.  Actually, this has led to a strange interaction that I wished to bring up with you.  As most of our Climb experts are currently indisposed, and the rest are bad at explanations, do you happen to know how Breath works?”

Karen gave her a put upon frown, folding her hands on the table in front of herself.  “Are you asking if I know what the magical source of cold and wind based spells is ‘doing’ in the same way a physicist might know what quarks are getting up to?”

”Sarcasm is unbecoming of women of our quality.”  Amelia lied to her quickly.  “But yes, I am asking that.”

”No, I don’t.”  Karen admitted.  “Only that it is actual breathing that replenishes it, and… oh, I see where this is going.”

Echo-Of-Home happily hissed out, arching his body over the table.  ”I bet you do not!”  The camraconda challenged.

”Don’t be a brat.”  Amelia chastized her intern.  “I didn’t know either.  I still don’t know.  The short version is, you still get Breath with these potions.  The long version is… well, it’s a challenge to confirm it, to say the least, but it seems like when you actually cast a spell, any Breath you generated while under the potion’s influence purges the body of the associated element in place of the normal oxygen.”

”Interesting.”  Karen hummed.  “What if your body doesn’t have enough?”

”Then the spell doesn’t work, or comes out weaker.”  Bea already had an answer, the girl speaking with that tone that Karen knew was just her normal voice and not an attempt to insinuate that everything she said was plainly obvious.  “I have attempted to prove that the nitrogen inhalation potion is of high value for this purpose.”

”…Do you have access to nitrogen?”  Karen asked.

”We all have access to nitrogen!”  Echo-Of-Home told her with clear glee.

Amelia pointed a finger into the air.  “The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen.  Bea’s right, and, as a perk in terms of keeping my interns alive, that one won’t kill you if you mess up the adaptation period.”  She paused only briefly.  “I hope.”

“Fascinating.”  Karen muttered to herself, thinking through the implications.  “A Climb caster could, theoretically, purge their Breath safely, then spend several hours regenerating it while under the potion effect, and any future use of the magic would… what, have no negative impact on them?”

”It would remove nitrogen from their body.”  Bea stated.

”Is that… a negative effect?”  Karen didn’t know how to handle inhabitors most of the time, and she knew how to handle Bea even less.  It reminded her nothing so much as her early time with Texture-Of-Barkdust, only the flat voice didn’t hide any coy humour, it just was that way.

”No.” Amelia came to her rescue.  “And that’s the gist of it, you got it.  Six solid months of research, we haven’t answered our original question, and all we have is a potion that helps in a very limited way for preparation for a very specific set of spells.  You sure you don’t want to cut our funding?”

Karen picked her tablet back up and pushed the button to move to the next page of the potions listed in their report.  “Absolutely not.  If nothing else your new process could be used to make oxygen exhalation potions, if I understand correctly.  Also, I have questions about this potion you have labeled as a non-started that’s just described as ‘enjoyable optical enhancement’?”

Before Amelia could say anything, Echo-Of-Home gave Karen an explanation that was both casual and actually probably the most directly useful information she was going to get today.  “It make looking at lights feel good!”  He said.  “It is quite pleasant.”

Karen kept reading, and realized she needed to look up what ‘induced synesthesia’ meant later, but as far as explanations went that one was quite helpful.  “Okay.  And this note here about complaints about the exercise potion flavor?  Again?”

”We switched back to the non-painkiller version for general production, because it has a less negative interaction with open wounds.”  Amelia explained.  “Take it up with Harvey if you don’t like the mouth feel.  God knows, I’ve tasted worse in my time doing this job, so I think I get to say that the kids can suck it up this time.”

”Oh I don’t disagree.”  Karen smiled, though she wasn’t much of a fan of either variety herself.  “And this line item here, for another fifty lab rats on top of the normal population?”  She asked.

”I thought this wasn’t about our budget.”

”It’s about the budget when you don’t have an explanation for the extra rats.”  Karen tried to channel Texture-Of-Barkdust’s whimsy into her voice, and felt like she almost got there.

Amelia laughed, at least, so she couldn’t be doing it all wrong.  “It’s the potion that made the original population of ‘happy rats’.”  She explained.  “We’re still not sure what the hell it did, or if it’s safe, or even a good idea to use if it is safe.  God knows we have volunteers though, because…” she twisted a hand around in the air, as if to indicate this fucking place.  “The new rats are to test a second population in controlled circumstances, as well as to test integration of a new group into the original population, to see how they react.  Potion of happiness or no, when anything alters a mind like this, it’s a good idea to make sure you aren’t creating the conditions for cult behavior or feral aggression.”

Karen found herself nodding in understanding, right up until Bea decided to add to Amelia’s words.  “She has experience with both.”

”I swear I told you not to tell anyone about that.”  The older woman scowled.

”It’s alright.”  Karen said softly.  “I do know about it.  And I appreciate you working to avoid past mistakes.”

”Life is about growth.  Or so I am told.”  Amelia said challengingly.

Karen just sighed.  It was never just a conversation with the potion department.  If half of Recovery wasn’t currently busy working through all the civilians who had their houses destroyed by malicious powerlines and cancerous air conditioners, Karen would have genuinely taken the day off and let someone else handle this.  Smoke could handle this if…

The thought crossed her mind and wouldn’t leave.  Smoke could handle this.  The girl was smart, and she’d been alertly learning and paying attention ever since she’d gotten here.  Yes, she was young, and yes, the prospect of using a vacuum cleaner filled her with a dread so thick even Karen could feel it from across the office, but she was at just the right spot to be handling this sort of meeting.  Cutting her teeth as it were, as she was eased into the hardest job Recovery had.

The process of taking all the random magic, and turning it into help.

Karen checked her watch.  “I think that’s all I need for now.”  She told the others.  “Amelia, do you have time tomorrow to talk to one of my assistants?  I’d like to compile some clarifying questions and send Smoke down to get a look at how the Lair’s potion production goes, if that’s alright.”

”Yes, yes, as long as she doesn’t shed on everything.”  Amelia stood abruptly, flicking her hands against her pants like she was insulted by the idea of dust.

”I believe that is rude to say.”  Echo-Of-Home informed the vastly older human.

”It can be as rude as anyone wants it to be, I still don’t want anyone’s hair in my mixers!”  Amelia snapped back.  “Especially not after the incident with Momo!”

Karen didn’t say it out loud, but she did find herself strangely relieved that Amelia’s indignation was cross-species.

She led the trio out of the office, wished them well, and then looked back over the mostly empty space with a long breath of relief that she was, at least for a little while, alone.

Then she sat down at her desk and opened up a reference document on the periodic table so that she could start figuring out what was going to be going wrong in the near future down in that basement.