“My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity!” -Literally every villain from The Middleman-
_____
James Lyle had, in his opinion, a pretty dang good job. Most of the time.
He got to do a lot of different and fascinating tasks. And, yeah, half of them were literal magic, too, which was a big mark in the ‘good’ column. James tried to know at least a little about every ongoing project, and his cultivated curiosity and augmented memory helped with that.
He could dress essentially however he wanted, as long as sometimes ‘how he wanted’ was ‘heavily armored’. No one had tried to make him cut his ponytail off, which was a big change from most of the jobs he’d worked in his life. He was free to make his own hours, and set his own direction. The main motivating factor was what he wanted to do.
And yeah, the hours were sometimes… weird. He could take days off, but he often found himself working long stretches at all hours, just because he liked it. James was the most dangerous kind of member that their organization had; an actual honest true believer in the cause.
The organization was called the Order of Endless Rooms. They did a lot. Found magic, found ways to put that magic to use, found people who needed help, used that earlier magic to help those people, that kind of thing.
James was their paladin. Which wasn’t strictly true anymore. He was one of their paladins. He’d been the first, because he’d been the one to pull the whole thing together in the first place, and then had to figure out what his place in it was. It should never have worked, but one thing that a lifetime of fantasy media hadn’t prepared him for was a surprisingly cool fact. Other people could be just as smart, savvy, and heroic as he could. Often smarter, actually. And when a potent combination of magic and money meant that the people who’d tied their fate to the Order didn’t have to worry about things like poverty…
Well, when you could do almost anything without worry, there were generally two things that people chose to do. Either they chose to relax, enjoy their lives, and not tether their value to how ‘productive’ they were, or, they chose to be heroes. And even saying it like that wasn’t really true, because half of the Order either did both, or did one and then the other.
Heroes was a flexible term in the Order, too. Not ethically flexible, exactly. Though as a giant snake had once told James, knowing what was evil was a lot easier than knowing what was good. No, the idea of a hero to them wasn’t the same as a comic book cape. Sometimes self defense was required, but a huge amount of help could be poured out into the world with applications of logistics, compassion, and simply having the time and willingness to do something. The Order of Endless Rooms had fought and bled for their base right to survive, but they were under no illusions that the ability to win a battle meant they had good ideas. The good ideas had to come separate, and they had to come bundled with the true desire for a better world.
James’ version of heroism was largely centered around communication. The Order didn’t have a strict hierarchy of power to it, though they did have their own version of a representative democracy. But it did mean that there wasn’t exactly a central source for information on what everyone was doing, what was going on, and what threats were being evaluated. His main job, in addition to learning how to use his own magic to maximizing effect and how to help with anything he might be needed for, was to facilitate the movement of useful information throughout the Order.
It almost felt like a small task, when he put it like that. But there was a surprising amount of depth to it. So many things to consider about what each person was working on, what each group might be able to use, even just the consideration for what not to get bogged down in. And a lot of running from place to place. Or teleporting from place to place.
Oh. They had teleporters. Two - technically three - kinds. It wasn’t a big deal. Just part of the operation at this point.
One of the biggest things that James had needed to force himself to adapt to was just how much he had to learn. Learning was great, and he knew that, but as it turned out, there was something of a good reason for why humanity specialized. Trying to bring himself up to a minimum level of competence for everything from construction to cartography, education to medication, was a task. And the magical skill ranks could only take him so far before he just had to start asking questions. So far he had not stopped asking questions, and had no plan to in the near future.
But even that wasn’t bad. Every day, he was better than he was before. Every day, he grew a little. Everyone should have that opportunity. Hell, the idea that everyone should have that opportunity was one of the core goals that the Order was putting work toward.
They wanted a perfect world. There might not be such a thing as a perfect world. But that wasn’t going to stop them. Because while it was hard to find the final shape of what was good, it was pretty damn easy to spot the things that were bad. Maybe they’d progress toward utopia forever and never get there, but they’d still be somewhere better than where the world had started.
Part of James’ job was shifting around what the goals for individual projects were. Making sure people were aimed in the right direction, and also making sure the Order didn’t slip into the mistake of thinking that just having power and wealth was itself a moral good. They had to use them, and that meant at the very least sending some of their power away. Out into the mass of human life on Earth. Small things, really. Teleporting problem solvers. Duplicated material stockpiles. Cures for cancer. Free energy. That kind of stuff. They hadn’t gotten to the really big projects yet.
The projects James really cared about were a lot more personal. The stuff about gradually but firmly introducing nonhuman sophonts to the area around their headquarters was a big deal for him, for example. Camracondas were the easy part, despite being the least human. Serpents with security cameras for heads and corded cables for bodies, hundreds of pounds of power with brass fangs that dripped paralytic; also some of the most honest and sly people in the Order. They were so different that everyone just kind of… got over the difference quickly. Ratroaches were harder, both because they looked like they were made out of spare parts from insects and rodents, and because they were - every one of them - deeply traumatized and often skittish. But humanity would just have to adapt to seeing weird people around. James wasn’t planning to back down on that.
Or the ongoing attempts to find ways to communicate with the necroad or chanter populations that the Order had safely hidden away. They were clearly people, and they deserved support and fulfilling lives. But that meant figuring out how to talk to them, and how to let them talk back. James spent a lot of his spare hours on that. It helped that the dog that lived with him and his partners also benefited from the ongoing progress, too.
Sometimes, though, his job was a little more dangerous than just collecting useful information and then sharing the details of their operations or the nuances of their magic with people who might not even know what questions to ask. Sometimes, James had to go out and actually get that magic.
The Order called them dungeons. Recently, a powerful post-human entity had insinuated to James that the name was fitting, but not for the reason he thought. Which was… deeply worrying, but also not something he could really do anything about at the moment. Either way, dungeons were places where the geometry of the world folded, knotted, and expanded. Where the place itself was alive in some way, and that guiding intelligence created anomalous life forms, objects, and effects.
The why was still up for debate. They just didn’t have enough examples to really know, yet. The how would probably never be solved, realistically. But the what was where the Order had planted their flag; because a lot of those things that dungeons made? They were great. Pens that translated automatically, a spell that let you grow wings, jewelry that could purify water, orbs that gave years of knowledge in an instant, an mp3 file that generated your own personalized episode of Car Talk, all sorts of amazing stuff. But not just the loot. All those other species that were part of the Order, maybe they were supposed to defend their creators, but James had declared his intent early to solve things with the power of friendship. And that was why there were over a dozen different forms of life that made their home with them.
And despite the fact that the dungeons - most of the dungeons, not all - were hostile places that could and would kill an unprepared or foolish human, James made a big part of his life delving into them. Risking himself to find the next big thing. The next disruption, the next fix, the next miracle. Something as innocuous as a box of paperclips could turn out to be an endless source of steel, and every delve was another roll of the dice to find a piece of power that his people could turn from abstraction, into aid.
Officium Mundi was still his favorite. And his first. The place that had sparked this whole thing. Cubicles forever, twisted into a dozen different mimicry biomes, filled with things made from office supplies that would bite and snap in a constantly hostile ecosystem. But all the ones that came after were just as important. The Akashic Sewer, disgusting and violent as it was, had been where they’d stolen the ratroaches from, and more. Clutter Ascent was beautiful, both physically as a sunlit attic, and emotionally as an almost childlike creator of wonders. Winter’s Climb was harsh and cold, but ever fair, and its magic could tip the balance of the planet. The Ceaseless Stacks were just as vast as the Office, and just as powerful at accelerating human learning. Route Horizon was endless roads and baked desert, but also endless bizarre resources.
And there were more out there, they knew. Waiting for a paladin to lead the way in.
Risking his life felt easy to James. It had been easy at first, because he hadn’t felt like he’d had anything to live for. Now, it was easy because he was trained for it, used to it, and because he had everything worth risking his life to preserve. The people he loved and the world he wanted to heal; it just made sense to him to let his job be making the trade of safety for prosperity.
When he said that he liked being a paladin most of the time, it wasn’t the delving that was the other part. The part that wasn’t under the banner of ‘most’.
It was that he was, by his own designs, not in charge of anything. The Order of Endless Rooms decided on resource allocation and broad strategies democratically. They decided on plans and tactics by expert consensus. And there were people with veto power mixed among the different divisions and projects, that was important. But James wasn’t one of them.
Currently, James was doing his job. He’d come down to one of the Lair’s many, many basements to talk to an engineer about using the heat tunnel spell to generate mostly free clean electricity. Specifically, to talk about different mediums for where to build the thing, and if it was either possible or useful to build the generators at the bottom of the ocean. He was pretty sure it wasn’t, but despite his endless learning, he hadn’t gone to college for half a decade to be able to have that answer confidently off the top of his head.
That was why he’d intended to come down here. What was actually happening was that he was desperately wishing that he had kept the authority to tell them to stop doing a thing, as a pair of the more enthusiastic members of Research explained their plan to use the cell phone that made non-sophont temporary copies of people to do dangerous low-orbit construction on a platform for a magically assisted space elevator.
James loved his job. But he also had a headache, and the coffee that made it easier to make plans wasn’t helping.
_____
Alanna Byrne gulped in air as she checked her phone, short blonde hair swishing as she twisted her torso to keep herself limber as she and her running partner took a break at their halfway point. “Our boyfriend just sent me a text, probably through his skulljack judging by his baffling lack of punctuation, that just says ‘we have to destroy engineering’.” She put the phone back into the secure pocket of her enchanted sweatpants, and looked over at Arrush. “I don’t think I’m with him on this. I think he’s on his own.”
”…Say the first part again.” Arrush was not breathing heavily, yet. His inhuman form could run, climb, burrow, and fight to the death for hours at a time before exhaustion would start to have a much more rapid and deleterious effect on his ability to function than a human would. But the ratroach was made to be a weapon, and not a person, and so talking would wind him quickly if he kept it up.
”The part about punctuation?” Alanna asked, giving her friend a cocky yet still friendly grin that said she knew exactly what he meant.
Arrush shook his triangular head - slowly, so as not to drip corrosive saliva onto the plants near them - and made a kind of exasperated clicking noise in his chest. “The part where he is our boyfriend.” He said, not managing to maintain the same kind of confidence Alanna had, and flushing a shy neon green on the parts of his face that were exposed hide and not chitin or fur.
Popping her neck as she rolled her head around, Alanna kept up her sharkish smile. “You know, Anesh says the same thing a lot.” She barked out a couple notes of laughter to herself. “I think James has a type.”
”You never say that.”
”I do, actually!” Alanna replied excitedly. “It just hasn’t come up around you yet. Give it time! Also that makes me feel pretty fucking good, since it means I am also in that whole ‘type’ thing.”
Arrush nodded back, and was about to say something, but froze as other people came by them on the path they were using for their morning jog.
The duo were out on the asphalt walking trail that wound through about five miles of suburb and undeveloped wilderness. There was less undeveloped wilderness now than when Alanna and James had been growing up here, but around the path, there were still clusters of old oak trees, small creeks, and sharp tall grasses that made it feel cut off from modern living. But also, at any given time, they were within sight range of a few overpriced houses or a whole apartment complex, so it wasn’t isolated.
The pattern of morning jogs had started when Alanna had realized that James was never going to be awake on a schedule, and ‘morning’ was an abstract concept to him in the same way that ‘France’ was. It existed, and he didn’t really consider it his place to meddle with it. Her attempts to coerce her other boyfriend into it was met with a blank stare from multiple copies of Anesh, who had all made the exact same excuse about having work to do, every time. When Alanna had tried to get Sarah into it, her new girlfriend had turned into a cave goblin and tried to bite her, though that might have just been because Sarah was asleep at the time; she was the most peaceful human on the planet when she was awake and would never resort to cannibalism.
The point was, none of the people Alanna was dating - a sentence she hadn’t ever really expected to need to use - wanted to go jogging.
Arrush did though! And not just in the way that a lot of the ratroaches would agree to anything because they thought they had to. The big ratroach was interested in his own physicality, especially since the Order had come up with some ways to mitigate the amount of pain he was constantly in until a more permanent solution could be applied. He ran for the same reason Alanna did; maintaining himself, staying sharp and active, and to grow slightly better at this one specific thing over time. The only issue was, he was an inhuman creature that a lot of people might see as a literal monster, and Alanna didn’t want to go on jogs through the basement of the Lair, she wanted to go on jogs outside.
Personally, Arrush thought outside in the morning was too cold, and somehow too damp, but he didn’t mind it too much. What he did mind was that people - ‘normal’ people, the humans who had never known life that wasn’t Earth - would stare at him.
”Morning!” Alanna dropped how loud her voice was to politely greet the middle aged couple that were out for their own walk.
”M-morning.” Arrush’s own intonation was a stuttered chitter that had no volume to it at all as he stared at the ground.
The man’s muttered return of the greeting spoke of someone who had been coerced out of bed to be here, as was his confused stare at Arrush’s face until he shook his head, blinking heavily as the walked by. The woman was a little more enthusiastic, but paused on seeing Arrush, glancing between him and Alanna as the two walked by, though she was no less polite. It was a little awkward, but nothing happened. Nothing ever happened, it seemed. But Arrush was still waiting for something to go wrong, and no amount of therapy seemed to be able to make him not afraid. Though honestly, it probably helped that he and Alanna were both pushing seven feet tall and had a general look that started at ‘dangerous’ and went from there.
“You good?” Alanna asked him.
”I…” Arrush started to answer, then stopped, sawing his fangs together as he tried to find the words to express his frustrations. “I don’t know.” He admitted with a wet sigh and a fluttering clicking from deep in his throat. “I want to be. You are trying so hard for me, and… and that makes me feel good. But I don’t like being looked at like that, and I want to borrow an earring.” He looked sheepishly at his own feet as he answered.
Alanna just snapped her fingers. “The earrings! Shit, I never even thought of that, that’s a great idea.” She said easily. “I kinda get caught up in the Response mindset these days, you know?”
“…you do talk about it.” Arrush agreed, his trust for Alanna warring with his bitter instinct that told him that everything was a trap.
It wasn’t though. Alanna was the most bluntly honest person around, and she really had just forgotten that they had magical earrings that deflected hostile notice. A sentence that was even more batshit insane to her than her earlier ‘I am dating three people’ thing.
But that was just how life in the Order was sometimes. That was why they’d nailed down early that they needed to keep solid records. And have people like James, technically.
”Yeah.” Alanna said, instead of commenting on their bad habit of not maximizing the use of their magical superpowers. “It’s sorta eating my life. I need more hobbies. But there’s just-“
”So much to do.” Arrush finished her sentence with his own growing grin, his cracked maw glowing an almost fluorescent blue in the dim early morning light. He’d heard Alanna say this a few times before, and here, now, he was on familiar ground.
She stopped rubbing the back of her neck and tried to glower at Arrush, but he knew that this human was not only safe, but actively cared about him. “Bah!” Alanna declared. “Well despite your mocking of me-“ Arrush curled one of his ancillary claws over his muzzle as he tried not to set off a chittering giggle at her, “-I’m pretty sure we can just get you one of the leveler earrings. If nothing else, the things need to be used anyway, so it might as well be someone who gets advantage out of it!”
Arrush dropped his extra arm, staring at the sky as he tried to breathe steadily, the simple conversation draining him more than their two miles of running so far. “Maybe… maybe not.” He said slowly. “Maybe I should stop being afraid. Learn to live in your world.” His array of eyes turned down to look at Alanna’s face. “I don’t know.” He admitted in his raspy voice.
”Meh!” Alanna shrugged. “I mean, I abuse the shit out of the magic I have access to. I’m basically drinking exercise potion as a daily thing now, you know? And I don’t bother shutting off my Empathy these days, which makes conversation so much easier. So I say fuck it. And, like, it’s not mandatory, you can have the priceless covert ops relic as a backup, just in case you’re having a bad day or need to give the old Irish goodbye, right?”
”That seems… wasteful?” Arrush asked, pausing to give a marginally more confident nod to a woman running by with her dog on a leash, one of the familiar faces that had gotten used to seeing him out here and was more interested in her own podcast than stopping to stare or talk. “Shouldn’t someone else have it?”
”Okay, I just checked.” Alanna said, looking up from her phone that she’d deftly been typing on. “The things are pretty small, so we have about six hundred of them, and we actually do need people to be using them constantly to progress them up the level chart. Now! You ready to keep going, now that I’ve exhausted you talking?”
”B-bah.” Arrush stole Alanna’s favorite word, chitin-banded chest rising and falling in rapid pants.
”I’ll buy you a doughnut at the end? There’s this fancy doughnut place over in the little shopping area up ahead.” Alanna said, resorting to base bribery. Arrush looked like he wanted to keep bantering, but his breath was running out, and also his tails twitched behind him, betraying excitement for the militarized payload of sugar now waiting for him. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Alanna flashed her teeth as she started to take easy strides, working up to a faster run.
Arrush gave a slow shake of his head as he watched her lead into a jog, but inside, he was happy. An experience that was becoming less and less novel every day, which was really exactly as it should be.
When he moved to follow her, he didn’t take his time to build up a pace. The ratroach just exploded into motion; recently trained control mixing with the violent strength that his semi-artificial body possessed.
He caught up to Alanna, fast. But the two of them pace with each other after that. And when he did get a doughnut - some kind of frosted blueberry cake concoction - it was fantastic, and only about a fifth of it ended up on his muzzle and not in his stomach. His devouring of it had still made Alanna laugh in a way that distracted him from the human teenager behind the counter staring at them; and had also provided a second reason that the two of them had booked one of the pools back in the Lair’s basement for after their run.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
It hadn’t been too long ago that Arrush had even learned what June was, but so far, he was pretty sure it was his favorite month.
_____
Rufus was running into a bottleneck in his daily activities, and the fact that it was already June was bothering him.
His first human friend had sent off one of his best helpers to do some kind of paladin-errant thing, which was already bad enough. But on top of that, Rufus was running into more and more communication issues, and none of his constant growth seemed to fix the fact that he couldn’t actually talk like the others could.
Oh, he had a skulljack, yes. And for when that wasn’t an option, a little keyboard that he wore on his flank that one of his pen legs could tap to project emojis. That was actually alarmingly good at getting the point across in about eighty percent of all situations. But despite being a creature that had literal actual pens for legs - the ink was a kind of natural ichor, he was told - Rufus still couldn’t write.
Write, type more than a character or two, feed thoughts into the vocalized program, nothing. Higher order communication was off limits to his species.
For the majority of his life as a roaming stapler inside Officium Mundi, it hadn’t mattered. For the majority of his life after meeting James and Anesh, and then getting into an increasing amount of trouble, it still hadn’t mattered. His subspecies of strider had their capacity for complex thought grow over time along with their size, though, and as he felt like he had more and more things to talk about, the inability to do the talking began to frustrate.
At this point, Rufus was the size of a corgi with a few extra hard edges, and was on par with the average human college student in terms of mental acuity. He’d also been more or less left on his own to develop hobbies, which had, as many things in life did, gotten utterly out of control.
A lot of what he did was hang around a small room in one of the Lair’s basements. Twenty feet underground, and yet still possessing a skylight, the partitioned ex-storage-closet now played host to a whole host of botanical experiments that Rufus and his assistants were working on. One of his helpers and friends, Fredrick, even had hands of a sort, and the ability to take notes, which went a long way in their work.
Some days, their attempts to get different dungeon plants to grow or splice or mutate bore fruit. Sometimes that fruit was all… okay, mostly-natural Earth-origin skill orbs. And sometimes it was volatile highlighter ink. That plant actually only still existed because no one knew how to remove it and at this point they’d reached a détente. Rufus, Fredrick, and Ganesh left it alone, and in exchange, it didn’t explode. Again.
Gardening was just a hobby though. Rufus also had regular chores he tried to do. He and Ganesh were both of a shared mind that they should give back to the people who kept them safe, and so he and the living batlike drone had a habit of keeping the high ceilings and hidden nooks of the Lair clean. They weren’t alone in it, since a few new striders had joined them in their work, and it wasn’t thankless work either; the whole operation was noticed and vocally appreciated by basically everyone who had dust allergies. Which turned out to be a lot of humans. Humans were shockingly fragile sometimes, and Rufus was saying that as someone who was vulnerable to getting trampled by an excited and inattentive child.
And then there was the project that had a deadline. Sort of.
Rufus wasn’t sure how he’d ended up being not just involved with this one, but actually in a leadership position. How was he supposed to lead people - human people even - when he spoke in low-vocabulary sign language and emotes? And yet, he’d been the one doing research, and his artificially imposed linguistic barrier didn’t stop him from compiling useful information that other people had already written. He’d been the one doing a first pass on recruitment. And he’d been the one who had been inexplicably present at most of the meetings.
The problem was that the timeline for opening a school was a little tight when, for most of the humans that were planned to attend, they needed to have things not just ready to start, but ready to hit the ground running, within a few months.
The Order of Endless Rooms was an organization that wanted to prove their ideology correct by taking action and showing how their ideas worked. And that was great and all. But Rufus was into this because Rufus’ own ideology was one centered around the power of knowledge. Education was an almost spiritual expression for him, and while he was certainly interested in the effort to create mixed species classrooms, and actually seek to gather more information on intellectual development and emotional maturity rates, the main reason that Rufus wanted to put different species together was that it would let them teach more people more things.
Every single thing he’d ever learned had let him survive better, plan better, be better. And Rufus firmly believed everyone should have that same opportunity.
Maybe that was why everyone seemed to think he was in charge.
He still needed to acquire a new human proxy to go to a leasing meeting today. They were signing paperwork for the places they would be rapidly renovating in accordance with the government guidelines that had already been accounted for. After that, it was a simple matter of deploying the creation division to the site, and letting them do their thing. Their thing with hands, and machines, in a way that was much more convenient for them than for Rufus.
He’d already gotten concurrence authorization for the duplication of multiple green orbs to put to use in the place. A much better use for the damned things than making puppet life, in his opinion. Material processing to speed up the remodel, accident prevention for safety, garbage removal for… garbage removal. That one was obvious, he’d admit. Also a few for extra time, and one for faster writing. Another forty orbs, unidentified, waited to be used until after the place was ‘a school’, as opposed to ‘a building under construction’. Office greens cared about that, for reasons that felt natural to Rufus but that the various beings down in Research argued about a lot.
And all of that accomplishment didn’t change that he couldn’t properly discuss human psychological research. Couldn’t do more than highlight sections of other experienced teachers talking about lesson plans and share their words. Couldn’t even get past his own mental block to copy and paste words into his own ransom note style patterns.
Rufus had heard that one of the new paladins had picked up a parasite from the Akashic Sewer that fed off his own anger to make him stronger. Right now, Rufus was pretty sure that if he’d had one of those, he’d be able to stab a leg through a steel plate. Because he was burning mad at the injustice of the whole thing.
What was the point of lasting long enough to make friends who had stayed alive so far too, when he couldn’t grow closer to them?
Rufus folded his legs under his hull, settling down on the portion of the desk that he’d taken over in his shared office and forcing himself to calm down. Being eternally irate didn’t solve problems.
Maybe the point was that he had friends. Had something he enjoyed doing. Had a dream. Maybe there wasn’t a point, and it was okay to be angry. Maybe Rufus should look into the therapy thing that James advocated for so much and had been insistent was one of the foundational cores of their soon-to-be-realized school.
Rufus closed his central eye and let himself find his center. Maybe he should actually listen to the people who he thought of as friends when they said it was okay to be different. The three hundred chanters hidden down in Tennessee couldn’t talk to a degree worse than him, even, and no one had abandoned them. The idea of abandoning them was anathema to the Order’s ideals, frankly. Same thing with the ratroaches who were too scared to speak for months or longer upon being rescued. Or with the apartment dog Auberdeen who, like Rufus, technically knew a lot of languages but couldn’t vocalize them.
He opened his eye and stood back up, deciding to trust his companions for now, and believe that his existence was valid. It was a nice feeling. If this was what therapy was meant to evoke, he should definitely try it, as he’d like to feel it more.
But for the moment, he went back to tapping at his laptop. Following links through JSTOR on a hunt for data, and also sending alert pings to the six people who were supposed to be meeting later this afternoon to start the final series of interviews for teacher and staff positions.
Rufus liked what he did, believed in what he did even, but dang did June really sneak up on him. At least there was no active crisis going on and diverting knights that he needed right now.
_____
“Who’s on hand for our daily crisis?” JP asked his assorted group of ne’er do wells.
He was standing on clean smooth concrete, looking at a series of projected screens sitting in the air that were actually part of Planner’s body, occasionally sipping at the Starbucks cup in his hand to determine if it was still illegally hot or not. Casually stylish as he always was, even on slow days like today, JP liked to project the impression that he was cool, collected, and on top of things.
Inside, he was starting to empathize with James in regards to how, after growing up, it was easy to see that adults lied constantly about the things they were on top of. He tried to not have those feelings when Alanna was around; her superpower would let her rip his ego apart without even trying if he did.
Ben grunted out a single hummed note, a bad habit he’d picked up from Nate, and looked through the roster. “Depends. What is it this time? Daniel and Path are around if we need to find something. Uh… Lyn’s on hand somewhere. Kirk too, if you need a driver.”
”Is that it?” JP paused. “Hey Plan, where’s our boss?”
”Nate is attending an SCA event six miles from here at a community park.” The scratching noise of half-dry pen on paper that was Planner’s voice filled the air around where their projected tentacles fed into their displays
JP and Ben shared a look. “Why?” They both asked at the same time, the human and the friend equally confused at the statement. JP continued. “SCA, like, the ren fair people, right? This isn’t some kind of industrial acronym?”
”Correct.” Planner said. “He was punctual, too.”
”Okay that’s cool Plan but like why.” Ben asked, his attention already drifting back to the topographic map of Missouri he was going over.
The assignment strain of infomorph didn’t exactly shrug. They just coiled a pair of tentacles that extended out of a desk drawer as they answered. “He did not say.”
”Is he learning how to use a sword?” JP muttered. “We have guns. He knows how guns work, right?”
”You super know that he does.” Ben flicked his eyes over to JP for a moment. “Probably better than either of us. Also aren’t you the sword guy around here?”
”If I don’t remind people about that, they’ll forget eventually.” JP flicked a finger over the end of his nose as he gave Ben a winning grin.
Ben was unaffected. “Well, I’d be a bad friend if I let you live things down.” He smirked as JP stifled a curse. “Anyway. What’s gone wrong today? You never said.”
”Nothing.” JP admitted, chancing another sip at his drink and suppressing his concern that he kept going to Starbucks instead of drinking the literal magical coffee they had here. He knew he could just order fancy flavored syrups; it didn’t have to be this way. “Yet.” He added.
”I’m not calling Myles in on a ‘yet’.” Ben told him, unimpressed by JP’s suffering. “Hey, there’s a delivery today? Plan, is this on your list?”
”Silver jacketed munitions, estimated time of arrival is 3 PM.” Planner stated with a hint of smug pride.
“Does that account for them trying to say that we weren’t here and they couldn’t deliver today?”
Planner’s displays flickered slightly in anxiety that the infomorph was irate about. ”Yes.” They said. “They will fail to do that.”
”Creepy, but effective. That’s why you fit in so well here.” JP told the ethereal leviathan construct. “Why are so many people out today, anyway?”
Ben and Planner started going back and forth. “Route delve has half our camraconda knights.” “There is ongoing monitoring for one of the Last Line’s daughters in the area.” “The new guys are following up missing persons leads in Utah.” “More experienced ‘guys’ are tracking the Blitzkrieg.” “It’s just Blitzkrieg, Plan. Also there’s a training thing today that’s taking up a bunch of people.” “There are also six other ongoing monitoring activities, if you would like a list.”
JP held up his corporate branded cup like a venti latte could deflect a barrage of information. “What about Matt?”
”Matt… what? We don’t have a Matt.” Ben shot a sharp look in Planner’s general direction, his head whipping around to point toward the assignment. “Plan, mental check, now.” He pointed a finger at JP like he was ordering a charge into battle.
”No!” JP rolled his eyes, taking a step back and keeping his eyes on the pale blue appendages coming his way. “Matt! The guy! You know the guy, the boxer who’s really into horror movies! The one knight who has actively failed out of Response!”
”Oh.” Planner pulled back the octet of tentacles that were lancing toward JP’s head. “That Matt. Yes. We know that Matt.”
Ben glared across the neatly organized dumping ground of his desk. “That Matt doesn’t work for us. How the hell are you in charge of anything?”
”I keep asking people that too.” JP nodded, sipped, and sighed. “To be fair, I’m not in charge here, I just help you and Nate. And when I was in charge of Townton, I got replaced fast.”
”You made Myles do it.” Ben scowled. “And then we were short one rogue for a month.”
JP smiled to himself. ”Yeah, I’m really good at giving people promotions to my job.”
”Was there a point to this?” Ben asked. “Because I have actual work to do, and you’re just… lurking here. Getting in our way.” He gave Planner a pitying look. “Look, you’re making Plan act like a sci-fi dystopia prop. That’s mean. Stop that.”
”Alright, fine, but only because we’re friends.” JP waved and nudged Planner back into their more comfortable projected form.
”I’m friends with everyone, you’re not special.” Ben said quietly, actually kind of hurt by the statement. He was friends with everyone. Whether he wanted to be or not. He wasn’t human, and he didn’t have full control over the way people reacted to him, and he had hoped that at the very least some of the people who actually knew him would stop bringing it up.
JP cocked a single eyebrow in a practiced motion. “I mean I’m friends with Planner.” He said, the smooth needle of an insult bringing a shocking amount of surprised relief to Ben. “Anyway, no point. I just wanted to make sure we’re ready for whatever comes next.”
He didn’t sigh. Didn’t show anything outwardly except calm competence. But JP knew it was only a matter of time. They’d set themselves up to be in the perfect position to either get arrested as a dangerous cult, or to swoop in and save the day at the last minute, possibly both at once. There was no way there wasn’t going to be a next crisis.
The only question was what it would be, and if they’d be ready. Were they going to get caught unprepared by another Status Quo? Were they going to have their training and expertise pay off when another dungeon opened up to swallow a city?
Were they going to lose more people?
JP wasn’t cut out to be a commander. That was why he’d made it someone else’s job, even if no one actually realized he’d done it on purpose. But he’d prefer that the next big problem tilted toward ‘simple and easy’, and their outcome toward ‘clean’. He couldn’t do much about the first one, but he could for the second. Not unless he wanted to start being even proactive about things than he already was.
He partly hid a grin, letting the others see that he had things well in hand, had his own little confidence in what the Order was doing. Because he knew a bit of a secret.
They couldn’t exactly control what crisis came to them. But sometimes, when they were having a good day, and everything lined up…
They got to be the crisis that showed up for some other assholes.
JP sipped his coffee, and actually did sigh. He’d been staring dramatically at a whiteboard for too long and it had gotten cold.
_____
Frequency-Of-Sunlight woke up when she got cold. Her bed was empty of everything except for her camraconda body, and a series of blankets that were neatly tucked on one half of the bed and tangled on the other.
The part of the bed that was made was because Deb was gone. Off to work, off to be an optimized and motivated human, off to do something impressive and complicated and heroic in a subtle yet powerful way. She’d left Frequency-Of-Sunlight behind, not waking up the slumbering camraconda when she’d risen, dressed, and headed out. Though there was a sticky note attached to the dresser right at Sunny’s eyeline that had a heart and a crisply written “Love you, see you tonight” written on it.
Sunny loved her too. So much that she practically burned from it. She’d experienced care and compassion in her relatively short life before, of course. Her own people weren’t dead to their emotions, even if they’d found them hard to manage when they first awoke from their puppetry. But she’d had nothing like what she shared with the human woman. Nothing like the feeling of romantic love, the quickening of her biomechanical heart when she thought of her partner, the shortening of breath when she saw her lover tangled in their shared sheets.
Smoke-And-Ember had joked to Sunny once that she might have a human fetish. And they were close enough that Sunny hadn’t tried to check him off the roof for the comment; it was hard to grow up together with someone you considered a brother and not be able to take a few snarky comments from them, even if she’d had to learn to do it from an actual voice relatively recently. But he was wrong, anyway. Sunny didn’t have a human fetish, she had a Deb fetish. Though she probably wouldn’t tell Deb that.
Maybe. Maybe it would make her girlfriend blush and sputter, which was always cute and perfect. Actually, Frequency-Of-Sunlight was coming around on sharing now that she thought about it.
Suitably warmed by that bit of consideration, the camraconda girl settled into the mattress. Before getting out of bed, Sunny decided to plot out the trajectory of her day. Despite not being human, the Order of Endless Rooms had accepted her. Not just accepted her, they’d made her a knight; or she’d made herself one, and no one had commented. And again, not just that they hadn’t commented, they’d treated it as utterly natural.
Sunny wasn’t stupid; she approached things with a level of casual cheerfulness that put people off guard, but underneath that, she had a sharp and suspicious mind. She knew that humans weren’t all going to be good people. Wouldn’t accept her for her differences. When James had first come sauntering into the camraconda refuge in Officium Mundi, though, his default attitude was to trust them utterly. And when the Order had saved them all, they’d asked for nothing at all in return, not even service.
Which was why Frequency-Of-Sunlight gave her service willingly and eagerly. And even then, when she did, the Order had just nodded as a whole and said “Alright, here’s what we’re working on.” And that only settled it, that she’d made the right choice.
Being a knight had some duties though. Sort of. She had promised to help Cheha with conversation practice, the ratroach girl needing all the compassion that could be afforded her. And she was signed up to take part in avatar training later in the evening. But those were small things.
Sunny had a skulljack braid in. One of the newer models, that kind of just blended in to her cable body, and that were actually pretty pared down and comfortable to not have to remove most of the time. All it did was give her wi-fi access through her magical cybernetic, but that was all she really needed when she just wanted to look at the Order’s local network. Looking through the list of open jobs for the day as she twisted her tail to flick the heavier part of the blanket off, she found something that she could throw herself into. Moving heavy materials wasn’t the sort of thing you thought someone without hands would be good at, but camracondas could lock things down in relative space, and if you needed to shift a few tons of stuff for a construction project, someone like her was useful to have on hand.
One of the neat things about being here was that it was okay that she was different. Not that it was ignored, but that it was folded into daily life. The things about her differences that presented obstacles, everyone worked to find solutions or workarounds for. And the things about her differences that made her special, became solutions for other problems. She was different. And somehow, it made her feel more accepted for those differences to be such a core part of her life.
She added it to her schedule with a mental nudge at one of the four half-natural programs running on her skulljack braid. And then she added herself to the roster of active knights.
If anything came up… if anyone tried to hurt her friends… she’d be there. And then Deb would fret over her later, and they’d go back and forth about Sunny throwing herself into danger, and then she’d have to remind Deb that being chronologically young did not make her a child. But while those conversations hurt, it would hurt more to do nothing.
She couldn’t. How could anyone do nothing, after what had been done both to and for them? Not even Deb did nothing. Though she wasn’t exactly risking her life, she still threw herself into the kind of work that might change the world someday soon.
Frequency-Of-Sunlight double checked her plans, made sure she had hours to herself for things like lunch and relaxing and reading and magic practice. She replied to the verification message that said she was awake and prepared to deploy in the event a knight was needed. And then she got out of bed.
Well, she rolled over the edge of the bed and let the floor take her fate into its hands. Frequency-Of-Sunlight was one of the lighter camracondas, but that still meant she weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and when she wasn’t putting effort into being elegant, she made a pretty heavy thud when she hit things.
After that, she just needed to get dressed. Which, for a being without arms, was surprisingly easy. Her part of the shared closet was the lower bar, and it was easy enough to grasp what she wanted in her mouth without punching holes in it, and place it on the wall hooks nearby. From there, slipping her body into the cloth wrap she wanted to wear, and pressing into the pegs in a way that sealed the velcro it used to secure it to her, was pretty simple.
After that, she repeated the process with one of the arm packs. The thing was basically the lightest possible battery and motor, with a pair of programmable mechanical arms attached. Their apartment had a special spot for it, so that she could easily clip the ethernet cable it used into a designated port on her skulljack braid, and then use the arms themselves to secure the rest of it. She would do it in the other order, but it turned out, wearing a camraconda version of a skirt over the arms was a good way to get everything tangled up forever.
The battery would last for two hours of constant use, but Sunny didn’t really stress the things. She liked the light weight of this pack, and the option if she needed it, but she’d mostly keep the metal manipulators folded up at her sides.
She did use the arms to add a belt under her skirt, checking to make sure she’d have easy access to a series of pockets that held a few potion vials and backup orbs. It never hurt to be prepared for things.
And then she was ready. For breakfast.
Frequency-Of-Sunlight, knight of the Order of Endless Rooms, slithered out of her shared apartment and headed for the elevator up to the Lair’s dining room. She didn’t have any particular plans, but she was feeling pretty good about today, so she decided she’d see if one of the shared tables had a spot she could hang out at. Maybe talk about dungeon stuff with some other delvers. That was always fun.
She hissed the beat to an Aquabats song that had been stuck in her head for the last week, cheerfully throwing herself into the world. Part of something bigger than herself, that she wouldn’t trade for anything. There was no time to lounge around in bed when there was adventure out there waiting.
_____
Morgan woke up. Looked at his phone screen telling him that it was before noon. Went back to sleep. He was nineteen years old and uninterested in being out of bed if it was still morning.
Next to him in bed, Color-Of-Dawn pushed itself up in an arch, blankly stared at the wall, and then flopped back down. It was too early to consider doing anything else.
It was summer vacation. They both knew where their priorities were.
_____
The Order of Endless Rooms had over four hundred people in it. More if you counted kids, kid-level life, and dependents. A lot more if you counted the chanters. And they were growing more and more every day.
They were beginning to build systemic structures that they could rely on, ways of living, of helping, of resolving problems, that they could rely on to take care of them. They were continuing to throw themselves forward into the unknown, and the approach every strange new thing they found with open arms and welcoming words. They were working, in their own ways, on a dozen different things that they wanted to be seeds of a better tomorrow.
Every one of those people had their own story. You could fill a book with all the different stories. Of how they got there, and where they were going; of what they wanted, and how they had changed. They were all different, from all over the world, if they were from the surface of Earth at all. But they were here, united, under a banner that made them all more than they were the day before.
It wasn’t them individually against the world anymore. And it never should have been; no one should have to live that way. It was them, all of them, for each other. They were all in this together, the way they always needed.
To live was to be open to change and to face challenge, and the Order of Endless Rooms and its members were no exception. But every now and then, there was a quiet warm day in the middle of June. A day where nothing happened, except for everything that happened. Where the world didn’t quake, where lives weren’t upended, where it felt like they wore the grooves of their lives a little deeper into the world.
Every now and then, there was a day where they simply got to be themselves. Marvelous moments that would always be there, driving them forward, even when things got dark and messy.
The day passed by without anything going disastrously wrong.