“Let me tell you something about Clark Kent. Clark Kent is kind, he is decent, he makes time to visit his parents, and when he finishes the coffee he always makes a fresh pot. Sure, when there's a giant robot attacking he's always suddenly not around, but he is a damn good investigative reporter who has taken on civic corruption, Intergang, even Lexcorp. He is a devoted husband, loving father and the fastest typist I have ever seen. If Clark Kent is a critique of the human race, I'll take that. I'll take that any day.” -Three_Of_Swords, regarding Kill Bill’s Superman monologue-
_____
“I knew this was gonna happen.” Alanna grumbled as she stood behind Anesh, arms folded, staring out at the old pumpkin patch. And also at the hundreds of bugs, about half of whom were making some kind of warbling howl together.
Alanna wasn’t in a good mood. She couldn’t be in a good fucking mood, because she was probably the most powerful human empath on the planet. Her head hurt, her eyes felt sore, and she still ached from being shot, even if it hadn’t worked to kill her. And being able to shut out or dial back how much she picked up from other people was somewhat overshadowed by the new information that seemingly every one of these new bug friends were empaths too. Receiver and broadcaster.
If it weren’t for the fact that their collective screaming howl was deeply cathartic in a way that none of them understood or could ever explain, Alanna might actually have gone completely fucking mad in the first wave of it. Instead, she’d held onto her senses, and was now mostly past being actively influenced. A lot of the Order without empath experience - which was everyone that wasn’t her - wasn’t. They were still slightly reeling from the incoming sensation, even if it was muted compared to what Alanna got. Half the Order’s forces had needed to either pull back to Nate’s secondary perimeter sites, or leave altogether.
“You knew that about three hundred and fifty nonhuman sophonts were going to turn out to be mental radio towers that send out nightmares on a frequency humans -especially you - can pick up, and that it would be because of something James did, and that it also would be the better possible outcome?” Anesh demanded, perhaps a little harsher than he intended. He was marking dots on the sketched map of the farm that he had on his clipboard, comparing distances with where he saw certain patterns out on the field. “Sorry.” He said, after he placed a couple more dots, and had a chance to think about how he sounded. “That was…”
“I mean, I knew it would be James.” Alanna said. She was starting to feel a bit better, but it was mostly because she and Anesh were using their relationstick link, and she was dumping a lot of her awareness into him. Deafening herself slightly to the ongoing event. “I didn’t know it would be all the other shit you said.”
Anesh clicked his tongue. “If you had, we’d need to talk about whatever prophecy power you’d picked up, and how you aren’t allowed to use it.”
“What, really?”
“Quite so, I’m afraid. We had a delver majority vote on it last week. No use of causality breaking magic if we can help it. That includes prophecy.”
Alanna frowned. “What if it’s suitably cryptic?”
“I’m not gonna litigate mucking with time with you.” Anesh felt his head start to ache, in the spot directly over his left eye. “Do we have a potion for headaches?”
“To cause one? Yeah, there’s… oh, you mean… no.” Alanna shook her head as Anesh bit back an unintended chuckle. “I mean, we have ibuprofen?” She unclipped a pocket on the harness she had over her armor, and offered Anesh a small wrapped packet.
He eyed the wrapped pills curiously, glancing away from his clipboard to do it. “Why do you have this?”
Alanna shrugged. “I dunno, I had an extra tiny pocket on here, and I used to wear the webbing when I’m doing Response stuff. It’s good to have something like this; a lot of times people are only being shitty because they’re in pain, and it’s not an instant fix, but it does help to be able to offer it.” She shrugged again. “Since I don’t go out in armor anymore, I built a different loadout that doesn’t use all the tiny pouches. But I didn’t take the stuff out of this one.”
“Well, thanks.” Anesh said, already tearing the little packet open with his teeth. “Does it sound like they’re quieting down?”
It did, somewhat. The distant sounds of voices finding themselves for the first time couldn’t hold forever. All of the creatures had been entirely silent up until this moment, and the way many of them rapidly tapered off, screams and wails ending in hoarse hacking sounds, it seemed like they hadn’t ever used their voices before at all. And now the chained howl was dying down, the warbling shared notes of it reduced to single voices that struggled to keep going.
“Oof. That was… something.” Alanna murmured. “Can I have my eyes back?”
“Sure.” Anesh pushed back across their link, and felt Alanna on the other end take back what was hers. “Okay. Look at this.” He held out his map to her.
“What am I looking at?”
“Spots in the dirt where there’s stuff growing.” Anesh said, looking out over the field with eyes that no longer worked quite so well. It wasn’t that his vision had gone blurry, it was more that he just felt a little slower, a little dumber maybe. He’d been leaning on his pattern recognition skill as well as his own sharp mind, and those weren’t gone, but Alanna’s perception had really helped. “And before you ask, I mean where things are growing that they weren’t before.”
“Spots around where there are clusters of the bugs when they started yelling, right?” Alanna said slowly.
“I think they’re magic.” Anesh said softly. “I mean, we knew they were probably magic. But like… like camraconda magic. I started taking it for granted that camracondas can freeze people by looking at them. Or that ratroaches have magic blood. Or… I don’t know… that the things like Fredrick probably do something.”
“The stuff animals?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Sarah thinks they soften damage around them.” Alanna said. “Just a little. It’s kinda weird. Don’t spread it around, honestly. We can have a discussion about it when they’re actually adults.” She sighed. “Also ratroach blood?”
Anesh shrugged himself. “It’s corrosive to most things but it’s neither an acid nor a base. All their fluids are.”
“Uh huh.” Alanna waggled her eyebrows at her boyfriend.
“Please don’t make it weird.” Anesh shook his head at her. “So they’re magic in two ways.” He said. “And… I don’t know how to…” He trailed off, looking over Alanna’s shoulder. She turned her head and they both watched as Arrush and Ethan came running up. “News?” Anesh asked quietly.
For one, Arrush was the one not panting, the extra lung chambers he had grown making him easily able to outpace the human. He knew it wouldn’t last, but at this point in his weird biological cycle, he felt almost invincible. “James is alive, but hurt himself.”
“Of course he did.” “Yeah, okay.” Anesh and Alanna spoke at the same time.
Arrush continued like he hadn’t heard them, his multitude of eyes splitting between their faces in concern at their seeming lack of care. “Deb is watching him. She had… words.” He didn’t expound on that. They probably knew. “He did not tell anyone he was diabetic.”
“He’s… not?” Alanna scrunched up her face in confusion. “He’s absolutely not.”
“…oh. You should tell Deb.” Arrush said, slouching most of his shoulders without thinking about it. “The… the new ones are listening to us now, though. Letting people get closer. We need more telepads, and a place to put them, and… and…” He blinked his eyes in a rotating sequence, trying to think of what he was supposed to say.
Ethan came to his rescue, the young man red in the face and finally having caught his breath, popping up from next to Arrush with a hand on his chest. “Ah-Alanna, can you help move the shellies into groups of six? They seem okay, but people are still nervous to get into the middle of them. And Anesh, uh…”
“Telepads.” Anesh said. “Got it. Be right back.” One of him pulled his own telepad and vanished, leaving the other iteration of him still sitting there. “Do Nate and JP know what’s up here?”
“JP’s still in the hospital back at the Lair, and Nate and Ben are keeping everyone informed.” Ethan said. “And I gotta go. We need to find… uh… El? She’s not in a squad, and not answering her messages.” Ethan gulped in air, squared his shoulders, and then turned and took off running again.
Arrush nodded. “And I am escorting him.” He said, three of his paws resting on the hilts of the long knives or pistols in his armor. “Good luck.” The ratroach said as he loped off, easily keeping up with the human.
Alanna and Anesh watched them go. They weren’t the only people rushing around the farm, either. Anesh spoke a stray thought. “Didn’t Ethan play football or something? And he’s a delver? How is he drained when Arrush isn’t?”
“This is one of those things you take for granted. Cause you only ever talk to Arrush, so you got used to not thinking of him as someone who could fucking destroy you if he actually wanted to fight.” Alanna said calmly. Then she added, in a quieter voice, “Jesus, he’s in a full combat load, isn’t he? He might actually be the most dangerous thing here.”
“Good.” Anesh said, startling her.
“Good?”
Her boyfriend nodded, running a hand through his short black hair. “Good. That’s another person I can hide behind when everything goes wrong.”
“You…” Alanna stared at him with narrowing eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
“I probably wouldn’t.” Anesh said as his double popped back in. “Okay. Got the telepads. I’m gonna go link up with the Recovery team.”
“And I need to talk to Ben.” Alanna grimaced, hoisting her rifle. “You be safe. If things get bad, don’t hide behind Arrush. You get out, okay?”
“We’ll…” Anesh was going to say something flippant about how he’d play it by ear. But then he saw the worried, almost hurting look in Alanna’s eyes. “Yeah.” He corrected himself. “I won’t try to fight anyone.”
“Good.” Alanna rustled his hair, and took off toward the farmhouse. “Go check on James when you have a chance!” She yelled back.
_____
Alanna found Ben hiding behind the tractor shed, sitting in the dirt in a way that reminded her of how James looked when they’d cut class in high school and hide in the loading dock, a laptop on his legs and two phones sitting on a notebook next to him flecked with bits of earth.
“Kinda expected you to be at your little command center.” She commented. And instantly regretted it, as Ben looked up at her with red eyes and a face painted in fear. Ben, it turned out, looked like how you expected your friend to look like. And for a lot of people, that meant they wouldn’t actually see him hurt. But Alanna expected her friends to look like how they felt, and whatever magic cloaked Ben wasn’t really effective against her own empathy. “Shit. You-“
“Shut up.” Ben’s voice was cool and professional, even though it wavered ever so slightly. “I don’t… shut up. Please. You don’t need to worry, or help, or anything. I’ll be fine, I just needed to be a little farther away.”
“…I don’t even a little bit believe you.”
“Yeah, well, tough.” Ben still held no malice in his tone. “What do you need?”
“I’m gonna start organizing the bugs for teleport.” Alanna said. “Who am I helping, who’s helping me, and where are we going?”
Ben blinked. “I thought we’d just go back to… oh.”
Alanna drummed her fingers idly on the front ballistic plate of her body armor. “The Lair has housing for a bunch of people, but none of it is made for these friendos, and we just straight up don’t have a comfortable space for them. I’m taking them to Townton. Get in touch with the Recovery team there and tell them we’re coming. Loop Karen in, tell her we’re going to need food and bedding and whatever else for all of them. She’ll know.”
“Do you want to be in charge?” Ben asked.
“Not really.” Alanna tapped the green hoop earring she was wearing in the ear opposite the old looted Status Quo artifact. “But if I have to be, I’m going to be good at it, and it’ll make us stronger.”
Ben nodded. “Okay.” He breathed lightly. “You need to know, Nate did find a GPS tracker in the prison chunk we ripped out. Two, actually. I had Deb check the prisoners we rescued for any implants, but they seem clean.”
“Are you jamming it or something?” Alanna realized she didn’t know what that entailed.
“Well, Nate swore a lot, and smashed it, then gave the debris to someone on a drake to fly out and dump in the ocean.” Ben was clearly trying to hide how darkly funny he found that. “But we can’t do medical checks on the bugs. Not without… uh…”
“Right.” Alanna sighed. “Okay. And even if they’re not being tracked, Squo, they still know we’re here.”
Ben nodded. “I’ve got the engineers making jammers, because it turns out you can’t just order things that interfere with GPS signals on Amazon. I’ll make sure they know they need to get to Townton, and have them up before you get there. Just in case.”
Looking up from her own phone, where she’d just texted Anesh the place to start filling out telepads for, Alanna nodded like she’d fully processed that sentence. “Sounds good.” She said. “One other thing; what’re we doing with our prisoner?”
Ben groaned. “I don’t know.” He complained. “She’s an enemy agent, she’s also empowered. If we let her go… well, what do you think she’d do?”
Grimacing as she thought back to the interrogation, Alanna went over what they knew of the woman. She wasn’t entirely unsympathetic; she felt like she was underpaid, and while she had ‘job security’, it came in the form of vague threats to never leave the company. Her social life suffered for it too; being essentially on-call twenty four seven.
Of course, she was also a cruel and manipulative bitch. Alanna was utterly confident in that assessment of the prisoner, too. They’d managed to catch her in two lies, though it wasn’t clear if she knew that, and that was her lying to Ben. And she did it while feeling entirely at ease. That, and the way she’d instantly dropped any pretense of not enjoying hurting people when James had confronted her about the bugs the second time around…
“I think,” Alanna said slowly, “that we should examine, ethically, where the line is.”
“What line?” Ben gave her a confused tilt of his head.
Alanna swallowed her personal disgust. “The line where we put together an Order hive mind, skulljack into her head, and annihilate her personality, so we can use her body as a backup later.”
“What the fuck.”
“Just, as an example.” Alanna said. “Or we-“
“Alanna, what the fuck?!”
She stared Ben down, his righteous indignation grating on her after the emotional ordeal earlier. “Man, what the fuck do you think she’s gonna do? She’s a killer, and she likes it. If we let her go, she’ll go right back to Status Quo, because she likes being powerful and she likes hurting people. She might also try to stab a few of us on the way out. We could ransom her back, which is more direct, and we could profit off it, but then there’s even less question that she’ll go right back to causing harm.” Alanna spat in the dirt, an irate snarl on her face. “We could keep her prisoner; we could. We could put the facilities and protocol for it together real fast, especially if she’s the only one. But then what?”
“Rehabilitation. Restitution.” Ben said softly. “The things your boyfriend always talks about a functioning justice system having.”
“I don’t really wanna spend anything on her that could instead be spent on her victims.” Alanna pointed through the wood slats of the tractor shed to where the field of shelled life forms were hanging out. “That’s fucking insane.”
Ben pushed back on her anger. “It’s not an either or. It’s… we have the resources to do both. And you fucking know we shouldn’t be randomly scooping out people’s minds because it’s convenient. I know I’m maybe not the best person to talk about this, but just no.”
“We could also just shoot her.” Alanna suggested.
“That probably wouldn’t work”
The almost flippant way Ben said it actually helped her calm down slightly. “Okay. Well. We can figure it out later.” Alanna extended an olive branch. “Maybe just leave her here and let her live out her life as a pumpkin farmer.”
“Swords to plowshares isn’t a real life spell anyone has yet.”
“I hate that James has inflicted on me the understanding of that reference.” Alanna cracked her neck. “I’m gonna get started. Is Townton ready?”
“You think that, while sitting here talking to you about unethical prisoner disposal, I have managed to redirect all our Recovery staff who were nervously waiting at the Lair, to another city halfway across the country, and that they’re already prepared for a…humanitarian is a bad word but whatever… effort?”
Alanna pointed at his head. “Yes. I can see your skulljack braid.”
Ben stared at her, and then started moving deliberately to pocket his phones and fold up his laptop, before he stood and awkwardly dusted off his knees and ass. “They’re getting ready. There’s a public park they’re setting up at, though it’s overgrown as heck.”
“You were swearing at me a second ago and now you say ‘heck’.”
“I don’t swear at my friends.”
“We are friends!” Alanna cheerfully told him as they circled the tractor shed and she was presented again with the view of the survivors of the brand new species that had just joined her world. “Wait, we are friends, right? Or is that just me… uh… being influenced?” She didn’t think it was. Ben wouldn’t do that kind of thing to… Alanna frowned. This was difficult.
Ben shifted his stuff to under one arm as he pointed out a cluster of knights. “There’s your team. Get to work.” He told her. “And we’re only friends if you’re not suggesting mind wiping people.”
Alanna nodded, and jogged off, really getting a good workout today. So they were friends.
_____
Arriving to work was the most chaotic part of Karen Ward’s day.
Once she actually made it safely to her desk, and sat down, the list of potential surprises narrowed to a finite amount. A manageable amount. Research and their reformed mad Alchemists might present a new potion that had to be budgeted for, a delve team might come back with an unknown paramaterial or just a sack of gold coins that she’d need to work out the financial impact of, someone might demolish something important and she’d need to hire a landscaper to replace the trees around the Lair. Normal things. Things that were within the scope of her day to day operations.
It was the stretch between entering the building and getting ‘upstairs’ that was where the danger lay.
Once, Karen had arrived to work in the afternoon, sat down in the dining area to review some notes and have a light lunch, and gotten two sips into her fruit juice before a virulent disease had torn through the Lair and given her skill points to go with the new dotted scars on her arms. Another time, she’d actually made it to the elevator before Color-Of-Dawn had timidly approached her and asked if Karen would be overly upset if the camraconda asked her daughter out on a date.
Karen had settled into a small frown as she realized that somehow, she’d ended up with a life where these two things felt equivalent.
Even still, though. There was a calm to the changes that happened behind her desk, and a frantic sense of powerlessness to all the ones that caught her unawares before she made it to safety.
Today, she moved through the lobby and on to the elevator without anyone stopping her. There was clearly some kind of activity going on; the Lair was always full of people in odd styles of dress, whether that was because they were sartorially impaired or simply returning from or going to a delve. But Karen could read the flow of things, and she could tell there was a mustering of knights happening in a way that meant trouble.
But nothing was on fire. No one was shouting, no one was bleeding. Things seemed organized and deliberate. So she’d moved on to the elevators, and waited patiently for her ride. She’d even gotten a polite good morning from Marcus as the young man passed her and took the stairs down to his own job. Karen didn’t feel that she could relate much personally to most of the kids in the building, but many of the dispatchers for Response had an attitude of structured problem solving that she felt was good for anyone to be familiar with. This was the closest she would get to saying she liked Marcus, but it did mean that she gave him a smile and polite return of his greeting before her elevator arrived.
‘Upstairs’, which was technically vertically elevated but also in LA, was the last hurdle to clear. “Good morning Fernidan.” She greeted their door guard as she stepped off the elevator. Karen had almost mastered the awkward and somewhat silly pronunciation of the living plant’s name. “You’re looking suspiciously healthy this morning.” The plant, which was technically a mix of felt and plastic, but grew like it was alive and bobbed like it was very alive, was a brighter green than normal. Despite having no face to emote with, she got the impression Fernidan puffed up with pride at the statement. Karen just nodded to him, and kept moving toward her office.
“Ah, hello Karen.” A woman only a little younger than Karen herself gave her a thin smile and a nod as she passed through the desks that lined each side of the pathway to the walled offices. Originally this office floor had them with the employees sitting in the hall itself, so that their boss could walk behind them unannounced and make everyone nervous. The Order hadn’t wanted to remodel the glass wall that separated the conference room, so they’d just turned the desks around and made everyone more comfortable.
“Cathy. You’re here early.” Karen paused to make polite chat. “Anything important?”
Cathy gave a tilt of her head at being acknowledged. “My turn to do the vacuuming. Honestly, I see the benefit to sharing the work around, but if we’re not going to hire a dedicated janitor, we could at least get the young ones to do it. My back protests!”
Karen’s smile gained a hint of something more earnest. She constantly had to be reminded that it was alright to be vulnerable here, even if she maybe didn’t think of it in those terms. “Yes, well, Smoke… ah… dislikes the vacuum. And she’s the most proficient of the kids.” Karen said. “If your back is giving you trouble, though, I believe some of our friends downstairs have been making some worrying concoction for that. Or we could simply rearrange it so you’re doing low impact tasks.” Karen’s mind listed off the options almost on reflex.
As far as distractions went, making a schedule more efficient was a fairly tame one. “Oh, no no, it’s alright.” Cathy waved her hands between them. “I just wanted to complain a bit; I’ll manage.”
“Your health is important, dear.” Karen informed her bluntly.
“I know, I know. I’ll look into the potion.” Cathy ducked her head, but Karen could see the thin blush on the woman’s cheeks under her makeup. Even for someone who’d been with the Order since before they’d called it that, Cathy was, like Karen, from a world where it was uncommon for anyone to care. You either did the job, or you didn’t, and that was the extent of your value. Working here took getting used to. “Oh, the reports from Townton are on your desk. I know you like the printouts.”
Karen gave a professional nod. “Thank you. Oh, please send Texture-Of-Barkdust to me when she gets in. Normally she’d be here by now.” Karen looked around the mostly empty office. Not many people actually came in before seven AM, but she and her camraconda partner worked efficient hours.
“Can do.”
And then, having gotten through the potential gauntlet of distractions and chaos, Karen made it to her office, and sat down, and took a sip of her coffee. It was warm and comforting and helped ground the normality of the job.
Because despite the fact that she was researching the potential security requirements for teleportation devices, and doing an inventory of duplication ritual outputs, the job was normal. And Karen got to work cross referencing information and doing a broad outline for the budget and long term plans of the Order of Endless Rooms.
The duplication ritual - and Karen did hate calling it a ritual - was up to an average of fifteen uses every week. Experienced delver teams made the trip from the door of Officium Mundi to four different cubicle stacks, safely extracted the altered coffee grounds needed, and returned with ample time to run the ritual. Some weeks they made more or less, depending on injuries or unforeseen circumstances, but fifteen was the comfortable middle, even if they were looking to increase it with more towers producing coffee.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The hardest part was that the Order wanted to help. And that, unfortunately, conflicted with the fact that the Order needed to survive. Armory packages for new recruits were eight small orbs, which meant a single copy could cover ten people. But that wasn’t the only thing they needed; shield bracers and other Status Quo items were bulky, uneven, and frustratingly didn’t have good standard measurements. Those took another three copies, as the Order continued building its less ethereal armory.
Two copies were set aside for other orbs, as they now had the room to test a large quantity of the smallest size. The good ones were saved and might be added to the armory lists. Another copy was for developing Order veterans with orbs of their choice; not maximum efficiency when they were still finding hundreds of the things unidentified, but it was important for making people know they were valued.
The next copy was esoterica. ‘Magic items’ they needed more of, such as the pots that grew cacti which her daughter’s friend had figured out how to slim down to fit in the copy space, or single Akashic Sewer lesson books to be shared between good friends. The Order hadn’t yet started a protocol of having one mass-duplicated lesson for everyone, and Karen wasn’t sure it was a good idea anyway. If there was anything specific that they needed more of, like, perhaps, a magical teleporter, Karen would assign extra duplications in this part of the process. And she did, because those things were maddeningly valuable.
The next two were dedicated to telepads. Packed boxes of the far more effective style Anesh had made. The almost two second delay on the teleport was considered to be worth the risk given that they were almost three times as efficient in terms of space.
The last duplication for material wealth. The one thing they could easily compress space and get away with, because platinum, gold, cobalt, lithium, and even aluminum, weren’t magical. And a strange orange totem that enlarged the duplicated case, with its twin covering the area that duplicate popped into existence, meant the Order could make… too much money. Literally printing wealth.
Transport was an issue. That’s why it was last. They had to move a lot by hand. Because they couldn’t duplicate a briefcase with a totem inside it, and still get the totem, so the issue of portability became a problem. Karen’s head had hurt for a week after hearing Reed try to explain it, and in the end, she’d simply assigned a lot of extra people to help move the tonnage into a transportation case after duplicating it.
Every other duplication went toward making runs of the orbs that cured cancer.
It was, Karen had rapidly realized, never going to be enough. The numbers didn’t scale. Earth had two million new cases of cancer a year. Six hundred thousand deaths. The Order could, if they stopped every other thing they were copying, cure a thousand people a week.
Karen was familiar with the tyrant of the extra zero. It was just hard to look at the numbers, and see a gap of that many orders of magnitude. So she didn’t focus on it beyond getting the number of orbs they’d have available sent off to Justine and her department. Instead she focused on writing up the list for what was getting copied and sending it off to Research to put together the cases in advance and make it all easier, smoother.
Other things were easier. Double checking Research’s allocation for the sap they used to make potions. Returning an email about the first delivery of platinum to one of their buyers. Giving their salary expenses a once over just to verify for the fifth time that they could actually afford it.
That last part was strange. Karen had not been under the pretense that this operation would be profitable when she’d joined it. And now that it was, and it was becoming clear that magic that solved problems was just as valuable as anything else that solved those problems, she found that most of the people here wanted to give the profit away.
Well, that wasn’t fair. They wanted to make use of it, as opposed to reinvesting or stockpiling or even just pushing for constant growth. And Karen found it hard to complain when she was one of the beneficiaries of that use. Enriching the lives of the Order’s members, and then sprawling out to wend their way into positions to do it to other unsuspecting civilians, was where a lot of money went.
That, and hiring.
The Order didn’t exactly take applications these days. They found people who might be good fits, and dragged them in. Karen wasn’t part of that, but she did have the number in the budget for how many people they could afford, and so, having spent two hours glaring at numbers that were both too large and too small for her to be truly happy with them, she sent the go-ahead to three different people that they could bring in new recruits.
She also gave a heartfelt thanks to Smoke as the ratroach crept into her office and left fresh coffee and a salad from downstairs on her desk. Karen didn’t actually know what the purple-furred ratroach’s job here was, but Smoke was constantly useful in a way that felt almost paranoid.
The thought made her pause, midway into spearing a tomato wedge. Maybe she should talk to the girl. If she was only working because she was worried she’d be kicked out otherwise, that wasn’t good for anyone. Karen made a note, before finishing her lunch and resuming her afternoon.
It wasn’t until after she’d finalized the budget allocation to Townton’s recovery efforts, having gone through several steps to figure out how much they were actually paying for legal consultation because no one had thought to include it, that Karen realized she’d been alone in her office all day. “Where is that woman?” She muttered, looking up at the door as if Texture-Of-Barkdust would be summoned by the words. And to be fair, it might have worked on any other day.
Today, the knock on her door that sounded shortly after she noticed was… well, a knock on the door. Texture-Of-Barkdust didn’t actually knock that often. “Yes?” Karen said, perhaps a little sharply.
When the door cracked open and her daughter poked her head in, Karen relaxed a bit. “Hey mom.” Elizebeth said, with the kind of voice that put Karen right back on edge again. She recognized that voice. It was how she’d addressed her mother when she was about to ask permission for something stupid, and her daughter sounded… achingly familiar, when she did the same thing. “How’s your day going?”
“It’s certainly going.” Karen smiled at her daughter. “Come in, sit, relax. Weren’t you supposed to be helping Momo with something today?” She internally winced at how accusatory that had sounded. And also how vague. Karen knew precisely what her daughter had said she was going to be doing, but she was trying to not seem like she was keeping close tabs on the child. “She didn’t oversleep, did she?” She added, offering what she hoped was a lighthearted out.
Elizebeth gave her a worried look. “Mom, you need to check your texts more.”
“I check them twice a day, which is already more than anyone should need to.” Karen might have sounded slightly defensive. “And if there’s an emergency, that infuriating program your friend made makes ignoring it impossible.”
Her daughter pulled her phone from one of the multiplying number of pockets on her cargo pants, and flicked through it, before pushing it across Karen’s desk. “This?” Karen glanced over the text, careful to respect the teenager etiquette rule of not scrolling through someone else’s phone - she was amazed there had been a yellow orb for that, but not disappointed with the effects - while her daughter kept talking. “So things seem okay, and everyone’s… uh… fine…” She trailed off while Karen’s eyes widened as she tried to read and listen at the same time. “So can I go help? Everyone else is going.”
“Excuse me?” Karen was caught off guard by the question.
Elizebeth slipped into excited, faster speech patterns. “There’s a whole bunch of people who are helping out with the new things, and a couple of the youth groups are sort of going to help put up tents and run errands and stuff. It’s out at the farm that-“
“The farm that Reed destroyed, yes, I’m aware.” Karen was nonplussed. “And also that there is a chunk of Underburbs sitting in?”
“I’m pretty sure that got burned down?” Elizebeth sheepishly replied. “And it didn’t get destroyed! Just one of the fields got torn up! And no one got hurt!”
Karen eyed her daughter. “And you know this because…?”
“Because I check my texts!” Elizebeth smugly stated, as if that would secure her victory.
Karen tapped a few keys on her computer to pull up her own messages, and read with the rapid pace that only came from years of needing to know things mid-meeting. “Hundreds…” she heard herself mutter as she caught up, before locking eyes with her daughter. “And you want to go there?” She asked harshly.
But then her daughter did something that surprised her. That happened a lot, lately, Karen realized. And maybe she should put more faith in Elizabeth, and realize the teenager had grown just as much as Karen had herself.
“They’re going to need someone there for them, mom.” Elizabeth said, voice dipped and hardened in determination. “Their world just ended. I…” She stopped talking, nervously grinding her teeth together as she failed to keep eye contact with her mother.
Karen heard the unspoken words though. ‘I went through that too.’ Her daughter pointedly didn’t say. She never said it. She didn’t ever once use that against Karen, never tried to make her mom feel guilty for being captured while visiting a client site, for their lives falling apart, for anything. Not that she needed to; Karen was acutely aware of her own failing as a parent.
And now she was looking at her daughter and seeing a young woman who had grown into someone who saw others hurting the same way she’d been hurt, and wanted to help. Without reservation, without fear. Karen was afraid; she could easily see one uncontrolled moment of panic from the hundreds of spined creatures ending with multiple deaths on all sides. But Elizabeth just came to ask if she could have permission to go into that field and help.
Karen clicked a few things on her monitor, saved her work, and closed down her computer. Then she stood up and made a precise movement to grab her jacket off the nearby coat rack. “I’ll meet you downstairs. I assume there are groups teleporting out from the lobby.”
“Mom?”
“I trust Nate to manage combat deployments, and Ben to manage those gathering intelligence, and JP to…” Karen trailed off. “I trust Nate and Ben in their fields. I think they’d be better served by someone with organization experience on the ground. I just need to contact a few people from Recovery to come with us. I’ll meet you downstairs, and we can get to it.” Karen smiled at her daughter, maybe a little stiffly. “Their world ended. They’ll need all the help they can get.”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything at first. Just threw herself against her mom in a crushing hug, before uttering a rapid series of thank yous, and fleeing Karen’s office.
As soon as she was alone, Karen pulled out her phone and started making calls, while she also pulled the concealed holster from her desk drawer and slung it into place under her coat.
Her phone clicked and a man’s voice spoke a greeting. “Pavan, hello. Have you checked your texts lately? Mh hm. Yes, myself as well. Yes, I’ll be heading there now. Prioritize food and water, I will speak with Deb about medical. Yes. Yes, bring them in. Yes, I’ll see you there.” Karen opened her office door just as she was hanging up, and stepped out into the open floor to see Cathy and Smoke standing waiting for her, expectantly. She appraised the two women, especially the timid and skittish ratroach who had her angular face pointed like an arrow at the floor, and then nodded once. “Let’s go.” Karen said as the elevator opened for them. “Before things get out of hand again without us.”
_____
James woke up in an efficiently set up medical tent that was somewhere in the middle of the Order’s collection of temporary work spaces loosely surrounding the small army of bug things. It was mostly empty; the serious cases had been moved back to the Lair by now, and the knights who had taken injuries that didn’t put them out of commission had already gotten up and either left the field, or started taking orders from Nate about defensive emplacements.
He wasn’t entirely alone. TQ was coiled up next to the cot he was on, the camraconda’s solid rectangle of a head pointed his direction, camera eye focused on him with a slight droop to his cords that James interpreted as exhausted relief. Alex was also here, doing something with a needle on a sterile tray that James didn’t like much.
“Mmgplhh.” He protested elegantly.
“Oh be quiet you baby.” Alex said, capping the needle attached to what James saw was an empty syringe. “You’ve already got an IV in, I didn’t need to stab you.”
James blinked, turning dry and crusted eyes down to look at his arm where a tube was taped against his skin. “Oh.”
“How’s Zhu doing?” Alex asked abruptly. “Can you talk to him? We don’t have an infomorph available to diagnose right now, Mercy’s exhausted and Planner is… I dunno, doing Planner things.”
She looked out of place in the tent, an incongruity wearing sterile purple gloves on hands that poked out of the end of the shell of Order custom riot armor. “I…” James tried to focus, finding it hard. “Yeah, he’s there. He’s sleeping.”
“Makes sense. According to Chevoy, the skulljack thing knocks people out like that if they’re diabetic. You should be fine, though that right there was insulin for your blood sugar, which should help you feel less bleary in a minute here.”
“Nnnnno.” James slurred the word. “‘M not diabetic.”
“…You absolutely are.” Alex said, the girl grabbing the clipboard hanging on the end of James’ cot and looking at it. “You’re also mildly vitamin deficient, so leave that IV in for a while. If you’re trying to diet, you suck at it.”
He shook his head, focus starting to return. “No, Alex, I’m not diabetic.” James said. “Seriously. TQ, tell her I’m not diabetic.”
“No!” The camraconda sounded worried. “I am here to make sure you rest. And to tell you things are fine, and working with… minimal problems. Not to argue for you.” He inched forward, coils shifting. “You are resting, yes?” The camera eye bore down on James.
Shrinking back into the stiff material of the cot, James held up his free hand. “Okay, okay.” He offered a shaky grin. “But I’m actually, seriously, not-“
[Survivor : Abyssal : +8 Skill Points]
“-diabefuck.” The warm splash in his arm from the IV was suddenly overshadowed by what felt like a torrent of life. Vim and vigor that he hadn’t noticed being absent coming back to him, an exhaustion that had crept into his muscles banished in a moment, dexterity he’d not felt slipping away coming back to his fingers.
He sucked in a breath, the still warm air of the passing evening feeling like purifying fire in his lungs. James was abruptly starving, in a way he’d been trying to ignore for weeks as… as…
“Shit, what the shit, are you okay?!” Alex was abruptly at his side, trying to push him back into the cot.
Next to him, TQ didn’t do anything to help her. “You look angry.” The camraconda noted.
James pushed Alex away and swung his legs out, kicking his boots out from the thin blanket and letting them drop to the mat. “The fucking dungeon.” He growled out. “The Underburbs made me diabetic!” Weeks of feeling lightheaded or exhausted after every meal, eating less to try to compensate without realizing what he was doing, slowing down, losing focus, making mistakes. How many mistakes did James make that could have gotten himself killed? Or worse, someone else killed? “I’m so hungry. And I don’t have time for this.” James’ voice dropped to something quiet and distraught.
“I’ll be right back.” Alex rushed out of the tent, giving James a brief glance through the flap of a trio of camracondas slithering by, all of them armored and looking alert.
As James sighed and leaned his elbows on his knees, TQ scooted closer by a small fraction. “Are you actually unharmed?”
“No.” James whispered. “I’m freaking out because I feel deeply violated by this, but that’s basically everything from the Underburbs, and you’re probably the last person I should complain to about this.”
“That is idiotically untrue.” TQ had somehow found time to master making his digital voice sardonic. “Who better to understand losing something to a dungeon?”
“Okay, fair.”
TQ gave him a bobbing nod, ducking his thick cabled head back and forth in a u-shape. “Besides that, you can complain to me. I will listen. I don’t mind.”
“Heh.” James chuckled. “I feel like you’ve been lurking in my office long enough when I’ve been complaining about stuff that you’d have to either not mind, or hate yourself.”
“Some of each.” The snappy response was worrying. “But that is different, and you know it.” TQ squared up his body with James, camera eye meeting James’ own. “You’ve been hurt. You, yourself, are the one who constantly says that human society is flawed at talking about being hurt, or hurting. Do better than that. Trust that everyone has been listening to you.”
James chewed on his own grin as he sorted through the chastising words. “Alright, alright.” He held up his hands, a halfhearted laugh dying in his throat. “I mean, you’re right. You’re…” His stomach hurt, but he tried to ignore the hunger pang. In a quieter voice, he tried to get a handle on what was bothering him so much. “I don’t like that the boundary doesn’t matter. I don’t like feeling that a dungeon can reach into my life and fuck with things and hurt me or kill me even if I didn’t accept the challenge of the whole threshold thing. You know a lot of us think of dungeons that way? As a sort of trade off, of risk for reward? It’s why Alanna fucking loves them. Because they’re honest about the danger. And… and me too, I guess. But then every now and then we get something like this, or something like you, and I…”
“Something like me?” TQ asked, hissing curiously, the tip of his coiled tail flicking back and forth in robotic motions.
“Yeah.” James nodded, staring down at his hands. “Something that recontextualizes things. The Office took away your agency. And maybe if you’d stayed as drones and never woken up it wouldn’t matter, or maybe we could just ignore it. But we couldn’t, and won’t, and it’s a reminder that there aren’t clean answers. Hell, the Office or things from it have tried to kill people on Earth repeatedly. Probably succeeded at least a few times.” James focused on his breathing, trying to keep his heart from racing off.
TQ’s thin tongue flicked out over his brass fangs. “Likely. It bothers you that it is going to keep trying?”
“Absolutely it does!” James barked a laugh. “You know how sometimes people ask why we don’t just teleport into places and wreck the people hurting the world? I think it’s because, everything else aside, we all know that once we cross that line, there’s no coming back. And then our home is less safe too, whether the people in it were part of the war or not. There’s a kind of… of tactical restraint to it. Plus the ethics.”
“I had always assumed the ethics were one of the big things with you.” TQ settled back on his coils. “It does feel as though you choose your actions based on an ideology of good, and not on what is convenient.”
James looked back up and shrugged. “Probably. Maybe I’m just reverse justifying my decision. The point is, the Underburbs is another one of those things that doesn’t care. It doesn’t respect the threshold, it doesn’t… care. Fuck, I’m being stupid. None of these things have ever cared. The Sewer keeps sending out scouts, the Mountain grabs hikers, Clutter’s creatures hang out anywhere they want… okay, that one is fine…”
“You are rambling. Are you alright?” TQ asked worriedly. “You talk quickly like that when you feel overwhelmed.”
“You’ve been hanging around too much if you know that about me.” James smiled.
“I have been hanging around exactly as much as I want.” TQ hissed irately as he replied. “From the first moment, you have been exactly yourself with me. You actively do not care what I am.” He added as he whipped his head around to stare away from James.
James wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. And he was saved from having to by Alex coming back in, balancing a pair of stacked plastic containers. “Here!” She said, handing them over. James’ stomach growled at him again as he opened one and saw some tiny sandwiches. “There’s fruit in the other one. You look like- Jesus Christ dude, chew or something.”
“Mmhank oooh.” James muttered around a mouthful of white bread and cucumber. Seeing TQ staring at the latest of the bits of finger food he’d grabbed as he was stuffing his face, he held out the tiny sandwich. “Mhant uhn?” James tried to ask as he chewed. The answer came in the form of the camraconda leaning forward and engulfing James’ entire hand in his mouth, then pulling back and leaving James sitting there with an empty hand extended. Swallowing his lunch, James rolled his eyes at his friend. “You’re so fucking weird.”
“Thank you.” TQ tilted his head back as he ate.
“So, what now?” James asked Alex. “What’s been going on while I’ve been out?” He held his arm with the IV in it out, and stared at Alex.
She started to answer, then stopped and raised her eyebrows at him. “I’m not gonna…” James kept staring, and Alex sighed as she put her timing power to use and realized he was going to take longer than her to give up, so she moved around TQ and leaned down to start removing the needle. “If Deb asks you did this yourself.” She said. “And things are… going. We’re moving the new best friends out to Townton in batches, but it’s going slow cause we keep having to bring back one or two with each teleport to show the others it’s okay. No sign of Status Quo yet. Uh… the rescue teams for the civilians from the fight got everyone dropped off safely and in contact with Recovery for if they need anything, and I heard that someone called the cops on Dave, which went as well as you might expect.”
“Alex, the last time I dealt with the cops in New York it was because they were being mind controlled by some kind of eldritch being that might be the embodiment of the ‘bastard’ part of the ‘all cops’. What I expect from that encounter is that Dave got shot eighteen times and Pendraon incinerated a city block.”
Alex stared at him with a narrow eye look, like she was trying to figure out if he was serious, while TQ just hissed out a laugh. “That is not what happened.” The camraconda said. And then a short pause later. “Yes?” He clarified with Alex.
“Yeah, no, that didn’t happen.” Alex folded her arms. “Are you gonna be… okay?”
“I’m fine.” James continued wolfing down his food, before stacking the hard plastic containers and standing up. His legs hurt from all the running, his arms had bruises in them, the medical gauze Alex had wrapped around his elbow joint itched, he was pretty sure he had bits of dirt and plant burrs in his hair, and his lungs sent pangs through his chest if he breathed too hard. But he wasn’t lying. He felt… not just fine, he felt better than he had in weeks.
The best he had since coming out of the Underburb, still infected with something that was sapping his life away.
James mentally poked at Zhu, softly verifying that his navigator was still buried in his thoughts somewhere. There was, James realized, a parallel there. Zhu always taking naps after they completed trips. He’d need to find a way to get an infomorph form of insulin, somehow.
But until then, he needed to be useful. “I’m gonna go help with the evac.” He said, balancing the last pair of orange slices between his fingers.
“I’ve gotta get back to the Lair.” Alex told him. “Things in the hospital are… busy.”
“Right, you’ve been doing medical stuff. How’s that going?” James asked as the three of them left the tent, blinking away the brighter direct sunlight outside. “I realize you just… uh… did the thing where you threw yourself into danger, that you said you didn’t want to do. And thank you, seriously. You don’t-“
Alex flicked a hand at him, cutting off whatever James was going to say. “I’m a knight.” She said. “No idea what that means. But I can’t just sit down and do nothing, right?”
“You absolutely could.” TQ said. “People do that frequently.”
“Well, not me. And James here taught me how to glibly play off how scary it all is afterward!” Alex sounded way too cheerful about that. Before James could challenge her on that, and tell her that he also really relied on the support of others around him, and a lot of therapy, Alex glanced down at her phone and clicked her tongue. “Gotta go. There was an accident. Be careful, you two.” She rapidly pulled a telepad page and, a second later, was gone.
TQ hissed softly. “She is not doing okay.”
“How can you tell?” James asked, staring at the patch of trampled grass Alex had left behind.
The camraconda dramatically flicked his head over to look up at James. “She’s acting like you.”
James laughed, caught off guard by the jam. “Ouch! Let’s go see what needs doing.”
There wasn’t much, shockingly. There were about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty of the shelled creatures left in the field. James kept wanting to mentally call them bugs, but having been up close with them now, he absolutely knew they weren’t. They weren’t really anything he could think of under that shell, though maybe closer to elephants if elephants had no trunks or ears and flatter faces and also spiked shells and weird chitinous legs. The comparison fell apart a bit on him.
He and TQ linked up with Alanna and the other knights who were cautiously and slowly coaxing groups of the new refugees over to teleport. There was still a palpable aura of terror lingering in the air that they could all feel, and Alanna herself complained about it to James bluntly and repeatedly, but their new rescues were quiet for now and weren’t broadcasting their emotions quite so hard. And under that terror, there was something else now. Curiosity, maybe. James wouldn’t call it hope, not yet at least.
A few more of the newcomers had accepted skulljacks. The language barrier was still there, but it was helpful for giving simple directions on how to move, how to hold on for telepad transport, that sort of thing. The shelled creatures were letting the Order get close, but they would still lurch away or even lash out if anyone touched them. Apparently that’s why Daniel was back at the Lair’s hospital right now. So it was safer to ask one of them to act as a guide, to push the others into place to move.
James took two groups to Townton, each one needing about ten to twenty minutes to coax out, softly reassure even though they couldn’t understand him, and then hand off to the Recovery knights who were in full swing down in the abandoned city. There was a big public park that they were using, partly because it was mostly fenced off, and partly because it wasn’t as close to the asphalt that the necroad population of the not-so-abandoned-really city tended to stick near. A lot of the stuff had already been moved from the old farm; food and water, first aid tents, temporary shelters, teleportation made it easy to put the help where it needed to be. Though it would still probably be a while before anyone was doing a medical checkup on one of their new charges.
TQ had an easier time with his groups, and James assumed that it was because they just would not be able to trust a human for a long time. He kept having to remind himself of it. This wasn’t a dungeon that did this to them, it was good old fashioned human monsters.
That was fine. James was angry enough today to share it around.
Within an hour, they had it down to under a hundred needing to be moved. Another hour, and sunset closing in, and it was down to maybe a dozen fearful stragglers. Well, sunset where they were leaving, a warm night already where they were arriving. Somewhere in that time, Chevoy found James and tripped over herself trying to apologize for nearly killing him with the skulljack interface, a thing that he didn’t remember happening, but which he capitalized on to reinforce the importance of safety procedures to the Researcher who he personally figured was most likely to cause an international incident by dropping something from orbit.
“This feels good.” James said to his friends, at the end of the day. Across the field, a camraconda was gently helping to move the last of eggs into a basket with the last group of five of the creatures. A few minutes later, and they blipped away with a tiny clap of air, leaving the Order’s plot of cheap land empty once again. “I feel like we did a good thing.”
“That’s called ‘pride’ or some shit.” Alanna nodded, her eyes drooping slightly. She’d been awake for over a day and a half, and hadn’t told anyone, but it was starting to show. “You feel that way when you do good things. Dumbass.”
“I thought Pride was the one possessing the prince?” TQ asked.
Alanna stared at the camraconda blankly. “What the absolute fuck are you talking about?”
Intercepting that conversation before it could go off the rails, James spoke up. “He’s making an anime reference, and I’m trying to figure out if he knows that pride is also an emotion, or if he’s doing the camraconda thing of capitalizing on everyone underestimating them all the time to slip jokes in.” He narrowed his eyes at his friend, who irised his camera eye back innocently. “Yeah, he knows.” James said.
Arrush ducked his head, looking ashamed. “I don’t know.” The big ratroach said, shifting back and forth on his claws as he fidgeted.
“Oh, there’s a character named Pride in Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s… actually, you might like that show. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of cool shit in it, philosophically speaking. Like, a lot of characters who aren’t human, but that doesn’t diminish their agency or validity.” James shrugged. “It’s cool.”
Alanna coughed, choking on the water she was sipping. “Did you forget about the chimera thing?!” She asked, after she finished hacking up a lung and looked up to see everyone staring at her.
“Yes.” James admitted.
“Well… okay then.” Alanna rolled her shoulders. “God I’m tired.”
“We are all tired.” TQ said. “I agree.”
“I’m awake.” Arrush softly disagreed. “But am hungry.”
“Ooh, yeah, I’m starving. Again.” James grumbled. “Okay, we need to check in with… uh…” He trailed off as Nate stalked across the shattered gravel lot, past the titled concrete spire of the chunk of Status Quo’s prison that the Order had teleported in, and toward their group. The man glared at the piece of structure as he passed, though that might just be what his face looked like now. “Hey Nate.” James greeted him as they were approached.
Nate surveyed the empty field, nodding once. “Good, you’re done.” He said flatly. “Now fuck off.”
“Buh?” Was about all James could think of. Alanna just snickered, her tired brain interpreting Nate’s words as a particularly funny joke.
“Yeah, all of you. Get out of here. Go home.” Nate ordered them.
James looked around at the people near him. “What about… the security thing?” He asked. “Like, keeping an eye out for Status Quo? Dealing with our prisoner? Any of that stuff?”
“Not that it’s your job, but I’ve got it handled. Rotating guard shifts, camera drones and traffic feeds being watched, rogues doing some on the job training. But the part you need to give a shit about is the rotating.” Nate dusted his hands off. “So fuck off. Go sleep, grab something to eat, have weird sex, break an economy, whatever the four of you do when you’re not my problem. Because right now, you’re not my problem.”
Arrush raised two of his paws. “I don’t…”
“Don’t care. Get out of here.” Nate cut him off. “There’s nothing incoming, we’ve got the place locked down, and I can’t set up an ambush if we’ve got half the fucking Order here giving it away. You’ll get a call tomorrow. Go home. You’re not useful if you’re exhausted.”
It was hard to argue with that. James, for all that he felt like a newly reforged superhuman now that his Underburbs disease had been purged, was still getting to the edge of exhaustion. Everyone else would be feeling it too. As Nate stalked off to banish the next group of knights, James turned to the others. “You guys wanna go get dinner?”
“Anesh is making food at our place.” Alanna said, words starting to slur slightly. “Uh… you two wanna come?” She asked Arrush and TQ. “I think Keeka’s already there for some reason.”
“Yeah, we’ve got plenty of couch.” James added. “Or we can drop you at the Lair or something?” He asked the camraconda, just in case his friend wasn’t feeling social and wanted an out.
“I… yes!” TQ perked up, the camraconda straightening slightly. “I would like your dinner.”
Alanna gnawed at her lip as she wrote their address on a telepad. “Don’t get too excited. Anesh is making curry, and I love that boy to death, but he’s got a magically upgraded spice tolerance, and we’re all going to fucking die from his food.”
“Eh.” James commented as he took Arrush’s paw and set a hand on TQ’s head. “I’ve faced death, like, twice today already? Bring it on.”
There was a light pop as the four of them vanished. Leaving behind a quiet farm, populated only by alert sentries, an irate prisoner, and the bright green shoots of plants growing rapidly from the trampled field that had held a few hundred rescued inhuman prisoners only a few hours ago.
It had been a long day. But, James forced himself to remember, he wasn’t alone. The whole point of the Order was that no one had to do it all themselves.