“An Antimemetics Division operative is as good on their first day as they're ever likely to be. -Your Last First Day, Antimemetics Division-
_____
James woke up, instantly on edge as he realized there were other people in his room. He relaxed slightly when he realized they were all asleep, and also all people he knew, but there was no getting away from the awkwardness of being in his underwear around people he wasn’t actively smooching on a regular basis.
Careful movements got his hand to his phone on the desk next to his head without smashing into a corner or hitting anyone in the head. The time was a little after five AM, which was actually a lot of sleep considering when he’d gone to bed. He was also starving, and way too warm, so he started moving more to try to escape his own bed. Still being careful, not wanting to disturb any of the cluster of snoring dorks around him, using light from his phone screen and the orb he kept on a shelf over the bed to guide him.
Grabbing some pants and what he hoped was a clean shirt, James cracked the door to the room and stepped out to get dressed in the hallway, assuming that the otherwise empty apartment would be a more comfortable place to get changed. He was halfway into his pants and shoving the phone in his pocket when he realized he could hear someone talking from his living room, and that it wasn’t as dark out here as he would have expected.
“-stagnating, I guess is the word. The kind of fancy word I’m picking up from hanging around Research too often.” A familiar woman’s voice spoke. Momo, he realized. The younger knight was in his apartment, and talking. He sped up his efforts to get dressed. “Thing is, it should all fit together. The wacko your sister helped them kill made a fucking diary out of metaphysics, and I should know the shapes of things like engines and alloys and torque. But it doesn’t line up?”
There was a small, disinterested grunt in response. James got his shirt on and started walking down the hall, wrangling his belt into a useful place.
“Exactly!” Momo kept talking, unimpeded by the lack of care from her conversation partner. She was keeping quiet, probably to not wake anyone, but James could hear her clearer as he approached. “So it’s obvious there’s no universal magical language, which, sweet I guess? I love this shit, I love learning about being a witch or whatever. But also it would have been a lot more convenient, and also more tactically useful. And also - oh, hey James.”
Momo greeted him as he walked into the living room, standing barefoot on the inexplicable strip of hardwood floor that led to his front door. James looked at her, lounging on his couch, talking to a Camille who was sitting prim and proper like she hadn’t lept off his balcony last night. He opened his mouth to say something, and ended up making a weird noise around a yawn instead.
“Yeah, I agree.” Momo nodded against the cushions. “Also your couch smells like dog. Or rat, I guess? Also hey, I’ve got a question for you.”
“How the fuck did you get in my house.” James asked flatly as he dropped his hand away from covering his yawn, his brain making rapid progress in pushing away the fuzz of sleep. Momo raised an arm to point at the door in a semi-sarcastic reply. Before she could say anything though, James raised his eyebrows at what he saw on her skin. “Did you get a tattoo?” He asked. “Neat.”
“Buh?” Momo pulled back, distracted and turning her arm back toward herself. “Oh, right. Uh. Not exactly? Maybe.”
“Looks like a tattoo.” It looked like a badly drawn cat, but James didn’t want to be rude.
Momo tugged at the sleeve of her tee shirt, as if she could somehow figure out how to cover her forearm with it. “It’s from testing with the stupid new glove enchantment you made. The whole ‘write at distance’ thing. Turns out, it works on skin.”
“And with doodles, apparently?” James half asked, curious about the effect. “I thought it only did text. Actually, doesn’t it have a character limit?”
“I dunno, maybe it thinks ‘cat’ is one character in a pictographic language or something.” Momo suggested. “Anyway, it writes ‘into’ skin, so it’s up in the air if this is permanent or not. Personally I’m guessing no, but it’s kinda cute so I don’t mind.”
James avoided mentioning how horrifying the idea of a way to rapidly mark people with something that would be permanent could be. He didn’t know how to articulate how, he just had a kind of grim feeling that a flexible magical ranged tattoo gun would be way too abusable somehow. Instead, he reasoned an earlier question. “Seriously, why are you here? Not you, Cam… though also when did you get back? Also how did you get… actually don’t tell me.”
“You leave your door unlocked.” Momo told him. “And everyone knows where you live.”
“How?!”
“Okay, I know where you live. And also Cam was just lurking in your parking lot, so I brought her in. I do that sometimes. It’s my thing.” Momo made it sound a lot more dramatic than James thought it really should be. “Anyway, are you awake now? We’ve got shit to do today.”
“Weren’t you shot or something?” James demanded.
Momo held a couch cushion out as a shield between them. “Stop asking questions.” She said. “I’m fine. And we’ve got new nonhuman life to flirt with. It’s everything you ever wanted. So let’s get on down to Townton and start making friends.”
Pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes, James tried to figure out exactly why Momo was here, and not actually just doing the thing that she was trying to weasel him into doing with her. His couch was comfortable, and he was sure that Camille was a perfectly unresponsive conversation partner, but Momo could have just teleported down. The Order didn’t even need to use telepads for the connection between Oregon and Tennessee anymore; they just had a set aside swap point for their newly pilfered and duplicated magic items. Momo could have walked from here to there with no effort at all.
Changes came fast sometimes. Faster than James could keep up with in some cases, even when he was the one instigating them. But it didn’t explain Momo being on his couch.
“You did get shot.” James accused her, and saw the flinch in Momo’s eyes. “You did! And you got told by at least one person to fuck off back to your room and rest! And now you’re trying to use me as a social shield!” He thumped a loose fist onto the tablecloth at his end of the living room. “Did you actually think this would work?” James asked her, more curious than irate.
Momo shrank down into his couch. “Yes?” She mumbled around the cushion. “If you were tired enough, maybe?”
James sighed and wiped the back of his hand at the corner of one of his eyes. “Momo, go home.” He commanded, before turning to his other guest. “Cam, uh…”
The stone faced pale woman stared back at him, and James was suddenly acutely aware of how young she looked. Just like her sisters had. They were just… children. Late teens, maybe, by human standards, but the farther into his thirties James got the more he felt like he could call anyone under a certain age ‘kids’. “I have no answer.” She said, breaking him out of his thoughts.
“Hm?”
“You asked me what I wanted.” She reminded him. “And I have no answer.”
“Oh.” James paused. “Okay. Well. You can head back to the Lair with Momo and she’ll get you set up with an advocate from Recovery. We can get you a place to stay, and you can figure things out at your own speed. We’ll talk more later, because I have a lot to do today.”
Camille stared back at him, and James shifted uneasily from foot to foot as the silent gaze stretched on. He was in the middle of retreating to the kitchen to grab a handful of crackers and some water as a ‘breakfast’ when she spoke again. “Why?”
“I’m getting really fucking depressed getting asked why I’m being a decent person.” James said, regretting instantly how harsh the words might have sounded. “Momo, you field this one. And no field work for you, you dumbass.” He ordered her. “I’m gonna get a head start on the day, and I still need coffee or something.”
“Yes boss.” Momo said with a sigh. “Oh, before you go, can you touch these?” She perked up as she emptied a cloth bag full of lightly luminescent yellow crystals onto James’ table. They all had duct tape wrapped around them with words written in bold pen. “I’ve been missing actually making you do this for a while and you’re the only one with enough points.”
James sighed, and looked over them. Some were labeled, others were waiting to be filled in. “What do you want me to do?” He asked.
The skill points from the Underburbs were… unpleasant, for him. He had a lot. More, now. Thirty one, if his count was correct, and he was pretty sure it was. But thinking about how he’d gotten them wasn’t like memories of earning orbs or spells from other dungeons. They were, each and every one, linked to a moment of pain or violation or loss. So James had been sort of dodging Momo’s requests for a while, and had apparently taken too long to teleport out of his apartment this morning to keep doing it.
But leaving a tool on the table just because he felt slimy about it wasn’t smart. And while James was pretty sure none of the skills would be life altering at this point, he knew there were plenty of people in the Order who could benefit from him using his points to get them better information on this new weird form of magic.
Momo ignored his internal turmoil, like most people did. “Basic tests. The ones with the little pink tape have had other people put partial points in, so I need to know how many points it takes you. Also if you could use at least one of them more than once, that would be handy. Aside from that, just tell me what they are. The tested ones only took two or three skill points each, so you should be able to do them all. I assume. I dunno. I actually never asked? Anesh just said you had ‘a lot’ so I figured you… uh…” Momo winced as she saw James’ tired and sad expression, and trailed off without finishing the thought.
“Yeah, okay.” He said out loud, reaching out for the first crystal. “How many chairs did you murder to get all these?” James asked, trying to ease the mood a bit.
“Oh, we broke a ton of shit from the house you brought back, and got a couple. Also some of the furniture from the big beetle either wasn’t magic, or was just pure trap, so it didn’t drop any crystals. These eight are just what we’ve got for now.”
“Sure.” James took a breath and picked up the crystal. “Alright, let’s go.” He started pushing at it, letting it ask for the skill points he’d accrued, and offering them up.
It took one point.
[+1 Skill Rank : Instrument - Drums - Snare]
“Huh. That was fast.” James commented with raised eyebrows. “One skill point, got a rank in snare drums.”
Momo shot up. “Holy shit, it works.” Her voice was full of excitement. “Do this one next.” She handed James a crystal that was already labeled, and had a second strip of green duct tape on it. He obeyed, and it also only took a single skill point from him before he got a notification.
[+1 Skill Rank : Construction - Carpentry - Screw Driving]
“This is easier than I expected.” The tension he’d been feeling interacting with anything from the Underburbs again started to fade as he got into the flow of it. “Also, that was only one point too. Are these special?”
“They’re ones people already put points in.” Momo said, pulling the tape off. “Can you put one more in here, so I can test it again?”
James did so while his brain caught up. “So, hey, that means that if someone doesn’t need or want any skills we have, they can ‘feed’ them to other people? That’s super cool. Not, like, foundation-shaking, but still rad. Should I do the rest?” He asked as he got more comfortable. Momo nodded at him excitedly, so James just started running through the unidentified and unused crystals.
[+1 Skill Rank : Art - Handwriting]
[+1 Skill Rank : Computers - Programming - BLISS]
[+1 Skill Rank : Language - Pochutec]
[+1 Skill Rank : Government - Chinese - Politiburo]
[+1 Skill Rank : History- Sailing]
All told, he spent nineteen of his skill points before he was done, and gave Momo a report on what he’d earned.
“How many points per?” She asked. “Also use the cheapest one again, we need to know if it stacks or something.”
James rattled off answers in order. “Four, three, two, four, three.” He said, taking back the language skill crystal Momo had just finished wrapping a duct tape label around. “And sure.” He pushed, two more points vanished, and James got a familiar notification.
[+1 Skill Rank : Language - Pochutec]
“Exactly the same?” Momo asked, excitement obvious. “Like, exactly?”
“Looks like it.” James answered, roughly using a language that no one had spoken for over fifty years. When Momo and Camille gave him blank stares, he sighed and switched back to English. “Yeah, exactly. Also two things. One? Pochutec is an excellent way to maintain operational security if we’re worried about being bugged in the field. I doubt anyone’s gonna casually know a literal dead language. And two, now knowing more about China, I’m starting to get a perspective for why some people don’t like communism. Yikes.” James winced as he sifted through the new knowledge dumped into his brain.
Momo threw a pillow at him. “Whatever man. Get political on your own time. I’m just here for magic.”
Catching the pillow one handed, James rotated his arm with inhuman flexibility and winged it back at her, catching the injured woman in the stomach and eliciting a shocked grunt. “You’re in my house!” He reminded her pointedly, before sighing. “And I am on my own time, and I’m gonna go use it. Cam, don’t let her get distracted until she gets you set up with Recovery. And…” James lost some of his lighthearted smile as he met Camille’s eyes. “And I’m sorry, I guess. For how this is all turning out. For your sisters, and for you.”
The unarmored pale woman stared back at him, her eyes hard out of simple lack of practice emoting, not any kind of malice. But when she dipped her head, and looked down at the table, her voice was painfully human. “So am I.” She replied. “Thank you.”
“…yeah.” James’ mouth twisted as he looked over at Momo. “Take care-“
“Care of her, yeah.” Momo agreed with less sarcasm. “Go. Play with your new friends. We’ll be fine.” She was already rolling off the couch, standing with a pained wince as she put weight on an injured leg, which James didn’t fail to notice.
James sighed as he watched her start to get a telepad prepared. “Actually, I’m gonna hitch a ride with you to the Lair.” He said, then turned his head at the sound of something squeaking from the other side of his front door. “Oh, after our friendly dog for the day.” James took a couple steps and pulled the door open, the very early morning not normally when the dogs showed up, but not unwelcome. What caught him off guard was that this dog was incorporeal, and rippled with rainbow hued distortions in the air, visible under the white light of the apartment’s porch. “Uh…” James looked down at the familiar creature.
“Magneto!” Momo’s voice was a little too loud for an apartment full of sleeping persons, and also as surprised as James felt. “Why are you here?!”
The mongausse ignored James, magnetic distortion pouring around his legs as the apparently-dog-enough creature ran into his apartment and jumped up on Momo. Though it was just as incorporeal to her as it was to James, so he kind of just watched while shaking his head as Momo fished around in some of her cargo pants many pockets for a few magnets she could use to pet her companion animal.
“Why is he here.” James mused. “Wait, actually, hang on. Is he our friendly dog for the day? Does this mean the green orb is teleporting random fucking dogs here?! I worry this has terrible implications. Oh no, have we been kidnapping dogs?”
“No.” Another voice from outside the apartment spoke, just before Simon stepped up to the top of the stairs, breathing heavily from chasing down an excited ball of magnetic field, and leaned on the door. “El asked me to make sure you were okay.” He said.
“Me?” James asked, curious.
“What? No, Momo. The one who vanished at four AM.” Simon gave his friend an irritated glower. “Without telling anyone.”
James held up both hands. “Nope. There’s people sleeping in my bedroom, this argument can happen somewhere else.” He declared. “Though also thank you for quickly solving my existential crisis about dognapping.” James gave a grateful nod to Simon.
Without saying anything except a heavy sigh and a nearly audible eye roll, Momo wrapped her arms around two of them and made sure the magnetic dog was connecting her to James, and yanked the telepad page off. The sudden shift didn’t actually serve as an escape from the awkward conversation, but James didn’t mind. He had a backup plan, which was simply walking away and going to gather the information he needed to start helping.
It mostly worked.
_____
James had planned to start with his checklist at home, but since his first goal for the day was talking to everyone who’d been injured and checking up on the rescued prisoners, he held off. Most people didn’t like being woken up at just after five AM, and he was trying to respect that.
In Tennessee, though, at least someone would be awake and socially obligated to not tell him he was too early. Time zones were the real magic, honestly.
So James grabbed a cup of coffee and a muffin from the snack bar in the dining room, got halfway through his improvised breakfast before realizing the coffee was itself magical and that he was feeling mental connections come easier as the wisdom boost took hold, and then joined a handful of other people for the scheduled teleport down to Townton.
He’d been teleported three times now via the transposed sphere of space method, and it was still kind of wild to him. Functionally, as far as James could tell, it wasn’t even moving space around. It was just… creating very good portals. And then compressing them?
He watched it happen, his enhanced thoughts supposedly making it easier to sort through it. The walls of the bubble went up around them, speeding up after they got through with the chunk of dirt that the Order had taken great pains to make sure didn’t have any piles or cables in it. As the walls rose up overhead, James could see at ground level the similar patch of dead dirt they were swapping to, but with different buildings nearby. A different sky. Even as directly overhead, there was a patch of ethereal blue where the early morning light of Oregon hadn’t fully been closed off yet, the rest of the space now showed a mid-morning Tennessee.
And then, he wasn’t in Beaverton looking at a massive near complete window into somewhere else. He was in Townton, full stop. No connection left, everything now fully swapped between the two bubbles of space.
It was only after the sphere fully closed that an exhausted looking Nikhail spoke up to everyone. “All ashore! Townton, park outpost, population us and a bunch of bugs! Return trip is in half an hour!” At the words, the other people who’d come in with James started moving, stepping out of the circle, and across the line where the dirt obviously changed colors in a ring.
“Why do we wait at all?” He asked out loud. “Why not just walk through the portal before it closes?”
Nik stifled a yawn while frantically grunting at James. “No, no no no. Don’t do that!” He swept an arm around, gearing up to say something dramatic.
James cut him off. “It’s hideously unsafe, isn’t it?” He asked. “Wait, hang on. I thought the wall of the thing pushes up at, like, lackadaisical car window strength?”
“It does. The edges do. The ‘portal’ itself is unstable and moving through it can mess you up.” Nik informed him as he swapped out the gps coordinates that were rolled up and placed in the central slot of the stacked array of brass gears. “We’ve been testing it a lot since we got the swappies, and - don’t give me that look, you took too long to name them - anyway, it’s not consistent. We’re not doing live tests, because inanimate objects get anything from what I’m going to call ‘light bending’ to ‘light rending’, and finding out if it does that to people too seems like a stupid plan.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve been through one before.” James looked up in thought. “On Pendragon, when we first found the Wolfpack. Or maybe we just timed it really well?” He tried to think back to that particular moment, but couldn’t come up with a clear picture of how it had gone down. He did remember one thing though. “Wait, like, yesterday, we moved a bunch of the chanters through an open one of these things. They were fine?”
“We [Move Personed] a bunch of them. That’s different I think. Also, if any of them were hurt running through the breach, they couldn’t tell us anyway, and we might not notice. Also, good job getting out ahead of the name this time! Gotta get in early on stuff like this.” Nik shot him a thumbs up.
There was something a little frustrating about that comment, and James didn’t really know how to articulate it. “I’m not sure I should be taking advice from someone about early action when that someone is the most reckless human in the Order in terms of sticking weird magic in his body.”
Nik perked up. “Hey, I got upgraded! Most reckless human is better than last time!”
“Specificity is important to good communication.” James failed to mention that most reckless human didn’t preclude any other broader titles for stupid behavior.
Heading toward the nearby reclaimed building, and ignoring their resident poor decision maker, James took a minute to look over the teleport site. The sudden shift in dirt consistency underfoot when he crossed the line, the mix of ruined buildings around them, the smell of clean morning air.
They’d chosen a spot that had a park, near where a residential street abruptly ran into a cluster of commercial buildings. The part was a little overgrown, but the whole city was looking that way these days; Townton was built over time for a population of twenty thousand, and currently it had maybe fifty people living in it. Not enough to maintain things to any degree. So crab grass and dandelions shot through every gap in the asphalt, and some kind of vine or ivy James couldn’t identify crawled the sides of the damaged buildings.
A few of the houses nearby had burned during the aftermath, and against the blackened remains, tiny wildflowers poked their colored petals up to the sun. The natural world reclaimed the city, uncaring of what had occurred here.
Any other day, James would have been morose about it. But today, it meant that they had a large public park space to put their new shelled refugees in, and he wasn’t in a mood to mope. The hundreds of chanters were spread across the dry grass and old bark chips, some of them sleeping underneath the jungle gym, quite a few lining the outside of the park like sentinels. There was a low frequency vibe of exhausted despair coming from them, though nowhere near as bad as it was yesterday. But still, it was a thing that the helpers from the Order were having to fight through. James shrugged it off, pitting optimism and a good night’s sleep against the intrusive empathy broadcast and winning as he walked across a splintered street.
The closest building to the park had once been an art gallery of some sort. While the other structures near it still had holes in them and in some cases had cars crashed through their front facades, this one had been quickly patched up with a combination of different magics. It also had a rolling sheet metal garage door that led to a room now emptied of sculpture and refilled with emergency aid supplies and food.
The interior smelled… not good. Like it had recently had a sewage line breach cleaned up or something, which might literally be true. But it didn’t actively smell toxic, which would have to be good enough. Dorothy greeted James a little while after he walked in. The elderly woman had the most dangerous weapon anyone in the Order ever wielded; a clipboard. And she used it to marshal the group James had teleported in with, giving them marching orders as they sipped on coffee and juice and pretended they were more awake than they really were.
“Paladin!” Was the way she addressed James after sending everyone else to their assigned roles.
“That’s never gonna stop being weird coming from people older than me.” James muttered, just loud enough that it was clear he was trying to be funny and not actually hiding anything.
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Dorothy gave him a prod with a bony finger, getting more of a flinch out of James than he’d shown when he was being shot at. “Get used to it.” She ordered him, her grandmotherly smile not at all at odds with the sharp command. “Are you looking for Kirk?”
“No, I’m just here to check on our friends.” James said, before realizing her tone had been worried. “Why, where’s Kirk? Is something going on?”
She looked out at the clouded glass of the front window, remade inexpertly by a blue orb ability. “He went out looking for a straggler, and hasn’t come back.” She said. “I was going to send Roland after him, but if you’re here…”
“My literal job is solving problems. Straggler how?” James asked, reflexively double checking how many shield bracers he was wearing. It was two, both at low charges, but he probably wasn’t going to get in mortal peril today.
“One of the big bugs.” Dorothy told him.
“I’m calling them chanters.” James interrupted. “It’s sort of how they think of their emotional projection. I think. It’s all a little fuzzy, interrupted skulljack link and all that.” He shrugged. “Anyway, sorry. One of them wandered off?”
Dorothy nodded, as she propped her clipboard in the crook of her arm and wrote the word on the top of the page. “They were missing this morning, and no one saw them go. Kirk went off to putter around the block and see if he could find them. He’s supposed to have magic to be safe about it.”
“He’s in a car?”
“Bike. The streets here…” Dorothy didn’t shrug, didn’t look away, but gave the impression that she wanted this line of conversation to end anyway. “Well. We did a number on the traffic, didn’t we?” Her voice rang full of self loathing at the reminder.
James nodded, and gave her a small smile. “I’ll see what I can do.” He said.
It wasn’t what he’d come here for, but he had some time to kill, and there were a finite number of people who he’d be comfortable sending out on a search in a city filled with living asphalt creatures of dubious attitude.
Hell, he wasn’t even comfortable sending himself out. Which is why he decided not to. Skipping the line for the cargo teleport and dipping into his personal telepad stack, James jumped back to the Lair to pick up a few things, then back to Townton to find a good roof he could set up on.
If you compared James to someone in the Order who had been practicing this so they could run actual search and rescue as part of Response, or so they could scout dangerous dungeon environments, then he’d absolutely come up short. But ‘not as good as the best the Order had’ left a lot of room, and as far as skulljack drone pilot went, James had been doing it the longest. He wasn’t running elaborate multi-acre search patterns, but he could stick two wide angle camera drones hovering high overhead and run a third one for a more thorough street by street search.
He was pretty sure, if Dorothy had thought of it, she could have gotten something like this accomplished with an hour or two of time from the aid volunteers down here. But Dorothy, for all that she had been living in the magical world for a long time, just wasn’t familiar with every esoteric capability the Order had. He didn’t want to dismiss it as her being old; it was more that, when someone was focused on something like cleaning up and reclaiming a demolished city, they might not keep up on every weird trick that got developed for dungeon delving.
James found Kirk’s bike before he found Kirk, though he didn’t know it until a little later. It was hard to tell one ruined vehicle from another around here. It was, though, a novel experience to see a group of necroads moving down one of the streets. The creatures, asphalt held together by some kind of weirdly enchanted bone, tended to move by walking on their hovering claws, as far as James had seen up close. But now, when he watched from overhead, they almost skated along the road, fluidly drifting between wreckage as they wove the lanes.
When he realized the group he was watching was circling a block, James brought his two high point drones over to the area, and investigated further. From there, it wasn’t long until he found a motorcycle on one of the sidewalks that wasn’t a stationary piece of wreckage, and also had a bloodstain on the ground near it.
It took him a little while to carefully move his drone through the holes in the nearby commercial buildings for dentists and antique stores in his search, but he only had to go through two of the places before a navigator flared itself into his line of sight streetside. He found Kirk through the orange lines leading back to him, along with the chanter Kirk had been tracking down. The man was pale faced and leaning against the back of a counter just under the cash register, his leg broken in a painful way. The chanter was nervously scuttling back and forth nearby, like it wasn’t sure if it should run or stay, and the arrival of James drone didn’t help much.
There was a tempting thought to use the drone as a GPS beacon, and just use a Wolfpack teleporter to rip the chunk of building the two were hiding in back to safety. But James didn’t want to risk collapsing the place on top of them, so he struck out on foot instead; the place actually wasn’t very far away at all, and with one drone left high overhead so he could see anything coming at him out of the corner of his mind through the skulljack link, he made it without any problems.
A simple telepad got them back. Kirk had thanked him through teeth gritted in pain, Doroty had gone off on Kirk in a way that wasn’t exactly unfamiliar to how James remembered his own grandma being furious with worry, and the chanter had scuttled away on their spined claws to hide somewhere in the park. Maybe they were worried they’d be punished for the whole thing, but honestly, everyone seemed to just be relieved that no one had gotten hurt.
Kirk had objected to that statement from James, up until James had gotten him one of their purple orbs that reduced broken bones per month, and the worst part of Kirk’s leg had fixed itself.
“What I don’t get is why the necroads were trying to kill you.” James asked him as he helped the man bandage up his calf. “I thought we were cool with them.”
“Right. You don’t come down here much.” Kirk sighed as his navigator tried to get him to stop moving so much. “Some of the little packs are vicious. We try to avoid them, though.” He swatted limply at the orange feathers that were trying to keep him from tugging at the heavy bandage wrapped around his hand. “None of them talk to us though, if they even can.”
“We should move this up on our to do list.” James grumbled. “Do we have xenobiologists yet? Let’s get some.”
“Don’t you fucking dare ruin this place with a bunch of nerds.” Kirk glared at him. “I like it quiet down here.”
James gave the man a flat stare. “You didn’t complain about the chanters but you’ll complain about people studying the native life?”
“Yes.”
“Well… okay, well, you can do that. But I’m still gonna try to get some people to help us figure out what to do about the necroads. So deal with it.” James bluntly informed the Horizonist, his patience not able to hold up to the complaining. Shortly after, he’d left Kirk and his mild whining in the hands of a better medic than himself, and gone to actually do what he came here for, and check up on the chanters.
The picture he got of the situation wasn’t great. The Order knew from some of the captured Status Quo documents that the chanters needed food and water, but a lifetime of abuse and starvation conditions made actually feeding them a challenge. Recovery was trying to keep things familiar for now, which meant the humans got to feel a little uncomfortable providing food and water troughs instead of personal portions. But honestly, their comfort was secondary to creating an environment where the chanters knew it was okay to eat without being punished.
The creatures also were still very skittish around the mostly human group of aid workers. To the point that there had already been a few cases of them lashing out, though fortunately no one had been hurt badly. Shield bracers set to ‘claw swipes’ were now standard issue, though. But this meant that the few veterinarians and nurses on site didn’t have much to do at the moment. James did relay to them what he’d heard from Nik about the portal earlier, though. Taking a moment to let them know that it was possible that some of the chanters had injuries that might not be apparent.
He wouldn’t even know where to begin on fixing that. But there was talk of getting a unit of camracondas in to help with preliminary medical checks. Again, it was deeply uncomfortable, but, ultimately…
It was more important to achieve the result of keeping everyone safe and alive and uninjured than it was to wait until they could communicate fully as equals and risk one of the chanters quietly dying to internal bleeding that could have been found and treated.
“Kinda hate feeling like we’re just slightly more benevolent prison wardens.” James confided to Dorothy as he shoved his notebook back in his back pocket.
“We’re not slightly anything.” She told him as the thinnest ghost of her shared navigator manifested off her bony shoulders. “They’re like children. And we do know what’s better for them.”
James winced. “That’s…”
“A slippery slope?” Dorothy filled in with an interruption.
“Something like that. More that I think if we’re going to use ’we know best’ as a reason to act, then we should make sure we have really hard lines on the why and how. But then, I also think the world would be better if we were in charge of everything, so what do I know?” James sighed, mostly to himself. “Take care of them, yeah?”
Dorothy smiled at him. “Of course we will. I’ll treat them better than my own kids.”
Perking up, James started talking without thinking. “I didn’t know…” he paused as he saw the hurt look underneath the smile. “Ah.”
“My fault, I suppose.” Dorothy didn’t elaborate on what part she meant, exactly. “Now go on, get out of here. We’ll yell if we need you again.”
Her smile that time was real, and James mirrored it back to her, before heading off to the scheduled teleport that was bringing in a couple hundred gallons of fresh water, a pallet of granola bars, and the next wave of volunteers. The new teleporters made cargo transport so much easier, it almost felt like a waste to not use all the space they had available.
James added ‘check on the cargo thing’ to his list, but didn’t have much hope of getting that done today. Much higher on his list was getting a security team down here, because everyone who lived and worked in the city was being way too casual about living alongside the necroads that apparently sometimes were actually aggressive.
It wasn’t that James didn’t have his own slew of bad ideas and flawed assumptions about living conditions being normal. But he wasn’t gonna let this one slide right now, when they had new people relying on them for safety.
_____
“Hey there. I’m James.” Were the words he tried to make sound as calming as possible as James settled into a chair near the foot of the bed in the Order’s hospital.
The kid - well, mid twenties, probably, but James was feeling older with every passing day, so kid it was - in the bed looked at him like he was a snake waiting to bite. Which was ironic, because James was pretty sure that a camraconda would get a better reaction. “Wha-“ the guy tried to say something, and found he couldn’t make the words come out.
James grimaced, and nodded sympathetically. He took a quick glance at the notes on the whiteboard on the wall; specifically the ones that glittered somehow. “Sorry, Mercy says you should recover full speeching ability in a day or two. I can come back then, or I can give you the quick info now?”
The man who had been one of Status Quo’s prisoners up until yesterday shot him a look that seemed like it was hiding a lot of animosity, but he didn’t have the energy to keep it up for too long. Eventually, he just dropped his head back to the pillow. “Guh ahee.” He told James with a pirouette of his hand.
James snorted a bitter laugh. “Sure. So. The Order of Endless Rooms officially extends its hospitality to you. You can stay here until you recover, and we can help you rebuild your life afterward if that’s what you want. You owe us nothing, and that includes information about whatever magic you have.” The kid flinched, his face going slightly red as he turned and looked studiously at the wall. “If you know that your magic is recoverable on death, do not tell us. We have a standard form for everyone as to what they want done with their drops, regardless of if it applies to you.” James recited the speech he’d been refining on the last two prisoners he spoke to. “You’ll be able to explore the Order a bit more after you’ve recovered, with an escort at first. If you like our culture, and want to join us, there’s a path to that. If you want to leave and for us to forget you, we can do that too. We’re not in the business right now of judging you for anything in your past, okay?” James looked down at his hands, trying not to sigh. “Right now, all we’re interested in is putting you back together.”
“Eineds?” The man in the hospital bed slurred after a moment of silence. “Ey einds?”
“Your… friends? Oh, friends.” James nodded grimly. “We didn’t get everyone out. And we don’t know all the names yet. Until the communication damage is healed, we can’t get consent from most people to talk about them to anyone else. I know this might seem odd or stupidly picky, but we won’t tell anyone about you until you tell us it’s okay either. Once we can do that, in a day or two, we’ll start letting everyone know. But you’re far from the only survivor.”
The kid nodded silently into his pillow, still staring at the wall.
James watched for a minute before he took another breath, and made to stand. “If there’s anything you want to tell us, about anything, we’re here to listen. We also default to assigning people who have been through trauma like this to a therapist, so just know that if you’re staying with us, that’s coming up next week. Also, no one, even our resident infomorphs, know exactly what the thing that was attached to you was doing. Not totally. So if there’s anything going on, we’d like to know that too.” He tried to make eye contact, and failed, as the rescued prisoner just kept focused on the space next to the head of his bed. “You’re not a prisoner here. Just to say that again, just in case.’
There was no response this time. And James didn’t wait too long for it, either.
When he stepped out into the hall, he almost ran into Deb passing by. The woman was in her blue scrubs, hair tucked into a tight bun, and was currently rubbing her hands like she’d just taken gloves off. “Oh good, you’re here.” She said to James as she saw him.
“Yeah, I’m helping with intake, or whatever we call it.” He said. “I had wanted to try to talk to some of the people we rescued, but… yikes. You got a moment?”
Deb looked over her shoulder as if she was being chased by a specter of time management. “Two minutes.” She stated.
James nodded. He wasn’t sure what Deb was up to, but he wasn’t about to start wasting her time for no reason. “What’s up with the prisoners, anyway?” He asked directly. “I haven’t actually gotten a chance to talk to Mercy.”
“She’s still exhausted.” Deb said, sounding no small amount tired herself. “I can give you the spark notes.”
“Hit me.”
“Each of the prisoners we’ve worked with - and there’s still thirty or forty people who we haven’t gotten to yet - have some kind of symbiotic infomorph wrapped around them.” Deb started.
James cut in instantly. “Symbiotic?”
She nodded at him as the two of them moved aside to let one of the nurses pass with a wheeled cart stacked with wrapped meal trays. “Removing it caused noticeable physical changes. We monitored the second one closer, and while the thing was absolutely restricting the patient’s mental capacity, it was also making them tougher in a lot of ways. And we see it now with the ones still under; they don’t need food or water, not really.”
“Huh.” James tapped his foot on the polished tile floor.
“Yeah. ‘Huh’ is right.” Deb checked her phone on reflex, flicking messages away with nimble fingers. “They take a lot of assignment stamina to break, but they don’t fight back. Mercy describes them as structures built around a living person’s self, not as distinct individuals, and I agree; they won’t communicate, and maybe can’t. I think, personally, they’re close to authorities. Able to make intelligent actions, but they don’t choose anything.” She looked back up at James. “You’ve also already seen the aftereffects mentally. They’ve been keeping people from communicating in any way, and that’s residual. We’ll need some kind of directed therapy to really help them shake that off. Or skulljacks, or some other magic we’ve cooked up.” Deb sounded casual about the concept of medical magic in a way that made James smugly satisfied with what they had going on here.
“Well. You know what? I’m still fine with it. Better this than drained to the point of near death and used as a blood battery.” James hated that memory. Hated having seen first hand what the last Status Quo they’d met was willing to do to preserve ‘normalcy’. “And hey, maybe some of these people will be willing to work with us once they’re doing better.”
“We’ve got a better benefits package than Squo at least.” Deb agreed. “Now. Anything else? I need to go deliver good news.”
“What…?” James raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t that he didn’t think there was positive news; after all, despite a bunch of injuries, no one from the Order had been critically hurt or killed in the last fight.
Deb offered a rare smile to him. It wasn’t that she didn’t smile, it was more that every time James had seen her for what felt like the last year, it was because he was causing more problems for the would-be doctor. Her smiles got saved for Frequency-Of-Sunlight, and times when things went right.
“Yeah.” Deb told him. “Well. We had a shaper substance use scheduled. And there’s no sense postponing that when I can’t dig into people’s brains like an infomorph.” She tilted her head. “You’ll hear about it later, I’m sure.”
James felt his face light up with his own happy smile. “Everything went well though?” He asked.
“Oh yeah. Exactly as planned.” Deb nodded. “Now your two minutes are up. I’ve got real work to do. Get out of here.”
It was a dismissal, and it was sort of phrased harshly, but James didn’t take it personally. Much like Deb, he was just kind of happy that things were still moving forward, still getting better. For privacy reasons, Deb wasn’t gonna tell him who it was, but he could guess it was probably still a ratroach, or maybe Banana finally going through her own transformation. Either way, it was something powerful and uplifting. Taking a terrible thing from a terrible place, and using it to force the world into a more acceptable shape.
He started to leave the hospital feeling happy. But that faded as he passed by room after room after room, copied spaces containing placid, unresponsive prisoners. Or worse, sometimes, people who had gotten hurt rescuing them. Injured knights sleeping off stitches or blood transfusions, bruises and stray bullet wounds putting them down for more than just one night. Not all of them were human, either; a camraconda with a cracked lens, an inhabitor who was currently trying to convince a nurse that his body didn’t need rest. People who had gotten hurt, because of his choice.
James knew it was a good trade. Knew everyone had chosen to follow him into this. But it still stung. It would have been so much worse if anyone he’d made the decision for had died.
So he ended up walking out with a mix of melancholy and optimism. Things were going to be okay, because they’d make them okay, but that process wouldn’t be painless.
He’d always known that. It wasn’t even like now was much of a wakeup call; the last time Status Quo had gotten in a fight with the Order, they’d actually killed more than a few people, most of them not knights at all. James knew, for a fact, that there were plenty of people who would shoot him dead for his belief and his attempts to make them real.
But that didn’t mean he had to stop trying.
He also thought, as he finally made it back to the door to the Lair proper, that maybe they’d gone overboard on the size of their spatially warped hospital. He’d had way too much time to mope on the way out of here.
_____
Roughly twelve hours ago, Nate had sent James and the people with him to get a bite to eat and some sleep. The man’s roughly compassionate logic was that, while people like James were pretty competent fighters, they weren’t really soldiers, and keeping them on high alert was just going to exhaust them and wear them down. It wasn’t like they were leaving anything undefended; the Order had been recruiting and training up people to help with their security for months now, and a lot of those recruits that Nate refused to call squires were posted around their acres of old pumpkin farm.
When James arrived and checked in with Nate, the first thing he noticed was that Nate looked like he had utterly ignored his own advice to rotate out for rest. The stocky man was wearing a black cloth skullcap on his bald head, the Order’s weird mix of ballistic plate and riot armor, and was as heavily armed as any frontline soldier. He also had a rough look around his eyes, like he hadn’t slept much at all. Ben and JP were in the downstairs room of the old farmhouse with him, and James distinctly remembered them being here when he last left.
Planner was still here too, but Planner got a pass. Not because assignments didn’t need to sleep - that was still unclear to James actually - but because if anyone in the world could be trusted to stick to an actual sleep schedule, it would be Planner.
“Everyone in my group is ready to go.” James told Nate straight away. “Where do you want us?”
“Nowhere.” Nate and Ben said at the same time, Ben’s companionable voice mostly overridden by Nate’s louder declaration.
James frowned at both of them, before turning to JP. “Don’t look at me.” His friend told him without missing a beat. “I think you should be hovering around in Pendragon waiting to do your heroic swoop thing.”
“I do not.” James rolled his eyes, voice flatly contemptuous.
Nate cut in like a bull going through a store that only sold fragile conversation threads. “The one time anyone rescued anyone in that dragon, I was the one doing it.” He reminded JP. Incorrectly, James was about to say, because Dave had done it at least once too, but that was before Nate joined them. “And we don’t have anything useful for you to do. The Squo shitweasels might not even show up, there’s no bugs here for you to make bad calls about plugging your brain into, and our one prisoner is a psychopath who would just get off on fucking with you. What am I supposed to do you with you, stick you in a concealed post and let you get bored?”
“…yyyyyes?” James wasn’t actually sure. “Look, I’m supposed to be helping.”
“I’ve got thirty people whose actual job is securing areas.” Nate told him bluntly. “I don’t need your dumb ass getting in the way.”
James felt mildly offended. “I’m a little hurt.” He told Nate. Though he dropped the exaggerated attitude when he noticed the tired irritation in Nate’s eyes. “Alright, look. I don’t know how long we need to be on guard for. I don’t know if new east coast Status Quo is something we’ll have to be worried about for the rest of our lives. So if anything comes up, you tell me, okay? I’ll stay out of the way and let you do your thing, but I’m not useless, and I will not be sidelined for this.”
Nate met his eyes with a respectful scowl of annoyance. But he did give a grudging nod. “Sure. But it could be a while. Could be never.”
“Hopefully never.” Planner’s dry voice added itself to the conversation. “The obfuscation on the Lair is still quite strong and undisturbed. The concealment on the outer structure of Officium Mundi is much weaker still, and I would appreciate help in building it, but it does mean that I would be able to see even more subtle changes, and it has not been located either.”
“So we won’t get ambushed at home, at least.” James let out a small breath of relief. Though he wasn’t completely blind to the fact that a lot of people lived in non-Lair homes, at least this would be a major block to anyone trying to track the movements of the Order.
There was a shared moment between most of them. Nate had been there for that one. Ben hadn’t though, and the friend shaped mimic didn’t really think too much about breaking the stressed silence by answering his radio. James payed half a mind worth of attention as Ben took a report from one of the teams posted in a loose perimeter around the farm, but mostly shared a quiet moment with Nate and JP as they all, in their own way, hoped it wouldn’t come down to one last futile stand again.
“So.” James said suddenly. “What if I send you to get some sleep, and you can banish my dumb ass when you get back?”
Nate snorted at him. “I can take short rests here.” He jerked his thumb at a couch sitting in the adjoining room.
The old piece of furniture looked like it had more holes than cushion. James wouldn’t be surprised if he rounded the corner to get a full view of it, and saw springs sticking out of it like a cartoon prop. It was so beat up that the owners had left it here when they sold the place, and they’d taken the shower curtains.
“Uh huh.” He said, dryer than even Planner’s pen scratch tone.
“Fuck off.” Nate snapped without any heat. “I’ve got time. It’s not like they’re going to show up now anyway.”
JP snapped his head up from where he was looking over Ben’s shoulder at the hastily assembled set of monitors. “Don’t say that.”
“The world isn’t a goddamn movie.” Nate reminded him. “Besides, we’ll see them coming actual literal miles away, unless they teleport in.”
“Oh sweet Jesus, stop saying things like that.” JP reiterated. “I know you don’t believe it, I know it’s stupid, but man, you’re going to get us killed.”
James gave a grudging nod. “Much as I hate to give JP credit-“
“Hey!”
“-I’ve been around one too many ironic twists in my day to think that you should tempt fate.” He finished. “Though, that said, we actually don’t have any proof that saying shit like that does anything, so it’s probably fine. It’s just that if something does go wrong, you’ll never live it down.” He shrugged. “So it’s kind of a trade off?”
Ben chose that moment to clear his throat. “Uh. Guys?”
“No.” Nate barked out the word. “Don’t you dare.”
“Tapped traffic cams show eight vehicles headed this direction. About ten miles away. I’m looking back on their trail and I think they’re all rentals from the airport.” Ben’s fingers flicked at his keyboard, chunking through stolen video feeds in thirty second intervals as fast as he could process them. “So no teleporting. But…”
JP sighed, and rolled his head around to look at Nate. “But?”
“I’m not fucking apologizing.” Nate stomped out of the room, calling out to the other Order members who were still working on something else in the farmhouse. “Incoming! Move your asses! We’ve got five minutes! Get that concealed and rigged up!”
James wasn’t sure what he was yelling about, but he had something more important to ask. “What’s our plan?” He directed it at JP and Ben, but JP had clipped a skulljack braid in and was in rapid communication with the teams around the area. Ben was still checking the feeds from cameras and drones that he had access to; drones over the roads leading to the area being especially valuable in the more rural area that just didn’t have as many intersection cameras to siphon off of. “If they can’t teleport, and if they’re only coming here… we could just leave, right?”
“Right.” Ben said. “The big question that Nate hasn’t made a call on is what to do with the prisoner.”
“I want to talk to them.”
“Talk to… her? You already did. We all did. She’s an asshole.” Ben glanced back at James. “No, you don’t mean…”
James nodded. “I want to talk to the people coming in here. I want to offer them an opportunity to resolve this peacefully, and I want to actually see what they have to say. Maybe get something useful out of it too.”
Ben stared at him. So did JP, who was still subconsciously moving his mouth as he talked to distant people. So did Planner, but that was just because Planner tended to stare at anyone within range.
“Figured.” Nate said, coming in as the herald of a pair of the Order’s normally basement-dwelling engineers who were running wire along the base of the walls. “Okay. There’s three things you need to know first.”
JP raised his hand to the side. “And then I have one thing too.”
“Go for it.” James gave a tiny nod to them both.
“One, if things go wrong, we’re going to try to cut down as many of them as possible, then get out.”
“I’m okay with that.” James said. It was grim, but if Status Quo was insistent on enforcing an unfair and brutal… well… status quo… then they weren’t the kind of people who the Order of Endless Rooms could coexist with anyway.
Nate nodded. “Two. If they’re willing to resolve it without shooting, you let them take the prisoner and go.” He met James’ eyes. “I fuckin know you don’t like it. I don’t care. This is how we do things, so that war doesn’t become the absolute worst humanity has to offer.” He glanced up at one of Planner’s drifting tentacles. “Whatever we are has to offer.” He corrected, badly.
“I can do that too.” James’ voice was quieter. But he did sort of understand. “But they have to know that we’ll still fight them if they try this shit again.” He got a look from Nate, and sighed. “I will not purposefully antagonize them. What’s the third thing?”
Nate kept the stare for a minute before he glanced at the engineers and nodded once. “The building is rigged to blow, and I want you to sit on the trigger and teleport out when they start shooting at you.”
Almost complete silence took over the room. The only interruption to the stillness was one of the engineers - one of the bomb makers, James realized - whispering something to Nate before the duo ran back to link up with a camraconda and another human and teleport out.
Slowly, he started to clap. He didn’t keep it up for long, but he wanted to let Nate know he appreciated the attention to drama. “I can do that.” James said, much firmer than the other two statements from him. “Get me a chair. JP, what was your thing?”
“Hm?” JP looked almost entirely unconcerned about the dramatic turn, like he was distracted by something. “Oh, right. Yeah, don’t sit down, you dumbass. I have mentally prepared a second option for you; I call it ‘a phone’.” He held up a flip phone that he was entirely comfortable sacrificing. “Now help Ben get his hardware out of here, and I’ll leave this in a conspicuous place.”
James pursed his lips in consideration. He had sort of gotten caught up in the drama of the situation. And JP’s solution was safer and easier in almost every way.
So he joined the others in scrambling over the next few minutes to get their stuff teleported out, and secure the prisoner on the couch that might count as a war crime.
And then, before he forgot, he texted his partners. They might not be awake yet, but at least there’d be a record in their group chat if he died doing something stupid, and they’d know he loved them very much.
The last time a Status Quo had hunted down the Order, it had been a disaster. This time, James watched them through an overhead drone feed, and knew this one would be too.
Just not for the people that the incoming agents expected.