“Look upward, and share the wonders I’ve seen.” -John Chriton, Farscape-

James walked through the doors of Officium Mundi like he was puppeting his own strings. Arms limp by his side, legs moving in intentionally deliberate steps that were almost stomps, eyes not really focused on anything. He trailed behind even the new members of the Order that were gawking at their first time.

It was about twenty feet in that Sarah dropped back and pressed her shoulder up against his in a familiar motion. “Hey.” She said. “You doing okay?”

“Eh.” James replied listlessly. “I’ll be fine.”

“Not even close to what I asked.” She spoke softly, her voice still compassionate, but missing a lot of the bombast she usually used. “What’s up?”

James half-shrugged. “Just depression bullshit.” He replied. “Making it hard, as always. Kinda worse today than normal.”

“I…” Sarah considered her words. “I didn’t think you’d be depressed today?” She questioned, worried eyebrows tilted upward.

“What, because it’s an adventure?” James thought about making a rude noise, but didn’t make the effort. “That’s not how depression works.” He said, and was a little amused that Sarah echoed the words with him.

“I mean, now that you mention it, it is pretty fun watching the new kids see the place for the first time.” Sarah gave a hesitant grin that faltered as James just kept unfocused eyes staring forward. “But seriously, is there anything I can do to help?”

“Nope.” James tried to say it with a cheerful tone, but got sarcasm by accident instead. “It’s…” He sighed, “it’s not about being ‘happy’, it’s the physically present symptoms of depression making it difficult to walk, or taste things, or even for my eyes to dilate properly. It’s a lot of little things that make life hard. And the worst part is, I *know* I should be in a good mood today. But I’m not. So we can add ‘angry, mostly at myself’ on top of the pile of problems.”

Sarah leaned to the side, wrapping an arm around James’ midsection in a sideways hug. “I’m sorry, buddy. I’d hoped that potion JP got you would’ve helped more. Or at all. Want me to give you a few hours of naptime? I can just sleep through tonight’s dungeon adventures.”

“No thanks.” James managed a grin. “And I… didn’t take the potion.”

“What?” Sarah stepped back, confused. She looked over James’ face, and realized that he was serious. “What.” She glared, crossing her arms.

“There’s a lot of things…”

James didn’t get much farther than that before Sarah cut him off. “Oh, did you not duplicate it yet?”

“No, we did. It doesn’t copy properly. The other potions do, tho…”

“So you’re running tests on it somehow.”

James turned his head and shot Sarah a look. “No. We’ve done a chemical analysis on it, among other things. It’s inert, nontoxic, all sorts of benign…”

“So you’re waiting to…”

This time James interrupted her, glowering at his friend. “It appears to be exactly what it says. A one use, probably safe, cure-all-depression potion. There is no reason for me to have not taken it. Happy?”

Sarah wasn’t. Because even when James admitted that, there was something left unsaid. Because there *was* a reason he wasn’t shotgunning the potion like it was an energy drink during finals season.

She stared at her friend, who despite everything that had happened was still *her* best friend, searching his eyes for some hint as to what was going on. Sarah managed about three seconds of eye contact before James flinched away and stared at the ground, guilty expression on his face.

“Oh!” Sarah exclaimed. And then, a second later, softer, “Oh. You’re afraid.”

“I mean, the potion looks like an angry dragon corpse glowing with anti-light shoved into a bottle, so you can’t really blame me.” James defended himself.

Sarah shook her head. “No, not like that. You know what I mean.” She reached out and grabbed James’ hand, folding his fingers between her own. “You’re afraid of losing who you are.”

James looked up, staring at her with a hollow look in his eyes. “*Can* you blame me?” He asked. “I’ve been this way my whole life. And yeah, it got better when we plucked you out of the dungeon, and I learned what was going on. But even though it’s getting worse again, it’s still… part of me. It feels weird to just get rid of it because it’s inconvenient.”

“Buddy...” Sarah started, and then shook her head and corrected. “James. It’s not ‘inconvenient’. You’re standing here, in the lobby of a thousand mile long office, full of wish granting magic, and you can barely keep yourself standing. That isn’t an inconvenience, that’s a *problem*. What’s that quote you repeat at least once a month from Eclipse Phase?”

“The body is hardware, upgrade. The mind is software, reprogram. The…” James replied mostly on instinct.

“Yeah, that. We all change. It happens. It doesn’t mean you stop being you when you take control of what change is happening.”

James registered Sarah’s hands around his own, and weakly returned her grip. “Have you always been this smart?” He asked with as much of a grin as he could.

“Yes.” She nodded imperiously. “That’s why we’re friends. I’m the brains of the operation.”

“I thought you were the heart.” James quipped, some energy seeping through the grim veil around his thoughts.

“Yes, that too.” Sarah nodded more vigorously now. “I am a lot of parts of the operation!”

James smiled, and squeezed her hand one last time. “Okay. Feeling a bit better now. I’ll… I’ll talk to Anesh tonight about the potion. Can we go risk our lives now? It’s easier to move when it’s life or death.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yeah. It’s how I can drive while I’m like this.”

“You absolutely should not drive while you are like this.” Sarah admonished. “But yes, let’s catch up. Want me to do the introduction speech tonight?”

James felt a wave of relief wash over him. “*Please*” He thanked her.

They moved into the dungeon, and for a little while, he walked without having to think too hard about it, limbs light and mind in motion. It wouldn’t last forever, but it was something, and it would make it easier to fight back against the black cloud in his head for the rest of the night.

Which was good, James thought. Because they had a *lot* to do tonight.

_____

“Okay, here’s the deal.” James spoke to a group of five delvers, some new, some old. Anesh had found him a minute ago, presumably prompted by Sarah, and had gotten James to down a half-thermos of the mental sharpening coffee he’d brought. It had left him feeling way more capable of taking on the dungeon, and interacting with other humans, even if it didn’t entirely kill the physical symptoms of his depression like the light not being right or the coffee tasting like cough syrup. “We’re testing this out, and you’re our first group. Don’t grimace at me, Ethan, we already know it’s safe!”

“I just don’t wanna be a lab rat!” The young man retorted, giving a dramatic shake of his head that flipped his growing blonde hair around. “It’s not cool, man!”

“You’re a test group *for the program*, not for the magic itself!” James bit back. “So. When you open and read these books, you’re going to start a Lesson from one of the other dungeons. It’ll be an academic topic, and you’re expected to learn about it. Fill up the bar, and you get a bonus, okay?” Nods from everyone, even Ethan. “Now here’s the thing. These copies, they work like copied orbs. They give you the same Lesson. And I mean *literally the same Lesson*. You’re all going to have to learn the same hundred points of knowledge to progress, got it? That means, most likely, that you’ll want to schedule a time to meet up somewhere and have a study group. Is everyone gonna be okay with that, or does anyone need to find a replacement?”

The five selected delvers shook their heads eagerly. Every one of them had a slightly different look of excitement on their face. For Ethan, it was something bordering on hero worship. For Mark and Bill, the older blue collar workers had a look that was more about just being happy to be part of something. Though that look from them might also just be awe at the dungeon they’d been invited into for the first time. Tyrone looked excited to be back in the magic saddle after months dealing with some family thing out of state. And Dave just looked like he was thrilled to be getting a textbook, finally.

Either way, no one objected.

“Alright.” James handed over the five battered copies of what looked like a slightly singed version of one of those Penguin Classic books. “Hope you all get along, because you’re stuck with each other if you ever want this to go anywhere.”

Thirty seconds later, the first official study group of the Order had a shared Lesson in [Drama : 0/100].

“Woah. That feels a lot different than the balls.” Mark commented. And then, the group started talking to each other, while James just stepped back and watched them interact. Talk about what they already knew, what they could learn, and what their general plan was. Also, no small amount of speculation on what upgrade choices they might have.

James wondered to himself how that would play out, pun mildly intended. How much would this little group focus on their Lesson, how much would they specialize, how far would they push the soft cap before they shifted to something else? Would the Order have a whole theater troupe before too long? Would someone be asking him for an extra basement to put on stage performances in sometime next month?

He honestly kinda hoped so. Also it would let them test the diminishing returns of that basement orb.

_____

“I’ve been having a hard time getting used to something, and I think it’s causing problems.” James confided in Anesh.

The two of them were five kilometers deep into the dungeon, and were currently snapping locks into place around the two bikes they’d ridden to get here on an efficient timeline. The expansive hallway that James and Alanna had once explored to find an ocean of printer ink at the end was still mostly in place, despite the dungeon changing its structure more often now; but it had a lot more obstacles in it they had to contend with, which had made their ride mostly a quiet one.

Now, though, James got a chance to talk. They’d ridden as far as they could before the ground began to be overtaken by the pen cap ‘sand’ of the beach, and there was no way they could ride over that safely. The exercise had woken him up a bit more, and he was feeling pretty okay.

“Is this about the potion? Because I noticed…”

“Nope!” James cut him off. And then, a second later, he cleared his throat and relented. “Okay, it could be. And I probably should talk to you about that soon. But no, this is different.”

“Is this gonna be about how pants are named? Because it took me long enough to get used to the word ‘pants’ not meaning ‘underwear’, and…”

“Anesh please.” James lightly chuckled. “We’re going to get into a fight before I finish my thing.”

Anesh looked around at where they’d parked. The cubicle ahead and to their left was half crumbled into the sandy substance that filled the gaps between the pen lids on the shores of the ink ocean, but the other ones around them were still intact. Or, as intact as deeper dungeon cubicles ever were. All different heights, even as they were all identically grey in color. Some had overhangs or crenellations around their upper parts, one had a ‘door’ that would require crawling. Normal stuff, really.

“I thought this place was safe.” Anesh suspiciously asked.

“We’re in a dungeon.”

“James, so far, one and a half of the dungeons we’ve found have been safe.”

James counted on his fingers as he tried to get his impaired brain to work through that. “Is this the half? Or… no, this is the half. Okay, yeah, fair. My point was there’s monsters everywhere and the beach shellaxies are actually very angry all the time.”

“I’d be angry too if I had sand in my coolant fan.” Anesh nodded. “So anyway. Trouble wrapping your head around…?”

The way his partner reintroduced the thing James had been saying made him almost sigh in relief. Anesh did it without thinking, but it took a ton of the anxiety off of James’ mind. “Right. It’s the concept of testing to destruction.”

“I’m tangentially familiar with it, mostly because we have tech people. Why’s it a problem?” Anesh asked as the two of them went back and forth checking each other’s armor, and unhooking their weapons from the bikes. They kept talking as they started to sweep the cubicles around where they’d parked; no sense not making sure there wasn’t something spiky and angry at their exit point.

“The idea is, you see how long something works under stressful conditions, until it stops working.” James didn’t have to raise his voice much to be heard through the walls; the Office was quiet here, a zone of dead air between the hum of the air conditioners and the crash of the ink waves. “It’s good for getting to know the limits of things, and also figure out where you need to work on improving. Buuuuuut…”

“But a lot of our fun stuff is, uh… hang on.” From the other side of the cubicle wall, there was a crunch, and then a pained yelp from Anesh before another wet crack of a noise. A portion of the dividing wall cracked slightly and bowed in toward James’ head, and he suppressed a snicker as he continued rifling through the filing cabinet before rising back to his feet, just as Anesh continued. “Sorry. Ow, wanker tried to ambush me. I got two ranks in the etiquette of breakups, though. That’s… worrying.”

“Don’t read too far into it.” James told him. “I once got skill points in fellation, and that… oh wait.”

“Oh my god.” Anesh gasped, and a second later James had to duck as a rubber band ball was lobbed over the wall between them, bouncing wildly before James caught it and set it onto the desk. “The *point* is that our stuff is all irreplaceable magic, right?”

“Right.” James said, heading to the cubicle across the hall. This one looked unoccupied, which was something that didn’t happen often, surprisingly. Just an empty desk and a single chair. And a lone picture frame sitting on the desk, ornate gold filigree around its edge. James had a weird feeling about it, so he added it to his pack to check later, before double checking there were not strider nests in the drawers of the desk. “And now, like, we can make copies of small stuff, but not… a lot?”

“We’ve more or less maximized volume, yeah.” Anesh rejoined James by their bikes. “And we’re kinda limited on how much mana coffee we can bring in.”

“Why aren’t we just teleporting to the towers?”

“Oh! I figured you’d be up on this. The dungeon erases our ‘landing pad’ markings, and we can’t name the towers, so it’s very hard to get to them properly. Usually the telepads just don’t do anything.” Anesh grabbed the spear he’d leaned up against the bikes and tipped it over his shoulder. “So, testing?” He asked, getting a grip on his weapon as James took a drink of water.

The spear might have seemed out of place, but this one had an electromagnet and a pretty big battery in it. It was for if they ran into another maimframe, or anything else that gave a damn about having its hard drive scrambled.

“Oh yeah. We don’t take stuff as far as it can go to see where it stops. And we need to, if we ever want to maximize things. But that kinda means using the Lair or somewhere else we control as a test ground, and it’s weird to me? Like, for real, we should be windmill slamming basement orbs until it stops giving us basements. Because we need to know how many basements we can get. We should be building a lineup of blue orbs that give good absorb powers. We should be getting everyone to do accelerated strength training with those fuckin weird potions JP bought for us. Which *by the way*, feel really weird to drink.”

“You’ve tried one?”

“I’ve tried several.” James replied. “I’m trying to figure out what the limits are. Get around my own biases and mental hangups.”

Anesh nodded. “This is different from how we’ve been doing things. What changed?”

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“Nothing.” James said. “Not a fucking thing.” He realized suddenly that he was snarling, and brought his expression back under control before Anesh noticed as the two of them started to proceed down the increasingly crunchy hallway on foot.

They passed by a water cooler, tank cracked open and half full of sandy dust. The cubicle walls around them became more and more crumbled as they walked. At first, it was just a little erosion around the tops, but it quickly turned into whole chunks having fallen off, dusty puffs of coarse sand drifting out of decayed holes in the walls as they passed by. Anesh stayed quiet, waiting for James to find the words he wanted to use; keeping his eyes on the mostly empty cubicles around them. There just wasn’t much furniture or features around the beach, but that wasn’t any reason to drop your guard.

Eventually, they passed a demarcation line. The walls around them rapidly shifted now, from towering fifteen foot overhangs to normal height cubicles to short waist high walls, and eventually to nothing more than stumbling blocks in the sand. Plant life began to creep in on those surfaces, before eventually resigning itself to growing out of the ground itself; ivy in highlighter yellow and blue and green, vegetation tipped with a hundred blades. The ground underfoot had no sign of carpet anymore, being completely overtaken by rocky pen caps and sandy drifts.

Ahead of the duo, miles of beach stretched around a bay of black inky liquid. The dull roar of waves constantly overlapping and slapping against the shore filled their ears, and the distant breeze from some monolithic AC unit in the far off horizon tugged at their clothes where the cloth poked out from under the armor.

Anesh took a deep breath, and instantly remembered that the ocean here was made of printer ink.

By the time he’d finished coughing, and had pulled out and put on a filter mask, James had decided on what he wanted to say. “You know how normal we are?” He rhetorically asked. He didn’t give Anesh time to answer. “We’re so normal, the fucking FBI wants to be friends with us.” James commented flatly. “We hang out, talking about building a better world, but even though *we’ve* changed, even though *we’re* better, faster, stronger, and more magic, what have we actually *done*?” James looked over at his boyfriend, eyes dully pleading. “We haven’t built anything, we haven’t broken anything, we’re just doing what we always do. Delve this place and say we’ll do something nice for the world once we’re ‘better’. And it’s just too easy for me to get so angry about it.” James started stalking down the sand, taking a left from where they’d emerged out of the line of cubes and leaving a trail of boot prints behind.

“Okay,” Anesh said, catching up to his partner, “so, first off, shut the fuck up?” He opened with, and then grit his teeth as he heard the words his brain had formulated. But still, he powered through. “You, personally, are responsible for something like a hundred people being alive who otherwise wouldn’t? Maybe a thousand more if you count the half a high school that’d be turned into compost if not for you. On top of that, you’ve got the camracondas, which is another batch of fifty people, and you’re more or less responsible for the, like, two or three thousand people who’ve been assisted by the response team at this point?”

“Eh.” James shrugged. “It’s more than that. Though it’s not like those people would have all died.”

“Shut up. Again. I know you’re feeling like shit today, and I know you know that you’re so much more than what your brain is letting you focus on. But you don’t get to pretend you haven’t done anything. Or that we *aren’t* doing anything! Probably the only reason the FBI isn’t actively trying to shoot you, me, and everyone else in the Order, is because we have, against all odds, managed to keep the skulljacks secret up to this point! And if you’re itching for a fight, I personally promise that at least one police union is going to try to have you, or maybe Harvey, assassinated within a year. Does that make you feel better?”

“Somehow, inexplicably.” James blinked, and was only a little surprised to find his eyes wet. “I just feel useless. I feel like the world is so huge, and we can’t do anything about it, magic or no.”

Anesh wrapped his arms around James from behind, stopping his forward walk for a minute as he tried to give the best armored hug he could. “I know.” He said. “Seriously, I know. But we’ll just keep trying, until something gives, okay?”

“Ok…” James started to say, with a shaky grin. He marshelled some of his mental strength, and began to pull himself together.

Which is when the sand to their right, toward the black ocean of ink, exploded upward in a fountain of plastic and dust, and a shellaxy the size of a pony burst through the debris to lunge at them.

James reacted so fast he wasn’t even sure what he was doing until a split second after it had happened. As the rectangular hardware maw approached, he shrugged hard, pushing Anesh off him and back a couple steps, and then without missing a beat, slammed his hands together on the pebbled metallic sides of the creature that had literally jumped at the chance to eat his face.

It was too big to arrest all its forward momentum, but James was stronger than he looked. And, as a bonus, he’d been working out; alchemically packing *months* of exercise into a couple of days. Still, instead of trying to hold the overweight aggressive computer in place, he just pivoted and body slammed it into the beach with a spray of grit. In that moment, the mask suddenly seemed like the smartest idea he’d ever had, even if some of the sand did spray into his eye.

James rolled away from the creature’s thrashing cords and chomping teeth, and started to draw his handgun, when Anesh interjected. His partner had stepped back and fetched his spear from where he’d planted it in the sand, and now, he thrust forward as hard as possible with the weapon braced under his armored arm. Still, ‘as hard as possible’ wasn’t quite enough to do more than poke a half an inch of the bladed point into the metallic chitin of the shellaxy, which instantly started thrashing to try to lunge at Anesh next. But the young man stayed calm, kept the point in their enemy, and flicked a switch on the haft of the spear.

The internal battery connected, cycled, and dumped as much power as possible into the electromagnet built into the spear’s point. There wasn’t any fanfare, just a clearly artificial popping sound, the feeling of something off in the air, and the shellaxy going suddenly limp before toppling over.

“Good job.” James told Anesh, standing up and dusting himself off. “I feel better now!” He added.

“I’m almost certain that’s adrenaline.” Anesh was gasping for breath, while James looked perfectly collected. “Also, piss.”

“What?”

“It died mostly intact. The orb dropped inside it.” Anesh complained.

James almost laughed, but chose to just pat Anesh on the shoulder instead. “It’s fine. I’ll get this one. You okay?”

“I’m good. Let’s grab the orb, and get to the tree, yeah?”

With a noise of agreement, James got to work.

They didn’t get ambushed the rest of the way to the decision tree they were here to visit. Though they did see *something* breach the waves a couple miles out from the shore. It didn’t look like a whale, but it clearly had similar dimensions, even from this distance. Anesh caught James’ attention and pointed as the creature rose out of the waves around where a flock of paper was gliding over the ocean, and the two of them watched as the thing repeatedly rose and fell below the waves.

Then, just as they were about to turn away, a hundred black lines exploded out of it like needles, spearing dozens of the pieces of paper that flew around it. Even from this far away, they could see its back open up to reveal some kind of fleshy interior, which the paper birds fell into by the score, before the creature sealed itself back up and dove again, this time not resurfacing.

“Well that was fucked up.” James stated.

“New plan. Let’s never go in the water.” Anesh added.

“It’s ink.”

“Even more reason!” Anesh threw his free hand into the air, turning to continue, this time with a bit more of an angry stalk to his walk, toward the decision tree.

The rates had gotten worse. They traded a hundred yellow orbs for eight purples, resigned to the bad deal, and headed back. There was still plenty of time left tonight, and they planned to copy and test all of these for armory candidates before the delve was over.

The monitor lizards waved goodbye to them in unison as they headed back away from the tree to their bikes. The small green and clear plastic creatures shifting themselves back and forth in unison, undoubtedly planning to gorge themselves on the extortionate price they’d extracted from the delvers.

“Do you ever feel like bringing everyone here for a vacation day?” James asked as they left.

Anesh wiped furiously at a splatter of ink that had gotten onto his cheek. “No.” He said. “This place sucks.”

_____

[+3 Skill Ranks : Drive - Car - Honda Civic]

[+2 Skill Ranks : Programming - C++]

[+1 Skill Rank : Fishing]

[+1 Skill Rank : History - Metallurgy - South America]

[+1 Skill Rank : Construction - Home - Wall]

James nodded to himself as he cracked the large yellow orb, the feeling of new knowledge filling the corners of his mind both familiar and yet perpetually novel.

He was helping Momo and Daniel with a run to one of the water cooler caves. Bill, the more burly and less tired of the two more mature men who’d come in with them, was also tagging along, for experience. Things were going pretty well so far, honestly. Which was how James was choosing to phrase the fact that they’d only gotten into a few life or death fights.

Also, he’d been *very clear* on the fact that Daniel was not allowed to use Pathfinder’s ability to seek out a goal tonight. He was *tired*, and while he was starting to pull his mental fortress back together, James was well aware that he had *zero* patience for ‘misadventure’ on this delve.

They’d just ambushed a group of stuffed shirts that had been blocking the way forward. Where possible, James liked to avoid being the aggressor in fights around here, but the stuffed shirts were hostile basically a hundred percent of the time. The fight had been mostly one sided, with Bill shaking off his anxiety at an actual battle just in time to rescue Daniel from having his throat crushed.

At the end of it, they had three yellow globes, and three piles of shredded cardstock.

The team had moved on, while debating who got the orbs. Which had led to a long tangential conversation about the difference between green and yellow Life. Bill had some questions, and the rest of them had some wild speculation.

“The main difference,” Momo had said, “is that the dungeon *owns* green orb Life. As long as, you know, it’s here. It seems to not work outside, since the camracondas are cool in the Lair.”

“Wait, they’re green?” Daniel asked, eyebrows up.

“Oh yeah, absolutely.” Momo nodded. “We’re not really sure what the variations in life-types actually are, though, right James?” She waited for an answering nod before continuing. “Yellows act like, well… wildlife. Greens are the agents of the dungeon, but *sometimes* they leave the dungeon, and keep working for it. We’re pretty sure things like the iLipedes are red life, but we haven’t actually killed any so we don’t know, and I’m not about to either! Those things are nice. Oh, and then informorphs, which are purple. Right Path?” Momo elbowed the space around Daniel in a friendly way.

“Not even close.” Daniel informed her, a shimmering orange mirage flaring to life over his right shoulder briefly, showing off Pathfinder’s physical position.

“Well, whatever.” Momo grumbled. “Anyway, stuffed shirts are weird.”

“Weird how?” Bill asked.

“Weird because they’re the only one that we’ve seen that drop *either* a green or yellow.” James answered. “Also, Momo didn’t say this, but we don’t know how the red life is different at all from yellow. Or how it relates to the dungeon, in terms of taking orders or not.”

“Yeah, these ones are yellow. So, they’re… skills, right?” Bill asked, tossing one up and down, the melon sized ball not looking quite so large in his huge hand. “Do you copy these? Like the ones you gave to us when we signed on?”

“Oh, hell no.” James shook his head. “It’d be cool, obviously, if we found one that gives a big batch of points in something useful. But they’re *huge*. Fitting one of those in the projector basically means you’re giving up copying twenty smaller orbs. And with how many people we have now, the smaller ones are just more useful, almost every time.”

This led to more questions about where the life came from. Everyone had to admit that they didn’t really know. In theory, they were aware that you could use a yellow to basically create life in anything that didn’t already have it. But the Order had been holding back on going too nuts on that. Life needed to eat, and oftentimes what it needed, even if it could supplement its diet with mundane materials, was more orbs.

The dungeon *probably* made orbs, somehow. Life in here, almost certainly, made more life. Striders often had that kind of look like they’d been put together a little haphazardly. It was entirely possible their nests were all started by one strider with a pile of orbs, a desire for family, and some determination. No one had ever witnessed it directly, but they all knew that yellow life could make more yellow life. After all, Rufus had made Ganesh, so long ago.

“Yeah, the paper pusher thing confuses the shit out of me.” James admitted. “Like, do the green ones make subservient yellow ones? Or are they both just made for different reasons? And what determines it?” He shrugged. “The green ones seem to be able to take over other dungeon life they come across; they always whip up strider swarms around them.”

“Maybe it’s a promotion?” Daniel asked.

“What?”

“Like, the yellow ones get promoted to managers. And then they become green orbs?” He sheepishly suggested. “I mean, a lot of stuff here doesn’t map perfectly to actually working in an office, but, like.. these things are shaped like employees?”

“Huh.” James made a motion somewhere between a nod and a shrug. “I mean, it’s the best theory so far!” He said. “It’s probably something way more sinister, though. Oh! Here’s a fucking weird thing! These guys all have names!”

Momo jerked back, dropping the orb she’d been doing basketball tricks with. “Wait, what?” She asked, letting it fall into their cart.

“Oh yeah! We’ve scanned a dozen or so of them with an iLipede. The paper pusher orbs always read as people’s names.” James let out a long breath of air. “Man, the first time that happened, I actually threw up? The names are apparently random though. They don’t map to anyone who’s actually gone missing or died, even though coincidence is gonna make at least one name line up sometimes.”

“So…” After a few more comments and questions chased the conversation in familiar circles, Bill asked something most new people eventually asked. “What do the paper pushers… do?”

“Lots of things.” James gave a small nod to a passing strider walking on the cubicle walls. “Sometimes they’re delivering mail or messing with the computers. The real ones, not the shellaxies. Sometimes, the green ones go out into the real world and try to kill people. No idea why they do that, but we’re getting good at stopping them. Sometimes they’re acting like fantasy novel bandits, blocking paths with walls of rolling chairs and ambushing us. Other times, they sit at desks and stare straight ahead, and don’t move.”

“So, they’re not people?” Bill seemed concerned.

“I think they’re like everything else here. They could be people, or they could be… I mean, ‘monsters’, even though I don’t like the word. They’re individuals.”

“Oh!” Momo chimed in. “Sometimes they wear faces! Like, the masks. They wear the masks like faces. And it doesn’t look any different until they tear them off and throw them at you.”

“Masks? The sticky note things?” Bill asked.

“Yup. We never came up with a clever name for them.” Momo lamented. “Got any suggestions?”

“Nah, I’m not a word guy.” Bill replied. “Besides, I dunno what they do.”

“Try to eat your face, mostly.”

Daniel sheepishly added his voice to a lull in conversation. “In my head, I call them the Masks of Amontillado.”

“Oh, that’s fuckin great.” Momo beamed at him, giving a light clap with her fingertips. “James? Got anything?”

“I was gonna suggest ‘flayer mache’, but while that’s easier to say, Daniel’s is kicking my ass by virtue of being actually on theme, and them not being paper mache at all.” James sketched a bow toward the other delver. “Good job. You’re officially one of us now.”

“Wait, *that’s* the requirement?!” Momo exclaimed in horror, even as Daniel looked like he was legitimately trying to hold back a tearful smile. “I’m so bad at puns! No, no, it’s fine! I’ll name…”

Whatever bad idea Momo was going to propose was shot down by the cluster of feral striders that had been attracted by the yelling, throwing themselves off the tops of cubicles and aiming for skulls and vital organs.

Even with Bill letting out a high pitched yelp and tumbling backward at the surprise, the team cleaned up the ambush in a couple minutes.

[+1 Skill Rank : Fabrication - Lightbulbs]

[+1 Skill Rank : Math - Statistics]

The group moved on, occasionally having to stop to find an alternate path for the carts they were hauling with them, but mostly making constant progress toward the cave they were looking for. James lapsed into silence, mostly just keeping an eye on the skies above them, and letting Momo field questions from the new guy. When they eventually decided to draw straws for who got the orbs, he won one, and that was when they’d lightened the cart slightly.

When they reached the water cooler cave, the operation went off without a hitch. The pinpricks, still unfortunately magnetic, were swept up and pinned in a corner while the group quietly pulled more silver and magic programming devices out of the walls.

Okay, mostly quietly. Bill kept trying to make up mining songs to pass the time. And then ‘mostly quietly’ became ‘raucously’ after Momo got over being nervous and started trying to join in. It turned out, Momo was a lot of things, and ‘on key’ was not one of them.

On the way out, James stopped to take a few pictures on his phone. One of the tanks, the crystalline growths out of the ground and walls that seemed to slowly fill with pure water, wasn’t full of water. It was near the entrance, and he hadn’t spotted it on the way in, and now that he saw it as they passed by to leave, he had an instant spike of anxiety about the singing they’d been doing.

Because it wasn’t empty, it was full of something. Something red and black that twisted around itself in slow spirals, like the storms of Jupiter.

The tank was only half full, but as James paused to frown at it and make a record, just in case someone else had seen this before, he saw another drop of liquid fall from the ceiling and slide perfectly into the mouth of the tank, adding to the substance.

Was it something growing? Some kind of poison waiting to erupt? Was it alive, and watching them? It looked *mean*, was this the dungeon finally being done with their presence?

“What’s that?” Bill asked, nudging James out of his anxious speculation.

“Nothing good, I’m betting.” James sighed, pocketing his phone. Well, not *his* phone. But a phone. He’d learned his lesson after the third time he had to replace his phone due to unforeseen combat damage. But he still wanted a way to take photographs and use the wifi in here, so the Order had run off a bunch of copies of a mid grade smartphone that they used for Officium Mundi operations, and nothing else. “Alright, let’s go. Time for the hard part.”

“Hauling all this back?”

“Yuuuuup.” James nodded at the older man as they ascended the ramp to where Daniel and Momo were struggling to tetris the pieces into the carts.

“Aw, toughen up kid!” Bill somehow managed to sound friendly and not condescending when calling James ‘kid’. “Manual labor builds character. And *muscles*!” He flexed his furred bicep with a toothy grin.

His smile had gaps in it, but his logic didn’t. So James grinned back. “Yeah, yeah. The fact that this is paying for half your salaries helps, too.”

“Your salary too, eh?” Bill nudged him again.

“James doesn’t get paid.” Daniel cut in, swearing slightly as he dropped one of the larger pieces and nicked his finger open. “Fuck, ow! Hand me the bandaids?”

“I’m busy!” Momo growled back, pushing with both arms and her whole body to roll a seventy pound hunk of silver into the side of the cart.

Bill stepped over and added a hand to her effort, letting Momo direct while he applied a professional amount of force, easily sliding the material into a securely wedged position. “Why doesn’t he get paid?” He whispered to Momo and Daniel. “Is he being punished for something?”

“What? No. I don’t get paid either.” Momo shrugged.

“Yeah, and Karen complains about it every time I turn in receipts to her.” Daniel told the girl in the silver studded armor.

Momo made a rude noise with her lips. “I don’t need cash. He doesn’t either. There’s no reason to care, right?”

“Stop talking about my finances, and let’s get moving!” James called over to them. He had a boot placed on a tipped over shellaxy that had wandered into the clearing around the cave while the three of them had talked. It had tried to bite him, but it was kinda lethargic about it, and James wasn’t gonna put in the physical effort to kill something that didn’t seem to be really trying to do the same to him. “Come on! I’m feeling better, and I want to test all the purples Anesh duplicated to see if any of them break society!”

“Is he always like this?” Bill asked his coworkers about their employer.

“Pretty much.” Daniel was still smiling. Sure, their leader was a bit weird. But he was too, after all. He was one of them.

_____

Anesh had worked his magic, which was actually the magic of anyone who could follow directions on the bag of ritual coffee, and had a duplicate run of all the purple orbs collected that day. Eight from him and James, two from Alex’s group that had caught a paper pusher pack off guard and managed to get the orbs off them before they got turned into hostile memes.

He hadn’t wasted space, and so had filled the remainder of the case with vials of the exercise maximization potion. Those things were shockingly powerful, for anyone willing to put in the work. And Anesh wasn’t just saying that because his boyfriend had developed two months worth of muscle tone overnight.

It wasn’t like he *liked* abs or anything. But if James *had* abs, Anesh wasn’t going to complain. He just… didn’t need to finish this line of thought.

The ten copied orbs were distributed and tested, the Order collectively searching for anything they would want to make a thousand more of and spread around their organization and maybe the general population when possible.

At some point in the evening, Anesh had been made aware that the Old Gun had been spotted again, and he was intensely aware of just how outclassed they were by that thing. They needed every purple orb they could get, every possible edge. And everyone was largely in agreement about that. There was a grim calculus to their explorations these days, even as they all took part in the wonder of seeing new parts of the Office or finding new incredible magic. There was an enemy out there, one that was at least partially aware of them, and could kill them all without trying if she wanted to. They needed to be *ready*. Or at least, prepared to do some damage on the way out.

Anesh himself only took one orb, getting something entirely reasonable and not at all useful for fighting a god.

[Shell Upgraded : Radiation Resistance - 120 Rads / Day Negated]

It put him further on the road to being an exceptional space-based life form. But it wasn’t instantly useful. Still, he noted that orb, and saved the original.

James got given two, as a way of Anesh trying to cheer him up. Nevermind that he’d arrived in good cheer anyway; it was important to do nice things for people you cared about. What he’d gotten had been a little more… bombastic.

[Shell Upgraded : -1 Cancer / Year]

[Shell Upgraded : Elbow Joint - Range of Motion - +26 degrees]

James was excited over the combat potential of the second one in hand to hand fights. *Everyone else*, especially including James, were excited over the prospect of… no more cancer. Ever.

They didn’t have wikipedia in here, but they did have a medical student, and some roughly remembered statistics informed everyone that this probably was a first step on the path to true biological immortality.

James got a lot more excited after hearing that. Not that he wasn’t before, but if before his excitement was sitting at a seven out of ten, now it was firmly clocked in a nice chunky ‘six thousand’.

The best part was, they could run off sixty copies of this orb per run. And while there were hundreds of thousands of cancer patients in the world, and they’d never be able to get to them all, a person only had to crack the orb *once* to be given a near perfect immunity to one of the worst scourges humanity faced. Bit by bit, they could immunize everyone, if they moved fast enough.

They’d never be fast *enough*, but they could focus on this. They could do it. Change the world. Forever.

Compared to that bombshell, the upgrades to lactose tolerance or vision range or water storage or improved fertility just *didn’t seem that important*.

Anesh noted them all down anyway, though. Especially the one Ethan got that simply said :

[Shell Upgraded : -1 Broke Bone / Month]

They were absolutely going to test that one to destruction.

Probably not on Ethan. Though with how excited he was, it was possible he’d already triggered the damn thing kicking the floor.

____

The Order had, in the last hour of delve time, congregated around the tower they used as a home base. Small conversations, tired smiles, and an overall feeling of accomplishment filled the air. It had been, all things considered, a good day.

They used their spare time before they moved out to clean armor, stock equipment properly, and just lounge around on ‘couches’ made of lines of padded chairs. Or, for a few people, to leave early and head to the bathrooms. The time dilation would mean that the rest of the group would catch up to them almost instantly from their perspective, but it was still a way of calling dibs, and not spending another hour with a full bladder.

But as the minutes ticked by, there was still one person missing. Simon still hadn’t arrived back at the tower.

A quick roster check showed that he’d made the choice to go off hunting on his own tonight. A proposition that was so absurdly dangerous in a building that had hostile camracondas in it, that James had wasted several minutes swearing. Creatively, and loudly.

The Order had begun organizing rapid search parties, throwing noise and caution to the wind, and was prepared to storm down the path their missing hunter had taken, when the young man had limped back into the fortifications.

His armor had been savaged, chunks snapped off in some spots, melted away in small dots in others. He was bleeding from a gash on his forehead, and clearly favoring his left leg. If he’d taken a backpack, or a weapon, he’d left it in the Office somewhere.

Behind him, he led two serpent shaped forms on leashes of paracord. A pair of camracondas, one, James noticed, wearing the missing backpack over its head like a hood. The other one with a suit jacket and ample duct tape forming a similar mask.

Neither of the puppet camracondas could see, and therefore use their immobilizing power. They looked, it seemed, about as battered as Simon himself.

“I…” Simon started dryly, before coughing repeatedly until someone got him a bottle of water. He thanked them, and tried again. “I dunno… if they’re prisoners, or refugees, or what. But you’re probably gonna want to telepad them into the secure room.” He said.

He almost took a seat, but Sarah calling out a five minute warning got everyone moving, *fast*. They still didn’t want to be trying out what it was like to survive in here for a week, cut off from the outside world.

“We’ll talk about this later.” James said. “For now, let’s go. Everyone move! Come on, orderly lines, you know the drill! We’ve practiced this!”

They’d practiced it over and over. Once out, they had about twenty minutes before the building’s camera system would come back on. So far, somehow, mostly thanks to the pandemic, they continued to avoid being detected by the management or ownership of James’ old workplace, and tonight wasn’t the night they wanted to break that streak.

Twenty delvers and two hopefully future liberated camracondas left the infinite expanse of Officium Mundi and stepped into the ‘real’ world of Earth.

It had been a good night.