“One of the hallmarks of the liberal order is its frenzied attempts to purify and depoliticize - that is, to remove the human agent from - all facets of social and economic life. Liberalism’s faith in the “free market” for example, is of a piece with an entire weltanschuung that fails to see the inherent politics in a failed mortgage, a closed school, or a starving child.” -Jeremy Parker and Joshua Reeves, Killer Apps-
_____
A long time ago, practically a lifetime but in actuality only about two years, there was a bit of a pandemic happening.
Technically there still was, though James was unclear on whether or not the entire thing now counted as an endemic. He knew there was a distinction, but not exactly where the line was. It seemed like one of those things that was more declarative than factual. Like, someone one day would wake up and go “You know what? I think that’s a wrap on the global spread of a highly contagious disease. From now on, it’s just something that we live with.” And from then on you used the different word.
He took a moment to consider if his brain maybe wasn’t back up to a hundred percent yet. That thought felt like something from a fever dream. But no, reality agreed with him, which was maybe worse.
The main side effect of the pandemic, from the perspective of the Order of Endless Rooms, was that it pushed them to devote their resources more aggressively to attacking that problem. It hadn’t really worked out; the truth then was still the truth now, that the problem was societal and systemic, and it didn’t matter how many biotech yellows or immune booster purples or magic books that gave you growing stat points in health that the Order could produce.
They couldn’t produce eight billion of them. There wouldn’t be a magical mass distribution that stopped a disease. They couldn’t even really do much to help the people working on a mundane version of that, since at the time, they didn’t have skill orbs for genetics, pathology, or any related field.
The lack of power rankled James. Magic was supposed to change the world. Maybe if it were a thousand years ago and Earth’s population was measured with a couple fewer zeros, it could have. But in that moment, it felt like it wasn’t doing much for anyone that he didn’t personally know.
But that was something that was true. Magic did work for the Order. It did a lot for them. They maybe couldn’t supply an endless cascade of easy fixes for everyone on the planet, but they did what they could, and they invested that magic back into themselves so they could keep doing what they could better.
Including a convenient purple orb that they’d found a couple years back, and had made a lot of copies of, that just happened to bolster a human immune system in a weird way that didn’t quite line up with reality. A lot of purples were like that; they’d do things that were easy to represent with numbers, but the numbers were describing something that should have come from somewhere else. But it didn’t, it just… came from the numbers. It was weird, everyone in Research complained about it constantly, James thought it was kinda cool, the world turned. And because of the weird numbers-based powers of those purples, James got over his flu and was feeling hale and ready to get back into it again almost exactly two days after the delve left into Route Horizon.
They could have delayed for him, but the Route had been getting weird with the timing on its gateway. It was starting to get weirder in general, from what James had heard, but he’d have to wait to find out. It might be because the Order itself was the primary source of delvers for it, and the Order of Endless Rooms was just pretty weird by default. For example, Arrush was going along as a driver. James found that utterly bizarre, even though it was perfectly innocent and reasonable. He just had never once seen a ratroach drive anything, much less a salvaged and restored SWAT vehicle.
The point was he didn’t want them to stall on his account. Also it was hard enough to get thirty people lined up for something chronologically, and he wasn’t going to be the one that delayed it for half a week.
But being stuck in bed, even with Anesh there fussing over him and making him soup, had left James restless. So he’d made the poor choice, devoid of a dungeon delve to go on, to bike from their apartment to the Order’s headquarters. By the time James got to the Lair, he was exhausted again, his legs more like pool noodles than actual limbs, and was feeling like maybe he was a little farther from recovery than he expected. If it weren’t for the green orb that made travel to the Lair faster, he wasn’t sure he’d even have made it.
Not like he would have died, he just would have given up and teleported. James never left home without three telepads tucked in different pockets anymore. Telepads, shield bracers, a full store of Breath and Velocity, a concealed holster for his pistol, it had all become part of his waking routine along with deodorant and lying about eating breakfast.
Maybe the extra weight was what made cycling feel more tiring than it should have. James took a second to consider blaming the fifteen pounds of assorted metal he had on his person, before dismissing that. It definitely didn’t help. But he never felt this gross about being tired when he was on delves or getting in firefights while he was healthy. This was a flu thing.
The flu sucked. James mentally nudged the organizational program he was trying to get used to always having on through his skulljack, and added a long term goal of exterminating the flu.
Entering the Lair after sticking his bike on the rack outside, there were two things going on that drew his attention. The central part of the room that usually held a pile of beanbags now had a new addition. A collection of glass tanks, about four feet to a side, each tank containing a small habitat of plants and pools, or for a few of the better secured tanks at the bottom, just filled with water and fish. James spotted a big frog in one of them, and was instantly curious what the other terrariums held. The beanbags were still around, but there was a buffer of space between them and the collection of reptiles and fish. An unmodified ratroach sat in the middle of one, a tangle of limbs wrapped up in a ball with a towel under them, eyes locked on one of the tanks as a young girl read aloud from a book about amphibians.
James blinked at the sight. They weren’t the only people around, but it had been a long time since he’d seen Ava around the Lair, and seeing her just hanging around was reassuring. Especially since lately his track record of actually saving people had… faltered. Though not seeing her might have been a product of her having an assignment living in her head with the power to keep her concealed; a power they both enjoyed making extensive use of.
There was also an addition to the back counter. This place had previously been some kind of pool hall before the Order had moved in. Or at least, that’s what James remembered. And they’d never actually bothered to remove the staff counter, instead just working around it. And then when people started living here and needed to get their mail, just using the counter as a logistics hub. And now it had a pair of big monitors over it, cycling through lists of pickups on one, and…
James approached the counter, where a human and a camraconda were working on sorting stuff. “Hey, I’ve been out for a few days. Is that a list of orbs?” He asked, pointing at one of the screens.
“Oh! Yeah!” The human was a young Hispanic man James hadn’t met, but remembered reading the dossier of when they were looking for potential recruits. His name was… Tino? James needed to just get one of those emerald chips to grow him a program to remember names for him so he could stop stressing about it. While James didn’t know what he planned on doing in the Order, he did know that as a new guy, he’d be cycling through a bunch of different jobs and trying stuff out, and his clear enthusiasm for the magic of this place was casually on display. “I guess the adventurers brought back too many of the Ceaseless Stacks orbs, and there’s no practical way to copy all of them. And that sentence makes sense, right? Hah!” He laughed with a big grin on his face as he elbowed the camraconda next to him.
His serpentine coworker glanced over at James and gave a small bow in a way that James had thought had stopped happening. “Yes. We have extras of many things, and do not know what many of them are. Each member is allocated exchange credits based on total available supplies. You are not.”
The new guy looked over at the camraconda with a suddenly upset look. “Yo what? Why?”
“Ah, no, that’s totally fair actually.” James spread his hands out. “I kinda have enough of-“
The camraconda cut him off. “You may take what you wish.”
“Yo, what?” The new guy asked again.
James was looking for an opening to ask his name; they really needed either name tags, or he needed that identity program, or something. An ancient conversation came to mind about how the dungeons never handed out health potions or bags of holding, and James added the RPG staple of the identify spell to the list of things they just didn’t get around here. “Sorry, real quick. Tino?”
“Yeah?”
“No, I’m asking. Sorry, I didn’t know your name. We don’t have…” James gestured to his breast, where a nametag would live normally.
“Oh! Yeah, that’s me! This is Caller-Of-Midnight. Why do you get to walk off with anything you want?”
Before James could answer, the camraconda made a long hiss. “He is a paladin.” They said in a bassy digital voice.
“Like… like from Warcraft?” Tino asked.
James wheezed out an abrupt laugh that went on long enough to hurt his chest. “Wow, that is not the one I was expecting!” He gasped out through the laughing.
“Hey, I haven’t gotten through the whole manual yet!” Tino got defensive, glaring at James briefly like he wasn’t sure if he was being mocked.
“No no, it’s fine. That actually was just hilarious, and you will get why when you get to that part of the ops book.” James smiled reassuringly, holding up a placating hand. “Anyway, I’m not here to loot you, though I do see on our new menu that you’ve got orbs for SQL?”
Caller-Of-Midnight didn’t have a normal lens eye like many of the camracondas James knew. Instead, they had one of those reflective domes that covered modern security cameras in big box convenience stores across the country. Which meant that it was hard to tell if they were making any kind of motion with what was he supposed an ‘internal organ’, and yet, James still got the impression of an eye roll. “Research overcommitted and too many duplications were made. There was a similar communication error that led to our stockpile of green orbs that reduce the cleaning time of restrooms.”
James nodded in understanding. “Cool. Cash my credits in on those. I have a Lesson to advance.”
“Again, you have unlimited access.” Caller-Of-Midnight said bluntly as their human partner pulled out a keyring and started going through drawers under the counter, eventually coming up with three yellow orbs. All of them the size of big grapes, and while he couldn’t feel anything, James knew they were brimming with power. “Would you like anything else?” The camraconda asked as James picked up the orbs.
“I’ll come by when there’s another crisis and I need a miracle.” James promised with a smile. “Tino. Nice to meet ya. Oh, how’re you liking the Order so far?”
The young man looked at the camraconda that he was working with, then back to James. “It’s kinda wild, but I’m getting used to it. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing though?”
“Oh, that’s normal!” James reassured him. “You’ll figure it out. Like, actually, that’s the point of bouncing you around different jobs. You’ll find something that you’ll end up making yours. And if you don’t, then… nothing bad happens. You just keep looking.” He shrugged.
Tino narrowed his eyes. “Is that why you had me cleaning bathrooms for a week?”
“First off, I have been either sick or delving for the last week, so that wasn’t my fault.” James defended his honor. “But also, cleaning bathrooms is important. I’ve done the math! You know how you tend to clean your home bathroom about once a week? Don’t… don’t correct me on that. Don’t make me sad. Just nod. Well, that represents something like twenty to forty ‘uses’, depending on how many people you live with and how well hydrated you are. So if a bathroom is getting used that often every six hours, it’s kinda important to actually put the work in to keep it clean and comfortable. And that’s really what we aim for.”
“Why have you just done the math on that?” Tino asked. “Like, why? Do you not have hobbies?”
“My main hobby is designing a city.” James admitted with a grin. “Also did someone say green orbs that reduce bathroom cleaning time? That sounds so unbelievably powerful, holy shit.” He paused. Then added, “Pun unintended.”
“Why?” Caller-Of-Midnight asked. “It is paired with an emotional resonance rank in pity, incidentally, if you were curious.”
James nodded. “I was.” He stated. “And it’s powerful because time is the most valuable resource we have. And that’s time that would never be wasted. And it lasts forever. So that adds up to whole lifetimes saved, on a long enough timeline. I think that’s valuable. No one wants to clean the bathrooms, even if it is important. Or at least, I never want to when it’s my job for the week.” He shrugged, and then stepped back, disengaging. “Also I think someone needs their mail. Thanks you two! Have fun!”
He let the person politely waiting approach, and stopped monopolizing their time. Which had the added bonus of getting him out of a social situation that James realized abruptly he just didn’t have the fortitude to continue. He could have tapped into his Endurance to push on, but that seemed like a great way to end up collapsing in a basement hallway in half an hour when he let go of his grip on it.
So he just left, and then listened to his rumbling stomach and headed to get lunch from the Order’s little restaurant while he used the orbs he’d technically purchased.
[+2 Skill Ranks : Programming - Database - SQL]
[+.8 Skill Ranks : Programming - Database - SQL]
[+.2 Skill Ranks : Programming - Database - SQL]
One of the weird things about yellow orb skills was that they never changed how James approached problems. He felt like, with this much of any one tool, he should be finding nails to use it as a hammer for. But instead, it just kind of pooled there; waiting for him to call on it, if he really needed to make something to manage the Order’s digital archive. Which he didn’t, because someone else surely already had it covered, and if they didn’t, then there were too many of these orbs waiting behind the front desk for them.
Even with the diminishing returns, three ranks for three orbs was pretty good, and was almost certainly enough to shove his Lesson over the threshold. But James was doing this thing he liked to call ‘thinking before taking dumb actions’, so he actually grabbed one of the small tables and sat down before he prompted his Sewer based magic into reacting to the change.
The abrupt transition to being in a degrading and filthy classroom, sitting at the only clean desk in the middle of a moldy pile of rubble, was as jarring as always. Even though James knew he wouldn’t remember this later, he still didn’t like it now. The teacher, a ball of tweed and sharp blades that was currently digging claws into the blackboard and making a symphony of the screech, demanded something of him.
Fortunately, James already knew his answer. He’d actually had the chance to think on it beforehand. Study, Energy, or Composure. Study was the answer for a different version of James; someone who spent less time doing dangerous stuff and more time planning a society, ingesting statistics to convert them to knowledge, and just learning for the sake of learning. James wanted it so badly, and maybe he’d take it as his second rank. But not now. Composure was for a version of James who hadn’t already gotten a lot of practice bantering with people who were shooting at him. It would be valuable, absolutely, but it wasn’t what he needed.
What he needed was Energy. Constantly. So he called out his answer, got screamed at by the Sewer construct that apparently managed these rewards, and then snapped his eyes back open in the real world.
[Lesson Continues : Basketball IV (18/4,200), Aim II, Agility I
Lesson Continues : Biology IV (611/4,200), Endurance III
Lesson Continues : Computer Science II (96/1,400), Energy I
Merits : 266, Credits : 2, Accolades : 0]
The reminder of how far he’d come was welcome. There was something gratifying about seeing gains like that laid out in front of him, seeing just how much he’d earned. But there was also the reminder of the problem that the more Lessons you stacked, the more it took to get to each subsequent level. When he’d just had to learn about basketball, it had been 100, then 200 little bits of knowledge. But at three Lessons, even with the edge that the reading potion gave, he’d gone from 350 to 1,400 for his computer science path’s next increase.
And yet, James didn’t care. He suddenly felt… ready. More alert, more energetic. Not like he could take on the world; he was actually still recovering from being sick and that reality didn’t just go away. But he felt like he had a much larger reserve that he could draw on, coming from nowhere in particular, if he actually needed it. And that reassurance was worth the cost. He’d be around for a long time, hopefully. So long as he was still alive, he could keep learning, and keep advancing those Lessons. But first, he had to still be alive.
Eventually, one of the people working for the kitchen today dropped by his table, and James ordered a lunch special. He didn’t know what it was, so he was sorta rolling the dice, but he was hungry enough that trying something new would be easy. While he waited, he used some of that new energy he was infused with - which was really nothing more than just a boost to how adventurous his attitude was - to take a quick elevator ride upstairs to the LA office and grab a drink from the vending machine there. Also random. Really was prepared for anything, it felt like.
He got back to find his table had been occupied by Texture-Of-Barkdust, who was using her fangs to flip through an economics textbook while occasionally glancing up. She spotted him just before James decided to abandon his previous spot and claim a different table, and waved him over with a waggle of her tail from the basket chair she was curled up in.
“Hey Barkdust.” James greeted the camraconda as he sat back down. “How’s-“
“Explain communism.” She demanded of him abruptly.
James clapped his hands together in front of his chest, elbows planted on the table. “No!” He briskly shot back. “That seems like such an enormous hole to fall down right now!”
The camraconda glared at him in her own way. “This text has numerous assumption-based errors founded on a cultural perspective I do not understand. I require an explanation from someone who is a part of that culture, to begin to extract what usable information it does hold.” She explained. “Which means I am asking you to explain communism.”
“I’ve had this nightmare.” James muttered. “Except the teacher wasn’t a snake, and I wasn’t wearing pants.”
“If you need to remove your pants to explain communism, I will find someone else.” Texture-Of-Barkdust told him with blunt honesty.
James sighed. “Okay. So. Communism in general is the idea that… actually, I don’t even know if I have a good answer for this? There’s literally whole books written just about trying to express this idea. I think a common theme though is that it’s the idea that because labor has value, the value of that labor should be distributed to the people who do the labor. And through doing this, you build a stronger society, that uses its resources to take care of everyone, regardless of their labor-based value.”
Texture-Of-Barkdust looked back at her economics text, then back at James, then back to the book. Slowly, she leaned forward and used her fangs to flip backward several pages. “Under communist governments,” she quoted, “there is no concept of private ownership, rendering economic incentives meaningless.” She looked up. “The author is stating that this harms innovation, as well as personal motivation for growth.”
“Uh… yeah. A lot of people say that.” James shrugged. “I have a counterpoint?” She nodded at him to continue. “Okay. Well, you’re studying economics, presumably because of your work with Karen, right?” Texture-Of-Barkdust nodded again, slowly, the bulky lens of her eye narrowing. “Okay. That was it.”
“That is a terrible point. Be more direct.” She ordered him.
“I… oh, thank you!” James shot a smile as his lunch arrived. He realized the person bringing him what looked like a plate of enchiladas was Morgan, and decided to go say hi to the kid in the kitchen after he ate, and escaped from Texture-Of-Barkdust. “Okay, direct. Sure. Barkdust, you have no economic incentives.” He told her. “We’re fucking rich. Like, we could cash out right now, sell the Order’s assets, and every one of us could retire to a tropical island with an endless stream of luxuries, as long as we share Netflix passwords. But we’re all still here, and so are you. So why?”
She looked back down at her textbook while James started covering his lunch in sour cream. He was two bites in, and enjoying the rich flavor, when she chomped into the side of the book, made an arc with her neck to slam it closed, and then shoved it off the table entirely. “I am accustomed to sources being reliable.” She hissed angrily as she spoke. “And now that you point it out to me, I cannot even see this author having ever met another living person.”
“Well, they are an economist.” James said around a mouthful of shredded chicken and red sauce.
“Do not be coy. This is important. This is being presented as knowledge.” Texture-Of-Barkdust sounded legitimately angry. “Why? Wait. Is this about a historic power struggle again?” She hissed something that was almost a word and focused her lens on something James couldn’t see. “I have gained two points in my social studies Lesson from this already. This is about nation states, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know why he suddenly felt guilty for eating lunch, but James sighed after gulping down a bite. “You know it absolutely is.” He said sadly. “That’s sort of the problem with an explanation; I can tell you about theory, but then you won’t get the real world history. And I could tell you that history, but then you’ll come away not understanding why anyone would ever come close to agreeing to that. Or at least, the history as I know it in the shadow of the Cold War.”
“I am going to go find a different book.” Texture-Of-Barkdust told him with clear ire. “And then we are going to discuss distribution of resources.”
“Uh… sure?” James smiled warily. “I mean, I can do that without the broader context. Like, you want me to talk about how wealth should be a flow structure and a GDP should essentially be divided among people within five percentage points of variance?”
“No.” Texture-Of-Barkdust pulled herself out of her chair, slithering to the ground and touching down with dexterity that always surprised James when it came from the two-hundred-pound-plus camracondas. She collected her book, filling her fangs with the now somewhat scarred text before looking back up at him. “I do require context. I will ask Planner to schedule a time to talk, which I am certain will be postponed due to crisis, but at least we will try.”
“Of course. Yeah. I mean… when you just say it that way, it feels bad! But I’ll always try to be around if you need to talk.” James told her. Then the camraconda bobbed a nod to him and left, leaving him to his lunch.
James ate quickly, mostly out of reflex and not because he had anywhere to be. It was a habit he was trying to break, and he wasn’t doing a good job of it, and it didn’t take long before he’d demolished the meal. His lingering hunger from eating mostly soup and crackers for a few days making it pretty easy, and then the lingering bits of discomfort making it seem like a terrible idea right afterward as his stomach made its displeasure known. But not before he’d tried a sip of his fermented coconut soda, decided he hated every part of that, and then tried it again a few times just to make sure. Which was how he found the surprise purple orb that was suspended in the fluid.
[Shell Upgrade : -1.2 oz dead skin/year]
“Huh. Neat. Also I really need to stop thinking these things have boba in them and be better about extracting the orbs.” James spoke to himself as he stood and cleared his table. And then, with nothing in particular to do and a desire to bug a certain teenager, he headed for the kitchen. Weaving his way through tables large and small, about a third of them occupied by members of the Order eating, chatting, laughing, or just relaxing on their own.
It made him feel really, really good to see just how thoroughly the people under his banner had accepted and mingled their lives with the camracondas and ratroaches and everyone else that came to them. Equally good to see many of those camracondas holding conversations now as equals, those ratroaches having lunch out in the open without fear.
After he passed by the last couple tables, sliding between a Response duo that were doing reporting paperwork and a group of some of the people who organized their youth groups doing planning for that evening after the human children arrived, James made it through the room and slipped into the kitchen.
Nate wasn’t there today, so he nodded to Marjorie and her pair of helper cooks that were doing an admirable job of keeping up on everything, and then headed over to harass Morgan.
“Hey kid.” James greeted the teenager.
Morgan didn’t look up from his phone, the lanky teen wearing his hair tied back as he worked to keep it out of face and food. “You’re never gonna stop that, are you?”
James smiled. “I mean, honestly? I absolutely will if you tell me to. Does it actually bother you or does it just sound too much like I’m a real adult?”
“That second one.”
“Then I’ll probably keep it up.” James nodded. “I’ll be a real adult someday! Gotta get practice in.” He kept grinning as he pretended Morgan’s stare - a poor imitation of seriousness - tried to bring him down. “Anyway. Just checking in on ya. Things going okay?”
Morgan tossed his phone down on the counter in a way that made James wince in sympathetic pain for the poor electronic. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just sending memes in a group chat.” He looked at James. “Oh, you might be too old. ‘Memes’ are these things where-“
“Don’t lecture me about the memes, you whippersnapper!” James affected an old man voice. “I was posting image macros when you were in grade school!”
“Yes.” Morgan said. “So was I.”
“Touche.” James laughed lightly. “Why the phone though? I know for a fact you have a skulljack, against all advisement.”
“Uh…”
James raised his eyebrows at the panicked looking kid. “Uh, is the best you thought of? You’ve had months without me accusing you of this to plan.”
“Um… I was…” He looked at James and realized that there was no anger on his face at all. “Wait, I’m not in trouble at all, am I?” He asked, and James shook his head. “Alright, then yeah. But I suck at browsing TikTok in my head so I use a real phone.”
“Fair. So, you’re working here?” James prompted. “I figured you’d be doing stuff with the gardens or something.”
Morgan shrugged. “Liz asked me to cover for her today. And I… uh… I mean, I’ll…” He couldn’t finish his thought before his cheeks turned red enough to be noticeable and he shifted to look away from James.
“Wow, I wonder if I was that transparent as a kid.” James muttered to himself with quiet amusement. “Well hey, it’s cool however it goes. Pretty much everyone we bring in we rotate through positions, you know? You’ll be a full member before you know it.”
“I haven’t even graduated high school.” Morgan protested. “Hey, I also never asked to join!”
“Okay, do you wanna join?” James asked.
“I mean, yeah, but…”
“Cool. Keep up the good work!” James clapped him on the shoulder, and saw one of the kitchen staff muffling a heavy laugh. “But also, if you wanna go back to school, it might feel weird but we’re on track to try out a limited run of our own actual organized program next year. So you can!”
Morgan grabbed his phone again and shoved it in an apron pocket. “I dunno. It seems weird now? Like I missed it.” He shrugged. “I just got used to being the least weird person around.”
“Oh, like high schoolers aren’t all fuckin’ weird to begin with.” James snorted. “I’m not so old and decrepit that I don’t remember. Some people just hid it better.” He realized that Morgan was doing something familiar; making excuses for why it was okay to not take a risk. James had done that a lot. Still did that a lot, really, since he hadn’t dunked his head in shaper substance and tried to see how cool of a body he could make. Or even just tried being romantic with some people, just out of background worry that it would change things. James was the master of avoiding taking risks that weren’t really that bad. “Okay, so, I can’t promise you won’t feel weird. But it’d be okay, and if you wanna make that choice, you can. I think it’d be helpful for you though.” He shrugged lightly. “Especially if you wanna get a good grounding for the kind of stuff you’d be doing with us, if you want stick around.”
“Y-yeah!” Morgan tried and failed to hide his excitement, in the way teenagers did where they were probably certain they’d gotten away with it. “I mean, yeah. Sure. Sorta feels like you’re trying to emotionally manipulate me into this, but I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, that reminds me!” James said, slapping his palms together with a distant look in his eyes. “Okay, I‘m gonna get going, let you go back to work. Why’s it so quiet in here today, anyway? I figured someone’d need you by now.”
“Everyone’s off on the delve.” Morgan was eager to impart the knowledge he’d been picking up listening in on conversations all day.
“What, everyone? Noooo. Like, Charlie and his crew aren’t. I know that.”
“They’re in Missouri.”
“Oh. Uh… Nate?”
“Nate’s on vacation.”
“Seriously? Fucking good for him!” James smiled appreciatively. “Alright. Hey, just so you know, you’re doing great. I’ll see you later.”
Morgan was too taken aback by the open praise that it wasn’t until James out of the kitchen and he was halfway through the next task the cook gave him that he thought of something. “Wait, why does emotional manipulation remind him of something?”
With his enhanced hearing, James caught the words from the other side of the kitchen door where he was just checking a few things before actually leaving the area, and smirked to himself. It was always good to get a few mysterious wizard moments in every day.
Mostly what he was checking on was the next teleport to Townton. James had been either delving or recovering for weeks, and he felt like he was starting to get out of the loop on the fact that they had hundreds of nonhuman refugees hanging out down there. A meaningful amount of the Order’s money and operation time was going into that, but more important than just the resource cost, was the fact that James did care about them.
It was just getting harder to fit everything into his life. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t take some time to go say hi. James figured it was important to have some first hand knowledge of things that he was supposed to participate in the discussion about when the Order made decisions about how to move forward. He wasn’t going to know all the names and faces, but he was going to do his best to understand everything he could about their lives.
But he also had an hour or so to wait. So in the meantime, he headed to one of the basements, because Deb had messaged him about a conversation while he was having lunch, and if James could keep his list of problems managed today, he’d still have some of that extra energy left over when he went home with Anesh later.
The Lair’s hospital space was pretty quiet, though Deb was talking to someone James didn’t recognize, and he didn’t want to bother her. So he checked in with the front desk, and went to visit Banana while he was here. Down the long hall that shouldn’t have fit down here, and that no one had ever really ‘built’, past the quarantined rooms where several ratroaches and one human who’d gotten some kind of Akashic Sewer infection were waiting to be cleared.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
In her own long term observation room, more decorated than any of the others by far, the girl assembled from parts of crows and wasps sat reading a book. Four legs, three of them ending in smoothed stumps from where her stingers had been shattered, were folded underneath her. The crack on her beak was more like a scar now, and she had a fitted patch for her missing eye. Black feathers that had regrown in a place with less damp and far less fungal infections shone on her thin frame, the elytra that didn’t really match up to any earth species cracked open to let her arms hold the book she was reading.
She was also surrounded by stuffed animals. Like some kind of throne. “Hey Banana!” James grinned as he lightly tapped on the door and leaned around the corner. “Just wanted to say hi!”
“Aaaames!” The girl’s voice was a squawk, pitch rising and dipping as she greeted him with her book dropped back to the hospital bed’s clean sheets. “Lllo!”
James was still smiling as he slipped around the corner and approached her at an even pace to lightly ruffle the stuff on her head that was apparently a sort of feathery antenna. She squawked in earnest then, not a word, just a sound, before devolving into a buzzing giggle as her wings flailed at James. “How’ve you been doing?” He asked. “Doing some reading?”
She nodded at him, shaking off his hand. Then she tried to say something and found her voice turning into a buzzing mess of consonants. Banana didn’t get demoralized though, instead poking James and gesturing to the table by her bed, shaking her head as he pointed at things and asked if that was what she wanted until he got to a cable and earned a nod. Taking it, Banana’s crooked fingers slipped a few times as she plugged her skulljack into the small speaker, but she did it all on her own otherwise. “Reading. A. Book. About. Avian. Bone. Structure.” She spoke with a default mechanical voice. Learning how to talk as smoothly as a camraconda was a work in progress. Apparently she’d used a helper program the first few times, but that didn’t give her as much flexibility, so now she was learning to do it herself.
“Nice.” James nodded as he looked at the book she had dropped. It was colorfully illustrated, and looked like something that was about two levels above a Zoobook in terms of knowledge. Educational, but not overwhelming, hopefully. “You like learning about birds?” He asked with a teasing voice.
Banana didn’t rise to his bait, instead twisting her head at an angle that would kill a human to point her beak up at his face, her good eye glinting in the hospital’s lights at his question. “I. Have. To. Learn. How. To. Put. My. Body. Together.” She told him. “Amy. Helping. Library. Orbs. Helping.” Her organic voice punctuated that last statement with a happy buzz.
James hadn’t known that they’d gotten any orbs from the Ceaseless Stacks that would help Banana out, but it made sense there’d be at least a few. They’d brought back a lot of those. At least a couple thousand, as far as he knew. If any of them were about birds or bees at all, then copies of those orbs would help Banana and any future rescues of her species to learn how to reforge their bodies, and that was very valuable to the Order’s mission statement. Though it did bring up a question for him. “So, you’re gonna be a bird of some kind?” James asked her.
Banana nodded, idly pulling a stuffed badger into her lap and slowly petting the toy’s soft fur. “Ebbb aye…” She started to say out loud, before buzzing in frustration and switching voices. “Deb. Says. Bigger. Changes. Too. Hard. So. I. Will. Be. This. But. Fixed. Up.” The crow-wasp made another noise like a buzzing huff of exasperation.
That information was something James hadn’t heard. But then, he’d been kind of not paying attention to ongoing shaper substance trials and experiments. Partly because he sort of did want to change his body, even if he didn’t exactly know what to; but he felt like if he knew more, it would become… more real, maybe. Something he was actively avoiding instead of just that passively ‘wasn’t ready yet’. “Well hey.” He told Banana kindly. “You’re already pretty cute. Now you can be cute and healthy too. That’s important!”
“Nnnnnnnnaao!” Banana cawed out. “‘Annna ‘eee ah sssharrk!” Her voice was filled with buzzing clicks, but it was clear she’d been practicing saying this particular thing.
James couldn’t hold back a riotous laugh that erupted out of him at the statement. “Okay!” He told her. “We’ll look into turning you into a shark.”
“Arrrrk orrrrbs.” Banana told him firmly, staring up at James. “Shark. Orbs.” She added in her digital words as she swapped back, breathing heavily.
He pressed his lips together, hoping the almost painful smile on his face didn’t make Banana feel like he was making fun of her. James wasn’t quite sure what the difference was between the species, but Banana at least always came across as a lot younger, by human standards, than the ratroaches. She wasn’t stupid by any means, but it was taking her a lot longer, even with magical assistance, to really comprehend the more advanced biology topics that were needed to safely shift around your internal organs. “I’ll find you some shark orbs.” James promised. “But you need to get yourself to a stable body first, alright?” She snapped her head to the side, looking away from James, and he set a hand on the bed next to her comfortingly. “Hey, once you do, you’ll be able to go out for longer without hurting yourself. We can go explore a bit, okay?”
“Cafe?” Banana asked in her digital voice. “Banana. Smoothie?”
“I…” A pang of sharp guilt hit James in the chest. “I… the…” he hadn’t been prepared for this, and his breathing quickened as Banana caught him off guard entirely by accident. “The cafe is…”
The girl looked back at him, tilting her head curiously to focus her eye on his face as she sensed his distress. “Aaames?” She squawked.
He took a deep breath. “We’ll need to find a new place that makes smoothies.” James said, his smile back in place, if a little shaky. “But yeah, we can do that.” Banana’s face lit up, any sense of trouble forgotten in a moment at the promise of a sugary drink. James was about to say something else, but there was a light knock on the glass door of the room, and he looked over to see Deb watching him. “Hey, I gotta go do a thing. I’ll drop by later, see if I can get you some shark orbs. And I’ll make sure Alanna remembers to visit when she’s back.” He said more cheerfully. “Be a good kid and do your homework!” He commanded with mock sternness.
Banana nodded rapidly, and picked up her book, shifting her feathered tail around under the pillows as she got comfortable again. She peeked over the edge of the book at him as he turned to meet her eyes from the door, making a buzzing giggle as she looked back down, and then got pulled back into the words and pictures.
James shook his head, still smiling softy as he walked back down the hall next to Deb. “Yo.” He said. “What do you need to talk about?”
“First off, thank you for visiting Banana.” Deb said. “I know you’ve been taking time to recover, but that girl does love it when you and Alanna show up.”
“Yeah, of course. Also this is how I recover.” James lied through his teeth.
Deb didn’t even bother giving him a look as she led him into the little office space she used for private conversations. “The only reason you still have your left arm attached is because your bones are an ontological challenge to break.” Deb stated in an unimpressed voice. “And also because Nik’s authority is starting to get farther and farther into actual magical healing.”
“A lot of the Response authorities are too!” James said happily. “It’s kinda a weird situation, since they can’t actually be full time delvers, even though that’s where they’d do the most healing, without losing some of the power. But I’m finding it kind of… okay, this is off topic. Sorry.”
Snorting a laugh as she leaned against a shelf, ignoring the chair for her own desk, Deb shook her head and folded her arms on her chest. “You’re fine.” She said. “There’s… a lot going on around here. I don’t mind the update.” She closed her eyes, breathing slowly and enjoying the quiet as James let her take a moment. Deb herself still felt like she hadn’t recovered from the Climb. Even if it was only a few days, and they had exercise potions aplenty, her legs still ached and the allure of sitting down was too tempting to give in to. And now she was doing more work to distract herself from how her girlfriend was flying around at high speeds fighting road spiders or whatever Route Horizon had in it. So she appreciated the quiet moment, even if she was going to interrupt it for herself. “Speaking of things going on around here…” Deb led into what she had wanted to discuss with James.
“Ominous.” He said. “Are you doing okay? We can get you more help, you know.” He told her.
“No no, I’m fine. I’m tired for personal reasons, not work reasons.” Deb felt a weird appreciation for the compassion. She’d been kind of hostile to James in the past, and while they’d worked through it, there was a constant and very human voice in the back of her head whispering that the problem persisted. “Okay. Have you met Smoke?”
“Ratroach, darker chitin, white fur but dyes it purple, nonverbal, worked with Recovery until Karen found out she was doing it because she thought we’d murder her if she wasn’t useful?”
“Yeah.” Deb couldn’t keep mild surprise out of her voice. “Are you cheating?” She looked around at James’ neck.
“I’m online, but no, I just knew that.” He said with a proud smirk. “Anyway, is she doing okay?”
“Sort of.” Deb said. “She doesn’t talk because her body literally doesn’t support it, but she’s still pretty clever. She had a few friends online that she talks to through text. Non-Order.”
“Okay…” James raised his eyebrows. That was cool, but he was waiting for Deb to tell him what the problem was, and why she looked like she was chewing on a lemon.
Deb dropped her arms to her sides and cut to the chase. “She wants to swap bodies with one of her online friends.”
“Lol wat.” James laughed once. And then saw Deb’s tired eyes as she looked up at him, and cleared his throat. Her patience seemed brittle at best. “Sorry, I mean… what? Really?”
“Really.” Deb said. “Well, not really really. It’s… she’s met someone who’s into the idea of being in a nonhuman body, and I don’t think they actually believe her, but Smoke has been sneakily asking about things in a way that makes me think she’s planning to remake herself to the body they want, and then swapping with the break room table that… that does that. The one that’s a time bomb waiting to detonate on us. She just hasn’t gotten up to asking directly.”
James nodded. “Okay.” He said slowly. “That’s…” he paused to think. Was this an issue? The biggest problem would be making sure the other person actually knew enough to consent to this process. You couldn’t just tell someone magic was real and expect them to take everything you said at face value. And James had a suspicion that Smoke’s friend might see this as a kind of flirty roleplaying more than anything else, because James had been on the internet and he wasn’t completely sheltered. “I’m gonna say something that might annoy you?” He started.
Deb waved a hand in a flat line between them. “Go for it. Can’t make it any worse, and I assume you’re just gonna say yes.”
“Sorta. Why don’t we just invite Smoke’s friend here? Like, get a security check done first, sure, but then invite… them?”
“Her.” Deb informed James. “My understanding is that half of the appeal is that she’s trans.”
“Okay, I feel like this would be an issue if it were our policy answer to things. But it’s not right now, we’re still working through stuff, and so why not?” James asked with a shrug. “Is there a reason to not bring her in, show her around, let Smoke actually hang out with her friend, and then see if they’re both still willing to try it? Wait, hang on; the table is reversible!” James thwacked a few fingers off his forehead and instantly regretted it as the lingering ghost of a headache reminded him he was technically supposed to be sick and that magic couldn’t kill the symptoms instantly. “It’s reversible. Let’s go for it. Anything with an undo button is okay.”
Deb gave him a small nod, mouth set in a line. “I hadn’t actually thought of that.” She admitted. “My main worry is Smoke’s mental well being if this goes wrong somehow. Or the trauma if one of them wants it undone.”
“Also a good point. Why not just send her therapist a note about it, and they can talk it through beforehand?” James asked, and got a nod from Deb as she tilted her head up and closed her eyes in the way she usually did when using her skulljack for things. It took her very little time, and she looked back and nodded before James could even realize he was waiting. “Okay. Cool. God I love these things.” He muttered. “Do you want me to talk to Smoke?”
“No, I’ll do it. That girl hides it, but she’s not exactly comfortable around the more dangerous people here.”
“Oh.” James tried and failed to keep a sad frown off his face. “Yeah, I mean… I get it.” He nodded, keeping himself from feeling personally sad about it. “But yeah, am I missing any potential problems?”
Deb shook her head, a strand of blonde hair that had escaped where she’d tied it up fluttering on the side of her face. “I think the biggest issue is going to be personal. People have gotten used to ratroaches behaving like what we think of as how ratroaches act. If there’s someone who’s human, in a ratroach body, then that’s going to upend some assumptions. Buuuuut…” She trailed off.
Picking up on her comment, James added a nod. “But that’s already happening, right? Some ratroaches are a lot smarter or speak differently than some people except. I mean, also, I don’t care if species-based assumptions get messed with, that’s a whole… I don’t care. I guess the biggest issue is gonna be for Smoke’s friend, right? She’s gonna have to deal with being something totally different, and presumably she’s not isolated from human society.”
“Yeah, we’ll need to make sure they actually know what they’re in for.” Deb pursed her lips. “But like you brought up, we can undo it. Maybe something where they trade for short periods, hashing out if they’re going to make it more permanent. Yeah, this is workable.” She sighed. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, of course. I mean, I hardly did anything, but I’m always willing to do hardly anything.” James grinned as he answered.
Deb snorted at him. “Liar.” She accused bluntly. “Alright, get out of here. I’m sure you have something to do, and I’ve got stuff to take care of.”
James followed her out of the cozy little office, gave a polite incline of his head to the guy manning the front desk for their medical facility, and then left Deb to her own work as she rapidly transitioned out of the casual resting stance she’d used around him, and into something more animated and energetic.
He should try to get her a Sewer lesson for computer science. If anyone in this place could make use of a little extra energy, it’d be Deb.
With a little of his time eaten up, James made his way upstairs, and found a place to quietly lounge around while he waited for the scheduled teleport. He amused himself with a mix of people watching, and indecisively flipping through the list of spells from Winter’s Climb that he still hadn’t picked from fully yet.
On the people watching side, it was an unexciting, but pleasant, afternoon. The most drama that appeared was a human couple that James loosely recognized as some of the original rescued people from Officium Mundi, trying to explain dating to a ratroach. It was going… amusingly, at least to James. Right on the line of what was just too awkward to be able to handle.
On the magical hand, he had six Climb spell slots to work with, and somehow, enough anxiety about making the ‘right choice’ to drown all of them at once. He would have had seven, but he’d been the one to test out the Rot Eyes spell, so that left him with three spells and six more options.
After his recent experiences, though, James was no longer comfortable leaving power sitting on the table. That was the whole point of trying to make long delves a habit, really. As part of his role as a paladin, he had a responsibility to not hoard magic. His job was to distribute the Order’s special form of wealth as effectively as possible; to use their tools to combat problems. But he also had a responsibility, and a whole heap of personal trauma lurking in his soul, telling him that he could not be caught off guard again. So while he wasn’t ready to start eating the loot drops of the fallen in their basement, he also wasn’t going to sit idle. No matter how hard it was to pick.
Between the spellbooks they’d found, and ones already in inventory, there were over twenty things to pick from. And while some of them were more easily dismissible than others for what he was doing with his life, that still left him short on spell slots, and with further progression up the Mountain looking kind of like a qualitative difference in challenge.
But he had half an hour to kill, and an inventory available to access through his skulljack, so he browsed and made some notes.
One of the first things James noticed was that they had a spell that removed friction between something and the ground, and also a spell that made it so you couldn’t lose traction, and then he stared into space for a good three minutes before deciding it wasn’t worth taking both spells just to see what happened. What was likely to happen was either nothing, or his legs liquifying when he tried it, and he couldn’t find any Research reports on it for some reason. He did note Frost Vector as a good candidate though, just because he felt like being able to tell friction to sit down and shut up was a good way to cut out a lot of the ways he’d gotten hurt in the past.
He also noted down Mountain Of The Self, the spell with an atrociously high Breath per second cost, but that offered an unprecedented level of improvement to his ability to stop getting hurt the same way twice. He had Breath to spare now, though the fact that using it was painful and dangerous hadn’t changed. If anything, it made the spell riskier. But it would also let him walk through hell. Even better, if it was literal fire and brimstone hell, it might actually offset the temperature drop.
From the new books, Call To Blood was a quick addition to his list. James wasn’t sure when he’d need it, but he could think of a lot of cases where it would have offered a lot of investigative power that would have let him avoid a lot of grief. He’d started a quip to Zhu when he picked it, before remembering that the navigator was currently off with Alanna.
James sighed as he realized just how quiet it was when he was alone. It wasn’t like he was really actually alone; that explanation of romance was still happening near him, and a few kids were hanging out at the corner table playing Minecraft. Also he’d seen Anesh literally a couple hours ago, and his boyfriend was also at the Lair right now if he wanted a quick kiss.
But it had been a while since he’d been alone in his head. And it was weird how comfortable he’d gotten with it. He’d been worried that, with Zhu gone, he might have realized that the infomorph was doing something that changed how he felt about the situation to make him more okay with it. But no, it turned out, he’d just adapted to having someone with him all the time, and now deprived of that, James felt lonely.
He shook it off. Alanna and Zhu would be back by the end of the week, and in the meantime, he’d console himself by burying himself in a pile of Aneshes when he got home.
The next spell he earmarked was Winter Wroth. Which was, in his own words on the report, kind of fucked up. And James didn’t like the particularly grim thought that he might “need” to assassinate someone someday. So he didn’t commit to it yet, just put it on the ‘maybe’ list. Not on the maybe list was the spell that messed with math itself, because that one was off limits until it had been very very thoroughly tested.
He also regretfully left off a lot of the crafting or production magics. It would have been cool, and maybe he’d get the chance someday, but that wasn’t what he was doing right now. But that was okay; it was okay to specialize. And besides, no one could safely cast the spell that created a spatial warp, so they didn’t even know if it was worth it.
Survival Flare went on his short list, because it had potential in a lot of situations including combat. Pulling heat to an object sounded like one of his least favorite D&D tricks with the heat metal spell, but what annoyed him in games was fair game when someone was shooting at him. It also made him wonder - and the Research notes confirmed he wasn’t the first one to think it - if some of the spells were maybe designed to be supporting casts for the fact that actually using breath drained away your heat and air.
He was about to close down his work and finalize his notes later, rising to head out to the parking lot with a few others for the long range teleport that came in the form of swapping two bubbles of space, when he caught one last thing to read. Cloud Prowler was a spell that James had sadly felt like he couldn’t actually justify taking. It sounded so cool, making a cat out of ice or snow or something similar. Not exactly useful, just something casually magical and deeply satisfying. If that had been the only spell he’d ever gotten from the Climb, he could have walked away feeling like magic was worth it. But instead, he had choices, and felt obligated to put together a build that actually let him keep people safe.
And then he noticed the note. And James quickly dialed a number as he followed a few other people outside into the breezy afternoon.
“John’s phone, this is John, how can I help you?” John answered promptly.
If he weren’t in kind of a hurry, James would have commented on that intro. “Hey, real quick. You signed off on a report about the Cloud Prowler WC spell. And the note just says ‘it’s the same cat’ and then nothing about that. What’s up with that? Quickly, before I confuse the fuck out of a cell tower.” James asked, halfway to where the logisticor was set up.
To his credit, John didn’t even pause. A couple years in Research had helped him grow into the kind of person that responded rapidly under pressure. “I mean it’s the same cat. Every time, you summon a cat. It might look different, but it’s the same.”
“The same how?” James asked. “Like, you mean the same mind?”
“Exactly, yes. It remembers everything.”
“Holy shit. We have a pokemon spell.” James said with wide eyes and a note of wonder in his voice.
John didn’t react much to the tone. “A lot of people say that. Anything else?”
James muttered out a quick goodbye and hung up. “A lot of people say that, my ass.” He grumbled as he stepped into the teleport circle. “Alright. Defense against friction, defense against everything, investigation, heat, cat. And… fuck the sneak attack knife. I’ll work around it. Does that sound…” James trailed off when he remembered again that he was talking to no one. “Ugh. I need more ibuprofen.” He sighed, getting a knowing nod from one of the other passengers on this particular warp ride.
Only six people plus the operator were heading down; just a scheduled supply run to move a couple pallets of food and water. It turned out that when it came to moving large quantities of food, the lunchbox of holding lunch was annoyingly inefficient. Especially for non-lunch items.
A vision of a different world rose up around them, a line of change like a car window slowly rolling up and showing off the real outside. Except it wasn’t a different world; just Tennessee. And the line of change crept up in a steady pattern, eventually closing off overhead, the blue sky changing to a different shade filled with clouds as the teleport ended. And then they were just somewhere else. Between one moment and the next, what was a window became what was real.
“Welcome to scenic Townton!” Someone said. “Where our motto is ‘legally, they are not zombies’.”
James barked a laugh that joined a couple of the others, and stepped out of the circle of terrain that used to belong to Oregon. He helped get one of the pallets moved while someone else started up the generator they had on standby to recharge the teleport relic, and after that, made his way across a few cleared city blocks to where the chanters were camped out.
“Camped out” might have been the wrong term. The long stretch of park that the Order had taken over looked almost Edenic at this point. Sycamore and gum trees that had lasted through the death throes of the city stood revitalized, dotted among flourishing greens and splashes of blooming color. But among that wild and free growth, there were dozens of thick canvas tents. The Order had acquired a bunch of them from a disaster relief surplus organization, and put them to use here as shelter until something more permanent could be put together, but the chanters had immediately taken to them. The creatures that looked intimidating with their bladed limbs and frilled shells radiated a sense of cautious safety as they cozied up in packs inside the wide tents.
Literally radiated. James could feel it from here. Their empathic ability blanketed the area as a background whisper, as they got used to using it more.
It was still fearful. James wasn’t sure it would ever stop being a little afraid. But that was okay; fear wasn’t a sin, and a constant little reminder of the depths that humanity could drag itself into maybe wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The chanters were a living monument of how not to treat a people.
It was a little odd to walk down city streets that had been reclaimed, but not put back to use as byways for cars. The team down here used a few Kei trucks to move supplies around the area, but otherwise the streets were treated like an extension of the park after they’d been cleared of debris. It made it feel like it was an indulgent amount of free space within the ruined city, with the different stations the Order had set up for food or medical attention or just working on interspecies communication in tents in the road around the green zone. The buildings in the area were used for bulk storage or administrative work now that they’d been cleaned out and verified as safe. That had taken a lot of work, only a little of which James had helped with. But overall, it just felt like a living city. At least, here, in this small piece of it.
He paused at one of the food tents where a few chanters were standing, the shelled creatures watching him with shaded shimmering eyes as he approached. The woman serving them was Dorothy, the oldest of the ex-cultists that had killed this city in the first place, and she turned to him after handing out the last of a trio of oblong shaped bowls. The chanters scuttled away quickly, moving to the sidewalk around the park to sit on the warm concrete and eat slowly somewhere away from the new human, grey hide showing in flashes as they shifted under their shells to take bites. “Scaring away all my customers?” She challenged James with a smile that looked perfectly at home on her grandmotherly face.
He chuckled. “Just saying hi.” He said. “I wanted to come by and see how things were going.”
“One of your harem was here earlier this week, you know. You could just ask her.” It was said in a friendly enough tone, but the word choice made James’ smile harden a little.
James shook it off, along with the cruel impulse to remind Dorothy where they were standing, and just went for polite professionalism. “Not quite the right word, but also Alanna was here heading into the Route. I haven’t talked to her in a few days.”
“Oh yes, yes.” Dorothy nodded slowly, looking off to the side at the sky over a one story brick structure that used to be a dentist’s office. There was a small flutter of dusty orange light on her hand that brought her attention back to James. “So, what brings you by?”
“Are you… alright?” He wasn’t sure why he asked, it just felt like something was off about the woman.
Dorothy made a dismissive noise that was probably meant to be funny, but didn’t quite hide her pain. “I’m just losing my mind. Happens to everyone eventually.” She said.
“Right.” James said, suddenly unsure if he should pry. “Well. I’m here mostly to see how communication is going with the chanters. And also maybe to spend some time with them, or just around the area, seeing how stuff is going and if there’s anywhere I can help today.”
She nodded at him and pointed across the park. “Over on the corner of Market street, look for Dira. She’s your girl. Now shoo, I’ve got hungry children to feed.” She waved him away with a spoon before pulling one of the oval bowls out of a stack and putting a mix of beans and rice into it. James waved a thank you to her as he turned and almost jumped out of his shoes when he noticed a chanter was waiting behind him. The silent creature had snuck up on him without even really trying; he supposed the softer digits on the end of their bladed limbs meant they didn’t click when they walked on pavement. It stared at him, a tiny drip of individual terror leaking out as he caught his breath. Which then faded slowly as James smiled, and gave a small wave, before stepping to the side and bowing, letting the chanter past.
He skirted the edge of the park, watching the way the chanters moved and watched him as he passed. The ones on the grass stayed in rings of five or more, but sometimes one or two would break off to go get food or water from some of the Order who were hanging around. They were especially receptive to attention from the members who presented as nonhuman, which James understood. They’d been kept prisoner by humans their whole life; it would take perhaps another lifetime to recover from that.
Finding who he was looking for was pretty easy. There was a wide blue sunshade tent set up with a pictographic sign out front that showed what James assumed was a chanter learning how to talk. He wasn’t sure if it was working, because the tent was empty of everyone but one human at the moment.
Well, he assumed that she was human. She did have a mermaid tail.
“Hey. Dira?” James asked with a wave. “Dorothy said I should talk to you about-“
“Indira.” She corrected him with an exasperated huff, as she moved to pivot the wheelchair she was in to face him. The woman was probably around James’ age, skin a little darker than his boyfriend’s and a thickness to her frame that made her seem comfortable. Also she had big silver loop earrings, and a tail. She sighed, deeply. “I know she’s trying to be nice, but it’s Indira. Hello. How can I help you?”
James made a quick mental note. “Indira. Apologies. Hi, I’m James. Uh, Dorothy said you’re the one to talk to about how communication efforts are going, and also, are you a mermaid? Is that a thing I missed?” He tried not to stare at the bright green and blue tail that came off the end of her wheelchair in case it was rude. It ended in a split fin and bobbed slightly as she turned her chair.
“Only recreationally.” She answered him with a small grin. She leaned forward a little, slapping the side of her tail. “This is shaped silicone, but it looks great, right? It helps the chanters feel more comfortable.”
“Oh! That’s-“ James got one excited word in before she added something onto the thought.
“Also I’m missing a leg under here!”
James crossed his arms, instantly recognizing the tone of someone who was hiding a lot of personal pain with a joke. “You know we can fix that, right?” He held up a hand to stall her as she glared at him. “Sorry, that might come across wrong. I am aware that something like having slightly less than one limb fewer than the average isn’t a defect that deprives you of value as a person. But also, you know we can give you a leg, right?”
“…I’ve heard that, yes.” Indira said flatly. “Repeatedly. Thank you.”
“Aaaaaah…” James trailed off. “You know what? Let’s start over. Hi, I’m James, that’s a cool tail, how’s it going getting the chanters to interact with us on a level where can begin to build relationships as peers and not caretakers?”
Indira let out a startled laugh. James often found that someone’s surprised laugh was a great way to get a glimpse into who they were as a person; most surprised laughs from his friends were silly, for example. Indira’s sounded like a spooked giraffe, and James made that comparison with the utmost respect for both parties. “You just pulled parachute on that real fast, huh?” She asked.
“Look, if you’re here and down a leg, it means it’s something personal to you. There’s probably a hundred people who will help if you ask, and my name’s on the list because that’s what I do around here. But if you’re not ready yet, that’s cool.” He shrugged. “So, chanter chat?” James mentally noted down the phrase ‘chanter chat’ for a potential future podcast title. In the distant future world where he had the mystical foreign substance of free time.
Indira studied him with a confused expression for a minute until she decided to just move on and give him answers. Maybe in the hope that he’d leave faster. “They don’t want to talk yet.” She said.
“Okay.” James nodded. “I mean, I kinda figured that. But, like, is it all of them? What methods are we trying out? I’m trying to get a good look at the situation so that if I run into a potential solution to any outstanding problems, I’ll recognize it.”
The explanation eased the irritation on the woman’s face. “Oh, okay.” He seemed almost hesitant to accept it, but shrugged to herself and moved on. “We try a few different things, regularly. Maybe it would be better to say we offer them, not try them. Not many chanters are willing to take the risk; or maybe they don’t understand that they even could. It is… explaining things to them is a challenge. They are not stupid, but they are like children. Very young, very stunted children.”
James pressed his lips together and didn’t mention that it was a little hypocritical of her to call him out for his comment on her leg, and then turn around and use terms like ‘stunted’. Instead, he just asked a question. “No success with skulljack connections?” He asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work correctly. They don’t know how to hold back, so it snaps into a full meld far too quickly, and anyone without infomorph assistance can’t properly move complex ideas across. The chanters can understand while melded, but they don’t retain the knowledge afterward, only a mild emotional imprint. I’m not even sure how the first lucky idiot made it work at all. It takes a very strong heart to weather the fear they do not speak.”
“Thank you.” James said with a nod.
“What?”
“Thank you!” He repeated with a cheerful smile and a small wave. “Hi. I am the lucky idiot. Anyway, what else?”
Indira’s look became more assessing than confused as she continued. “Well, we’ve gotten them to take a few different language orbs. Which is actually hard. They don’t instinctively crack them, they try to make life out of the things. It usually does nothing, but there are a few little creations around here made of bits of glass and metal. They’re friendly, don’t worry.”
“I have never been less worried about something in my life.” James honestly told her. “But they did eventually crack the orbs?”
“After some practice.” She nodded up at him, and he realized that this was probably awkward, so he stopped pacing and settled into one of the canvas folding chairs while she spoke. “Language, along with supplemental orbs for civics, anthropology, and etiquette so that they could understand why to talk. Same thing we’ve been trying without clear success with the asphalt creatures. Languages were spread across English, Chinese, and French, just in case their bodies had an easier time with one over another.”
“But…” James quietly looked out at the park, where a silent flock of chanters rested. He watched one of them coax a sprouted sapling upward, an inch of growth in seconds as something flowed through the air between the refugee creature and the plant. He felt the thrum in the air of shared emotion. But none of them said a word.
“But they don’t talk.” Indira agreed with his unspoken comment. “They are getting more comfortable with me, though! With us in general.” She corrected herself quickly. “I think we’re asking the wrong questions, but I don’t know what the right ones are. And I’m not used to actual magic being real, so I don’t even know where to start.”
James nodded. “A lot of new people say that.” He said. “Has anyone tried talking to their creations?”
“…I don’t know!” She sounded a little surprised.
“It might be a starting point.” James said with a nod. “So, how often do chanters come by here? Like, this tent.”
“About ten or so a day.” She said. “Usually in groups of five. They aren’t just looking for the orbs, either. They stick around and try to communicate. It’s just… I don’t know if human languages work for them. Or they could, but it’s not how they’ve lived their whole lives. It’s not just knowing the language, it’s like they don’t feel it.”
“But that’s also a guess, huh?” He wasn’t trying to make the comment a challenge, but Indira gave him a sharp look to go with her nod. “Huh. I’ll ask Rufus later.” James said. “He’s similar in having an almost mental block when it comes to some forms of language. He might have insight.” He sighed. “Alright. Thank you for the quick update. I kinda want to get closer with the chanters, but I don’t wanna spook them. Is there a way to do that?”
She didn’t look quite happy about it, but did point out a series of park benches on the sidewalk around the green area. “Sitting helps.” She said. “Sometimes they’ll approach. More often if you don’t look too human.”
“Thanks.” James said, and waved goodbye as he ducked under the flap of the sunshade and slowly strolled over to sit.
Sitting down, actually sitting down and not just positioning himself to talk to someone, was so abruptly restful that it felt like his legs planned to shut down entirely to get him to keep doing it. James let out a sigh that came from deep in his chest as he melted onto the uncomfortable and hostile design of the park bench, the cruel design of an unethical civic engineer not enough to deter him from feeling like he was actually resting.
Ahead of him was a flourishing span of plant life. Tall grass dried out and pale brown, trees casting healthy zones of shade onto soft earth, creeping vines and broad ferns crawling up the sides of tents and what remained of a children’s play structure adding a wild and untamed look to everything. And it wasn’t just alive, it was occupied by the living. The chanters with their thick grey hide and liquid shimmering eyes and shells that covered their backs in ridges and spikes looked different from any person James had ever known. They also smelled different; a bit like burnt cinnamon. But they were still people. And they were here and alive and every other problem was secondary to that victory.
He watched the patterns as the chanters moved around. The way they walked when they weren’t running reminded him a lot of a horse showing off; tiny taps of their legs as they inched along. Always sticking in groups, but the groups changed every time they passed each other. Small circles of chanters that were exploring different parts of the part trading members even if it meant going back the way they’d just come.
James realized abruptly he was looking at patrol paths. He blinked as he tried to unsee it, but his brain had locked onto the idea. And once he saw it, it was hard not to trace it back to see what they were constantly orbiting.
After about twenty minutes of sitting, someone from Recovery was passing by close enough for James to wave him down. “Quick question. What’s in that tent?”
He tried to point without pointing, and the man he was talking to gave him a tight lipped look. “That’s where they keep their eggs.” He said simply, and James just nodded.
The chanters were a lot of things. But they weren’t stupid. Just new to everything. And they clearly had a priority that was above anything else. James wasn’t offended that they didn’t fully trust the Order; how in the world could they? They’d been used as fucking livestock for as long as any of them had been alive. Trust would come slowly, if at all. It wasn’t anyone’s place to demand or force it.
They’d earn it by proving they were worth it. It was that, or nothing at all.
James took a deep breath of the warm air. The scent of spring in a place that hadn’t had more than a few dozen cars or living humans in it for years filling his nose with a kind of quiet peace. This was a place that had died. But it didn’t have to stay like that. He thought about how Indira had said they were sharing language orbs with the necroads, and his eyes flicked around to find the lines of entry where the streets were unbroken and the asphalt left clear paths into the cleared part space for any of them that wanted to show up. Not unguarded, not unattended, but there and open.
This was a city that wouldn’t stay dead forever. Maybe it’d have more park space than before, given how the chanters seemed to prefer the outside over the reclaimed apartment spaces that Recovery had put a lot of work into. But maybe that would change when winter rolled around. But also maybe it wouldn’t be so bad with more plant life. Different didn’t mean bad, after all.
He was interrupted by someone sprinting toward him, veering sharply to circle around the park and the line of chanters that had noticed the approach and absolutely snapped to attention. The blades of their legs pushed outward like they were trying to imitate porcupines braced to meet a charge. There was a spike of anxiety that wasn’t wholly his own that flowed from the group that had seen the running human, and it didn’t go away even as they kept distance from the chanters to approach James.
The runner - James recognized the teenager as Brian, one of the kids looking to become a delver himself - panted wildly as he approached. “Hey, no running here.” James kept his voice steady and calm as several sets of eyes tracked the human that was leaning next to him. “It spooks them.”
“S-s-sorry.” Brian panted out. “B-Ben says… come… back.” He gasped out words between heaving breaths, presenting a telepad to James.
James took it with raised eyebrows. “And he didn’t call because…?” Then he winced and remembered that the first Camille he’d known had explicitly knocked out every cell tower within about twenty miles through the high tech approach of ‘kicking them over’. “Right, nevermind. Did he say why?” Brian just shook his head, still catching his breath. “Alright.” James stood and stretched languidly. “You sit here, and apologize for scaring all the chanters.” Brian made a confused noise, then looked up with a little panic as he saw all the shelled forms staring his way. “They’re not actually mad, and you can tell, which is cool. So you get to let them get to know you from a distance, while I go take care of this.” He looked down at the telepad and sighed, savoring the last bit of fresh air he might get today, depending on what Ben wanted. “It’s always something, huh?”
Well, if nothing else, he’d get to have his own adventure while Alanna, Zhu, and an Anesh were off on their long delve. Keeping busy was important to keeping his mind from getting too cluttered with anxiety. Nice simple tasks he could prioritize and make progress on were satisfying.
James pulled the telepad, and vanished back into the Lair’s planning area.
Things didn’t get any simpler.