The Daily Grind - Chapter 405 (Patreon)

Reminder that today is a double post, and this is the double.

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“Start out perfect and don’t change a thing.  Always accentuate your best features by pointing at them. And conceal your flaws by sucker punching anyone who has the audacity to mention them.”  -Miss Piggy, The Muppets-

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“Okay, I’ve got a demiplane slip opening in a targeted spot in about four hours.”  James informed Cam as they met up in the Lair’s lobby.  

Things were pretty busy today; the last batch of people coming out of quarantine who weren’t eager to go sleep in their own beds were often eager to come in and just experience a place that was kind of home.  Especially the ones that did live in the basement.

But it wasn’t just casual socialization either.  The line for the allocation counter was stacking up to the point James considered going to help before Caller-Of-Midnight had summoned aid seemingly from nowhere.  Lots of people had points they wanted to spend, but also the growing number of Underburbs skill crystals were all on permanent offer now, and boy howdy did the knights of the Order have those skill points to spend too.  James was actually supposed to be testing another batch later, but as much as he was drawn to that, Reed could wait while he dealt with his actual paladin mission for the day.

On top of that, there was the sound and fury of a couple of the youth pluralist ball teams roughhousing in a mostly harmless way as they waited for their adults to show up and take them out into the freezing rain that they were way too excited to play sports in.  James often felt like he didn’t understand kids, and he didn’t understand sports, and while he loved the concept of pluralist ball he felt like he understood both of the component parts far less right now.  Maybe it was just residual trauma of being forced to play soccer under similarly miserable conditions when he was younger that told him that going outside was a bad idea.

Voices and laughter - and also the less fun sound of someone going through a breakup - made for a nice backdrop to the space, even if it was a little crowded.  They could have just moved to the briefing warehouse, or even James’ actual office assuming Rufus hadn’t fully commandeered it by now, but the two of them had secured one of the low tables with beanbag chairs that were set technically inside the front windows thanks to a green orb, and James liked it here.

”I’ll have one in six hours as well.  We can time our arrival and the start of our operation to coincide with having multiple escape routes, good.”  Cam stiffly nodded at him.

“What’s in your demiplane anyway?”  James asked her, trying to help Cam relax.  It was perhaps difficult to tell with how she normally talked, even with how much she’d changed over her time in the Order, but he could see how her face was tight around her eyes and her voice was forced into stillness as opposed to her normal calmness.

Cam was nervous.  And normally that would make James nervous, because Cam could tank a hit from most things and walk it off unless the person doing the hitting wanted her dead hard enough.  But today, it was a social nervousness, and besides, James had already survived the sister they were planning to go surprise meet anyway.

She responded to his question without really softening that much, her reply coming like a report.  “The dungeon door, of course.  A glass orb that takes some of the kinetic impact to my head, which is barely useful for me.  A distillery that transforms scrap paper and materials sufficiently like leather into usable notebooks, of no special properties.  A refilling flask that produces juice.  A hand.  A few other things.  Oh, I have modified it via green orb to have thirty cubic meters of refrigeration inside, which I had hoped to use as a ration storage as preparation for emergencies, but the reset applies inside there as well.”  Cam tipped her head and pulled the high collar of her grey and white coat back so that James could see the scar of a tattoo on her neck that the green orb had added on.  “We need to return to the Wastes soon.  Jubilance claims there is a way to influence what a slip lets you bring into the demiplane that is immune to the resetting.”

James shook his head and sighed as he curled one leg up against the front of his beanbag.  “She let Speaky comb over her brain the other day after the Underburbs, finally.”  He was being a little unfair and he knew it; not everyone was cool with infomorphs crawling through their thoughts.  “She thought she had the method, but it was a guess, and our own shockingly dedicated data analysis team has already disproved it.”

”I see.”  Cam said with the kind of cold frustration that actually unsettled James more than any upcoming conflict.

He kind of wanted to ask her what was up with her saying she had a hand in her demiplane.  But he also wasn’t sure if Cam really wanted to be socialized with at all right now, especially after spending a good amount of time in the umbral dungeon earlier.

So James went with engaging her on a tactical level instead.  ”Do you know where we’re going, or are we waiting on Nate for an update?”

That was the wrong thing to say too, apparently, judging by how Cam frowned out the window.  “Nate is currently investigating a plant.”  She said flatly.

”…Why?”  James didn’t want to get sidetracked, but he had to know.

”Because the gigantic hypnotic siege plant has shown signs of potentially blooming again.”  Cam said, as if James knew what that meant.  Her nose twitched as she saw that he was absolutely baffled by that explanation.  “The flower that you and JP rescued our rogues from?  The one that was used as area denial on a power plant?”

”Okay, yeah, I’m with you there.  It was… dead?”  James asked.

Cam tapped one finger on the smoothed surface of the circular table between them. ”Dormant, apparently.”  She said.  “And now spring is approaching, and it is reactivating.  Nate is attempting to discover if its antimemetic effect lessened while it wasn’t in bloom.”

”…Nate got out of quarantine, like, six hours before either of us.”  James pointed out.

”I am aware.  But it isn’t as if we have the moral high ground.”  Cam almost smiled.

And wasn’t that just the truth.  The Underburbs had shown up, violent and monstrous as ever, and instead of being a disruption to the Order’s operations or a source of turmoil and death, it was…

It was a fucking speed bump.  Not even that, really, because the influx of skill points from the knights slaughtering their way through thousands of Underburbs shock troops and the supply of crystals that gave the ethically sourced skill ranks meant that they were coming out of that fight with more momentum than they went into it.  People had been hurt, people had suffered, but the worst actual permanent damage to the Order had been one knight losing most of his arm.

And Matt was already trying to convince Deb that he should be allowed to reforge his body with shaper substance to have some kind of biokinetic bone cannon in his forearm.  Because Matt was kind of a dumbass, even if James would trust the knight to cover his back in a fight any day of the week.

So they’d gone through safe quarantine procedures, they’d scoured everyone of disease and damage, and James had stepped back out into a world that didn’t need him for anything immediately.  And he’d promptly gone on two dungeon delves and one diplomatic meeting.  And now he was hanging out with Cam planning an evening trip to New York.

And James wasn’t the only one.  Despite not spending all day with his partners, he did know what they were up to, and none of them had taken the opportunity to relax either.  Alanna was actively doing a real world campaign for the local school board election coming up in March, Anesh was doing some math tutoring for a few of the Greenway students and also for a 400-level statistics student he’d met back when he was in college, Arrush and Keeka were visiting friends down in Townton and James was almost certain he’d heard one of them say ‘dungeon delve’ and another say ‘taking guitar lessons’ but he couldn’t remember which was which.

And then TQ had been on one of those delves James had been on, before spending the night with him, and then heading back to Townton himself for some kind of underground professional wrestling show, and James was only mostly sure that he was kidding.  He sure as fuck shouldn’t be performing if he wasn’t joking, because while a delve could be as dangerous as a nature hike if you had a good party around you, a camraconda getting suplexed was a great way for TQ to end up being locked in a hospital room by one of five or six different people who cared about him more than they cared about his sports entertainment career.

Even Sarah was right back into acting as a kind of champion of both Clutter Ascent and Kiki, exploring one and doing her personal version of compassionate therapy on the other.

“Yeah, we’re idiots.”  James said happily, and got a strange look from Cam before he realized that to her, this was probably something she was used to.  Living with the Order, as hectic as a lot of them perceived their lives as, likely still had more downtime than her life with the Last Line Of Defense.  “So, you want to give me the situation then?”  He asked her.

“There is almost nothing to the situation.”  Cam said with a slight frown.  “There is a Camille operating in New York at present, but tracking her movements has been difficult.  The city traffic control organization has been remarkably adept at closing backdoors that our grown programs exploit to subvert traffic cameras, and as is normal, she constantly employs evasive tactics while moving.  Because we were clearly trained in the same way, I believe I have narrowed down an area where she is repeatedly returning to.  But as for why, I couldn’t say.”

James frowned as he accepted a file from Cam and opened up her map of the area.  And by ‘map’, what he meant was ‘Cam-branded tactical analysis’.  A fifth of a mile wide and running up against the water, the area her sister was tracked to still included a chunk of a park, a half dozen factories and warehouses, some kind of government building, a residential skyscraper, and an even larger hotel skyscraper that could have fit every other structure inside itself.  And every part of it was tagged with dense notes about travel times, insertion and exfiltration routes, potential targets, and risk assessments.

”Cam do you ever sleep?”  James asked her.

”Unfortunately.”  She told him, voice still bland, but this time he could tell it was the blandness she weaponized to tell jokes.

He gave her a sympathetic nod as he tapped the toe of one foot against their table.  “Yeah it’d be nice to have extra time for Garden spells or something.”  James agreed with something Cam hadn’t exactly said out loud.  “So, who’s coming with us for this stakeout?”  He asked.

”I don’t expect this to become a fight.”  Cam said.  “So a reasonable amount of support from a full shield team should be sufficient to balance everything out when I learn that I am wrong about how much combat there will be.”  She continued, spreading one hand palm-down on the table like she was drinking in the sensation of its texture.  “Unfortunately we are out of 106mm munitions, so my choice of supporting heavy weapon is off the table, but I have several magazines of silver-jacketed conventional bullets that should be sufficient.”  She looked back at James with a shake of her head.  “Yes, even one for your personal sidearm.”  Cam told him with inherited disdain.

“The UMP is not a sidearm.”  James protested, still not quite sure why Nate hated his favorite submachine gun so much.  He only ever got snark and never real reasons, so he was starting to assume this was some kind of team sport and not something with a reason behind it.  “But also thanks.”  He said.  “Also sorry, you were going to bring our insanely illegal recoilless rifle into New York City?  You walking around with wings, I get, people in that city will gloss over anything.  But a gun the size of a small god…”

Cam frowned.  “I hadn’t actually thought about that.  I’ve… I’ve become too comfortable, maybe.  I could shed the wings…” she said slowly.

“So, I said that, and then had the thought that you with dragon wings, your fancy coat Liz made you, and a big-ass gun over your shoulder would probably be the perfect camouflogue.  People would assume you were in cosplay.”

”As whom?”

”Oh, no, Cam, that’s not how it works.”  James laughed.  “At that point you can tell people you’re from one of the Fate spinoffs and they’ll believe you.”

”I would make an excellent iteration of an Arthurian legend.”  Cam said with the sort of ironclad confidence in what she was saying that James got briefly stunlocked by it.

Remembering that they were supposed to be preparing for something, James grabbed his deeply installed impulse to start talking about contemporary interpretations of King Arthur, and shoved it down.  Away, into the abyss where he put all his knowledge about the Fate series anyway.  “You would.”  He told Cam.  “Also there’s no shield team available right now, is there?  They’re all on downtime after…” he motioned heavily.

Cam shook her head.  “Teams one, two, and three are rotated out for mandatory rest.  But we have more shield teams.”

”Already?”  James remembered doing the recruiting, but he wasn’t sure if they’d finished their initial training.  “Okay, well, that works then.  What are we up to now?”

”Eight, but I was simply going to ask for team four, because they are the least… masculine.”  Cam said with a frown.  “Some of the others have habits and mindsets that I need more time to break them of.  It will happen eventually, it always does around Townton, but it would help if we perhaps had a way to get them to stop attempting to seduce me that didn’t involve me staring at them until they crack.”

”…I… am imagining that now…” James said diplomatically.  “And I find it amazingly funny.  Also I’m sorry, want me to do something about it?”

”No, they will learn.”  Cam said ominously.

James let that thread go too.  “Sure.”  He said.  “What about Nate?  As part of our backup, I mean.”

”I told you, he is investigating one of the plants.  He isn’t-“

”Cam.”  James cut her off with a firm smile.  “I’m not the most observant person in the world.”  He paused to give her a window to joke in, but she just kept quiet and watched him in a way that James forgot a lot of people had ‘normal’ conversations.  “But you know Nate would drop whatever he’s doing to help you with this.  Or anything, probably.”

She gave him a quick nod.  “Oh, I am aware.  I have my weaknesses, I know, but I was trained to understand networks of connection.  I know.  But what he is doing is important work, and I don’t need to drag him into this until we are certain it is needed.”  She said, in a way that James found intensely suspicious.

“Right, and not at all because this feels personal to you.”  He said, watching her hide a wince before he took a moment, and then asked the question that was much more important than the more tactical planning.  “Cam… everything else aside, I need to know.  What are you hoping for here?”

”I try not to put hope into operational planning.”  Cam said bluntly.

”No, but this time you should.”  James pressed.  “I know we keep picking up other sisters of yours, but this is different.  And I’m gonna be deferring to you on this, so I want you to know in advance what you’re hoping for, because what you want is the point.”

Cam didn’t look comfortable with that.  “It shouldn’t be personal in the first place.”  She said eventually.  “It’s…” the girl trailed off, staring out the window to the rainy parking lot where a couple of big vans had just pulled up to ferry away a lot of the rambunctious children here in the Lair’s lobby.  “Do you know, every time I realize a way in which my life has changed, I consider running away again?”  Cam asked him.

The words hurt him, unintentionally sharp fears projected across the table.  But James didn’t panic at her, that wouldn’t help.  “I remember you jumping off my balcony when I asked you what you wanted once.”  He said idly.  “Please don’t defenestrate yourself, these windows are hard to replace.”

”These windows are a security risk.”  Cam pointed out.  “Wait.  These windows don’t… exist on the outside, do they?  I should have noticed that earlier.”  She shook her head.  “Well.  My point is, I have become someone who enjoys eating, who enjoys coffee, who enjoys music, who enjoys playing.  I even enjoy martial training, which I never did before even if it was my life, because now it is a choice and I get to share it with people who interest me.  But every change I notice I feel like I am becoming a stranger to myself, and I don’t know how to meet that person anymore.  And so you ask me what I want, and I think…I think…” her voice caught in her throat, Cam raising one of her slim hands to cover her eyes as she leaned on the table with an elbow that listed the piece of furniture, “I think that ever since Castleton, I have been doing a worse job at being a knight, because when I should be sharpening my perception and plans, I am instead wondering who my mother is.”  She said with a high pitched slip of her tone.  “And I know it isn’t Kiki.  I don’t even know if what I saw there was real.  But you ask me what I hope for, and…” She stopped talking, just focused on breathing with her eyes closed.

James reflexively moved to reach across the small table and take the hand Cam had left on the surface balled up in a fist.  “Hey.”  He said, ignoring the bone-deep stinging pain as she flicked her hand to push him away.  “It’s alright, Cam.  No one is-“

”I’m upset!”  She said, suddenly laughing in a brief bark of noise.  “Someone is upset, it’s just me!  And it’s because this is a side of myself I have been blindsided by!  Every other change, I could see coming, and even if I never said it I welcomed them because I could see how they made all of you so happy and I craved that.”  Cam dropped her hand from her face and looked at James with eyes that burned with something both furious and deeply longing.  “But this?  I hope I somehow find my mom, paladin, and I don’t know how to reconcile that with the reality that this isn’t a normal thing to want!”

The words struck James in a way that made his stomach sink.  Because he felt like, somehow, he recognized the source of a particular issue that had just cropped up.  “Cam…” he whispered with quiet dread, “why do you think that’s not normal?”  He asked.

”Is it not?  With how easily so many people here gave up their own family connections?  You don’t even care about losing your parents, and you’re the most compassionate person in this building.”  Cam challenged him.

James’ stomach continued to twist.  “I… no, Cam, that’s… that’s not what’s happening here.”  He said, taking a second to look back at the mess of people in the lobby, some of whom were walking past their spot.  “We’ve got so many people who lost their families and can’t get them back.  You’ve met Reed, you think she didn’t want to go home?  Her brother fucking left her here, and her own parents don’t remember her.  Charlie has a wife and kid somewhere.  Davis has grandkids.  Karen… actually Karen’s kinda like me, and also her daughter is around all the time.  But me?  I already didn’t want to talk to my parents before they got ripped out of my life.  I’m glad they’re safe somewhere, I keep tabs on them and my little sister a little bit.”  He reached out again and caught her hand, wrapping his fingers around her fist, and this time not letting her strike him away.  “Look, there’s three possibilities here.  Maybe you don’t have a mom at all, and you’re a dungeon construct like we kinda thought.  In that case, it sucks, but nothing changes.  But maybe you do have a mom.  And if you do, maybe you will end up like me, happy to have her somewhere far away and not talking to you.  But maybe you won’t.”  James’ voice heated up as he tightened his grip on Cam’s unfurling hand.  “Maybe you’ll have a mom that’s worth having.  And don’t you just wanna roll the dice on that?”  He asked her.

”Well yes.”  Cam said with a distant tone.  “That’s where my inner turmoil comes from.”

”Okay, well, stop having inner turmoil and let’s go figure out what’s up with your weird estranged sister.”  James said, like it was that simple.

Cam opened her eyes and stared at him, her body stilling back into the solidly stoic way she moved and sat when she was in control of herself.  “Is it alright if I get exceptionally annoyed that whatever this mangled form of emotional support is works on me?”  She asked.

”I hear that a lot from Anesh!”  James said happily, letting go of her hand and sliding back again.  “Also I am sorry to drag this out of you.  But… well…”

”But I should know as well as you do that if we don’t do it now, it will be relevant during a melee.”  Cam shook her head.  “I am learning that emotional responses are just as important as physical ones, tactically.  I may need time though.”

”I get that.  Also stop calling me paladin, I got enough of that from the umbral earlier.”  James rolled his eyes at her.  “Anyway, this is important.  We need to know what our overall objective is, and I’m gonna be honest, what I’m getting here is that you care a lot more about your family than I think I would.  So holding back is important.  That in mind, what are our nonlethal options for… well, you?”

”Me but both stronger and weaker.”  Cam said, and before James could protest, she cut him off.  “No, this isn’t mistaken self-evaluation. I’ve seen the recording of your fight.  She used at least one power I’ve never seen from one of my sisters, but she also had less physical force behind her blows, and required less to get through her armor.”

”…I literally hit her with the combined force of the Order…” James said with concern.

”Yes and that wouldn’t work on me.”  Cam told him dismissively.  “Not if I were in armor.”  She gave a proud smirk.  “As for options, we are limited.  Some Garden spells are useful; I’ve found God’s Braid advanced to level three to be exceptionally good at holding someone of my strength.  But unless you’re willing to devote the time to a very sharp Bell By Midnight cast…”

James frowned at her.  “No?  I hate that spell.  We don’t use that spell.”

”It’s a tool.”  Cam replied evenly.  “I’ve found, in my time here, that the majority of your ideological complaints about specific tools often come down to the fact that the people using them are abhorrent monsters and the uses they’ve found are both vile and stupid.  Not any real complaint about the tools themselves.”

”That is… not true?  In fact with the Tyrannies it’s literally the opposite!”  James shook his head.  “This doesn’t matter, we don’t have twelve hours to stack a spell, we’ve got maybe three before we want to deploy, right?”

”Right.  How many area-style Climb wands do we have?  Karen continues to disrupt my training scenarios with a sudden loss of all friction, so that could work.  I severely doubt my sister has trained for that.”  Cam got them back on track.

”I’ll check.”  James said, sitting forward and cracking his knuckles.  “I’ll also go see if Momo has any infobomb totems ready.  Do you want to look over our Office dungeontech lists for anything circumstantially useful?”

”No, but I suppose I am asking enough of a favor that I can suffer through the lack of logic that dungeon applies to everything.”  Cam said.

James blinked at her.  Apparently, somehow, the girl sitting across from him had developed an opinion about Office magic when he wasn’t looking.  “Ooooookay.  We’ll dig into that later!”  He promised, since they’d likely have time if they did end up on a stakeout.  “Oh, before I go, I never asked.  What’s your domain?”

”…Townton?”  Cam asked him with furrowed eyebrows.

”No, from the Recesses.  What domain did you end up getting?  I’m paper, apparently, which I seriously need to practice more, but I assumed you’d get something… uh…” James raised his own eyebrows back at Cam’s expression.  “Do you not have a domain?”  He asked with an awkward forced politeness.

”No, I do not.  Because I do not wish to, as Pathfinder informed me about the process she and Planner have devised to enter, ‘have my sense of chronological progression fed into a blender’.”

”Well, that-“

”And then we turn the blender on, and put it inside a cement mixer.”  Cam continued quoting.  “The cement mixer is then driven at high speed until-“

”No domain yet, got it.”  James laughed as Cam kept talking.  “I’ll meet you back here in three hours!”  He told her, making a quick retreat, as she gradually raised her voice so he could continue to hear her explain the thing she was avoiding to him across the room as he fled through the Lair’s lobby.

Honestly, he didn’t see what the big deal was.  He’d had his sense of time frappéd and it had only been a minor issue for a week.

Maybe if they wrapped this up effectively, James could drag Cam along with his polycule when they went on their next long playground hike.  She looked like she needed a break anyway.

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The basement room was a long way from what it had started out as.  And James found it kind of cool how thoroughly they’d transformed some of the magical gifts they’d been handed, especially down here under the Lair.  A green orb had stuck a basement here, yes, and it had even come close to being appropriate for a commercial-industrial flex space warehouse.  But it had been the Order that had taken the cracked concrete walls, maintenance corridors, and occasional open box of a space that felt like it was suitable for some kind of indoor sport court, and turned those places into server rooms, storage spaces, research and engineering labs, and magical study spots.

Here, bare grey stone had been collared with sterile vinyl sheet flooring, the single dangling bulb of lighting had been replaced by a row of diffuse lights on rails overhead, and the air conditioning worked now.  What had been an afterthought with a door attached had turned into a place where the strange professionals of Research tried to figure out how magic worked, and took iterative notes as they did so.

It was very cool.  It was also somewhere James had ended up in his search for Momo.  He hadn’t found her in her own much weirder lab, and had then been found by Nik who had brought him here under what James was starting to realize were false pretenses.

”I’m gonna hire a bunch of people to be Research sherpas.”  James declared.  “Every time I come down here, I want a dedicated guide who will take me exactly where I need to go.”

”And handle the really dangerous dungeontech for you?”  Nik asked with a cocky grin.

James huffed and stuck his nose in the air.  “Please.  A true adventurer doesn’t let the hired guide take all the risk.  Besides I knew what I was signing up for when I walked into the basement.”  He grinned wider as Nik rolled his eyes in response, before putting on a more serious voice.  “But really.  I’m on a time budget and I really do need one of Momo’s baffler totems.”

Nik nodded dismissively.  “Yes, yes, I know.  I already dispatched Halo to fetch one for you.  I just need you to poke some crystals.”

”I thought other people were handling the tests for this.  Also I don’t really have the emotional bandwidth for more grappling with getting power ranks today.”  James announced.

The Researcher flicked his fingers at James like he was trying to cast some form of dispelling magic on the paladin’s trepidation.  “No moping in the labs.”  He said.  “Also we filtered out all the power ranks already.  Oh, though, I’ve heard through the Recovery grapevine that you’re supposed to be talking to several next of kin?  Personally?”

”I hadn’t heard that.”  James frowned.  “Which means they’ll tell me when I need to know, I suppose.  I trust Recovery.”

Nik gave him a worried look, lightly gnawing on his own facial hair.  ”It’s pretty likely they’re gonna tell you they want to donate those power rank crystals to us for active use.”  He told James slowly.

”Yeah, I know.”  James sighed.  “I’m not going to assume anything though, and like I said, I’m on a time budget today so I don’t have the luxury of stressing about the future right now.”

”…Luxury?”

”Don’t question me.”

Giving him a shrug and rounding the central work table so that he could pop open one of the storage cabinets, Nik drew out a plastic carton and popped that open too.  Fingers sorting through a series of spiky gleaming yellow Underburbs crystals that all had labels affixed to them, until he’d pulled out three and set them on the table.  “So, these ones are for you.”  Nik said.  “Normally I’d just add these to your paladin pack next month and make you go to an allocation desk.  But you’re here now and this is easier and I bet you’re gonna go do something stupid, so why not get in early, right?”

”Sure, I’ve met me.”  James laughed at the blunt appraisal of his daily plan.  “Why these ones?”

”Well, this one is for basketball, which I believe is relevant to you.”  Nik pointed out, and James perked up at the words.  It had been a while since he’d leveled up that Sewer Lesson, and having another rank of Aim would feel like a very solid addition to what James was already doing all the time.  “These two are just generally useful things that might save your life.  Which is mostly what we’re down here to facilitate, you know.”

James shrugged, and went through the process of feeding skill points into the various crystals, partially listening to Nik talk about powerup plans.

[+1 Skill Rank : Athletics - Basketball - Positioning - Point Guard]

[+1 Skill Rank : Observation - Behavior - Ambush Tactics]

[+1 Skill Rank : Athletics - Martial Arts - Karate]

James always found it part interesting, part annoying, that there were different formats for the same kind of thing.  He knew he’d gotten a skill orb before for a martial art, and it had just said ‘judo’.  It hadn’t sorted it into a category.  Did that mean that the category breakdown meant something?  Or was this just multiple different dungeons being chaotic little bastards with their magic systems?  He really wanted to know, because the answer would tell the Order a huge amount about the nature of dungeons themselves.  But the problem was that he’d probably get the answer after they learned all that stuff, as a result of it, rather than up front.

Or maybe he could get Kiki to ask Clutter Ascent.

“Sorry, Nik, I was trying to listen, but I got distracted.”  James said as he repeated the process and dumped enough skill points into the crystals to get three ranks in each of them before they locked up and stopped giving him any more.  Enough to take his basketball Lesson to six hundred and eighty.  Out of forty two hundred, but still.  Progress.  “What were you saying?”  He asked the Researcher, focusing this time.

”Oh, I’m whining about my personal bugbear.”

”…like the actual D&D creature, or…”  James never knew around here anymore.  He’d actually lost count of the number of species hanging out in this building.

Nik looked like he was thinking about it, but then shook his head.  “Nah, personal project I mean.  It’s the crown.  God, the crown is so… everything.  It’s perfect, it’s useful, I hate it.  I want to make more crowns.  And it resists me.”

”…I feel like I may have heard something about this at some point, yes.”  James nodded, wondering if he could escape this room somehow.

”Did you know that the truck that shrinks stuff destroys blue items?”  Nik asked, and then quickly assuaged the terrified look on James’ face.  “We didn’t kill the crown!  Don’t worry!  But that’s the problem; we could have made it small enough to copy!  But we fucked it up before we knew that would be a problem!”

James pursed his lips, looking at the accusing finger Nik was leveling at him.  “Now, you say ‘we’, but it sounds like you mean me.”

”Well yeah, you did do that.”  Nik nodded.  “You literally did it on stage.  I was there.”  He continued, waving one arm as he replaced the crystals in their secure carton, turning them with a strange amount of meticulous care so the labels all aligned.  “Some day I’m gonna figure out how to imbue Heard orbs into a leveler and then I’ll get to mess with the crown on stage.”

”That sounds like… something else.”  James didn’t know what it sounded like, only that it sounded very weird.  “Have you figured out how to imbue Heard orbs into anything yet?”  He asked hopefully.

The look Nik gave him could have been used to pave a road it was so flat.  “I think magic is getting harder faster than we’re getting smarter.”  He complained.  “You wanna try?  We’ve got lots of the things!  I can get you some!”

”I don’t really have time, I need to get working on a Garden… spell…” James trailed off as Nik yanked open one of the tall cabinets and wrestled out a big plastic bin that looked half as tall as Nik himself.  The bin thudded into the table, the lid of it flung aside to reveal it was full to the brim with the crystal-clear Heard orbs.  “You just have this here?”

”We have them fucking everywhere!”  Nik shouted out his aggravation.  “Since the cleaning crew told us we couldn’t use the laundry carts to store them anymore, we’ve just been putting boxes wherever we have room where we might want to mess with them!  There’s multiple storage closets down here that are just bankers boxes of orbs!”

”Gonna regret this but how many of these do we even have at this point?”  James asked.  “Like, do we have a solid count?”  He was starting to feel like he really needed to get moving, but this conversation was luring him back in.

”Few hundred thousand.”  Nik said like that was a normal sentence.  Every one of those orbs, after all, represented one piece of violent dungeon wildlife killed somewhere in Oklahoma.  Or the surrounding areas.  They’d definitely started migrating in waves down into the northern tip of Texas.  But the point stood, that was a few hundred thousand things the Order had either killed, or facilitated the killing of, and it felt like… a lot.  It felt almost monstrous to phrase it that way.  Even if the majority of those lives were caerbannogs that were perfectly happy to rip apart and eat every living thing they chanced across like organic bunny-shaped terminators.  “Please take some?”  Nik begged James.

The stare down had lasted for long enough that James eventually decided it was easier to just agree, in exchange for quick access to the Garden spellbooks he needed.  Which was how he found out that they had a serious problem of all the Garden spellbooks he wanted being currently checked out, despite the fact that they had multiple copies of a lot of them.

So James had to wait for a bit, sitting in a reading room near the main vault, while multiple different Researchers scrambled to find who had the copy of God’s Braid and bring it to him.  But at least it gave him time to also have an assignment that looked like the world’s toothiest shark show up and drop off the infobomb totems he’d asked for, and for him to realize that if he and Cam were going to be on a stakeout, that having a bunch of orbs to try to infuse into whatever he found in the glove box could be a fun way to pass the time.

But they really needed a better library program for their absurdly valuable spellbooks.  Even if the Garden made multiples of them, the drop rates were weird and hard to parse, and the simplest book was worth way too much for them to be going missing like this.

That was a problem for future James though.  Present James had a couple hours to equip movement and rope spells, and then get back to Cam.

Technically there was no real rush.  But both of them wanted their demiplane slips nearby when they were busy hunting down one of Cam’s sisters, and that put a bit of a time limit on the operation.  There was no sense in showing up in a distant city with less than their best escape routes, after all.

Though James did get that it was weird that all his experiences in leaving his hometown had been the kind of things that would have benefited from an escape route.  He just felt like it was way too late to change the trajectory of his life at this point.

_____

“I’m gonna be in New York for… I dunno, at least tonight.”  James said into his newest phone while he waited for one of the new shield teams to get their stuff together.  He liked his new phone, but he’d never admit it, because that would mean validating the deaths of all the past phones he’d… expended… and also if he showed any kind of preference for this one he knew it was doomed too.  “So don’t worry about me for dinner.”

“Noted.”  Anesh replied with a kind of relaxed calm that made James suspicious.  “I’ve got some of that Korean soup in the fridge I can reheat, so I’ll probably just hang around and catch up on reading.  I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go on the record and say that you, oh I don’t know, don’t expect things to get hectic or something like that?”

James held his phone away from his ear for a moment, narrowing his eyes even though Anesh couldn’t see him.  “…why?”  He asked with enunciated slowness.

”Alanna and I have started keeping track of how often you say things that taunt fate, shortly before someone shoots at you.”  Anesh told his boyfriend.  “Or some other disaster.  I have a list.  The most obvious one of course was when you were in Dakota and you called me to say don’t worry Anesh, it’s not a trap, then you walked into a trap.”

”I did not say that!”

”Mm.  If you insist.”  Anesh said with the voice of a human that simply was not going to believe a claim, but was going to be pleasant about it regardless.  “So?”

”So I’m not saying anything.”  James declared haughtily.  “I’m saying I’m going to New York, I’m gonna help Cam out with a thing, and I’ll… mmh, no, no declaratives, you’re right.  Wait, you’re keeping track?  Seriously?”  He didn’t wait for Anesh to answer beyond a joyous laugh from the other end of the call.  “What’s my ratio?  Like, does it get better if I do keep my mouth shut?  I don’t know if I could live like that, please don’t tell me narrative throughlines are real things that influence reality.”

Anesh’s laughter escalated, and James had a really hard time feeling bad about that at all.  His boyfriend hadn’t been doing very well lately; the Underburbs was an ironically positive distraction for him from the ongoing subjugation of his home country.  But with that done, and quarantine safely over with, James had seen more than a few moments just in passing where one Anesh or another had looked like he was staring into space with a sad wrinkle around his eyes.  So laughing was good.  And James would be as big of a target for that laughter as was ever needed, if it meant Anesh could have a few moments of unrestricted joy.

Now, he did also really want to know if Anesh had empirical data, however limited, that indicated that fate might be real.  But he could wait.

Wait and be just a little bit subsumed by existential dread.  James had a standing policy for things like fate or divinity or prophecy, which was to act as if they weren’t real so that they couldn’t take root and control his behavior.  But some things that the Order had more or less confirmed to be real really skirted the edges of his ‘do not touch’ concepts.  Like the rule that teams of three had some kind of nebulous edge to them, which was less a narrative rule and more like a law of metaphysics now.

But if tempting fate actually tempted fate, that was a little too close to saying that fate was real, and he just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that.

”No, no.”  Anesh’s eventual reply after he caught his breath soothed James’ thoughts.  “Actually, the worst rate you have is when you joke about the thing itself.  You know, saying ah, don’t say everything will be fine, you know what that causes, that sort of thing.”

”I don’t sound like that…” James absolutely sounded like that.  “Also that’s weird.  Is one of you available enough to do this on a larger scale for the Order?  I’d kinda like to know the numbers on this stuff; I’m not a whole sample size on my own.”

Anesh chuckled again.  “You are more of a main course than a sample, yes.”  He teased James.  “But also I am more busy than I’ve ever been, and I’m almost thinking of making a fifth me.  Ask Research though, I’m sure someone would be into this.  Do we have a social science department?”

”All our scientists are of the mad variety.”

”Mad social scientist could still work.”

James hummed and nodded to himself.  “I agree, but I’m having a hard time thinking of anything funny to go with that.  All my ideas for mad science sociology are just… uh… child abuse.”  He admitted with a sigh.  “Maybe we just do the thing we do where we hire some recent sociology and psychology grads, give them a handful of magical skill upgrades, and set them loose to do what they really wanted to do with their lives but in our basement.  No that sounds bad.”

”That sounds normal is the problem.”  Anesh said with a voice that James could hear the eye roll buried in.  “I never should have leased us this building, I should have gotten us a tower somewhere.”

”Wait, are you in the Lair?”  James asked, looking around himself as if he might spot Anesh here in the front lobby where he was waiting for Cam.  “I thought you were in Townton.”

”Some of me is.”  Anesh sighed.  “I really need to sort out my phone situation.  Also… when you get back, can we talk for a while?  Nothing bad, I just want to spend several hours running my brain in laps about how much of a hive mind I am.”

James stopped craning his neck to try to see behind the terrarium column.  “I love talking to you.”  He said happily.  “But… wouldn’t someone like Marlea or maybe Simon be better people to discuss being a hive mind with?”

”Marlea only has one piece of advice, I already talked to her.”  Anesh said as James watched Ava and Hidden wander into the lobby leading a line of young ratlings and stuff animals for some unknown purpose.  “Besides, if I change how I live it changes our relationship, so you’re involved whether you like it or not.”

”Yeah but I’ll adapt.”  James promised.

Anesh audibly scoffed at him.  “James I love you, but you know, it’s possible to do things in such a way that you don’t need to personally take on all the emotional work for a situation just because you have some kind of thing about doing that.”

”Hey!”

”No, do not hey me, I’ve been living with you for the better part of a decade now and sleeping with you for almost half that time and I am wise to you.”  Anesh paused and then James heard his partner’s voice pointed slightly away from the phone.  “Yes, it is James.  Do you want to say hi?  Yeah, alright.  Hang on.”

A second later a higher pitched voice than Anesh’s slowly eroding soft english accent came down the line.  “Hello!”  Keeka cheerfully said as he took control of Anesh’s phone.  “You should come with us, we’re going skiing!”

”I… can’t unfortunately, I’m going to New York, also hey can you put Anesh back on?”

”Okay!  Please be careful, I love you!”  Keeka volleyed that at James with the kind of confidence that came from being able to say something then hand the phone off to another person.

Anesh cleared his throat.  “Keeka may have had something else he wanted to tell you too.”

”I actually already knew about the romantic affection, we can talk about that later too.  No, Anesh, what did he mean you’re going skiing?"

”Well there’s excellent conditions for it on Mt. Hood right now, and Keeka was interested in learning, so…”

James was glowering into the air as Cam approached the table they’d been sitting at earlier and took her same seat back, looking at him with a curious look as he finished his conversation.  “I just don’t want you to die or anything!”  He told Anesh.

”James, please.”  Anesh told him.  “I haven’t even said anything to taunt the universe.”

”You said that!  That gets you on the list, apparently!”  James protested swiftly.

”I’m hanging up now.”  Anesh laughed at him.  “Enjoy your trip, please come back to me.”

James took a deep breath, and then let it out with the best attempt to not just blow air into his phone’s microphone.  It was so easy sometimes, to run headfirst into this kind of thing; the moments where he realized that all his time spent putting out fires and being heroic and helping people and even dungeon delving itself was… well, it was becoming his life.  And he loved it, really he did.  But sometimes he got reminded that he was making a trade.  He didn’t get to go learn to eat snow at high speed with his boyfriend, he had to go help Cam.

And he would still choose to help.  But he also needed to make time to be alive sometime.  To engage with the world in a less abstract way, and do something fun that wasn’t reading a book about city planning.

”Always.”  James told Anesh.  “Ask Keeka to record it for me if you accidentally do a backflip.”

”Always.”  Anesh told him, and then hung up while James was still laughing.

James shook his head and pocketed his phone, looking up at Cam who was watching him with a nervous little smile.  Like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to do that.  “I’m sorry.”  She told him, her face falling as he gave her a confused look.  “I… overheard more of that then you maybe wanted.”

”Ah.  It’s fine!  Thanks for thinking about it though, I guess.  And we’ll have plenty of time to gossip about your romantic life in retaliation while we’re staking out the target area.”

Cam snorted at him, a noise that really did combine with her wingspan to make her feel like a dragon for just a second.  “The closest thing I have to a romantic life is… actually no, I choose not to share this with you.”

”Yeah, see?  We’re gonna have plenty of gossip.”  James nodded with a sly smirk.  “Now, are our minions ready?”

”Them and me too, yes.  Are you?  I know I asked, but I could likely do this on my own, and…” She looked away, staring out the window as she tried to not feel guilty for asking in the first place.

James stood and stretched, his sleeves sliding down around the multiple shield bracers he had on.  “I’m ready for this!”  He cut through her thoughts.  “I’ve got doughnuts.  And Sarah gave me a nap earlier, and my Energy stat took that and sprinted with it, so I feel really good.”  James offered Cam a hand up, and she took it even though she didn’t really need the help.  “Also, if we’re really, really lucky, we’ll show up and you can fire off your fortune sense at full blast, find what we’re looking for, and then we can get out of there in twenty minutes.”

”That has never once worked for me, but I appreciate that you have that level of faith in my ability.”  Cam told him.  “Still, I’m going to apologize now that it won’t work, and you’re going to be spending quite some time sitting in a car with your… excessive… energy.”

”I’ve also got a box of orbs to use as fidget toys.”  James told her gleefully.

Cam closed her eyes and ducked her head, before sighing happily and looking back up at the paladin.  “Thank you.”  She said quietly.  “For everything.”

Shrugging as if he didn’t think that highly of his contribution to the complete rewriting of her destiny, James turned away and headed over toward the briefing warehouse door where the shield team was waiting for them.  ”No problem.”  He said, and sounded as if he really meant that.  “Now!  Let’s go have a big city adventure.”

Cam followed him, but didn’t have the heart to point out that every time she’d ever been in a big city, the adventure had ended up being surprisingly boring compared to basically every other operation she’d been sent on, either with the Last Line or with the Order.

Maybe this time would be different. 

_____

“You know what’s weird?”  James asked as he sat in a nondescript rental car next to Cam.  She currently had her wings folded over the passenger seat, trusting James to be their driver if that came up, opting to keep them despite the fact that she’d requested several copies of the leveler stealth earring just to divert attention from herself.  And James really got that; the change Cam had undergone since finding a version of her body that she was comfortable in was pretty dramatic, and he wasn’t going to be the dumbass that told her to backtrack now.  

Especially when they had those earrings anyway.  Odds were good there was actually another one waiting in his demiplane, too.  A copy of a high level version that James never took off anymore, letting his magic get used as a very slow replicator.

Cam didn’t turn her head from where she was watching out the window.  Either she could see through it and was watching the street, or she was meditating to the curtain of raindrops in constant flux as the weather hammered the car, and James wasn’t going to complain about that either.  “What is weird?”  She asked, a tiny hint of amusement in her voice.

“I expected this city to be more expensive than I’m used to, but we just paid three dollars an hour for parking.”  James said, leaning back in his seat and shifting to adjust where his pants had arbitrarily decided to stop working as a comfortable garment.  “I don’t even really drive that much anymore, but the last time I went to dinner with Anesh and Alanna, we paid twenty bucks to park in a gravel lot someone owned.  And we don’t live anywhere near as big as New York!”

”Aren’t you an economist?”  Cam asked him, still not looking away from her window.  She wasn’t going to say anything about it, but she was enjoying the almost lava lamp vibe of the rain cascading down.  “This area isn’t low traffic,” she pointed over the dash to indicate the cars passing by in an endless city river of moving metal and tail lights, “but the things that the majority of people stop here for have their own parking.  The hotels have valet service and their own underground garages, the industrial facilities have lots, even the park section has a modest space set aside for vehicles.”

James shrugged.  “I’m not saying it doesn’t have a reason, I’m mostly saying that there’s a lot of other stuff around here, right?  And this isn’t the most walkable area.”  Mostly because of all the cars.

”Yes, those businesses cannibalize other parking solutions.  And, of course, there are several lots like this one.”  Cam turned and settled her head against her seat.  “What I find weird, is that you focus on very odd details during situations like this.”

”Oh yeah?”  James said, eyes scanning people as they walked in and out of the tall tower of condominiums across from where they’d parked.

”Yes.  You could be talking about the use of the limited waterfront property, the location of a woodland park adjacent to living spaces, the steps this area of the city has taken to encourage pedestrian traffic, the architecture, the weather, anything really.  And yet.”  Cam gave a single soft chuckle.  “You decide to start a conversation about the price of parking.”

James gave a little shrug in the stuffy warm air of the car.  “I’m bad at small talk.”  He admitted.  “And sometimes I worry I annoy people talking about cities.”

He really wanted to talk about this city though.

New York wasn’t a city.  It was several, all of them shoved into the same trenchcoat and pretending they were unified.  Part of that came from just how much space it covered, but it wasn’t like James was an authority on it or anything.  He’d just glimpsed it in bits and pieces as they’d driven through to their target region, going through the harrowing process of contending with other drivers who had apparently long since decided that establishing dominance was more important than living.

It wasn’t even the separation of the boroughs either.  They were in Queens right now, which James could tell was different from Brooklyn, but in passing through both areas, he’d felt like he’d crossed multiple invisible lines where the whole environment had dissolved and reformed into a totally new biome.  New York’s ongoing attempt to figure out if it should have skyscrapers or parks, highrise apartments or cracked brownstone homes, chain stores or family restaurants that would melt any health code inspector that looked at them funny, it all blended together to make the place seem like a huge mess of a city.  But also, kind of like a dungeon in a lot of ways, especially with how you could turn a corner and suddenly exist in a place with a radically different vibe.

Things being so rainy that he was surprised the city wasn’t partially underwater made studying it a little tricky, though.  And while James knew a lot about city planning, the scale of this old place, with all the layers of history and strata of design, it was well beyond what he could understand just by driving through it once.  He could live here for a year actively studying it and probably not know a tenth of its nuance.

It was very cool.  It also had too many rats.  And he felt like if he was going to sum it up to someone he’d say it like that.  Then they’d roll their eyes.

The look Cam gave him made James wonder if she’d heard his thoughts and rolled her eyes internally anyway.  “Part of me is concerned that you are one of the people on Townton’s development committee.”

”I’m reigned in by those smarter than me.”  James joked.  “Oh, speaking of, how’s the other massive life-altering nonsense you’ve been investigating?”  He asked.

”The memetic assault that nearly killed Nate?”  Cam asked as if that were a normal thing to be casual about.  “The origin is still unclear, and the Underburbs… did not help the process.”  James managed to restrict himself to just a toothy grin at her understatement.  “With help from Mia, I can confidently say that we aren’t missing anyone, which is good.”

James’ smile faded.  “Yeah.  That… that always hurts.”  He said, just barely audible over the hammering of the rain on the car’s roof.

”Apologies.”  Cam raised a hand like she was planning to reach out to him, but then stopped and just let the silence sit for a moment instead.  “Well, it isn’t something we need to deal with this time.  It seems as if the memetic defense was centered on the room itself, with the potential for damage to a person growing deeper over time as more information was cut from them.”  She quirked the corners of her mouth downward in annoyance.  “Two things support this.  My sisters and I were much less affected than Nate was, and it was his bedroom.  But also, we found a second space in Townton that was masked.”

”…What?  Where?”  James asked with sharp alarm.

”I feel that telling you might be a risk when we don’t have an assignment on hand to stop you from having your autonomic processes shut down.”  Cam told him.  “It wasn’t an important place anyway, but the point is that it was there.  Which means there are likely more.”

He flicked a hand upward, the confines of the car stopping him from throwing his hands into the air.  “Great!  We pitch ourselves as the place where everyone can live safely protected from nationalism and dungeonism alike, and it turns out we’re selling property in a minefield!”  He bemoaned.

”It isn’t that bad.”  Cam said, and then paused and changed tactics.  “Well, it is that bad.  But we have several growing assignments and navigators with significant power that have been helping scour the area.  Again, no certainty, but I have confidence that we haven’t lost anyone.  And the good news is, if this is a targeted attack against the Order, then we have very incompetent enemies.”

James blinked, and then realized what she meant.  “If someone did this on purpose, they hit two rooms, one which did nothing and one that alerted the people most likely to survive.”  He summarized.  “Yeah, okay.  So that makes it more likely it’s either a natural effect - terrifying by the way - or… something more dungeony?”

”And we know dungeons trend toward being in clusters.”  Cam said with a nod.

”We do not know that!”

”Beaverton, North Smiths, Saskatoon, and while Oklahoma is slightly more expansive I am still counting it.”  She riposted.  “All sites with multiple dungeons.  And now something novel occurring around Townton.  Maybe it would be smart to investigate anywhere we know there is a single dungeon.”

James groaned.  “Our scout teams will love that.”  He said, one hand covering his eyes.  “Actually, that might not be sarcasm.  They can have more points to put on their scoreboard.”  He sighed and straightened up in his seat.  “Sorry about the Underburbs though.  Oh, I dunno if I said it, but thanks for saving Daniel’s life there.”

Cam shifted awkwardly, one wing pulling up to partially cover her face.  “It wasn’t important.  And the downtime gave my fortune sense time to recover.  I was leaning on it extensively for tracing antimemetic effects.  It isn’t good for that.”

”Speaking of.”  James started double checking his gear and the skulljack file he had with his equipped spell list.  “My alarm that says our slips are both open now just went off.  You want to send out a pulse and see if we need to reposition?”

The girl sitting next to him nodded once, something in her shifting mood transforming her in a flash from someone engaged in conversation to an agent on assignment.  “Yes.  I’ll be using about ten percent of my reserve.  If we do need to enter either of the residential structures, or worse, if this is a smokescreen, then I’d like to hold the rest back for that.”  She explained as she closed her eyes and focused.

James watched her out of the corner of his eye.  He always loved watching people do magic, but sometimes it wasn’t very flashy.  Cam’s fortune sense was one of those.  She didn’t even really need to close her eyes, as far as he knew, and he kind of wondered if she was just stealing a moment of being enveloped by the sound of rain.

But even without any gestures or words or an accompanying light show, James could almost feel the presence of some kind of effect.  Maybe it was just mundane observation sharpened by a lot of his time around magic in its various forms.  Maybe he was seeing the way Cam tilted her head, listening to something that wasn’t a real sound with a very deliberate movement, or the tension in her shoulders that seemed to pair with her noticing important things.  But those could have had normal causes, beyond magic.  So maybe what he was noticing was something else.  A little curl of vapor that he wasn’t supposed to be able to see, an atonal note of a song that he couldn’t hear.  Something just outside of his own senses as Cam made use of her own magically enhanced perception.

He wasn’t sure he was supposed to be able to feel anything.  But this wasn’t the time to be concerned about it.

”I have good news.”  Cam told him with a flat and unamused voice that said quite the opposite.

”Hit me, I can take it.”  James laughed.

She shook her head, and made contact with his skulljack, the handshake protocol flashing by in an instant before she sent him an updated map of their region.  “There are potentially personally valuable encounters in these six buildings.  An organizationally valuable encounter on this vector.  Something of emotionally charmed significance on this side of the forested park territory.  And the vague potential for opportunity with thirty different people within a half mile radius.”

”Cam what does your fortune sense do?”  James asked with a scrunched up frown.

”At the moment, more than I asked it to.”  She complained.  “Dense cities and nebulous targets are both bad for it.  And it does not help with stakeouts quite so much as I would like.”

James pursed his lips and examined the map.  “Okay.  If we can somehow secure curbside parking… here…” he tagged a street, “then we have a good view of four of your personal points.”

”It could very well be the organization benefit.  Recruiting another sister would be…”

”Nope.”  James shook his head and flicked his eyes toward the rearview mirror.  “That spot correlates to the two cop cars having a chat in that side street.  Check the reflection in the big plate window  Which makes me worry that it’s pillar shit.  Let’s skip that one.”

Cam’s mouth twitched again as she followed his line of sight and found that she was sitting on the wrong side of the car.  “And this is how the sense works.”  She told him by way of explanation.  “Paring down options until I can focus more of the reserve on a single thing for the most information possible.  It pairs well with my breacher sense when entering a building where there will be resistance.”

”Let’s hope it’s in the hotel then, and that the concierge getting fussy counts.”  James said as he started the car.  “Now, wanna place bets on how many times we’ll have to circle the block before I find somewhere to park that’s even a little bit where we want?”

”One.  Because after that, I am teleporting someone’s car away.”  Cam said.

James laughed.  But only because he was pretty sure she didn’t mean it.

They had plenty of time to get in position, just going off when Cam’s tracking of her sister normally had her here.  And as the sun gave up for the night and the rain intensified, the environment of a hundred blended lights illuminating rainy streets full of people headed to a thousand different places felt like somewhere it was easy to vanish into and lie in wait.

Which gave James plenty of time to wish he had a fortune sense too.

It was a great night for a stakeout.  And he hadn’t even had to bribe Cam with a doughnut yet to break her normal stoicism.

That was his backup plan for if they got bored of sitting in a car later.  It was also, coincidentally, his backup plan for dealing with her sister if she remembered that time he got her shot and thrown out of a tenth story window.

James just kind of assumed each iteration of Cam had the same tastes, and his secret weapon was knowing what dessert they all liked.