“He died as he lived. Not dying of poison.” - Blue, Failed Assassinations -

_____

Nate met up with Myles at the airport. Everything about the interaction was normal, mundane even. Same, too, for the drive in the rental car from the airport to the nicest possible hotel in the small city closest to their target. They had small pleasantries to exchange, but otherwise didn’t talk much. They intentionally, especially, did not talk about anything weird.

Nate checked them into the hotel, a business booking under an actual company registered out of Iowa. Four rooms, two sets of two adjoining suites. He paid, politely thanked the front desk, and sent Myles up to relax while he got everyone else.

Then Nate took a walk, found a nearby park with a strange name that would be hard to mistake for anything else, ensured there was no one nearby, and sent a single bland text message.

A minute and a half later, with three pops of air and ripples of space, twelve people snapped into existence around Nate, holding hands or other applicable limbs in three groups.

“-Actually *like* flying!” Deb was in the middle of a sentence, unbroken by their teleport across hundreds of miles. “We could have had a nice flight!”

“You would have me in overhead storage.” Her partner, Frequency-Of-Sunlight, retorted. The camraconda making a cogent argument. “I checked. Airlines do not allow large animals.” Her words got a snicker from Bill, the larger man towering nearby and trying not to loom too much.

“They’d make an exception.” Deb crossed her arms and huffed, the pout on her face powerful enough that Nate figured she would have had at least a thirty percent chance of it actually working on a flight attendant trying to tell her that she couldn’t take up a whole seat with a camraconda.

“I thought this was the professional team.” Mars grumbled. It wasn’t that he was annoyed to be here or anything - far from it, he’d only been part of this bizarre world for a couple months and he felt a kind of buzzing excitement to have the chance to encounter another dungeon. It was more that, accounting for time zones, there was basically no way to get out of a this trip without missing at least some sleep. And he hadn’t had any coffee.

“This is the professional team.” Dave looked uncomfortable this far removed from his emotional support dragon. “That’s why we sent Momo to Australia.”

“Can we please focus?” Nate looked like he had a headache. The group of humans and camracondas instantly dropped their conversations, and focused on him, Knife-In-Fangs stopping a sentence on being stored in a carry-on halfway through his point

As soon as he had their attention, he gave them the quick briefing. “Alright, we’ve got a hotel a short walk from here. Frequency, you *are* going in a duffel bag to get there, and we’re going to keep the weird shit to a minimum. Got it? We can talk more once we’re out of the open.”

Some grumbling and swearing to get the four camracondas in the team into their carry bags, and one group walk later, they wasted no time getting everyone’s luggage put away, and the group collected in one of the suites to discuss their next move.

“So, here’s the problem.” Nate took the lead with a firm charisma that he didn’t tend to show in the day to day of working at the Lair. “We are aware of the location, and have a possible access path, but we don’t know the specifics of this dungeon. Also, as a major complication, we *know* the Old Gun has been in the area.” He glanced at the camraconda unit of their team. “That’s why you’re here, specifically. So if we need to get out of her range, we can at least slow her down enough to write on the telepads.” He paused, then shifted back. “Now, as far as good news, we *do* know where we’re looking, and have confirmation there’s at least some weird shit going on. Myles?”

The young man, unaccustomed to public speaking, or really speaking to other people much at all, withered as everyone turned to him. “Um… yes?”

“Recap what you saw.” Nate prompted.

“Oh, right!” Myles cleared his throat, and went over the incident, up to the point that he had to leave the area to get medical attention for his phone exploding.

“Okay, so, that’s absolutely a dungeon.” Dave leaned back against the side of the couch. “But I’m worried about the other interlopers.”

“Can we be called interlopers, too?” The other rogue in the room, a short Japanese American girl who, as near as Myles could tell, changed her name every time she met new people, and today was going by Maki, asked.

Dave shook his head before anyone could respond. “You’re all aspirants until proven otherwise.” He told her.

“The ranking system is nerdy and dumb.” Deb, an official knight, cut in. “And also not relevant to what Dave said, which is that yeah, there’s at *least* five groups that’re orbiting this place.”

“Five?” Her girlfriend inquired. “Count please.”

“Well, us. The Old Gun. The woman who went in in the first place, who obviously isn’t on the ‘same team’ as the Old Gun. And now, these other two.” She counted off on her fingers. “And I’m sure we could deal with the human ones, if it’s one at a time, but even with all of us here, I don’t think I trust our ability to take them all at once.” Her voice was tired, but not actually all that anxious about the prospect of open fighting.

Nate made a mental note to himself to check in on if Deb had been seeing one of the Order’s therapists; her brush with near death was the kind of thing that would rattle anyone, and while everyone reacted to trauma like that differently, he had a sad feeling how Deb was handing it.

“The biggest problem I can think of is that they have a three day head start on us.” Dave commented.

“Who?”

“Anyone. The Old Gun especially, but also anyone watching Hall… huh. I already forgot her name. Is anyone else having trouble with that?” Dave narrowed his eyes in concentration, but didn’t sound overly concerned. Too much exposure to memetic effects had dulled him to the terror of the process.

A lot of people in the room said yes, though.

“Great. So that’s something to watch out for. Same general pattern as the Office, you think?” Deb thought for a second. “Everyone text someone right now, just in case. Breadcrumb protocol.” Phones came out.

“Do we know if Halliston ever came out of the dungeon?” Mars asked, checking the woman’s name from notes. “Because if so, we could just ask her what it’s like, and shortcut that problem.”

“Security risk.” Nate shook his head, trying not to crack a smile as the two rogues in the room echoed his words. “We cannot, under any circumstances, risk the Old Gun knowing we’re around like that.”

“What about… notes, or maps?” He persisted. “Even if she’s working with someone else, she’d still have a copy of her maps somewhere, right? I do.” The engineer commented.

“You do?” Dave raised an eyebrow. “Like, of the Office? Is that allowed?”

“I mean, I’m not selling them to the highest bidder.” Mars looked embarrassed, glancing around for anyone who was on his side here. “And how else am I supposed to… have… a map. That I don’t really use for anything.”

Nate rubbed his forehead. “This was supposed to be the professional group.” He uttered.

“I think the fact that it *is* the professional group is worse.” Dave reminded him.

“Okay. So. Her house is probably also under surveillance.” Nate tried to salvage this meeting. “We are *not* going to make contact with the trigger happy idiots that’re watching her, but we could stand to know more about them. Myles, you and… Mika… are on scout duty there. You need any assistance with planning that out?” Nate legitimately asked. That was something nice about working with the Order; questions were almost *never* veiled insults.

“I’m good.” The two rogue aspirants said together, before sharing a glance. “We’re good.” Maki followed up, as Myles nodded.

“Creepy. Good for you.” Nate turned back to the rest of the group. “Mars, if you can, I’d like a more complete report on Dow Chemicals from an information perspective. Turnover rates, if you can find them, any comments from past employees. People post cryptic bullshit online all the time, and I bet if anyone knows about the dungeon, *someone* made a quip on Glassdoor that we’ll recognize.” The young man pushed his hair off his glasses and nodded, already tapping on the laptop he had sitting on the end table. “Dave, you’re with me. We’re going to go check out the building. You can do that voodoo that you and the old delvers do where you guess what it does and then get unnervingly close to the answer.”

“I don’t do that.” Dave shook his head. “James does that. Alanna did that too. Oh! We could get Momo in here! She can do that, but in the opposite direction.”

“You mean she will be wrong.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s digital voice was somehow dryer than normal.

“Yes.”

“Then no.” The camraconda, not having eyes to roll, adapted the gesture to making a loop with her whole head.

“I still want to see the building.” Nate cut off their banter. “If for no other reason than to scout entrances. We will *not* be going into *any* dungeon until we have a good picture of the local landscape, physical and social, okay?”

Everyone agreed, reluctantly or not.

“I’m okay with that, actually.” Myles said to his new spy partner. “I don’t want to miss a chance to actually see a dungeon for the first time.”

Everyone stopped, and turned to him.

“What?” Deb and Frequency-Of-Sunlight said together.

“How?” Dave asked, looking confused.

Nate just nodded. *This* was about the level of professionalism he expected.

Poor Myles just ducked his head, shrinking away from the room full of attention. “I don’t know!” He yelped. “Isn’t that normal?”

“Normal’s fucked off a long time ago.” Nate told him. “Alright. Everyone who doesn’t have an assignment, get some rest or some food. We’ll have more to do later. Matt, Bill, you two were quiet this whole time, you got any questions?”

“I don’t think I’m deep enough into this to have questions yet.” Bill said. “But I’m here for whatever you need me for.”

“I’m the hired muscle!” Matt reminded everyone. It wasn’t… strictly inaccurate. The guy had been recruited to the Response program, and loaned out to them by Harvey to get more experience with “the weird stuff” at his own request. He was one of those fringe cases; people who didn’t *clash* with the Order’s ethos, but maybe didn’t internalize it quite all the way yet. Harvey had several people like that, and the idea was to put them on rotation for adventures like this one. Get them some exposure to the people and ideas of the rest of the Order, as well as some mental preparation for in case something went horribly wrong that *wasn’t* normal, and that they’d need people with powers to combat. Only time would tell if the plan worked out. But for now, they at least had someone who knew more martial arts than an orb rank, and was willing to fight with them.

“Alright.” Nate nodded at the two of them, then at everyone else. “Everyone remember; no public magic, no teleporting into anywhere you didn’t recently teleport out of, let’s not leave camera records or any suspicion that we were here, alright? Good. Now. Let’s get to work.”

_____

Momo and Jamie’s flight landed in Sydney around noon, local time. Where this was on their personal clocks was largely irrelevant, at least for Momo. For the high school age intern to the Order who, by his own admission, hadn’t been out of his home state in his life, the time was probably a little harder to get used to.

Not that Momo actually got used to it, she just didn’t sleep much.

Alice Springs didn’t have a major airport, but it did have a private airstrip nearby, mostly for hobbyists, and the Adelaide airport had irregular short hop flights out there. Irregular because you either had to plan in advance, or get lucky and hitch a ride. Momo had been in favor of rolling the dice, and going with the adventure, because of course she was. Karen had booked them a charter flight without asking. Since the alternative to a flight was a thousand mile long road trip that would likely rival James and Anesh’s vacation, Momo didn’t complain too much. At least, not while Karen was within earshot.

The experience of landing in Australia was surreal. Back home, it was still just barely clawing out of a dark, wet winter. Here, the noon sun beat down through the wide glass windows of the airport, warming the air in an endless battle with the air conditioning. Bright yellow-white, the kind of sun that you always thought was neutral until you found yourself with the grey-blue of winter and realized you missed it.

“The air smells different!” The kid next to Momo, struggling to shift his backpack into a comfortable position, exclaimed with a goofy grin.

She considered saying something snarky, but honestly, she’d been thinking the same thing. There was a dry, almost electric tang on the taste of the air, even here inside a building. It was *different*. To so suddenly be dunked into an environment that wasn’t home. So Momo contained her snark, admitting that maybe she was just jealous that the kid four or five years younger than she was had so much height over her head.

And after they struggled to navigate through socially distancing crowds to meet their pilot north, and eventually emerged onto the tarmac, the smell took on the aspect of a hundred foreign plants, just as the temperature soared.

“So! Whatcha in town for?” Their pilot called back to them as they stashed their limited luggage under the seats of the little four-seater prop plane. She was an older lady, with a bun of grey hair and hands that looked like they’d spent fifty years perfecting the controls of the craft.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Jamie, not wanting to cross any lines about secrecy, went with a simple answer that he’d been provided by JP with, in case anyone asked. “Visiting family!” He called back up front.

At the same time that Momo was saying “Wizard bullshit!”

Their pilot glanced back at them. Took in Momo’s explosive grin, visible around the edges of her mask, and the kid trying to subtly remind the other passenger that she wasn’t supposed to just *say that*. Nodded one, looked back at her console, and radioed the control tower to request permission to take off.

A few hours later, after a friendly conversation at altitude where the pilot pointed failed to ask any follow up questions about wizardry, the two of them hopped out of the back of the plane, tipped their pilot, and realized this wasn’t the kind of airport that had rental cars available.

Half an hour wait for the nearest ride share to get to them, during which time Jaimie kept asking her questions about the totems she made, taking advantage of their time away from people to exercise his persistent curiosity. Then another half hour drive to their hotel, during which time Momo regretted her choice to not wear shorts when the day started.

They’d booked the entire top floor of one of the local hotels. Weirdly, this small town in the middle of nowhere actually had multiple hotels; near enough to a couple of very popular public parks that they did decent tourism business. The pandemic must have hit them hard, as the front desk had seemed almost *excited* to have a group of their size come through.

Momo, despite her commitment to never sleeping again, had walked into their main suite, and promptly collapsed on a couch. Jaime, her loyal assistant, had texted everyone else with the verified address and room numbers

A minute later, a crowd of people blinked into existence around them with a series of pressure pops.

“Oh hey, the air smells different!” Sarah exclaimed with a girlish smile. “Hey guys. How was the flight?”

“We could have just teleported!” Momo screamed into the couch cushion.

“It was nice.” Jaimie told her, noncommittally. “The pilot that brought us here was cool.”

“I would have flown!” Ethan puffed up his chest as he dragged a heavy bag out of the middle of the room.

Everyone ignored him. Alex, feeling like the only adult in the room briefly, directed Morgan and Color-Of-Dawn over to the side of the room so they could sort the luggage out. Behind the couch, Chevoy clutched her backpack to her chest, the engineer seeming unsure if she was thrilled by her first teleport, or terrified. And in the kitchen, Texture-Of-Barkdust partook of the human custom that James had told him about, and started taking snacks out of the minibar.

“Momo!” Sarah shook her friend awake. “Sorry to bother you, you look really tired, but just a quick update. JP was gonna come with us, but he got hurt doing whatever he was doing with our friendly neighborhood fed, so our little group is rounded out by this guy. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to a Hispanic man with a swimmer’s build and a lopsided grin paired with a sleeveless shirt that showed off thick arms. “This is Diego. He’s like JP.”

“Personally, or professionally.” Momo muttered, slumping her face back into the rough pillow of the couch.

“Both.” Sarah answered with a dry humor.

“Yay.” Momo muttered.

“Um, excuse me.” Morgan slid up, shoulders slumped and eyes cast down, like he was still worried to even ask questions. “Should we check in with the front desk or something?” He asked Sarah.

“Nah.” Sarah waved it off. “I’m sure they won’t notice. And if they do, I bet people teleport in all the time. We paid for our rooms, it’ll be fine.”

Elizabeth propped herself up on the back of the couch and looked down at Momo. “Do you ever get mad that no one notices all your magic?” She asked.

“That people are teleporting everywhere is *probably* not true…” Diego drummed his fingers on his bicep, arms crossed as he considered the statement. His voice was a little airier than Momo had expected from someone with that much muscle. “Do people teleport everywhere?” He asked, more amused than concerned

“Wouldn’t you, if you could?” Momo challenged.

“Yes. That’s why I did. The teleporting is *very choice*.” He nodded. “Maybe next time you’d like to teleport with me?” He waggled thick eyebrows at Momo, who wasn’t really looking. Elizebeth noticed, though, and tensed slightly on the back of the couch.

“Oh, he is like JP.” Momo grumbled. She pushed herself up, and once sitting, called out to the room that had started to hum with a handful of separate conversations. “Alright, minions! Listen up!” They did, quieting down as she rubbed at her the corner of an eye. “First off, welcome to Australia! I hope you all have your permission slips for this field trip.”

“I do!” Jaimie answered literally, pulling out a wallet to dig out a literal piece of paper his parents had signed.

The adult population stared at him for a second, before Momo shook her head and continued. “Yes, thank you. Anyone else? Liz? Actually wait, hang on! Liz, does Karen know you’re here?” She demanded.

“Probably?” The girl blushed as the attention landed on her. “I told her I was gonna hang out with you for a bit?”

“Oh my god.” Momo buried her face in her hands. “She’s going to kill me.”

“No no, it’s fine! I’ll… text her!” Liz promised, pulling out a phone.

Momo nodded, and got back on track while that social disaster unfolded. “Alright. Welcome to Australia, again. So. Here’s the deal. Somewhere, within or nearby this small town, is a dungeon. If, *if*, we are *very lucky*, then it’s going to be in one of the twenty art galleries in the downtown area. So! We’re gonna take today to relax, get settled in, get some food, and then tomorrow, we’re going to start poking around and seeing if we can get any signs around here.”

“And when we find nothing?” Texture-Of-Barkdust asked, mouthful of peanuts not impeding their speech at all.

“I figure we give it a week?” Momo shrugged. “Half of us have that weirdness sense. And I figure that wandering around town with camracondas asking wizard questions will at least be a starting point for flushing out anyone who has a starting point.” She looked over at the two new people who had shocked looks on their face. “Jamie, Diego, you guys…?”

“Yeah,” Diego jumped in, “you’re just going to… no stealth at all?” He looked at the camracondas. “You don’t think that’ll be a problem?”

“I mean, the town’s gotten a lot less violent in the last five years, according to the stats.” Sarah offered. “They should be safe? People might think they’re art?”

“These are not reassuring excuses.” Color-Of-Dawn chimed in.

“I’m still not really sure why I’m here at all.” Morgan reminded everyone. “It’s cool, though, but… um…”

“It’ll be an adventure. And we needed to bring someone so we could tell Daniel there was a full roster.” Alex told him.

“Why wouldn’t you want to bring Daniel?!” Morgan looked puzzled, in an almost angry way. “He’s gonna be way better at this than me!”

“Because,” Momo told him, “when Daniel and Pathfinder map a way to something, there’s *always* misadventures. *Always*. It’s statistically unlikely, and it feels like they’re bending causality. And no one wants fuckin’ misadventures in the outback where half the wildlife is venomous.”

“...Yeah, okay.” Morgan shook his head and blinked. “Yeah! That makes perfect sense. Sorry! I’ll do my best!”

“Good attitude.” Sarah gave him a thumbs up.

“So, do we know what kind of dungeon we’re looking for?” Alex asked. “Like, is it carnivorous?”

“What?” “What.” “*What*!?”

“Well, we’ve seen three or four so far, right? And only one of them actively tries to kill people. So, you know. ‘Carnivore’ for the murder dungeons, ‘herbivore’ for the emotional subsistence ones like the attic?” Alex explained. “I know it needs work…”

“It does, but it’s a good starting point. Anyway, the missing persons rate here is surprisingly low, given that a major hobby is camping in the local wilderness preserve.” Momo explained. “So it’s probably either very hidden, or very nonhostile. That said, our early detection source *did* flag it as potentially lethal, so… conflicting information!”

“Yay.” Sarah did a mock cheer.

“It’s worth remembering,” Alex pointed out, “that we’re supposed to *find* the thing, not specifically *go inside it*. We don’t need to walk into the murder dungeon, and we probably shouldn’t since we aren’t, like, the most survive-y people in the Order?”

“We’re scouts, yes. Anyway!” Momo said. “I’m tired from a massive flight, and next time we just teleport directly to the hotel! I’m gonna nap, everyone split up the rooms and get settled, we’ll go get a group dinner later and kick this adventure off right.”

“Thank you. Am not hungry.” Texture-Of-Barkdust mentioned, consuming the last of the small bags of nuts from the minibar.

“Um…” Elizabeth brought a hand up to her mouth, trying to think of what to say.

“Your mom’s the accountant, right?” Diego asked her in a conspiratorial voice.

“Yeah?”

“Good news!” He said with a small wiggle of his eyebrows. “She’s not going to be as mad at you!”

“This is a good start.” Momo decided, sliding back down on the couch until she was horizontal again. “Got a good feeling about this one.”

____

“So, we’ve got the building mostly to ourselves for, like, two weeks?” Nikhail asked Reed leaning back with crossed arms and raised eyebrows.

The two of them were in the basement. Reed had lost track of which one. It was the basement that had previously contained a shooting range, which had since been dismantled, and was now being retrofitted into living space.

They needed more and more living space, it turned out. Even if it was just temporary rooms for on-call Response agents and the camraconda population. A few camracondas had chosen to move out of the Lair, to live with humans they’d formed a close bond with; none of them had chosen to live on their own so far. And many members of Response, especially the newer recruits, didn’t live it as a lifestyle, but instead showed up for shifts and left when they were done.

But it all added up. So the extra space was welcome, and would make for a fine batch of quarters when it was fully remodeled. Which, sadly for everyone who cared, meant they were going to have to stop firing guns down here.

“It’s not exactly ‘to ourselves’.” Reed corrected his assistant and fellow mad scientist. “JP’s here somewhere, there’s still about thirty camracondas in the building, and the Response teams, and the rest of Research, and…”

“Alright, alright!” Nik waved him off, watching as Reed stacked duplicated shield bracers into a cardboard box and then handed it to him. “But we could get away with *more* than normal, right?”

“The last time we ‘got away with’ anything, I lost an organ.” Reed griped. He was still in quite a bit of pain from that, though he did his best not to show it. It was hard, though, when he had to bend down to start clearing the lower part of the table they were in the process of moving. Research was, essentially, the warehouse of the Order. Though it might be more appropriate to say they were the attic closet; constantly filling up with random clutter and trying to figure out if it was earth shattering or silly.

So they made use of a lot of tables.

There was a joke that basically any flat surface, left unattended in the Lair for long enough, would act as a magnet for stuff Research didn’t want to throw out or convert to orbs, but really didn’t know where to put, exactly.

“Oh hey!” Reed said, trying to cover up the wince of pain in his voice. “The crown thing! I’ve been looking for this.” He rolled over from where he was knelt down to the bottom shelf of the workbench, holding up a wire and wood circlet. “How long has this been down here?”

“I… don’t know? What’s it do?”

Reed settled it on his head, and mentally scanned the information that it provided his mind.

[Inner Spirit Reignition - 14 - 19,984 / 20,000 -1:2:44:10 (26)]

“Yup!” He exclaimed, plucking it off and looking at it more closely. “This is the one that has the effect that increases uses of blue orbs!”

Nik plucked it out of his hand and added it to the box of Status Quo equipment. “Well, *that* sounds like something we can duplicate and abuse forever, huh?” He nodded to himself. “Any other SQ stuff down there for this box?”

“Uh… maybe. Also I think that one still ranks lower than the cancer cure, unless we finds blue that does something similar.” Reed replied, not moving from his spot on the floor.

“Probably. Also what do you mean ‘maybe’? The bench isn’t that large.”

“I mean, there’s the weird hexagon thing down here.” Reed said. “Does that count?”

“It doesn’t level up, it doesn’t go in the box. Come on, let’s get this and the pile of red orbs over to the Research side, and then come back for the rest.” Nik tapped his foot impatiently, shifting his grip on the badly weighted cardboard.

Reed awkwardly cleared his throat, looking at the concrete floor he was propping himself up on. “Um.. can I get a hand up?” He asked. “I didn’t realize… how much this would hurt, when I got down here.”

Nikhail swore, setting the box to the floor with a clattering thump as he knelt down next to Reed to offer an arm and shoulder for the supposedly intelligent head of Research to use to stand. “You were supposed to *take breaks if you needed them!* Reed, you need to take better care of yourself!”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re missing roughly five pounds of human parts that humans are supposed to have!”

“Yeah, but most of it doesn’t hurt that much.”

“...And the parts that *do* hurt?!”

“Hurt a lot.” Reed’s voice came out with a kind of hollow exhaustion. “Anyway. Grab the nightmare hexagon and let’s go.”

Nik didn’t look like he wanted to stop supporting Reed, but the other guy pushed away and seemed to be standing okay on his own. Although Nik made sure to shift the heavier box out of his reach while he grabbed the last Status Quo artifact.

“Um… hey, what did this thing do again?” He asked Reed as he looked at the orangish hexagonal polyhedron and very blatantly didn’t touch it. “I remember it had a bunch of ID badges in it, probably from agents, right? But… what else? Did we ever test that?”

“Uh, it didn’t do anything, even to people who did test it with their own IDs. Why?” Reed asked, shifting the lighter burden he’d grabbed himself into a better position that didn’t stress his bad arm.

“Because part of it’s sorta glowing and I’m suspicious.” Nik said.

Reed dropped his box back to the table, and leaned down to check, arm supporting himself against the upper surface.

Indeed, the object was glowing. Reed nodded. Okay, good. Verification out of the way. Now. *Why* was it glowing, and was that bad for everyone?

It was one of the things they’d recovered from Status Quo’s HQ. Possibly the most important thing, not that they’d know. For all that James and Anesh complained constantly about the lack of health potions or bags of holding, the Research division knew that the true tragedy was that no one had found an identify scroll.

About a foot and a half in diameter, with a series of perfectly hexagonal sides. The object was made of some kind of pale orange resin or something; they hadn’t wanted to damage it to test the substance, and really, it didn’t matter much when dealing with magical artifacts, near as anyone knew. When they’d found it, the indented facets on each face had been filled with ID badges of people who, even through the infoweapon that had been set off, they could match to a lot of Status Quo agents.

What the object did, no one knew. They’d assumed it was responsible for the agent’s unnatural durability, but if it was, they’d never been able to trigger it. And so, it had been shuffled from shelf to shelf with the other Status Quo artifacts for months now. Mostly ignored.

And now it was glowing. Well, a few of the hex surfaces were glowing. A kind of luminescent green, pale and almost unnoticeable unless you looked at it.

“Huh.” Reed said. “Okay, don’t touch that.”

“Should we… try the ID thing again?” Nikhail asked with a kind of anxious concern.

“That seems… bad?” Reed replied. He pulled himself back up with a sigh and a stab of pain in his side. “It looks like it’s moving.”

“Yeah, it kind of looks like little larva or something.” Nik said, still on his knees and trying to get as close to the thing as possible for a better look. “Like...oh.”

“Oh?”

Nik settled back on his heels. “Is this a hive?” He asked. “Like, maybe the reason we couldn’t figure out what it ‘does’ is that it isn’t dungeontech. It’s something more alive than that.”

“Okay, that’s awful. Two questions.” Reed ticked off on his fingers. “What sort of nightmare bugs is it growing, and what do we do with it?” Then he added a third. “And also, why was it full of IDs? Did they… grow… the things...into agents?”

He and Nik shared a grimace, and at the same time, both said “Creepy.” Before Nik shook off the disgust and tried to come up with answers. “I mean, we could just break it. But also, what if it grows something friendly?”

“If they were holding onto it, we know it was at least friendly to *them*.” Reed countered. “That doesn’t mean it’ll like *us*.”

“True. Still doesn’t answer why they had their IDs in there.” He looked down at the object, the suspected hive, again. “I’m gonna try it.” Nik said, pulling out a wallet from his back pocket.

“I feel like I should be armed for this and maybe you should *wait* and…” Reed sighed. “Alright, you did it. Okay. Cool. Are you dead?”

Nikhail looked up from where he’d dropped his driver’s license into one of the glowing hexes. “Nope! Nothing happened. Except that it seems like it likes my ID.” He cleared his throat. “And I can’t pull it back out. And… I needed that, probably.”

“Well, good news. You get to be under observation from now until we figure out what that was.” Reed shook his head. “Why is everyone so goddamn reckless?!” He threw up his good arm in exasperation. “Did we all learn nothing from that time we blew a hole in the parking lot?”

“I think the others learned more than me. Davis learned a lot! He actually spoke up in a meeting!” Nik cheerfully replied. “Anyway. This *seems* safe to carry, so let’s get this stuff moved, and then I’ll go sit patiently while everyone asks me questions I cannot answer yet.”

“James doesn’t have to deal with this.” Reed grumbled. “James gets a vacation. Do *I* get a vacation? No. I get stupidly reckless minions.”

He complained all the way until the elevator doors opened on another basement, and they finally cleared away the last of the clutter. By that point, he’d come to terms with the fact that he was more worried than angry, but the complaining had a momentum of its own by then, and it seemed like it fit his growing image of the grumpy old scientist a bit better in front of the rest of the division.

Nevermind that he was younger than a third of them. Or that he wasn’t really much of a scientist at all, and more of a manager that kept people directed at projects that mattered and wrote the reports they were too excited to get to.

What was important was that most days, they discovered something, and no one got hurt.

“Nik did something stupid.” Reed announced to the room as they walked in and dropped their boxes over by a half assembled IKEA shelf. “Someone keep an eye on him, and if he starts trying to gnaw anyone’s arm off, remember that you stop zombies by taking out the brain.”

If he was lucky, today would be like most days. Reed sighed, and started looking around for the cobbled together series of vision enhancements that he and Momo had made a month ago, and that served as the closest thing they had to a decent identification system. Hopefully, Nik would be okay with the massive invasion of privacy.

_____

James, in fact, did not have to deal with that. Reed was absolutely correct.

He and Anesh had woken up too late for the hotel’s probably not very good breakfast service. So they’d gone to an IHOP, in the time honored tradition of late morning road trips since the dawn of pancakes. The waitress had given some weird looks to Ganesh and Rufus as the dungeon life sat on the table either drinking a small dish of coffee, or trying to help Anesh solve a crossword, respectively. But they’d tipped well, and there’d been no problems.

Then they’d drive for six hundred miles, and spent at least three hours of that trip debating about fanfiction.

They spent a bit of time, when they had actual serious energy and mental states that were a little more awake, talking about making infomorphs.

“I think we’ve been missing something a bit.” James had told Anesh. “I almost feel like I understand it, but I don’t really know why I feel like something is just a bit off.”

“What’s your theory so far?”

“Okay, remember when Research tried to make an infomorph?”

“Curious, yes. It was a disaster. We almost caused real problems.”

“Right. So, what’s different, between Curious, and, say...Pathfinder? Or Planner? Or that one that died off after a while that kept me from using weaponry?”

“I mean, all the other ones you listed didn’t start with names, for one thing.” Anesh shrugged from the driver’s seat that he was currently occupying. “What’re you getting at?”

James, slumped forward in his seat so his head was right against the air vents, made an affirmative grunt. “Mostly that.” He said. “They started out… small? Narrow, maybe. Not *simple*, because they weren’t simple concepts. They were actually incredibly complex and relied on layered levels of context. Path was just ‘a map’. Planner was a compulsion to frame the Office as a job and be on time on certain days. But Curious? Curious was just… that. A word, a broad idea, and every piece of baggage that came with it, all at once.”

“So, you think the way to make an infomorph-“

“Safely, anyway.”

“-Safely make an infomorph, is to create something that’s so narrow it’s kind of meaningless, and then just let it grow into what it’s gonna be?” Anesh asked.

James shrugged, rolling his head around back to the seat cushion so he could look into the backseat via the rear view mirror. “I mean… yeah? Yeah. Same thing as with the physical life, right? We don’t make tools. We make family. And...maybe, like, that’s why Pendragon is the way she is. Why she was willing to fly into the depths of Officium Mundi to pull Dave out. Because no one told her she had to.”

“This *might* be you projecting.” Anesh pointed out. “I know for a fact you only have long hair because every time someone tells you that you should cut it, you refuse out of spite and the timer resets.”

“Bah!” James exclaimed, but did not argue with what he knew was the truth. “But I do think I’m right.” He said, quieter.

“Well,” Anesh offered, “we’ve got a couple purples in the back. We could try, when we stop for the night.”

“Maybe!” James said. “For now… I’m gonna nap. I didn’t sleep well, and there’s nothing to see here but cows.”

“God, yeah, so many cows.” Anesh shook his head. “Enjoy your nap.” He said, and turned the music up a couple notches.

Just a normal day for the two of them. Halfway to where they’re heading.